Jennifer Graham. In the hotel lobby. This was five days earlier. There were two women in this equation and Jenn was one of the two. She and I were walking quickly through the conference crowd, smiling as if the evening were proceeding along quite smoothly, as if everyone had been gushing over our hard work, which, in my unsolicited opinion, wasn’t far from the truth.
“You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” she said to me. “You can’t pretend the problem isn’t real. You have to own it. You have to live it, breathe it, embrace it. Confidently. With open arms. Understand? Open arms. You go up to the microphone, you look the crowd in the eye, you stand tall, confident, you sound expensive, you make a slightly-offensive-but-not-offensive joke, avoid big words, then convincingly laugh at the pressure after fully acknowledging the pressure. You own it, then assure them that the ‘it’ doesn’t exist.”
“Okay.”
“I’m telling you exactly what needs to be said so that you and I—so everyone—the entire team—takes a step closer to actually making this work.”
“Okay.”
“You disagree?”
“No.”
“What part do you disagree with?”
“None of it.”
“What part do you disagree with?”
“Just . . .”
“Adam.”
“Everything. Literally everything you just said.”
“God, I knew it.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll say whatever you want, but don’t ask me three times if I disagree with you, because I can’t fend off that kind of Jennifer-ness. No, I don’t think sales is about putting your weakest foot forward and calling it your best foot.”
“It’s about owning it. We own it. ‘We as a firm have seen the issue at hand, Mr. Client, and we can assure you the issue is irrelevant.’”
“Or ‘We as a firm have a bunch of martinis ready for you, Mr. Client, so without further ado . . . drink your body weight.’”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“They’re literally going to be asking about the delay, wondering about it.”
“Drunk people don’t wonder stuff. They relate to you. They look over and say, ‘Wow, I really relate to you, you relatable fuck.’ First rule of sales: it’s a business of relationships.”
“You can’t solve problems with a martini.”
“Second rule of sales: you can solve problems with a martini. And I get it. I get it, I get it. We’re the hosts, I get it. We had a logistical delay, which, small as it may seem—a shrewd European banker is going to question whether we’re competently handling large European contracts. I get it. But I promise you, tonight of all nights, right now, they are upstairs at the bar, waiting for nothing but the bar.”
“Why are you fighting me?”
“Why are you fighting you? I said a hundred times you can do the opening words.”
“You’re who they like.”
“No.”
“You’re giving the opening words because they like you, Adam. Because everyone likes you. Because tonight you will say the right thing and you will believe in saying it. That’s my point.”
“I already said I’d do it.”
She stopped in her tracks, stopping both of us, right in the middle of the lobby, so she could get in front of me and win her case. We were both insanely jet-lagged and thouroughly overworked.
“Look around. What do you see?”
“The . . . lobby?”
“What do you see?”
“The . . .?” I genuinely didn’t know what she was doing.
“I’ll just give you the answer. You see a hotel full of corporate people casually wondering why there’s a security check for our event.”
I love Jenn. I’ve loved her since the Tuesday morning we first met eight years ago. She’s more than a best friend. She’s the best part of me. She’s all anyone should ever aspire to be.
“You know what I see, Jenn?”
“You don’t get a turn.”
“I see Paris.”
“No.”
“Through the windows, I see Paris. I see the streets, the cobblestone, a sensuous lamp, a neat bridge, elderly people making out. You know what this town is known for? Everything good and expensive. Paris outshines all other cities like an embroidered quilt among Burger King napkins. That’s what’s here.”
“You don’t actually think that.”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is that everyone at this convention thinks it. They think it, they love it, there’s a slight mystique every time they answer the question: ‘Hey, Earl, where ya goin’ next week?’ ‘Business trip in Paris, Alan.’ ‘Paris!? You total fucken’ asshole.’ Because everyone loves coming here because it’s a brochure on sex, and, yes, actually, I do believe it makes other cities into a Burger King napkin. This is night three of five. These people have been doing banking math all week so I really don’t think the terrace lounge party—Let’s repeat those holy words—Terrace—Lounge—Party—is the place where they go to hear another apology about another glitch.”
“It’s not a glitch. It’s an unplanned security check as a result of issues here at our event, which will make them wonder if our firm is ready to handle a four-point-eight-billion dollar loan, which is a hesitancy that Evan, our CEO, your CEO, said to avoid yet now we can’t even send these people up an elevator without a rectal exam.”
I took her hand in mine. “You’re an event planner, the best of the best. You live and die by the words ‘a nice evening,’ and I love you for this unrequitedly, and I will do what you tell me to do out of this unrequited love. You win.”
“Did you even hear one word I said!?”
“No.”
We’d arrived at the back of the line of people waiting for the elevator, queued up with their ID badges out for the hotel staff. They’d announced a technical issue, which Jenn felt would be regarded by our guests, the people around us—clients, associates, bankers, brokers—as a security breach. I disagreed with her until now—until I saw that the hotel staff weren’t the ones checking ID badges. It was the French police. The gendarmerie. All jokes aside, it’d taken fifteen minutes before they’d gotten to Jenn and me, and in that time, the line had doubled behind us and had begun to look quite serious.
“Madame . . . uh . . . Jennifer?” said the officer, reading her badge.
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her. Looked at her ID. Looked at her. Checked a list of names. “Merci, thank you, you can go.” He let her through. “Mister . . . uh . . . Adam?”
“Yes,” I said.
He did the same. Looked at me. Looked at my ID. Looked at the list. Looked back at me. “You are Mr. Adam?”
“Yeah. Adam Macias.”
He kept studying my badge.
I tried to be casual. “Is there . . . a . . . ?”
Whatever result he was seeing on his portable scanner had flagged something because he then uttered the sentence no foreigner wants to hear from someone with a weapon. “You . . . will . . . uh . . . come with me?”
“Sorry?”
“You . . . uh . . . You will come with me?” He pointed to the side area. He wanted to talk to me apart from the main crowd, privately, already turning to lead the way toward wherever we were going, already a few steps ahead of us so that Jenn and I had to hurry to follow him.
“Why would police need to talk to you?” she whispered to me.
“Why would police need to talk to you?” she whispered.
“It’s fine.”
“How is it fine?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your ID was flagged.”
“Yeah.”
“How is it fine?”
“Because . . .”
“Because . . . ? You’re not worried?”
“Not fully.”
“But a little bit.”
“No.”
“Adam.”
“I’m mostly sure it’s fine.”
“Mostly?”
“Yeah. I’m a hundred-percent . . . mostly sure.”