Surface tension, that’s what it is.

We were both past 30, we’d both been around, there were no nerves or awkward moments, we were broken in and knew the paces.

SURFACE TENSION BY RICHARD RISEMBERG 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 69

When Emily Minton was introduced around by the Big Boss, I looked up, rose from my desk, made polite noises. She was another pretty woman of average height, slim, dark-haired, well-dressed in the way of the office. Maybe more tastefully than most: she certainly had the quality, rare even in the city of show-offs that’s Los Angeles, of not being generic. 

But we were a media-oriented business, albeit a behind-the-scenes one, providing support services to the image-builders. Attractive and well-dressed people of any and all genders were not rare. I turned back to my computer and forgot about her. At one point I had to ask a colleague to remind me of her name. So it was definitely not love at first sight, nor second, nor third. 

Then we worked together shepherding a minor client out of his decline. She was still new then, a bit of a golden girl, but not quite done proving herself. 

We met with the Big Boss of that time. He leaned back in his chair, expressed formulaic confidence in our abilities, and handed over the troublesome but not very profitable client, a small-time producer with a reputation for alcoholic excess that was notable even in our industry.

I should explain that we went through a number of Big Bosses. The company was family-owned and they were more interested in spending the money than in helping to make it. While they had real offices for themselves, the kind with doors that closed, they brought in a line of Big Bosses to run things. The BBs kept proving themselves unsatisfactory, in one case by dying of a heart attack while trying to close a deal, but the family just brought someone else in. 

So Emily and I were given temporary use of a bland gray cubicle with an outdated workstation in it, where a couple of faded photos still hung off thumbtacks on the wall, legacy of a former colleague who had quit rather noisily and gone off to Northern California to tend a marijuana patch. Such was the shape of fate in our little corner of the world. Fortunately we dealt mostly with underlings, being underlings ourselves, and knotted together a network of machers and moneymen and, most important but also most ignored, the wielders of lenses and lights and digital geekery that could make it all happen. 

If you saw the resulting ad, you may have felt a sense of peace and comfort that it was hoped you would associate with a certain brand of tampon, though the breezy skirts and rolling landscapes had little to do with menstruation. 

Of course it was all bullshit, and Emily and I mocked the client, the ad, and the product mercilessly—as long as we were out of earshot of anyone else involved. 

It wasn’t her brand anyway, she remarked once, with what seemed to me a bit of an artificial nonchalance. She’d tried them, and they were no good. 

“I defer to your expertise on the matter,” I’d said. “The closest I’ve gotten to them was picking up a box now and then for my ex. Not these, she didn’t like them either.”

“It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” she said. “Helping a drunk sell junk with elegant bunk.”

“It could be worse,” I said.