He knew the introduction was going to be accurate. He knew his colleagues — people he had worked with for four years, people he had lunch with, people who had met him at company events and had a general sense of his life — were going to hear a professional bio for a woman they now knew was his wife. A bio that established, in the first three sentences, that she had been doing serious work for nine years and was currently running an independent practice.
He knew that some of these people might have heard, directly or indirectly, that Rachel was “not doing anything” or was “figuring things out.” He would not have said this explicitly in a workplace context, but the general vagueness that he deployed with his family was something he sometimes deployed in lower-stakes workplace conversation too, the way people use vagueness to avoid specificity without actively lying.
When Linda read the bio and his colleagues heard my name and some of them turned to look at him because they had made the connection, he sat in the third row and looked at the front of the room. He did not make a face. He told me afterward that he made a specific effort not to make a face, because any visible reaction — surprise, discomfort, embarrassment — would have been worse than no reaction, and he knew it.
“What were you thinking during the session?” I asked him.
“At first I was thinking about what other people in the room were thinking about me,” he said. “And then I stopped thinking about that because the session was actually — I got interested in it. The thing you were doing with the workflow maps. I was thinking about how it applied to our account transition process.”