Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  Julia ran back into her room and called the one person in the world who would not only know what to do in a situation like this, but who would also still be awake this late at night.

  “There’s only one right answer,” Patricia said, her voice full of absolute clarity and certainty. Patricia loved nothing more than being the picture of calm and the voice of reason when everyone else was frantic. And she also loved nothing more than saving Julia from imminent failure.

  “Which is?”

  “Make damn sure there’s a fire first before you wake the beast.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because chances are it’s just a false alarm.”

  “But what if it’s not a false alarm? What if it’s a real fire and I get out and she doesn’t?”

  Julia could just see the headlines: LEGENDARY FILM ACTRESS MARY FORD DIES IN HOTEL FIRE, PUBLICIST SAVES SELF.

  “You’re panicking,” Patricia said with annoying calmness. “Why are you panicking?”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “A bad day?”

  “An unbelievably shitty day.”

  “What happened?”

  Julia knew if she stayed on the phone Patricia would get it out of her that she’d thrown up on the plane, and Julia just couldn’t bear to share that right now. Besides, she could barely hear herself think with the incessant noise of the fire alarm. So instead of answering she told Patricia only that she was going down to the lobby and that she would call her from there.

  Closing her door behind her, Julia—in her exceedingly comfortable but extremely unflattering white pajamas, with their drawstring waist and wide legs and flood-level cropped length—raced down the hallway and into the stairwell along with all the be-robed and be-slippered businessmen to find out from the front desk whether or not the hotel was on fire.

  Which, of course, it wasn’t.

  News that Patricia couldn’t help responding to when Julia called her from the lobby with her usual: “I told you so.”

  Patricia called Julia several times the next day while Julia and Mary were in Atlanta to check up on her and see how things were going, but Julia didn’t have the time or the psychic energy to describe her daily horrors. Instead, when she landed at LaGuardia the following morning, she called Peter from the back of the limousine.

  “Nu?” he said. “Where are you?”

  “I just dropped Mary Ford off at the Ansonia and now I’m on my way back to the office to debrief Jack DeWack and pick up a bunch of shit that Jonathan’s been working on while I’ve been away.”

  “Did you get the photo?”

  Though she was feeling slightly carsick from the limousine ride, she smiled. She still didn’t understand how those picture phones worked and she didn’t care. All she knew is that she’d barely be surviving without it.

  “He’s cute, isn’t he?” Peter asked, and the image of Leo on the toilet with a big grin and a thumbs-up popped into her head.

  “Please,” she said. “He’s too much.”

  “So how was Atlanta?”

  Before she could tell him about Atlanta, she had to tell him about the fire alarm going off in Washington and how Mary had greeted Julia in the morning with an eye-roll and finger-wagging for not waking her (“So, Einstein, were you just going to let me burn?”), having found out about the incident from the room service waiter who’d served her breakfast; how angry Mary was when there was no escort waiting for them curbside at National Airport despite Julia’s repeated frantic calls to American Airlines all morning (“You tell Jack to change our flights. I’m not flying American for the rest of this trip”), but how quickly she recovered when she saw that there was a proper first-class section (“Finally, a little service”) and when both male flight attendants instantly recognized her (“The gays have always loved me, don’t ask me why”) and asked for autographs (“Hold off on that call to Jack. American is quickly redeeming itself”), becoming so expansive and almost human that she actually took Julia’s hand during takeoff and held it until the plane had leveled off somewhere over West Virginia; and how, by the grace of God, there was a uniformed security person waiting for them when they landed in Atlanta who drove them on a giant golf cart-like vehicle through the airport to baggage claim and then to the limousine.

  Then she told Peter how, upon checking into the hotel, Mary was pleased to see that it was the “good Ritz-Carlton” (as if there ever could be such a thing as a bad Ritz-Carlton) in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, the one that was close to all the good shopping and which contained the only five-star restaurant in the entire city (if not in the entire state of Georgia), and how despite the newspaper’s cancellation, the five o’clock news television interview for the local NBC affiliate had gone so well (the producer on duty that afternoon had been well into her fifties, which meant, unlike most of the teenagers working at television and radio stations these days, she knew who Mary was) that Mary had barely registered, or at least not mentioned, the fact that there were at least fifty fewer people at that evening’s Macy’s signing (not even two hundred and fifty) than there had been the night before at the suburban Washington Nordstrom.

  But what Julia didn’t have time to tell him about until she got home was her late-night dinner with Mary Ford at the Ritz-Carlton’s restaurant. On the way, Mary had once again taken Julia’s hand and held it as they walked through the hotel lobby and into the dining room until they were shown to a black leather corner booth in the middle of the restaurant.

  An immediate flurry of giddy activity ensued—six waiters, all of them male, approached the table, delivering enormous leather menus with gold tassels hanging from their spines, taking their drink orders and racing back to the table with Mary’s vodka martini and Julia’s club soda with lime. Mary leaned back in the booth and let out a contented sigh.

  “Finally a civilized moment,” she said, clearly pleased by the waiters’ attention, the muffled whispers of several tables of late-night diners, and the instant effects of the vodka and vermouth.

  “You must be exhausted,” Julia said. She was exhausted, and she was thirty-five years younger than Mary.

  Mary brought her drink to her mouth, her lips pursed with such movie-star poise that it looked as if she were about to kiss the glass.

  “I am exhausted. But I like feeling exhausted. Feeling exhausted means I’m busy, and being busy means I’m still alive. The minute you stop in this business, they think you’re dead. And I may be old but I’m not dead—yet.”

  Julia smiled politely and Mary sighed again, slightly annoyed. Mary divided people into two categories—chatterboxes and clams—and Julia knew she’d pegged her as a clam the minute they met.

  “So, Einstein. Tell me about yourself.”

  Julia took a long, slow sip of her club soda to buy herself time. It was always unwise for publicists to talk about themselves, even when invited to do so.

  Mary rolled her eyes. “You’re just like my daughter, Lindsay. She never tells me anything. I bet your mother says the same thing about you, too. Am I right?”

  “That’s the least of what she says about me.”

  Julia grinned and thought about her mother then, and her father, wondered what Leo had done with them that day after school; if they’d done puzzles or watched videos, and what her mother had made him to eat—fish sticks or macaroni and cheese or pasta with butter. Leo didn’t know enough to question her cooking—to him it was just Bubbe’s food, prepared and served between kisses and hugs, and whatever it may have lacked in taste or eye appeal was made up for with love and caring. His blissful ignorance and her parents’ unconditional helpfulness during this transition made her feel like a shitty little ingrate for all the times she’d looked her mother’s gift chickens in the mouth and refused to eat them. She swore when the trip was over and she got home she’d stop complaining about the food and eat it and make a big deal about pretending to like it.

/>   Mary looked as if she had suddenly been transported back to the trenches of motherhood. “From the time she was a little girl I couldn’t get anything out of her. ‘What did you do today, Lindsay?’ I would ask. ‘Nothing,’ she would say. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Nowhere.’ ‘Who are you going out with?’ ‘Nobody.’” She picked the olive out of her glass and held it between her fingers for a second or two before popping it into her mouth. “Daughters are impossible,” she said, still chewing. “I should know, since I was an impossible one myself. Which is why I’m lucky I also have a son. Bruce. Boys are much more forgiving of their mothers than girls.”

  Julia remembered what Jack had told her that first day in his office about how neither of Mary Ford’s children spoke to her, and she wondered now if he’d been misinformed—at least about Mary’s son.

  “At least he doesn’t give interviews on Inside Edition and Access Hollywood about what a terrible mother I was. Or pose nude for Playboy.” She shook her head. “A vilda chaya, my daughter.”

  Julia smiled.

  “You know what that means?” Mary said, her eyebrow raised.

  “An animal.”

  “A wild animal,” she corrected.

  Mary leaned back in the booth, fingered the enormous but exquisitely simple diamond studs in her ears, and nodded at Julia with her chin. Despite the fact that she clearly got a charge out of Julia’s understanding her Yiddish reference, Julia could tell that talking about her daughter was upsetting.

  “Tell me about your husband, Einstein.”

  “Well,” Julia said slowly. “He’s unemployed.”

  Mary raised her eyebrow again. “I ask you to tell me what your husband is like and you tell me he’s unemployed? Sounds like a very happy marriage.”

  Julia felt her cheeks go hot with shock and embarrassment. “I don’t know why I said that,” she whispered to herself, shaking her head.

  “Yes, you do.”

  Julia stared at Mary.

  “Because you’re angry.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Of course you are. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater was supposed to support you and now he’s not. I don’t care what anyone says these days about how it doesn’t matter who earns the money. It does matter. It always has and it always will.” She picked her drink up and took another long sip. “That’s why my first marriage ended. Because I was making more money.”

  Julia shook her head. Mary was getting it all wrong: Peter had been laid off! He’d been looking and looking for another job but he hadn’t been able to find one! Not to mention the fact that he was taking care of The Scoob and the house while she was gone, which, she knew from personal experience, really was work! But Mary didn’t seem interested in her explanations.

  “How old is your little boy?”

  “Three and a half.” Julia smiled. She was just about to add that three and a half was such a great age—the talking, the independence, the blossoming of an actual person with likes (white food) and dislikes (fruits and vegetables), hopes (toys and presents) and dreams (trains, trains, and more trains). But she realized she’d thought that about every stage of Leo’s life—when he was a newborn, throughout his infancy, from formula to milk and from bottles with plastic nipples to sippy cups, from a crib to a bed, and from diapers to Pull-Ups to Bob the Builder underwear—and she was afraid that Mary would say something to quash her innocent joy the way most parents of grown children often did.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Leo.”

  “Leo the Lion,” Mary said. “An August baby.”

  “Actually, he was born in April.”

  “Then why Leo?”

  Julia was momentarily surprised by the question and didn’t quite know what to say. No one who didn’t know her or her family well had ever asked her that question before so she’d never had to come up with an answer.

  “I had a brother.” Julia paused, unsure of how to continue. “I mean, I would have had a brother. He died when I was four. His name was Leo.”

  Julia barely remembered her brother—he’d died when he was seven from a blood disease that no one had ever heard of and that she could barely pronounce—but she’d felt his presence all her life in the form of his absence from her parents’ lives. It was as if a big black hole was blown out of them, a big black hole that was wide and deep and endless and that could never be filled, no matter what she did or how hard she tried to make them happy. There were just their whispered questions once a year, but every year, on his birthday—He would have been ten now; what would he have looked like? He would have been twenty; who would he have become? It wasn’t her black hole of loss and grief but she’d lived in it nonetheless, growing up inside the lonely rooms of their quiet house with an aching desire to please—which was probably why she loved being a mother so much and why she’d ended up doing what she was doing for work: trying to satisfy people who could never be satisfied.

  “From the look on your face it’s clear that Leo is the light of your life.”

  Julia smiled even wider.

  “So show me a picture already.”

  Julia fished through her big black bag and pulled out her picture phone. Scrolling through the pictures, she finally found one of her favorites: Leo in red plaid pajamas from The Gap, sitting at his little table in the kitchen with his fork raised and his cheeks full of pancakes.

  She thought of the morning Peter had taken the picture. It was the Sunday before she’d left on her trip, and her parents had come over for brunch. This was the only way Julia felt she had ever even come close to giving her parents some semblance of true joy—having Leo and moving back to Larchmont after he was born—and she knew from what her mother had tried to express on the phone the previous week and the way they showered Leo with the kind of unconditional unchecked love and affection that they’d never been able to show her that whatever had died in both of them all those years ago had come back.

  Mary took her smart-looking rectangular black half-glasses out of her purse and put them on. She looked at the photograph of Leo and then at Julia.

  “That’s some nose on him,” she said, her eyes lingering on Julia’s nose for several uncomfortable seconds before she finally reached for one of the huge leather menus on the side of the table.

  Julia snatched the phone back and threw it into her bag.

  No wonder Mary’s children didn’t talk to her.

  She was a chaya. A vilda chaya.

  Mary, who had disappeared behind the gigantic Ritz-Carlton menu, finally came out from behind it and took her glasses off.

  “I wonder if they have a veal chop.”

  Julia, still enraged by the remark about Leo’s nose, couldn’t have cared less. But out of a sense of professional duty she glanced quickly down the list of “Steaks and Chops” on her own menu. She didn’t see one listed. Not that it mattered, of course. Ordering off the menu—a mainstay of entitled-celebrity behavior—was just one of the many things publicists were required to endure.

  Mary jutted out her chin to signal to the all-male waitstaff that she was ready to order, and when two of them—both in their mid-fifties and neither of them French—arrived at the table, pens and pads poised, Mary’s eyes sparkled. She loved nothing more than being waited on. Literally.

  “You’ve got two ravenous women here,” Mary said with charm and just a touch of sass, “one of whom needs an answer to a very important question.”

  Hunched slightly, pens and pads at the ready, they nodded eagerly in unison at her inquiry about the availability of a veal chop.

  “Yes, I’m sure we can accommodate you, Miss Ford,” the first said.

  To which the other added: “We will check for you.”

  Mary thanked them, then asked for a wine recommendation, then ordered a glass of the California merlot the first waiter had suggested. Sipping her wine while waiting for an answer to her question, Mary turned the conversation back to the topic she and Julia had most in common.

  “Ja
ck Be Nimble called me this morning. He wanted to know how things were going.”

  Grateful to be distracted from the still-painful wound of Mary’s comment about Leo’s nose, Julia was instantly annoyed at the fact that Jack had gone around her and was calling Mary directly.

  “I told him it was going as well as could be expected. Given the circumstances. That he’s an idiot.”

  And that Mary was a Borderline Personality.

  “When I signed on with John Glom Public Relations, I thought I was getting Glom himself,” Mary continued. “Glom and I go way back. He knew my first husband. That’s how old Glom is. But then Glom fobbed me off on Jack. Who advised me to go on QVC and sell a line of face cream like Victoria Principal or Tova Borgnine, God forbid. Or a line of exercise and diet products like that idiot Suzanne Somers.”

  Not knowing which one of them to believe—Jack had blamed the whole QVC idea on Mary and now she was blaming it on him!—Julia thought it safest to say nothing and just allow Mary to continue.

  “I was the one who came up with the idea of a perfume. I was the one who said we should model it on Elizabeth Taylor’s perfume.” She took a sip of wine and shook her head with obvious disapproval. “Liz Taylor. Who still thinks she’s Cleopatra on a hot tin roof. But what she’s doing up there with that crazy Michael Jackson I’ll never know.”

  Julia folded the red straw from her drink in half. She was starting to get nervous that the waiters weren’t returning fast enough for Mary with a verdict about the veal chop. But just as she turned her head to see where they were, they reappeared.

  “Yes, Miss Ford,” the first waiter said, beaming with pride and bowing slightly. “I have just talked to the chef and he tells me that there is a veal chop in the house.”

  Mary smiled and gave him something Julia knew he would never forget—a that’s-my-boy wink—then threw her head back. “Fabulous,” she purred.

  “Yes,” the second waiter added. “We are in luck.”

  “In luck?” Mary’s smile faded and she looked at him dubiously. Julia could tell something about the flippancy of the word luck in relation to food quality had unnerved her.