Learning Curve (12 page)

Surely it isn't as bad as all that, he thought, sighing to himself as he got up from the sofa. He was so tired—and not a little resentful that his own wife had chosen not to support him in the single greatest challenge of his professional career. He knew he should walk over and hold her, reassure her. But he merely stroked her hair once as he passed by on his way to bed. Annabelle started to look up at Dan as he passed, but then turned away.

Back in Heidelberg, as he sat on the edge of a table in front of the nine employees who remained of what had been the Validator German sales office, Dan
grimaced, remembering how he'd left that conversation. Well, as bad as
this
is, he told himself as he looked out on the sullen, resentful faces, it's better than being back in the Valley.
Really,
he thought wryly,
there's no place like home.

D
an was nearly through his presentation—on the PowerPoint slide that he privately derided as the “kittens and unicorns” slide because it extrapolated sales and earnings out to an impossibly bright and sunny future—when he noticed that several people in the audience were staring at their iPhones and Blackberries and nudging the people beside them. Lisa, who was sitting in the back of the room, was also typing anxiously on her laptop. Dan felt his heart sink: here we go.

He opened the floor to questions. The first one, from a young man with flipped up Tintin hair, a manicured beard, and a disgusted smirk on his face, was the one Dan had been dreading for a long time: “
Herr
Crowen, it has just been announced that eTernity's stock has been listed on the NASDAQ exchange. Do you have any comment on that news?”

“It was expected,” said Dan, trying to look calm and presidential. “Everyone in the world—including you, I'm sure—knew this day was coming. So, in that respect, it's good news. The speculation is over. No more fantasy. Now we can all get down to real-life business.”

But he didn't believe a word he was saying. Nor, he suspected, did the young man, who had now folded his arms across his chest. And anyone in the room who did believe his words, Dan knew, was allowing wishful thinking to overcome cold logic.

There were only three more questions, all of them minor, and all searching more for comforting words than for any real facts. In the past, half the room would come up afterwards—employees would try to pass on private communications to the CEO, or suck up to him, or get their faces remembered by him, or just be able to say they'd met him. But this time, the tiny skeleton crew merely got up from their seats and shuffled out of the room. No one even thanked him for the trouble of flying halfway around the world to speak to them.

Dan was in fact relieved to be abandoned. He quickly yanked the projector cord out of his laptop and headed for the door. Lisa met him there with a stunned look on her face.

“How bad is it? Dan asked her. “What did they open at?”

“Pretty bad: $32, and they're still climbing.”

Dan stopped in his tracks and looked down the long, empty hallway beyond the door. “Jesus. Anything else?”

“We opened down $5, but we're back up to down $3.”

He chuckled ruefully, “So it's not an utter catastrophe, just a complete one. Come on, we have a dinner appointment.”

But they weren't going to get away so quickly. Four reporters with photographers were waiting for them in the parking lot in front of the building. Dan grimaced at the sight and turned to Lisa. “You don't want to be in this camera shot,” he said. “I'll go first and take their questions. You wait forty-five seconds, walk out right past us, and head for the car. I'll join you as soon as I can.” He grabbed the handle of the door, and glanced back at Lisa. He winked at her. “Wish me luck. I get to be a movie star today.”

The escape went as planned. Standing tall and looking confident, Dan waded into the small crowd as cameras rolled. “Gentlemen,” he said, “how can I help you?” Four minutes later, as he began to walk away, the reporter from CNN was able to get in one final question: “Any message for Alison Prue and her people at eTernity?”

“Yes,” said Dan. “I congratulate her on a job well done. And I welcome her to the ranks of CEOs of public companies. She's done a great job. I have tremendous admiration for her. But she's about to discover that this is a whole different job than the one she had when she woke up this morning.”

With that, he turned and strode quickly to the waiting limousine, ignoring the shouted questions.

D
inner was destined to be distracted and moody, but the Dueling House did its best to make it appetizing. The many courses of rich food, the pretty face across from him, the engaging fellow diners, the extra bottles of wine, the old photographs of cruel Prussian faces with their fierce dueling scars—even the signature that a young Bismarck had carved into one of the table tops… it all conspired to build the most fragile of emotional bridges to keep Dan from falling into the deepest and darkest gorge imaginable.

After dinner they crossed a real bridge, this one over the Rhine, and went up the hill to the great castle. The cold and mist of the night made the landscape more romantic—especially to Dan, who was feeling the alcoholic buzz, the sensuousness of the proximity to tragedy, and the thrill, after so many years, of having a lovely young woman at his side as they strolled into an unknown and exotic locale.

Illuminated by powerful lights, the Heidelberg Castle loomed above. It was vast and the color of old teeth. And it boasted a mélange of eight hundred years of styles, from the medieval to the classical. It was less beautiful than powerful, a statement of brutal old civic power that no modern institution—be it a government or a great corporation—could match. “I'll bet those old Palatine princes didn't have to worry about shareholder meetings or the Securities and Exchange Commission,” he said to Lisa. “They executed reporters and analysts who said bad things about them.”

She laughed. “Probably. But you've got a much better retirement plan.”

Dan was out of breath by the time they reached the top of the hill. By then, the mist had turned into a fine rain, and Lisa had tucked her arm in his. “Should we head back?” she asked.

“No. We've come this far. Now I've got to see this thing up close. We'll get under cover once we get up there.”

They were both wet with rain before they found a covered walkway beside a closed restaurant on the back wall of the castle. From this vantage point, the entire interior of the vast castle was arrayed before them. To the left was a tall wall pierced by a score of classical, pedimented windows, all devoid of glass; and the upper two stories had no rooms behind them. To the right, an entire turreted tower, black as charcoal, had apparently been torn in two by an explosion and pitched forward to crash onto a grass-covered hillside. In the midst of this awesome display of Teutonic power, the fallen tower—the Powder Turret, which had been split by an explosion during the Thirty Years War—seemed a symbol of irredeemable weakness and decay.

Dan stared at the fallen edifice for a long time. “Maybe this wasn't such a good idea,” he said.

“The rain's letting up,” Lisa whispered. “Shall we go back?”

He nodded and looked away.

By the time they reached the hotel, his spirits had begun to return. Lisa agreed to a nightcap, and they each had a schnapps in the hotel lobby. As they touched their tube glasses, Dan offered a toast: “Now it begins.”

A couple of drinks later, they walked up the stairs to the landing on their floor. “Where's it at now?” he asked, and Lisa pulled out her iPhone. “We're only down two.”

“No,
them.”

“ETernity closed at $37.50.”

He took a deep breath and stared out over the stairwell. “That's a home run by any standard, isn't it?”

Lisa didn't reply.

“Well,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, “good night. Two more days and we go home.”

She forced a smile. “And we get to sleep in tomorrow.”

Dan nodded and turned away, his shoulders slumped under his overcoat.

In his room, still in his overcoat, he sat slumped on the bed and stared at the floor.
How many nights lately have ended just like this?
he asked himself.
And this is the worst. I don't know how I'm going to get through tonight. I can't bear any more of this.

He ran his hands through his still-wet hair. It seemed to him that the drops falling to the floor were from the rain, but slowly he realized he was crying. Ashamed of himself, he threw his head back, wiped his face with his hands, and sniffed back his running nose.
What are you, a child?
he asked himself.
A bit of bad news and you fall apart?

Dan finally quit crying, but it was still hard to breathe. He felt an overwhelming desire to run away. But where could he go? He was already as far away from the source of his misery as he could be on Earth—and the fear was just as great here. Desperately, he looked around the room for some source of comfort. The TV would have the news. So would the radio. His phone? Oh, god no. The liquor bar? I'm drunk enough already, he told himself. His stomach felt sour.

His computer? He glanced at it, then recoiled. The news stories. The analysis. The blogs. And worst of all, the messages. Sympathetic, offering to help, secretly triumphant, asking for comments.

And Annabelle. There'd be a dozen emails from Annabelle. All sympathetic and falsely up-beat and telling him she believed in him, that they'd get through this like they had everything else. It was too much to stand…

Almost before he knew what he was doing, Dan was standing in his suit, wet shoes, and damp overcoat and knocking softly on Lisa's door.

The door partially opened and she peeked around its edge. He didn't say anything, but just stood in the hallway with his hair hanging down on his forehead and tears slicking his cheeks. Lisa didn't speak either, but her eyes darkened as she looked at his face and hair.

She stepped back and pulled the door open. She was wearing only a camisole and panties. Behind her, he could see the glow of a computer screen and an open ironing board. He sighed with relief as she
reached out, took his hand, and gently drew him into the room.

T
he Public House sports bar at the entrance to Pac Bell Park had been rented for the eTernity IPO celebration party. The cab dropped Alison off on the empty street out front, where she could see that the restaurant, tiny beneath the looming black bulk of the empty stadium, was jammed with her reveling fellow employees. She took a quick glance up at the bronze Willy Mays, then breathed deeply, steeling herself before she headed through the doors.

Linda from contracts administration saw her first. She was so excited to see Alison that she couldn't speak, but she did manage to hand her a t-shirt that read ‘I was part of the eTernity IPO… and got a hell of a lot more than this t-shirt.'

It took a moment for the rest of crowd to notice Alison's arrival. As she took off her blazer and pulled the t-shirt over her silk blouse, she could hear the first rumbles of recognition. Then somebody shouted, “It's Alison!”—and all hell broke loose.

An hour later, she was sore and exhausted from hugging more than one hundred-fifty people, half of them drunk—including one woman who squeezed her a little too intimately—and all of them shouting their excitement and thanks into her ears. So far, she'd managed two sips from a margarita that Nguyen from accounting had managed to order for her, had been lifted off the floor and spun around in three hugs from large men she barely knew, and—in a moment the eTernity employees would talk about for years, if only to illustrate how much fun she
used
to be—had been lifted up onto the bar by two more male employees and asked to address the room.

Drunk and newly minted millionaires and near-millionaires proved to be an easy audience. Every sentence she spoke and every gesture she made drew cheers. Though she set out to say something memorable and even sincere, in the end she settled for the usual clichés: This is your big day. ETernity's success is yours, not mine. This is just the beginning. The best is yet to come. Etc.

The crowd's roar was undiminished with each drink and each sentence. Even in an alcoholic haze, everyone in the room—even those in their first job and too new to eTernity to benefit much from stock options—knew that this was probably the single most important day of their entire career, and they were intent on making it memorable and as protracted as possible. Sensing that their personal connection to Alison Prue might be important in years to come—if only as a cocktail party anecdote—they tried to hold onto her presence as long as possible.

Eventually, she managed to convince the men to help her down off the bar. As the crowd grew maudlin, one employee after another—many with faces slick with tears—embraced her again and swore their loyalty to the company and its long-term success. More than one employee, each thinking themselves original, said through sobs to Alison, “I'm with eTernity for eternity.”

Finally she made her way back to the front door to retrieve her blazer from the still-starry eyed Linda. She backed out the door, saying her goodbyes to a half-dozen more people. Once out the door, Alison turned and started walking across the plaza towards the street, pulling on her blazer as she went.

“Boss!” shouted a familiar voice behind her. She turned to see Armstrong Givens, decked out in a shawl-collared tuxedo and silk scarf. She laughed and waited for him to catch up. They embraced, and Alison stepped back and looked her COO up and down. “Very dapper,” she said. “I don't know how I missed you in that sea of t-shirts.”

“I remained seated during the endless standing ovation.”

“What?” she demanded with a smile. “You're not thrilled by all this?”

“More than you know, Alison,” he said seriously. “This is, after all, my second IPO. I failed to sufficiently appreciate either the first one or its… rewards. Since God and NASDAQ have decided to bless me for a second time, I intend to drink this one to the last drop.”

“We did it, Armstrong.”

“Yes, we did. And not least because of our brilliant and talented CEO.”

Alison blushed for the first time that day, and made a small curtsey. “Thank you. But I meant what I said. We all did this one together.”

“Yes we did. And no doubt for the last time. I hope you understand that after today, everything changes.”

She nodded. “Yes. I know.”

“No you don't,” said Givens. “Not really.” He gestured towards the restaurant. “Nor do they.”

“Do they all really believe what they're saying in there?”

“Pretty much. Yes.”

“Should I believe them?”

“Oh heavens,
no.
”

Alison
nodded. “Good night, Armstrong.”

He kissed her on both cheeks. “Good night, miracle girl.”