Author's note: A two-part story this time (seems I'm getting more ambitious). Fair warning, though, there is not a lot of sex in part 1 (just a little bit). Hope you'll still choose to stick around for the story.
Paul and I had reached a milestone in our relationship. Our first fight.
I'm not a dogmatic person. This despite -- or more likely because of -- my religious upbringing. But there is one point on which I refuse to compromise. My ambition.
The world is full of women whose careers have been strangled in infancy by men, whose careers have been shot down in full flight by childbirth, and (worst of all) whose careers have succeeded only because of the help men gave them. I have vowed never to be one of those women. I don't mean I won't accept male help or mentorship (a vastly overrated concept, in my experience), rather that I will only take advantage of them in a spirit of cynical self-advancement. In other words, I play tough, and if that doesn't work, I play unfair.
So when Paul and I finally had a falling out, it was no surprise at all that the immediate cause was work. In truth it was a trivial thing, but underneath it all was a point of principle.
It happened on a Friday evening. I'd agreed to meet Paul in town for an after-work drink. We'd texted to and fro through the day, finally agreeing on a bar roughly halfway between our workplaces. While all this had been going on, one of the young developers -- not one of mine, I might add -- had got it into his inadequate male brain that late on a Friday afternoon was a good time to install an update on a customer system. As if violating this longstanding tech-world folk wisdom wasn't bad enough, he then went on and botched the install. When his changes went down screaming, there was no rolling back to the old system, not without losing all the orders that had been put through by his crap code. The only option was to fix the bugs and manually repair all the corrupted transactions.
All of which would have been someone else's problem were it not that Jamie Chen, his boss and my fellow project manager, was hundreds of miles away in an airport lounge.
So, like it or not, it was Lisa to the rescue. A complete shit-fest, in other words, and none of my own doing, but there I was in the midst of it all, in a filthy mood, splitting my time between glowering at the developer, pleading with my own crew to stay late and help out, and groveling before the customers -- all of whom were managerial types who hadn't the first clue about what was going on, an ignorance they saw fit to demonstrate by demanding the impossible and generally getting in the way.
By the time Paul got through to me I was covered in the blood of a bleeding martyr (metaphorically, I mean). When his first words were to complain about my not showing up at the bar, it's possible I was less than sympathetic in my response. "Screw you too then," he replied. "I'm going home." This was pretty stern stuff for Paul, the archetypal mild-mannered guy, but at that point in time all I could do was park his outrage at the bottom of my mental in-tray and get back to more immediate concerns.
It was after nine when the mess was finally sorted. Jamie, to her credit, had come in from the airport, arriving just as the dust was settling. I didn't notice her at first -- a shadowy presence hovering in my peripheral vision, as if reluctant to come forward. Understandable, I suppose. I would have loved nothing better than to relieve my frustrations by bawling her out with a few choice pieces of professional advice, but in truth none of this was her fault either. She had only just started that week (her business trip being a meet-and-greet with some of our more far-flung customers), so hadn't had the opportunity yet to make her mark, one way or the other. The whole catastrophe was more fairly described as a farewell gift from her predecessor.
When she finally did step up, she at least managed to look contrite. "Come on. Let me buy you a drink," she offered, "I feel I owe you one."
I certainly felt that someone owed me something, and seeing as she was the only one offering ... I was mentally exhausted from all the rushing about; dealing with Paul right now was the last thing I felt like doing. A drink, on the other hand, seemed like a very good idea.
I told her all about it as we walked to a nearby bar.
"Why don't you just apologize?"
"Because he knows. He's in the same business. Work is work and nights like tonight happen from time to time. It comes with the territory."
"Why didn't you just text him to say you'd be late?"
"I was preoccupied, okay?"
"Still. It might be diplomatic to say sorry."
"What? Just because I'm the one at fault?" I wasn't in the mood for that.
She acknowledged this with a short laugh, then looked at me shrewdly. "I do know one way that might make it easier to ask forgiveness."
"What's that?"
"Do something worse that he doesn't know about."
This made me sit up and take notice. We'd just arrived at the bar and my attention so far had been divided fifty-fifty between Jamie and getting some wine into me. It was a low-key sort of place -- in a generous frame of mind you might call it a cocktail lounge -- catering to the after-work crowd from the surrounding offices. Still fairly busy, this being a Friday night.
"Like what?"
"A girls' night out? I'm new in town and your plans for the evening appear to have fallen through."
A girls' night out didn't seem much of a crime. We were two girls. We were at a bar.
Ipso facto
, a girls' night out. Perhaps her standards for misbehavior were tamer than mine. Or perhaps she had something else in mind. Either way, I still wasn't ready to let the previous subject go.
It wasn't as if I could blame Paul. If I could it would have been so much easier. I could punish him for a bit then magnanimously forgive. No problem at all. Instead I'd got myself into this little difficulty all on my lonesome -- to apologize to Paul I would first have to apologize to myself. But then to apologize about putting work first would be to step onto that slippery slope that ends in a life of housework. I explained all this to Jamie between frequent sips of wine, in terms somewhat less coherent than those I've managed here.
"Girls' night out," she said. "Face it. It's the only way forward."
"Girls' night out," I conceded, raising a glass. She seemed so determined to be cheerful, what else could I say?
And -- to give her credit -- she had been a good listener, by which I mean she asked the right questions and didn't try to inject her own experiences or advice. By the time I remembered that avoiding the topic of Paul was why I was here, I'd pretty much said all I wanted to say on the subject anyway.
Jamie was locally born Chinese, the descendent she told me of people who had left their homes to chase a goldrush or some such illusion, many years ago. Her black hair was cut to the shoulder and she had a flat, squarish face, lightly freckled, more paddy field than fashion catwalk. Not unattractive as such -- it was a face a lover could love. Its beauty, to those who could see it, would have been of a rugged, outdoorsy sort. She admitted at one point in the evening that she liked to go hiking and it made perfect sense.
I hadn't seen much of her at work -- our teams work for different customers, so despite having the same job title, the overlap was minimal -- and what impressions I had formed certainly weren't of a
girls-night-out
sort of girl. In fact, the impression that dominated all others -- and this is going to sound kind of weird -- was that she reminded me of Tim, my former boyfriend. It wasn't her body -- she was a little taller than average and athletically proportioned, as was Tim -- but that wasn't it. Rather it was something in her face. Not the freckles this time, but something else. A tentativeness, I suppose you would call it, as if conscious of an imminent threat that nobody else could see. Tim had been the same: the only person I know who is smarter than I am (that I'm prepared to admit) but someone who could never quite bring himself to trust a world that -- he suspected -- did not trust smart people. With Jamie, the source was a little different. I diagnosed it as a case of underlying seriousness, a desire to do things the way they are meant to be done, but not being entirely sure how. As if she were fragile on the outside but not on the inside, if such a notion can make sense. Someone to be handled with care, but who would forgive you if you got it wrong.
I swear I never used to have this tendency to deconstruct people. I blame my job, which when it comes down to it is all about manipulating others into doing what I want them to do. If you pull people apart to see what makes them tick, you also learn how to wind them up. You're probably going to argue that people aren't clockwork -- but this is work we are talking about, where superficial is often deep enough. Just the way it is, folks. Blame capitalism if you need a culprit.
She told me about her experiences growing up, how she had always been conscious of being different. "I was a tomboy, I suppose, but I still wanted to be pretty. Only pretty was a Blonde Barbie and I was never going to be that. My hair was the wrong color and my face just wouldn't do at all."
I'd heard other Asian girls say similar things. I gave a little prayer of thanks to the God I didn't believe in for saving me from this experience. Growing up in a closed religious community didn't have much to recommend it but it had protected me from the presumptions of the outside world (loading me up with an entirely different set of prejudices instead, but ones so absurd I'd like to think I've shrugged them off with ease). The only doll I recall was homemade; a hand-me-down thing with green hair, something I've never felt the urge to emulate.
Jamie laughed at this last remark. I was finding her to be good company, though with a feeling that, on some level, I was the one doing her a favor. That if I hadn't agreed to come out she would be at home alone right now.
She told me how she had taken the job as a fresh start, wanting a new town and a new life. Something about a relationship breakup, but she seemed reluctant to go into details and I was still too wrapped up in my own concerns to press her about it.
"We could be friends," I told her. "Allies. Nights like tonight aside, the company really isn't such a bad place to work." She looked so pleased with this that I congratulated myself on choosing the right tone. Meanwhile, the conversation meandered on of its own accord, keeping thoughts of Paul walled off for a time. Well almost.
