3
Nikko
With my recollection now well in hand, I looked at the plain, bookish girl that stood before me now, her fingers still fluttering nervously about each other, her lips twisting with anxiety.
“Yes,” I said once again. “You are Molly.”
Molly nodded quickly, sharply, her chin again completing that quick, girl like jutting motion, in and out. I continued to stare at her for a few moments, nodding, allowing the fragments that I could still recall to float back into my mind. She had arrived, I did remember that, but I had been so rapt with the girl that sat across from me that I had not at all retained any memory of any detail of this bland, nervous woman that now stood trembling before me. She certainly did not seem the picture of efficiency and ability that her beautiful friend had made her out to be, but wasn’t that just as well, I thought because that is what happens when you allow yourself to speak true business while drinking on an empty stomach. I sighed, understanding that I should now have to put up with this stuttering, anxious girl for the entirety of a year. That had, after all, been the deal I had agreed upon, and after last night’s events, I was fully sure that putting up with this bland, uncomfortable waif would be well worth the trouble if it meant securing her stunning siren of a friend to my company. I nodded, again fixed the collar of my jacket, and turned to climb the back stairs to meet the owner of the company.
“Oh and, Mr. Cartwright?” Molly called, her high pitched stammer following me up the staircase.
I did not pause and continued to climb upwards. “Yes?” I called back shortly.
“Thank you ever so much for allowing me this great, awesome chance of being able to work with you,” I heard her gush breathlessly. I gritted my teeth and nodded. I was already annoyed by her innocence and over the top doting.
“Yep,” I called down the staircase. I began to climb more quickly, eager to leave her behind.
“I will not fail you, Mr. Cartwright!” I heard her call as I curled up the staircase, reaching the top landing.
I stopped again and sighed deeply, knowing full well that I probably had months and months and months of this bullshit coming my way.
“Yeeeeup,” I called down, feeling the muscles in my neck twitch in annoyance at her persistent yelping. I paused for a moment, my eyes closed, bracing myself for one more pathetic cry for approval.
None came.
This pleased me greatly, relieved my deeply, and I leaped across the landing and towards the double door entrance to the Red Lounge, ready to meet with the owner and leave the sour taste of Molly’s neediness behind.
I paused as the double mahogany doors of the Red Lounge rose up before me. I again, out of habit, straightened my collar, tugged at the sleeves of my suit jacket, and straightened my tie. I ran a hand through my blonde hair and tilted my neck back and forth; enjoying the satisfying cracking sound that greeted my ears. Then I pressed my hands against the heavy doors and pushed my way into the room.
The weighty mahogany slid to a soft close, the doors thudding gently as I strode across the deep red carpeting. I could see the chocolate brown leather chair, its golden studs catching the dim light and flashing a sort of muted ‘come hither’ towards me. I walked confidently towards the back of the chair, my eyes fixed upon the head of silvery white hair I could see just slightly peeking over the top of the chocolate leather high back. Not an inch of movement betrayed the presence of the chair’s occupant, but that outcropping of whispy white hair was a dead giveaway. Sure enough, as I completed my final steps across the sound absorbent, plush red carpeting, the chair slowly spun around and left me standing face to face with the man himself.
“Mr. Offerton,” I greeted.
The name was delivered from my tongue the way a dinner service maid might deliver the main dish of the evening: the syllables were dripping with honey, and all served up upon a tone of voice that was the equivalent of a silver platter. It was true; I sucked up to this man. But I have always believed that there is a time to suck up to people, and a time not to suck up to people, and it is knowing the difference that really separates the spineless men from the intellectual men. A spineless man will suck up to everyone he thinks might offer him a bit of something; he will suck up out of fear, or out of desperation. An intellectual, intelligent man will do nothing of the sort. That is because the intellectual man knows how to identify which people are worth sucking up to. He will not ever put himself down or risk his own status in exchange for a potential benefit. Whereas the spineless man will suck up to anyone he thinks might offer him a bit of something, the intellectual man will only suck up to someone he knows will offer him a whole lot of something.
I was one of these intelligent men, as could be clearly seen by my wealth. Being an intelligent man, I know that Mr. Offerton was one of those people that was quite worth sucking up to. After all, he was one of the top ten wealthiest men in all of North America, if not the world.
David Offerton was the owner of the corporation for which I worked: an unyielding, profit hungry, monstrous beast of a corporation that had successfully overtaken the entirety of the North American plastic bag company within two years of its creation. We were Bagco, and we were some of the wealthiest motherfuckers in the entire world. The first time I had met David Offerton, I had recognized the wealth dripping off of him, his very breath had seemed to reek of money. His words had seemed to drip with that sort of self-concerned, narcissistic asshole-ness that only the most successful, most ruthless corporation owners can ever succeed in possessing. In short, I had immediately recognized that Offerton was a man who deserved every ounce of sucking up to. I had also immediately known that I would one day, no matter what it took, achieve the highest position of employment this Goliath of the industry had to offer me.
I had worked hard, put in endless hours of overtime, had slept very little and had sucked up (in a respectable, yet impressive way) as much as I could. The result was that I had found myself sitting in the position of CEO for one of the most successful corporations in the entire world, all before I had even turned twenty-five.
As I stood before Offerton now, I could not help but notice that characteristic air of unsubdued confidence that seemed to permanently hang around him. Despite his age, he sat upright, his spine straight and his head tilted upright so that he had to look down his nose in order to make eye contact with me. He was clad in a suit of deep purple, so dark purple that it was nearly black, with fine stitches of gold set into the material in a pinstripe pattern. He wore a thin gold tie that hung down between his slightly open suit jacket, and dark shoes with matching deep purple laces. His glasses, too, were a deep purple, the frames outlined in delicate golden rims. He stared down his nose at me, his fleshy face, as ever, impossible to read, his watery gray eyes staring emotionlessly through the thick lenses of his gold-flecked frames.
“Nikko Cartwright,” he finally spoke back at me. Offerton’s voice crackled from between his lips like the static of a garbled voice through a walkie-talkie. Thirty years of heavy smoking had rendered his vocal tone a chalky, crackling sound that scraped at the inside of your ears whenever he spoke. He cleared his throat, and then offered me a very simple, “Welcome.”
I stood there for a moment, unsure of whether to thank him for having me up to this room or to ask him why the hell he was here at this hour of the night. Perhaps it was that there was already quite an impressive amount of alcohol in my body at that point, or maybe it was just the sheer shock of finding the owner of my company sitting inside the mansion, but for whatever reason, I seemed absolutely incapable of coming up with one of my usual witty quips. So I just stood there rather stupidly for a few moments, staring at the wrinkled man in the oversized leather chair, staring down his nose at me as I blinked and nodded back at him.
After several long, uncomfortable moments of this painful stare off, Offerton finally opened his mouth again. He cleared his throat and smacked his lips together.
“Well, Nikko Cartwright,” his voice crackled across the room at me. “I am going to assume that you know full well why you are here.”
This announcement caught me off guard and succeeded in making me even more confused than I had been a mere second ago. I stared at Offerton, now completely in the dark. But, of course, I was not going to tell Offerton that.
“I believe I had a pretty good idea of why that is, sir,” I said confidently, having absolutely no flying fuck of an idea as to why my boss had called me up to meet with him, privately, in a dimly lit room after midnight.
“Good, good, very good,” Offerton nodded and raised one of his gnarled hands to run knobby fingers over his pointed chin. “I thought you would. You have always been one of the very smartest men I have ever had the privilege of employing.”
My shoulders softened at that, and the breath I had not even realized I had been holding in slid out of my lungs. I felt instantly more at ease having received one of Offerton’s rare, much sought after compliments. He still valued me, and still recognized my true worth. The knowledge of this made me feel slightly less awkward and very much more sure of myself. I felt a bit of my usual confidence beginning to flood back into my blood and warm my insides as Offerton parted his lips and continued to speak.
“I know that the last few months have been a very exciting time for us all,” the older man crackled on, allowing a dry smile to pull at his lips. “What with all the bonuses we have received after having relocated operations to rural China.”
I nodded back, having a difficult time keeping my own grin off of my face. The bonuses we had received from globalizing the manufacturing process of our company had lead me to experience an overwhelming increase in my bank account. Which had led to, I will admit it, a certain sort of intense spree of spending. The lush and lusty parties I had become famous for throwing had grown more lavish and more infamous; the Playboy Mansion had become less of a one a year thrill stop and more of a nightly romp for me. I had become a bit famous across LA for my parties and for my reputation, and with the money, I had begun to rake in on the regular. I could afford to maintain this reputation for, well, at this rate, forever. Allowing the images of the last few months of nights to flash across my head, I felt that old swell of pride and ego pounding in the pit of my stomach. I was rich, I was sexy, and I knew how to throw a damn good party, and everyone wanted a piece of the action. And every woman also wanted a piece of me. At twenty-five, I was quite sure, there was no place else in the world I would rather be.
I fixed Offerton with a small, reserved smile and a quick nod of my head.
“Yes, sir,” I affirmed. “I am very proud of all of the work we are doing. It takes but one look at the company ledgers to know that we are doing very, very well.”
Offerton nodded, his gray eyes trained upon my face.
“Yes,” he said in that crispy voice of his. “Yes of course. Monetarily, we are better off than ever before. But,” he said, and his eyes burned so deeply into my face that I felt as if he might leave holes in my skin. “If our image continues to be tarnished like this, our ledgers will also be quick to follow.”
The words hung in the room, weighing down the empty air between us. The dim lights flickered. The muted sounds of the party floors below thumped softly against the floor. I stared at my boss, incapable of speaking. He stared back, his eyes hard, his face angry and his mouth a thin, unwavering line.
“Sir?” I finally stuttered. “I...I am not sure that I understand exactly to what you are referring, Mr. Offerton, sir…”
“Let me make it a little clearer for you then, shall I, Nikko?” Offerton asked, but it was not a question. It was a statement, gravely, dripping with sarcasm, tearing into my ears like knives. He cleared his throat and leaned forward. “You are a young man. This is something that cannot be helped.” He pressed his gnarled fingers to his lips and stared down his nose over the tips of his manicured fingernails, his gray pupils boring directly into my eyes. “Your behavior, however,” he said, the words dropping like stones onto the floor between us, “is something that can definitely, and will definitely, be helped. That is… if you wish to keep your job and remain an employee of this corporation.”
I stared at Offerton as if the statement he had just delivered slapped me in the face. I felt the weight of his words land hard and solidly in the pit of my stomach. I instinctively shook my head; sure I must have heard him wrong, positive that there was some explanation to the sentence that had just been spoken. Perhaps this was some sort of sick joke? The man was famous for having a terribly dry sense of humor. Or could it be that I had finally overestimated my ability to handle my alcohol, and was now just drunkenly failing to properly comprehend the words that had just been spoken to me? I had heard people talk about having a harder time drinking after they turned twenty-five. I had only been twenty-five for seven months… could the cursed twenty-five drinking troubles be playing tricks on my understanding? As if he was able to read my mind, Offerton responded.
“No, Nikko,” he rasped, his face as ever completely blank and unexpressive. “You have not heard me incorrectly, even though you are standing there looking like an absolute uncomprehending idiot. I have got to say,” he added, leaning back in his chocolate colored leather chair and tossing one of his skinny, purple-clad knees over the other. “I always fancied you a little bit more intelligent that you are now showing yourself to be. I thought, at least, that you would be able to understand criticism when it is so harshly punching you in the face.”
I felt my cheeks grow a hot shade of red, a color of crimson so deep I knew that my face now mirrored the floor on which I stood. I stared back at my boss, forcing myself not to let my eyes fall from his. Offerton stared directly back at me, his gray orbs not even blinking.
“Look, Nikko,” he said, his voice dropping its usual lofty tone and edging more towards the voice a frustrated father might use when reprimanding his son. “I know what it is like to be young. Believe it or not, I was once a guy just your age. I was confident, smart, attractive, and I had everything going for me, everything coming to me, including the ladies,” he winked so quickly here that it was difficult to say for sure whether he had winked or simply twitched. “Much like you. But, Nikko, there is one huge, important difference between the man you are right now and the man I was at twenty-five. And that difference is this: I kept my parties quiet, my sex life private, and my alcohol and drug use secret. You, Nikko Cartwright, do not seem to have the intelligence or the business savvy to do any of those things.”
The words stung like another slap across the face. I felt the buzz of the champagne begin to fade and the harsh, cold sting of sobriety settle in. I stared at the man that sat before me, my shoulders still straight, but my insides sliding about messily, nervously. I was not used to being told I was wrong, and I decided very quickly, in that very moment, that I did not like it. In fact, I decided that being told I was wrong was the thing in this world that I hated the most. I swallowed the anger that had begun to bubble up inside me and threaten to explode out of me and stared at the owner of the corporation, willing myself to remain the very picture of professionalism and serenity.
“You appear every week in the papers, and that would not be so bad of a thing, Nikko, if you were appearing in the business sections. But, are you being hailed as the young firecracker who is leading this corporation to a new era of productivity? You were.” The old man stared at me, his lips rasping on. “But you are not now. Yes, your name decorates the pages of the papers more frequently than ever. You are even making headlines! But not in the business sections. No. No, not even in the financial sections, or the lifestyle sections. Where is it that we see the name of our CEO, Nikko Cartwright?” Offerton let the question hang in the air for several long, uneasy moments. Then finally, he spoke. “Ah, yes. That is right. We see the name of our CEO, the very face of our company, decorating the gossip columns. We see your name slid in between the names of other neer-do-well celebrities.” Offerton’s voice suddenly shook and thundered with anger. His face remained as devoid of emotion as ever before, but the shivering crackle of his voice was enough to make the bottom of my stomach drop and was enough to curl my fingers into fists.
“I have never before in my life seen any CEO of this company degrade our image so successfully. You, Nikko Cartwright, are single-handedly destroying the image of this fine, upstanding corporation, one drunken romp at a time. This is not the image I will have paraded about of my corporation. And that brings us to the main point of this little chat that we are having tonight.” Offerton placed his hands together again, his shining fingernails meeting to form a small temple beneath his chin. “At this moment, Mr. Cartwright, I am offering you a choice.” He fixed me with a cold, unblinking stare. I could feel the ice of his gray eyes pouring into my soul. I swallowed and forced myself to stare back. “The choice is this,” Offerton cleared his throat and smacked his skinny lips together, never once blinking, never once taking his eyes off of my own. “Change your lifestyle now. Get rid of the endless partying, the romping around with women who are famous for sleeping with anyone, the champagne rain storms and the half unconscious ramblings to paparazzi. Find yourself a wife. A nice wife, a woman who is modest and forthright and kind, who will allow you to properly achieve the image of CEO that this company wants. The image that this company, right now, thanks to your poor behavior, desperately needs. That is option number one.”
I stared at Offerton, unable to speak. There was no way in hell I was going to do that. What did the old man think? That it was 1920, and I was going to get down on one knee and whip out some diamond and carry some girl off into the sunset, all for the sake of protecting his ego? I had been cool and collected up until that point, but I felt my patience beginning to wear out.
“And what is option number two?” I heard myself blurt out before I was able to rein the words in.
“I am glad you asked,” Offerton said coolly back. “Option number two is this: resign from the company immediately or, if you do not, be terminated on the spot.”
I could not hold my rage in for a single second more.
“Your corporation is not dependent upon the image of its CEO!” I exploded, the words flying out of me with such violence that tiny droplets of spit shot forward across the air and landed upon the polished toes of Offerton’s shiny patent leather shoes. My fists trembled as I continued to speak. “Whom I choose to sleep with is of absolutely zero consequence in relation to the success of this corporation.”
“That is where you are dangerously wrong, Nikko,” Offerton shot back, his voice annoyingly calm and frighteningly low. The crackle and static sound of his tone had been completely replaced with a sound of deep, dangerous velvet. The words slid out so easily that I was instantly shut up and goose bumps trickled down my spine. “I have been informed, just one hour ago, by our main investors, that they have never been more disgusted by the associations our company has, of late, been reported to have made.” Offerton fixed me with a very telling stare. “These investors have promised that they will be backing out first thing tomorrow if we do not go ahead and inform them, no, swear to them, in writing, that we have got our image back on the right track. And more, that we are offering the public a new, better image, an image that they can get behind wholeheartedly for its wholesome, all-American truth. And that image, Nikko, is this: the announcement that our CEO, a former infamous party boy, and Playboy icon, has found love in the form of a modest, innocent woman, whom he will be surprising with an engagement by the end of the week.”
I stood before Offerton, his watery, gray stare holding me in place, like how a thumb tack pins a dead butterfly behind a collector’s glass. I breathed in angrily through my nostrils as he watched me with that ever unblinking, ever unwavering stare. Finally, after several long, silent moments, I let the air fall through my nostrils in a rush of frustration and defeat.
There was nothing I could do. Offerton, the manipulator, had me in a corner and there was no backing out: unless I wished to give up every penny I had spent the last few years of my life working my ass off in order to earn and be made the reject of the business world. Because Offerton was a man who could make or break your entire career. At that moment, I stood teetering on the precipice of a guaranteed, multi-billion dollar future, or a life spent being denied every new job I ever tried to get because of the reputation this man would stick on me if I did not take his offer.
I took one deep breath and then forced the words of out my mouth before I had another single second to second guess them.
“Okay. I’ll do it.”
Offerton watched me and slightly tilted his head.
“What, Nikko Cartwright, will you do?” he asked. He tapped one of his knobby fingers against the side of his face. “What option do you choose?”
“Mr. Offerton,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I will be choosing option one.”
A gentle smile curled its way across the old business owner’s face, and he nodded slowly, his double chins wagging in a pleased dance.
“That is very good, Nikko,” he said, grinning at me over his nose. “That is very good indeed.” Offerton pressed his hands against the arms of the leather chair and pushed himself into a standing position. “I am very glad we had this little chat,” he said, sliding his hands into his pockets and staring down at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
Offerton nodded at me. He stood there for a moment, just watching me, our eyes boring into each other’s, both of us willing the other to back down, both of us knowing that neither man would dare back down.
Finally, Offerton unhinged his lips and spoke.
“You can go now, Cartwright.”
I nodded, and turned, eager to leave the room and the conversation behind. I began to stride again out of the room, being careful to keep my back extra straight, my head thrown back, and my strides as confident and cocky as ever. I reached the door and placed a hand on the door knob, turning the silver face to let myself free of the room.
“Oh, and Cartwright,” Offerton’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
I froze; refusing to turn around, but careful to stay in place, to suck up just enough to the man I knew controlled my income, my reputation, and my future. I could hear the passive smile dripping into his voice.
“Do find a girl that you can propose to for Friday.”
I felt the blood rush to my head, and my fingers squeezed the doorknob tightly, turning my knuckles white. I bit my lip and stared straight ahead, feeling my cheeks flush with frustrated rage, but not about to give the man that stood grinning behind me another single inch of satisfaction.
“Mr. Offerton,” I said with the most over the top enthusiastic tone I could muster. “By Friday, I will be married to the wholesome, virtuous wife that you demand.”
“Very good, young Cartwright,” I heard the voice crackle back. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I said.
And with that I twisted the door knob and let myself out of the room and down the stairs, never once glancing back.