What Love Looks Like Read online

  Of course, I understood the company’s motives. They had a bottom line—call it revenue, profit, or simply cold hard cash. But it often felt as if the drive to fulfill the bottom line was at the expense of my coworkers and me. No one seemed to care about our bottom lines, which in my case were autonomy, happiness, and living bountifully. The structure of corporate America made me question the very concept of having a job. I believed in hard work and making my own way in the world, but not at the expense of my independence and creativity. My job felt like slavery: the higher-ups were the masters, and my coworkers and I were the slaves. There were just a few of the higher-ups and so many of the rest of us. They benefited greatly from our sixty-plus-hour workweeks, while we collected a mere pittance.

  One of the very few perks of my job was that I worked at a satellite location, which meant that the corporate managers were never around to check up on me. They were based in Atlanta and rarely ventured to the Midwest. Instead they assigned Penny, a regional manager, to oversee the territory. Penny was a rough-around-the-edges type who made it obvious that she didn’t like me. She smoked nearly two packs a day and regularly came in reeking of gin. Penny was thirty-seven years old and had never been married or had children. Her life had been devoted to working in restaurants. As a result, her appearance was worn and weathered, and she was noticeably bitter. Her poor management style and strange appearance was the laughing stock of our region, but I never made fun of her. As a formerly bullied teenager, I never made fun of anyone, even when they disliked me for no apparent reason the way Penny did.

  “Good morning,” I said, as I entered my partner Maureen’s office. I was armed with my usual grandé double latte, which I used daily to lift my mood, at least until lunchtime.

  “Hey,” Maureen replied. “How was your night?”

  The antidote to my dreadful work life was my partner, Maureen. Together we coordinated every event at each of our company’s five restaurants in Columbus. We shared everything in an even fifty-fifty split, including our commissions. In addition to being a colleague, she was the elder sister that I’d never had. Maureen was a married mother of one adorable four-year-old girl, who I occasionally hung out with when Maureen and her husband were desperate to get out of the house (conveniently for them, I was desperate to be in a house and out of an apartment).

  “It was fine,” I said. “I met Jenna out for a couple drinks. How about you?”

  “Went to Jeff’s parents' for dinner. Jessie asked about you again! She keeps wanting to know when she can play with Auntie Elle and her little puppy,” Maureen said sweetly. My heart warmed a little.

  Though we began our ritual morning coffee talks by gossiping about work, we always turned to the subject of our personal lives. Then eventually, we’d hear Penny lurking around the corner from Maureen’s office door, and she would tell us in the most passive-aggressive way possible that it was time to get to work. During Maureen's annual review with the corporate bosses, Penny had gone as far as accusing us of being too chatty. Interestingly enough, she seemed to find no fault with chatting up all of our male staff members herself. Penny’s management style in a nutshell was “flirt with the men; the women don’t really matter.” Such misogynistic behaviors prompted Maureen to come up with Penny’s nickname, One Cent, because from a management perspective, that was all she was worth.

  I was in no mood for her tricks that morning; my body was tired and dehydrated, and I just wanted to go back home. She performed her usual lurking around Maureen’s office. With an obvious clearing of her throat, she whispered, “Ladies,” which in Penny-speak meant, “Get busy.” I nodded, and Maureen, who never had trouble simulating sweetness, warmly said hello.

  The moment Penny vanished, I said, “We’re here ten or eleven hours every day, plus we work most Saturdays. Can’t we talk for a few minutes in the morning without being reprimanded? It’s because she hates me.”

  “She hates us both,” Maureen said.

  “No, she just has a lukewarm disdain for you because you aren’t her preferred sex. She has an actual vendetta against me.”

  “That’s because she’s jealous of you.”

  “Jealous of what? She’s my boss, she makes, like, double my salary.”

  “Um, hello! You’re hot, and she’s not. She looks like an absurdly tall twelve-year-old boy.” Maureen replied.

  “That’s so mean, Mo.”

  “How can you defend someone who you just said hates you?”

  “I haven’t even told you the latest,” I whispered. “Jenna called me last Wednesday right after she got out of a meeting with Penny and Ryan from the downtown restaurant. And apparently, Penny said something like, ‘Elle needs to be careful because people are watching her.’” Jenna was a colleague too; she worked in the restaurants and executed the events that I planned.

  “That is so creepy!” Maureen said a little too loudly.

  “Shh! I know. I don’t even know what that means! Like, who is watching me, and can they please stop?” I sighed. “I better get back to work or else she’ll poke her head in here again, and it’ll take everything in me not to create a Penny-sized voodoo doll and do evil things to it.”

  “Too much wine again last night?” Maureen asked, laughing. She must have noticed my heightened irritability.

  “No, I just couldn’t sleep, Luna kept barking at the homeless guy who sings at all hours of the night.” I hated lying to Maureen, but the shame of my one-night stand outweighed my moral obligation to be honest.

  “We’ve got to get you out of downtown.” Maureen was always trying to convince me to move into the suburbs. But even though I complained about it, the city noise kept me company on those really lonely nights.

  At my own desk, I e-mailed each contact person from the previous night’s events to ensure that everything had exceeded their expectations, and I received only positive feedback. Our company upheld something of a gold standard in the area of private fine dining.

  I’d come to be an event planner by way of a college job that in hindsight had probably given me what shred of confidence I had as I took the plunge into adulthood. Until then I had been a socially awkward student. I'd faced a constant onslaught of ridicule for my tiny boobs, frizzy hair, and extreme shyness. But during my junior year, to complement my PR major, I interned part-time at a public relations company called Forte Promotions Group. It was an unlikely course of study for an introverted, self-conscious teenager.

  I was so successful at my internship that I was quickly promoted to brand ambassador, which meant I coordinated launches for new cocktail and spirit companies. Conveniently, around then I began enjoying alcohol daily; in retrospect, I can attribute a lot of the vices that I carried into adulthood to the time I spent working the bar and club circuit. I often awoke hungover, but for the first time in my life I felt popular, so I didn’t care. I had been an ugly, nerdy duckling that had become a hard-partying swan. But I couldn’t deny that drinking all of the time caused me some trouble. I had a hard time keeping my grades up, and I couldn’t seem to show up anywhere on time, except at parties. And I was the life of all of them.

  After two years of interning at Forte, I finally graduated, and my standards for living became higher. I realized that to sustain the lifestyle that I wanted, I’d need a more substantial income and a more adult way of life. As luck had it, a friend of a friend of my mother’s owned a restaurant group called East Coast Prime, which included forty-some restaurants nationally, five of which were in Columbus. They were the type of restaurant that my parents went to only on special occasions. The company was hiring an event planner to manage the restaurants’ private dining programs. My name was passed along, and I interviewed three times with the director of operations. A few weeks later, I was gainfully employed; my big-girl life had begun.

  While I wasn’t a huge admirer of my company, my regional manager, or my office, there were parts of event planning that I enjoyed. Making a dream wedding come to life was invigorating, and help
ing a nonprofit solicit donations for auction felt inherently decent. But I regularly mulled over the fact that I could do my job independently of East Coast Prime, and probably do it better and for more money. I knew I’d be wiser spending my time channeling my visions for events into beautiful realities than reporting on the prior year's audiovisual usage.

  My hangover almost completely vanished later that day, when I left the office to visit our downtown restaurant. It was by far the largest space that Maureen and I booked events into; in fact, it was one of the largest in the whole company. Consequently, it hosted more events than all the others and earned me the most commission. It was a Mecca for several different demographics in Columbus: stylish gay guys, businessmen in suits, and suburban housewives. Each of these was a subculture that required maintaining an efficient staff, stunning interior design, and mouthwatering food and drink.

  East Coast Prime boasted a diverse, expensive menu and only the finest wines by the bottle. The atmosphere was that of an old Chicago-style steakhouse. I often suffered pangs of jealousy seeing people night after night out on fancy dates and enjoying their lives while I worked hours on end at their watering hole. The “poor me” broken record kept repeating in my head, and I just wanted someone to stop it.

  I found Jenna seated alone at the bar, silently working on what looked like a server floor plan. The restaurant wasn’t open for lunch except for when we had special private events, so we’d have the space all to ourselves for our weekly meeting. I was fortunate to have another wonderful work friend in Jenna. In addition to being my occasional drinking buddy, she was also my shopping partner. We met most Sundays for mimosas and perused the downtown boutiques. On paper, neither of us could afford to buy in such exclusive shops, but thanks to good credit, we usually each went home with at least one new item.

  Jenna was my only newlywed friend who still envied the single lifestyle that I had (and no longer wanted). Occasionally, she’d invite me over for dinner and, right in front of her husband, grill me on what I’d done the night before. This inevitably led to a disappointing story of how I’d taken my dog to my parents’ house and watched TV while drinking wine with my sister, or killed three-quarters of a bottle of red wine by myself while watching Real Housewives. Jenna’s eyes would roll at my uninspiring tales of singledom. Then, when her husband wasn’t in the room, she’d explain that I was wasting the best years of my life. I guess the grass really was always greener on the other side.

  “Hey, how’d it go last night?” Jenna asked. She was no doubt hoping for the details of a salacious hookup.

  “Hi, Jen.” I grasped my color-coded stack of folders; each folder contained information for the following week’s events at the restaurant. I took a seat next to her at the elegant bar. I always found it ironic that I conducted work meetings in a place where people got drunk, celebrated milestones, and fell in love. It was the story of my life.

  “So? How did it go?” Jenna asked again.

  “Nothing happened. We had a drink and then went home.” I was lying, again out of disgrace. “I’m here to go over next week with you.”

  She rolled her eyes and glanced down at the event calendar for the upcoming month. “Damn, you’ve been busy. This is a pretty eventful week for this time of year.”

  “Businesses have new budgets out and know how they want to allocate their funds for the year, so dinner meetings should start really picking up now. And some of this is just holiday overflow. Certain companies are busier during the holidays, so they hold their Christmas dinners after New Year’s.” Suddenly, I felt nostalgic for the holidays.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenna asked. She must have seen a subtle shift in me.

  “I’m just sad it’s over.”

  “New Year's? It’s, like, the worst night of the year for us.”

  “No, Christmas. I love it. It’s my favorite time of year.”

  “But you complained that you were lonely for the entire month of December,” Jenna said. How embarrassing.

  “Well I got through it. I had Luna.”

  Jenna smiled, a rare display of warmth for her. “You need to date more.”

  “What’s the point? Do you know how hard it is to actually find a stand-up guy anymore?”

  “There’s no way for you to know who's a stand-up guy and who’s not because you give every guy you meet the cold shoulder.”

  I wouldn’t tell her that I'd given a lot more than my shoulder to one-night-stand-Josh, but I saw her point nonetheless. I was becoming increasingly pickier the older I got. “Let’s talk events,” I said.

  “Wait, shouldn’t we get Ryan to go over this with us?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess we should.”

  Ryan Adler was the general manager of the restaurant, and a favorite of both Penny and the corporate bosses. Jenna was fond of him too, but I didn’t know him well enough to share everyone's adoration. He was in charge of all restaurant operations, and everyone knew that he did his job well. In fact, I’d heard from several sources that he was the highest-paid manager in the whole company.

  Even though Ryan didn’t actually execute my events (he reserved that task for Jenna), due to his position he had to be aware of all banquets that took place in his restaurant, and he had to be present for the read-through each week. His service staff spoke highly of him, but I perceived him as cold and standoffish. He had tunnel vision about the restaurant. He’d never argued with me; in fact, he was actually kind of a gentleman. He was the type who always got the door for a woman (no matter her age or physical appearance), and whenever it rained he’d walk guests to their cars with an umbrella. But good manners alone didn’t earn him the title of Mr. Congeniality.

  Jenna went to the kitchen and reemerged with Ryan, who walked back to the front with her, his eyes scanning the bar area for imperfections. He wiped a microscopic speck of dust off of a handrail, shaking his head in disapproval as he marched through the dining room. He would have had a field day in my apartment.

  “Hello, Elle.” He nodded and made about a tenth of a second’s worth of eye contact.

  “Hi, Ryan.” I tried to sound in good spirits without coming across as ditzy. I had always been convinced that I could kill him with kindness and get him to come out of his shell, but it never worked. “Busy week next week!” I spoke a bit too cheerfully.

  “I see that—nice work.” He made momentary eye contact with me. He had large wide-set brown eyes that penetrated those of everyone he spoke to. Ryan was tall, well over six feet, and had an imposing, brawny build. His stature was commanding. He had an almost militant air to him, as if he were the kind of guy who would never lose a fight. But he was probably too calm and collected to ever get into one. “Show us what you’ve got,” he said.

  I immediately began reciting my banquet details, and Ryan and Jenna listened as I described at length every event for the following week. The read-through usually lasted an hour, and I always felt Ryan getting fidgety near the halfway mark, as if he had somewhere better to be. Jenna took notes while Ryan sat across from me tapping his finger impatiently on the bar. When I finished, he quickly got up, thanked me, and left.

  “Friendly, isn’t he?” I said sarcastically to Jenna.

  “You don’t see him often enough to understand his personality. He’s a great boss; he’s just very efficient when he’s on the clock. He’s a totally different guy outside of work. If you ever hung out with us after our shifts you’d see. But your lame ass is always in bed by ten.”

  “That’s because I’m in the office by seven fifteen.” I gathered my event folders.

  Jenna rolled her eyes again. “Brunch on Sunday, right? How about Union at eleven? I already told Nolan I was skipping lunch with his parents so I could get my shop on.”

  “It’s a date. I need it bad,” I said. There was nothing quite like the rush of hunting for a new addition to my closet. But I knew I gave shopping entirely too much glory. Sometimes after getting new clothes I felt as if everything was right in the
world. And then inevitably, I’d wear them and realize that it wasn’t.

  I headed out the back of the restaurant and into my snow-covered car. My apartment was just one block from East Coast Prime, which was both a good and a bad thing—bad because I often felt as if I should walk over and check on my events even on my days off, but good because when I did my read-through in the late afternoon, Maureen put my calls into voice mail and I got home at five instead of my usual six thirty or seven.

  I moved my car into the garage below the building and rushed upstairs to the second floor. As I turned the key to my door, I heard high-pitched squeals from the other side. Luna bounded up into my arms and licked me intensely as, through my laughter. I tried to fasten her leash to the collar around her tiny white neck. The rest of her body was black, apart from a white strip of fur between her eyes and little white ‘fur socks’ around all four of her paws. As a Terrier-Chihuahua mix, she was a highly energetic lap dog who licked me so much that I often wondered how her tongue didn’t get sore. I still felt guilty for whatever atrocities she'd witnessed the previous night, and I prayed that dogs ignored humans having sex.

  Luna was the most loyal companion I’d ever had. She demonstrated her love for most everyone she met, and when she didn’t take kindly to a new person, I knew right away that I should be suspicious. Aside from her psychic ability, she was also the main source of happiness in my life. Never had I met anyone who was consistently overjoyed at the mere sight of me. She was thankful for every head scratch, morsel of food, and ounce of affection I gave her.

  Once we reached the park, I let her off of her leash to run around with the other dogs. It was cold out, but I didn’t mind. Seeing Luna excited always raised my spirits. Back upstairs, I dished out Luna’s kibble and then considered what I should feed myself. Takeout sounded easiest, but I had to be economical. I decided instead on baby carrots with an entire container of hummus, followed by what afterward felt like a pound of chocolate drops I'd bought at Whole Foods, elegantly paired with the remains of a bottle of Shiraz. I stuffed myself far beyond the point of satisfaction, and in so doing maintained my self-proclaimed title of reigning queen of eater’s remorse. In fact, I was the queen of all sorts of remorse (buyer’s remorse, one-night-stand remorse, and so forth).