Hardly Working

His own thirtieth birthday had sailed by a couple of decades ago, leaving him with a pear-shaped torso and an ex-wife who blamed him for everything from her lost youth to the hole in the ozone layer.

He often let us know that his only passion these days was his La-Z-Boy recliner positioned in front of the sports network. He was immune to women, he said, and no woman would ever trick him again. But Green World International was an office full of women. We weren’t fooled.

“I don’t know about a party. The trouble is,” I said, “my birthday falls on the Sunday, and we’ve got Mr. Important CEO from the East coming in on Monday morning, haven’t we?”

“We sure do. Ian Trutch,” sighed Jake, his features clouding over.

Ian Trutch was higher management. In our office, all higher management was referred to as The Dark Side.

The sudden announcement from the main branch about Ian Trutch had come just the week before and everybody was on edge. Trutch would be arriving in Vancouver to do a little monitoring and streamlining around our office. In other words, there might be a massacre.

As soon as Jake had let the Trutch bomb drop, I’d gone into a state of panic. I wanted to keep my job. The downside of working here was the pitiful wages, cramped ugly offices, weird volunteers, and all that unpaid overtime. The upside was the altruistic goals and the great gang of fellow party anima…uh…employees.

So I immediately Googled Ian Trutch, then called the scene of his last slaughter to try to get information on him. When I finally got Moira, my connection in Ottawa, on the phone, she nearly had to whisper. “Listen Dinah, he’s ruthless…last month there were four more empty desks…lower-level employees. You think they’re gonna touch The Dark Side? No way. I don’t even know if I should be talking to you…Big Brother might be watching…and he has cronies… I’ve gotta tell you what happened to a woman here…uh-oh…one of his cronies has just come sleazing in…gotta go.” The phone slammed down. I sat there a little stunned. I knew Moira was overworked and probably needed a vacation—bad. But four empty desks were still four empty desks.

So maybe he was ruthless. And if his Web-site picture was any indication, he was also first-class material.

Ian Trutch was beautiful.

The beautiful enemy.

Green World International’s in-house magazine had run a long article on him. It stated that Ian Trutch had been hired by GWI to bring the organization into the twenty-first century, that his aim was to make GWI into a smooth-running and profitable machine.

Profitable and machine were two words that did not fit Green World’s profile at all. We were an environmental agency, for crying out loud.

GWI’s current interest was biomimicry, which studies the way nature provides the model for a cradle-to-cradle, rather than cradle-to-grave, use of natural capital, or the planet’s natural resources. Our mission was to redefine “sustainable development,” make it less of an oxymoron, promote biodiversity as a business model, and the idea that a certain kind of agriculture was killing the planet, and that the flora and fauna of a forest or an ocean did not need human intervention or human witnesses to be a success as a forest or an ocean. We were trying to talk world leaders and policy makers into letting the planet’s last few resources teach us all how to live.

Simple, really.

If you happened to be God.

My job was in PR and the creative department, finding as many ways as possible to pry donations out of tight corporate fists. And I was good. My degree in environmental studies enabled me to scare the wits and then the money out of people, because the world picture I painted for the future was scientifically backed up and not pretty. Not pretty at all. And let’s face it. Having a world-famous scientist for a mother may have helped a little. The biggest problem was making that first contact with the right people.

And now there was the whole water business. In the last year since Jake had been promoting the Mudpuddle model to our international counterparts, the office had gone crazy. We’d moved to bigger premises. They were still shabby as hell but bigger. Communications with the other Green World offices, in Moscow, Barcelona, Rome and Tokyo, had been flying back and forth.

And the best part of all? We’d finally found Tod Villiers, the superdonor we’d been seeking. The government was going to match his donation one hundred per cent and it was a sum that ran close to half a million.

Tod was a venture capitalist in his late forties. He was fat, sleek, bald, olive-skinned, and had the most unfortunate acne-scarred skin and bulging pale-brown eyes. But the bottom line was that he loved the project, recognized its worth, and wanted to invest. He’d written a check that amounted to a teaser. So lately, I had to keep his interest inflated until the second and largest part of his donation was processed and his contribution awarded at the fund-raiser in the spring. Because although we’d also received the final check, it was post-dated. I wasn’t worried though.

It did mean that all of a sudden, the spotlight was on us in a way it never had been before. We had begun paying fanatically close attention to anything that had to do with H

O. National Bog Days and World Water Forums were suddenly big on our agenda. Never again would we take a long deep bath, use the dishwasher, jump into a swimming pool, or run the water too long while brushing our teeth, without feeling horribly guilty.

Green World was experiencing a huge growth spurt and this, according to head office, was why Trutch was being sent in. To do a little strategic pruning before the branches went wild.

“Listen, Jake,” I said, “when this Trutch guy arrives on Monday morning, send somebody else out to get the coffee and donuts. Weren’t we going to be democratic about the Joe jobs? Send Penelope.”

Jake perked up and asked, “How are things working out with Penelope anyway?”

A deep, languid female voice broke into our conversation. “Jake, darling, the next time you decide to hire someone who’s good at languages, make sure they’re old enough to drink alcohol and get legally laid first.”

It was Cleo Jardine, GWI’s Eco-Links Officer, and social co-conspirator to yours truly. Cleo is part Barbadian and part Montrealer, a wild-haired woman with coloring that makes you think of a maraschino cherry dipped in bitter chocolate.

She draped a slim dark arm around Jake’s neck and half whispered in his ear, “Little Penelope has a trunk full of brand-new pretty little white things for her wedding night, Jake. She’s got it all figured out. The perfect pristine little life. In any other situation I might find it charming.”

“Huh?” Jake looked slightly startled. Then he laughed. “I know she’s young, but she’s very talented.”

It wasn’t the young and talented part that bothered us.

Well.

Maybe it did.

Just a tiny bit.

“The kind of talent we need in this office,” said Cleo, “pees standing up. And if you had to hire another female, Jake, why couldn’t you have hired somebody with a face like a pit bull but a nice disposition?”

“I couldn’t find a pit bull with her qualifications,” said Jake.

The new talent, Penelope Longhurst, was a very smart twenty-two-year-old. She’d graduated from Bennington College, summa cum laude, at the age of twenty. She was very pretty, too. She had big green eyes and shiny honey-blond hair. But if her necklines got any higher they were going to choke her. She was a self-proclaimed virgin and proponent of the New Modesty and Moralism Movement.

Every office should have one.

Since Penelope had come to work at GWI three months ago, we could sense her getting more superior by the minute, filling up with smugness. Any day, she was going to burst, and purity and self-righteousness would fly all over the office.

“It’s fear,” Cleo observed. “Penelope’s just afraid. She’s sensitive. You can tell she is. She just needs to get over that hump. No pun intended.”

So it was sheer synchronicity that when I left Jake and Cleo and went down the hall to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face and fix my makeup in the mirror, that Penelope, Miss Virgin Islands herself, happened to burst out of one of the cubicles in that moment.

She moved with maniacally nervous energy. I couldn’t help thinking that a few orgasm-induced endorphins would have done her good.

For crying out loud.

They would have done all of us good.

She planted herself in front of the mirror next to me and fiddled with her buttons and hair and the lace at the top of her collar. Her fingers wouldn’t stay still. They skittered all over her clothes like policeman’s hands performing a search.

“Hey, Penny. Something wrong?”

She shook her head and huffed.

“So how’s it going?” Bathroom mirror etiquette requires that one must at least make an attempt at friendly chitchat with fellow colleagues. I popped the cap off my new tube of cinnamon burgundy lipstick.

Penelope’s expression was strange. She looked at me as if I were applying cyanide to my lips.

“Like this color?” I asked.

She stared at my mirror image and remained motionless.