Romance with CEO

quickly turn us into the object of his cruelty, and that's what he did to me that day. On that rare occasion, I didn't find it funny that Grandpa's dead body was underground and helping the petunias grow, nor did I find it cruel. I saw a certain beauty in it. And a lovely fullness and justice, too. It was exactly what my grandfather would have loved, now that his thick sausage-like fingers could no longer contribute to the blooming of his long, beautiful garden that was the center of his universe. It was my grandfather's love of gardening that inspired the choice of my name: Jasmine.

This was what he brought to my mother in the hospital when I was born: a bouquet of flowers he had plucked from the wooden frame he had built himself and painted red that adorned the shadowy back wall, wrapped in newspaper and tied with brown string, the ink from the Irish Times crossword puzzle dripping with rainwater that had gotten on the stems. It wasn't the summer jasmine we all know from expensive scented candles and fancy room vaporizers; I had been born in winter, and so the little jasmine, with its small, yellow flowers like stars, was in abundance in his garden to help brighten the dull winter. I don't think my grandfather ever thought about the meaning of the flower, or whether he felt particularly honored by my mother's honor in naming me after the flower he had brought. I think it was a strange name for a child to give him, a name he had only ever invented for natural things in the garden, never for a person. With a name like Adalbert, after a saint who had been a missionary to Ireland, and Mary as his middle name, he was not used to names that did not come from the Bible. The previous winter, he had bought purple heather for [1] my mother when my sister was born and she was named Heather. A simple gift when my sister was born, but it made me wonder what his intentions were for my name. In doing some research, I discovered that winter jasmine is a direct relative of the winter-flowering heather-another provider of color for winter gardens. I don't know if it was because of him or the way he was, but I have always believed hopefully that quiet people have a magic and knowledge that less restrained people do not have; that the fact that they do not say something means that more important thoughts are going on in their heads. Perhaps that apparent simplicity contained a hidden mosaic of fantastic thoughts, and among them my grandfather Adalbert wanting me to be named Jasmine. Back in the garden, Kevin had mistaken my lack of laughter at his joke about death as disapproval, and there was nothing he hated or feared more, so he turned his wild gaze on me and said, "You're going to die, too, Jasmine." Sitting in a circle of six, I, the youngest of the group, with my sister spinning by herself a few feet away and loving to get dizzy and fall to the ground, a daisy chain tied around my ankle, and a lump in my throat so big I wasn't sure if I'd swallowed one of the giant bees swarming around the flower buffet next to us, I tried to comprehend the fact of my impending demise. The others were shocked that he'd said that, but instead of defending me and denying this premonition-like statement, they gave me a sad look and nodded. "Yes, it's true," they all agreed with that one look. "You're going to die, Jasmine." In my long silence, Kevin hatched an even more horrific plan for me, driving the knife even deeper. Not only would I die, but before that, I would have something called a period every month for the rest of my life, which would cause excruciating pain and agony. Then I learned how babies were made, in a description so in-depth that I found it so horrifying that I could barely look my parents in the eye for a week, and then, to rub salt in my open wound, I learned that Santa Claus didn't exist. You try to forget things like that, but I couldn't. And why am I talking about this episode in my life? Well, it was where I started. Where I, as I know myself, as everyone knows me, was formed. My life began when I was five years old. Knowing that I was going to die instilled something in me that I still carry with me to this day: the awareness that, although time was infinite, my time was finite, my time was running out. I realized that my time and someone else's were not the same thing. We cannot spend this hour in the same way, nor can we think about it in the same way. Do what you will with yours, but don't drag me along with you; I have no time to waste. If you want to do something, you have to do it now. If you want to say something, then you have to say it now. And most of all, you have to do it yourself. It's your life, you're the one who's going to die, you're the one who's going to lose. So I got used to getting things done, to making things happen. I worked at a pace that often left me breathless, and I barely had a moment to regroup with myself. I ran after me a lot, but I rarely caught up; I was fast. I took a lot of things with me from that meeting on the grass that night, and not just the daisies that hung from my wrists and ankles and were woven into my hair as we followed the sunburned mourners back home. My heart was full of fear, but before long, in the way only a five-year-old could process it all, the fear went away. I had always thought of death as my grandfather Adalbert Mary underground, still tending the garden even though he wasn't there, and I felt hope. You reap what you sow, even in death. And so I began to plant. Chapter 2 I was laid off from my job, I was fired, six weeks before Christmas-which, in my opinion, is a pretty undignified time to get rid of someone. They had hired a woman to fire me for them, one of those third-party agencies trained in firing employees properly, to avoid scandal or a lawsuit or their own embarrassment. She had taken me to lunch somewhere quiet, let me order a Caesar salad and ordered just a black coffee, and then sat there practically watching me choke on a crouton while she informed me of my new employment situation. I think Larry knew I wouldn't accept his news, or anyone else's, and that I would try to talk him out of it, that I would slap him with a kid glove with a lawsuit or just slap him in the face. He would try to let me die with honor, except that I didn't feel much honor in leaving. Being fired is a public matter, I would have to tell others. And if I didn't have to tell others, it was because they already knew. I died of shame. I started my professional life as an accountant. At the tender age of twenty-four I started working for Trent & Bogle, a large firm where I stayed for a year, and then I moved abruptly to Start It Up, where I provided financial advice and guidance to individuals who wanted to start their own businesses. With most of them, I had learned that there are always two sides to every story: the public version and the truth. The story I tell to others is that eighteen months later I quit my job to start my own business. I was so inspired by the people who walked through my office that the desire to turn my own ideas into reality grew stronger. The truth is, I got fed up with seeing people doing things the wrong way, with my drive for

interest in selling, and I put him under too much pressure. He believed that "monitoring it to the end" meant keeping the company growing, while I believed that meant "selling the business and starting over with something else." I was building the business with the vision of eventually leaving it, and he was building the business to keep it going. If you saw the way he was with his wife and teenage daughter, you would know that this was his philosophy on almost everything. Hold on, don't let go, it's mine. Control shouldn't be given to anyone else.

What can I do? I'm thirty-three years old and I worked there for four years. I have never taken a sick day, never had a complaint, never had an accusation, never received a warning, never had an inappropriate affair-at least none that had a negative impact on the company. I gave my all to my job, and notably for my own good, because it was what I wanted to do, but I hoped that the machine I worked for would give me something in return, to honor my honor. My previous belief that being fired was not personal was based on the fact that I had never been fired before, but had fired other people. Now I understand that it is personal, yes, because my job was my life. My friends and colleagues have been incredibly supportive in a way that makes me think that if I ever get cancer, I want to treat it alone and without anyone knowing. They make me feel like a victim. They look at me as if I am the next person to board a plane to Australia to become the next overqualified person to work in a watermelon field. It's barely been two months and I'm already questioning my worth. I have no use, no contribution to make in the day-to-day. I feel like I'm just taking advantage of the world. I know this is temporary, that I can play my role again, but that's how I feel at the moment. The main thing is that it's been almost two months and I'm bored. I'm a doer and doer, and I haven't gotten much done. All the things I dreamed of doing in my busy, stressed-out days have already been done. I accomplished most of them in the first month. I booked a vacation to a sunny place just before Christmas and now I'm tan and cold. I met my friends, who are now all mothers on maternity leave and extended maternity leave and I-don't-know-if-I'll-ever-come-back leave, for coffee at a time of day when I've never had coffee in public. It felt like skipping school, and it was wonderful-at least the first few times. Then it got less wonderful, and I turned my attention to those who served coffee, cleared the tables, stocked the paninis. Workers. All working. I approached my friends' cute babies, even though most of them spend most of their time lying on colorful mats that beep and make other noises if you accidentally step on them, while babies don't do much more than lift their fat legs, hold their toes, and roll sideways, struggling to get back into position. It's fun to watch the first ten times. I've had two invitations to be a godmother in seven weeks, as if that would help keep the unemployed friend busy. Both requests were thoughtful and kind, and I was thrilled, but if I were working, they wouldn't have asked me because I wouldn't have visited them as much, or met their children, and it all comes down to my being unemployed. Now I'm the girl her friends call when they're having a meltdown, their hair greasy and stuck to their heads, stinking of sweat and baby vomit, when they tell me on the phone in a whispered voice that gives me the creeps that they're afraid of what they're going to do, and then I rush off to hold the baby while they take a ten-minute shower. I've learned that a ten-minute shower and the gift of going to the bathroom without a timer does a lot more to restore new parents than simple personal hygiene. I call my sister spontaneously, something I've never been able to do before. It's been really confusing for her, and when we're together she keeps asking me what time it is, as if I've messed up her biological clock. I got my Christmas shopping done in plenty of time. I bought real Christmas cards and mailed them in time-all two hundred of them. I even took charge of my dad's grocery list. I'm ultra-efficient, I always have been. Of course I can do nothing-I love two weeks off, I love lying on the beach and doing nothing-but only when it's my decision, on my terms, when I know there's something waiting for me afterward. After this holiday season, I need a goal. I need a purpose. I need a challenge. I need a purpose. I need to contribute. I need to do something. I loved my job, but to make myself feel better about not being able to work there anymore, I try to focus on what I won't miss. I've worked with men most of the time. Most of them were a pain, some were fun, and a few were pleasant. I didn't like spending much time with them outside of work, which may make my next sentence seem nonsensical, but it does. Out of a team of ten, I slept with three of them. Of those three, I regret sleeping with two; the only one I don't regret deeply regrets sleeping with me. How unfortunate! I won't miss the people at work. People are my biggest pet peeve in life. I get annoyed because so many people have no common sense, because their opinions can be so backward and biased, and so completely frustrating, misguided, misinformed, and dangerous that I can't even listen to them. I'm not that annoyed about everything. I even like non-politically correct jokes in controlled settings in the right situation, and when it's obvious that the joke takes the ignorant person who would say things like that out of the bag. When the punchline of a joke is told by someone who actually believes it to be true, it's not funny, it's offensive. I don't like a good debate about what's supposedly right or wrong; I'd rather people just be born knowing what's right or wrong. A heel prick test and a common sense shot. Not having a job forced me to face what I hate most about the world and myself. At work I could hide and distract myself. Without a job, I have to face things, think about things, question things, find a way to actually deal with the things I've been avoiding for a long time. That includes the neighborhood I moved to four years ago and have had nothing to do with until now. It also includes what happens at night: I don't know if I was somehow able to ignore it before, or if it's become more intense, or if my lack of things to do has led me to become more fascinated and almost obsessed with it. But it's 10 p.m. and I'm a few hours away from my nightly distraction. It's New Year's Eve. For the first time in my life, I'm alone. I chose to do this for a few reasons: First, the weather is so horrible that I couldn't bring myself to go out after being nearly decapitated by the door as I opened it to get my Thai food delivery from the brave man who braved the elements to bring me my food. The shrimp chips had practically dissolved and he had spilled the sauce from my dumplings into the bottom of the bag, but I couldn't bring myself to complain. His long, helpless gaze as he passed through the door and into the safety and warmth of my home prevented me from mentioning the state of the delivery. Outside the wind is howling so hard I wonder if it's going to rip the roof off. My next-door neighbour's garden gate is banging and slamming and I don't know whether to go

places I need to go has been flooded for two days. Just when I want and need to be busy, Mother Nature is making me even more sluggish. I know what she's doing: she's trying to make me think, and she's winning. That's why now every thought about myself begins with "Maybe..." because now I'm having to think about myself in ways I never have before, and I don't know if I'm right about thinking about certain things. The dog barking across the street is barely audible over the wind, and I think Dr. Jameson forgot to put him back inside.

He's getting more and more distracted, or he's sick of the dog. I don't know his name, but he's a Jack Russell. Sometimes I see him running around in my yard; sometimes he takes a dump; a few times he has decided to get into my house, and I have had to chase him down and hand him back to the honorable gentleman across the street. I call him the honorable gentleman because he is a fine man in his seventies, a retired general practitioner, and for fun he has been president of every club under the sun: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighborhood management company, which handles leaf blowers, streetlight replacements, neighborhood watch, and so on. He is always smart, his pants perfectly pressed and his shirts with V-neck sweaters, his shoes shined, and his hair neatly styled. He talks to me as if he is throwing sentences over my head, his chin high and his nostrils flared, like an amateur stage actor, but he is never blatantly rude, which gives me no reason to react rudely, just distant. Distance is all I can give to someone I cannot understand. I didn't even know until a month ago that Dr. Dr. Jameson had a dog, but now I seem to know too much about my neighbors. The more the dog barks above the wind, the more I worry and wonder if Dr. Jameson fell to the ground, or was blown into someone's yard like the trampolines that bounce from one yard to another during storms. I heard about a little girl who woke up and saw a swing and slide in her yard out of nowhere; she thought Santa Claus had come again, but in fact the toys had come from five houses down the street. I can't hear the party down the street, but I can see it. Mr. and Mrs. Murphy are having their New Year's Eve dance with their family. It always begins and ends with traditional Irish songs, and Mr. [2] Murphy plays the bodhrán and Mrs. Murphy sings so sadly that she might as well be sitting in the middle of a field of rotten black potatoes. The rest of her guests join in the singing as if they were swinging back and forth aboard a Great Irish Potato Famine ship in stormy waters on their way to the Americas. I'm not sad because the wind is carrying their voices in another direction. But I can hear a party I can't see, probably a few streets away; a few words heard from those crazy enough to smoke outside drift up my chimney, along with a distant rhythm of party music before it's carried away again, sounds and leaves circling in a violent frenzy outside my front door. I've been invited to three parties, but I can't think of anything worse than going from one to the next, trying to find taxis on New Year's Eve and feeling like this in the meantime. Besides, the TV schedule is supposedly great on New Year's Eve, and for the first time in my life, I want to watch it. I curl up deeper into my cashmere blanket and sip my red wine, feeling content with my decision to be alone, thinking about the people outside, all this madness. The wind howls again and I reach for the remote to turn up the volume, but as soon as I do, every light in the house, including the television, goes out. I'm plunged into darkness, and the house alarm blares angrily. A quick glance out the window tells me that the power is out on the entire street. But unlike everyone else, I don't even think about lighting candles. It's all the more reason to grope my way up the stairs and into bed a few minutes after ten. The irony of the power outage is not lost on me. I watch the New Year's Eve show on my iPad until the battery dies, and then I listen to my iPod, which shows an ominously low red battery and dies so quickly that I can barely enjoy the music. So I turn to my laptop, and when that dies too, I feel like crying. I hear a car in the street and I know it's time to spring into action. I jump out of bed and throw open the curtains. The whole street is dark, I can see the candles glowing in a few houses, but most of the houses are in darkness; most of my neighbours are over seventy and asleep. I'm sure I can't be seen because my house is dark too; I can stand at the window with the curtains open and watch the show I know is about to begin. I look outside. And I see you. Chapter 3 I'm not a stalker, but you also make it very difficult not to stalk you. You're a complete circus act and I can't resist being your audience. We live across the street from each other on this cul-de-sac in Sutton, north Dublin, which was built in the 1970s and modelled on an American suburb. We have large gardens in front of the house, without thumbs or vivid fences to separate the sidewalk from our gardens, without gates, nothing that prevents a person from walking directly to one of our front windows. They spend endless hours in the gardens and, as they are always out there, everyone knows who comes out and what time. But not me. I see you with them.You've lived across the street from me ever since I moved here, and you've always bothered me so intensely, but going to work every day and all that entailed-the distraction and the knowledge that there are more important things in the world-kept me from caring, from complaining, from marching over to your house and breaking every light. I feel like I'm living in a goldfish bowl and all I can see and hear from every window in my house is you. You, you, you. So at two-thirty in the morning, which is actually a pretty respectable time for you to come home, I find myself with my elbows on the windowsill, my chin in my hand, just waiting for your next mistake. I know it's going to be a good night because it's New Year's Eve and you're Matt Marshall, the announcer on Ireland's biggest radio station, and despite myself, I listened to your show on my phone tonight before it died too. It was annoying, disgusting, repulsive, unpalatable, abominable, nasty and hideous like the others. Your talk show Matt Marshall's Trombone, which airs from 11pm to 1am, gets the most calls from listeners of any show on Irish radio. You've been hosting late-night talk shows for ten years. I didn't know you lived in this street when I moved in, but when I heard your voice cross the road one day, I knew straight away it was you. And everyone knows when they hear your voice, and most of the time people get excited, but I was repulsed. You are everything I dislike about people. Your views, your opinions, your arguments that do nothing to fix the problem you pretend to fix and in fact only provoke angry outbursts and low-life behaviour. You provide a venue for hatred and racism to have a voice, but you present it as free speech. That's why I dislike you; and for personal reasons, I abhor you. I'll tell you about them later. You drive up, as usual, at forty miles an hour, on our quiet, retirement-home street. You bought your house from an elderly couple who wanted to live in a smaller, easier-to-maintain place, and I bought mine from a widow who died-or at least from her children, who were