Behind the Fern

Mitchell Davos (code name ‘Giraffe’) craned his neck to catch a glimpse of my screen, just as he had every single day for the past couple of months. Earlier that week, I’d bought a lush fern from a flower shop near the office and placed it, perhaps a little too deliberately, along the thin gap between our desks. It must have taken him a great deal of self-control not to say anything, but composing himself like an old-school gentleman was what he did best.

He sat down slowly, interlaced his fingers, stretched his arms out, then rolled his wrists. When he pressed ENTER to unlock his laptop, I heard the key snap. The look he gave me through the soft curtain of fronds reminded me of Hannibal Lecter.

Giraffe was my direct manager and I was his subordinate. On the corporate stage, he and I performed elegant roles, with well-rehearsed lines and a composure worthy of the BAFTAs. Behind the curtain—or rather, behind the fern—the actors were consumed with disdain.

I am not, as they say in corporate, a ‘top performer’, an ‘overachiever’, or the ‘exceeds expectations’ type; but I do my job well enough, keep my KPIs in control and my customers happy.

Yet my greatest asset as an employee is keeping my ego in check. This was something I’d learned early on, when I challenged a business strategy proposed by Giraffe—a man who, even with an MBA and a postgraduate degree in Strategic Management (plus various LinkedIn certifications), could not figure out why his plan wasn’t fitting our Q2 performance. I took it upon myself to point out the errors.

In our next 1:1, Giraffe treated me to a little artistic moment —he drew a corporate pyramid on the blackboard.

‘If this was our company, who’d sit here?’ he asked, pointing to the top of the pyramid with his red marker.

‘The CEO,’ I replied, visualizing Mr. Andrew Gaston’s face (The Lion).

‘And here, on the next category?’ he continued, marker squeaking against the board.

I named all the people filling each layer of the pyramid. Below the CEO: the VP of sales, Ms. Linda S (Classification: Viper); beneath her, the Director of Sales, Mr. Stu Blow (Classification: Badger); then Senior Manager, Mr. Mitchell Davos (Classification: Giraffe); and at the very bottom, Individual Contributor—yours truly (Classification: Mouse).

Giraffe turned, sat down and let the red marker drop onto the desk.

‘Excellent,’ he grinned.

From that meeting onward, I learned to make myself small. Which was harder, since I was already petite. My feet didn’t touch the ground when I sat in my office chair, and I often needed help reaching the top shelves.

Later that afternoon, behind the fern, Giraffe pushed his face through the sea of green and asked me to roll my chair over to his side. When I got close, he used both hands to pull the chair even closer and leaned forward.

‘Are you dating anyone at the moment? Because if you’re not, I might just have the perfect match for you,’ he said, with a wink.

He reminded me of an old fortune teller who once asked if I knew what my future held—only to offer me a tarot reading.

‘I’m not, no’, I replied as I sank in my seat.

Leandro Facundo Pérez (41 years of age) was a prestigious Argentinian neurosurgeon at the Central Hospital, with a fondness for volleyball and hiking. He was smart, funny, and—according to Giraffe—a man who was very pleased to hear about me.

On the other side of the dance floor stood Yours Truly (37 years of age), an Account Manager at Dust Inc., managing a B2B customer portfolio and, allegedly, a great personality. My strongest quality was my empathy.

‘I think it’s a match’, Giraffe glowed.

It’s cold and scary at the bottom of the pyramid.

Numbers were exchanged, a blind date was planned for next Saturday.

I tried to see what Leandro Facundo looked like on WhatsApp, but his profile picture was just a mountain. He refused to tell me where he was inviting me, adopted an air of mystery and said it would be an experience I’d forever remember. We were to meet at a street corner, close to the venue.

I took a good look at myself in the mirror; I always had a certain charm in red, especially with mother-of-pearl details. I showered, moisturized, blow-dried my hair, applied foundation, then contour and blush, finishing with mascara. I chose a pair of strappy, medium-heeled sandals. It was a long walk to the corner he’d given me, but I decided to walk anyway, to take the edge off.

On the way, I thought about Giraffe. You could say many things about him, but never that he lacked elegance or style. He was impeccably dressed, well-spoken, and carried himself like someone who kept similarly polished company. The thought made me even more nervous—what if I was, in fact, meeting someone suitable?

I arrived punctually but kept a certain distance from our meeting point, just to observe the crowd and figure out which one of them my date was.

‘I’m here,’ he texted.

I looked around. He must have had the wrong address, because the only people I saw were a group of adolescents smoking weed, an old couple carrying plastic supermarket bags, and what appeared to be a bouncer about to start his shift, leaning against a lamppost. He looked like the Colossus of Rhodes.

‘Me too,’ I texted back.

Just when I was about to re-confirm the address, I saw the bouncer waving at me, calling my name.

Leandro Facundo Pérez had been captain of his high school rugby team and had almost made it professionally. He was broad-shouldered and blessed with perfect hand-eye coordination. When he leaned over to hug me, it looked like a yoga sun salutation sequence. I hugged him back somewhere around his bellybutton.

We had to walk to the venue side by side, which proved challenging—he could barely hear me from up there, and I could barely see his face from down here. The result was an awkward kind of choreography: him bending his knees and tilting sideways, me stretching my torso and leaning the other way. By the time we arrived, we looked like two figures drawn by a toddler. We were also basically shouting at each other.

The place he had chosen was a hidden bar, a new trend in the city. I had been there before with two girlfriends, celebrating a birthday over cocktails. Lovely time.

It had a barbershop façade—chairs, mirrors, hair accessories—and a brightly lit sign that read ‘Johnny’s Barbershop.’ Behind one of the chairs, a velvet curtain concealed a door leading into a dark corridor. At the end of it was a stylish cocktail bar with high stools, leather couches, and round marble tables.

‘I bet you’ve never seen anything like this,’ he said, beaming.

I had, actually. I’d spilled a Porn Star Martini on those exact leather couches while celebrating my friend Valeria’s thirty-third.

I didn’t reply.

He said something else, but I couldn’t quite catch it—his head was already near the chandelier. He didn’t seem concerned.

We sat down. Leandro Facundo snapped his fingers in the air and called the waiter before I’d even had a chance to read the menu. I recognized the move. Different room, same energy.

‘Bring us a bottle of Pinot Grigio and a small shot of Jim Beam,’ he ordered. ‘I’m celebrating the fact that I’m off-call.’

He didn’t ask if I liked wine, nor did he notice that I hadn't asked a single question about his career. Even so, over the next two hours, I was about to learn more than I ever dreamed about what it meant to be a doctor.

‘You know,’ he said, stirring the whiskey in his glass, ‘people think the hardest part is getting into Med School. It’s really not. It’s the residency. At Memorial Central, I was doing eighty hours per week.’

He locked eyes with me.

‘Eighty. Can you imagine? Most people can’t even point to their parietal lobe, and I can clip a cerebral aneurysm in my sleep.’

I watched him suck the marrow off a bone while I gently massaged my right temporal lobe with the tip of my distal phalanx.

‘We had a patient—massive meningioma, wrapped right around the transverse sinus. One wrong move and you get rivers of blood everywhere.’ He popped another wing in his mouth. The BBQ sauce had migrated across his chin and a drop of it had fallen on his white shirt.

‘But the money’s good. I'm in the 500k bracket, which is okay, growing steady year by year. Affords a lifestyle most cannot even dream of. Can’t complain.’

He patted his belly and opened the second bottle of wine.

‘Have I told you about my fellowship in Berlin?’

I was still on my first glass and was finishing the bruschetta I had ordered almost one hour ago. Another great skill of mine is that I can dissociate almost instantly from any life event and live comfortably in my own universe. It serves me very well in long corporate meetings. I came to my senses around dessert when Leandro Facundo was proudly listing his volleyball trophies.

He snapped his fingers again asking for the bill. It was higher than I made in a day. Leandro Facundo took out his credit card.

‘I’ll take half of that,’ he said. The waiter was doing the math.

I looked for my wallet and paid the other half.

It was dark when we came out. As I said my goodbyes, I had the bizarre sensation that he’d grown even larger since the start of the night. Classification: Gorilla.

He called for a cab. I watched the car carry him away and I turned around towards the Metro. I realized I was still a bit hungry.

The next Monday morning, Giraffe was already at the office when I arrived. He was twirling a fern leaf between his fingers while watching my every move.

‘So, how did it go?!’ he asked, lifting the fern slightly, as if testing whether it would come loose from the pot.

‘It was nice, but I don’t think we’re a match,’ I replied, opening my laptop.

Giraffe brought his hand to his mouth, eyes wide.

‘I don’t understand…I was 100% sure you’d hit it off!’

I checked my Outlook. There was a meeting in my calendar, starting in five minutes. Title: The 5 Stages of Tuckman's Team and Group Development Model – Session #4.

Giraffe was doing a certification in Project Management and was treating our team like lab rats for two hours each week.

I went to get a coffee.