My Only Talent Ch. 24

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conanthe
conanthe
2,761 Followers

He must have broken the ice, because several more people queued up to follow him on the stage. More and more people came down the stairs, and by 8 PM the Fire Marshall's limit had certainly been reached. There was a very brisk business in the expensive drinks, and lots of great looking and fragrant tapas were served. No greasy bar food here. Suzanne realized she was hungry. The crowd was too, and they had ordered first, so it was going to take her a while to get served. It was an interesting mix: about a third people in their mid-twenties like her. The rest was in their thirties and forties, with a smattering of 50's. As the evening wore on, most of the new arrivals were the younger demo -- people who worked at the universities in the area, or offices on K Street NW, or a little further away on or near the Hill. The older customers came from the same areas, or those who were well-heeled enough to live nearby. This was a very upscale crowd: judging from the designer clothing and jewelry most of them didn't even notice the $20 cover charge or expensive drinks. Most of the younger crowd probably lived 5 or 6 roommates to a bathroom in old row houses out southeast or northeast somewhere at least two metro transfers away, and were willing to nurse an expensive drink all night for a chance to mingle with this crowd for a while.

Kimee Blue brought her another Tito's screwdriver and her order of two little bite sized lamb, mint, and lime salt empanadas -- they were hot, savory, flaky, crunchy and completely fantastic. Suzanne was in a perfect spot to watch the door, and the place was definitely filling up. Several people looked mildly familiar, maybe from the news or CSPAN, but none were immediately recognizable to her. Then one was.

An academic economist, of all people, whose work she had studied: Professor Auguste F.I. Haubenfelter. She had seen his picture many times on his book jackets and appearing with his published articles, and she had always assumed that it was a very old picture. He had been publishing for at least 25 years, but he looked like he was only in his forties. He must have received his PhD before he turned twenty. He was the titular leader of the 'new old school' of socialist economists, and very controversial. Her father said his kind of communist economic nonsense was responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths under dictators, and that his middle initials stood for either Fucking or French Idiot. No one seemed to know what they actually stood for. Haubenfelter preached a vision of a sort of ultra-Keynesian elitist moderated utopia where the government would simply create enough fiat dollars of money supply to support 'the economy the people wanted'. These ideas bubbled up in the early 1900's and again after the second world war, to the effect that if everyone just wanted to sing opera or make ceramic ashtrays for a living the government should just give them a subsistence check each month for their basic living expenses, and if they actually sold any ashtrays they would make more. The world money supply would then be the perfect total of all those subsistence checks plus the sales actually made, and there would be no poverty or crime anymore, and everyone would be ecstatically happy, with a few brilliant socialist economists making the tough decisions and steering the ship for us all.

Suzanne had read most of his books and articles in her first graduate survey course, and she thought him very strong on 'natural goodness' arguments and very weak on logic and math. He was also supremely arrogant, responding to any criticism with loud bluster, condescension, and the sneering suggestion that the critics were not smart enough to understand his work. He had been at the Sorbonne for many years and she would expect to find him in a trendy night club in the Latin Quarter. What brought him to DC she did not know, but he was surrounded by several grad school age women and a few very academic looking men, so he might be spending some time at Georgetown or GWU. It would be best if her father did not encounter him, as there almost certainly would be a scene. The elder Pliskin was a devout free speech advocate, but an arrogant and condescendingly lisping Frenchman with his facts wrong pushed all of her dad's buttons. Her thoughts of the potential impending confrontation were interrupted when someone approached her table.

"Hello, Suzie. My name is Chuck Bailleur, and I am happy you chose to join us tonight."

"I am glad I found the place, too. I wasn't sure what to think of your poem, but it definitely wasn't boring, which is the main reason I am here."

Chuck began to explain his poem, obviously hitting on Suzanne but not obnoxiously so. She liked the implied complement, but her other emotional reaction surprised her. It made her think about Robbie, which made her happy and mad at the same time. As her grandmother would say, 'she had it bad' for Robbie. Chuck laughed when she talked about her interpretation of the two girlfriends in his poem. "Well, they are inside your head, but they are neurotransmitters. We used to think there were only a few, but now we know there are dozens, at least. In fact some people now think that every chemical in the body functions at least part time as a neurotransmitter, and all physiological communications circuits are transmitted both electrically and chemically through synapses of adjoining nerve or glial cells, and chemically through hormones, all with different time courses, clearance rates, failure modes, and side effects. There is lots of redundancy, and lots of ways for the message to get through. Maybe a lot of messages we don't even recognize or understand yet are getting through too!"

Suzanne feigned shock. "So you are a doctor? With those loud suspenders, I thought for sure you must be a trial lawyer or a stockbroker."

He snapped his suspenders and guffawed, almost too loudly. "Actually I'm all three! I went to medical school, got very involved in buying and selling shares in high flying biomedical startups, and got screwed so bad that I then went to law school to learn how to protect myself so I couldn't get fucked over like that again!"

She smiled. "So now you are well trained in how to screw other people over first? But you really just want to be a poet?"

"I am a poet. It just doesn't pay very well. The Blue Spot is my hobby. My shrink says my need for control made me create my own social environment so that I wouldn't feel threatened by people. He says the club is cheaper for me than a fourth marriage and divorce!"

"Do you really trust your shrink?"

"Sure, I went to medical school with him, plus he is now married to my second wife, which saved me a boatload of alimony!" Chuck waved at someone else and went off to make his table by table rounds. Steve the bartender arrived with his first test version of Instant Stripper, and it tasted much better than the ZZZ frat rat version, and it was certainly much more sanitary. He waited for a moment to see if it produced the desired results, but all he got was a semi-promising smile from hot little Suzie as she waved him on his way.

* * * * *

Barry Fermy shook my hand and began introducing me to our dinner companions, already arrayed around a small table in a small private dining room, with cocktails in hand. First on my left was a very well turned out uber nerd named Alexis T Quandry. He was thin, short, dark, and wearing a custom tailored suit of some of the most sumptuous looking fabric I have ever seen. It seemed so deep and multi-faceted that you could disappear into it, and the suit looked to be three or four fashion rungs above the Zegna or Brioni suits that my dad wore to big meetings. No watch, but a black Fitbit Flex wristband that I recognized from Saskia having demonstrated one to me as being part of my conditioning class next semester. Barry described him as an 'SOA' and 'our head quant' that all the trading houses wanted to hire away. He apparently was the author of all the pricing policies and risk exclusions for the new clients we were to insure in Europe, with Lara's dad the only one who could overrule him.

Next was Ben Wahni, a nervous and very dark man in his forties who made me think of a ferret, moving nervously and uncomfortably and watching Barry obsessively. He was the newly chosen EU/MEA sales manager, apparently desperate to make this new business sector here work, and also hoping that Barry would get hit by a bus so that Ben could move up to the overall VP sales spot.

To his right was Senex Pedo, a very tired looking man in his sixties who was the 'vertical area manager -- construction' and an apparently well-worn veteran of babysitting and monitoring hundreds of large and long duration construction projects. He would analyze the project plans and translate them into the parameters that Alexis T Quandry would use to come up with a mathematical estimate of the risks involved, and then update the estimates as the project moved along.

Finally there was a very nice looking young woman in her late twenties named Penelope Profico, who instantly reminded me of a younger version of Erminia, which produced a vigorous erectile reaction. I hope she noticed. She was described as 'Barry's AA' and was apparently the one who actually did stuff while everyone else talked and postured. She passed out an agenda sheet, and Barry, ever the slave driver, demanded that we polish off an agenda item and check it as complete before the next course (or another cocktail) could be served. It certainly motivated me, as my stomach was actively growling, and it seemed to work for the others too.

First was a brief review of our schedule tomorrow, which began with a very early morning drive out to Hertfordshire to visit Abelard's HQ, give him our generic corporate insurance wonderfulness pitch, and then a tour of several of their construction sites, beginning with a new military airfield almost completed nearby and then boarding a helicopter to overfly several other sites ending with a walking tour of a new oil platform in the north sea, and a flight back to the Battersea heliport near London City Airport.

My dad, with several million frequent flyer miles on virtually every major airline, made somewhat of a fetish of learning all the airport 'designators' as he called them, but everyone else seemed to call them 'codes'. There were usually least least two for each physical airport, owing if I remembered his explanation correctly to history and bureaucratic wrangling between commercial versus government bureaucracies. Our own beloved DFW for instance, back in Texas, apparently had two: DFW and KDFW: most Americans simply dropped the 'K' which is apparently the prefix for the United States. 'E' was for England, but London City Airport for some reason was known as LCY and also EGLC, not LCY and ELCY. He had told me some wild stories about people booking flights with just small errors in the designator which sent them winging thousands of miles out of their way, and also a very memorable airport code trivia strip contest played with marooned pilots and flight attendants once during a hurricane.

EGLC was apparently the only airport that was actually in London, and very close to Canary Wharf, making it home to lots of private planes and charter services, plus a few commercial airline flights. A dusted salad course was served, reminding me of Strelsa, and causing me to wonder if Penelope would like Suzanne and vice versa. I know I did.

The next agenda item was the meat of the matter, so to speak: the real and perceived benefits that Abelard and his firm would see from doing business with us, and how best to pitch them. Here Ben Wahni was clearly and aggressively differing with Barry. He seemed to think that Abelard was an old fool who would pay premium prices for standard coverage if we sold it with enough flowery words. Barry said we had to give them a low price and/or a high perceived value to break the inertia and get them to switch from the EU based firms Abelard was using now. Brujo's carefully redacted consultant's report made it clear to me that neither was exactly right. Abelard's existing insurers might balk at taking on the huge absolute amount of risk his firm might be faced with if they won a lot of new contracts, so there was a window for a new firm to exploit, and Abelard had already told me he would give us some business if we would give him a slightly better price that his current firm, one of Britain's largest, as long as we could demonstrate the assets to back our play. I decided to let Barry and Ben go at it for a while before I said anything, but I was getting pretty hungry.

* * * * *

The great professor then joined the table right next to Suzanne, greeting one very gay looking young man there by name and then openly ogling the woman that were sitting with him. The young man introduced Haubenfelter as a 'brilliant visiting professor in his department at Georgetown' and the women seemed very interested. Haubenfelter's accent suddenly became even thicker and more exaggeratingly French. Questions from the women flowed from around the table, and Suzanne was amazed by the answers the great man gave. "My theories offer the world more than any religious superstition ever has. I can give us a perfect economy, with truly worthy intellectuals like myself providing a guiding hand for the less enlightened." And then, "Christianity and capitalism have proven to maximize misery, and other theocracies are only useful to the top religious leaders in charge." After some small talk, he finally said "but I don't like to talk about myself. If people knew how wonderful I really am, they would either resent me or worship me, and neither is particularly useful to me." Suzanne couldn't take any more, and she got up to use the ladies room.

When she returned, the professor had taken to the stage, obviously tipsy, and recited an improvised poem about his favorite subject:

"How great am I? To count the ways I can only try. I think that I shall never see, a man as wonderful as me. Way out on the bell curve brilliant, strong: yet flexible, cool and resilient. Nuanced and sophisticated, yet never domesticated. A lion of science, a ram among sheep, thinking great thoughts so deep. Performing such service to my fellow man, that I deserve to be pleasured by women any way that they can, that Women may serve me and find peace. Kneel before me and look upon my face, That I may grant you the essence of my grace!"

Suzanne would have jumped up and left right then, but Steve the cute bartender appeared at her table. "Suzie, I think I have a few ideas to make this Instant Stripper drink even better. I want to experiment a little bit, and then could you come back for some comparative taste testing?"

Suzanne smiled at him. "I have an engagement tomorrow, but perhaps the evening after that I could drop back in...." His happy smile was the only acknowledgment she needed. She had to attend one of those stuffy Kennedy Center things with her parents tomorrow evening, with a socially mandatory late dinner party at some socialite's place afterward, so tomorrow night was shot. She waved goodbye to Kimee Blue and Chuck Bailleur as she ascended the steps back to the street and walked back towards her parent's new house. As soon as she closed the door, the lift she got from being at the Blue Spot fell out from under her.

Her parents were at a huge Foggy Bottom party out in Virginia and were invited to spend the night there and have breakfast before driving back into town. Lettye, the housekeeper, greeted her at the door, but otherwise the house was dark and cold, and so was her mood. Lettye had been with her family since just before Suzanne's older sister had been born, and had moved with them through dozens of overseas postings, so she must be at least 50 by now, but she looked the same as ever. Someone who didn't know Lettye might have pegged her age anywhere from 30 to 70. She had the same kind of small frame, lanky hard muscles and raven black hair that Suzanne did, but with a more angular face and a much darker sepia skin tone. Suzanne had one Senegalese great grandparent; Lettye had eight. Lettye had taught the infant Suzanne to speak French, but with an unusual African accent, and most of Suzanne's actual early conversational immersion had been in former French colonies in Africa. When she later lived in France and attended school there for a while, people were surprised by her complete fluency, but very exotic accent. In New Orleans, they thought she was part Creole.

When Suzanne was six years old, and her father was on 'special assignment' in Djibouti, three men had attacked their house at lunch time when both her mother and father were at the consulate. The guard killed two of the attackers before dying himself, but the third man ascended the stairs to find Suzanne and Lettye hiding in the linen closet. His expression of grinning triumph paled when Lettye suddenly produced a strange hooked knife that Suzanne had never seen before and slit his throat from ear to ear. It happened so fast Suzanne could not be sure it had actually occurred, until the blood began to spread from between his fingers now clutching his throat, and he toppled backward like a felled tree. Lettye was family. After that incident she had taught Suzanne how to use a knife like that, just in case. Suzanne gave her a hug and went upstairs to her dad's study.

She took out the doodles on the personal ad she had jotted down earlier, and scratched it all out. If she wanted to catch a submissive man, maybe a man should help her write the ad. Then she realized Robbie already had. What was it he said? "With your super-hot and fit little body, haughtily beautiful face, and relatively deep voice, you are probably their dream dominatrix."

She decided to go with that, and was then inspired to add a few twists of her own:

"I am your Dream Dominatrix. Tri-athlete fit, with a petite and super-hot body, a haughtily beautiful face, and a deep voice. If you reveal yourself and your fears and dark desires to me completely, I may toy with you for a while. I will hurt you. You deserve it. But I will never talk to anyone else about what we do. Can you handle having your darkest fantasies actually come true? Perhaps you will amuse me."

She was a little worried when the very exclusive erotic personals site that she had chosen required a valid email address that could be verified before the posting. But her dad's quantum anonymizer came with a hell of a software suite, and it offered via a popup menu to insert a valid, working, but completely untraceable email address, complete with a 'legend' name and background info and a untraceable forwarding mechanism to and from her phone. She accepted it, and posted the ad, using what appeared to be a faculty address at the University of Maryland out in College Park. A few seconds later, a verification email message arrived, forwarded to her by the proxy server, and she typed in the sequence of somewhat distorted and stylized letters that appeared as a graphic in the email, and sent the reply. A few minutes later, she got an email saying her ad had been posted. She got an instant case of seller's remorse. How could she have been so stupid! She shut everything off and took a long hot shower, as if she could wash the issue away.

But sleep would not come. She began to think of Robbie and Lara, and suddenly she was using her hands on herself like she had not done in months. She dreamed of them being completely subservient to her, accepting her domination like they were born to it. Her orgasm was physically satisfying, but not emotionally so. She finally cried herself to sleep.

* * * * *

Barry Fermy and Ben Wahni finally wore each other out arguing. They agreed that we had to demonstrate the company's resources, international capabilities, and commitment to doing business in Europe and the Middle East for decades to come, plus be charming, engaging, and learn the prospective client's big issues. I could have told them that yesterday. Can we eat now?

conanthe
conanthe
2,761 Followers