Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  Assistants: full of hate.

  “Twice married and twice divorced. First to former studio head and notorious drinker and womanizer Marvin Green: 1943 to 1957. Then to former studio head and notorious drinker and womanizer J. B. Heller: 1960 to 1967. Both splits were ugly and played out in the press.” He glanced toward the towering white cabinets that lined the hallways just outside his office door. “Clips are in the files.”

  Ex-husbands: full of hate.

  “Two children, one from each marriage: Lindsay Green and Bruce Heller. Lindsay Green, an actress slash writer slash activist-without-a-cause, lives in Los Angeles; Bruce Heller, a physician, lives here in New York. Anyway, neither one speaks to her. But at least the doctor keeps to himself. The daughter is a troublemaker, always trying to get attention.”

  Kids: full of hate.

  Julia looked up. “That’s sad.”

  Jack shrugged. “What’s sad?”

  She shrugged back. It seemed obvious.

  “That she’s alone and her children hate her?” Jack shook his head. “The only reason you’re capable of compassion is because you haven’t met her yet. Don’t feel sorry for Mary Ford. She’s a desperate client, paying for the right to suck the life out of us. You should know that by now.”

  Of course she knew that by now. She looked down at her pad and started to make a note, but the sharp sarcasm in Jack’s voice interrupted her.

  “And, umm, Julia?”

  She looked up.

  “Don’t write that down.” He sighed loudly and sat down behind his desk, even more annoyed than before. “All I need is for one of your fucking notepads to be found and every word Jack DeMarco, Jackass, has ever said—off the record—to show up on ‘Page Six.’”

  She felt the back of her throat seize up and her face redden. She was either about to apologize or tell him what he could do with this stupid job, but something—thoughts of the mortgage? the car payments? The Scoob’s upcoming preschool tuition bill?—stopped her.

  “Positive personality traits,” he continued, without even a hint of apology in his voice, half swiveling in his chair and stroking his left cheek with an open hand, as if trying to decide whether or not he needed a shave (he did): “None. Famous friends willing to do her professional favors before, during, and after the Legend launch: None. Hobbies: None.” He paused and smirked. “Unless you consider torturing me a hobby. In which case I’d say she’s an avidly devoted fanatic.” He smirked again, clearly impressed by his own cleverness. “Hyperbolic redundancy intended.”

  Julia didn’t blink.

  “Client history: Mary Ford came to us two years ago,” Jack continued. “At the time, she was doing voice-overs for Purina Cat Chow, Triscuit crackers, and Pontiac and wanted to break out of her non-status status via some sort of product line—makeup or skin-care products like Victoria Principal’s or Tova Borgnine’s. God forbid.” He paused there and shivered with mock disgust: “Beware the has-been who wants creative control over her comeback.”

  Julia could tell that at this point Jack was expecting—dying for, in fact—a reaction on her part, but, still pissed about his earlier condescension and impatience, she gave up nothing: no smile, no nod, no eye roll.

  “Failing that, she had suggested a diet-exercise-clothing-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink product line like Suzanne Somers. But I had higher hopes for Mary Ford.” He raised his chin and straightened his neck proudly, as if he truly cared about Mary Ford’s destiny beyond where that destiny could possibly take him. “My idea of a comeback is not remaking someone into the next queen of QVC or late-night infomercials. I’m not interested in that sort of transformation: going from bad to worse.”

  He stood up then, came around his desk and leaned against the edge of it—his hands back in the pockets of his stupid pleated pants—right in front of Julia. “And so, after many heated arguments and much persuasion, I finally convinced her to go in a different direction.”

  Julia looked up at him, and when she did he leaned down and whispered practically into her ear:

  “Nude mud wrestling.”

  Despite herself—and Jack, who didn’t deserve it—she laughed.

  But only briefly.

  Taken aback by how close he suddenly was to her—he had extremely blue eyes and he smelled nicer than she’d expected—at least his cologne was more expensive than his suits—and nervous that he would be able to read, upside down, what she’d written about him just moments before, she shifted in her chair and flipped to a fresh piece of paper on her yellow pad.

  “Needless to say, I was kidding about the nude mud wrestling,” he said, the not-so-subtle change in his voice a signal that he was about to revert to his previous level of professorial pomposity. “My vision for her comeback vehicle was, and still is, a fragrance. Something classic, elegant, timeless. Think Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, one of the most successful perfume launches in retail history. When Mary finally signed off on my idea, our team here began planning the branding process: who would produce the fragrance; what the fragrance would cost and what level of retailer—and thus what level of consumer—we were targeting; what message the packaging of the product and the advertising and marketing campaigns would convey.”

  He went back around to the other side of his desk and sat down, and from where she was sitting it appeared that his hands were finally out of his pockets.

  “Which brings us to where we are today,” he said. “Only a few weeks away from our launch of Legend. Much accomplished; much to be accomplished still.”

  Julia nodded, folded her arms across her chest. Despite his joke about the nude mud wrestling, she was getting rather bored and heavy-lidded just sitting there being talked at—especially since she had stopped making her notes. Her mind wandered to Leo, and she wondered what he was doing now, mid-morning, at school—Playing with trains? Playing with trucks? Playing with his peanut? She thought about what she would have been doing then, too: getting ready to pick him up, straightening the house, doing the laundry, wondering when Peter would get a job, if he would ever get a job, what would happen if he didn’t get a job for a really long time. Maybe being at work would be a good thing after all.

  When Jack took his glasses off and smiled sheepishly at her, she was a million miles away.

  “Julia.”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  “I’m sorry for being such an asshole before. Especially on your first day.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said.

  He paused before putting his glasses back on. “Sometimes the stress of the job just gets to me.”

  “Sometimes it gets to me, too,” she conceded.

  “I’m glad you understand,” he said, smiling a little too warmly. “My wife—well, she’s never really understood.”

  Julia couldn’t believe she was getting the my-wife-doesn’t-understand-me business on her first day—so she did what she always did when an “unhappily married” man complained to her about his wife and which always stopped the conversation cold: Julia expressed interest in her.

  “Does she work?”

  “Yes, she works. She’s Marketing Director for Clinique.”

  “Big job,” Julia said, impressed.

  “Yes, well, I guess when you’re making life-and-death decisions about women’s moisturizers all day long the way she does,” Peter said, with bitterness that quickly burned off to sadness, “what we do here—career resuscitation—can seem pretty inconsequential.”

  After taking Julia to lunch at his favorite restaurant, Anthony’s, the kind of old-time slightly shabby place with gigantic leather menus listing Shrimp Cocktail, Lobster Bisque, Oysters on the Half Shell, and Waldorf Salad on the left side and Pork Chops, Lamp Chops, and Steak Tartare on the right, Julia returned to her office, sat down in her chair, and felt the great grim yaw of the afternoon hours stretch out before her the way they never did in her previous work life.

  Back then, the workday had always seemed too short, as if there was never enoug
h time to do everything she needed to do. Now it seemed just the opposite: too many hours looming to fill up with stupid meaningless tasks that were going to deprive her of precious time with her Scooby-Doo.

  Pushing her chair over to her grimy little piece of window with her feet, she finally had a minute to herself to set up her desk. She put the three framed photos of Leo she’d brought with her from home next to the phone and quickly downloaded a photo she’d e-mailed to herself the night before and installed it as wallpaper on her computer. That’s when Jack appeared in her office.

  He was carrying an armload of Legend files that he proceeded to drop on her desk, one by one, ceremoniously absolving himself of all responsibility for their contents:

  Proofs from the previous month’s photo shoot (Mary Ford in a chocolate brown sheared beaver coat on loan from Bergdorf Goodman which “she stole from the photographer’s studio and which she still refuses to return despite repeated warnings from the store’s legal department”).

  The various designs for the Legend packaging (“Bottle shape is critical—tall and thin—phallic—preferred by female and male purchasers alike two-to-one over short and fat—vaginal”).

  The prospective print ads for newspapers and magazines (“‘Inside Every Woman Lives a Legend’ and ‘Every Woman is a Living Legend’—both of which Mary Ford insisted on and both of which I hate”).

  The list of retail outlets that would not stock the fragrance (“The elusive quartet: Bergdorf, Neiman’s, Barneys, and Saks”); those that would (“The non-discriminating middle: Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Hecht’s, Filene’s, Foley’s, Bullock’s, Lord & Taylor”); and those that were waiting in the wings (“The desperate masses: JCPenney, Sears, Kmart, Wal-Mart”).

  Once he’d emptied his hands and given her a rundown of what tasks she would need to tackle in the last crucial weeks—follow up with long-lead-time national magazines, trade publications, and top daily newspapers for feature stories; meet with the sales and marketing teams at Heaven Scent to finalize the proposed advertising campaign and merchandizing strategies; lock in and confirm details for media appearances, in-store appearances, and travel arrangements—he sat down in one of her two small folding vinyl guest chairs and looked around her still-bare office.

  He sniffed, pushed his glasses up his nose. “So.”

  “So,” she said back.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About the files?”

  “About the job.” He put his feet up on her desk.

  Convinced there was only one right answer—a lie, always a lie—she obliged, though without her usual vigorous attempt to be sincere. Almost seven hours had passed since she’d been home, and she was feeling the cold-turkey withdrawal from Leo in her blood and bones. She missed him even more than she thought she would, and the idea of sitting behind this new desk hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month until—and this is what she was so ashamed to admit and even to think—until Peter found a job and she could quit and stay home again—was unbearable. But she refused to give Jack DeMarco the satisfaction of watching her morph into a first-day-back-at-work crybaby puss-of-a-publicist mom.

  “I like it,” she said firmly enough to almost convince herself.

  “Really?” He sniffed again, folded his hands behind his neck. “What do you like about it?”

  “Well,” she said, trying to contain her fatigue-induced Scooby-deprived sarcasm, “all I did was fill up my stapler, turn on my computer, and eat a salad. I’m sure if you ask me tomorrow, I’ll be able to say unequivocally that I hate it.”

  He grinned. He seemed to like it, she noticed, when she was just a little bit mean to him.

  Men.

  “Oh, by the way,” Jack said. “I heard from Brian Young. David decided to go with PMK. But Brian said it was a very difficult decision. They were both very impressed with you.”

  And repelled by you.

  Jack smiled, then tilted his head, assessing her.

  “What?” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Her parents had always looked at her the same way before she was married—like she had a bird on her head—as if they were perpetually wondering where she had come from and what, if anything, would become of her.

  “Listen, I figured since we’re going to be working so closely together, I should tell you, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’m in the process of getting divorced.”

  She looked down, then away. “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, then stared at her again as if there were another bird on her head.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask me.”

  “Ask you what?” Looking across the room at him, she realized suddenly that, at some point during the day, he had combed his hair back off his forehead, just like David Cassidy.

  “Ask me why I’m getting divorced.”

  Julia stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding.”

  “I’m not asking you that.”

  “Why not? Everybody always wants to know why people split up—whose fault it was, what happened. Since we’re going to be working closely together, I figured we should just establish the facts instead of you making incorrect assumptions.”

  “Look, Jack,” Julia said, sitting up straight in her chair and reaching for her briefcase to signal that she didn’t want to continue their conversation. It had been one fucking long first day—what with the David Cassidy ambush and the lengthy Mary Ford debriefing and lunch at the poor man’s Bull and Bear and the bestowing of the files—and she didn’t think she could take any more. Especially a look through the dark cringe-inducing little peephole of Jack’s troubled personal life. “I’m really sorry that your marriage fell apart. But I assure you that I have other things on my mind right now besides what happened with your wife and why.”

  “Soon-to-be ex-wife,” Jack corrected.

  She rolled her eyes. “Soon-to-be ex-wife.”

  “That’s bullshit. You’re dying to know who left whom, who failed whom.” He paused briefly, set his jaw and pursed his lips. “It’s human. People want there to be reasons why bad things happen. That’s why random violence is such an unsettling concept: no apparent cause and effect, no apparent means of prevention.”

  Julia stared at him.

  “It’s the same with this job. Every time we pitch a has-been’s comeback, the first thing the person on the other end of the phone wants to know is why: Why did the has-been fail in the first place? Why is the has-been worthy of a reversal of misfortune? Why is this comeback attempt different from all previous comeback attempts?” He leaned back in his chair, collected his thoughts. “I mean, I’ve wanted to ask you the same question,” he continued, lightly biting the fingernail on the thumb of his left hand. “The question that I’m sure everyone has been asking you.”

  “And what question is that?” she said.

  “Why you had to come back to work. Or what took you so long to come back to work.”

  Her mouth dropped open, and stayed open.

  “It’s hard, right?” he said, swinging his feet down off her desk and planting them firmly on the floor. “Either question makes your failure implicit. That is, are you a bad mother or just lazy? It puts you on the defensive, as if you owe the questioner an answer. Which you don’t. People shouldn’t have to explain their failures.”

  Before Julia could even address that last statement—before she could even begin to argue the position that she saw her past situation as a success and was trying to see her current situation not as a permanent failure but as a “temporary setback”—Peter would find another job and when he did, things could go back to the way they’d been before, whatever that meant—Jack stood up. Coming around the side of her desk closest to the window, he looked at her, then briefly at his own reflection in the glass.

  “Which is why there’s only one rule when you work for me: Never apologize for a client’s downward trajectory. Failure is inevitable. Any magazine
editor or TV producer or agent who doesn’t understand that doesn’t deserve a response. Much less, access to that client.” He moved away from the window and rapped his knuckles three quick times on her desk as he passed it.

  She looked up at him, and, because she was finally about to take the bait on the question of his divorce, she rolled her eyes.

  “So whose fault was it?”

  He stopped, then turned.

  “Mine, of course,” he said, his face overanimated and his voice full of false pride. “I fucked up.”

  They both nodded silently as he rapped his knuckles on her desk one last time before leaving her office for the day.

  “Peaks and valleys, baby,” he said, a sudden parody of a Hollywood hotshot. “Peaks and valleys. That’s what life comes down to, in the end. Fucking geography.”

  8

  It was well after six when Julia finally managed to leave the office that first night, and by the time she made it down in the extremely slow elevator and race-walked the four blocks up and two avenues over from Thirty-eighth and Madison to Grand Central, she had missed the 6:20 p.m. train back to Larchmont and knew she would have to wait for the 6:43.

  Calling Peter as she raced through pedestrians and into the station—her big black shoulder bag heavy with the Mary Ford files and her feet hurting from yet another pair of shoes she hadn’t worn in years—she wondered what he and The Scoob had done the rest of the day. But when Peter answered the phone in barely a whisper, she knew before he had to tell her that Leo was already asleep.

  “I just carried him upstairs. He really wanted to stay up until you got home but he was so tired after his playdate with Batman that he just crashed after dinner.”

  It was a brief ride out of Manhattan to Westchester County—thirty-two minutes—though now that the moment she’d been looking forward to the entire day wasn’t going to happen—seeing her baby—she didn’t care what time she got home. Watching the landscape of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx race past in the falling dusk through the window, she felt tears slip out of the corners of her eyes before closing them. But as she got closer and closer to home, she forced herself to concentrate on what she was going to tell Peter about her first big day—how she was going to spin it so he would believe that she liked being back at work.