The Fourth Part of Chapter 9: The New Arrangement

Maurice had organised a work dinner for September 24th; it was essentially a meeting at a restaurant with a lot of food. Given that it was expensive, and given that he had to keep some semblance of being above board, he paid for the dinner out of his own pocket, rather than out of the business account. There was some aspect of the dinner that was troubling him, and that was a growing feeling of unease in his mind; the firm was continuing to slide, and would do so until he took some decisive action; what was there to do? Certainly, some jobs will be lost, he thought, desiring to dissociate himself from these losses, as ultimately, he would be the one making the decisions and laying people off; given that layoffs were a nasty business, he tried to delay the inevitable as long as possible, but the inevitable was looming, larger and larger, like the financial crisis that had triggered the most spectacular losses of the past recession, which was foreseeable to some several years before the fact. Although many firms had recovered and were turning a profit, Maurice could not count Valoix consulting among them. There was no good way to do layoffs, and Maurice liked all of his employees; the least unfair method would be a lottery; he would draw names from a hat, and would not heed traditional qualifiers such as seniority, employment equity or anything like that. Quality of work was irrelevant in this context, as all of his employees, in his opinion, were exemplary. He artfully kept up pretences of cheerfulness as he led the group of twenty to the restaurant, and that bothered his conscience, as the best way would be to advise them of the impending cuts and suggest that it may be a good idea for people to update their résumés; there was no convenient time for him to do this, however. Each time he felt like telling them, he could see the smiles, and those smiles vanishing.

“Hello, we have a reservation. You’ll find it under Valoix,” said Maurice to the hostess, brushing the rain out of his hair. He attempted to banish the thought of impending layoffs from his mind, but it was ever-present, just below the surface, even tonight, when everyone at the firm were supposed to be enjoying themselves.

Clarissa smiled at James. “It’s very nice for you to have invited me,” she said. “Do you do this often?”

“Yes,” said James. “Maurice tries to do this every year,”

“We don’t get to do them that much in the public sector; bureaucrats aren’t supposed to have fun,” said Clarissa.

“So, your boss is the stereotypical frowning bureaucrat?”

“Not so much; we have fun in the office, for sure, but we always have to do it on our own money; the guy has a sardonic sense of humour,”

Clarissa turned to Arlene behind her. “Do you find Maurice to be a nice person? My husband says so,”

“Oh yeah, but you can always tell when there’s something on his mind. Like now, see; he’s pondering too much for it to be something good, and you can see it in his knitted brows right now,” Maurice overheard Arlene, and quickly looked away; he was, at heart, something of a secret-keeper; he rarely divulged very much about himself. “That’s setting me on edge,” said Arlene.

“My boss is like that whenever there’s a controversy over EI.”

“Did you hear of those noises being made about payroll taxes?”

“Yes, and it will mean a lot of work for us; weighing the pros and cons of EI financing through premiums is a very tricky business, and it involves all sorts of complicated mathematical models,”

“I can only imagine; I’m an accountant, myself,” said Arlene.

All told, foreboding subtexts or not, the dinner went well, save that Clarissa spilled some of her drink on her dress; Maurice didn’t think his employees were feeling unduly apprehensive, but therein lied a bigger problem: was it better for them to be on their toes and come begging him not to lay them off? The answer was uncertain, but Maurice didn’t want to deal with it; he had started the firm in 2002, over some objections from his wife, who wondered why he didn’t do something with more stability, such as teaching, a job in the public sector, or a bank in Toronto, but Maurice made it clear that he did it for the exhilaration; now, exhilaration’s downside was presenting itself. It would not do to make his employees nervous by telling them of impending layoffs and doom, but it would also not do to have the sudden shock of unemployment hit them; there was no good way out of the situation, and he could only offset the day of reckoning.

Economic tempests, while present for Maurice, were as far from James’s mind as could be; he was just discovering that married life could be a bore as well as the ideal espoused relentlessly by mainstream media; he thought that his revelation of married life as less than glamorous was actually what all the advice was striving for: a manual on how to achieve success in marriage would actually be a manual on how to achieve some kind of equilibrium, or some boredom; however, boredom breeds contempt, and James was just starting to feel the first glimmers of frustration; one must always feel that they are moving, thought James; equilibrium and stasis are for the dead. This was necessary for excitement; there must be something new, and he thought that the upcoming family Thanksgiving with the extended Varrette family might provide some drama, even if he and Margaret were at the centre of it due to their tension.

At the end of the dinner, the bill came to $203, which Maurice paid with his credit card; it had been cheaper than he was expecting; typically, this sort of dinner would run to over $20 per person, but that was not the case on this night.

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