Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  Just as they were about to finally get down to work, Jack’s assistant, Vicky, darted into her office.

  “Meredith Baxter-Birney’s agent is on hold and he’s really upset,” she said.

  “Who’s Meredith Baxter-Birney?” Jonathan whispered.

  Julia was about to explain—Bridget Loves Bernie; Family Ties; The Betty Broderick Story—but she could tell Vicky was panicking.

  “Where’s Jack?”

  “At lunch. Not answering his cell phone.”

  “Shit.”

  Julia remembered that Jack had mentioned to her in passing the previous week that Meredith Baxter-Birney was going to be shooting an infomercial in New Jersey for a line of skin-care products she had agreed to endorse, and she suddenly wondered if a flight had been canceled or a connection missed en route from Los Angeles. But when she picked up the call, she gathered, from what she could make out from the bad cell phone connection (the agent was, of course, in his car on the freeway), that the situation was far worse than that.

  “The limousine that had been sent to pick up Ms. Baxter-Birney at Newark Airport is white.”

  Julia waited to hear whatever was to follow: that this white limousine’s engine had failed, or that this white limousine’s air conditioning didn’t work, or that this white limousine’s driver was dead. But all that followed was this: “White limousines are unacceptable because they are vulgar and cheap-looking. This requirement of travel was made clear to Mr. DeMarco in writing early on in the star’s business association with John Glom Public Relations.”

  Julia was momentarily stumped. White limousines, though ubiquitous in Hollywood, were almost nonexistent in Manhattan. In fact, she couldn’t remember whether she’d ever even seen one in the city. Not that it mattered. What did matter was that a celebrity—a client—a has-been—was in crisis and it was her job to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.

  The first thing she did was try to figure out what would cause a Manhattan-based car service to use a white limousine instead of a black one—and she quickly realized since she now read the paper every morning on the train that it must be because it was Fashion Week in New York. “Fashion Week” drew thousands of models and celebrities into the city in such volume that most limousine companies would undoubtedly have depleted their fleets of vehicles and outsourced to other car services in the tri-state area—like New Jersey—where there were tons of proms and probably few people who had an emotional and aesthetic aversion to white limousines.

  The second thing she did was call Patricia. When they’d worked down the hall from each other, she always called Patricia with important questions she couldn’t immediately answer. Even though every time she called Patricia with an important question she couldn’t immediately answer, she had to endure Patricia’s excruciatingly annoying know-it-all tone. But at this particular moment, as at others throughout her career when she was under the gun to perform, Julia couldn’t afford to think about her own ego.

  Putting Meredith Baxter-Birney’s agent back on hold, she dialed Patricia’s various numbers on the other line until she finally reached her on her cell phone. Patricia was having a simultaneous manicure-pedicure around the corner from her office, and because all extremities were being worked on, one of the young girls employed by the nail salon had to fish Patricia’s phone out of her bag when it started ringing and hold it up to her ear so she could answer it.

  Julia rolled her eyes. “Is she still holding the phone?”

  Patricia laughed. “Wait. She has to take my earring off. Otherwise I can’t hear you.”

  “I feel kind of weird talking to you while some service person is holding your cell phone against your head.”

  Patricia laughed again. “Time is money.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that right now,” Julia said. Sitting in her depressing little office with a lifetime supply of Post-it notes but without a decent pen or lamp, she realized that in a matter of days, she would once again be performing such unspeakably servile tasks for Mary Ford as the young girl in the nail salon was performing for Patricia.

  But back to the life-and-death matter at hand.

  “Do you know of a driver currently in possession of a black limousine in the vicinity of Newark Airport?”

  “Well, there’s my driver.”

  “Your driver?” Julia swallowed. “You have a driver?”

  Patricia cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  Julia felt suddenly very small, as if the chasm of professional success and advancement had grown extremely wide during the years she was home with Leo, not paying attention to the world she’d left behind. She had more in common now with Jonathan Leibowitz than with Patricia. It was the only moment she could ever remember feeling the sting of regret or doubt about the decision she’d made four years ago to quit her job, but it passed quickly.

  “It’s just a sedan, though. Not a stretch,” Patricia clarified.

  Like it mattered.

  “What’s her flight number? I’ll call Mario and have him hightail it out there right now.”

  Julia gave her the information, then sat down in her chair. Feeling both grateful for the favor and guilty for questioning Patricia’s motives when she always, in the end, came through for her, Julia thanked her.

  “Anytime.”

  “I owe you one.”

  “You owe me, like, a hundred.”

  Julia laughed, finally, too. “As soon as I get my first paycheck, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “Let me have Leo for a sleepover and we’ll call it even,” Patricia said before her cell phone cut out.

  13

  In the limousine on the way to pick up Mary for her Long Island Bloomingdale’s appearance the following morning, just blocks away from her apartment building on Seventy-second and Broadway, Julia’s cell phone rang.

  Jack.

  He was probably calling to remind her about Mary Ford’s brunch—mini bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese from Marche on Madison and Sixty-ninth Street which Julia had called ahead for and picked up twenty minutes before. Or to make sure she’d found Mary’s Specified Beverage—Fresca—the grapefruit-flavored diet drink oddly popular in the sixties which was now almost impossible to find—which she and Radu, her favorite driver from Manhattan Transport who still remembered her from when she worked at CTM, had frantically spent over an hour scouring the supermarkets for on the Upper East Side and then on the Upper West Side before finding two dusty six-packs in a D’Agostino’s on the corner of Broadway and Sixty-sixth.

  “I just wanted to give you a heads-up on something,” Jack said.

  “On what?”

  “I came clean with Mary.”

  Julia tried desperately not to slide off the long smooth car seat and into the middle of the limousine as it came to a stop. They had just pulled up in front of the Ansonia, and Radu had already jumped out and approached the doorman to ring Mary’s apartment to let her know that they were ready and waiting.

  “What does that mean, Jack?”

  “It means I told her.”

  “You told her what, exactly?”

  “Everything.”

  “You told her that her perfume sucks and that it’s destined for failure?”

  Jack was quiet. “Not in so many words, but yes, that was the message.”

  Julia felt all the blood start to drain out of her extremities. She looked out the window again and saw the doorman stepping onto the sidewalk as Mary strode out of the building toward the line of long black cars that were waiting at the curb. It was all happening in slow motion—Mary lumbering forward like some prehistoric beast from Jurassic Park and the ground shaking with every step; Julia trapped in the car behind the tinted windows with her mouth open and no way to escape.

  “Are you crazy?” she yelled into the phone. “I’m about to be stuck in a car and at an event with her for six or seven hours and this is the time you pick to finally ‘come clean’?”

  “Julia, I kept it from her as lon
g as I could. Better she finds out from me now than from some cosmetics counter clerk next week when you’re all alone with her.” He paused and sighed loudly. “She’s not going to be mad at you. You have nothing to do with any of this—you just started. It’s me she’s going to blame.”

  Mary was just feet away from the car now as Julia considered the extremely high bullshit quotient of Jack’s response—which was certainly a clever way to spin his unspeakably bad timing and which, given Mary’s propensity for “splitting,” might end up being entirely true. But when it suddenly registered that Jack was using the future tense to refer to Mary’s reaction to the bad news, she asked Jack what Mary had said when he told her.

  He paused, then lowered his voice. “I didn’t actually talk to her. I e-mailed her.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Did she write back?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked.”

  Julia stared at the phone, then folded it back up without even saying goodbye. Mary had now reached the limousine and Radu was opening the car door for her. Seeing the expression on Mary’s face and knowing what she’d be in for, stuck in the car all the way out to Long Island, Julia had a cartoon fantasy of sliding down the long backseat and jumping out the left door as Mary was coming in through the right door. But before she could imagine what would come next—running down the center strip of Broadway, then over through the park and down to Grand Central to go home—Julia felt a massive shift in the atmospheric pressure and gravitational force of the earth:

  Mary Ford was in the car.

  “Where’s that idiot Jack?” Mary said as she maneuvered the substantial bulk of her body with a surprising lack of agility into the backseat and practically onto Julia’s lap. Mary was huge—five feet eleven inches—and her once reed-thin figure had thickened considerably over the years since the peak of her fame. Which was why the exquisite stolen matte-leather Donna Karan jacket she was wearing that camouflaged her girth so brilliantly came in so handy.

  When Julia didn’t answer—couldn’t answer—was unable, despite all of her experience in situations just as miserably uncomfortable as this one, to speak any words at all—Mary snapped her fingers in her face and added:

  “Hey, genius. I asked you a question. Where’s that idiot Jack? He sent me an e-mail this morning and I have a good mind to cancel this whole tour.”

  Shocked by the radical change in Mary’s behavior, she panicked at the question: should she acknowledge the fact that she, too, considered Jack to be an idiot? Or should she sidestep the whole question of idiocy altogether and simply answer the question of where Jack was? And while she did, her mouth had opened and closed once, twice, three times, gasping for air.

  “You look like a blowfish,” Mary Ford barked, poking Julia in the tender flesh of her upper arm before mimicking her opening and closing her mouth with unabashed cruelty, “Blowfish blowfish blowfish.”

  Julia’s mouth opened and closed again—she knew that it did because she could actually feel the thin film of saliva on her lower lip drying from the breeze her blowfish motions had created—while she tried desperately to come up with a response to Mary’s question and to process the fact that compared to the first time they’d met, Mary was behaving like a madwoman. And as the limousine pulled away from the curb and squeezed its way into traffic, Julia couldn’t help thinking, yet again, how ironic it was that so many people were obsessed with the ethical treatment of and prevention of cruelty to animals when publicists—actual people—were being verbally abused and tortured every day of the week.

  “Come on, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blow Fish. Spit it out,” Mary barked again, poking and snapping.

  Julia rubbed the spot on her arm where Mary had been jabbing at it and wondered briefly whether, underneath the thin wool of her suit jacket and cashmere sweater, an ugly purple bruise was already beginning to form there.

  “I think, after your conversation, Jack assumed he wasn’t traveling with you,” she finally managed.

  Mary stared at her coolly. “Going to Long Island isn’t ‘traveling.’”

  Julia was confused: she thought Mary didn’t even want Jack to come!

  “I think he thought it was,” she said, as softly as she could.

  “Well, that’s rich,” Mary said, tossing her head back until it hit the leather headrest with a dull thump. “Jack DeMarco parsing out sentences.” She laughed bitterly, tucked a section of her shoulder-length yellow-blond hair behind her right ear, and came at Julia again before she could move away:

  “What is he now?”

  Poke.

  “A fucking—”

  Poke.

  “Linguist?”

  Poke.

  Julia winced and tried to ignore her painful flesh wound and her mounting anxiety.

  “Well . . .”

  “That was a rhetorical question, you idiot.” Mary pursed her lips in disgust. Then she addressed the row of backward-facing seats inside the limousine as if an audience had suddenly appeared there:

  “She’s an idiot and her boss is a pussy.”

  Julia’s face froze into a tense smile—the default expression publicists often resorted to when they didn’t know what to say or do—and a small, hard knot began to form between her shoulder blades and radiate down to her lower back.

  “Jack Be Nimble drops a bomb on me this morning about how my perfume is a disaster and then he disappears.” She pulled at the leather jacket and readjusted the collar of the silk blouse—also stolen—then turned to Julia.

  “An appearance somewhere on Long Island instead of in Manhattan. I should have stayed home and watched Meet the Press with that disloyal little sellout, Georgie Porgie Stephanopoulos,” Mary continued, picking at some nonexistent lint on her charcoal gray pants before looking absently out the window. “I met him once, actually. At the Kennedy Center. We were both being honored for our commitment to the Democratic Party. He’s quite short, you know.”

  Again, Julia tried to figure out how she should respond to Mary’s comment. Should she say that no, she didn’t know firsthand that George Stephanopoulos was quite short since she’d never actually met him in person although of course she’d always heard that he was and he certainly appeared to be every time she had seen him on television? Had Mary purposely mistaken the show he was on—it was This Week with George Stephanopoulos, not Meet the Press—in order to test Julia’s knowledge of the media (which was, admittedly, not as good as it used to be) or had she really made a mistake, in which case it would be unwise for Julia to correct her?—but before she could decide what to do, Mary had already returned to the subject of Jack.

  “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. I’ll beat him with his candlestick.”

  Distracted by the third instance of Mary’s nursery-rhyming that day—Wasn’t nursery-rhyming an early indication of psychosis? Or schizophrenia? And, if so, why did nursery rhymes even exist? And why were we supposed to read them to our children?—Julia started to explain—to lie, actually—about how badly Jack had felt because he couldn’t make it and how he would have come today if he could have (he hadn’t exactly asked her to cover for him but she assumed he expected her to say something other than the truth: that he’d “had enough of that hag for the week, thank you very much”), but Mary poked her one last time.

  Radu, who had such a severe crew cut and sad eyes Julia had always suspected he’d probably survived an internment camp or some other kind of extreme deprivation at one point in his life, appeared silently concerned. Though his face betrayed no emotion all day, she saw him looking at them in the rearview mirror as they made their approach to the Midtown Tunnel:

  “I hope Jack remembered to tell you to bring me my Fresca.”

  Poke.

  “And my little bagels.”

  Poke.

  “Otherwise I might have to eat you. And I wouldn’t even have to fatten you up first.”

  Poke.

  And that’s when the
y entered the tunnel.

  And everything went black.

  When Radu finally stopped in front of Julia’s house just after three o’clock on that clear blue Saturday afternoon in October, he jumped out from behind the wheel and opened the door for her, practically bowing as he held her hand and pulled her from the black hole of the backseat.

  “Never,” he whispered with discreet astonishment, “never in all my years driving have I seen anyone as mean as Miss Ford.”

  Were it not for her need to get as far away from the car—and the day—as quickly as possible, Julia wouldn’t have rushed through her teary goodbye with Radu. After all, he was the only living witness to the full extent of the torture she’d endured that day—the torture that had occurred during the four-hour round trip in the car, that is, not the torture that had occurred during the two-hour promotional appearance itself. And for that she would be eternally grateful.

  Julia walked quickly across the lawn which Peter had mowed and edged and raked with obvious care and precision, and nodded perfunctorily at Bobby Barth, their next-door neighbor who always seemed to be around when she was. Keys in hand and adhering to the “new flow” dynamic, she headed for the back door and let herself into the house—the now expertly organized well-oiled-machine of a house—the house they might have to give up—sell, unload, ditch—if Julia could not find a way to renegotiate the terms of her recent reemployment with Jack.

  I’ll understand if you have to fire me, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to travel with Mary Ford.

  Putting her keys into the little wicker basket Peter had marked Keys and dumping her shoulder bag into the large basket on the floor Peter had marked Bags, she headed for the living room, carefully sidestepping two fire trucks, three dump trucks, and what appeared to be an entire school of cheddar Goldfish carefully arranged in a nearly straight line nose-to-tailfin from the hallway to the kitchen—clues to how Leo had spent his day which she was grateful that Peter had not yet had a chance to clean up. Feeling numb from the familiar sort of exhaustion the overproduction of adrenaline had always left her with and which now, at thirty-six, she felt she might truly be too old to handle without the risk of permanent cardiac damage, she had neither the energy nor the will to change out of the clothes she’d sweated in all day like a pig and into her favorite soft mental-hospital-style white cotton flowing yoga pants she never actually used for yoga and matching oversized T-shirt that she’d bought late one night on QVC while she was pregnant and couldn’t sleep.