There wasn’t a projector, but his father, who clearly had been sitting in front of the table, stood, arms wide, welcoming him and his brother.
He didn’t look awkward in a suit: glasses, beard, and moustache matched his hair.
“Come, come,” Michael Greenblatt said, as if he were speaking for the New York family, and not them.Not him and his brother.“We were just having a chat.”
A chat, huh?The kind of chat that would affect the rest of his sons’ lives, not just his.
He caught his brother’s glance.He nodded.
The sound of clicking heels made him turn, only to see the gorgeousness that was Naomi as she entered the room.She held both her computer and tote bag, following his instructions, his silent partner and the woman who meant more to him than anything in the world.
He caught her glance as she sat at the couch at the back of the room, just beyond the doors.Like she’d be waiting for him when he was ready.
“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we.”
The older gentleman at the center.The man whose signature adorned the letter that got sent with that piece of tabloid garbage.
He was the one who ran the family.
He was the one who, if Jason had to guess, Naomi had researched.“Let’s not waste more time kibbitzing when the business is at stake, hmmm?”
Which, as Jason could tell, was his cue.He pulled out that huge overfilled red folder, untied it and removed and the stapled packets of information.Passing them to the four people sitting at the table across from him.
“Can you demonstrate how you are going to keep your tuchus out of the tabloids once your name is officially connected to the family business?Make a positive impact?”
The older man, again, speaking as if Jason had forgotten what he was there for or why.Like if he didn’t speak, he’d lose control of the room and the family, neither of which he wanted.
But Jason was focused, in a way he hadn’t been before; there was apparently something about having your feet held to the fire that made him concentrate.“Yes,” he said, opening his own copy of the packet.“If you’ll direct your attention to the pages within this packet?”
But the older gentleman swatted the air, as if he was shoving a recalcitrant fly out of the way.“I don’t need the fakakta papers.I need your assurance that you will do everything in your power to keep that tuchus of yours out of those papers.Your brother’s career, and our choices depend on what you say right now, so you’ll choose those words of yours wisely.”
There was a moment where there was nothing in his brain, no speech, no chart, no evidence that hours of creating a business plan for his future career, had done anything to impact his brain.
Make it your own.
Naomi’s words ran through his head, the ones that had arrived at the perfect time hours before.
His reputation counted on it.
And what was his reputation?What was it he pulled out of his mouth when he talked to Batya?
That was what he’d tell his relatives.That’s what was his.
“I will do my job as a chef,” he said, remembering the conversations he’d had with so many people, including both Batya and Naomi in specific.“I will make the people I’m cooking for happy with my food choices.I will bring honor to my name with my food and the reputation I make with the people who ask me to make their culinary dreams come true.I will be above board with my business practices, continuing to partner with an experienced event planner.I will be above reproach with how I treat those I encounter and work with.”He paused, looking across the table.“I put together a sketch of the business of my own I intend to create.”
“And the papers?”
“All I can do is to be a good person, and my job.If a photographer decides to take a photograph of a single moment of downtime during an exhausting and fulfilling job, working alongside a Teruah and Music Award winning artist as he does a historic performance at a famous festival in the California desert, I can’t control that.I can only control the smile on the musician’s face when he gets off stage, his eyes lighting up when he sees the post-show meal I made for him.”
“Can you create positive media to counteract the damage if you’re not willing to keep yourself out of the press?”
There was something about his life where the most random things made sense.
How would he have known that the important conversation he’d had with Batya only days before would be so important now?
“I had a wonderful conversation with Batya Averman-Neumann a few days ago; I’m working with her husband on an event, actually.Anyway, she issued an open invitation for my brother and I to tell the Greenblatt family’s story, in a way that added the Michigan family on to the story of the New York family, of course, on her show.”
And considering he knew that Batya hadn’t done a Greenblatts episode, and how much this particular relative was interested in such things, the expression on the other man’s face made it very clear he’d done what he’d intended.
