Chapter One (continued)

Stephen Jones ignores the ding of the elevator, because it has dinged plenty of times over the last twenty-five minutes, and none of those ended with him meeting new co-workers. To stretch his legs, he has taken to wandering around the lobby and reading the plaques and framed photos. The biggest of the lot is a huge, gleaming thing complete with its own light and glass case:

This isn’t the dullest thing Stephen Jones has ever read, but it’s close. Oddly, it makes no mention of training packages, the selling of which is, as he understands it, Zephyr’s main purpose. Then he realizes that a short man with dark hair and glasses is standing a few feet away, staring at him. “Jones?”

“Yes!”

The man’s eyes flick over Jones’s new suit. One of his hands wanders down to where his own shirt is stuffed awkwardly into his pants and tries to fix it. “I’m Freddy. Nice to meet you.” He extends his free hand, and they shake. Freddy’s watery blue eyes look huge behind his glasses. “You’re younger than I thought you’d be.”

“Okay,” Jones says.

Freddy looks at his shoes. Then he glances at the reception desk, at--if Jones is not mistaken--the empty chair behind the eve jantiss nameplate. “Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“I do.” He says it apologetically. “This way.”

---

“It’s a good department.” Freddy sucks at his cigarette. It is a fine day: the clouds are high, there is a light breeze, and the building even seems to be emitting reflected warmth from the mesh of its tinted windows. Freddy’s eyes follow a dark blue convertible inching toward them through traffic, then jump to Jones. “I mean, once you get used to things.”

“I’m ready for a steep learning curve,” Jones says, employing a phrase that came in handy during his job interviews.

“You’re Roger’s sales assistant. You have to process his orders, type up his quotes, file his expense forms, that kind of thing.”

“What’s he like?”

“Roger? Oh... nice.” Freddy’s eyes shift.

“Ah,” Jones says. “So... he’s not?”

Freddy glances around. “No. Sorry.”

Jones snickers. “Well, I don’t plan on being a sales assistant forever.”

Freddy says nothing. Jones realizes that Freddy has probably been a sales assistant forever. “Roger’s got a job for you, actually. He wants you to ask Catering how many donuts they gave our department this morning.” In response to Jones’s expression, he hurries on: “See, we get morning snacks; some days it’s fruit, some days cookies, and occasionally, rarely, donuts. This morning there was an incident.”

“Okay. Sure thing.” Jones nods. This may not be a glamorous assignment, or make much sense, but it is his first task in the real business world, and by God, he’s going to perform it well. “So where’s Catering?”

Freddy doesn’t answer. Jones follows his gaze until it intersects a blue Audi convertible entering the Zephyr lot. The bulk of Zephyr’s parking is subterranean, but there are a few valuable ground-level spaces, and the Audi slides confidently into one of these. The driver’s door pops open and a pair of legs climb out. After a moment, Jones registers that the legs are attached to something. The something is Eve Jantiss, supermodel receptionist.

She looks as if she is just stopping off at Zephyr on the way to an exclusive nightclub opening. Her hair, long, tousled, and honey-brown, bounces off exposed tan shoulders. Two delicate straps appear to play no functional role in suspending a thin, shimmering plum dress; more mysterious forces are at work. She has lips like big sofa cushions, the kind of ancestry that probably includes nationalities Jones has never heard of, and liquid brown eyes that say: Sex? Why, what an intriguing idea. In the nights between his job interview and now, Jones has occasionally wondered if he wasn’t building Eve Jantiss up in his head, remembering her as more attractive than she really is. Now he realizes: no.

“Morning,” she says, clacking past on high heels. “Hi,” Jones says, and Freddy says something like, “Muh.” Jones turns and sees Freddy practically dribbling love. Freddy’s gaze is fixed on the back of Eve’s head, not flicking up and down her body. Jones feels suddenly sordid. He was checking her out: Freddy’s infatuation is pure.

When the sliding doors block their vision of Eve, or at least tint it, Jones says, “The receptionist has a sports car?”

“What?” Freddy says. “You think she doesn’t deserve it?”

---

His business shoes squeak as he and Freddy cross the lobby. It sounds as if he is conducting a mouse orchestra, and he feels the eyes of the two receptionists, Eve and Gretel, swing onto him. “That’s him,” Gretel says to Eve. “His name is Jones.”

“Ah.” Eve smiles. “Welcome to the Titanic, Jones.”

Corporate humor! Jones has heard about this. He would like to respond in kind, but is too self-conscious about his shoes. He settles for: “Thanks.”

They reach the bank of elevators at the lobby’s rear and Freddy pushes for up. “People say she’s Daniel Klausman’s mistress.” Klausman is the Zephyr CEO. “But that’s just because she’s hardly ever in reception.”

Jones blinks. “Where does she go?”

“I don’t know. But she’s not his mistress. She’s not like that.” The elevator doors slide closed. “So anyway, Catering’s on level 18. When you’re done, come on up to level 14.”

“You mean come down to 14,” Jones says, but even as the words come out, he sees the button panel. The floors are numbered top down: level 1 is at the panel’s apex, marked ceo, while level 20, lobby, is at the bottom.

Freddy snickers. “Reversed numbering. It throws everyone at first. But you get used to it.”

“Okay.” Jones watches the numbers click over--20... 19... 18--while his body tells him he’s rising. It feels unnatural.

“They say it’s motivational,” Freddy says. “As you move into more important departments, you rise up the rankings.”

Jones looks at the button panel. “What’s so bad about I.T.?”

Freddy looks surprised. “Some of them don’t even wear suits. I don’t know why they’re allowed in the building.”

---

On level 14, Elizabeth is falling in love. This is what makes her such a good sales rep, and an emotional basket case: she falls in love with her customers. Unless you have done it, it is hard to convey just how wretchedly, boot-lickingly draining it is to be a salesperson. Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. There is something deeply wrong with the kind of person who becomes a sales rep, or if not, there is something deeply wrong after six months.

Elizabeth doesn’t rely on the usual facades of friendship and illusions of intimacy: she forms actual attachments. For Elizabeth, each new lead is a handsome stranger in a night club. When they dance, she grows giddy with the rush of possibilities. If he doesn’t like her product offering, she dies. If he talks about sizable orders, she feels the urge to move in with him.

Elizabeth’s love affairs are purely internal: no-one else knows about them. But they’re real enough to her, which is why she’s so stressed: she’s currently involved in eighteen long-term, on-off, hand-wringing relationships and last Thursday she spied somebody new across a crowded meeting room.

On the phone now, her customer is trying to scale back an order. Last week she sold him 200 staff-hours of training, but now he’s trying to back-pedal. As she sits in her cubicle, her back to Wendell and Roger, the phone growing slippery in her hand, Elizabeth bites down on her lip. Why can’t he commit? she wails. What’s wrong with me?

“It’s no biggie, Liz,” the customer says. “I just checked our schedule and found we don’t need to do so much at once. We’ll take the package, we just need to scale back the numbers.”

“But we talked about 200 hours. That’s what I thought we were talking about.”

“We were, Liz. I’m just changing my mind.”

“I...” Elizabeth’s throat thickens. She fights to keep her voice steady. Men don’t like clingy, needy women; she read that in one of the relationship books she owns that double as sales manuals. Men like to be challenged, so long as--so long as!--you never show disrespect. You have to set the challenge and at the same time imply that he is up to it. “But Bob, we had a commitment. You’re not one of those guys who makes promises he can’t keep. You’re my rock. I love that about you. I rely on that with you. You know what I’m talking about.”

A sigh from the phone. Elizabeth’s heart leaps. “Okay, okay. We’ll keep it at 200 hours. But it’s really more than I need, Liz.”

“I appreciate that, Bob. You’re a wonder.”

“Well, you’ve always been good to me...” Elizabeth feels herself tuning out. Bob is under control. Bob is becoming less interesting by the second. Her thoughts drift to the man she saw in the meeting room. He was short and overweight; from the look of his shirt’s armpits, he has some kind of sweat problem. She bites her lip, dreaming. She wonders if he is interested in some training.