"OK, Bill, we're all set with McDonald. The crew is free to go on campus and get started. Send someone to McDonald's office to liberate the grip truck. Is that the contract with Letourneau?"
"Yeah, and we did call it out specifically in the fees section."
"OK. I can deal with him later. Let's make sure he gets the message that any more drunks on his crew and I'll hold him responsible. What's your day like, today and tomorrow?"
"Meetings, mostly internal."
"OK. I want you on the next flight to Tallahassee. Buy clothes down there if you don't have time to pack. Before the day is out, I want you in FSU's communications office talking to Sharon and reassuring her that we're on this. I also want an adult on the ground down there making sure we dot our i's and cross our t's. We can't afford another incident."
"You know Rick Stewart is already there." Rick was the creative director on this project.
"I know. You're the cavalry, riding in to the rescue. I send you down, it sends a message to FSU about how seriously we take this."
"OK, boss. On my way."
I made a mental note to tell Amy about this crisis when I got home tonight. Then, I experienced an awful, sinking feeling as I remembered that I couldn't tell her. Amy, my wife and confidant, the person I had shared all of these details with for the last 35 years, was dead.
When Amy died about eighteen months ago it left me pretty much adrift. There isn't an hour that goes by that I don't think of Amy. Not an hour that I don't feel a little lost and a little guilty that I'm here and she's gone. But every so often the habits of a lifetime together cut in and I think "I need to tell Amy about this" or "Amy will get a laugh from that." And when that happens, the next thought that comes into my head is that she's gone. And I feel awful all over again. It doesn't last long. I've grieved for Amy and tried to move on, but that's easier said than done.
I live alone now. My kids are grown and have lives of their own. I haven't dated; haven't really wanted to. Instead I work all the time. Often seven days a week; always six days. The sole comfort I have is my dog, who comes to work with me now that there's no one at home to entertain him. He barks at people, from the UPS guy to clients who come to visit, but I figure barking is his job. I tell people he's my Director of Security.
The Florida State debacle hijacked my morning. Three meetings I had scheduled were interrupted or cut short as I fielded updates from my guys on the ground there. It was about 10:30 that Rick Stewart called in to say that the crew was on campus setting up for the first shot. That was later than it should have been, but at least Letourneau got them moving. I would deal with Letourneau later, when we knew what this was going to cost us. We were now almost certainly going to have to add a half-day of shooting to make up for the lost time.
It was noon before I had a minute to myself. When I did, I closed the door to my office, turned on some music and sat at my desk for a minute to gather my thoughts. When I tried to remember where my day was going before it was hijacked, I remembered the stunning black woman from the bagel store. I found myself daydreaming about her as I went through the rest of the day, occasionally to the point where I had to almost shake my head to clear it.
In my two o'clock meeting, my COO and our tech guy were yammering on about the new phone system they wanted to install. Voice Over IP - VOIP - it was taking over the phone business. I knew this from reading the Wall Street Journal, not because of anything I heard in that meeting. I was replaying the bagel store encounter from this morning, except in this version a wittier me had grabbed her attention and...
"Collin? You with us?" Peter and the tech guy were looking at me like they expected me to say something. I tried to do an instant replay on the conversation, but I had been too far gone. I missed it entirely.
"Sorry, Pete," I said. "I must have zoned out there for a minute. Let's cut to the chase. What do you guys recommend?"
I could tell from the looks on their faces that it was their recommendation that I had missed, but it was one of the benefits of being the boss that neither of them was about to scold me for not paying attention. Now, I hyper-focused, asked a couple of pertinent questions and made a quick decision.
This girl had really gotten under my skin, and I wasn't sure why. She was black, and I've always been attracted to black women, but I work with black women all the time and they don't have this kind of effect on me. She was vastly appealing to me in a way that I hadn't felt in a very long time. She was young enough to be my daughter, but the thoughts I was having about her were far from paternal, and this made me feel irrationally and inexplicably guilty.
It was a familiar feeling. I'm no saint, and, as much as I loved my wife, over the thirty-five years of our marriage I had strayed. Someone told me once that an affair in the mind is a much a sin as an affair in real life, and while I didn't quite buy it, I know where she was coming from. I had affairs of the mind, many in fact, but I had an actual physical affair as well. It happened in a moment of weakness, when things at home were going poorly and I was stressed. That's not an excuse, it's not even an explanation, it's just context.
In the end, my wife learned about it from me. I came clean, ended the affair, and worked to restore trust. When she got sick, I cared for her, held her while she was dying, and did anything and everything I could to make up for my transgressions. Her last words to me, with a wan smile and a squeeze of my hand, were to tell me that she had always loved me. I cried, and thought I might never stop.
My kids and I eventually picked up our lives where we had left them and soldiered on without her. For months it was a dark, joyless existence. Then my son announced that he and his new wife were having a baby, and despite the bittersweet knowledge that Amy would have loved to have shared this, the sun peeked through the clouds. My younger son graduated from college, Summa Cum Laude, and more sun. The holidays were hard, and I'm guessing they always will be, but spring is coming and the sun is out regularly now. I can look at her picture on my desk now without tearing up. My kids and I can talk about her and remember the good times without me choking up. Time heals.
But this was new. I had not been attracted to anyone in a long time, and my emotional self was having trouble reconciling my new feelings with old guilt. I knew, of course, that my guilt was irrational. Amy was gone, and me living my life and being happy was no sin. And, anyway, this girl was half my age. It was confusing, so I did what I guess a lot of men would do: tried to ignore it.
That was easy enough for the next couple of weeks. Work took me out of town, first to Houston, then to the West Coast scouting talent for a major new series of commercials for a big client. The work was relentless. Twelve-hour days, watching auditions where beautiful but utterly talent-less women tried to read lines from one of our scripts with remarkably little affect. Lines that seemed to me and my creative team to be chock full of drama came across as listless and ordinary. No amount of direction could tease a little life out of them.
Now this was no surprise. I've been doing this for a long time, and it is remarkable how hard it is to find "talent" that actually has some. This production was well into six figures to make one commercial, and it rested on our ability to find one person who could make the concept work. I know it seems easy, when you're watching the finished product, but as an experienced producer told me my first year on the job, "Actors practice their whole lives so they can sound natural on camera. You want some kid to do it for $400 a day."
And so we slogged on. We looked at more than forty "actresses" in Houston; seventy-five or more in LA. It was utterly consuming and exhausting. But at the end of it, we found an attractive girl with the best "girl next door" looks I've seen in a long time who seemed to get it. And she was new - no major commercials under her belt, just a handful of regional theater productions. She had come to LA to make it big, but was still waiting tables. This could be her big break. I hoped so, for her sake. The fact that she was new was important. The client wanted a fresh face for their sporting goods line, one that we could sign to a multi-year contract. She was perfect.
When I called her to ask her to come back for a second read, her reaction told the whole story.
"Hey, Karen, this is Collin Halloran, from HSDO. How are you?"
"Oh, hi. I'm good thanks. "
"Karen, we're wondering if you would be available to come back in tomorrow morning to talk and maybe do a second read?"
"REALLY? Oh my God!" she could barely contain her excitement. "Just tell me when and where."
I gave her the details, and even as we were hanging up I could hear her tell someone, "Oh, my God! They called me back."
We met her the next morning over breakfast and I got to see her in a new light, literally. California sunshine flooded the hotel restaurant, reflecting and glancing off the glassware and table settings. The white table cloth served to bounce the light up onto her face in a way that allowed me to see what she would look like in close-up and I liked it. She was gorgeous. Flawless skin, blonde hair, a runner's physique; long, muscular legs, flat stomach, toned arms. That was the director in me talking. The man in me saw a great ass, perfectly proportioned breasts and eyes that could be seductive without even trying. Her eyes were an almost startling shade of blue, so much so that I had to ask her if that came from colored contacts. I admit to being a little mesmerized by her as she sat there at our breakfast table. She had this incredible combination of sexiness and innocence that was utterly irresistible.
When we said goodbye, I walked her out to the hotel lobby to fill her in on a few details. Before we parted she put her arms around me and hugged me, out of gratitude, I guess, but it surprised me - more so because she molded that insanely hot body to mine. I responded, like any man would I imagine, by putting my hands on her back and feeling the warmth and firmness of her tiny frame though the mostly see-through fabric of her blouse. I'm a lot taller than her, so her head was under my chin. I learned that her hair smelled vaguely like strawberries, that her breasts felt bigger than I would have guessed and she was a physical girl. She liked to touch and be touched. In that moment, the months I had gone without any feminine touch in my life surged over me, my longing for a woman's attention nearly overpowering my generally good judgment, and I had to consciously pull myself back.
