“You mean, chances are we just ask them to drop it and they do, and we don’t even have to pay a fine?”
“That, my friend, is the unfair advantage of having legal representation. And knowing what to ask.” Dan now shifted audibly from business voice to chitchat. “So, how’re things at Aspire? You’re back from China, I discern?”
“Uh, yeah. We haven’t talked in a while. Well, actually, it’s been only a few days, but—I quit Aspire as soon as I got back last Thursday. It was . . . it was just bad. I had to get out.”
“Wow. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, actually . . . I just got back from central Illinois, where I had an interview, and they offered me a job.”
“Illinois?” Dan sounded taken aback. “That’s far from home. Are you thinking of taking it?”
“It seems like a good company, and it’s near my parents and—you know, what we need is to have dinner. When are you free?”
“How about Saturday?”
“That would be great.”
Jeff’s Fusion Bistro described itself as having “a casual yet intimate ambiance” and “a menu drawing from the best of every continent”. It rambled through several small dining rooms, with small, high-backed booths and low lighting. The wait staff, however, dressed casually—clearly under orders to express their own style as wildly as possible while never straying from the company approved black-and-white palette. The menu, too, claimed a certain casualness by focusing almost exclusively on small portions and exhorting customers to create a meal out of a selection of dishes to suit their mood, yet the prices and the exhaustive wine list made it clear that this was no mere light dining venue.
Dan and Jen had arrived separately, and the first ten minutes after they were seated were taken up with discussion of the food and wine options. Their server—a young woman named Skye with short, spiky, black hair, a fitted black silk blouse, and white pants—took down their choices with apparent calm derision and left them to themselves.
Silence stretched on for several moments. Jen laughed awkwardly. “I wish they’d bring the wine. I just can’t get the balance right. Last time we saw each other in person, I was being too loud. Now I say we should meet, and I don’t have anything to say.” She shook her head. “Thanks, by the way, for helping with Katie’s legal problem.”
“No problem. It’s what I do. Really, it’s going to be very simple. Just make sure she wears some conservative, ‘nice girl’ clothes when she comes for her court date next week. It’ll be easy.”
“I didn’t know what to do, but I was sure that it would be a lot easier than she was thinking. I guess you just have to know the way these things work.”
Dan shrugged. “As with anything. There’s a heavy tax on not understanding how the legal system works. And a lot of people just freak out anytime they have to deal with a judge or a lawyer. That’s why I have a job.”
Jen nodded.
“So, speaking of jobs: The last I’d heard from you, you were stuck in China trying to fix bags. What happened?”
“Oh, sheesh. Where to begin? So, you remember I was product-line director for this line of expensive, women’s laptop bags, right? There were supposed to be six different bag designs. The U.S. design team had come up with the styles, and they’d sourced the bags from China. The prototypes looked great, but then once I got there and saw their production samples, I found out the contract manufacturers had been changing designs and materials and taking shortcuts.”
Having embarked on the kind of narration that came easily to her, Jen described the whole China adventure in detail—which proved far more amusing in the retelling than it had seemed at the time. When she reached “So then I see myself in the mirror for the first time as she’s drying my hair, and I’m blonde”, Dan choked explosively on a spoonful of bisque and apologetically began to mop up the table.
“Not just lighter. Not dishwater blonde. Nearly platinum blonde!” Jen continued with triumph.
“I’m having trouble picturing that. I kind of wish I’d seen it.”
“There are pictures, but I don’t think the people who have them will share them.”
“Sounds like there’s more story to come. Go on.”
Dan was more serious as Jen closed the story with the newspaper article and her decision to quit as soon as she landed.
“Now, I’m the lawyer friend, so let me give you the quick lecture here: You did not knowingly speak to a reporter, and you didn’t divulge any proprietary information to the person you thought was just another business traveler, so you have grounds to take action against this reporter if you wanted to, and Aspire does not have grounds to discipline you for appearing in the article. Further, since one of their executives made a pass at you on a business trip, you have very strong grounds for a sexual harassment claim against him and the company, and if they took any kind of action against you—regardless of what they claimed the reason was—you’d have a good case that they were punishing you for reporting the harassment.”
“Dan, honestly, I’m just glad to be out. It may sound funny now, but that China trip was one of the worst business experiences I’ve had in my life. The company culture is toxic. I just don’t want to work there.”
“I get that, but if that’s partly because of the harassment, that’s something you could sue to remedy. You’re letting them off easy by just walking away. A lot of people would say you have a duty to other women to sue so that they’ll clean their act up in the future.”
Jen looked away for a moment. “Look, maybe I’m a bad person for this, but honestly, I just don’t want to deal with these people again. Yes, Todd was an entitled jerk, and I imagine he’ll hit on some woman on a business trip again. But it’s not the first or the last time I’ve had to deal with some drunken slob trying to start something with me. Maybe I’m not doing my part for womankind, but I’d rather just never see any of the people involved again—even if that means forgoing some level of justice.”
“You don’t have to defend it to me,” Dan assured. “I just wanted to make it clear that if you want to get some justice and teach Aspire a lesson, you can do so really easily.”
Jen shrugged.
“All right. So you got off the plane and quit. But since you lead a charmed existence, you already have another job in the wings. Tell me about that.”
“Hmm.” Jen poured herself a second glass of wine, enjoying the loquaciousness that came with it. It let her talk the way she wished she could naturally, silencing the mental editor that at other times kept her quiet lest she say the wrong thing. “I didn’t have anything waiting in the wings when I called Bryn and quit. I just wanted to be out of Aspire as soon as I had my feet planted safely back on U.S. soil. But on the way home from the airport, I stopped at my salon and had my hair put back in something like its natural shade.”
“Depriving my sense of curiosity.”
“Oh, hush. It wasn’t all that. Anyway, by the time I got out, I had an e-mail waiting from a recruiter I’d talked to weeks ago about this job at Schneider and Sons, asking if I was still available. I said yes, and next thing I know, I’ve got a phone interview, and then they ask me to fly out for in-person interviews.”
“You make these things sound so easy.”
“You know, it was pretty easy. I feel like I ought to feel bad about it, with so many people having such a hard time finding jobs. But for whatever reason, it keeps working out. Though, you saw me before I got the Aspire job. I was a mess about being unemployed. And I suppose if I hadn’t landed the Aspire job, I would have been tearing my hair out for the last two months, waiting for something to come along.”
She trailed off, poking bits of food around her plate and contemplating this other possible existence, then shrugged it off. “So, I flew out to O’Hare and drove down to Johnson, Illinois, where Schneider and Sons has their headquarters. It’s about an hour and a half from Chicago. Definitely a small town.
“Schneider and Sons makes high-end tools, m
ostly power tools. Most of their customers are construction companies, contractors, and other professionals who are willing to pay more for tools that will last way longer than the brands you see in Home Depot or Lowe’s. But the line I’m being brought in to manage is ‘Schneider’, their consumer line. It’s still more expensive than mainstream brands, but it’s not as overengineered as the professional grade. Right now, it’s only sold directly through their website and through a few woodworking chains, but they’ve been working to try to get it into the big-box stores. What?”
Dan was shaking his head and smiling slightly. “We’ve known each other for what—six years? When I look at you, I don’t exactly picture power tools and Home Depot.”
Jen shrugged. “I didn’t use the PocketDJ app or carry a designer laptop bag either. Product management is a skill totally separate from using the product.”
“I know, I know. I just . . .” Dan paused, swirling his wine in his glass and clearly considering his words carefully. “I’ve seen you in, what, four different jobs since you got your MBA? I know how you thrive in a fast-paced environment and how ambitious you are. Are you really going to be happy living in some small town in the Midwest and working at a company that makes power tools? I have trouble picturing you working with a bunch of middle-aged guys who drive pickup trucks and shoot deer. Are you sure you’re not just reacting to the bad experience at Aspire Brands? Looking for the farthest thing from that kind of frenetic dysfunction that you can find?”
“In some ways, the company isn’t as different from the tech companies I’ve worked for. I mean, they’ve got a fleet of company bicycles for getting from building to building—because the campus is big and they want to encourage people not to drive too much. And they’ve got tennis and volleyball courts and stuff—though the woman from HR told me that those date back to the fifties, when there was the whole ‘company town’ kind of thing, and people would come down to the campus on weekends and have barbecues with their families.
“So yeah,” she concluded, “it’ll be a huge change from the Bay Area and from the companies I’ve been working at lately. But it does seem like a fairly dynamic company—for all of being 130 years old—and maybe it’s time for me to try a change anyway. Illinois is where I’m from, and the Bay Area hasn’t been treating me so well lately anyway.”
Dan nodded. “Hey, maybe so. You remember how fast I burned out on corporate law and went off to write wills and dispute speeding tickets. So, it’s not like I have any credibility to tell someone to stay on the fast track.”
Conversation turned, for a while, to Dan’s activities and then to those of others they had known from graduate school at Stanford. This flow of conversation was finally punctuated by the server appearing beside their table to glare darkly at them and inquire if they would be having dessert tonight.
“What exactly is the molten cocoa torte?” Jen asked.
“Basically chocolate cake.”
“I’ll have that.”
The server retreated and left them looking at each other in silence.
“So,” Jen asked after a moment, “how’s the ‘nice Jewish girl’ thing going?”
Dan shrugged. “She was nice. I’m still single.”
“I just can’t get over that whole idea. Your mom setting you up, that is.”
“Yeah. It kind of makes sense, though. She has friends who have single daughters my age. And it’s not necessarily all that much more awkward than the first date with someone I found on JDate.”
“But why is it so important to find a woman who’s Jewish? I mean, aren’t there much more important things to agree on?”
Dan gave his crooked smile. “Well, like what? Following the same sport? Having gone to the same school? You always first meet someone because of some shared characteristic, and often it’s something pretty shallow. It’s not as if I’d just go off and marry someone just because she was Jewish. But if I’m going to start somewhere, it’s not that bad a place to start, is it?”
“Maybe it’s just because I’m not Jewish, but religion just seems like an odd thing to be so fixated on when looking for a girlfriend.”
“I don’t know. None of my college girlfriends were Jewish, and those didn’t work out either. So at least I’ve got consistency across creeds.”
“But why the big emphasis on finding a Jewish girl now? Have you really become that religious?”
“I’m a bit better than I was when we first met, but no, I’m not what you could call a ‘good Jew’. I believe in God and everything, but somehow I just don’t follow many of the rules most of the time.”
“I really don’t get it then. So, most of the time you don’t do that much about being Jewish, but you’re saying that if you met some woman you really hit it off with, but she happened to be agnostic or Methodist or something, you’d take a pass because you really need to find someone who’s Jewish? That just doesn’t seem like you.”
“No, I’m not saying that. But let’s be honest: I don’t have lots of women just wandering into my life who seem perfect for me. I’m thirty-five, and I’m not getting any younger. So, if I want to ever get married, I have to search. And if I’m searching anyway, I need to pick some criteria to determine who I look for. The fact is that being Jewish is defining: racially, culturally, religiously. At least we start out with certain things in common. And if things did work out, it would give us commonalities on which to build a family life.”
Jen considered this as she ate her dessert and drank her coffee.
“You know,” she said at last, her sense of honesty overcoming her reluctance to bring a subject back up merely to concede it. “That makes a lot of sense. You’ve thought about this more than I have. Maybe because there were a couple times I really thought everything would work out—with Kevin when he first moved in with me, with Adam back when I was at Stanford—I always thought about marriage in very specific terms: Is this the guy? Maybe that’s enough for a lot of people. But obviously, for people like us, mid-thirties, no prospects, we need to have something going for us, some first spark. If being Jewish means so much to you, I can see how it would be that common thing you’d look for.”
Once such topics had been brought up and their depths plumbed, it was hard to return to small talk. Soon after, they requested their checks. The server had evidently not expected this, and so they found themselves confronted with a single bill. Dan offered to pay the whole thing, but when they’d just spent time discussing their separate ideas of dating, this hardly seemed just. A series of negotiations followed, but between them they had enough cash and enough flexibility to reach an amicable arrangement, and after a few words in the parking lot, they went their ways.
The next week brought a quickening stream of change. Jen’s start date would be the last Monday in September, two weeks away. The transfer of her life from the Bay Area to Johnson, Illinois, was entrusted to a “relocation specialist” named Carla, working for a company based out of Omaha. Clearly practiced in the details of moving people across the country, Carla set to work with an efficiency that made large decisions pass almost without notice. E-mails would arrive laying out some detail of Jen’s coming life and providing two or three easily chosen options.
How many people were in her household, and what relation did they bear to her? She lived with her sister. Would the sister be moving too? Yes. This was nonstandard, but since there were no other members of the household, the company would probably approve it. She would check. Yes, they did approve it. Did Jen want to have the company buy out her condo if it didn’t sell in three months, or would she prefer to keep marketing it herself as long as necessary? Take it off her hands if it doesn’t sell. Following please find links to three residence communities in which furnished apartments are available in or near Johnson, Illinois. Let me know which one you would like to have for your three months’ company-paid temporary housing.
Decisions about where to live, when to move, and how to sell her condo were made so quickly a
nd easily that it seemed hard to credit the fact that such major changes were occurring at all.
Katie’s court appearance, which had loomed darkly over the week, proved something of an anticlimax. Having been told that all that was required of her was to dress conservatively, say she was sorry, and be polite, Katie had invested the first of these with perhaps undue weight. After spending significant amounts of time contemplating her own closet, she secured Jen’s permission to plumb the depths of hers. From this she emerged, well satisfied, wearing one of Jen’s best suits.
“How about this?” Katie asked, turning around for inspection. “Muted colors. Very conservative. Low heels. Does this say, ‘Don’t send me to jail; I won’t do it again’?”
Jen’s first—though, she recognized, not kindest—instinct was to try to calculate whether Katie looked better than she did in the outfit, due to being younger, or worse, due to being less in shape, but she quickly drove these unwelcome considerations from her mind.
“You look good, and it’s a conservative look, but that’s an expensive suit. If the judge knows anything about clothes, it’ll make you look too well off for your age, and spoiled rich kid is probably not the look that helps.”
“Are you saying I look too good?” Katie asked, with a hint of a smile—an encouraging change, given how obviously nervous she had been all day.
“Yeah, I guess so. We probably want you looking a little young and inexperienced—the sort of girl who never found herself yelling drunkenly at a cop at a traffic stop before.”
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