Eve Kelly (fearlessfelix) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-20 17:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, catwoman |
Who: Thomas Brandon and Eve Kelly
What: A business meeting that does not go very well at all
When: Very recently?
Where: Thomas Inc
Warnings: None. All catty insults are PG.
The conference room had the kind of glass supposedly impossible to see into but clear to look out of -- the reality, she observed, was that the world outside became sepia, like an old photograph left to curl. Seattle spread itself out for perusal, houses and municipal buildings in amongst the streets, like items laid out on a carpet in a back-alley but the executives sat with their backs determinedly turned against the windows in ergo-dynamic chairs and played with gold-plated pens she idly considered swiping on the way out, just because of the way they clicked the lids with impatience. Not hers -- his -- hers were on her goddamn payroll, and that was new, and they were deferential in suits that cost more than she’d paid on rent for the last two months and that was even newer, and the thought made her smile, over the droning voice of the lead executive, who seemed set upon crushing her ideas into dust beneath a heavy blanket of boredom.
Eve drummed her fingers against the polished table-top; the papers they’d handed round at the beginning of the meeting had skidded along it like it were ice -- the mild-faced lawyer who led ‘her’ team gave her the disapproving look that made her want to do something worthy of that disapproval in a fit of pique she hadn’t had since she was fifteen and hemmed in by adolescence and foster parents and rules that didn’t allow for bending -- she’d already been given one or two for sitting down and within seconds, kicking off the heels surreptitiously beneath the table. Bad enough she was forced into crisp white shirt and the kind of skirt that was all about wiggle, and no ability to walk at all. ‘Business-wear’ for women was a joke, more sexual than the leather pants that permitted striding and kicking a guy when he strayed from looking into touching.
“Could you cut to the part where I sign a cheque and you do what I want?” she demanded, tired of dancing around the issue, the way meetings seemed designed to play out in a ritual, a game where everyone knew the rules and seemed content to waste time in following them. Surely the point of money was being able to snip through the tape that bound you to this stupidity? Her lawyer glared; she softened the demand with a smile that was all teeth and sharpness and red lipstick. The ‘team’ had approved of that, at least. “Please?”
The chief executive sighed heavily and self-importantly, he shuffled the papers in front of him with a look that said he’d rather consign them to the secretary to shred, the mousy woman who had shuffled into the room with coffee and tea and a look that said she was fucking the chief executive and that she knew how much the agonizing heels had cost. “The thing is, Miss Kelly,” his voice oozed self-importance and persuasive coaxing; she hated it, worse than the men in bars who had the excuse of being drunk to be assholes. “What you’re trying to do is admirable, really,” as if she were a particularly stupid child showing off a lopsided art project, “But it’s not quite -- ah,” he looked toward the bank of lawyers who sat like spaniels, waiting for command, to spring forward, “Legal.”
Thomas wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten dragged to this particular meeting. It was something to do with the charity, he was sure. He refused almost anything that didn’t have to do with the charity; those, and the higher level board meetings, simply because there were people on his board that he didn’t trust. A great deal of his money was not at the beck and call of the board; indeed, a great deal of his money that had come through the portal was not on any paper under his name.
He found, however, that Miss Kelly’s attitude toward investing in charity was extremely... practical. She was a breath of fresh air, in a way, in that she had an end but no means. She could throw money at it until she got it done, of course, but since her end was a charity that functioned for longer than ten minutes, that probably wouldn’t last. “There are laws meant to protect people from establishments that don’t have their safety in mind,” Thomas said, literally talking over the pompous board director with such mild authority that everyone else shut up and stared. “If you’re really trying to help, Miss Kelly, you’ll realize why they’re there.” He didn’t say her name like his colleague had said it. He didn’t sit forward and lean on his elbows either. Thomas wasn’t leaning on anything at all, or drinking the coffee the mousy assistant had put out. He was without distraction in that particular moment; very present.
From the way everyone turned to look at him, their breath respectfully held as if the goddamn Pope had walked into church on a Sunday, it was clear the execs thought this man shat gold. Eve didn’t care much for men in suits, even when those suits fit impeccably and she didn’t care much for the men that the lawyers and executives and others with titles that they gave you self-importantly when they shook your hand, respected. Two strikes against Thomas Brandon who sat at the head of that meeting-table as if it had been called for his convenience (it had; it had been rescheduled twice after a long discussion with one of his personal assistants as to whether he could fit it in, she’d nearly thrown a fit) He spoke and that room fell silent and even the chorus of clicking pens that had punctuated each self-aggrandizing sentiment that fell from the lips of a man who probably had his assistant wipe his ass for him, ceased. Eve felt as if even her skin tightened with irritation and it caught in her eyes and it held there, even as her mouth curved into a smile that was as sincere as the mousy assistant’s compliments in the lobby before the meeting.
“Look,” she said, and legal team’s disapproval be damned, she’d be comfortable if she was going to be talked down to for the better part of two hours: Eve shifted in her seat to curl around, to bring one unshod foot up and tuck it beneath her thigh in the silly, impractical skirt. “I don’t know legal. I don’t care about legal, and if anyone in the hypothetical establishment we’re discussing decided to impinge on the safety of anyone needing to use it, I would slit them open from nose to groin,” her smile turned sweeter, honey stirred into a voice naturally pitched low and husky -- she slid a glancing look at the most irritating of the executives and watched him gulp, her mouth pursed around the last word, almost lovingly. She didn’t know business meetings but Eve certainly knew threats. “What’s important is that the kids who hear of the place don’t think five minutes after being given a place to sit and get warm or whatever, the cops are going to show and cart them straight back. If they’re running, they’ve got a damn good reason and I’ve got several hundred million at my disposal to give them somewhere to run to. Are you going to be able to make this possible, or do I need to find somewhere else?” She looked directly at Brandon now, and the green eyes in the starkly unmade up face were clear; throwing down the gauntlet.
Thomas Brandon was not easily intimidated. In fact, nobody who knew him had ever seen him be intimidated by anything. He sat in the big orthopedic leather chair, and it didn’t so much as creak under his weight during that little speech of hers, but he didn’t smile as if she was a little girl throwing a tantrum like half the room. “You’re talking about creating a political haven. You can’t do that, Miss Kelly.” The room tittered, but he ignored them. “What you can do, however,” he said, slightly louder so they shut up again, which he honestly preferred, “is create a safe place without getting law enforcement involved. If you’re talking about a shelter, you can do that, but you need to be careful about what you decide to call it.” Silence.
Even her team were looking at her now, as if she hadn’t signed the paperwork to take the whole insane inheritance over, as if with one word they would leap to Brandon’s side and dog his heels as happily as his own board members did. It rankled: pity, thick enough to feel settling against her skin, thick enough to taste cloying in the back of her throat. The one person in the goddamn room taking her seriously, didn’t behave with that sense of mild indulgence that only money bought, was Brandon himself. King of the suits, a man it would probably take perhaps three glasses over the legal limit to reduce to a shuffling, slurring mess poured into Armani or whatever the label on that overpriced outfit was. Spite, sweet-sharp and pointed, rose effortlessly to her lips; she swallowed, drew herself up with the dignity of someone who actually had earned a spot in the board meeting.
“What I call it?” It was a question without being a question; it took enough to curl the word up at the end and even suggest that she didn’t know quite what he meant. “I don’t care what it’s called so long as the kids who walk through the door get a shot, they’re not hamstrung by not having anything at all. And I don’t want another place with bunk-beds crammed too close together, where when the lights go out they’re in a different kind of danger.” She managed, with a little difficulty, to inject dispassion, distance into the words, anything but imply she knew more than what a handful of brochures and a brief from an enthusiastic volunteer might provide in the way of information. “Go back to school, get a job that doesn’t start at dark and end at dawn and operate from an alleyway. Is that even possible?” It was the first time Eve -- Miss Kelly, she’d been ‘Miss Kelly’ since she’d walked through those glass doors and into the building; she liked it less and less each time they said her name, as though it were something to be stepped on -- had even permitted the possibility the project might not work.
His eyes were grave. No one was laughing now. One or two looked uncomfortable, and were sipping their coffee to hide it. He understood her spite and frustration, and he was alright with her directing it in his direction. It did him no harm, and he wasn’t in a position to know if it did her any good. It might. “As you’ve already surmised,” he said, looking at her from across the long board table in such a way that it seemed like it was not a great distance at all, “it is. Taking measures to create somewhere safe doesn’t put you at odds with the government, Miss Kelly. The things you’re talking about, they’re not without solutions. You need planning, not chance. You think you want a place without laws, but you need rules to keep your charges safe, not chaos. Find yourself someone who believes in it as much as you do, but with a legal background in nonprofits, and you won’t need to ask for corporate support. We’ll give it to you because we know your way works. Do it safe, and do it legal.” This was a great deal of talking for Thomas Brandon. He did not give motivational speeches. He told people what he wanted and they obeyed. He assumed that those that worked for him were efficient, because he was efficient.
To everyone else in the room, it seemed to signal an end: Brandon had pronounced his verdict like Solomon in session and the shuffling of papers together and production of briefcases began busily. One or two of Brandon’s execs produced small and impossibly complicated cell phones, began to tap away at them as though it had already been dismissed, as though she had already been dismissed. Another looked out the window, actually admiring that so-expensive view through the haze of bullet-proof, sunshine-proof, voyeur-proof glass. The head of Eve’s team leaned over, bent his impeccably groomed gray head near hers and put his mouth very close to her ear.
“It’s over,” he said, in a voice that said she had wasted their time, and with the condescending sort of pat she had learned they gave, in this world. In hers, it was too insulting to risk -- Eve wished that they were all in the kind of bar in which people were who they were; stripped of the falsities that made up corporate world, when men who thought you were nothing as a woman, looked at you lazily, without any pretense that they thought anything else. He snapped open his briefcase and the locks sprang apart and she could see on top of the paperwork inside the same pale yellow file that they’d tried to present her with the other day -- a list of investment stock options, artwork for sale, things that could be bought because all anyone could want to buy with money, it seemed, was more money. At her insistence (feet-stamping: it had taken being outrageous to get them to do anything she wanted them to do,and even then...) they’d already quizzed what charities were about, what local experts might be persuaded into helping. Each time, her head-of-staff had come back, regretfully spread his hands wide like a magician showing his lack of tricks -- and now Brandon.
The board members were leaving now, filing out -- the last engaging himself in conversation with Brandon. Hurriedly, Eve shoved her toes inside those stupid shoes that lay against the corporate carpet, stretched herself out of the chair and wove between the business suits pushing into a queue out of the door and on to other things. She caught Brandon’s sleeve; a faux-pas, very probably.
“Why can’t you?” It was a demand, but it didn’t sound like one, not entirely. The honey was back, wound between the words.
Faux-pas or no, he still wasn’t at a hundred percent with that arm, and he tried to make the move graceful as he turned, but he also pointedly removed her hand from his arm without putting a lot of pressure on the sleek suit’s lines. “I’ll talk to you another time, James,” he said pointedly at his conversation partner, who took the hint and followed the rest outside, on to bigger and better things. He put a cautionary step between himself and Eve and then he looked at her the same way he had looked at her a moment before over the expanse of the board table. “Miss Kelly. Why can’t I what?”
“Believe in it.” She said it softly, and she said it as though she didn’t think it entirely possible for Brandon with his suits and polished shoes and the sort of watch on his wrist that it wasn’t feasible to buy unless you had an invitation, to believe in anything that wasn’t money and business and people doing as they were ordered. It had taken Eve only one or two meetings with a group determined to have her money increase, to realize the gap between people like her and people like him was more than the number of zeroes in a bank account. For all the silly shoes -- she was standing in them with grace borrowed from an ability, but as if any moment the grace might fail -- and the low-cut, well-cut shirts and the scent one of the shop-assistants had coaxed her into, all spice and warmth and richness that curled up against the skin, she wasn’t part of this world and it showed. She was studying him as though trying to find the one crack through to the human being underneath the business polish, and she wasn’t trying to hide it. He had stepped back and away, let her hand drop as though he knew she didn’t fit here, too.
Thomas, on the other hand, had discovered in his years of doing... whatever he did, that people were all the same. Whatever shoes they stood in, whatever watches they wore or did not wear, however many zeroes they thought made a billion--they were all essentially the same. For some reason he found the incongruous spice of the scent she wore confusing, and he took a moment to remember where he was standing and why. Then he said, “What makes you think I don’t?” She had an odd, harrowing sharpness to her, this Eve Kelly. He admired her passion for her cause, but he knew her to be woefully short on patience and understanding for the obstacles that barred her path. Some walls, Thomas knew, only got thicker the more you beat at them. Some you had to take down, brick by brick. Some you had to go around. And some--most--you had to climb.
Eve had little difficulty scaling physical walls -- she didn’t need to, they held so pitiful a boundary when you could jump them. But now her impatience was almost tangible, and it prickled and bristled the way she had during that first half an hour in which one of his executives had addressed her as ‘Miss’ without even the respect of her surname. She had expected a reply of something similar, some billionaire’s way of caring without caring from a man who had doubtless signed countless checks for countless ‘good causes’ that people waved beneath his nose, and stood and drank champagne in honor of people who didn’t give a shit about fancy dresses, but their next fix. It made her angry, in a way Eve wasn’t, and the green eyes were all mild contempt and irritation that she either had no skill in hiding or the desire to. It was both, in fact.
“I’m sure you’ve been to benefits for things like it,” and her voice gave delicate disdain to the word benefit, the week of counseling from people used to working for people like him giving it more significance than it ought to have had, “You just said I needed to find someone who believed in it, I’m asking why you can’t help. You’ve clearly had the experience.” Her chin notched up and she was tall usually, five seven of rangy, long-limbed height, and in heels that was significantly more but she looked taller still now.
“I meant a business manager,” he said, in his even, serious voice. “Not like what you have there.” The disdain in his gray glance out the door of the room, toward the sitting room where her legal team waited, was obvious. The board room itself felt strange and cool with only the two of them in it, and his voice dominated it without filling it at all. It sounded like grinding concrete, and sometimes like new asphalt. It depended on what he was saying; when he said, “Someone who shares your interest, and not just because it is your interest. You can’t pay people to care, though they might like you to think so,” it was smoother and softer.
He was not surprised or intimidated by her height, and considering that he had to be at least six feet himself, he probably didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s height very often. He had the certainty of big and tall men without flaunting either.
She looked the way of his glance in a way not at all as discreet -- a tossed look thrown with complete dislike that was as obvious as the rest of Eve and then she looked back at him and she smiled a smile all light and conspiratorial -- the kind of smile that came easily to her, and that doubtless the walls here didn’t often see.
“Them? They don’t give a shit about the project. Isn’t it obvious?” she said, as though subtlety were a foreign concept she didn’t so much as not understand as walked over in those high heels, with the delight of a child in ruining something so carefully built up. Eve folded her arms across her crisp shirt-front, and was herself for a moment, in a way totally unsuited to the inner workings of Thomas, Inc. “I have to keep them as they have contracts. The thing is,” and she leaned the backs of her legs against the boardroom table, taking the weight off those ridiculous shoes, “I don’t know where the hell to find anyone who cares and knows what to do with it all. They know,” a hand gesture that encompassed a barrage of gray headed, gray suited, gray faced lawyers and executives with a life time experience in being cautious, “What to do. But they can’t wrap their heads around the idea I don’t want to keep my money, make it bigger.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a bright and happy sound, rather someone opening a present and discovering it made everything more complicated than it had begun.
“I can find people who care, Mr Brandon. I just have to walk outside my building for a few blocks after sunset. They’ll care all right. So having harassed your secretary to get an hour or two of your time which has been completely pointless,” Eve didn’t sound remotely sorry for having done so; the laughter was back in her voice at least, a note of taking none of it seriously at all, “I might well ask -- where the hell do I find a business manager to put this into possibility?”
He was silent for a little while, watching all these sharp-edged thoughts move behind her eyes before she said them. Finally he replied, and it was not with speeches about how he did know what and who she was trying to save, and how he cared too. Instead it was, “I’ll recommend some names to you. Not here; I’ll have my secretary send you a list. Interview them; find one that suits your style.” Abruptly, like spring, a faint, faint smile appeared in the corner of his mouth. He thought her abrasive mannerisms to be a managerial style that few would find easy to deal with, and he fully knew that she knew that.
“It is in the interest of your endeavors to preserve your funding, Miss Kelly. Do that, and you keep your charity solvent long after you’re gone. Think long term, not short. You can set up the building, but how to staff it? You can staff it, but how to supply it? You can supply it, but how to maintain it?” He lifted his good hand--his right--and made a little gesture that said, and so on and so forth.
Knife-bright smile that slid through the ‘charity running 101’ lecture, like warm butter and Eve looked at him with her head canted as though to listen a little better, but shook off the end of his small lecture as if waking up. “You do that very well,” she observed, “Although it’s wasted on me.” The smile this time was utterly without apology for being abrasive or difficult -- she had an arsenal of them, it seemed; this one curved like a secret -- Brandon seemed so very boring for a billionaire. He was also the type, she decided, to have one of those high tech security systems that stole all the fun out of everything.
“Surely if I have a business manager, they do all that for me. And then I won’t have to parade around at events for too-rich people to convince them to give me money.” The words were pointed enough to do a little more than scratch, but she didn’t seem to notice -- it was a careless criticism from one horrified at the prospect, and her tone wasn’t sharp at all -- there was laughter that bubbled through the words, that made fun of everything in a way that doubtless irritated the hell out of that team waiting outside. It held out a hand to take Brandon inside the joke, to mock the silly and pointlessness of the whole affairs required, and Eve sat back against the boardroom desk and eased her heel out of the stupid shoe absently, to work the cramp out of the arch of her foot.
Thomas Brandon appeared to have a skin of steel, because her little dart didn’t even make him blink. He found it odd that so many people disliked what he did; it didn’t seem to matter what, exactly, that was, someone somewhere disliked it. It didn’t even matter what suit he was wearing, the effect was the same. Human psychology and variation, he assumed. An interesting phenomena that was out of his immediate area of expertise; in other words: not his concern. It didn’t occur to him that perhaps the comment hadn’t been aimed at him personally--an assumption, perhaps, that was indicative of his own personal pride and how few true friends he had. Real friends told you the truth and they tried to keep it from hurting you too badly when they did it.
He looked into Eve Kelly’s eyes and wondered what he had done to deserve her scorn. Maybe in the end, it didn’t matter. “Pardon me,” he said, gravely, looking away and then turning to go. “My assistance was well-meant. Good luck with your endeavors, Miss Kelly.”
For a moment, a very brief moment (and if he had been looking long enough he would have caught it) there was something there in those snap-spite green eyes that wasn’t spite at all: self-castigation perhaps, abashment certainly -- neither of which were especially familiar things to see there. The last lingered a little as the space between them changed, grew formal and cold and a door somewhere closed and when he spoke it was in the same dismissive way all the other executives had spoken. Eve wasn’t used to feeling sorry for sliding pointed insults home like knives into sheaths.
“You’ve taken it personally,” Eve said, and her voice indicated that that was a marvel -- because how often did billionaires do that? It made him oddly human beneath the sleek suit that was uniform, was armor and that made him far more interesting than he’d been until now. Either Thomas Brandon wasn’t quite as accomplished and perfect as her team would have her believe -- perhaps someone shuffled him around the way she was being hustled like a puppet with too many strings -- or he wasn’t as dry and dull and without redemption as he seemed to be. Her interest flickered bright beneath the surprise, obvious because Eve was, and her head tipped to look at him again and she wondered at it, at him as she slid her foot back into her shoe and stood up in a movement all regal grace and gathered papers together. “That’s the first time you’ve seemed anything other than superhuman.” A smile like a laugh, with something akin to apology curved into the corner of her mouth. “Thank you for the advice -- but I won’t need luck.” She was certain in the way of the arrogant and the foolish and those who are determined to do whatever they can until every part of them is used up in an endeavor -- and it was very clear Eve Kelly might know little, might be difficult to work with (although the smile she was giving him now was anything but) but she wasn’t a fool.
He glossed over the pseudo-apology, if that was what it was, icing it over and putting it away. To acknowledge the apology was to acknowledge the insult. He learned long ago if he let the criticisms of people he didn’t know get to him, he stopped being functional, and if there was one thing that Thomas Brandon wanted--needed--it was functionality. The isolation was a necessity.
“From what I’ve seen, Miss Kelly, you’ll need all the luck you can get.” Then he walked out to catch the elevator, and after admiring the figure he cut from behind, the mousy secretary turned her head to see who was left in the board room.