Beyond the Point
Page 24
“I was fifteen when things changed. First, they said that women couldn’t go to school, which wasn’t hard because my family was too poor to send my sisters to school anyway. Then they destroyed the cinemas. We couldn’t listen to music. There was no art. No industry. No festivals or feasts, like there had been when I was a boy. My wedding day was one of the bitterest days of my life. I went to pick up my wife from the salon—there were salons then, if you can imagine that. We drove together to my parents’ home for the celebration. But on the way, they stopped us. Pulled me out of the car. Beat me. Cut my hair. They said I shouldn’t have been with her, like that, alone, because we were unmarried.
“And things just kept getting worse. They killed people and hung them from streetlights. They’d leave the bodies there for weeks, until they rotted and fell to the ground for the dogs to eat.”
He paused, although Hannah couldn’t be sure if it was to collect his thoughts or contain his emotion.
“We can never go back to that. Never,” he said, looking straight at her. “We were dead under the Taliban. There was no life. No reason to live. No traditions. No beauty.
“But now, we feel again. We hope again. I can listen to music and dance.” He snapped his fingers, wiggled his hips. “I’m here, playing basketball with my American friends. That’s something. Right? That’s a . . . what did you say? Lasting change? Yes.”
He unscrewed the cap of his water bottle, took a long sip, then twisted the cap back in place and wiped his mouth.
“Maybe hope is the only lasting change one human can give to another. And for the first time in my life, I have hope. You gave that to me.”
19
Spring 2006 // London, England
Dani!”
Laura Klein had the annoying, completely unnecessary habit of shouting across the office to get Dani’s attention, when, in reality, all she had to do was stand up and look outside her office door and kindly say, at a normal decibel level, that she needed something.
That woman always needed something. But at the moment, Dani didn’t want to move. She’d just read an e-mail that had stunned her into paralysis.
From: Locke Coleman
Subject: booked!
Date: April 6, 2006 9:13:15 AM CST +01:00
To: Dani McNalley
Booked my ticket! Coming to London May 14–21. Call me and let’s start to make some plans.
—Locke
“Dani!”
Pushing away from her desk, Dani limped from her chair to her boss’s door frame. The London office was aesthetically disappointing—dark carpet, clusters of cubicles, a tiny kitchen with a refrigerator full of other people’s forgotten lunches, stinking and spoiled. Laura Klein, it turned out, was as short and brittle as a boss as she’d been in that first interview a few years earlier. She had platinum blond hair, and wore the same dark maroon lipstick and black three-quarter-length dress, as if it were easier to wear the same thing every day than to make fashion decisions. In nearly every conversation, she found a way to mention her current separation from her husband of twenty-two years, and Dani wondered if he’d grown bored with her clothes or simply annoyed by the sound of her nagging voice. Either way, she couldn’t really blame the guy.
Dani poked her head into Laura’s office. “Yes?”
“What’s this I hear from Webb about new slides?”
“I cc’d you on that.”
“Cc,” she repeated, lowering her glasses down her nose.
“Carbon copy.”
“Right. Well I didn’t see that. And I need to see them before my presentation.”
Dani wondered if she’d heard Laura correctly—if her boss had actually put emphasis on the word my. As if Dani would forget who was giving the most important presentation in E & G history. After more than a year and a half of global research, they were finally presenting their research findings and marketing recommendations to Gelhomme. Dani had been assigned the task of building the PowerPoint deck that Laura would use to deliver the presentation, which meant that nearly every other moment, the woman was calling Dani to her side.
“I’ll send them again,” Dani promised. “But the gist of it is that I think we should add digital advertising to our recommendations.”
“Digital,” Laura repeated, as if it were a foreign word. “As in . . .”
“As in the Internet.”
Her boss laughed. “You must be joking. Everyone knows banner ads are a colossal waste. Gelhomme doesn’t need that. They have a thirteen-million-dollar budget, Dani.”
“I’m just saying that it may be worth using some of that budget to start playing online.”
“Our clients don’t want to play. They want to make a profit.”
“Sure. But you should take a look at the numbers. There’s this new website called the Facebook that’s really taking off with college kids—”
“What is it, porn?” Laura laughed at her own joke and went back to work at her computer.
“It’s a place you can chat with your friends, see what they’re up to. Share pictures. There are like, thirteen thousand new users every day and—”
“We are not advising our biggest client to throw money away at some online fad. They’ll laugh us out of the room. They hired us to create TV commercials. Not reinvent the wheel.”
“The wheel is about to be made obsolete,” Dani said with conviction.
Laura stared up at Dani, her fingers perched on the keyboard of her computer.
“I don’t think you appreciate the opportunity you’ve been given here,” Laura said, putting her glasses on her desk. “When I got my start in this industry, women were seen as secretaries, not future executives. I had to keep my head down. Learn the rules. Play the game. I suggest you do the same.” Laura picked her glasses up again and said under her breath, “Of course, you wouldn’t understand.”
Dani stared at the side of Laura’s face, which was now trained on the computer screen. “I’m sorry. Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“Well, you know. There’s such a push for diversity these days. It’s easier for you. Things didn’t get handed to us, back in the day.”
Dani’s head reared back, as if Laura’s words had hit her in the face with force.
“Easier,” Dani repeated. “You think it’s easier. For me?”
She wanted to show Laura pictures of her grandmother, picking cotton as a sharecropper on a white man’s land in North Carolina. She wanted to recite the statistics: How unemployment among black women was nearly twice as high as among white women. How even though white women earned eighty cents for every dollar white men earned, women of color earned just sixty-three cents. Dani wanted to take Laura back and show her how hard she’d worked at West Point, earning the respect of her peers and professors, only to get tossed to the curb when her body couldn’t keep up with her mind.
Easy? she wanted to say, and show her the pharmacy of medication in her purse. Nothing about this is easy.
“You know what I mean,” said Laura, with an added layer of kindness. To Dani, it seemed like her boss was trying to say something sincere, but it was coming across so desperately insulting. “You’re good at your job, and it looks good for the company to have you at the table. It’s a win-win. Comparatively, I just look like the old hag that refuses to retire. That’s all I’m saying.”
Dani sighed and chose to push forward with the marketing, rather than the debate over who had it easier in the workplace. “Let me just tell you a few more things about this online strategy.”
Laura leaned back and nodded.
“With TV ads, you can get certain data from a consumer: age, zip code, gender, race,” Dani conceded. “But with the Internet, we can drill down to the minutiae—what kind of music they listen to. How they lean politically. Where they spend their time online. It’s data on a whole different level.”
“I hear you. But unfortunately, we don’t have the benefit of time,” Laura re
plied. “The presentation is next week. It’s too late. What we have will do.”
Laura looked Dani up and down, taking in the sight of her black trousers and blue button-up shirt.
“Oh, and Dani, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ll need to wear a dress and heels to the presentation,” she added. “It’s Paris, after all.”
THE MORNING OF the Gelhomme presentation, Dani showered in an expansive hotel suite in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, then toweled off while taking in the view of the Eiffel Tower. The rain outside her window tempted her to get back in bed, but thankfully, a shot of pre-presentation adrenaline pumped through her veins, which acted like speed to get her moving.
The last weeks had been moving at a breakneck pace, as E & G prepared to present its final recommendations to Gelhomme’s CEO, Paul Duval. The London team had fleshed out six different marketing campaigns, which, thanks to a focus group of consumers, had been narrowed down to the final one. Somehow, through it all, Dani’s concept had survived. She had a football coach in Jamaica Plain to thank for that.
When the pressures of work mounted, Dani found herself staying up late at night to either revise Laura’s PowerPoint presentation, plan the itinerary for Locke’s upcoming trip, or shop online. The clothes and shoes she purchased only made her happy for a few days before they found their way to the bottom of her closet, a pile of unfulfilled promises. But she had no time to travel. And her doctor had put her on an extremely restrictive diet, hoping it would help with the arthritis pain. So she couldn’t eat out at fancy restaurants or drink alcohol. So what if clothes had become her guilty pleasure? What else was she supposed to do with all that money?
Wrapped in a Burberry trench coat and lavender cashmere scarf, Dani stopped to check her reflection. It had been nearly impossible to find a barber in her Notting Hill neighborhood who could do black hair—but she’d finally found someone, and he’d relaxed her hair and added a weave. It was straight and silky, parted on the side, with extensions that reached her collarbone. But no matter how she styled it, she still didn’t feel like herself when she looked in the mirror. Even her freckles seemed to have faded in England’s rainy climate. Her skin glowed thanks to the high-end products she could afford with her new salary. She looked expensive. But she felt cheap.
Yesterday, she’d received an e-mail from Hannah detailing life in Afghanistan. In the photos her friend had attached to her e-mail, Hannah stood in the midst of a desertscape, wearing ACUs and her Kevlar vest, smiling widely. Her platoon had convoyed out to a remote location, where they were building an outpost for incoming NATO troops. The photo looked like the set of M*A*S*H. There were six GP medium tents, Army green against sand. In another photo, Hannah posed outside of a wide aluminum shipping container with three young girls whose hands were wrapped in white bandages. The burn unit Hannah had described in the e-mail sent chills down Dani’s spine. In the photo, Dani saw dark shadows under Hannah’s eyes, pain hidden within her smile. By comparison, Dani’s life was completely self-serving—a picture of comfort and luxury. How could she complain to her friends about the existence of Laura Klein, or the loss of a man she’d never had, when by comparison, their chief complaint was the existence of Afghanistan?
WHEN SHE ARRIVED at Gelhomme’s Paris office, Dani made her way directly to the conference room to set up the audiovisual equipment. A simple spread of pastries, fruit, and coffee waited at the center of the table. The rest of the room looked like it had been prepped for a visit from the queen: wood floors waxed, windows washed, oriental carpet steamed, table shined, all twelve leather chairs placed in a perfect oval around the table. The buttery scent of croissants tempted Dani, teasing her senses with the memory of bread, but she refrained. The allergist’s proposed diet—no dairy, gluten, sugar, or inflammatory vegetables—had decreased her pain significantly. Hanging her jacket on a hook outside the door, Dani felt immediately powerful in the dress she’d chosen to fulfill Laura’s demand. White, with cap sleeves and a conservative neckline, the dress fit tight around her curves and stopped just below her knees. “Showstopper,” was the word the shopkeep had used when Dani had walked out of the dressing room. When he rang it up at the register, Dani hadn’t even listened when he said the total cost. She’d just handed over her credit card.
Jim Webb had flown in from New York, with three other E & G executives. They lingered outside of the conference room, in crisp suits of different shades of gray. The tension in the atrium became palpable as the minutes drew closer to nine o’clock. Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent—on the building, the research, the insights, the art, the preparation—and if the deal happened, another few million dollars would change hands in an instant. All of this just to sell disposable razors, Dani mused, eyeing her superiors’ glittering watches and shined shoes. Four little blades on a plastic stick.
Just then, Laura Klein came through the door, a flurry of energy and anxiety. She wore the exact same black dress she wore every other day, only this time, the blond-haired woman had chosen a pair of red high heels and red-rimmed glasses to match. Giving Dani a once-over, her boss winked, the closest thing to approval Dani had received from her to date.
“Is it ready?” Laura asked.
“Yep.” Dani picked up the remote from the table and clicked through a few slides, then back to the beginning. “It’s all ready to go.”
“Audio, too,” said her colleague Philip, who was standing behind the computer, testing the speakers.
“Good,” Laura breathed. “No surprises. This has to be perfect.”
“You’ll do great,” Dani said, hoping to sound encouraging. But from the look on Laura’s face, Dani knew it came across as condescending.
As the crowd of white men migrated into the conference room, Dani stood back in wonder. It felt like a dream, really, to be this female, this black, in this room. Jim Webb made the introductions, taking time to properly flatter the man of the hour, Gelhomme’s CEO, Paul Duval. Dressed in a three-piece suit, with a swooping hairstyle, Duval held the seat at the head of the table, looking unimpressed. He checked his watch.
“Over the last year and a half or so, our researchers have conducted nearly one thousand in-home interviews in more than one hundred target countries,” Jim Webb began. “This is the largest consumer study E & G has conducted for a single client.”
“I can assure you,” Laura said, interrupting Webb, “we’ve watched more men shower in the last six months than you’d care to know.”
The CEO didn’t laugh.
“Laura, why don’t you go ahead and share what we’ve come up with for Gelhomme’s new razor launch,” Jim said.
Laura smoothed her black dress. She stood, took her place at the end of the table, and switched the computer screen to the presentation Dani had painstakingly written and designed for this very moment.
“As you well know, Gelhomme is the standard bearer for men’s products,” Laura said. “In interview after interview, we found that subjects mentioned Gelhomme with reverence, by name. You have a brand that is trusted and respected, Mr. Duval. That is no small feat.
“But . . .” Laura pressed a button, but the slide didn’t change. She shook the remote, pressed the button again. “Well. Sorry. This was supposed to go to the next slide.”
Philip quickly moved to the computer and tried to manually move the presentation forward. Nothing. You could feel the energy in the room shift, and Dani exchanged a worried glance with Jim Webb across the table. It was doubtful Laura had the order of the presentation memorized, Dani knew. She and Philip were the ones who’d written it and rewritten it time and time again. When they’d run through it last night, Laura had stumbled over the taglines—to get it right, Dani had noticed her boss had to read them off the screen.
“Sorry,” Philip said. “I think we’re frozen for a moment. I have to restart the computer.”
“That’s fine,” said Duval from the head of the table. “Just continue. It’ll eventually catch up.”
Quietness fell on the room. The CEO of their biggest client checked his watch again and looked at the door. Dani felt her stomach twist. Laura was fumbling. She was ruining all the work they’d done for nearly two years. Jim Webb shot Dani a look of desperation. He lifted his chin, as if to say . . . You. Now. Take it away.
“Laura’s right,” said Dani, still seated at the table. Paul Duval turned to look at her. “The women’s beauty market is a massive thirty-billion-dollar industry. By contrast, the male beauty market figures in the single-digit millions. Minuscule in comparison. Obviously, the two pies will never be the same size. We won’t argue that point. Women are too vain to let men look better than they do.”
The CEO grinned. Laura adjusted her weight on her high heels and smiled, as if this were all part of the plan.
“But clearly, there’s an opportunity up for grabs in the male sector,” Dani continued. “Our research shows that in the next ten years, men’s grooming will grow from a ten-billion-dollar industry to something closer to twenty billion. Unfortunately, if you continue with the messaging of yesterday, Gelhomme won’t capitalize on that growth.”
“Go on,” Duval said, spinning his chair toward Dani.
“For decades, your brand has dominated the market by making one promise: your razors provide the closest shave. Period. It was a functional claim, and that worked for a while. But what happens when every razor gives a close shave? What happens when your consumer stands in front of the mirror, day after day, knowing that no matter how close the shave is today, he’ll be back again tomorrow doing it all over again?”