Chapter Five
Mike Tattersall told her late Thursday afternoon that he’d made the dinner reservation for seven-thirty at Bistro 201, his favorite local haunt. The popular upscale eatery was located just a few doors up the PCH from the SunBurst office building. Since he was well known by the owners and the wait staff there, Mike had no problem getting a table reserved on short notice. Julie had only been in the swank restaurant once before, with her dad and Lora, just after she moved into her villa over a year ago. It was her first experience with contemporary California cuisine, and although such fare has lost some of its former popularity, to a girl who spent her entire adult life in the mid-west, it was special and meaningful. She loved everything about Bistro 201: the food, the service, the atmosphere, and especially, the view of the marina. Her singular experience there has remained painted in her memory as a colorful epilogue to the realization of her dream of returning to the coast. Unfortunately, she judged the restaurant as being too expensive to visit again, anytime soon. Until tonight of course, but then, tonight, Mike Tattersall would be picking up the check.
Though it was only a few blocks from her house to the restaurant, she drove her car because it was well past sunset, and also because she did not want Mike to end up driving her home afterward.
There was a queue inside the door. Julie restrained herself from looking around to see if Mike had already arrived. Instead, she studied the decor while waiting her turn for the hostess. Two couples had to be seated before her, along with a party of four. It was seven forty-one by her wristwatch when she was shown to a booth along the window-wall overlooking the channel where Mike sat, lingering over a San Pelligrino water with a twist of lime.
Mike rose to greet her, extending his hand. “I’m so glad you agreed to join me this evening,” he said, grinning. “I hate dining alone.” He was dressed casually, in a colorful silk shirt and tailored slacks, clean-shaven as usual, his hair gelled and combed artistically. Julie also noticed his Euro-cut black loafers, polished to a military shine.
“This is one of my favorite restaurants,” she said, trying to kick off the conversation with light and innocuous small talk.
“Mine too,” Mike replied. “Do you dine here often?”
“Just once in a while. Mostly, though, I eat at home.” That wasn’t entirely false, she thought. Outside the window in the incandescent lamplight, Julie saw two gulls swoop low over the channel, diving for food of their own. Numerous glimmering masts were swaying lazily with the rhythm of the bay. Further east, at the edge of her field of vision, Lido sparkled like a jeweled paradise in the dusky night.
“Drew will be back any moment. What type of wine would you prefer?”
Julie thought for a minute, not sure she wanted to drink any wine at all. But she didn’t want to be rude or unsociable either. “White, I guess, not too sweet,” she said, thinking that one glass might be an appropriate compromise.
Mike studied the wine list as though he were reading it for the first time. Julie re-fixed her gaze out the window and watched an elegant sailing craft motor toward its slip in the marina, running lights lit, crew on deck, tying down the sails.
“I was thinking about some grilled shrimp for an appetizer. How does that sound to you?” He set aside the wine list.
Julie turned her head toward him to answer. “Great. I love shrimp.” Mike seemed to be studying her, so she looked away again, out toward where the sun had set earlier. There was foreboding darkness in the cloud-thickened sky.
Drew arrived as predicted, and Mike ordered a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, along with the appetizer.
“You know,” Mike told her, “I’ve always believed that timing is one of the most important factors in determining one’s ability to capitalize on opportunity. And mainly, that is why I wanted to meet and talk with you tonight. Timing could not be better for you than it is right now.”
Julie screwed up her face. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“I’m sorry, I should have made myself more clear. Regarding your opportunity to make a career move — into marketing, of course.” Mike drank the last of his water. “And, to be ultimately successful, it is equally important that every opportunity is met with a corresponding measure of desire. But I’m talking too much already. Perhaps you could tell me about what you’d like to do with your career. What are your goals and ambitions, Julie?”
Julie hadn’t realized that this was going to be a job interview. He’d caught her off-guard, and now she felt somewhat nervous and unprepared. She took a stab at an impromptu response. “I guess making a significant contribution with whatever I’m asked to do would be my first goal. Then to...well…follow through, you know, go the extra mile…for the sake of excellence. And, I suppose that as long as I’m challenged and enjoying my work, I’m not that fussy about what the specific tasks might be.”
“I’m very impressed,” Mike said. “I don’t often hear remarks like that from the people I talk to these days, including business executives. It’s become all too common for employees to demand what they want out of a job and how the company needs to cater to their needs. This is one reason why turnover is so high among small businesses. Employers can’t always do what their employees want, exactly when they want it. So, many times, after the company invests time and money into training them, employees quit and take the company’s profitability right out the door with them.”
Julie wondered if Mike was attempting to impress her or simply trying to control the conversation until he could mentally lock on to the next logical question. In either case she didn’t have a response for him, so she simply nodded in quasi-affirmation while remaining mute.
In her peripheral vision, she saw Drew approaching with the wine. When he arrived at the table, the server held up the bottle so Mike could read the label, then waited for the expected approval before twisting in the corkscrew. He caressed the bottle in his left arm and levered out the cork with a deft mastery, easing it ever-so-gently from the neck as though he were making love to it. The bottle responded with a barely-audible sigh of relief. Wrapping a white linen cloth around the bottle, the waiter poured a splash of wine into Mike’s glass. Mike raised it and went through the ritualistic swirling, sniffing, tasting, and chewing — proving that he was no novice — before indicating to Drew that the wine was acceptable. Drew then poured out a measure of the silky-blond liquid into each goblet and walked away.
“Sorry for all the business talk,” Mike said. “We have the entire evening. Perhaps we should take a moment to sip some wine and look at the menus.” He held up his glass. “Here’s to your career.”
Julie remained silent but obliged him with a smile and a lifting of her own glass. The wine was very nice, she thought, not harsh or woodsy tasting, though she was far from an expert. She set down the goblet, opened her menu, and studied it for a selection she could eat without looking too Bohemian. That left out pasta, and soup too, of course. There was a grilled chicken breast, served with Pico de Gallo and a side of roasted California red bell and Anaheim chile peppers. That sounded ideal.
When she looked up, Mike was studying her again. “Your eyes are the most intriguing color,” he remarked. “But I suppose I am not the first person to tell you how beautiful they are.”
“I’m flattered you think so,” she said, thinking that he may have meant nothing by the compliment, but then again, he might have been trying to soften her up for the conquest. She’d be on the lookout for more sweet talk. But for now, she’d change the subject back to business.
“Could you tell me more about the position in marketing you have in mind for me?”
“I suppose I can. Allison Kraft is leaving us; she turned in her resignation earlier this week. You work with Allison, don’t you?”
“Sure. I’m shocked that she would leave. She always seems so happy with her job.”
Mike explained, “Well, her husband’s company is transferring him to Denver. She’s pretty distressed over having to leave SunBurst, but it’s one of those things. Evidently, her husband is well paid, and he doesn’t want to pass up this opportunity. They’ve talked it through and decided that she’d be the one making the sacrifice. His gain, our loss, I guess you could say. Anyway, we need to train someone with the proper career-orientation and the desire to learn how we develop proposals and corporate presentations. It involves heavy use of PageMaker and PowerPoint software. And, eventually, we may want you to handle some face-to-face situations with the customers. You’d be working with me and a sales rep; you wouldn’t have to fly solo.”
“So, are you offering me Allison’s job?”
“If you want it, and if we can count on you to make a career commitment.”
“Wow, that’s really exciting. But what exactly do you mean by a career commitment?”
Mike sipped some wine, then shifted his eyes back to hers, seemingly looking right through them into her soul. She hoped that it was murky enough down there to obscure her real thoughts.
“It’s like I was saying earlier, Julie. If we invest the time and effort into training you for this position, we hope you’ll stay with us for quite some time and be a productive addition to the marketing team. We’re not big enough to be able to withstand too much turnover in key positions like this.”
Julie swallowed hard before asking the other question that has been on her mind since Thursday. “Will there be a raise involved?”
“Spence and I are prepared to move you from thirty-five to forty immediately. Then we’ll look at things again in six months.”
Not bad, she thought. Five grand will certainly help. “What else do you need me to do?” she asked.
“Just say yes or no. And if it’s yes, we can start talking about the Williams Industries project.”
“It’s yes.”
At first Danny struggled. Nothing he typed seemed right. He didn’t want to come across as maudlin or desperate. But he knew he owed her an apology; he had to come clean with that first — clear the air so to speak — if he truly wanted Julie to respond, and he did. He couldn’t remember ever writing her a letter before, not even when they were young lovers. Writing wasn’t his forte, not then at least. Over the years, though, he has improved his skills, mainly for the sake of business correspondence. But a personal letter to his ex-wife, whom he jilted two years ago, was something else entirely.
He wrote and deleted and re-wrote and edited and...
Three hours later he saved a draft of the file, got up for a glass of water, and then returned to read it through. As he read, butterflies fluttered deep inside him. For the first time in his life, he had actually put his inner feelings into words. There was none of the usual cynicism, no carefully couched setups, no craftily constructed half-truths, no innuendo, no machismo, no bluster, just Danny as he knew himself in his heart to be. And he wondered why he hadn’t previously discovered he could be true to himself with something as simple as a letter.
Still, he wavered in his determination to actually send this letter over the Internet to his ex-wife. What would she think of him when she read his words? He was making himself vulnerable, laying his heart open to her as he had never done in their twenty years of marriage. On the other hand, he knew there was very little to lose. She couldn’t get much further away than she already was.
Danny gulped down the rest of his water and weighed the possibilities one more time. Perhaps I should sleep on it, he reasoned. When I am more alert in the morning, I’ll be better able to make this decision...and then, I’ll probably forget the whole idea.
He had been trying to picture Julie in his mind’s eye all evening. But he kept getting stuck on the image of her from the Disney World photograph, taken over a decade ago. His alternate view was the way he remembered her from the afternoon in the law offices when they negotiated the divorce settlement. That day she looked older, tired, angry, and aloof. He wondered how the past eighteen months might have altered her appearance. He feared that she would read his letter and then write him back saying she didn’t want to be reminded of the past — of how he’d hurt her — suggesting that he find someone else to be sincere with, if he really thought he could be sincere — or understanding, or loving, or caring. She knew better.
He’d had his chance with her, a long run, and on the day she moved out, there wasn’t a single spark of energy left in their relationship. Now he was going to try to rekindle a fire from dust and ashes. It was improbable at best, and to her, maybe even unthinkable.
Then, upon further consideration, he realized that sending this letter was a risky proposition for another reason as well — he knew her. She could be loving and warm one day, heartless and cold the next, as though a switch were thrown in the night. And where he was concerned, that switch may have been thrown irreversibly, two years previous.
But then he thought about her warm body that had lain next to him so many nights, and how he’d taken both it and her for granted. Now, although he believed himself to be beyond such feelings, dead to her for at least a year-and-a-half, suddenly he longed to touch her again. Certainly, these thoughts and emotions could have come bubbling up from the alcohol he consumed earlier, but, for a moment, he swore he could actually feel her next to him again — strands of silky hair brushing against his chest, slender, strong legs interlaced with his.
Why not? he thought. Why the hell not?
Julie was feeling better than she had in months, perhaps years, giddy with a sense of accomplishment, of upward mobility. She’d always longed to be recognized as a valuable contributor, one who could be trusted with significant responsibility. Now, albeit in a small way, she’d done it: worked hard, proved herself, secured a promotion and a raise. Of all the candidates Mike could have considered, he had picked her. And Spence must have agreed. Nice of Spence not to insist on holding her back out of a sense of possessiveness. These were good men, she thought: progressive, intelligent, successful. And Mike was turning out to be pretty good company as well.
He entertained her all evening, telling her tales of the trade, how so many small business owners get in over their heads. “Truth is,” he proclaimed, “When it comes to running a business, most entrepreneurs just don’t have a clue.”
It was becoming clear to Julie why SunBurst did so well. Mike and Spence could provide the business expertise and savvy that most small business owners and managers lacked. Certainly, entrepreneurs who built up their businesses beyond the start-up stage, and developed a core clientele, knew their particular trades well enough. But soon after surviving the first test and making a little money, these tradespeople often find themselves in the throes of difficulty. Facing possible bankruptcy or extinction, they call SunBurst. Then, if things aren’t too far gone, Spence and Mike, using their proven methods, can almost always prevent a premature crash landing by helping the companies organize, implement pretested processes, handle their debt judiciously, make sound growth decisions, and avoid stupid mistakes. SunBurst performs a valuable and needed service, and now Julie Baker Predmore was destined to be an integral part of its sales and delivery mechanism as Marketing Communications Specialist. She was pumped!
And she was also a little bit tipsy. In her excitement over the promotion, she had ignored her own admonition to herself — to stop at one glass of wine. Mike kept pouring, and together, they finished off the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. Then, he insisted they cap off their dinner with a glass of the house’s best tawny port. Although light-headed, she didn’t want to disappoint him by refusing. Now, having sipped away half a glass of the sweet, fragrant nectar, she was half-bombed — but positively euphoric.
And Mike had her nearly rolling on the floor with humorous anecdotes from his work in the fertile field of family-owned companies. She was still giggling about his reference to one son of the owner, senior vice-president whom Mike referred to as a “doofus,” and whose only qualification was his share in the family gene pool, and from the shallow end at that.
Then he changed the subject. “I hope you don’t feel too bad that we didn’t make much progress on the Williams Industries project tonight.”
“It’s okay. You said that Allison will be able to start training me on Monday. Maybe she can bring me up to date with what she already knows.”
“I’m sure she can. But I’d like you to have the advantage of our perspective, Spence’s and mine, I mean. This is going to be your first project, so I want you to get off on the right foot.”
“Can Spence fill me in?”
“Partly, but you know Spence. He’s brilliant, but he lacks the marketing angle.”
“Maybe we can schedule some time to meet during the week,” she suggested.”
“Ordinarily, that would be fine. But next week is going to be a bear for me. I’m out of the office until Friday with consulting work I can’t juggle. Then, I’ll be catching up on paperwork all day Friday. How about dinner after that?”
Julie’s head was spinning but not loosened to the point where she didn’t recognize how smoothly he just asked her for another date. To agree would be a clear violation of her rule. Nevertheless, he had been the perfect gentleman tonight.
“I don’t know, Mike. Don’t get me wrong, I really have enjoyed myself this evening, but I don’t want to make a habit of this. It’s too much like a date.”
“I see,” Mike said. “For the sake of discussion, let’s presume that it is a date. What would be wrong with that?”
“Well, to you, maybe nothing, but to me, everything. It’s like I told you. I have a policy not to date people I work with. In my opinion, that can only lead to trouble — or hard feelings. I don’t think either of us wants that.”
“You’re right. We don’t. But, what if I promised to keep it on the level of business? Like tonight. Surely that’d be okay, wouldn’t it?”
She thought for a moment, eyeing him, trying to read his body language. But he was motionless, with only a hint of a smile, and unfortunately, his bright blue eyes didn’t reveal much beyond the obvious — he hoped she’d say yes. Her mind reeled through the possibilities, and in the split second she had to decide, she could not think of another plausible reason to refuse him.
“I guess so,” she replied. Then she added, “But I must be able to trust you to respect my policy. It’s like you said, we want my new position to get off on the right foot. Do we have a deal?”
“We do,” Mike said.
After he paid the bill, they walked together out into the sea-dampened night. It had turned considerably colder, chilly with a knife-edged, on-shore breeze. Julie shivered in her blazer.
“Boy, it’s getting nasty out here,” Mike remarked. “Probably’ll rain before morning. Where did you park?”
“Over there,” Julie pointed.
“Let me walk you to your car. Are you cold?”
“A little.”
“Here, put this around you.” Mike quickly slipped off his suede jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
When they arrived at her car, she keyed the lock and then pulled off Mike’s coat before opening the door. As she handed it back to him she said, “Thanks for dinner and everything. I really appreciate it.”
“My pleasure. I’m glad you came along when you did. SunBurst wouldn’t be the same without you. And I like your companionship, too.” He bent down slightly and kissed her cheek. “Congratulations, Julie. Welcome to marketing.”
When she got into her car, she was shaking, partly from the cold and partly from Mike’s parting gesture. She wanted to be mad at him, but he’d made the kiss seem so innocent, coupling it to his congratulatory remark. And besides, she’d felt a rush inside when his lips touched her.
She fired up the Mirage and watched him walk to his own car, his jacket over one arm. He looks especially great from behind, she thought, but he’s two years younger than me. And then there’s my rule. She put the car in gear and headed out of the parking lot and onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
Why is life always so damn complicated?