package came to a halt just inside the doorway to his enormous office. He could barely see her at this distance.
“You called?”
Or hear her. “Of course I called. Where is everybody? Where’s Mike with the Harbisher analysis? Where’s…”
“Hiding,” said Carol.
“What do you mean, hiding? Do we have a maniac loose in the office?”
“Yes.”
“Carol,” Alex said, forcing a tight smile, “come closer.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked you! Nicely!”
She grabbed the door and closed it silently, his shout echoing against it.
“So much for nicely,” he muttered. His single objection to his staff was that they didn’t always treat him with the respect he, as owner of the firm, properly deserved. They treated him more like family. A younger member of the family, to add to the insult. So what if he was thirty years old, younger than anybody, except the office manager? Didn’t matter. This was his castle and he should be king.
Of course, they were Americans. They took a dim view of kings. That might explain it.
For a few minutes he remained at his desk, fuming. Then, being a man of action, he got up and went in search of his people.
He found them huddled together in Mike’s office. Mike Semple was his financial analyst. Carol, his executive assistant, was just sitting down at Mike’s conference table with Suzi, the office manager, Les, his management analyst and Tricia, negotiator and director of communications.
“Good of you to join us, Alex,” Mike said. “We were just starting a staff meeting.”
“Without me?” Alex felt startled and oddly unbalanced.
“About you.”
“Oh.” Alex nudged Suzi to the left and Les to the right in order to plunk himself down in a side chair, avoiding his usual spot at the head of the table. “Good thing I showed up. What is it about me we’re discussing?”
“We’re wondering what’s up,” Les said. “Are we going broke?”
“No.”
“Did we underbid for Palmer Pipe Company?”
“No. Look, I know I haven’t been in the best mood the last couple of days.” To his annoyance, his team answered him not with reassurance, but with, to be precise, two nervous giggles and three derisive snorts. “It’s a personal matter,” he said, hoping that those sacred words would end this ridiculous cross-examination as it would in any civilized sort of setting. Americans, however, were not yet completely civilized, as he had learned from numerous painful experiences. They talked too openly about matters they should keep to themselves, and in return, wanted the most outrageously intimate details from others. You’d think, with more than two hundred years of practice, they’d learn to stop asking how much you made in a year. And whom you were sleeping with. At least one of the two.
“I didn’t know you had any personal matters,” Suzi said.
Of course, Suzi was still very young.
“I didn’t know you had any personal anything,” Les seconded her. “Except your toothbrush.”
Now Les should have known better than to mention something as personal as a toothbrush.
“Put the problem on the table,” Mike suggested. “We’ll discuss it just like we discuss business problems.”
As his senior person, Mike should be hanged for what he’d just said. This was not fine, warm team spirit. This was insubordination of the most outrageous, most insupportable nature. He wouldn’t put up with it. He’d fire the lot of them. Let them find somebody else to work for, somebody who could increase their net worths by eighty percent annually instead of a mere seventy.
He suddenly heard himself, his irritability, his childishness. He had plenty of faults, but childishness wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t been childish even when he was a child. His mother hadn’t allowed it. So why was it suddenly showing up now?
It must have been the distraction of his own thoughts that made him blurt out the one thing he most wanted to keep to himself. Either that, or he’d lived in the United States too long. “I ran into an old girlfriend in New York last weekend.”
That was as far as he got before a collective sigh drowned him out, followed by, “No kidding?” and “Great!” and “Uh-oh, it’s a woman problem.”
“I told you it had to be something important,” Suzi said. “Tell us all about her.”
Cornered by his own stupidity, Alex said, “No, no, it’s not like that. She’s just a girl I dated in high school. Hollywood High. When my mother did those three movies—” He made a gesture with his hand. He didn’t need to embellish. Eleanor Asquith was a household name, in cultured households, at least. “She pulled me out of boarding school and brought me with her. She wanted me to see what real Americans were like.”
“Real Americans at Hollywood High? I don’t think so,” Les said.
“Sarah was there.”
The silence told him he’d shocked them. It was a frightening thought, that he might have said more than one of them would have in the same circumstances. What was it that made him babble on? “We fell for each other, but this and that happened, you know how it is with kids, and we broke up. I lost track of her. Last Saturday I found her again.”
“Something about this reunion did not make you happy.” Mike folded his hands over an incipient paunch and waited.
Alex had opened the doors himself. There was no going back. “I thought it would be the polite thing to ask her out this weekend. She turned me down flat. I gave her my card and asked her to call if her plans changed.”
“I didn’t know you were going to New York this weekend,” Carol said, looking worried. “You loaned the plane to Tucker Associates, remember? You don’t have transportation or a hotel suite, and you don’t have any appointments.”
“Well, obviously,” Alex began, then, realizing he sounded sarcastic, backed up and started over. “I wasn’t going to New York unless she called.”
“But she didn’t call,” Suzi said.
“Not yet.”
“It’s only…well, I guess it is Thursday,” Mike said. “Looks like maybe she’s not going to call.” He winced under the glare Alex sent in his direction.
“She calls or she doesn’t,” Alex said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m annoyed by her bad manners, that’s all.”
“If you did something to make her so mad that she’s still mad after all these years,” Suzi said, “it may take her more than five days to get over it.”
“Or maybe you need to push her a little bit,” Carol suggested.
