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Carol wore the periwinkle smock to work. She looked good in it, with her heels and pencil black skirt. Nothing like a Parisian boutique to set a girl to rights, or almost, Carol thought.
She dropped her pocketbook in her file drawer, got coffee, and sat down for her first hour of writing.
She didn’t gain momentum at first, but she persevered, and suddenly she felt a surge of energy. The storks and the ogre began flying off the page, so to speak. She had conflict in every line, with subterfuge, plots, and counterplots. This was her best work ever. Her fingers flew.
After an hour and twenty minutes, she looked at the clock in her computer. Wow! That was great! Not as great as you-know-what, but good fun. She stood, stretched a bit, and went for more coffee.
Gregoire was in the kitchenette, in a tight suit. Carol hated him and his perfectly groomed beard and mustache, and the wiry brown hair combed and sprayed into submission. How satisfying it was that the ogre would have Gregoire’s hair gone wild, all over his body. Maybe I should put back in the scene where it grows when he eats spinach...She said hello and pressed her lips into a smile.
“Please come to my office when you’re done here,” Gregoire said in a certain tone. She’d heard it before in her career.
Suddenly she felt naked. Her smock was not enough. She would have to put on lipstick for backbone, but it wouldn’t be enough. Her ideas were not enough, either. She wasn’t enough.
She dumped her coffee down the sink and tossed the Styrofoam cup. Why did he order these poisonous cups? Didn’t he know that they never decomposed? Why couldn’t he be kinder to the environment? Would he be the slightest bit kind to her?
With lipstick on, she went to Gregoire’s office and knocked. When the door was closed and she was seated, he stood, came around his desk and loomed over her, his back to the bright window and the Z-3 parked outside it. Carol blinked up at him, trying to see his face.
“France is famous for being a place where management can’t fire anyone,” he said.
She just stared at him, her heart pounding.
“But it’s not always true. I’m firing you. For having a bad attitude.”
He was having trouble not smiling, she could see. What a jerk. It had to have been calling him unprofessional that caused this. Damn. Philippe’s advice had backfired. But it certainly had been essential that she confront Gregoire on that.
Well, she wasn’t going to leave with things unsaid.
“You are unprofessional.”
“Carol, you’d better—”
“—Telling Amandine was unjust. It was worse than unjust, it was downright rotten.”
A wave of anger swept over her. She wanted to cause him pain, like he had caused her. She ought not do something that he would take her to court over. She considered her options: spike the car or the movies or his marriage. No, those wouldn’t do. She ought not to do this, but she was just so angry and in so much pain.
“God, you’re a bloody bastard!” She grabbed the crystal elephant off his desk.
“Hey!” he shouted.
With the power to do damage in her hand, her anger became rage. She hated him, his smugness, his abuse of power. She hefted the elephant. Something in his glassed-in bookcase, in his altar to himself, gleamed. One of his statues. Or maybe it was one of those annoying brass plaques. Damn him! She would go out in a way that he would remember. She drew her arm back—her father had taught her to play cricket—and with a delicious sense of anarchy, she hurled the elephant.
The glass case exploded. Statues toppled. Glass flew everywhere. One shard pricked her cheek. She rubbed the spot, and her fingertips were red.
“I’ll have you arrested!” Gregoire shouted.
That sobered Carol up a bit. But she had a little more to say before she stormed off stage in a memorable exit.
“You don’t deserve to be president of this company, or any company! For a man who works with creative people, you’re not supportive of the creative process. You’re way too stingy with praise for the things that are good. And—and—your suits are too tight!”
Carol charged out of his office. She went back to her office, grabbed her Paris calendar off the wall, scrabbled through the drawers for personal items, like her box of organic lavender tea from Provence, a favorite red pen, and a nail file, threw them all in her pocketbook, and headed to the front door.
All she could think of was Louise and the rent on her apartment in Le Marais, due in two weeks.
She said “Hi” to Daphné as she passed her in the hall for the last time. Moving without seeing, like a sleepwalker, she stumbled to the Metro.
