by Laura Zigman
He stood up, readjusted his pants, and put his hands on his hips in frustration. “Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do about it? Manipulate time and space? Yes, Legend is not among the finest fragrances of the modern world. I know that. But I also know we’re all contractually obligated to go through with our ends of the deal—Heaven Scent produced it; now we have to promote it—so that’s what we have to do.”
Julia glared at him. “You should have told me.”
He glared back. “Why? So you could turn down the job when I offered it to you? In case you couldn’t tell, I was kind of desperate.”
Unmoved, she shook her head in disgust at his dishonest behavior. Which was ridiculous, given the fact that he was a publicist and was therefore paid to lie.
“What does Mary Ford think about all this?”
Jack sat back in his chair. “She doesn’t know.”
“Mary Ford doesn’t know that the perfume about to start shipping to stores is not the one she approved?”
He scratched his chin violently. “We need her to help promote the fragrance. Without her cooperation—without personal appearances in department stores that are carrying it—this would be a complete disaster. We’d be dead in the water.”
While his reasoning made some sense, Julia still didn’t understand why he wouldn’t have wanted Mary Ford to know that it was the perfume company’s fault for producing an inferior fragrance, not his. But there were bigger questions she needed answers to.
“As for informing her about the fact that the top tier of retailers passed on carrying the fragrance and the fact that we’re not using most of the usual promotional tools in our marketing campaign,” Jack began, “I plan on discussing those issues with her when the time is right.”
Whenever that would be. Julia rolled her eyes, then sat down across the desk from him. “You should have told me that the legend behind Legend had driven both my predecessors to quit. And you should have told me that the perfume I was hired to promote was guaranteed to fail.”
“You weren’t hired to promote a perfume. You were hired to promote a person: Mary Ford.”
“I thought that was the whole point here,” Julia said. “That they’re one and the same: Mary Ford and her fragrance. Connect the dots—make the sale. Make the sale—make the comeback.”
Jack shook his head. “There’s always a separation between the celebrity and their product. There has to be. You always have to factor in unforeseen circumstances like this. That way, if you have to, you can separate the two; distance the former from the latter.”
Julia blinked rapidly, trying to ignore the visual that had just popped into her head—Mary Ford in full astronaut gear, orbiting the earth in her capsule of preserved fame that had separated itself from the original rocket ship that had delivered her into space—but in an instant it was gone and all there was in front of her was Jack, looking exhausted, and defeated, and very, very nervous. He stared at her for a few seconds and she could tell he was wondering whether she would say the two words she knew he’d heard so often before, the two words she knew he’d come to dread hearing most in the entire English language:
I quit.
But she didn’t.
She couldn’t. She hadn’t even gotten her first check yet. It was up to her to keep her family afloat and she had no choice but to try to make the best of a bad situation.
“Listen, Jack. All I really want to do is smell the perfume already.”
He swiveled for a few more seconds before reaching down into the credenza behind him, past a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a framed photograph of him and his wife taken, Julia could tell from the comparative thinness of Jack’s face and the fullness of his hair, years before in front of an unknown but spectacular body of water, and handed her the prototype of the phallic flask.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
Back in her office with Jonathan, she closed the door and they smelled it.
He looked at her and she looked at him.
“Unlike torture and hate,” she started.
“It seems stinkiness is quantifiable,” he finished.
10
The following week Jack finally signed off on the big meeting.
“There’s a photo shoot for New York magazine’s ‘The Return of a Legend’ story tomorrow morning,” he said, hands in the pockets of yet another pair of cheap pleated pants. “It’s set for ten, which means eleven. Or twelve, depending on how long it takes Mary Ford’s makeup people to plaster her face on. So get there at nine-thirty to be safe. Any questions?”
“No.”
Not for him, anyway.
But of course she did have a question, a very important question: what the hell was she going to wear? On the train ride home through the darkness of the underground station and tunnels, Julia envisioned the quilted storage bag full of her old clothes that was in the back of the guest room closet—the clothes that she’d had cleaned and which she’d then carefully stored in the slow, quiet weeks before Leo was born.
She remembered those clothes now with a strange, unexpected longing—she loved those clothes. Those expensively tailored suits and skirts and pants and collarless jackets under which during the day she used to wear simple white T-shirts, the sea of thin wool suits in black and navy and khaki that were the mainstay of her daily wardrobe in her past life at CTM. They used to hang in the closet of her old apartment separated by color so that she could, on any given day, for any given occasion—client meetings, client lunches, daytime client appearances and promotional events, nighttime film premieres—find something to wear in minutes.
Thinking back to the unencumbered ease of those days—the days before Leo when she would wake up and drink her coffee and read the three newspapers that were delivered to her apartment door every morning without interruption; when she would take a shower and dry her hair and put on makeup without interruption; when she would slip her clothes on over her hips and thighs and zip them, snap them, button them, and tuck them in without radical physical contortions or mental anguish—made her fully realize, maybe even for the first time, how much her life had really changed.
As the train slowed down for the Larchmont stop, Julia knew that it would be pointless to pull out that quilted storage bag since none of the clothes contained inside—all size 6—would clear her ankles and knees, let alone her front and back sides, so she forced herself to turn her attention to her current wardrobe, such as it was, which she knew would end up in a huge pile on the floor after dinner, each item tried on and rejected in a tear-filled haze of frustration.
She wished she’d been able to shop during lunch for something to wear, but because Jack had told her about the shoot so late in the day, there hadn’t been time. And she also wished that there had been time to watch some of Mary Ford’s old movies before meeting her, but as she walked home from the train station as fast as she could, Julia forced herself to accept the fact that their all-important first encounter would be far from ideal. But racing across the lawn toward the house, she hardly cared anymore. She was just dying to see her boys.
Julia let herself in through the front door and immediately saw that the house looked neater than it had looked since she’d started working. Leo had gotten out of preschool at one o’clock, and, having been home with Peter ever since, they’d had plenty of time to make a huge mess the way they usually did.
But unlike before, during the initial phase of their “transition,” toys were not all over the living room and the big plastic red Flintstones-like car that Leo loved to drive himself around in all over the house, using his feet to move and steer and stop, was not parked in the middle of the foyer.
Instead, the living room was shockingly neat and straightened, with toys and videos and trains stored in places she’d never known existed and organized in ways she’d never thought possible.
Speechless, she took off her jacket and turned to hang it and her shoulder bag up on the hook in
the vestibule.
But the hooks were gone.
So was the small table on which they normally unloaded keys, change, wallets, cell phones, and mail, and their accumulation of crap—trains, Matchbox cars, half-eaten sandwiches, partially sucked lollypops—upon walking in the door. Still holding her jacket and her bag, she walked slowly across the hallway toward the kitchen the way she always did so she wouldn’t trip over Legos and Lincoln Logs. But tonight the foyer was a completely clear expanse of floor, which, by the way, had even been vacuumed.
And tonight there was an unusual smell coming from the kitchen: Dinner.
Leo, who had been sitting at the kitchen table eating Pirate’s Booty from a bowl instead of straight out of the bag, slid off his chair and ran to her. Hugging her thigh, he wiped all the powdered white cheddar cheese puff residue onto her skirt, leaving a thick yellowish smear. Had she not missed him so much and had she not already known that the skirt was not in the running for tomorrow’s wardrobe competition, she might have panicked, but instead she lifted him up and held him as tightly as she could, registering again the weird fact that Pirate’s Booty, unlike Cheetos, always smelled vaguely like vomit.
Peter greeted her with a kiss and a glass of Diet Coke with ice. She looked at it, and then at him, in shock. Gone were his khakis and button-down shirt—instead, he was wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt over which he wore the apron that said L’Chaim! which her parents had given him the previous Hanukkah when they’d come over with a plate of her mother’s inedible potato latkes—and he seemed to be vibrating with energy and excitement. As he slow-poured himself a glass of Diet Coke over ice, too—the glass tilted, the speed of the pouring controlled in order to preserve as much of the carbonation as possible (he had worked as a bartender during his final year of business school and had been fanatical ever since about the correct way to pour carbonated drinks)—she noticed he hadn’t shaved. It was the first time since his unemployment that she’d felt a pang of concern about his mental state, but when he pointed to the oven with a huge smile on his stubble-covered face, she forgot all about him.
“Chicken potpie,” he said. “Your favorite. I found a recipe.”
“You made chicken potpie from scratch? For me?” Her mouth dropped open.
“I wanted to do something special. It’s been a stressful time for you, going back to work.”
She was surprised to find herself suddenly blinking back tears.
He led her to her chair at the kitchen table and sat her down in it before returning to the oven. Sipping her drink and watching Peter check the Martha Stewart cookbook he’d slipped into a Lucite holder that someone had given them but that they’d never used, she reached out for Leo and pulled him onto her lap. She closed her eyes and buried her nose in his still-damp hair, wondering how Peter had managed to give Leo a bath and make dinner.
“You smell so good,” she said.
“Daddy washed my hair.”
“He did?”
“With watermelon shampoo.”
“Where did Daddy get watermelon shampoo?”
“At the big store.”
“What big store?”
“The big store where we get the big snacks.” Leo pointed to a box on the floor by the pantry that contained a thirty-six count of little individual Cheez-It packages.
“So you went to Costco,” Julia said, putting it together.
“With Bubbe and Papa.”
“With Bubbe and Papa?”
Leo nodded. “And we had lunch there, too. Pizza.”
Julia tried to smile but she couldn’t help feeling insanely jealous. While she was at work all day, dealing with idiotic Jack DeMarco, they all got to go to Costco! It didn’t seem fair. But then, nothing did when it came to their current situation. If she hadn’t been so distracted by the smells coming from the oven, she might have said so.
“What happened to the coat hooks?” she said instead over Leo’s head and over the din of Peter setting out plates, tossing the salad, and opening and closing the oven. “And the entry table?”
Peter beamed. “I moved them.”
Julia sucked on an ice cube and slid her hands up Leo’s shirt and ran them over his soft, chubby stomach and hips. “Why?”
“I’m trying to reconfigure the flow of the house so that things move more smoothly.” He motioned for her to follow him to the back door area. “By shifting the point of entry from the front door to the back—moving the coat hooks, moving the table, and, in essence, creating a mudroom here instead of there—we’re able to free up the space in the vestibule and move everything now to the rear of the house. Backpacks, lunchboxes, shoes, boots, sneakers, raincoats, umbrellas.”
“Why?” she asked again, like a three-year-old.
“Because that way, like I said, you improve flow.” He began moving his arms in a synchronized swirling motion as if to explain, illustrate, and clarify.
“I hadn’t realized we were having a problem with flow before.”
He nodded, as if it were something that had been on his mind and troubling him for quite some time. “We had a big problem with flow,” he said, without a trace of irony. “A big, big problem.”
“Then why did you, a professional—and pathological—organizer, wait so long to get us organized?”
He shrugged. “When I was working I didn’t have the time.”
She nodded. She’d meant after he’d stopped working, but she didn’t want to ruin the flow of their conversation.
“I also reconfigured the laundry sorting system.”
Her eyes immediately went toward the ceiling to the second floor, where the washer and dryer were.
“What laundry sorting system?”
“No more individual hampers in Leo’s room and in our room. Now there’s one centralized sorting center in the laundry room itself. This eliminates a step—the transporting of unsorted laundry to the laundry room from the hampers themselves—and allows the laundry to simply be sorted at the same time you deposit it in the three wicker baskets I’ve put in there and labeled. Again,” he said, his arms in a synchronized reverse swirling motion, “flow is improved.”
Peter stopped talking about flow and took his potpie out of the oven, brought it over to the table, and set it down between them. Then he took the oven mitts off his hands, sat down, and unfolded his napkin onto his lap.
They both stared at the perfect Jiffy Pop-like poof of the potpie, shiny with brush strokes of a professional-looking egg wash, without speaking.
“It smells incredible,” she whispered, knowing the crust alone probably contained at least one stick of butter (“Actually, it contains two sticks of butter,” Peter informed her when she asked), and then added reverentially, “It’s so beautiful I wish we didn’t have to ruin it by eating it.”
“I know. I kind of want to take a picture of it.”
“We should.”
Peter laughed. “No. That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not.” Julia slid Leo off her lap, walked him to the train table in the living room, and came back with the digital camera. She took two pictures—one of the potpie with Peter grinning in the background and one close-up of the potpie alone in all its perfectly formed poofed glory—then sat back down. Peter blushed with pride, and relief (she knew he was glad she’d taken the pictures), then picked up the knife and served them each a large wedge.
For a minute neither of them spoke—so delicious was the rosemary-flecked crust, the thick jagged pieces of roasted chicken, the cubes of Yukon Gold potatoes with the skin still on, and the savory gravy. She knew they were thinking the same thing—When was the last time they’d cooked a decent dinner, midweek, just for themselves? Had they ever cooked a decent dinner, midweek, just for themselves? No wonder people cooked with so much butter: it made everything taste good—and when they both finally looked up from their plates, their eyes met. Julia reached out across the table for Peter’s hand and squeezed it tenderly in wordless gratitude (her mouth was full) be
fore retracting it so she could serve them each seconds.
After giving Peter a quick overview of her day and telling him about the Big Event tomorrow, she asked him about his day.
“When I dropped Leo off at school, there was a sign-up sheet looking for volunteers.”
“Volunteers for what?” She’d only just left and already she felt completely out of the preschool loop.
“For a Halloween party, a holiday bake sale, and a potluck dinner.”
Having cleaned her plate twice, she still couldn’t help ogling what was left of the potpie. She was tempted to pick a chunk of crust off the pie but restrained herself when she remembered that it was going to be hard enough trying to look presentable the next morning without gaining another two pounds of butter weight overnight.
“So I signed up.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Confused and overwhelmed—Costume making? Cookie and casserole baking?—Julia shook her head. “Why did you sign me up for everything? You know I don’t have time to do things like that now.”
Peter put his glass down and lowered his eyes. “I didn’t sign you up. I signed myself up.”
Julia nodded and forced a smile. “Oh.”
“I want to get involved,” he said. “I want to throw myself into it. I figured while I’ve still got the time I could do something useful.”
She continued nodding and smiling as the back of her throat tightened.
“They’re very disorganized, you know,” Peter said, clearly feeling a need to explain. “There’s no centralized planning committee, and nobody’s really in charge.” He moved his arms around again in a synchronized swirling motion. “There’s no flow.”
He reached for her hand this time and when he did she thought of little sinks and toilets and smocks and cubbies and snacks. This was Leo’s first year at preschool—a preschool she had picked out after visiting seven preschools, a preschool she had planned on being involved with and had been involved with for Leo’s first two weeks there—packing his first lunch, making sure he was toilet trained (or that he at least knew what being toilet trained meant). It was the new beginning she had been looking forward to feeling a part of after the previous year’s miserable experience, when they’d sent Leo to the highly regarded and difficult-to-get-into “educational playgroup” at the home of Gerte Hallstrom, whom she and Peter had almost instantly referred to as “the Dour Swede” since she never had anything good to say at pick-up. (“Leo wouldn’t wear his mittens.” “Leo didn’t want to sing during circle time.” “Leo didn’t want to eat the big, huge glutinous hunk of flavorless wheat bread we baked this morning.”)