Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  She knew that the first thing he would ask her about when she walked in the door was her office—what it looked like (depressingly narrow; fluorescently lit); what was in it (an ugly metal desk with faux-walnut veneer on top, a cheap black-domed halogen floor lamp, one white function-room-style padded folding guest chair); where it was situated in relation to Jack (down the hall); the bathrooms (all the way on the other side of the floor); and “the action” (there was no action). She wished she’d just brought their digital camera to work and taken actual photographs of her new surroundings, but since she hadn’t, Julia made a list in her head as the train made its way out of the city of things to tell Peter: about what a shitty old building it was and how it had one of those shitty old creaking elevators that people packed into with palpable desperation since they never knew when—or if—another car would come again; about how the John Glom Public Relations offices were, in a word, grim—with their unimpressive and inelegant lobby (a faux-teak desk, a giant, fake dusty potted palm tree, four Danish modern armchairs with avocado bouclé cushions, and a magazine holder filled with back issues of Time, Newsweek, Us Weekly, and, inexplicably, Highlights); and about her own office, which was half the size of her old office at CTM and which had a tiny slice of window through which, if she slid herself between her desk and the wall and craned her neck around the four-drawer gunmetal steel filing cabinet, a miserable view of an airshaft and a dark alley was possible.

  But perhaps the grimmest feature of all and the one Julia had always felt separated great places to work from deeply depressing ones was the office-supply closet, which she asked her new assistant, Jonathan Leibowitz, to take her to right after she got back from her lunch with Jack. But instead of a closet, or a cabinet, or a storage unit resembling either or containing shelves of any kind, Jonathan Leibowitz led her to the small sink next to the coffeemaker in the office’s tiny makeshift kitchen. There was a drawer right next to it and he opened it. Then he stepped aside.

  She stared at him.

  “What’s this?” she said, unsure of what he was showing her.

  “The supply drawer.”

  “The supply drawer?”

  He nodded.

  She laughed.

  “What’s a supply drawer?”

  He didn’t answer—couldn’t answer—since outside of John Glom Public Relations—and her kitchen, come to think of it—such a ridiculous thing didn’t exist, and had she not been used to the extensive and unlimited selection of office supplies barely contained in an entire office-sized room at CTM—the sea of pens (Rollerball, Sharpie, felt-tipped), pads (yellow and white; standard and legal), Post-it notes and Pendaflex hanging files in every imaginable color (primary, multicolor, pastel, neon, fluorescent), and every other office supply one could ever need (pencil cup holders; Post-it note dispensers; lamps and chairs), she probably would never have asked the question in the first place.

  This was all there was, and all there would ever be here at the loser firm where washed-up has-been publicists ended up. She looked into the nearly empty drawer and registered its contents: a dusty half-filled box of blue Bic pens she thought they’d stopped making years ago, one shrink-wrapped pack of pink “While You Were Out” telephone message pads, and about a hundred little boxes of small paper clips. She grabbed as much as she could carry and went back to her office with Jonathan.

  Jack hadn’t told her much about Jonathan except that he had been there for a little over a year, but as she watched him slouching across from her and noticed the slight unevenness of his haircut which made her suspect he had cut it himself, she wondered whether he was tough enough and seasoned enough after so short a time to handle the task he was there to help her with: the Legend tour.

  “So, Jonathan, have you had much to do with Mary Ford?” she asked gently. Julia always made the mistake of being too friendly with her assistants, treating them like friends and behaving more like an older sister than a boss, and she knew she was going to do it again now. But she couldn’t help herself—so young and earnest and wide-eyed was Jonathan; so innocent and unassuming he was with his baggy concession-to-the-corporate-world khakis and his clean but faded and slightly misshapen John Lennon New York City T-shirt with the black collar and lettering and his choker of multicolored love beads; so unlike all the entitled Yale-educated, preternaturally polished, savvy and sharply dressed summer interns and assistants she had become so used to dealing with over the years at CTM.

  “Yes, actually, I have. Not directly, of course, thank God, but in a support-staff capacity.”

  Julia shifted in her cheap armless swivel chair. How refreshing for once to hear an assistant not inflate his position!

  “The person who worked here before you quit because she couldn’t take it anymore. Mary Ford almost put her in a psychiatric hospital.”

  Unprepared for and shocked by his candor, Julia laughed loudly.

  “Psychiatric hospital!”

  “Really,” Jonathan said, nodding emphatically as if he, too, had almost been put in a mental hospital. “It got pretty ugly.”

  “And by ugly you mean . . . ?”

  “Abusive. I’d definitely say she was abusive.”

  “I see.” Julia had stopped the laughing by then.

  “Same thing with the person who worked here before that,” he said, relaxing a bit and throwing his hands into the air with a Can-you-believe-it?look in his eyes. “Mary Ford was abusive to her, too.”

  “I see,” Julia said again. She licked her lips and tried to figure out what to ask—or not to ask—now. Tempted to quit while she was ahead—Did she really need to know this on her first day?—she decided to try to extract the answer to her question as surgically as she could and move on.

  “Now with Jack,” she started slowly, shifting in her chair. “Has he had the same experience with Mary?”

  Jonathan shook his head vigorously. “No. Absolutely not. His experience with Mary has actually been much much worse. If degrees of torture are quantifiable. Which I’m not sure they are. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, in fact, since I started working here—reading about American prisoners of war in Vietnam, for instance. Not to compare POWs with people who have unpleasant jobs, of course, since that would be incredibly disrespectful,” he clarified. “But as a general rule, past a certain point with both physical and emotional abuse, I’m not sure you can make a distinction between varying degrees of pain and injury. Torture is torture, it seems. To say that someone was ‘tortured a little’ seems as inaccurate and absurd as saying that someone is ‘a little bit pregnant.’”

  Finding Jonathan’s cogent analysis and philosophy and sensitivity not only impressive but immensely helpful, Julia sat forward in her chair, clasped her hands in front of her on her desk, and tried to appear calm. Yet inside she was starting to get nervous despite the fact that she had always had a remarkably high tolerance for the particular brand of suffering inflicted by the Mary Ford-level abuser. She hadn’t lasted thirteen years at CTM and earned the nickname “the Celebrity Whisperer” for nothing.

  “At first I thought that Mary Ford hated women, because of how she treated them,” Jonathan continued. “Making fun of how they dressed, saying they weren’t organized enough or smart enough or sharp enough to work with a star of her magnitude. But then whenever she deals with Jack it’s like a bloodbath. It’s like she gets some primal sense of pleasure and well-being from degrading him. I think she hates men more.”

  To follow Jonathan’s previous train of thought, it was questionable whether hate, like torture, was quantifiable either. Hate was hate, wasn’t it? Past a certain point—say, complete humiliation and psychic devastation?—it seemed pointless to attempt to create a graded continuum.

  Julia couldn’t help asking Jonathan where he had gone to school (City College), what he’d majored in (history), and what could account for his unusual fluency in psychodynamic language (both his parents were psychiatric social workers). She couldn’t wait to tell Lisa abou
t him—he was exactly the sort of person Lisa would want to hug and stare at in disbelief and wonderment as if he were a full-grown Smurf. But just as she was about to ask him twenty more questions, Jack had walked in and asked her for Patricia’s contact information, which she’d reluctantly given him. And while she could have tried to continue their conversation after Jack had left her office, she chose not to. She didn’t want to frighten Jonathan by chasing after him as he was leaving and smother him with questions on his way down in the elevator. And she also didn’t want to let on to him that she was frightened. As any flight attendant could tell you, fear—undisguised and without containment—was contagious.

  9

  By the end of her first week Julia was still waiting for the okay from Jack to contact Mary Ford directly. But he wasn’t budging.

  “I just want you to focus on the actual work, on tying up the loose ends of the launch,” he said when Julia asked him that Friday morning whether he thought she should at least call Mary and introduce herself as the new contact at the agency. “Besides, I think Mary might still be out of town.”

  “Where is she?”

  Jack scratched his chin: a tic, his “tell”—a lie. “At Sundance.”

  “Sundance?” Julia could have sworn that she’d read about Sundance months and months ago in a back issue of People magazine. “Isn’t Sundance in January?”

  He scratched his chin again. “Then it was Telluride.”

  “Telluride is over Labor Day weekend.” She knew this because Patricia had gone with a client the previous year.

  More scratching. “Cannes?”

  She had no idea when Cannes was and at this point it didn’t much matter. Jack was practically digging the skin off his face and was swiveling away from her in his chair as fast as he could.

  Julia then remembered wanting to smell the perfume, so while his back was turned she glanced discreetly at his shelves and at his desk, hoping to locate the absurd conically shaped bottle of Legend that she had seen only a color Xerox of. But it was nowhere in sight.

  Where would I hide if I were a giant glass phallus? she wondered briefly but intensely in the few short seconds before Jack swiveled back in his chair.

  Julia was meeting with Heaven Scent at lunch, and when their two-person marketing team walked into Anthony’s—which she had chosen because it was the one place she was sure she wouldn’t run into anyone from her previous professional life—at twelve-thirty and came to the table, she thought they could have been sisters—even twins—with their long streaked blond hair and their nearly identical black pantsuits and strappy sling-back stiletto sandals. She figured they were in their very early thirties—Who was she kidding? The Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen look-alikes sitting across from her were obviously in their very early twenties—and while Julia grappled with the suddenly shocking fact that she was probably old enough to be their mother, she engaged them in small talk (the unseasonably muggy weather, the unusually slow state of the cosmetics business) and advised them to bypass looking through the unwieldy menu and just order the chopped salad, the house specialty.

  She shifted in her seat, the backs of her legs sticking to the black pleather chair despite the air-conditioning in the restaurant and the dark tights she was wearing, then stared at the chalkboard above the bar where the daily specials were written. Except for her brief lunch with Jack earlier in the week, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to a restaurant for a real lunch—a lunch without high chairs and sippy cups and Cheerios and accidental squirts of ketchup—and now that she was about to have one she felt suddenly confused, displaced—Where were the chicken fingers? The grilled cheese sandwiches? The bowls of yellow macaroni and cheese? Where were the paper placemats with the shapes and the animals to color in and the little boxes of cheap shitty crayons that were never as good as Crayolas? And why, come to think of it, were chicken fingers called chicken fingers?

  She also felt sad. While it felt good to be out of the house, finally, after four years, wearing real clothes, she would have given anything to be sitting at Stanz with The Scoob, finishing his french fries for him and eating his crusts.

  “After going through the files,” Julia finally began after she and her companions ordered salads and iced teas, “I have a few questions.”

  Leeza and Alana nodded expectantly. Julia had already decided she liked them, despite their youth, spectacular figures, fabulous streaked hair, and the fact that she’d already forgotten who was who. If they hadn’t each been wearing diamond-encrusted initial necklaces around their necks, she never would have been able to tell them apart.

  “The first is about the scented blow-in cards. Which magazines are they going into and when are they starting?”

  The two girls looked at each other, then at Julia.

  “There are no scented blow-in cards,” one of them said.

  “No scented blow-in cards?” Julia blinked, incredulous. She’d never heard of such a thing! Scented blow-in cards were an absolute necessity in the launch and continued marketing of a new fragrance!

  “Okay, then,” Julia said, confused. “What about the peel-and-sniffs?”

  They looked at each other again.

  “No peel-and-sniffs,” the other one said.

  “No peel-and-sniffs either?” Julia said, then laughed nervously. “Now I bet you’re going to tell me that there are no department store spritz-blitzes scheduled.”

  They shook their heads.

  Julia sat back in her chair in disbelief while their lunch arrived.

  “Something’s wrong with the perfume,” Julia said, putting the pieces together finally.

  “It stinks,” Leeza said.

  “It really, really stinks,” Alana added.

  Julia quickly wondered whether stinkiness, like torture or hate, was quantifiable, but from the distressed looks on their faces she thought in this instance it actually could be. She stared down at her plate, at the multitude of squared cubes of ham, Swiss cheese, pepperoni, and at the big clumps of bacon and blue cheese, and she couldn’t help thinking that it was a sea of fat broken up by almost no salad greens, just like the chart Peter had made at home of her color-coded absences. When Alana started to talk she looked up expectantly.

  “Mary Ford wanted us to reproduce a fragrance that she had found years ago in Paris—a scent that a very prestigious perfumer had created just for her when she was very young and very, very beautiful,” Alana began. “All she had when she came to us, of course, was the original empty flask, since all the perfume had evaporated years before, but one of our ‘noses’—a highly trained scent expert responsible for creating perfumes, as they’re known in the business—managed to identify the components by swabbing the inside of the bottle where faint traces of the fragrance remained.

  “When the initial samples came in, she didn’t like any of them,” Alana continued. “She made us go back and try again. And again. And again. When the fifth batch of samples came in, she found one that she loved. I remember watching her as she smelled it. Her eyes closed for a few seconds and it looked like she had been transported back to that time in Paris—her youth, her beauty, the peak of her fame—which the scent clearly embodied for her. It was quite moving. Here was this tough old bird—”

  “Bitch,” Leeza interrupted.

  “Bitch,” Alana conceded, “literally moved to tears over a fragrance. There are few things as powerful as a scent memory. So it was clear from that moment on that Legend was very important to her. Not just as a promotional vehicle, or a comeback vehicle, but as a symbol. A symbol of loss—lost youth. Lost fame. Lost love.”

  Julia stared down at her salad and pushed her plate away.

  Lost appetite.

  “But as the initial sell-in of Legend to department stores continued to be very disappointing, we were forced to cut corners in the manufacturing process of the perfume.”

  “So Heaven Scent knew it had a failure on its hands and decided to try to cut its losses early,” Julia
clarified. She wanted to be sure she understood the situation correctly.

  They nodded. There was simply far less interest in the Mary Ford name and image than they’d anticipated. Retailers were either passing altogether on carrying Legend or were unwilling to give up enough of the coveted cosmetic-counter real estate space such a fragrance launch required. And though they’d tried to get out of the deal, the contract was airtight. Producing it and having a dismal sell-in to stores and a virtually guaranteed dismal sale to consumers, they learned, would actually be more cost-effective than paying the prohibitive penalties for canceling the contract.

  “Our hands were tied.”

  Back at the office, Julia paid Jack DeWack a little visit at his desk.

  “So you can stop pretending that you can’t find your one and only sample bottle of Legend.”

  He looked up at her and she put her hands on her hips but quickly took them off after becoming unnerved by the rolls of fat she felt under her fingers.

  “Jack. I know about it. That it sucks.”

  “Heaven Scent said that?”

  “No. Actually, what they said was that it stinks. Or rather, that it really, really stinks.”

  The voice from How the Grinch Stole Christmas came into her head:

  Stink.

  Stank.

  Stunk.

  He shook his head dismissively. “Matters of taste are completely subjective.”

  “Subjective? Jack. Please. I might not have seen a movie in two years, but I’m not stupid: if it’s between the Olsen twins and you, who do you think I’m going to believe?”