by Cathy Alter
I read on. Williams first identified two kinds of bitches: “The obvious in-your-face bitch ( like a demanding, snarling, screaming boss) and the underhanded bitch ( like that sweet-as-pie pal who says, ‘Stress makes you break out, too?’).” I was definitely attracted more to the idea of becoming the second kind of bitch because, as Williams explained in her “Know Thy Enemy” analysis, “an underhanded bitch favors sabotage. She’ll undermine you by spreading rumors (‘I heard she’s hungover’), making ‘harmless’ comments that sting (‘Your outfit is so…interesting’), and incriminating you when she messes up (‘That’s her job’).”
This bitch was cunning, diabolical, and a whole lot of passive-aggressive. She was also a chicken. But I could live with that. “She attacks through cruel jokes and backhanded compliments because they’re easy to laugh off or deny, which makes it hard to catch her,” revealed Janet Alberts, a PhD whom Williams interviewed.
There was one bitch tip in particular that stood out. Williams warned about revealing too much personal information to a conniver like myself, which could be twisted against you or used as ammunition. I had never considered the kind of talking Dave and I did behind Bruno’s back as being bitchy. Done over a glass of wine, our accents getting heavier and more outrageous with each sip, it was more like dinner theater. But what if I staged a command performance for my boss and other coworkers?
The plot would center on a creative presentation Bruno and I were giving to our boss Todd and his boss, Mary (an in-your-facer) the next afternoon. My portion of the work had been finished for so long it was collecting dust on Bruno’s desk. Even though he had chosen the date and the time of our presentation (casting his decision in an email, which I had been prescient enough to save), I knew Bruno had totally forgotten about our meeting and when the time came, it would be curtains for him.
For a brief moment, I had some qualms about the havoc I was about to wreak. But then I reminded myself about the type of guy Bruno really was. Here was someone whose goal in life was to get something for nothing, me included. I spent the morning preparing some bombshells for the second act: He called in sick for almost two weeks from a beach in Mexico! His portfolio contained work that wasn’t his! He was loose with his expense reports!
These were just some of the whoppers I was privy to while Bruno and I were still communing. And just as the Cosmo article had cautioned its gentle readers, I was about to use this intelligence to crush Bruno like a stiletto heel.
Ten minutes before our presentation, Bruno appeared at my desk, wearing a coat and a ridiculous newsboy cap.
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” he said, handing me a folder.
“How could you have scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the same time as our meeting?” I asked sharply.
He stared at me blankly.
“You were the one who picked the time,” I continued, raising my voice so the people in the back rows could hear. “And now you suddenly have a doctor’s appointment?!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “This just came up,” he said and walked off before I could respond.
Opening the folder, I realized that he had done just one of the six ads we needed to show our bosses. I used the remaining minutes before the meeting to become the biggest electronic tattletale of all time.
I forwarded his original email where he had picked the day and time of our presentation to my boss and other key players (cc-ing Bruno, which made me come off as a conscientious worker with nothing to hide as well as the underhanded bitch I was fast becoming). “To All,” I wrote, “Bruno has scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the same time as our presentation. He has left me with a folder containing his share of the work, but I am concerned about the art being incomplete and I don’t feel comfortable presenting it in his stead.”
I blind-copied Dave and called him as soon as I hit the send button.
He picked up the phone on the first ring. “Stand back,” he said. “The shit is really going to hit the fan.”
I didn’t expect a response from Todd, who always folded his cards when an action was required. But Mary loved a good blame game. Aware that Todd was a spineless wimp, she had once pulled Rena and I into her office and asked us why we thought Todd was such an enabler.
I dialed Mary’s extension. “Can I come talk to you about this?” I asked sweetly. Then, in her office, I opened up the folder of Bruno’s crap. “I find this so upsetting,” I said, taking a seat. “I was so prepared for our presentation and I thought Bruno was, too. I don’t understand how he could schedule a doctor’s appointment for the same time—especially when he was just at the doctor’s for most of yesterday.” (Another bombshell.)
“Why don’t you phone me as soon as he’s back, and I’ll deal with him.”
“Are you sure? I would hate for you to think of me as an informant.” I was giving an Academy Award performance now. “I’m just concerned this will all reflect poorly on our department.”
Could it really be this simple? Not only did being an underhanded shifty bitch feel vindicating, it might actually get him fired as well. I remembered that old Robert Fulghum book and changed the title to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Cosmo.
When Bruno hadn’t returned by 5:30 PM, I phoned Mary. “Just thought you should know,” I happily reported, “he still hasn’t returned from the doctor’s.”
“Gee,” said Mary. “I’d hate to fire him. He seems like such a nice guy.”
“He’s not that nice,” I told her.
Karl had only seen Bruno once, when he picked me up on his scooter to go to lunch. We had passed by the restaurant near my office where Bruno was seated at an outside table, cloth napkin folded grandly across his lap, enjoying what looked like a five-course meal.
“Is that the lazy idiot you work with?” he asked as we motored by.
“How can you tell?” I asked, shocked and slightly worried there was somehow a second blimp photo.
“Only someone who thought he had all the time in the world would treat himself to a meal like that in the middle of the day.”
So I let Karl believe that Bruno was that lazy idiot. I told him all about his overweening behavior, his broken moral compass, his lies and deceits—just not in relation to me. I was definitely making things worse for when I eventually revealed the truth about our “work” relationship (You fucked the lazy idiot?!), but I just couldn’t bring myself to come clean. Not now. Not yet.
When Karl came home from work that night, the only thing I revealed was that Bruno would soon become a thing of the past. “His days are numbered,” I said confidently.
“It’s about time,” he said, kicking off the weekend by cracking open a beer. “If he was working for me, I would have busted his fat head by now.”
On Monday, the first thing I did was stop by Bruno’s cubicle to see if it was stripped of his personal belongings. But there they were—his photos of his childhood dog, his books about the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, his piles of unfinished work, and finally, at 11:00, his self.
Maybe Mary was waiting to deliver his coup de pink slip during our Monday staff meeting. I had dressed especially for the occasion, kissing ass in the same power colors that Mary usually wore (although Dave and I joked that her wardrobe consisted entirely of Kmart’s Jaclyn Smith Collection).
As usual, Todd had to phone Bruno from the conference room and tell him we were all waiting for him to join us. “Yes, it’s Monday again,” he’d say every single week, as the rest of us snickered and shook our heads in expected disbelief.
Bruno sauntered in a few minutes later, like he half expected to see a cake and people in party hats. “Good morning,” he said, nodding in Mary’s direction. He took a seat all alone at the end of the conference table and leisurely began to pick stray hairs from his sweater.
“I have an announcement to make,” said Todd, glancing nervously at Mary. “We have decided to do away with our flexible workweeks.”
Before I could stop myself, a
“WHAT?!” had escaped my mouth.
“Mary feels that it’s essential for all of us to be here, working at our desks, five days a week.”
Bruno and I were the only ones in our department who took advantage of the compressed workweek. He remained calm, assured in his fantasy that Todd had meant everyone except him had to work five days a week.
I was so dizzy, I thought if I opened my mouth again to object, I’d throw up. I recognized that management was trying to punish Bruno by taking away his liberty, but why did I get lumped into the deal? If nice guys finished last, weren’t bitches supposed to wind up on top?
On my way to Dave’s office, I thought about the impact of losing my Wednesdays and what that would do to my career. My other career. In my mind, Wednesday was my day to be a real writer. It was the day when I rented a car and drove out to Virginia to interview the owners of The Inn at Little Washington. It was the day I spent at the Library of Congress researching sideshow freaks in the Prints and Photos department. It was the day I sat home, with unwashed hair and a half a dozen samples of lube, lustily pounding away on a story about better sex prep. What was the purpose of working a soulless job, only to have my soul-saving day kicked to hell?
“This is even more messed up than the nude sponge bather and the lushes in the legal department,” I shouted to Dave.
“Cathy,” he said pulling me in for a bear hug, “this company is fucked.”
“What do we do?”
“We ride it for as long as we can,” he said, releasing me from his embrace and looking me in the eye, “and then we quit.”
I knew Dave was shopping around a book proposal as well as doing some consulting work on the side with a friend of ours. “Are you serious?” I said, suddenly giddy. “I’ll never know if I can make it as a freelance writer unless I quit my day job and try to find out.”
“I’ll go from being your Breakup Buddy to your Breakout Buddy,” he said.
I ran around the side of his desk to where a calendar hung. “We need an ‘out’ date,” I decided.
“I thought I already was out,” he joked.
“How about Friday, July 1?” I suggested. “We can celebrate our Independence Day together.”
I pulled my Day-Timer out of my pocketbook and wrote “OUT” diagonally across the day. July was just nine months away, the same amount of time it took to have a baby.
That evening, I tore out a page from Allure’s Insider’s Guide called “How to Quit Your Job Gracefully,” and gave myself another year-end goal. Not only would I be hosting the perfect dinner party and getting rid of upper-arm jiggle, by the time my year of magazines was up, I’d also be handing in a letter of resignation.
NOVEMBER
Party Favors
my clever attempt to use an article about handling a bitch as a tutorial in becoming one had backfired, landing a big bitch slap across my own rutilant cheek. Not only did I feel the sting of moral shame, I realized my machinations had taken me down as well. In being underhanded with Bruno, I had merely undercut myself.
Dr. Oskar had given my involvement and lingering preoccupation with Bruno a clinical name: repetition compulsion. Basically, I psychologically got off on repeating a traumatic event over and over again (in my case, rejection and abandonment), thinking if I could somehow do something different this time around, I’d finally change the odds. Like Groundhog Day as imagined by Freud. “You stay with the pain until you can get it right,” Dr. Oskar explained.
I had to consider that Bruno was simply too big and too complex a problem to solve in two thousand words or less. That no matter what articles and advice I enlisted, Bruno was a lost cause. He was never going to quit his job, never going to repent, and never going to see me as anything other than an all-access pass.
As I began to accept the mistakes of my ruinous past, I consciously chose to move more and more away from them. Even though I hadn’t succeeded in destroying my tormentor, I had removed a layer of numbness that had once allowed me to walk through my days—my daze—demanding so little for myself.
I saw that now. And over the past few months, as the shape of my decisions changed, I truly began to feel things shift internally as well. If living well is the best revenge, then I had already settled the score with Bruno. The realization that I was getting things right startled me on a daily basis. How else to explain the man who was now sitting on my living room floor, our floor, happily tinkering away on something that looked like a tripod.
“Did you ever think you’d be living with a robot a year ago?” asked Karl, fidgeting with a giant eyeball. “Hello Karl,” the tripod said suddenly. “How are you?”
Karl looked directly into the eyeball and asked, “What is Raymond?”
“Raymond is a small cat,” responded the tripod.
“No,” I said after their exchange. “I can honestly say, in my entire life, I never thought I’d be living with a robot.”
But I was, and it was well beyond what I could have imagined for myself. I couldn’t listen to certain song lyrics or watch a particularly soulful American Idol contestant without crying fat tears of gratitude. Life was a proverbial Hallmark commercial. I wanted to tell the world what real love—my love—felt like and then worried that if I did, I would sound smug and vainglorious and no one would want to hang out with me anymore.
But I announced it anyway, broadcasting the news like I had just won a Pulitzer. In a diabetes-inducing email to a friend, I dripped, “Karl and I are living together and it’s unbelievably amazing! No fighting, no arguing—nothing but love.”
“Let’s be clear,” she wrote back, “you two have something that poets write about. It’s why people went to the moon. It was something they glimpsed from afar and wanted to touch for themselves. Living it is inconceivable.”
Reading this sort of review of my relationship—and actually believing it—was pretty heady stuff. Karl and I had our own shorthand to describe the lucky state in which we found ourselves.
“It’s disgusting,” he joked one night.
I was sitting Indian-style, barricaded behind a wall of magazines. I had recently added Lucky to the gang. I didn’t mean to, since that brought the tally up to twelve fat glossies a month, but I had become so easily lured by outer come-ons and inner promises.
“I think we should start our own magazine,” he continued, picking up the latest issue of O. “We could call it Ewww.”
Looking at him standing there, clutching his nemesis to his chest, the cover line “Hope!” practically silk-screened across his heart, I knew I needed to celebrate this kind of devotion. It marked my progress as well.
Karl’s thirtieth birthday was a week away, which didn’t give me a lot of time to throw together a surprise party. Not that I knew how to throw one anyway. But after the challenges of the past months (I was still having nightmares involving tents), how hard could it be? Plus, I already had a dozen magazines on my planning committee. With the holiday high season about to hit, I knew I’d have an easy time finding party-related advice, from how to feed the masses on a budget to scoring the perfect hostess ensemble. It was time to shine—even if that meant slicking on some metallic eye shadow. Even though it was Karl’s birthday, I still wanted to be the girl with the most cake.
I have never been the life of the party, at least not without a little help beforehand. In college, any pre-frat prep involved drinking massive amounts of liquor or smoking so many bowls I would famously misidentify people, confusing people I knew in high school with total strangers in college. I once chased someone around the Theta Phi taproom screaming, “Michael! Michael!” thinking I had just seen my best friend from ninth grade, only to find that, upon closer inspection, it was the girl who sat in front of me in sociology class.
An article in Self called “The Stress Mess” explained why I may have needed to shotgun three Old Milwaukees before heading out to the boy’s dorm for a night of quarters. A survey by Self and the Anxiety Disorders Association of America found that, “F
ifteen percent of women who say they’re frequently stressed turn to booze to regain calm.” Ironically, I was reading this with a glass of wine in one hand and the beginnings of a guest list in the other. It had dawned on me that before I could play hostess, I actually had to invite people to host. Which meant that unless Karl wanted to party down with a roomful of my friends (mostly gay men and, now that I thought about it, women over forty), I was going to have to bite the bullet and include some of his.
Most I liked, including his best friend Rob, a father of two who was married to a warm and wonderful woman from Puerto Rico named Mariel. I knew Karl thought of Rob as his brother, since they had helped each other through disappointing childhoods. Now, since Rob worked two jobs to support his family and lived a good hour away from D.C., we hardly ever saw him. I knew if I could cajole Rob and Mariel to hire a sitter and make the trip in, I’d win major points with Karl.
Besides Rob, Karl’s sister Val, and a few other names I swiped from a mass email our friend Daz sent out to announce his upcoming photography show, the only other people I knew how to get hold of were the jerks from our camping trip. Naturally, I didn’t want to ever see them again. Since July, they had been giving me the cold shoulder whenever we bumped into them at parties. There had been rumblings on the playground that I had stolen Karl away. Supposedly, Crazy Larry was running around saying that I kept Karl’s balls in my pocketbook. I was worried they wouldn’t come to Karl’s birthday just to spite me. Which would have been fine, but this camping crowd was at the epicenter of a larger crowd of jovial, up-for-anything people I actually wanted in attendance. I was afraid they’d bully the other guests into not coming, or worse, schedule a competing event.