Free Otherwise Engaged by Suzanne Finnamore Page B

insists. He feels it’s part of his compensation package.
    The addition of hot mango chutney made it even more diabolical. We each ate about five pieces.
    I am no longer losing weight.
    They had a catered cocktail party for the lizard man. Inside his new top-floor corner office is all-new furniture from Lim. The chairs have soft, faux zebra backs. One of those really expensive desks with the black trip wire and no drawers.
    I comfort myself with the conviction that he is probably, way down deep inside, profoundly unhappy. I tell myself that he is secretly terrified, just skating on his luck. Because he knows that others possess a higher sense of originality and style, even though he is doing way better careerwise and everyone in the Fuck Us Groups seems to love his work. On the
surface.
    I drink a single glass of champagne. I smile, feeling the burn. I can’t get over the fact that the lizard man is winning.
    It’s the Chinese who say, Envy is an insult to the self.
    I told Reuben how I wanted a raise and a promotion, how everybody is passing me on the ladder and how upset that makes me. I admitted that I was obsessed with ambition and money and getting recognized by the agency, how I wanted it all now. The desk with no drawers, everything.
    Reuben crossed his long legs. Then he said, “You’re spending all your time tending the outer garden, when what you need to do is tend the inner garden.”
    As for the raise and the recognition, he said that he felt all of that would probably happen. He waved his hands with a bored expression. Then he leaned forward and said, “But believing in yourself … that’s the alchemist’s gold.”
    He held up one bony finger like Merlin when he said it.
    I woke up today to a feeling of movement in my veins. I decided I had to confront my boss. I decided I didn’t care about the alchemist’s gold. I’ll get the false gold and then I’ll U-turn back and get the alchemist’s gold.
    We went into the Creative Director from L.A.’s palatial office, Graham and I. The Creative Director from L.A. demanded to know why we felt we deserved more money. He stood up when he asked this. The Creative Director from L.A. is, naturally, quite tall. He stood up and looked out his office window. His huge, 360-degree bay-view window.
    Then Graham mentioned the solicitous phone calls from other agencies we have been getting. The headhunters from New York.
    At the mention of headhunters, he turned around. His face softened. His head tilted slightly forward; he donned the mask of someone who is listening, with regularly spaced meaningful nods. His eyes hooded over as he calculated how little he could get away with giving us.
    I said, “Do we really have to go to New York to get what we deserve?”
    I improvised, borrowing from movies I had seen where Jimmy Cagney rises up to conquer the world.
Headhunters from New York
became a key phrase in my speech, because, as the Creative Director from L.A. knows, perhaps one or two of the agencies there might like to steal us away, Graham and me. Soon he leaned across his oversized desk and said, “No, of course not, you’re not going to New York.”
    If necessary, his flat black eyes suggested, we would be hobbled.
    Now I feel soiled. This is how he got to be the Creative Director from L.A. With skillful ease he downplayed our successes, laid claim to our work, and undermined what shred of self-esteem we had managed to hold on to. God you have to love life.
    I find myself getting back to basics, emotionally. Justwishing he would go away. Struck by a large Muni bus, and then maybe dragged for a time. This makes me know how unevolved I am, and why I am being visited by this sort of karma. Additionally I’ve discovered that whenever you pray for someone to go away, the next one is worse.
    Graham is my protector, the one who sits by me and says the hard things. He is the first man I ever had a true partnership with, before Michael. Although he is gay, I think of