reinvent your job
I woke up with one of those optimistic feelings that I guess normal people wake up with every day, but I just wasn’t accustomed to it. It was so nice that I lay in bed for an extra ten minutes. Just because. And if I was ten minutes late for work? So be it.
When I got in, there were three yellow Post-its on my desk. All of them said, “Call me.” All of them were from Lydia. This gave me pause. Three? I tried to re-create in my head what had gone on: She walks out of her office and down to the pit and sees that the person she wants to talk to—me—isn’t at her desk. So she leaves me a note asking me to call her. What I can only imagine is two minutes later, she walks out again just to check if I am there yet. No, I’m not. But, what the hell, she’s already standing, so why not leave another note saying the exact same thing. Then perhaps three more minutes pass—Christ, an egg could be cooked in that time. So up she goes to see if I have arrived yet. Again, I am still absent, so she decides that it would be an excellent idea to leave yet another note. Saying the very exact thing once again. Lydia gets paid a lot of money. This astounds me.
Then the phone intercom buzzed loudly.
“Are you in yet?” she hissed.
“Yes, I’m here.” I looked at the clock. It was 9:07. I was only seven minutes late. All this dramatic note leaving took place within seven minutes. Lydia truly was a hideous beast.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I just got here and I was reading all your notes,” I said. “I didn’t want to miss any. Were there more than three? I only saw three.”
“No. That’s all there were. Can you come in here, please?” All this was unnecessary by the way. One: Her office was two feet from my desk. Two: I could hear her equally well with or without the phone pressed to my ear. And three: She already had me on the phone, so why couldn’t she just say what she wanted to say?
I got up and walked the two steps into her office. Her lips were pursed into such a tiny, wrinkled mold of bitter, I almost laughed at the sight of her.
“Hi. Good morning,” I said.
She looked at her watch and then at me. “Gandhi said that lateness was an act of terrorism.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re late,” she said. “It’s terroristic.” I wanted to burst out laughing but didn’t. Again I was amazed, wondering how I managed not to react to that crap before.
“Are you sure that’s what he said?” And are you sure that terroristic is a word? “I mean, I apologize for being late,” I said, “but that’s a little extreme, no?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said as she googled Gandhi and then almost violently turned her computer screen to face me, reading aloud, “Punctuality is nonviolence. Tardiness is a theft of another’s good time and therefore does violence.’”
I stood there and looked at her for a moment, not really sure how to respond to the sudden storm of fury. “Well, I’m very sorry. In the future I’ll make it very clear when I’m doing violence.”
“Fine,” she said, brushing it off. “So I assume you went over everything?” Lydia raised her eyebrows. I raised mine back.
“Yup. Sure did.”
“Good.” She sighed. “I’m having a hell of a time with this one. The inspiration just isn’t coming . . . ” She looked up quickly with a pained smile. “Funny. You used to like knowing what was going on with the creative. Do you remember trying your hand at it?” she asked, almost admitting that I used to do her job for her but not actually saying it. What she was doing was trying to butter me up. A compliment before she asked me to do her job for her once again. “It’s for VibraLens. I’m not sure about what I have, but maybe you can make them better.”
“Sure,” I said. “Lay ’em on me.”
“Okay. What I have is ‘VibraLens . . . The Eyes Have It.’” She looked at me to gauge my response.
“Very . . . clear,” I said.
“Okay,” she continued with mild annoyance, “and then I have ‘Vibra-Lens. Eyes Are the Prize.’ Which I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing you’re having trouble remembering right now, but it’s a take on ‘Keep your eyes on the prize,’ which is a pretty universally known phrase.”
Yes. It was universally known. One of Martin Luther King’s more famous phrases and totally inappropriate for a colored contact lens campaign. She sure was bringing the great spiritual leaders to the party today . . . Gandhi . . . MLK . . . I half suspected after lunch we’d be pitching birdseed with St. Francis of Assisi and a new brand of water skis with Jesus.
“Hmm,” I said. And then there was a long pause. Normally, this is when I would have chimed in with all my ideas. Correcting hers but without seeming to. Making her shine. (“Ha,” I’d laugh. “That’s so great! It made me think of something else that I’m not sure if it’s worth anything but I’ll throw it out anyway . . .” I’d been the exact opposite of passive-aggressive. Was there a name for the act of manipulation in which you’re trying to help someone but need to make yourself look like a bumbling idiot in the process so they don’t feel guilty about taking advantage of you? I’d have to find the word so I could make a plaque declaring myself former world champion.) She was used to that kind of behavior from me. She was waiting for it. She leaned forward even. Cocked one eyebrow hopefully. Yeah, I had a couple of ideas. And if she thought I was handing them to her, then she was absolutely nuts. Those days were over, baby. But I waited an extra minute, just so it looked like I was percolating. And just when she was really chomping at the bit, I spoke up. “Those sound good to me! But I don’t know what kind of a judge I am.”
She was fuming. I could tell that she knew they weren’t very good and she desperately needed my help. But what could she say? Nothing.
“I’ll need them mocked up for the Tuesday meeting,” she said disappointedly.
“Okay.”
“And I’m going to let you sit in on the meeting.”
“Neat,” I said.
“And take notes.”
“Okay.”
“So you know where Caroline Keeps is, the art director, on the tenth floor?”
“I’m sure I can find her.”
“Okay then,” she said. “She needs this job bag back.”
I wasn’t sure if “Okay then” meant we were finished. That’s not entirely true. I knew that we were finished. But I liked the awkward pauses. I liked watching Lydia get flustered. She had treated me like an idiot for so long, I liked watching her do it from this new perspective. So I stood there and looked at her.
“That’s all. You can go now.” That’s what I was waiting for. I smiled, and my smile seemed to piss her off. Then again, everything I did that wasn’t benefiting her somehow seemed to piss her off. She narrowed her eyes at me as I turned to leave.
* * * * *
Todd met me at the concrete park across from my office for lunch. I shouldn’t call it that. It was really a cute little park with a pretty garden. “Concrete parks” are what suburbanites call the city parks once they’ve moved out to the suburbs and turn up their noses at our little sanctuaries. They get spoiled with not having to actually work to get a little greenery. Even though it was December, it was one of those random warm days that you feel like you have to take advantage of. The bittersweet upshot of global warming.
It was hot dogs day. Todd and I usually had lunch together three times a week, and at least one of the three times we’d eat Sabrett’s hot dogs. I know they’re disgusting, but for me it was comfort food. When I was a little girl and my mom and Walter would take us into the city, I’d always get excited about getting a hot dog from a stand. I had no idea how many stands spanned the city and I actually thought we were getting hot dogs from the same guy every time.
So once a week I’d get a foot-long with the works—this time from the same guy. “The works,” included a healthy topping of sauerkraut—which repulsed Todd no end. I don’t know if I even loved sauerkraut all that much or if I just got pleasure from grossing Todd out, but either way it made for a tasty lunch. And every time, Todd had to make a stink about it.
Like clockwork, Todd watched me sink my teeth into my first bite and offered, “I don’t know how you can eat sauerkraut. It’s fucking disgusting. It’s rotten cabbage!”
“It’s not rotten,” I said back, mouth full of food, as he shuddered. These were the little things that made me happy. Complaining about Lydia was always good times as well.
“Her ideas were completely pathetic. I mean—really bad.”
“We have that at our agency too. People fail upward. It’s part of life,” he said.
“But her ideas can’t have always been so insipid, so . . . silly and shameless,” I said.
“Like for instance?”
“She’s thinking of using Dr. Martin Luther King to sell colored contacts.”
He made a face. “Ouch. That ranks up there with the line she thought up for that new drug . . .”
“‘Kiss your genital herpes good-bye ’?”
“Bingo.”
“It’s not fair.” I sighed.
“What’s fair, Jordan? Is there an overwhelming glut of fairness in the world? Most days suck. Most people suck. What are you gonna do?” he said, with a shrug of acceptance.
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do,” I answered. “Whatever the hell I can. Right now I have somewhat of a pass—carte blanche to do things I’d never have done before. And I can do it under the guise of not knowing it wasn’t okay.”
“Uh-oh . . . I smell a plan . . .”
“You always did have a keen sense of smell.”
“Thanks. It’s this new stuff I’m putting on after I shave,” he joked.
“Which makes up for your dumb jokes.”
“Anyway . . . what’s the plan?”
“Well, after she not-so-politely excused me from her office, I got this idea. She keeps telling me how ‘instrumental’ I used to be and then gives me her lame copy to storyboard. She’s also going to let me sit in on the meeting. Such privilege. Meanwhile, I’m getting zero credit for any of my previous ideas, which she blatantly stole.”
“Corporate America.”
“Yeah, well, the new Jordan doesn’t just write it off as corporate America. The new Jordan doesn’t get mad—she gets even.”
“What evil have you planned?”
I smiled. He knew me so well. But this wasn’t evil. This was me finally taking control of my life. By seeming just a bit out of control.
* * * * *
On my way back to work, I spotted Lydia and Kurt canoodling in an alcove between two buildings. I sped up my gait so they wouldn’t see me, but it surprised me that they were being so careless—right near our office. I busied my mind by taking in the scenery. New York in December is something to behold, and I worked just blocks from Radio City Music Hall—home of the famous Christmas Spectacular, with the glittering nativity that suggests that since there was no room at the inn, the Holy Family just parked it for the night in a suite at the Four Seasons.
Back at the office Mr. Billingsly walked up to my desk and looked into Lydia’s office, seeming distressed that she wasn’t there.
“Where’s Lydia?” he asked, as if I were her keeper. I felt this low-level panic in my stomach, but I didn’t know why. I’d never actually confirmed that he and Lydia had a thing, but I was almost positive that at one time or another—if not still—they had. And what if one illicit lover should find her with the other? Call it confirmation that I’m basically a squeamish person that I wanted no part of it.
“She’s at lunch.”
“Well, can you make sure she knows that Tuesday’s VibraLens meeting has been moved from two o’clock to one o’clock?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“That’s an hour earlier,” he added, in case I couldn’t figure it out on my own.
“Yeah, I got that. Thanks.”
“Getting back in the swing of things?” he asked. And then before I could open my mouth to answer, he shuffled away down the hallway.
I opened up my e-mail program and clicked Compose. At the very click of it I started beaming. You wouldn’t think that writing an e-mail to your boss to let her know that a meeting had been changed from two o’clock to one o’clock would bring such joy, but it did. It did because Lydia never, never, never checked her e-mail. I was supposed to tell her everything verbally, and/or leave her a Post-it note, and/or send her brain waves to remind her in case actions one and two failed. But I didn’t know that Lydia didn’t check her e-mail. I had amnesia. So as far as I knew, I was being responsible and doing exactly as Mr. Billingsly said. It was perfect. I couldn’t have orchestrated it better myself.
To: Lydia.Bedford@SplashDirect.com
Cc: Ted.Billingsly@SplashDirect.com
From: Jordan.Landau@SplashDirect.com
Subject: **Important** Tuesday Meeting—Time Change
The VibraLens pitch meeting has been moved up an hour. Instead of taking place at 2 p.m., the meeting will now take place at 1 p.m. Please note: This is an hour earlier.
J
Just typing the whole “hour-earlier clarification” that Mr. Billingsly had so kindly explained to me made me feel giddy. So giddy that I copied Billingsly on it as well.
* * * * *
Stu Elliot waltzed into the pit and sat on the edge of my desk.
“Hey, daredevil,” he said. This was a reference to my riding without a helmet. “Didn’t I tell you to wear protective gear?”
I wanted to say, “Yeah, Stu. You did. And if you wanna call me out on that, when I know for a fact that you took Lexi Kaye home from last year’s Christmas party and spent the next afternoon in a pharmacy—we can talk about wearing protective gear. You sure you wanna have this conversation?” But I couldn’t. Because I hadn’t seen Stu since the accident and I wasn’t supposed to recognize him.
“Did you?” I asked uncertainly.
“I’m sorry. I’m Stu,” he said, and then put out his hand to shake. I took it and introduced myself back.
“I’m Jordan . . . but I guess you already know that.”
“Yeah, we go way back.” Stu cleared his throat and looked at my mock-ups, trying to move away from the awkwardness. “What are those?”
“They’re for VibraLens. Colored contact lenses. I’m just playing,” I said.
“They’re good,” he said as he looked through my ideas. They were good. I was looking at the colored contacts like my own fakery—and coming up with some slam-dunk ideas. He read a couple out loud “‘Change the way the world sees you.’ ‘A colorful new you’ . . . they’re really good, Jordan.”
“Thanks.”
“Colored contacts,” he scoffed. “How about ‘Pretend to be something you’re not.’” Normally we would have shared a laugh over this. But I just stared at him, wide-eyed, for probably too long. I wondered if he was subtly trying to tell me something. That low-level panic I’d felt when I saw Lydia and Kurt came back tenfold. This time with good reason. I froze. I guess Stu felt bad that I didn’t seem to get the joke, so he tried to change the subject. “So we have our company Christmas party next week. You coming?”
Funny he should mention it. “I don’t know,” I said. “Should I?”
“It’s a good ti-ime,” he said in a singsongy cadence. “People get pretty trashed.”
“Well, maybe . . .” I said, and we’d covered about all we could cover, so he got up and walked away.
The way Stu talked about the party made me think about the last good time I’d had. Thanksgiving. Not with my parents but with Travis. He’d given me his number and asked me to call him, but I didn’t know if he’d meant it or was just being polite. And he hadn’t yet called me, despite the business card I’d given him. I prayed it didn’t have some impromptu shopping list scrawled on the back of it consisting of Dirk favorites. I don’t care how down-to-earth you want to seem, it’s never good for a girl to send the message that she’s reminding herself to grab a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I pulled out his card and looked at it. He was an analyst in risk management at Goldman Sachs. I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded very corporate—not at all what I pictured him doing with his time. I wondered what risk management was. I knew that without risk there was supposedly little reward, but I also knew that I’d once risked everything to sneak out of my house junior year to go to Monique Anderson’s party, and that hadn’t provided any rewards at all. In fact, I’d gotten busted and lost driving privileges for three months. So which side of this thing was he on: Was it his job to create more risk and more reward or the opposite? And was that type of job rewarding? Since I was on the fence about whether to call or not, and the word risk was right there on his business card, staring me in the face, I decided that I shouldn’t call. No matter what the potential reward. Another thing a girl should almost never do: appear interested.
“Hello?” said the voice I remembered from Thanksgiving when I called thirty seconds later.
“Hi . . . this is Jordan?” I said. Silence. “The girl from the accident?” I added and then winced and held my breath until he spoke again. I was sounding like one of those people who raised her pitch at the end of every sentence like she’s asking a question even when she wasn’t.
“Jordan! I’m sorry, this speakerphone. I’m so glad you called.”
“Good.” Brilliant!
“Your business card turned out to be a frequent visitor card from a deli. Eight more punches and you’ve got yourself a free sandwich.”
Brilliant!
“How are— Do you feel any better?” he asked.
“Oh, God, well, all the time, I mean my wound is improving,” I managed to put together. “I’m still nervous about the memory thing.”
“Absolutely, that would be— Yes, that’s a difficult part.”
“Of the accident. Yes.”
With conversation this scintillating, we really should have just hung up immediately. But I was determined to right the ship, right then and there.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just got out of a really tedious meeting. It’s one thing to get tired after a marathon meeting about mitigation strategies and probabilistic risk models, but it’s a whole new level of excitement when you actually start to fall asleep during the meeting.”
“Yikes.”
“In front of your managing director.”
“Double yikes.”
“And I thought sociology class was bad. That was like Vegas compared to the last three hours of my life—which I want back, by the way.”
“So you like your job,” I said.
“Actually it’s not that bad, but it’s certainly not the grand plan.”
“I look forward to hearing what that is.”
“And I look forward to telling you,” he said. “What are you doing later? I know this great shabu-shabu place.”
“Shabu-shabu?” I repeated, while I googled shabu-shabu to find out exactly what it was. I found that it’s a fondue party of sorts . . . but there’s no cheese involved—which didn’t sound like a party to me at all—but before I could search the Internet further, he clarified.
“You cook the food yourself on a hot skillet in the middle of your table.”
“Aha!” I exclaimed. “Sounds fun.”
“You’ve never done shabu-shabu?” he asked, making me feel totally unhip.
“Oh, I’ve done shabu-shabu,” I said cockily.
“Really?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. It’s hard to know for sure.”
“Then we’re on it. It’s a plan, Stan,” he said, and I used all of my willpower not to say “You don’t need to be coy, Roy!” thinking it was too early to start being my usual goofy self. Plus, if he didn’t recognize it as a “50 Ways” lyric, I’d have the awkward explanation to deal with and I didn’t want to risk it. And was I supposed to remember lyrics? But there was that whole risk thing again, staring me in the face. And because I thought it, I felt like now I had to say it. Because the new Jordan took risks. And this entire thought process took only about four seconds.
“You don’t need to be coy, Roy,” I said.
“Just get yourself free,” he answered, and the smile that spread across my face felt like sunshine warming me from the inside out.
* * * * *
The restaurant was in the East Village, and when I got there Travis was standing outside, talking to another guy. We’d made plans to meet immediately following work, which was good because it didn’t allow me any time to stress out over what I was going to wear, but it was bad for the same reason. The guy he was standing with was a couple inches shorter than Travis and was wearing a suit. He had tight curly hair and wore glasses. As I approached them, Travis stepped toward me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“Hi,” he said. “Nice to see you again.”
“You too,” I said and looked at his friend.
“Sorry, this is Ben, a friend of mine,” Travis said.
“Hi, Ben. Nice to meet you,” I said.
“And you as well,” Ben said. “Did you get any of your memory back yet?”
“Ah . . . you know the whole saga,” I said, feeling guilty about the lie I was about to tell. “Little things, but so much is still not there. Some familiarity with the neighborhood, the coffeemaker, and the computer doesn’t mystify nearly as much as it did—but people, things that happened . . .” I reached out tentatively, then smiled sadly. Guilt shmilt.
“I feel terrible!” Travis said, throwing his head back, looking up at the sky.
“Stop it—it’s okay,” I reassured.
“Did you forget everything or just a few things?” inquired Ben.
“It’s sort of complicated,” I said. “Some things are totally there—like song lyrics, and like how to brush my teeth, but names and faces . . .” I trailed off.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll get your memory back real soon,” Ben said.
“I’m sure I will too,” I said to Ben. I felt like I was meeting the friends, so I needed to make a good impression. So it was a really good thing that I was lying through my teeth. Excellent first impression. I turned to Travis. “Please, don’t feel bad about it. It’s kind of weird, but kind of . . . incredible too. I get to start over.” Ben looked at Travis like he was trying to tell him something.
“Are you joining us?” I asked Ben, hoping that he wasn’t. I mean, it was supposed to be a date, I thought. I knew it felt like a date. What a cute meeting story we’d have. “How’d you two meet?” “Oh, he ran me over on my bike, which sent me to the hospital where he sent me flowers and candy while I faked a major head trauma and amnesia.”
“Oh, that’s nice of you,” Ben said. “But I have dinner plans already. I just bumped into Travis here, and . . . I guess I’ll let you two get to it. Nice meeting you.”
“You too,” I said, and Ben left us to shabu-shabu as a duet.
The restaurant was one of those places where they make you take off your shoes. I thanked God and everything that was holy that I was wearing cute socks (which weren’t holey) when I stepped out of my boots.
Our communal table was recessed along with the plush cushion seats we sat on and our feet dangled below us. I was giddy with excitement—but I couldn’t help noticing a smell permeating the restaurant. Hard to describe. I looked around and noticed the setup. There was a skillet built into each table, hot pots to cook some sort of stew . . . and it seemed that each table was given raw meat, vegetables, and some spices. I wondered if it was the raw meat that I was smelling, but it didn’t smell like meat—it smelled like . . . feet.
I didn’t know if I should say something to Travis because I didn’t want to come off as a complainer, but it was pretty awful.
“Excited for your first—?” He stopped and sniffed. “Do you smell something?” he whispered.
“Thank God,” I said. “Yes, I just wasn’t sure if that was part of the shabu-shabu charm, so I didn’t want to say anything.”
We both looked around and under the table and in the same instant zeroed in on the culprit. Our tablemate. A man, late forties with his wife and twelve-year-old son. It had to be him. His socks looked filthy, and there was a hole in the left one with his big toe peeking out.
“Hole-in-one, twelve o’clock,” Travis said, speaking in code.
“Roger that,” I said. And try as I might have, I couldn’t help but focus on that one renegade toe. “Kind of gross.”
“I’ll say. It’s like he wore the same pair for a week just for the occasion.”
“Well, let’s just try not to focus on it,” I said, trying to be upbeat and optimistic even though my eyes were practically watering.
“Sounds good,” Travis said and snuck one last peek at the table. The son was flicking his retainer in and out of his mouth.
“So what’s good here?” I asked.
“Not that,” Travis said, with a glance at the kid. “On the menu? Meat. And meat.”
“With a side of meat?”
“There’s not a lot of variation on the menu—it’s pretty much just how much of it you want to have.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
“This is too much effort,” said Mrs. Stench. “If I’m going to a restaurant I want them to cook it for me.” Travis and I shared a smile.
The waiter came over and took our order. The smell wasn’t dissipating like we’d hoped. I took a sip of water and could swear it tasted like feet.
I didn’t see it happen, but I definitely heard it—a plunk. And then a scream. The boy had flicked his retainer out of his mouth and into the hot pot in the center of our table. Then not thinking, he reached in to get it out and burned his hand. Then the mother started yelling at the kid for playing with his retainer, which she’d told him not to do “a thousand times,” and the boy was crying, and the father was yelling that he just wanted to have “one nice God-damned family dinner once in my life.”
The whole place was in an uproar. The stink, the retainer, and the mayhem were too much to bear. Travis grabbed my hand and helped me up. We put our shoes back on and ducked out of the restaurant.
“If you think I have good taste in restaurants,” he said, “wait till I pick our first movie.”
It may have been the worst restaurant ever, but the promise of another date made it entirely worth it. “Our first movie.” I liked the sound of that. We ended up on the corner of St. Marks and Avenue A, eating pizza and watching angsty, pseudo-punk rock kids beg for change and hiss at the people who didn’t oblige.
“This is the real deal,” I said as I took a dainty bite of my pizza.
“Who would have thought she’d prefer a meal totaling a whopping five dollars and twenty-three cents?” he asked and then stopped. “Don’t look down,” he said suddenly, staring at my chest.
Normally, any flattery implicit in a man’s staring at a woman’s chest is overridden by her anger at being reduced to a pair of boobs. But in this case, he was so obvious—and his gaze expressed so much alarm—it caught me off guard. Naturally, I looked down.
“Perfect,” I said, now comprehending what he’d regarded with such dread. My “dainty” bite had resulted in a stripe of tomato sauce not much shorter than my forearm, in a neat diagonal across my shirt between my breasts.
“If anybody messes with us later, just tell him it’s blood from the last guy who messed with us,” Travis said.
I gritted my teeth and growled, but it couldn’t completely disguise my smile.
* * * * *
When I walked into the boardroom at 12:59 p.m. the next day, everybody was already there. Everyone except Lydia. I’d timed it to reduce the odds that someone would send me hunting for her. The marketing vice president and president of VibraLens were seated next to Mr. Billingsly, who looked confused when I walked in alone.
“Where is Lydia?” he said quietly to me, with just a hint of concern.
“Not sure,” I said, sharing the concern, putting my arm around it as if to say, I’m with you, brother—what the hell?
“I sent her an e-mail, notifying her of the time change,” I whispered.
“Well, where’s her material? Do we have that? Is Darryl around?” I smiled and pointed to the easel to reassure him, then shrugged about art director Darryl, knowing full well he hadn’t been invited to the party. It didn’t matter. Experience taught me Lydia rarely invited her art director on any given assignment to present, perhaps fearing to share credit even with the person who’d made her words come alive on the page or screen. We’d done boards and electronic mock-ups and I’d made sure everything was ready. Everything. Even if she wasn’t.
Two other teams were on the pitch—a touch of creative excess Mr. B. always demanded from us for a new account and a strategy that sometimes had the unfortunate side effect of overwhelming the clients and paralyzing their decision making. In this meeting, he was juggling the need to play host with the desperation about Lydia’s absence, sending an assistant searching, to no avail.
Within forty minutes, both teams had pitched their ideas, none of which were blowing away the VibraLens suits. I had a little rule of thumb: If anyone’s first words were “That’s interesting,” you were dead. And Splash had produced a load of “interesting” material. Mr. Billingsly looked in my direction.
“Okay then. Next, we have Lydia Bedford, who I know has come up with some great ideas. She’s unfortunately been held up, so . . .” He looked at me, the idea not yet occurring to him—so I gave it a little shove into his line of sight.
“I can do the honors, Mr. Billingsly.” I looked at him and smiled reassuringly. He announced me with a strained laugh, then muttered something under his breath which I wasn’t positive I heard right. It sounded like, “Don’t fuck it up,” but I’m sure that was just my ears talking. I just smiled again at him and walked to the head of the room.
“Thank you, sir. I am Jordan Landau. Lydia was very excited about these mock-ups and I hope you will be too. The first concept plays to a demographic that came up earlier, a missed opportunity I think someone said—beyond the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old vanity set. We’re in a lawmaking chamber—maybe the floor of the Senate. Image is everything for these power brokers.” I pulled up her first storyboard to show her lame-ass idea. It was a Senate hearing with one woman staring dead ahead with her impossibly bright blue eyes. “So, in this world, and in our target consumer’s world, ‘The Eyes Have It.’”
I looked around at the execs and saw that they probably thought what I’d thought. It was cute . . . but that was it. No reaction at all—they just seemed to be waiting for the next one. “Second, she evokes the powerful words of a great American leader but in a way that’s not overly serious.” I revealed the image—a table of dozens of multiethnic faces, eyes blazing with colored contacts that suggested a world in which every person had been forced to hand over his or her eyes, one person to the left. “‘Eyes Are the Prize.’” The room was deadly silent. But only for a moment.
“Interesting,” the marketing VP finally said.
Mr. Billingsly shifted in his seat. The VibraLens camp looked neither happy nor unhappy, the worst-case reaction to a creative presentation. Indifferent. I wondered if they were aware of how awkward and inappropriate that idea was. I hoped so. And now was my chance. I steeled myself.
“If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to continue with just a few very recent additions to our thinking on this . . . some things that were inspired by some experiences in my own life.” I smiled to gauge the reaction, and Mr. Billingsly’s eyes had widened to a point where I half expected them to fall out for lack of containment. Amazing how one eyelid extension could speak such volumes.
“First, the colored lens really holds a promise: that without much trouble, you present a new face to the world—and at last you’re in control of that face. What did you say, Diane?” I pointed at the advertising manager. “That it makes your eyes a fashion accessory? That’s at the heart of this concept.” I revealed my first board. “VibraLens—Change how the world sees you.”
Then I moved to the second. “A central part of your strategy is about breaking out of the commodity world of the contact and restoring the ‘cool cachet’ of the colored lens. So this concept builds not on how you look wearing VibraLens colored lenses but on how they change your outlook.” I unveiled the second board, which Deb had done for me, thinking she was working on a crash concept for Lydia. It was a flowing image that changed from a blurry black-and-white photo to wildly colorful, crystal-clear Impressionist landscape. “See the world differently.”
They seemed mildly interested. Then Lydia burst into the room.
“Hi!” she screeched. “The meeting was moved?”
Nine heads, four of them on the necks of clients, turned to see her. Billingsly tried to cover with a smile and an odd khhghg sound in his throat. Calmly, I replied, “I sent you an e-mail Monday about the change and then one again this morning.”
She was wound tighter than a boa constrictor’s grip on a rat. “But I never check my e-mail. You’ve known that for two years, Jordan.” She was now screaming. Everyone in the room was getting uncomfortable. Except me. I was loving it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, with a saccharine wide-eyed innocence. “I didn’t remember. I assumed you’d read it. I’m so sorry.” I was cool as a cucumber. Lydia looked like she was going to implode.
“Well, it’s not a problem, we’re just about through, so find a seat and we’ll be back to it,” Mr. Billingsly said, and then got in his characteristic late hit. “But I believe I saw the notice—so let’s continue.” Ha! Take that, snake woman! But then Mr. Billingsly said something that sounded like sweet, sweet music. “Jordan, please go on.”
I shook off the Lydia intrusion and continued. “Right. Keeping with the same theme, I thought, we show a woman one way, possibly corporate, stuffy, buttoned up . . . and then we see the rock-star version of her. Not a total one-eighty and not ridiculous, but a definite change, highlighting her bright eyes. She walks in one way, dressed appropriately, and walks out completely different—and happier for it. ‘VibraLens . . . Reinvent yourself!’”
Lydia looked like she was about to have a conniption.
“That’s not my idea!” Lydia said loud enough for everyone to hear, straining mightily with a cracking smile to remain civil but utterly failing. She looked like she was in the early stage of a total breakdown. And as she melted, the VP of marketing for VibraLens clapped his hands together.
“Well, it should be,” Mr. Billingsly said. “It’s great!”
“Really?” I asked.
“I love it! Reinvent yourself!” chimed the VibraLens guy. “Jordan . . . ”
“Yes.”
“It’s interesting. No, it’s wonderful. It’s just the kind of thing we need. Fun, hip. I even like the rock-star thing. Any others?” He smiled and leaned forward.
“Research told us that much of the resistance to your product among your target demographics is that colored lenses tend to be so noticeable. With ColorSense, you’re toning them down, making them more like real eye colors, and avoiding the stigma of ‘pretending.’ Some places, they don’t mind people pretending—people make a living at it. But we’re casting our nets wider. For everyone who ever dreamed of altering eye color with contacts.” I flipped to my last board. A woman looks seductively into the camera. “So subtle—no one else can see through them.”
The room applauded. Mr. Billingsly smiled and acted as though he’d known it all along. The truth about Jordan . . .
“Jordan has always been our diamond in the rough. I think she’s finally starting to sparkle.” Was he serious? I went from “leave it in the gutter” to a diamond in the rough just like that.
Meanwhile, Lydia was mortified—which tickled me to no end. When everybody got up to leave, Mr. Billingsly put his arm around me with an off-balance hug (he had that post-positive-creative-meeting euphoria) and said, “How about this one, huh? Huh? Jordan, stop by my office this afternoon. I think it’s time we start talking about your future here.”
“Will do. Thank you!” I said, then mumbled but loudly: “Because I sure can’t remember much of my past.” And he actually laughed, long and hard, at my line. I was beginning to see and be seen differently.