1
“I totally have that company in the palm of my hands,” Randy Solomon bragged to his match dot com date while slamming his third scotch of the evening. Appetizers hadn’t even been delivered yet.
“I’m up for a promotion right now. Top rung of the ladder type promotion. Career maker promotion. Pretty soon I’ll be richer than my dreams and won’t need match dot com, every chick will want me. Paul Devarow, New York’s most eligible bachelor.”
His date tried not to vomit. She could feel a lump in her throat. It was right there. It might even be satisfying. Vomit all over the vomit he was already spewing at her. Instead she stared ahead, feigning interest. There was a game on the tv behind the bar and she could at least watch that when he was staring at his drink like he wanted to fuck it instead of her. The asshole didn’t even know her name. He’d called her two different ones since they met 20 minutes ago.
“So Maggie,” he quasi burped in her direction, “your profile said yoga instructor. What kind? Yoga Sutra?”
That one made him laugh.
She stared at him for a moment, wondering what his head would look like with a high heel in his nostril. Then she stood up.
“It’s Megan. I’ll be right back, Paul.”
And with that, her date was over. She grabbed her sweater from the back of the chair and walked out. She wondered how long it took him to realize she wasn’t returning. He probably just ordered another drink and hit on the waitress. Megan saw him staring at her ass when she dropped off the first round of drinks.
By the time Megan reached the subway entrance two blocks away she was over Mr. Paul Devarow. Thus was her mantra. Don’t get hung up on the people you meet. Especially when you’ll never have to see them again.
She rode the subway home in silence, stopped off at a bodega at the corner of her street and bought her favorite ice cream pint. At home she filed a last minute report for work and enjoyed a peaceful evening of Nina Simone and the sounds of New York from her window.
2
David’s masseuse hurt him but in a good way. This was the first time with her so he didn’t think much about it. Every masseuse is different. She found a spot in his upper back and began really working on it. Enough that he winced.
“You ok?” the masseuse asked.
“Fine. Just working out the kinks.”
“You have a lot of tension in your upper back. Do you sit at a desk at work all day?”
“Most of the time. I tried one of those bouncy balls once but kept rolling off. I’m under a time crunch for a project at work too so maybe that’s not helping either,” he moaned as she crushed a knot. Saying that about his work actually relaxed him. Weight off the chest type of thing.
“Stress is stress. It doesn’t have to be physical stress to hurt your body.”
The masseuse zeroed in on a specific spot and pushed her fist deep into it. David flinched and let out a grunt.
“You ok?”
“Yeah, I’m ok. Do your worst,” he chuckled back. “My team says I need to relax a bit anyway. I’m putting too much pressure on myself.”
“How come?”
“It’s a big project. I don’t want it to get messed up. It’s also my idea so my butt is on the line.”
“So you don’t want to look bad,” she asked flatly, not as a question.
“No,” David replied assuredly. “I mean, I like my job and don’t want to mess that up but it’s a good project. It’ll help the company.”
“What happens after the project is done?”
“I wait for the next one. Do my job.”
The masseuse smiled and eased her grip. The hard part of the massage was over.
3
Ahmed had been up since 3am with a sick child. The back to school bug they said. Naming it didn’t stop his daughter from puking all over her floor in the middle of the night. He held his daughter while she fell back asleep letting his wife get the much needed rest she deserved. When his wife woke in the morning and he was sure she was ok on her own, he kissed her goodbye and went to the first of two jobs for the day. At 730am he was in the middle of the breakfast rush. New Yorkers love their bagels and working at a popular bagel shop meant business was never slow. Most mornings he would show up before dawn to help make the first batch of everything and pumpernickel and onion bagels. He didn’t mind the early hours because there is nothing better than a bagel freshly baked. Hot, soft, tears apart in your hands.
When his child got sick Ahmed was able to switch with a coworker to a later shift. He didn’t want to leave his wife alone in the middle of the night with four kids if one was sick.
And so he focused on the job in front of him. There’s a funny thing about New Yorkers. They are, oddly enough, predictable. The pre-dawn crowd, stumbling in for coffee, were quiet and more polite. Too tired to argue. But the 8am crowd were more lively, usually running late and frustrated. You could practically tell the time by the type of customers you were dealing with. So when a woman in a business suit started yelling from the back of the line for him to hurry up, he knew it was around 830.
“You’d think they’d be ready for the morning rush,” the woman scoffed to anyone and everyone. “Some of us have real jobs.
A moment passed.
“COME ON! This is bullshit. I have an 9 o’clock meeting. Hurry the fuck up!”
Finally she reached the front of the line.
“Toasted pumpernickel with scallion cream cheese. Not sliced in half,” she ordered. Ahmed gave a nod and went to work. The woman kept complaining. The toaster took too long, Ahmed didn’t spread enough cream cheese, the bagel wasn’t toasted enough.
When everything was finished she snatched the bagel, dropped four dollars on the counter, and stormed off.
“Ma’am” Ahmed yelled out to her. “The total is 4.14, you left 4”
The woman stopped, turned, stared at him with fire and replied, “You owe me for wasting my time.”
Then she was gone.
She wasn’t worth going after.
Move forward, Ahmed thought.
“Wow she was fun,” the next customer said as she stepped up. She smiled at Ahmed and made sure to tip him extra.
4
Stacy Kirshner looked over a file from the top floor of her midtown corner office. She was focused on one specific part.
“The report on David Jefferon was as expected. The client didn’t have any suspicion that he would be a bad choice for promotion. I see you helped plant the massage bug in his team’s head.”
Across the table sat David’s “masseuse”. She smiled and brushed a piece of lint from her Burberry jacket.
“Yes, people reveal a lot when they’re on the massage table. I think the client will find him a valuable asset. He cares about the product and the company more than his status.”
“That’s good to hear,” her boss replied. “The same can’t be said about Paul Devarow. The client was sure he would be a perfect fit.”
“The client would have made a mistake by promoting him. At least they were smart enough to hire me.”
“But to have him fired? Was he that bad?”
“He was too perfect in public. Smiled too much. Nobody in New York smiles all the time. It was fake. I needed to see closer. I knew one minute into our “date” that he was slime. I can’t believe I lasted as long as I did. Plus, he ordered well scotch. Who does that?”
Megan Winters stood up and straightened her suit.
“I’ll be out of the country for the next few weeks. Send any new clients to my assistant.”
“One more thing,” her boss said. “You had Mrs. Wagner fired on your first day of monitoring? That has to be a record.”
Megan paused for a moment. “She insulted the bagel guy. Never mess with the bagel guy. Especially when I’m in line behind you.”
“You keep firing our client’s employees and they’ll have a supply problem.”
“My job is to make sure the scum doesn’t reach the top of the well, not to measure the supply. Tell them to hire better people at the beginning.”
And with that, she was gone.
