Ramona testified against me, of course, repeating her litany of my misdemeanors, which included detailed descriptions of my inappropriate office attire—I could swear she used the phrase “high-class tart.” Her manner was so smug and prim that I wanted to rip out her intestines and strangle her with them.
And then…at the end of the third day, they brought in their surprise witness.
Eric Witherspoon.
Who admitted, under oath, that it had been inappropriate for me, as a temproary employee, to attend major league baseball games and evenings at the ballet with associates, partners, and their respective significant others.
“You invited me to those events!” I blurted. I couldn’t take it anymore. The mediator warned me not to interrupt the witness and to observe the rules of the adjudication process. If he’d been running any more of a kangaroo court, he would have had a pouch instead of a placket at the front of his trousers.
Even my living arrangement had become an acceptable subject for scrutiny. I felt completely violated.
Finally, after Eric had been testifying against me for upwards of an hour, I was permitted the opportunity to cross-examine the witness.
“I just have one question,” I said. “Mr. Witherspoon…do you love me?”
I had caught him completely off guard.
“Of—of course I do, muppet. You know that. You know I do.” The others in the room snickered at his nickname for me.
“I have no further questions,” I told the hearing officer. What else was I going to say, anyway? All attempts to defend myself over the past three days had been denied or deflected. The adjudicator had no interest in listening to reason or common sense. He simply wanted to appear important and influential to the high-powered attorneys arguing on Newter & Spade’s behalf against a mere speck of a woman, an insignificant and now disgruntled former temporary employee who had had ideas above her lowly station. I wanted to stand up and shout, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” to the assemblage that had already determined my fate before I’d even entered the room, most particularly Ramona, who expected the prompt execution of justice as she demanded my immediate decapitation.
“Did you really have to be there today?” I asked Eric on the subway back into Brooklyn. Yes, the farce continued when my boyfriend—who had just testified against me—and I left the Department of Labor offices together.
“It was expected of me,” he replied morosely.
I shook my head, disgusted with the entire situation. “And I used to be so proud of your integrity.”
By now, Eric and I were striving like crazy to keep our professional lives separate from our personal ones. We attempted to repair the fraying threads of our relationship, reweaving them in such a way that the ever-annoying loose ends that will unravel the entire tapestry if you tug too hard at them were tucked away, hidden underneath the weft. If you looked at the underside of the fabric that represented our life together, it wasn’t especially pretty, but the errant strands were at least secured.
Two weeks after the final day of unemployment hearings, I received the adjudicator’s formal decision in the mail. Newter & Spade, with their fancy uniformed militia and their megaton cannons, had defeated the little lady armed only with a BB gun and the belief that her claim was justified. My benefits were to cease immediately. There was no point in contesting it; I’d given it my best shot, and I’d only have been setting myself up for more aggravation. Getting revenge on Newter & Spade by appealing the decision and forcing my former employers to shell out hundreds more dollars an hour in of-counsel legal expenses wasn’t worth the emotional cost to me.
I refused to let my loss ruin my entire day, so I went out, shopped for groceries, made a terrific gourmet dinner for us, and dressed up in a sexy negligee. After dinner, Eric and I curled up in front of the fireplace and made exquisite love. And, satiated and glowing, I felt as though I had transcended my feelings about his testifying against me, accepted that he was simply a cog in the nasty corporate wheel, and was ready to fully rededicate my heart to our relationship with a renewed vigor and appreciation about what was genuinely important in the grand scheme of life.
“Muppet,” Eric said, tracing his finger along the length of my bare back, sending a tickle along my spine. “We can’t do this anymore. I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“This. Living here. Together. You can’t live here anymore.”
“I can’t what?” I breathed. Did he just say what I thought I’d heard?
“They’re circling the wagons at work and Ray Spade—and others—have been coming down on me pretty hard.”
“Why? For what?”
“For living with you. Especially after the hearings and all.”
“You won, for fuck’s sake,” I said, getting up and retrieving the envelope containing the mediator’s decision. “Here,” I said, tossing it at Eric. “Glory in your Goliath-dom. What more do they want?”
“Alice, how can we show up at office functions together after this? After what you dragged the firm through?”
“What I—?” I was aghast. Livid. “You—your cronies—were the ones who decided to play hardball by challenging my right to collect unemployment.”
Eric shrugged noncommitally.
“And you wait until just after we’ve made fabulous love to spring this on me?”
He looked sheepish, uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, mup—”
“Don’t you dare call me pet names right now!” I said tensely, wrapping our blanket around my shoulders. Suddenly, I no longer wanted my own lover to see me nude. Considering he’d trampled on my vulnerability, I suppose it made sense.
“Anyway…Alice…I want you to move out. Take your time…but if you can manage it by the end of this week…I’d…appreciate it.”
A lump wedged itself in my throat. “That’s very magnanimous of you. And where do you expect me to go?”
“Can’t you move back in with your grandmother?”
“That’s pretty audacious, Eric. How do you know she didn’t take in a boarder to help her with the rent after I gave up everything to move in with you?” I rose and began walking around the apartment, pulling open drawers and removing my stuff.
“Would you like me to help you?” Eric asked. It took a lot of balls for him to act solicitous. I felt that the slick, wet spot between us wasn’t what remained of our final moments of passion, but the manifestation of Eric’s arrogance and hypocrisy.
“No, thank you,” I replied evenly. “When I needed your help, it was conspicuously unavailable.” He sat in the center of the living room, stark naked, looking at me as though he were wondering where we’d gone wrong. “I’ll make a few phone calls and try to get everything out of here tomorrow,” I told him.
After Eric went to sleep, I took the mobile phone into the bathroom, closed the door, and dialed a number. “Gram?” Good thing she was a night owl. “Is my room still available?” Her response made me laugh and cry simultaneously, loud enough to wake my slumbering, soon-to-be-former-beau. “Yes…the ‘name game’…yes…yup…he folded like a house of cards. Gram?” I sniffled. “I’m coming home.”
Chapter 9
Just when I’m wondering where my next paycheck will come from, thinking I never want to see another lawyer again, unless it’s his obituary photo, I get a call from my friend Rafe, who was cast in the national tour of a big splashy musical. He’ll be on the road for a minimum of nine months; and if he resists his natural inclination to spend all his per diems at the local watering holes along the way, he’ll return to New York next June a rich man. Well, rich enough not to have to immediately look for another day job.
Do I want to take over his temp job as an executive assistant in a market research firm, he asks me. His boss would prefer to replace him with a semi-known quantity rather than “wasting her time” (Rafe’s words) in interviewing candidates supplied by any number of agencies. What kind of a place is it, I
want to know. He tells me the company studies trends in advertising and marketing and how they affect consumers. “Huh?” I say. “My boss’s beat is fashion,” Rafe says, then adds “I think you’ll like it. Besides, you won’t be working for lawyers.”
At this point, cleaning sewers with my bare hands would be preferable, so I agree to meet his boss the following afternoon.
I arrive at the Association of Research Marketing and Promotion Industrial Trends fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. The receptionist, who pokes her head up from a Lisa Scot-toline thriller when I approach her station, is kind, hangs up my coat for me, and ushers me into the conference room, where I am offered a choice of soft drinks or Perrier. I’m hoping there might be a fancy cookie or two on hand as well, but the paneled sanctum looks like it has never seen so much as a donut crumb, let alone the residue from a Mint Milano.
Rafe enters the conference room and introduces me to his boss. Claire Hunt is an impeccably groomed and tailored Woman of a Certain Age, given, I learn, to wearing jackets in Nancy-Reagan-red that match her lipstick and perfectly set off her fair Irish complexion and short, expensively coiffed and highlighted platinum hair. Uh-oh, short hair, I think, aware of my continuing streak of bad luck working for female bosses with short hair and boobs smaller than a B-cup. But recalling Gram’s perennial platitudes, I remind myself not to judge a book by its cover. On the other hand, Gram also counsels that “experience is the best teacher.” I try to forget the dueling truisms in my brain and concentrate instead on a time-honored acting exercise by working on “being in the moment.”
Ms. Hunt and I continue to size up one another. Her heels, unlike my stilettos, are just a half inch higher than “sensible,” communicating that she is a respectable business-woman who understands the fashion business like the back of her only slightly liver-spotted hand, but won’t kowtow to its fickle whims. I catch her looking at my pumps and wonder if she thinks impractical footwear is the sign of an impractical mind.
Ms. Hunt makes a point of telling me that she cut her corporate teeth at a time when women rarely made vice president, and rather than trumpet her femaleness, she prefers to keep her identity, as presented to the outside world, couched in non-gender-specificity. While her four brothers and sisters call her “Claire,” in business she is known as “C. Hunt.”
She seems impressed by my résumé, by the schools I attended, and by the fact that my heels, like my hosiery, are pale and therefore add the illusion of height to my relatively diminutive frame. Okay, so I had her pinned wrong on why she was looking at my feet. She asks me where I got my robin’s-egg-blue wool bouclé suit and looks at me as though her offer of employment is conditional upon my response. When I confess that I don’t remember (recalling perfectly that I’d bought it in a thrift shop), she looks displeased. Rafe, who has been in the room the entire time, looks disappointed in me.
I’m gratified that Ms. Hunt doesn’t see fit to give me a typing test and is assuming from my résumé that I can handle whatever she’s planning to throw at me between next week and the time Rafe returns to New York. She is operating on the assumption that Rafe will actually want his old day job back. I know for a fact he won’t, but his spending tendencies on the road will more than likely boomerang him right back to the desk outside her windowed corner office.
Rafe excuses himself, and I figure this is where the interview will finally get tough, but in fact Ms. Hunt seems to just want to chew the fat about fashion for a while. She throws some names at me, which I recognize only because I’ve read them in Vogue. How I recall that Tom Ford, currently designing for the house of Yves St. Laurent, used to be at Gucci is a Zen-like miracle. The words just come to me. She waxes rhapsodic about Barneys and I nod and smile, as though I actually shop there and am so intimately familiar with their exorbitantly priced merchandise that I have several Visa receipts from the store stuffed in my wallet. Not.
“Do you think that people are put off by a Barneys ad for a five-hundred-dollar hat when the ad is placed next to a story about starving children in Rwanda?” she asks me. Is there a right answer to this question, I wonder. I’m not even sure exactly what her company does and whose interests they represent. I am, however, saved by the buzzer. Rafe intercoms Ms. Hunt and tells her that there’s an important call on her line.
Ms. Hunt looks grave. Her expression makes her unlined lips look thinner, if that is even possible. She stands and smoothes out the nonexistent creases in her jungle red blazer. “I need to take this in my office,” she says, extending her hand to me. “Be here at half past nine on Monday morning. Your hours are nine-thirty to five-thirty, with one hour for lunch, for which you will not be paid. You’ll receive an hourly wage. It was twenty-three dollars you asked for, wasn’t it? Rafe will give you the paperwork you need to complete and he’ll submit it to payroll.”
End of interview. Ms. Hunt leaves the conference room without another word or a look back in my direction to gauge my reaction to her offer of employment. I feel like I should be tremendously relieved, but for some reason, I am not. It seemed too easy, somehow. Where were the hoops of fire? I was certainly pleased that she handily accepted my bid for twenty-three dollars per hour. And because I nailed this job on my own without the assistance of a placement counselor, at least I wouldn’t be tithing part of my salary to Turbo Temps. I realized that I hadn’t asked Ms. Hunt about benefits or vacation time. And neither of us had brought up the subject of my acting career. Ms. Hunt had appeared sanguine about losing Rafe to a performing job. So I hoped she wouldn’t get upset if I went to auditions, but something about her persona gave me the distinct impression that she was a woman who didn’t like to feel “betrayed.”
Dorian, Isabel, and I met at McHales for a drink at the end of the day. Dorian was on his third Beefeater martini. I sidled up next to him in the booth. “I always thought drinking men lost their looks, but I was plainly mistaken,” I purred, invoking a famous line from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It was true. Tall and blond, over six feet with sparkling blue eyes, he was the ultimate alpha male. No matter how many martinis Dorian consumed, he never appeared drunk, never gained an ounce, and didn’t have so much as a crow’s foot or a busted blood vessel anywhere on his handsome, open face.
Izzy took a sip of her lite beer and lit up. “Since when do you smoke?” I asked her. She’d highlighted her blond hair and cut it even shorter, and now she looked like a cross between Meg Ryan and the Little Prince.
“I only smoke when I drink.”
I waved over the waitress and asked for a vodka tonic.
“Anybody hungry?” she asked us.
“I already ate,” Dorian said a bit sheepishly. “There’s a Hugh Grant shoot over by Worldwide Plaza.”
“Mozzarella sticks, please,” Izzy said to the waitress.
“I’ll share ’em with her.” The waitress looked discontented with our meager order. “So,” I beamed, as she left the table, “I got the job.”
“Did you ever think you wouldn’t?” Dorian asked.
“I mean, Rafe wouldn’t suggest you as his replacement if he thought you wouldn’t get it,” Izzy posited.
“At least I won’t be working for lawyers. Not for another nine months, anyway. It feels like a vacation. Or at least time off for good behavior.”
“Well, I’ve certainly had it with those lunatics,” Izzy commiserated. You think in the graveyard shift you don’t have to deal with them,” she said of her current middle-of-the-night word processing job at a white-shoe firm. “But I’ve got them in my ear, and they drone on…and on…and onnn. I swear, most of them just like the sound of their own voices. And you know, when you call over the supervisor because you can’t understand what the hell they’re saying through the Dictaphone, she gets mad at you—like you’ve interrupted her sleep or something.”
“What we really need to do is get out of these survival jobs and take charge of our lives,” I said. “And not expect some casting director to come knocking on
our doors, offering a chance at salvation.”
“Alice is right,” Dorian agreed. “At the risk of sounding like Mickey Rooney talking to two Judy Garlands, we should put on a show together. Something that really showcases the three of us. Anyone got an uncle with a barn?”
“My uncle Earwax has a loft space near Canal Street. That’s where his office is. In one of those belle époque buildings with the high tin ceilings. The acoustics are fabulous. In fact, when I worked for him, his partner’s apoplectic temper tantrums carried all the way to Cleveland.”
“Let’s go for it!” Izzy exclaimed, waving her cigarette in the air. I ducked to avoid it making contact with my left cheek. “I mean, the way my career is going I’ll be old enough to play someone’s grandmother before I get an agent.”
“Puh-lease. Both of you don’t yet look thirty,” Dorian said affably.
Izzy laughed. “I love you, but I think you need your eyes checked for myopia.”
Those two had a way of getting me revved up. “Okay, each of us has to hit the books when we get home tonight and find something with great parts for all three of us; something that won’t cost a fortune to self-produce. Check dead playwrights first. The deader the better. We won’t have to pay them any royalties.”
We ordered another round of drinks to celebrate our new brainstorm. “All for one and one for all!” Dorian proclaimed as we bumped glasses.
“I guess that makes us Musketeer Productions,” I said.
“Only if I can be Aramis,” Dorian insisted. “It’s my favorite cologne.”
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