5

I sat stiffly in a leather chair at the long meeting table. In front of me was a panel of picture windows that begged me to get lost in the scenic view of the west Austin hill country. Normally, I loved soaking in the atmosphere of working in one of the most beautiful parts of town—sometimes I couldn’t believe that I got such an amazing job straight out of college—but today I needed to devote all my focus to the product management meeting. I was the only female in my department and the only person who didn’t have a three-page resume that read like an instruction manual called How to Be the Most Type-A Person on the Face of the Planet, so sometimes it was hard to make my voice heard in these meetings. I had missed a big deadline for the multimedia piece I was designing for the website. Part of the reason was that I’d been coming in late because our after-work happy hours had begun to stretch past midnight, but part of it was because I didn’t have the resources I needed. I was going to ask for more resources.

“Can we start?” a product manager named Ryan asked.

Steve, the twenty-eight-year-old vice president of our department, said no. “We’re waiting for Joe.”

I looked up from my notes. “Joe? Who’s that?”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “The guy the board brought in to babysit us.”

“Ryan, he’s not babysitting us,” Steve said, using a tone that indicated that he and Ryan had discussed this more than once. “The board wants his perspective because he’s a B-school grad and he’s technical. And since he’s friends with the guys who just gave us two million dollars in funding, I think we might want to be cool to him.”

Now I knew who they were talking about. Shortly after our twenty-person company threw a forty-thousand-dollar party to celebrate the release of a beta version of our product, the board started asking nosy questions about the way this business was being run. Some bigwig from the venture capital firm that led the last round of funding had flown in from Silicon Valley to personally inspect the office. Unfortunately, on the last day of his visit the IT team hosted an in-office happy hour that got a little out of control, and the investor walked into the bathroom to find a manager passed out in his own vomit next to a urinal. The next Monday, the CEO and three vice presidents walked into a meeting room for a conference call with the board. They walked out as if returning from a wake and announced a whole host of changes, including the impending arrival of a new director of product management named Joe Fulwiler.

I’d heard whispers about this Joe guy’s background. It caught my attention that the aggressive, overachieving guys in my department seemed to consider him an aggressive overachiever. He’d recently graduated from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, one of the top business schools in the world. While at Stanford, he’d taken coursework in artificial intelligence in the computer science grad school, rubbing elbows with some of the pioneers of internet technology who were now on the covers of magazines. He’d gone to Yale for undergrad, and someone said something about his going to law school too, though I didn’t think that could be right since the guy was only twenty-nine years old.

“Ah, here he comes now,” Steve announced pointedly to the meeting room, silencing any further discussion of whether or not we were happy to have the new guy in our department.

Joe walked quickly into the room, but I didn’t get the impression that he was hurrying because he was late; he struck me as the type of person who never moved slowly. There were two empty seats: one across from Ryan and one at the head of the long table. Joe took the one at the head of the table.

Steve introduced him to everyone, and after I nodded an obligatory “hello” I returned to my notes. There would inevitably be some introductory small talk, and I planned to use the time to work on my pitch for getting more resources. I tapped my pen on the line where I’d totaled the time estimate for completing my project and thought about whether I should ask to hire an intern to help me. It would be hard to convince the higher-ups to add another employee to our small high-tech startup, so I considered my case carefully. Suddenly, a thought interrupted me, so unexpected that it was like hearing a thunderclap on a clear day.

You are going to marry him.

I froze. The idea was so clear and so unrelated to anything I’d been thinking about that I instinctively looked over my shoulder, as if an unseen person had said it. Who? That Joe guy? I replied to whatever part of my brain this crazy notion had come from.

I looked over at Joe, who was engaged in a surprisingly friendly conversation with Ryan. It turned out that they were both members of fraternities at Yale and knew people in common. Ryan even laughed out loud as Joe recounted some antics that had occurred at a fraternity reunion they’d both attended. I almost laughed out loud, too. I couldn’t imagine what had prompted that ridiculous thought, since there were few things less likely to happen than my dating this Joe guy, let alone marrying him.

First of all, I wasn’t even thinking about marriage. I was barely twenty-two years old, and I was intensely focused on my search to figure out what life was all about (which, in practice, meant working all the time so that I could get ahead in my career). Even if I had been thinking about dating, there was no way this guy and I could be a match. In high school and college I’d been the type of girl who wore ripped fishnet stockings and black lipstick. For a while I dyed my hair green. For fun I attended the concerts of bands like Gwar, a group whose main claim to fame was that they’d have a man dressed up like the pope walk out on stage and they’d pretend to behead him and then spray his fake blood all over the audience.

I’d now traded my black lipstick for a more business-appropriate dark red and had thrown away all my ripped fishnet. These days, I dyed my hair bright red, with black and blonde streaks added by my colorist. I may have smoothed out my appearance to look more normal, but I maintained a distaste for mainstream ideals. In other words: Girls like me had nothing in common with Ivy League frat boys.

I shook my head at the silliness of it all. I tried to get back to my notes for the meeting, but some part of me kept wondering where on earth those words had come from.

* * *

A month later, on a Tuesday afternoon, a new email popped up in my inbox with the subject: Coffee? It was from Joe. He wanted to know if I was interested in joining him on his daily Starbucks run.

Our company had an open-office setup designed to promote communication, and so everyone from the executives to the interns sat in the large common room at the center of the building. Joe had been assigned the desk across from mine, and with no cubicle walls to separate us, we couldn’t help but interact occasionally.

Over the past few weeks I’d been pleasantly surprised to see that he wasn’t the fun-killing automaton we’d all expected him to be. He had long, jocular phone calls with friends where he referenced barbecues and drinking beer at the lake. He smiled easily, and his blue eyes revealed both intensity and sincerity. Sometimes I wanted to talk to him, if for no other reason than to break up the monotony of the twelve-hour days that I usually worked, but he always seemed to be in too much of a hurry. He rarely sat at his desk for more than an hour at a time, and when he did he was so focused on whatever he was doing that he often didn’t notice coworkers lined up at his desk, waiting to talk to him. On a few occasions, I was just about to start a conversation when he’d jump up to run into a conference room or to go have lunch with this CEO or that investor.

So when he invited me to get coffee, I was curious. I peeked around my monitor to try to get a glimpse of him, but he was hidden behind his own computer and didn’t seem to see me looking at him. “Sure. When?” I typed in reply.

He stood from his chair, grabbed his car keys, and darted out the main door. I looked at my email inbox. His reply said: “Meet me in the parking garage in five minutes.”

I wondered why he didn’t just lean around his computer and ask me. Then I looked at our coworkers typing away at the desks next to us, and it occurred to me that he must have wanted to invite only me.

We rode to the coffee shop in his car, a maroon Jaguar XJ8 with the glossiest paint job I’d ever seen. The whole way there, I tried to figure out what this meeting was about. We talked about office politics and then drifted into more personal territory. I found out that, like me, he was an only child. He was from Houston, and also came from a family that had been in Texas for generations. He had recently turned down a lead for a job with a Bay Area startup called Google in favor of coming here, mainly because he wanted to come home to Texas.

It also came out that I’d heard correctly that he went to law school. He’d gone to Columbia Law and had worked as an attorney doing corporate finance mergers and acquisitions at one of the top law firms in Manhattan. He hated the long hours and stifling work environment, so he got a job at a prestigious management consulting firm, then went to business school. He described this transition as if it were an effortless move, the way I might describe my decision to dye my hair a new shade of red.

There was a lull in the conversation after we settled in to a table at the coffee shop, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to get the meeting back on track. I cleared my throat and sat up a little straighter. “Did you want to talk about the new client interface?” I asked. I’d heard that he was now in charge of our main product, for which I was creating a fresh design, so I figured that that’s why he invited me here.

“The what?” It was like I’d asked it in a different language. “Oh, the new design? No. Who cares? I’m sure you’ll do a great job.”

“Oh.” I took a sip of my drink, some caffeinated concoction I’d never heard of. I wasn’t a coffee drinker and was totally overwhelmed by the Starbucks menu, so I’d waited for Joe to order and exclaimed that that just so happened to be my favorite drink, too. “Was there something else we needed to go over before the next release?”

He seemed to think the question was funny. “No—in fact, let’s not talk about that at all.”

“Oh,” I said. I needed to stop saying oh. But when he suggested that we talk about something other than my current project at work, I realized that I had become so immersed in my job that my mind went blank when I tried to make conversation about anything else.

Luckily, he took the lead. “Where did you work before this?”

“I did the marketing for a feminist group that promotes girls’ involvement in the sciences,” I said, hoping that if I made it sound official enough it wouldn’t come out that it was a college internship.

He nodded. “So what’s next? What do you want to do after this job?”

There was something beyond this job? For the first time in a long while, I thought about my life on a higher level than how I was going to meet the next deadline for the new interface. Into my mind flooded memories of the girl who was depressed at A&M, who ran to UT to escape an existential crisis, who graduated college wondering if she’d always be the fragile weirdo who stressed about things that no one else stressed about. Was that me? I’d been playing the role of happy career woman long enough that it had started to feel real. It was disorienting to be reminded of that other side of myself, like seeing a ghost.

“I don’t know. I haven’t put much thought into my goals. I guess I’m still trying to figure out the meaning of life.” I tried to force a casual laugh, but it sounded more like a sneeze-cough.

“Interesting,” Joe said. I was surprised that he seemed genuine, since my answer was kind of lame. “So what do you think the meaning of life is?”

I took a long sip of my mystery drink. It was creamy with a vaguely burnt taste, and I decided I liked it. “Honestly, I have no idea. What about you?”

“Oh, to me it’s clear,” he said, as if I had asked him to add one plus one. “I grew up poor. My mom was a single mother. She grew up even poorer than I did—like, they used corncobs for toilet paper and didn’t have running water when she graduated from high school.”

“Seriously?” I interrupted. There were rumors at work that he’d come from a well-connected blue-blooded family, so I hadn’t imagined this side of him.

“Yeah. We struggled constantly. A lot of times my mom didn’t know how she was going to put dinner on the table. It sucked. So that’s my meaning of life—to get out of all of that.”

“Well, you’re there, right? I mean, this is a pretty good job, isn’t it?” I knew he had to be making six figures, and there was little question that he’d be promoted to VP soon.

He looked at me like we’d had some kind of misunderstanding and he was waiting for me to acknowledge it. Finally, he said, “No. I mean real financial stability.”

I obviously still wasn’t getting it.

“I have student loan debt that’s more than a lot of people’s debt on their houses,” he explained. “I’m not talking about having a decent job and some extra cash to take a vacation once in a while. I’m talking about having enough assets to where you don’t need to worry anymore. To me, that’s freedom. And that’s pretty much all I’m focused on right now.”

“Wow. Well, good luck with that. Those are some big goals.”

He shrugged. “They say that your first million is always your hardest. After that, it’s not as much work.”

I chuckled at his funny joke. He smiled politely, but he wasn’t laughing with me. That wasn’t a joke.

He held my gaze during the awkward silence that ensued, and I quickly looked down at my hands. That pattern had been repeating itself since we’d first scooted up to the table. When Joe spoke to people, he maintained eye contact for the duration of the conversation. His posture was relaxed but unyielding. When he talked about what he planned to do with his life, there was not a trace of hesitation, no twinge of uncertainty about whether his goals would actually come to fruition. He seemed to be supremely comfortable in the world, and I found that quality deeply appealing.

We spent almost two more hours talking in the coffee shop, and I delighted in every minute of it. It wasn’t anything in particular that he said; rather, it was that ease with which he moved, and the force with which he conveyed his ideas. Whether it was announcing why the last version of the product sucked or detailing how he was learning the Java programming language to be more conversant with the tech team, every sentence he spoke burst forth like a proclamation. He kept asking questions about me, but each time I deflected the conversation back to him, just because I enjoyed watching him. Joe Fulwiler moved through the world as if he owned it. He knew what he wanted out of life, and anyone who had even a moment’s interaction with him knew that nothing would stop him from getting it.