Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  “Yes,” he repeated, again beaming with pride. “We have a veal chop for you.”

  She made a face. “Is it fresh?”

  The waiter beamed. “Of course it is fresh.”

  “How fresh?”

  He bowed his head again, closing his eyes briefly, as if the topic of the freshness of food was sacrosanct. “Very fresh.”

  Mary seemed unconvinced. She looked at the second waiter. “What do you think?”

  “We will check again for you.”

  Mary rolled her eyes as the two raced back toward the swinging kitchen doors like the obedient terrorized flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. Only this time they returned almost instantly.

  “The chef tells me the veal chop is very fresh,” the first waiter said.

  The second waiter paused, hesitating slightly. “He says it is fresh.”

  Mary Ford turned herself in the booth to face the waiters head-on. “Well, which is it?” She looked from one waiter to the other. “Frick here,” she said, pointing at the first waiter with her thumb, “says it’s very fresh. And then Frack here,” she pointed with her other thumb, “tells me it’s just fresh.”

  “The chef told me the veal chop was just delivered this morning,” Frick said, sticking to his story.

  Frack again looked at Mary and hesitated slightly. Clearly he was going to stick to his, too. “The chef told me it’s possible the veal chop was delivered a day, maybe two days, ago. Which would still make it quite fresh.”

  “Fresh. Very fresh. Quite fresh.” Mary rolled her eyes at Julia and then up at them. “You two should get your stories straight since obviously one of you is lying.”

  Julia cringed with discomfort as the two waiters, having been duly shamed, flew back to the kitchen for the third time while several tables of diners stared. But this time when they returned—with the chef—carrying the raw veal chop in question on a platter for Mary’s approval, Julia wished she could have crawled under the table and out of the restaurant.

  Mary put her glasses on as Frick and Frack lowered the platter in front of her, but seeing it only seemed to annoy her more.

  “Well, I don’t know what I’m looking at. I’m not a goddamned butcher.” She took her glasses off, sighed loudly, and looked up at the chef with his white jacket and toque. “If you say it’s fresh, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it. What choice do I have?”

  The chef clasped his hands in front of him.

  “You could select something else from our very full menu of options,” he said in a heavy accent.

  Knowing she had annoyed and offended him and knowing it was time to make a decision already, she told him finally, as if she were doing him a great favor, that she’d take the veal chop after all.

  “Make sure it’s well done,” she said, and as the three left, she stage-whispered to Julia:

  “French men. Such big egos.”

  When they finally finished their dinner—Mary cleaning her plate and ordering a slice of key lime pie and coffee for dessert, then taking out her Claus Von Bülow bag and poking between her teeth; Julia barely making a dent in the green salad and—what else?—grilled salmon, which on any other night she would have devoured in minutes but which now, on her third full day of travel, she barely had an appetite for, given all the adrenaline coursing through her body from all the stress she was dealing with—Julia signed the check to her room and the two of them slid out of the black leather booth. As they got off the elevator and walked slowly down the long carpeted hallway toward their rooms, Mary slowed down.

  “The fragrance Legend was supposed to have faithfully reproduced was given to me by my father, you know. He took me to Paris when I was nineteen to show me where he’d been born, and while we were there he brought me to an old friend of his family’s, a very famous perfumer.”

  They continued toward their rooms, but Mary’s pace slowed even more, either from fatigue or by design: Julia could tell she wanted to have time to finish her story.

  “My father was terribly attractive. A real ladies’ man. He made my mother’s life miserable but I adored him.” She paused a moment to suck at her teeth. “You know what he did for a living?”

  Julia shook her head.

  “He sold hairbrushes. Door to door.”

  A few seconds passed in silence before Mary turned to Julia.

  “What about your parents?”

  After what Mary had said about Leo’s nose, Julia didn’t want to answer any more personal questions, but it was late and they were all alone and there seemed to be no getting around it.

  “They’re retired now,” she said protectively, “but my father was an accountant and my mother taught elementary school.”

  “So you’re like me. From humble beginnings. But ambitious.”

  Julia was surprised that Mary thought of her as ambitious. She’d never thought of herself that way, but maybe she had been, once, a long time ago, before she’d quit her job.

  Mary slowed down on the final approach to their rooms.

  “Coco Chanel said that a woman should wear perfume whenever she expects to be kissed,” Mary said. “And Heinrich Heine wrote that perfumes are the feelings of flowers. I may never be kissed again but I still wear perfume. And I still have feelings.”

  They stopped in front of Mary’s door and she put her hand on Julia’s arm and tugged lightly on her suit jacket.

  “Come in with me for a few minutes, Einstein,” she said, slipping her plastic key into the slot and opening her door. “You can help me decide what to have for breakfast and we can see if that idiot lets whatever idiot he has on get a word in edgewise this time.”

  17

  Back at work the next morning, Julia found Jack talking on the phone. When he looked up at her in his doorway and didn’t say anything or motion for her to come in, Julia felt the urge to give him the finger, but instead she continued down the hall toward Jonathan, who waved from his cubicle and followed her to her desk. The two of them barely fit in her tiny office.

  “Welcome back!” He put a giant Starbucks cup down on her desk. “I thought you’d need this.”

  Julia stared at the coffee and then at Jonathan. “I could kiss you.”

  Jonathan took a step back, laughed, then mimed drawing a line: “Boundaries!”

  She laughed, too, and when she did she realized it was the first time she’d cracked a smile in days. “You’re very thoughtful.”

  He shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s a very big deal. And not just because this stupid cup of coffee is about a quarter of your weekly salary.” She reached into her briefcase to give Jonathan the souvenirs she had brought back for him. “Here,” she said, handing him a snow globe with the U.S. Capitol inside that she’d picked up for him in the gift shop of the Hay-Adams when she was buying matching Washington Wizards basketball shirts for Peter and Leo. And then, because she still couldn’t get over his thoughtfulness, she gave him the assortment of soaps and shampoos and shower caps that she’d swiped from both hotels and that she’d planned on keeping for herself. “I thought you’d get a kick out of these.” She’d slip a ten-dollar bill into his big black messenger bag later.

  His face, already full of delight at the kitschy retro coolness of the snow globe, now registered shock at the sight of all the free miniature sample-size toiletries.

  “Wow,” he whispered, with unironic reverence. “These are so cool. And I really need shampoo.”

  Julia remembered suddenly what it was like trying to make ends meet on an assistant’s salary; what relief she used to feel when she didn’t have to pay for lunch because someone older with their own office was putting it on their expense account; how getting free tickets to a movie screening felt like winning the lottery.

  Just as Jonathan sat down and she started to tell him about the trip, Jack intercommed her. She rolled her eyes at Jonathan, picked up her coffee and dragged herself down the hall.

  “We have a situation,”
Jack said when she got to his office.

  Julia sat down in one of his guest chairs. “Now what did I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything.”

  “Because it’s not my fault Legend isn’t moving.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s Mary’s daughter, Lindsay. The one in L.A. The actress slash writer slash activist-without-a-cause.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, she found a cause. Or a cause found her. Animal rights. PETA.”

  “So? What does that have to do with Legend?”

  “It has everything to do with Legend. PETA is preparing to release a statement that names Heaven Scent Cosmetics as one of the top five violators of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), the federal law that governs the humane care, handling, treatment, and transportation of animals used in laboratories. And Lindsay Green, Mary Ford’s daughter, is spearheading this effort, using her mother’s new fragrance as the main focus of the campaign.”

  “Shit.” Julia sat back in her chair. A montage of news clips played in her head of rabid animal activists attacking women wearing fur coats with cans of red spray paint and tofu pies. The last thing she needed was for Leo and Peter and her parents to see her and Mary covered in whipped cream or covering their heads like convicts on Entertainment Tonight or in People magazine, escaping some disastrous in-store signing.

  “By tonight the broadcast media will have the story—Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition. By tomorrow the print media and the morning shows will have it. Perfect timing.”

  “Shit.” All she wanted was to get home early and start the weekend; now she felt like she’d never get there. She uncapped her pen and flipped to a clean page on her pad, then took a long sip of coffee.

  “So Heaven Scent still does product testing on animals?” she asked.

  “Apparently.”

  “But most of the big cosmetics companies have stopped testing on animals exactly because of this sort of public relations pressure and fear of being ‘outed.’”

  “So?”

  “So—I suppose we should have known that,” she said.

  “I suppose we should have,” Jack said sharply, hating, Julia knew, to be blindsided this way. “And I remember telling both of your predecessors to look into that very question when we first embarked on this project. But they were never very good at follow-through.”

  Julia thought it was strange that Jack wouldn’t have known about Heaven Scent before signing on with them—judging from how prepared he had been for the David Cassidy meeting, she couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t have found out everything there was to know about them before helping to approve a deal on Mary’s behalf—but there was no time to waste wondering why. Jack was standing up at his desk and flipping pages and opening up file folders, and she could tell by the way he pulled up his pants by the belt and readjusted himself (which he did all the time and which she hated) that a list of bulleted orders was about to come out of his mouth.

  The first thing Jack told her to do was find Mary Ford’s son, Bruce—a pediatrician with a practice in Manhattan and a clinic in the Bronx. Handing her the phone numbers for both offices, he told her to try to convince him to talk to the press, preferably on camera, to defend his mother and counteract the negative publicity this loose cannon of a half sister of his was generating.

  But when she finally did locate him at his Manhattan office and managed to get him to call her back, he politely declined to involve himself in what he called “the unseemly public battle of wills my mother and sister have always insisted on engaging in.”

  Without being able to offer up Mary Ford’s son to the media, Julia knew she had to try to talk PETA out of whatever public protests and publicity stunts they were planning. This was, she knew, an incredible and ridiculous long shot, given the fact that the PETA people were known to be zealots, but she thought she had to at least try. But after two hours of talking with the public affairs office of PETA and with the Olsen twins and Heaven Scent’s in-house counsel, Julia was shocked to go back to Jack’s office having negotiated what appeared to be a temporary truce:

  “If Mary agrees to film a public service announcement for PETA decrying the use of animals in cosmetics testing and if we agree to pull the print ad of Mary wearing the sheared beaver coat, PETA will scale back their attempts to completely disrupt her public appearances and allow the promotional efforts and store appearances for Legend to continue.”

  Jack’s mouth fell open.

  “You did what?”

  Julia repeated herself even though she knew he had heard her the first time. “Of course, there’s nothing we can do about the initial wave of negative publicity this will generate—like you said, all the entertainment shows already have the story and are planning on running it—complete with sit-down interviews with Lindsay and B-roll footage of Mary Ford from her old films—over the next few days. But we’re heading into a weekend, which is good, since that’ll slow down the news cycle and take the wind out of the story by next week.”

  “Whose idea was the PSA?”

  “Mine.”

  “Whose idea was it to scale back the protests?”

  Wasn’t it obvious?

  “Uhm, mine.”

  “I wish you’d checked with me on that first.”

  Now her mouth fell open. “Why?”

  “Because just like the United States, I don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists.”

  Julia couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

  “Jack. I just convinced the fiercest and most fanatical animal protection group in the world to put the pin back in their grenade and you wish I’d checked with you first? Why? To make sure they spelled your name right on the press release?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No. I guess I don’t.” She shrugged dramatically—her arms going up into the air and then noisily falling back down to her sides.

  “Look, Julia. This is the deal. The Legend campaign is—and was always going to be—a complete disaster. Which is why in order to fulfill the contractual obligation of our original mission—to create a successful comeback for Mary Ford—we needed to figure out a way to use Legend as a point of departure—as a means, not an end.”

  She finally got it. “You knew about Heaven Scent. That they still did animal testing.”

  He nodded.

  “And you leaked it to PETA.”

  Jack shrugged with false modesty.

  “And to Mary’s daughter,” she finished. She blinked while she tried to fit the pieces together and comprehend the big picture. “‘Separate the celebrity from the product.’ That’s what you said.”

  He smiled, deeply gratified. Clearly there were few greater pleasures for Jack DeWack than having his own words quoted back to him.

  “So that’s where it was going to end?” Julia asked, even though she didn’t have to. “That was your solution to the Mary Ford problem? To have negative publicity around Heaven Scent serve as the engine for her comeback?”

  Jack smirked. “I don’t think there was much more of a comeback in the cards for her. It was clear from the dismal sell-in of the perfume that her fan base was limited at best. That’s why I brought PETA and Mary’s daughter together—the publicity generated by the protests would have deflected attention away from the shitty perfume we couldn’t get out of producing and marketing while simultaneously directing attention toward Mary herself.”

  “But the attention directed toward Mary would be negative attention. Negative attention of the worst kind. A has-been in favor of animal cruelty. A daughter publicly attacking a mother and sabotaging her. How could that possibly have a positive outcome?”

  Jack shrugged. “There’s always the sympathy factor. The public loves an underdog. The politics of the issue would have evaporated quickly and then people would have felt sorry for Mary, getting blindsided by her daughter, whose sole purpose for embarrassing her mother was to get attention for herself.”

  Julia c
ouldn’t help but see—and even admire—the clever logic of his plan, but she had trouble accepting the abject cynicism of it.

  “What about Mary? When are we going to tell her and what are we going to tell her?”

  “I’ll call her before I leave the office tonight and tell her what’s coming. But I’m not going to tell her that I orchestrated it.” Julia could swear she sensed just the faintest twinge of disappointment in Jack that the bones of what she was sure he considered to be one of his most brilliantly manipulative scams ever would be buried in the client-relations graveyard.

  “What if she finds out? Wouldn’t it be better if she found out from you than from her daughter or some Entertainment Tonight producer?”

  “Lindsay’s not going to tell her.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because that was part of the deal. She’d get exposure—and the opportunity to attach herself to a politically-correct cause—in exchange for doing us this little favor.”

  Julia couldn’t help but bristle at the sound of her complicity in the matter.

  “It’s like I told you when you first interviewed for the job,” Jack said, reaching for the phone, which was her cue, she knew, to leave. “There are times when a has-been isn’t meant to come back. And this is one of those times.”

  But it wasn’t one of those times for Julia.

  The minute she got home for the weekend, she ran up the walk, into the house, and hunted down The Scoob, hugging him for as long as he would let her, which was longer than she expected but not as long as she wanted. Changing into her favorite pants, which felt a little looser, sitting down to dinner (Greek salads with grilled chicken on top from the take-out place around the corner), and then finally, at the end of the night, sleeping in her own bed next to Peter and The Scoob (she knew she wasn’t supposed to let him sleep in their bed but after four nights away from him she didn’t give a shit what all the books said), she knew how good a comeback could feel.