It was after midnight when I returned home to be greeted by banging noises. Nora was violently reorganizing our bedroom closet. Black clothes—Prada tops, Gucci bottoms, Versace dresses—covered the bed, which she used as a way station between the closet and a large suitcase.
"Hello, my love!" I said brightly, ducking the Cliniqué makeup kit she threw at my head. "What seems to be the problem? Is there an issue that we can, working together as a team, synergistically if you will, address?"
"Do you have to talk like that?" She continued shoving clothing into her suitcase, which seemed a rather amazing piece of luggage to hold so much designer apparel. I noted the brand.
"What way is that, my little partner, CEO of my heart?"
"Like you're at a self-help meeting at the Ramada. While licking Jerry's bunghole."
Unfair. My beloved was clearly displacing her own anger. However, she was also shutting her over-stuffed bag, climbing on top of it, and, sweating slightly on her shapely upper lip, wrenching the zipper closed. Without a glance in my direction she trundled toward the door.
Desperation seized me. "Nora! Wait."
She stopped, and I realized that there was the very real possibility of saying the right thing. The thing that would lead to us unpacking her remarkable suitcase and curling up for some post-stress nookie. My eye itched, and I scratched it with my little finger.
"Don't go." Good start. "Talk to me—what is it?" I could see that she liked what she heard, so I cranked it up a notch.
"Give me a chance. I can change."
Success. She dropped the suitcase, scratching my floor, but I totally tuned that out to look deep into her eyes.
"Roger," she sighed, "What's the point?"
I edged closer and made cooing sounds.
"I'm tired of being in a relationship with someone who's always gone. You practically moved into the office when you started working for that prick."
I adopted my best sympathetic nod.
"It's like a threesome now, you, me, and Jerry. And now this party-"
"I think you mean experience."
"With this party," she said, glaring, "it's still a threesome, only I'm not in it. Just you and Jerry and the Cobalt party."
"I hear you, love, every word. Incidentally, it's just ‘Cobalt', not ‘the Cobalt party.' And it's a busy time, honey, that's all."
Just then my cell phone rang. Not the company jingle, either, but the Harvard Business fight song I programmed to let me know it's Jerry. So of course I stepped toward my desk.
She took a step of the same length toward her bag.
And I looked at her, and she looked at me, and then my phone rang again and I answered it.
Jerry has a brainstorm for Cobalt, and could I meet him at the 24-hour Starbucks on 9th? Because a triple-tall espresso and some mental elbow-grease are all that are required to push this concept through the birth canal into the real world, only without the blood and the mess and the heavy breathing, and Nora has picked up her bag and walked to the door and slammed it behind her, and would half an hour be okay?
Sure.
#
So here's the download on Cobalt. Nora was being intentionally hurtful when she called it a party. Parties are disposable. We've got bigger plans.
Let me put it this way. Two months ago, when we were lining up Skyy Vodka and Parliament Cigarettes as corporate sponsors, Jerry was going through his pitch. A gaggle of vice presidents sat around the retro-chic conference table that used to be a garage door. At the beginning they seemed distracted by the levers of their Herman Miller chairs, but Jerry was on fire, painting a vision of monkeys and lingerie models on trapezes, and the Pod People who would be month-long citizens of the party, and one by one, the VPs stopped fiddling and started staring, the way people do when they haven't quite grasped The Concept.
It's the same with our business model. Unqualified people are always confused. Who, they ask, will watch our custom web feeds? Who will watch Trout Trading, our weekly flycasting / finance program? Stockbrokers that fish, that's who. The answers are right in front of you if you have the vision to look.
Anyway, a VP with spotty skin and bargain shoes cleared his throat and asked why in the world a party needs to go on this long, and besides, weren't there enough Y2K parties?
A moment of silence. Then Jerry rose.
"Gentlemen," his voice solemn, "We're not talking about a party.
"This is a birth. The old giving way to the new. Like horses put to pasture to what-do-you-call-it, graze. And why did the horses graze the clover of failure? Because the automobile arrived. And how did the automobile arrive? Was it meek and quiet and apologetic? It was not. It was aggressive. It was noisy. It produced copious and unapologetic exhaust.