The dinner seemed almost planned to include as many things unknown to the American palate as possible. Todd seemed convinced that it was necessary at least to sample every dish that was put before him. Jen had no such qualms. As the courses progressed, whisky was brought in between each offering, and toasts were offered aplenty.
As the dinner finally drew to a close, it was proposed that they adjourn to a nightclub.
“The American Club,” Amy’s husband explained. “Everything American style.”
Unlike the night before, Amy was clearly going too, so Jen assumed that this was not a male-only venue. They piled back into Trade Winds’ trio of black Mercedes-Benzes and tooled out through the glittering Guangzhou night.
The cars stopped and let them out before a fairly typical-looking skyscraper, with a revolving glass main door and a marble-floored lobby. The group crowded into an elevator glistening with brass fittings, and Amy pushed the button for the twenty-second floor.
The lobby they stepped into was specific to the American Club, as indicated by a sign with the name of the club in giant block letters, above which flashed outlines of the Empire State Building, the Hollywood Sign, and Mount Rushmore in glowing neon. In the center of this lobby stood a ten-foot-tall statue of Marilyn Monroe, garishly colored as if in technicolor made real, holding down her plaster skirt in a vain attempt to keep it from blowing up to expose her famous legs.
Amy’s husband and Eddy insisted on Todd’s posing with them for a picture in front of the statue. The three men stood arm in arm, with Todd in the middle, with the oversize Marilyn’s skirt billowing around them at shoulder height. “Okay, ready? Ready?” Just as the picture was being taken, Amy’s husband reached a hand back to tickle Marilyn between the legs. “For luck!” he shouted. The attendant who had taken the picture rushed forward with it, and the three men examined the preview on the camera’s screen, Eddy and Amy’s husband doubling over laughing and slapping each other on the back.
At the entrance to the club itself, they were greeted by a hostess wearing daisy dukes and a cowboy hat, and a waiter sporting a football jersey, a sideways baseball cap, and a large gold chain bedecked with a dollar sign. A cacophony of memorabilia covered the walls. The immense room was round and shaped somewhat like an amphitheater, with semicircular tiers descending toward a wedge-shaped dance floor opposite the entrance. The wall beyond the dance floor was all glass, allowing the dancers and those seated at the tables arranged along the tiers a view across the glittering downtown Guangzhou cityscape. At various points, larger pieces of Americana stood on platforms: a finned, pink, Cadillac; a stuffed Texas longhorn; a Harley Davidson motorcycle; a plaster Statue of Liberty.
At the lowest level, in the very center of the club, between the tiers of seating and the dance floor, stood an immense round bar, above which slowly rotated a replica of the General Lee, its resplendent orange body and Confederate-flagged roof reflecting the lights of the disco ball that hung from the ceiling above it.
Their party occupied a booth, and a waitress dressed as a low-necklined Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz arrived to take their orders. Eddy asked Jen and Todd what a good American whiskey would be, and Jen reeled off the names of the most expensive bourbons she knew, determined that some aspect of the night would be to her taste.
After several rounds of bourbon had been consumed, the Trade Winds contingent suddenly decided it was necessary that more pictures be taken to memorialize the occasion. The various objets à l’américaine seemed the obvious venue.
They converged upon the Cadillac. After some argument, Amy and her husband climbed into the front seat. Eddy took control of the camera and boisterously shouted instructions in Cantonese. Amy’s husband, still clutching a highball glass with a generous portion of bourbon, first mimed wild driving, swinging the steering wheel back and forth, while Amy leaned back against the seat impassively. Eddy shouted some instruction, and Amy’s husband let go the wheel, turned, and planted a huge, drive-in-movie teenager-style kiss on Amy, flinging bourbon across the back seat as he did so. The camera flashed, the image was shown around, backs were slapped. Amy smiled benevolently over the increasing pandemonium.
Next, Eddy and Trade Winds’ head of sales were to be photographed with the Statue of Liberty. Several poses were tried, with Amy’s husband manning the camera, and at last they settled on each kissing one of the Statue of Liberty’s cheeks. As the camera flashed, Eddy grabbed one of the reproduction’s overly prominent breasts, to the hooted approval of the assemblage.
Then Todd, urged on by the others, mounted the Harley Davidson. He gamely cranked at the throttle and made motor noises, to the amusement of the others. This, however, did not seem to fit the spirit of the evening. Eddy had the necessary inspiration. “Biker girl!” he exclaimed, indicating Jen. “Get on the Harley with him and be biker girl.”
Jen demurred.
“Have some fun,” Eddy urged. “Biker girl. Just for fun.”
“You should relax a bit,” advised Amy, with a smile that lifted only one side of her mouth.
“Come on,” said Todd, with an “aw shucks” grin. “What happens in Guangzhou stays in Guangzhou.”
“Nope.” Jen returned to the booth and poured herself another glass of bourbon instead, angry at having been persuaded to join the expedition, though considering that with a certain liquor-induced distance, it might have its amusing side, so long as she remained strictly a spectator.
Looking back toward the Harley Davidson, she could see that the group had persuaded one of the hostesses, this one wearing a Mad Men–era dress with flaring skirt, to sit astride the motorcycle with Todd as Eddy gleefully took pictures. This accomplished, the group milled around briefly, and Jen feared that they might return to the booth, but at that moment, the lights dimmed, garishly colored spotlights began to search the room in dizzying circles, and a sequined Elvis impersonator took to the dance floor to lead the assembled masses in a set of rock ’n’ roll favorites. This proved more than any of the Trade Winds group could resist in their current state, and Jen was left in her preferred solitude.
Time passed. Another club emcee took to the dance floor. Dressed in hip-hop pastiche and waving a golden microphone around, he led the crowd in a spirited Chinese cover of “Jump Around”.
Jen had begun to slip into a half-waking state, so it was a feeling of movement next to her rather than sight that alerted her that Todd had slipped into the booth with her.
“It’s late. I’ve been sitting here zoning out,” Jen said.
“What?” Todd leaned in close to hear her over the thumping music.
“I’m tired. I wouldn’t mind getting back to the hotel soon,” Jen said more loudly.
“Me too.”
“I wonder if we could commandeer the car that took us here. The Trade Winds folks may want to dance all night, but I’d rather go to bed.”
“That sounds good.”
“You must want to get to bed at a decent time too. What time is your flight out tomorrow morning?”
Todd did not respond, and Jen became aware that he was leaning closer to her only a moment before she felt the unwelcome presence of his hand exploring her thigh. She pushed his hand away sharply.
“Todd! Stop it!”
“Oh, come on.” He didn’t return his hand to her leg, but he was leaning over her, hands planted against the booth-back on both sides of her shoulders. “First you lead me on, being all couple-y with me this morning. Then you play hard to get over the motorcycle. We don’t have time for games; it’s my last night here.”
He lurched toward her, and his lips briefly made sloppy, bourbon-tinged contact with hers. Jen shoved him away hard, and his head hit the booth back with an audible thud. She extricated herself from the booth and left the club rapidly without looking back to see what effect her rebuff had had on him.
It was fully dark outside in the street, and there was a chill in the air. The Trade Winds cars that had brought them there were nowhere in
sight. Several taxis were idling by the curb, however. She climbed into the nearest one and showed the driver the card for the hotel. He nodded and swerved off into traffic.
When Jen’s alarm began to sound, less than four hours after she had gone to bed, her first thought was to get another hour’s sleep and drag herself out of bed with mere moments to spare before her five o’clock call with Bryn. Her second thought was to send Bryn some sort of curt e-mail declaring that she was unavailable that morning. The first she rejected as a matter of personal standards, the second because she didn’t want to have to wait till after the weekend before enquiring about when she would be returning home. Despite this triumph of will over exhaustion, however, the call was not particularly satisfying on any front.
“How did the purchase-order negotiations go?” Bryn asked, after they had covered various pieces of immediate urgency.
“Frankly, I thought we came off worse than we had to. The Trade Winds team came in demanding price increases in response to all the manufacturing errors I’d insisted that their manufacturers correct, and Todd didn’t seem able to keep up with the detail sufficiently to rebut all their demands.”
“Were you able to help him with the facts?”
“I tried where I could. But I couldn’t do the negotiating for him, and there was a limit to what I could do. I was already working beyond my scope trying to cover for him.”
Bryn shrugged it off. “Well, it’s commendable you tried. At the end of the day, it’s Procurement that’ll take the blame if they don’t hit their cost targets. Anything else interesting? Did you at least get a good dinner out of it?”
Jen was tight-lipped and shifted the conversation to her return.
Bryn sighed. “I want to get you back here as soon as possible. It’s awkward having had so little real time together since you started. And I would think things should be on a good footing for a while now that Todd has finalized pricing and placed purchase orders for the first season’s inventory. But the cross-functional team wants to wait till we get Todd’s full report on Monday before scheduling your return. I’m sure we’ll have you back sometime soon.”
“Is there a point when it starts to be a bad use of company money to keep me sitting around here just in case there’s something for me to do?” Jen demanded, exasperation causing her professional demeanor to slip for a moment. “I’m supposed to be a product-line director, not a babysitter for the Chinese side of the operation.”
“Look, I hear you,” Bryn said. “Don’t think I like having one of my line directors stuck outside the country either. There’s lots I’d rather have you doing.”
“Thanks.”
“You know, honestly, what with having to wait through another weekend, go take yourself out on the expense account and break the monotony a bit. So long as it’s not totally insane, I’ll make sure that it works out okay with Accounts Payable when it comes through. And there’s no benefit to having you go nuts over there. Soak up some culture or something.”
Jen reflected on the examples of culture and soaking that she’d seen the night before but remained silent. “I’ll come up with something. Honestly, though, I just want to get home. This is getting excessive.”
“I hear you.”
“Well, make the cross-functional team hear me. If this goes on another week without a good reason, I will call them up individually to tell them what they can go do with themselves.”
“Jen, I get it. Chill.”
“The only expense-account indulgence I want is a ticket home, okay?”
“Well, go get a massage or something. Take the weekend off. Relax. And I hope I’ll have some good news for you on Monday.”
They closed the call.
Over the weekend that followed, Jen attempted to give the expense account some exercise, but her heart was not in it. Back in her room, she tried calling Katie, but Katie seemed oddly preoccupied. She tried calling Dan, but he did not answer his phone.
Tuesday morning—Monday afternoon in California—Jen woke easily at four o’clock, eager to find what news the new week brought in relation to her return. Instead, she found an e-mail from Bryn waiting for her: “Some things have come up, and I can’t make our call this afternoon. Feel free to catch some ‘me time’. I should have updates shortly.”
Irretrievably awake, Jen went down to the hotel gym to work out until the breakfast buffet opened. When she got back to her room and checked her laptop, she found that Bryn had canceled their morning meetings for the next three days.
She spent Tuesday and Wednesday in anxious inactivity, woke up on Thursday to find an e-mail from the travel department with a travel itinerary for her to fly home the next day. She tried calling and e-mailing Bryn but received no response. The tickets themselves, however, were an undeniable fact. She packed her bags and scheduled the hotel car to take her to the airport.
It is a strange fact of travel that if you fly from Guangzhou to San Francisco, you arrive at almost exactly the same time that you left. This “no time at all” takes fully twenty hours. Conscious of this, Jen paused in the airport to stock up on reading material. Although her boarding pass told her that she would spend all of three minutes by the clock in the air, she knew that these three minutes would provide her with plenty of time to experience boredom.
Over the timeless expanse of the Pacific, while reading an English-language newspaper that was already two days old when she picked it up in the airport, Jen found herself regarding a familiar face.
“The Chinese Manufacturing Game”, read the headline. And next to it, April Holland’s byline and blonde visage.
She read the article with a growing feeling of expectation, and these expectations were fulfilled when she obediently “continued on page D6” and found herself quoted at length.
“Jen Nilsson, product-line director for the revived Courier brand, currently in the midst of sourcing its new product line in Guangdong Province, spoke with me about the difficulties of sourcing in China.”
There followed a number of her comments from the evening spent with April over the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which, read in the sober, if somewhat cramped, light of a transoceanic flight, seemed all the more blunt in their force.
She had, in the days since communication from Aspire had ceased, wondered whether perhaps Todd had returned to the office in full confessional mode and informed HR of his behavior the night before he left. Were that the case, the silence and then sudden return home might be an artifact of Legal trying to decide how best to deal with the situation and advising others not to communicate with her until they had resolved the question. Now she wondered if, instead, it was the result of the company trying to decide how to respond to her extensive quoted comments in this newspaper article.
As she contemplated these two alternatives, she felt a sudden sense of freedom. She knew what it was that she would do, and there remained only a feeling of peace unlike any she had known in some weeks. She closed the newspaper, reclined her seat, and slept.
The plane landed in San Francisco slightly early, with the amusing result that the passengers arrived before they left. Few seemed refreshed by this bit of trivia as they stumbled tiredly down the jetway. Having slept unusually soundly, Jen strode off the plane with purpose, her bag rolling behind her. Once out of the initial press of the crowd, she found a seat and pulled out her cell phone. She considered briefly the satisfaction of simply sending an e-mail, but she called instead. Bryn answered.
“Jen. Hi! You must have just landed.”
“Yep. Just stepped off the plane.”
“How was your flight?”
“It was good. I got some clarity at thirty thousand feet, and I’m quitting.”
“Ummm . . . What?”
“I am resigning my position, effective immediately. I will not be coming in today. I’m going to go home and rest up a bit.”
“Whoa. Jen. Hold on. You’re tired. Is this about—”
“Actually, I’m rested. I sl
ept very well on the plane. I’m happy to tell you what this is and is not about. It is not about Todd. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, ask him.”
“Jen—”
“It is not about the newspaper article, either. I stand by everything I said there. To the word.”
“Hold on, we—”
“Thinking about this job, this industry, this company, this past seven weeks, I’ve decided that I’m done. When I took this job, I was convinced that anything would be better than being jobless. I see now that is not entirely the case.”
“Can we just—”
“I will be in tomorrow afternoon to drop off my laptop, company credit card, and any other company property. I will turn in my final expense receipts then. I do not think it would do either of us any good for me to stay on for two weeks.”
“I know that you must—”
“Goodbye, Bryn. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She hung up. For a moment she sat looking at the phone. It began to vibrate with an incoming call. It was Bryn. She turned the phone off.
She collected her checked bag and then her car. Highway 101 was traffic-free. Midmorning on a Friday. Everyone was at work. Two months before, this feeling that everyone else was occupied while she was not had been paralyzing. Perhaps in another month or two, it would be paralyzing again, but at this moment she felt utter bliss.
Back in the South Bay, nearing home, she pulled off two exits early and stopped at her usual salon.
“I know I don’t have an appointment, but I was wondering if you have an opening. Normally I see Amanda, but anyone will do.”
“Actually, it looks like Amanda has an opening at 10:30. Do you mind waiting fifteen minutes?”
“Not at all.”
She settled in one of the chairs and pulled out her phone to check her e-mail, then stopped herself and returned it to her purse. She skimmed a few articles in Us. It seemed that Angelina could not resolve her babysitting issues but had a new beach body. Nicole was settling into motherhood. In the auditory background, the women of The View discussed the issue of the day. All of it was somehow glorious.
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