Bleak

by Lynn Messina

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  80 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1101

  New York, New York 10011

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Lynn Messina

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com.

  First Diversion Books edition June 2012.

  ISBN: 978-1-938120-19-0 (ebook)

  Dedication

  For everyone who’s heard it all before.

  And for Charles Dickens.

  Note to the Reader

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Day 774

  Marla Hertzberg calls me into her office just as I’m turning on my computer at 8:51 in the morning, and I quickly unwrap my wool scarf and grab a note pad. The temperature in the office is somewhere below Arctic, but we’re not allowed to shiver. The partners at Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn interpret any effort to stay warm as ingratitude for their generous use of air-conditioning, especially from the paralegal staff; we are supposed to be more grateful than the junior associates. It’s the same thing in the winter. They keep the thermostat in the mid eighties, then frown whenever they see someone in short sleeves.

  Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn is an aggressively conservative firm. Casual Friday means a tie with a pattern on it.

  Marla doesn’t look up when I enter her office, which is fine because she never does. Three years ago, when she first joined the firm, I took her lack of interest in my presence as a personal rebuke. Whenever my mother is angry at me, she always says she can’t bear to look at me, and, from the way she darts her eyes around the room, avoiding not only my face but my figure too, I believe it’s true. There is genuine pain in her aversion.

  With Marla it’s different. She’s simply too busy piling up billable hours for eye contact. Working three cases at one time is her special talent. Right now she’s taking a meeting with Collier Enterprises, writing a memo to Judson Tobacco and giving me an assignment.

  There’s an element of overcompensation in her manic behavior. The only child of former attorney general Albert Hertzberg, she has much to prove to the world, namely that she’s her father’s worthy successor and that her meteoric rise at Handelman, Finch and Burleigh wasn’t due to the fact that she was sleeping with Handelman and Finch (an impressive accomplishment, as both men are well into their eighties).

  The speakerphone drones on about fiduciary responsibility as Marla pounds forcefully at her keyboard. She’s hands-down the most emphatic typists I’ve ever seen. She presses each letter as if it’s the final exclamation point in a twenty-thousand-word paragraph.

  “The Roberts case,” she says, gesturing with her chin to a file on her otherwise spotless desk. Marla doesn’t just preach the religion of organization, she lives it. Everything is color-coded, labeled and returned to its rightful place within seconds of her putting it down. One of her three secretaries’ sole job is filing. She’s like Henry VIII having a servant devoted exclusively to fluffing his pillows.

  I grab the folder, which is slight and contains an index of the other files relevant to the case. Before she can explain what she’d like me to do, she shifts a hand over to the phone and presses the mute button. The gesture is smooth and quick, like she’s done it a million times before, and doesn’t interrupt her typing.

  “We found the promissory note during discovery,” she says.

  A melee erupts on the other side of the line as six, seven, maybe a dozen voices insist all at once that Christian Collier never issued a personal IOU to Danver Bobek. The disagreement continues for so long that Marla comes dangerously close to working on only two cases. Just when I think Roberts has been pushed completely to the back of her brain, she lifts a hand from the keyboard and writes “redaction” on a Post-it. The printer hums as the Judson memo rolls out.

  Marla hands over the Post-it and dismisses me with an absent wave. As I leave the office, the senior Hertzberg brushes past me. Unlike his daughter, he has no idea I’m there. An old-school businessman, he focuses on one thing at a time, giving it his complete attention until the problem, case, issue—whatever—has been resolved. As a result, there’s a quiet dignity about him, an air of serenity and stability. He’s nothing like his daughter.

  Returning to my cube, I drop the file onto my desk and put on my scarf. I consider taking out the fleece blanket but decide to try coffee first. Sometimes that keeps me for a good two hours. I wander to the kitchen, fill up a cup with weak corporate French roast and read the notices on the bulletin board. My hands warm, I head up to thirty-flour, where files are stored in a large meat locker of a room with bright florescent lights and hard wooden chairs.

  The space is empty save for Josie, who is redacting another file. She nods absently when I enter but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge me. Although we’re friendly, I don’t take offense. Redaction is like that. It’s mind-numbingly boring work wherein you peruse thousands of pages of documents looking for privileged information to black out with a thick, sturdy marker. As if that weren’t deadly enough, you have to keep a log of all your deletions. Once you start you don’t want to stop because the thought of starting again is unbearable. You get into a groove and you go with it. Momentum is everything.

  Although the storeroom’s frequent blasts of sub-Arctic air keep you especially alert (when they’re not giving you hypothermia), I take the file to my cube and plunk it solidly at my desk. In no rush to get to the Roberts redaction, I pull up Google, type in Moxie Bernard and click on the top ten news stories to see what damage she’s done in the last twenty-four hours.

  Some people have sports scores or stock quotes or the front page of the New York Times to distract them from work. I have the hottest teen star on the planet and a train wreck waiting to happen.

  Day 795

  My Hollywood film agent calls during lunch to announce that Chancery Productions has finally settled on a date for the relaunch party celebrating my novel, Jarndyce and Jarndyce. I take another bite of tuna fish and wash it down with lemonade as Lester Dedlock tells me to mark down August 21. As this is the fourth time in five months he has spoken with such definitiveness, I’m reluctant to follow his advice. Still, I jot the date down on a Post-it. On previous occasions, the event was rescheduled because the preferred venue was booked, Lloyd Chancellor’s father would be in Europe and Hake Hudson was opening a restaurant on the Sunset Strip and Moxie’s boyfriend, Carlos Wenders, who stars with Hudson in the NBC Tuesday night hit sitcom, Getting Nowhere, would probably go to that instead, taking his überfamous girlfriend with him.

  Who knows what they’ll come up with this time.

  Lester, however, thinks I’m being unduly pessimistic.

  “It’s set in stone. Chancery Productions sent out invitations two days ago. They couldn’t change it now without a great deal of expense and embarrassment. Trust me.”

  Lester speaks quietly but forcefully, with the full weight of thirty years of successful power brokering. He knows how things work, and when he tells me to trust him, I do—implicitly. I didn’t need to read Dominick Dunne’s flattering Vanity Fair profile to know he is the last of the old Hollywood guard. During our first telephone conversation, he exuded the calm self-assurance of the establishment, asserting confidently that he could sell my novel to a producer. If film agenting had an aristocratic hierarchy, Lester Dedlock would be a baronet at the very least.
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br />   But reading the Vanity Fair piece didn’t hurt, of course. It was certainly nice to have my first impression reaffirmed by the most respected pop culture magazine in the country.

  Seven months later, it was reaffirmed again when Chancery Productions, helmed by the imperial Lloyd Chancellor, made an offer: ten thousand dollars to option the rights for eighteen months, then five hundred thousand to buy.

  The money, although staggering to contemplate, was nothing compared with my excitement at the thought of my book being a movie. Instantly, I could see my name in ten-foot letters gliding across a darkened screen as I imagined my characters speaking the lines I actually wrote. In ten minutes I had the entire premiere planned: who I’d invite (everyone I ever met), where I’d have it (the Ziegfeld), what I’d serve at the after-party (beer and french fries).

  The giddiness wore off sometime in the past 794 days as the deal dragged on. I thought it would all happen immediately, but Hollywood moves at a glacial pace. It took Lester and the lawyers from Arcadia studios nine months to settle the contract, a 142-page behemoth that plans for every contingency, however unlikely. The last two issues—how much I’ll get for the sixth hour of a TV movie adaptation and how much I’ll get for each episode of a half-hour sitcom spun off from the half-hour sitcom based on the movie—were both highly unlikely to happen, but I was happy to let Lester fight for the going rate. Even though Jarndyce and Jarndyce is never going to be a miniseries or spawn a spin-off, let alone two, I wanted parity, even for things that don’t exist. At the heart of every negotiation, there are a few intangibles that mean more to the other person than they do to you, and those are the things you should care about the most.

  A few months after I finally signed the contract, Variety announced Moxie Bernard’s intention to star in the lawyer vehicle, a development so surprising I told the first six people who called to congratulate me that they were crazy. But it was true. Lloyd Chancellor had lined up Moxie to star as well as co-exec produce.

  Suddenly my name was everywhere—in Variety, Entertainment Weekly, People, Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  Since then the publicity has been almost constant and people talk about Moxie’s involvement as if it were a done deal. Much to my regret, it’s not. She is merely attached, a Hollywood dodge that means she might star in the film or she might not, depending on how she feels tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

  Still, all indications seem to be good. Lloyd Chancellor is a master of hype who can effortlessly create interest and fascination in a project that’s barely in the planning stage. The party is a perfect example. He’s throwing it to capitalize on the Moxie momentum, relaunching J&J in high Hollywood style. Even though there are thirty thousand copies of my book sitting in a warehouse in Jersey, he somehow convinced my publisher to reissue the novel with a younger, sexier cover announcing, “Soon to be a major motion picture.” Gone is the Hershfeld-like pen-and-ink drawing, replaced by a neon starburst of greens, blues, pinks and yellows. The heroine, Ada Clare Jarndyce, is now bent provocatively over the desk of coworker and love interest. She has a sparkling smile and a pixie haircut that looks suspiciously like Moxie Bernard’s. As if the connection weren’t drawn clearly enough, there’s a quote from Moxie six inches above my name: “Ricki Carstone’s wit makes the law so funny, it should be illegal.”

  I’m sure she didn’t come up with the blurb herself. No doubt her crackerjack team of handlers and assistants thought of it. But the result is the same. Moxie is in. She, along with Lloyd and the executives at Arcadia, isn’t promoting my book because she likes me. They’re not founding members of the Ricki Carstone Advancement Society. No, they see a worthwhile project that could bring them success and they want to help get it off the ground. I have nothing to do with it. Never once in all the discussion about dates for the event was my calendar consulted. It’s a launch party for a book I wrote and yet my attendance was always incidental.

  Rather than being insulted, I find this callousness comforting. Only something so much bigger than myself could make me feel so irrelevant. It’s the one thing that cuts through my cynicism and makes me think, despite the incredibly long odds, that we might actually make a movie.

  Day 796

  The story of Moxie Bernard’s secret pact with the queen of England breaks just as I’m being called into a meeting with a junior partner, and by the time I’m released forty minutes later, they are two dozen messages in my in-box telling me about it. In an e-mail wildly circulated among Moxie’s friends, then leaked to the press, the planet’s most famous teen outlines their plan to make movies expounding on the dangers of teen alcoholism. The arrangement is simple: Moxie will write the scripts; the queen will produce them.

  The e-mail, almost touching in its absurdity (and lack of self-reflection), reveals not only Moxie’s frail grasp on reality but also her feeble understanding of the English language. Her spelling is deplorable, her sentence structure imperceptible and her punctuation nonexistent. All her thoughts run together in one endless jumble like experimental modernist prose. The movies, if they ever were to exist, would quickly become psychedelic classics like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Teletubbies.

  Responding to a deluge of calls for comment, Buckingham Place issues a dignified statement asserting that the queen has never met Ms. Bernard but hopes she gets the help she so clearly needs.

  The paparazzi, here and abroad, swarm over the story with their usual enthusiasm, and news programs gleefully speculate on the meaning of the megastar’s latest public debacle. For months now, they’ve been following her increasingly erratic behavior with giddiness. Moxie caught with fake ID! Throws cell phone at bouncer! Film at eleven!

  Every move she makes provokes a feeding frenzy, with the tabloid sharks only a few meters ahead of the mainstream press. Her drug problem is the best plotline on television, and grateful network execs refuse to miss a riveting second of it. Their pursuit is so single-minded and dogged, a confused young woman with large breasts and overnight success might be forgiven for thinking this is how an eighteen-year-old starlet is supposed to behave.

  Still, there’s a point where self-destruction ceases to be entertainment, and Moxie Bernard flirts with it daily. Sometimes, her exploits are so painful, I can’t bear to watch.

  And yet I can’t make myself turn away.

  The correspondents on shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood hurt me the most. They always shake their head before throwing it back to Nancy in the studio, as if they’re personally saddened by the latest development and not secretly delighted. Sometimes the anchor in the studio will ask the reporter follow-up questions before heading into the next segment—the life and miseries of Moxie Bernard reduced to banter.

  As much noise as everyone makes, there isn’t anybody who actually cares about Moxie herself. Her father is a deadbeat drunk who resurfaced six years ago when she hit it big with The Nancy Drew Files to exhort whatever he could from her. He’s since been arrested twice for trying to break into her Malibu compound. Her mother is no better. A former Olympic skating hopeful and Ice Capade star, she’s living her dreams of fortune and fame through her daughter. It’s the same old story of unfulfilled stardom and exploitation made especially salacious by her party-girl reputation. Everything Moxie does, Lola Bernard does, too, including the cocaine. A recent E! Online report identifies her old skating coach as their hookup (an inspiring story of a washed-up has-been finding an unexpected second career).

  With no one to help her but a seemingly incompetent publicist, Moxie digs herself deeper and deeper into the hole. In a follow-up e-mail to the New York Post, she provides actual dates for her meetings with Queen Elizabeth and gives the plot of their first feature.

  As I read about the young gerl [sic] from small-town Montana who winds up in a Dumpster behind a strip club in Vegas, all I ca
n think is, There’s no way in hell Moxie is going to hold it together long enough to make my party, let alone my movie.

  Day 798

  According to the Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn employee handbook, requests for vacation time must be submitted electronically on RQ456 forms at least four weeks prior to the proposed date. Because the party has been rescheduled so many times, I wait seventy-two hours to make sure Lester doesn’t call me back with yet another delay and fill out the RQ456 per policy.

  It is instantly rejected. The program won’t accept forms dated fewer than four weeks from the requested time.

  I don’t panic. HWSP is a large, inhumane company with lots of rules and regulations, but the people in the human resources department are very nice. At the bottom of the totem pole, below—impossibly—even legal secretaries, they are remarkably un-ground-down by the corporate heel on top of them. When my father had a triple bypass two years ago they arranged a four-week leave of absence with pay so I could go home and sit by his bedside. That I wound up doing all the mundane domestic tasks that my mother has spent the last thirty years unlearning—vacuuming, laundry, washing dishes, microwaving Smart Balance frozen dinners—was hardly their fault.

  Henry, the HR associate who shepherded my sabbatical through the system, shakes his head when I present him with my problem.

  “I’d like to help but requests for vacation time must be submitted at least four weeks prior to the proposed date,” he says, quoting the employee handbook verbatim. His expression is sympathetic, but there’s something vaguely passive aggressive in his automatonic repetition of company policy. Suddenly I get the feeling that he really wouldn’t like to help. “There’s nothing I can do.”