Chapter 10 #2
When the vote came round to him, Adrian said, "In favor," and then he said, "and I'd like it minuted that this is the third time in nine years that a proposal in this room has come from the person who actually runs the company, and the first time she has been allowed to make it herself."
The chair said, "I'm not sure that's minutable, Adrian."
"Minute it," Adrian said.
That was all. He did not look at her. He did not make it a gesture, and he did not follow it with anything, and he sat through the remaining two hours of the meeting saying almost nothing, and at the end he shook the syndicate lawyer's hand and left before the room cleared.
Clara stayed twenty minutes talking to Frayne about the Ellwood roof.
Adrian caught her at the elevators, and did it badly, which is to say he simply appeared and then had nothing prepared.
"Clara."
"Adrian."
"That was —" He stopped. Started again. "Paloma's the right call. I should have made it three years ago. I didn't make it because I didn't know, and I didn't know because I have never once asked a general manager a question."
"I know."
"Right." He looked at the elevator button as though it required something of him. "I'm not going to ask you anything. I want to say that first, because you're standing there braced for it and I'd rather you weren't."
"I'm not braced."
"You've got your bag in front of you," Adrian said.
Clara looked down. She had it held across herself with both hands, the way you hold a tray.
She did not move it, and she was not going to give him the satisfaction, and she was aware in the same instant that there had been no satisfaction on his face — only a man noticing something, out loud, four months too late, in a hallway.
"There's a February pack," he said. "Esther's given you page nine."
"She has."
"The Ellwood roof's on page fourteen and it's worse than page nine."
"I know," Clara said. "I signed the survey three years ago."
"Of course you did," Adrian said.
And then, because he had apparently decided that this was a day for saying things in hallways:
"I read the deck."
Clara did not move.
"All sixty-one pages. The night you called." He was looking at the elevator button. "Page thirty-four's the one you meant. Page thirty-five is worse. I've ended the retainer."
"That's an expensive —"
"Yes." A small shrug. "They were doing what I paid them to do.
That's the part I keep arriving at. Nobody in that firm did anything wrong.
Somebody was going to write that slide, because for nine years the two of us standing next to each other has been an asset on somebody's page, and I have been happy about that, and I have never once thought about what it cost the person standing next to me. "
He pressed the button, finally.
"I'm not telling you so that you'll count it," he said. "I'm telling you because you asked me a question in February and I gave you the wrong answer, and I've been carrying that around for three weeks."
And that was the whole conversation. The elevator came and she got in it and he did not.
She did not fully understand what had happened until she was in the parking structure.
She had walked out of a boardroom and three people had followed her to keep talking.
Esther had handed her a folder — an actual folder, green board — and said, "The February management accounts, and I'd like your view on page nine by Friday.
" The chair had asked whether she was coming to the Founders' Dinner in September and had asked it as a scheduling question.
Clara sat in her car on level two and put her hands on the wheel.
Nine years. She had spent nine years in that building being the most powerful person in it and the only one without a chair, and it had taken her four months, one magazine, and a letter sent to the wrong address to end up on the long side of the table.
And the man who had spent nine years at the head of it had said minute it.
She was not moved. She wanted to be extremely clear with herself about that, and she said it out loud in the car, twice.
Then she drove up to Cambria and told Imani everything, and Imani listened to all of it without interrupting, which was so unlike her that Clara stopped halfway through.
"What."
"Nothing." Imani had her arms folded. "You said 'this company.'"
"What?"
"Three times. 'This company hasn't had a COO.' 'I intend to keep owning it.'" Imani tipped her head. "Four months you've called it his company. Every single time. And you walked in there today and called it this one."
Clara opened her mouth.
"I'm not making a point," Imani said. "I'm telling you what came out of your face."
She took control of the company on a Wednesday and it took nine days for it to stop being theoretical.
She did not move into an office. That was the first decision and she made it in the car — there was a corner room on State Street that had been empty since the last chief operating officer left, which was the year she arrived, and Clara understood, looking at the floor plan, that if she sat in it she would spend the rest of her life being a person in an office.
She went to the buildings instead.
Nine days: the Verdura, the Ellwood twice, the two valley properties she had not walked since June.
She took Paloma on four of them. She wrote nothing down in front of anybody and then wrote everything down at night in a form other people could use, which was the discipline now, and which she had learned in a borrowed office in Goleta in November.
What she found was not a company in trouble. It was a company that had been running for nine years on one woman's memory and had spent five months discovering, department by department, which parts of itself did not exist.
There was no maintenance schedule for the Ellwood. There had been Clara.
There was no supplier list with terms on it. There had been Clara.
There was no document anywhere in that company that said what the Whitmore standard actually was — what a turndown looked like, what a manager did when a guest lost a wedding ring, why the Verdura's front desk had four people on a Sunday and the valley properties had two.
By the fourth day it had stopped being satisfying and started being something closer to horror.
"You understand this is your fault," she said to Paloma, in a service corridor at the Ellwood, and Paloma said, "Ours," and Clara said, "No. Mine. I built it this way," and Paloma, who was carrying a clipboard and had been a night auditor once, said:
"Then unbuild it."
So Clara did.
She hired a night auditor for the Ellwood on the second day and gave Denise the daytime job she should have had four years earlier.
She put Paloma's name on an announcement and made the announcement internal-first, which nobody in that company had ever done, because for nine years announcements had gone to the trades and the staff had read about themselves in the press.
She started a document. She called it the operating manual, which everybody found funny, and she wrote twenty-one pages of it in a week and then a hundred more over the spring.
And on the ninth day she sat in a car outside the Verdura and realized she had not, at any point, gone up to the second floor.
Not once. Nine days in and out of that building and she had not been to the executive floor, and Adrian had not come down, and neither of them had mentioned it.
They were running a company together and had not been in a room since the twenty-fourth.