by Laura Zigman
“You’ve got more bad news for me, don’t you, Einstein?” Mary said.
Julia nodded, then sighed.
“Well,” she poked. “Spit it out already.”
So she did.
And after she did they looked at each other and neither of them spoke.
Mary leaned over to Nick and politely asked him to sit up front next to the driver for a few minutes so she and Julia could talk. And once he’d moved she looked out into the forest at the towering canopy of overhanging trees and thick grass—vegetation which, Julia imagined, was probably a spectacularly lush shade of green in natural daylight.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said.
“What are you sorry about?” Mary snapped. “You’re not responsible for my daughter’s behavior.”
“I can fix this.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, I can. When I get back to the office I’ll have a strategy and a plan in place. If we go on the offensive we can at least create a distraction with a counterattack.”
But Mary shook her head slowly.
“Don’t bother.”
Julia sat forward again and began to talk rapidly about what could be done to spin the story in their favor—interviews Mary could grant; a press release they could issue disputing Lindsay Green’s credibility; maybe even this time getting her son, Bruce, to finally speak out publicly on her behalf—but Mary put her hand up.
“I’ve had enough,” she said wearily.
Julia was shocked to hear the deep defeat in Mary’s voice.
“But we’ve come so far,” Julia pleaded. “We can’t just give up now.”
“Yes, we can. There’s no point trying to win a game I went in losing.”
Julia thought about all the time and energy Mary had put into the Legend campaign long before she’d even started working for Jack—all the photo shoots and marketing meetings with Heaven Scent—and all the time and energy they had both put into it in the last months, especially the last two weeks of travel. After all Julia had been through—watching Mary steal the clothes; enduring her verbal abuse in the limousine back from Long Island; that first shuttle to Washington and the veal chop and all those evenings spent in Mary’s hotel room watching Charlie Rose and helping her decide what to fill out on her breakfast room-service card when she could have been home with Leo—and after all the humiliation Mary had suffered—the inferior fragrance, the dwindling crowds, the PETA protests, and the Minnie Mouse Suite—she couldn’t believe that Mary was willing to walk away in defeat.
“But you’re letting Jack win,” she argued.
“I couldn’t care less about Jack DeMarco.”
“Then you’re letting Lindsay win.”
“Maybe she deserves to win after everything I’ve put her through.”
Mary ran her hand slowly through her hair and looked out at the animals. The family of monkeys preened each other and then huddled together as if in a group hug. As she stared she was collecting her thoughts, a lifetime of them, Julia knew—memories and incidents flashing behind her eyes like reels of home movies.
“I traded what should have been most precious to me—my children, my family—not for a wilderness of monkeys, but for just one stupid monkey. Fame. As short-lived and fleeting and fickle as it always was.”
Julia stared at Mary, trying to place the reference, and when Mary realized that Julia had no idea what she was talking about, she shook her head.
“That stupid college of yours. Allowing you to graduate without making The Merchant of Venice required reading.”
“Sorry,” Julia said reflexively.
Mary shook her head again. “Have you ever heard of Shylock?”
Of course she had. She’d actually even read The Merchant of Venice, though clearly she’d forgotten it since the focus of the college seminar she’d taken—“Shakespeare from a Feminist Perspective”—was on feminism, not Shakespeare.
“Well, in the play, Shylock has a daughter who he loves more than anything in the world and he gives her a ring—the ring that had been her mother’s. When he finds out that his daughter has married a Christian and traded the ring for some stupid monkey, he’s devastated.
“‘That ring!’” Mary bellowed, with great theatricality. “‘I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys!’”
Julia nodded silently.
“I screwed up, Einstein. Everything—my acting career, my films, my fame, my fortune—it all came before my family.”
“So you made some mistakes. Some errors in judgment. Every parent does.”
“You don’t understand. Your Leo is only a baby. He still loves you more than anything in the world. My daughter has spent most of her life trying to prove to me and everyone else in the world what a bad mother I was. And she has plenty of evidence to support her case.”
Julia tried to make out the expression in Mary’s eyes, but moonlight, artificial or otherwise, wasn’t intended to illuminate such subtleties. All she could see clearly was that Mary’s head was down, and that she was twisting the beautiful gem-encrusted yellow-gold stack of rings on her left hand.
“When I came here, years ago, with the children, it was terribly hot. Lindsay and Bruce were eating soft ice cream cones one afternoon and it was dripping down their chins and onto their shirts. What a mess.” She forced a smile and tried to laugh. “I remember moving away from them into the shade for just an instant and looking around for restroom signs so I could get them cleaned up—it’s not like today when mothers carry wipes everywhere they go—and when I looked back they were gone. Just like that. It took me a few seconds to realize in horror that they’d melted into the crowd, but once I did I screamed bloody murder.”
Julia blinked. That was her worst nightmare, losing Leo in a mall, or on a beach, or anywhere at all.
“A guard took me to a nearby kiosk and within minutes they’d found them. They were both terrified. When I grabbed them and held them, Bruce clung to me, but Lindsay didn’t hug me back. She wouldn’t forgive me. But the guard tried to make me feel better. He told me, Julia, that in Disney World, there are no lost children. There are only lost parents. When children get separated from their family, their biggest fear besides actually being lost is that their parents will be angry with them when they get found. They shift the blame to the parents—where it belongs.”
Julia felt a lump grow in the back of her throat. Mary had never called her by her first name.
“It’s not Lindsay’s fault,” Mary said, her back straight, her jaw set, a single tear running down her cheek. “It never has been her fault. It’s my fault. I’m to blame. I’m the one who was lost, and now it’s finally time for me to pay the piper.”
21
There wasn’t much more to say or do after that except go home—back to the hotel, where this time Mary didn’t tug on Julia’s sleeve to get her to come into her room to watch Charlie Rose; back into the limousine the following morning with Just Nick, who took them to the airport; and back to LaGuardia and into Radu’s black sedan, which was waiting to take them to the city.
But unlike all the other trips, Mary didn’t seem to care much about anything this time—she didn’t care that Sinbad and Tinker Bell dropped one of her bags while trying to fit all her luggage into the trunk of Nick’s car; she didn’t care that Nick had given her and Julia each a little Mickey Mouse stuffed animal as going-away presents with his homemade business card—Just Nick—Just a Phone Call Away—stapled to their ears; she didn’t care that for once the airline escort was exactly where he was supposed to be and when—on the sidewalk in front of the airport’s entrance, wearing an official red blazer, holding a working radio and with access to a golf-cart vehicle to take them through the airport, through security, and straight to the gate and onto the aircraft; she didn’t care that Jack had downgraded their tickets to coach and that it took Julia twenty minutes of discussion with the head flight attendant—who was too young to have any idea who Mary once was and was trying to be a
gain—to lose her battle to upgrade them to first class.
It was over—all over—and as Mary walked toward the Ansonia after the flight and the drive in from the airport and held up her hand to wave goodbye without turning around, Julia knew that something monumental was happening:
Mary Ford was quitting.
When Julia returned to work early that afternoon, she could barely look at Jack as she passed by his office—the Ultimate Cheeseball sitting there in the conversation pit, wearing another cheap suit, his arms outstretched across the top of one of the couches, meeting with Dennis Franz and his eager-beaver manager, auditioning for the part of career savior and master resuscitator with his usual unbearable pomposity. As she sat down at her desk and caught up with Jonathan, whose kindness and caring she’d missed out there on the cold hard road, she thought about the cold hard facts—the tight deadline she was under to manage her client’s impending public relations crisis—and she swung into action, attacking the situation with the necessary logic and rationality by forming first an overall strategy (positioning Mary as the victim, the underdog, then attacking the attacker), and then proceeding to nail down and lay out the particulars (drafting Mary’s statement, which would be e-mailed and faxed to the press Friday morning in advance of the story; formulating a wish list of media interviews for the following week; placing calls to or fielding calls from various producers and reporters for the remainder of Friday afternoon).
That was as far as she could plan things, she knew—the rest was unforeseeable. The reaction of New York publishers and Hollywood film people to Lindsay Green’s manuscript, the response to the news of Lindsay Green’s story by the entertainment media, and the continued attention to PETA’s political action would remain a mystery until they unfolded in real time. All Julia could do was prepare herself as best she could—sketch out a to-do list for the following day, brief Jonathan on what was coming, have him cancel Mary’s remaining appearances for the following week on the West Coast—then get home to Larchmont in time to toss the salad.
Racing from the train station to the corner of Larchmont Avenue and Putnam, where the parade always started from, she could see the collection of costumed characters gathered under a streetlight—a head of broccoli (Ali-Jon), a head of cauliflower (Adam), a red onion (Zanny), a spear of asparagus (George), a tomato (Deika), a carrot (Ian), a beet (Mia), and, of course, an artichoke (The Scoob)—posing for a group photo that Pinar, one of the mothers she hadn’t seen since those first two weeks of preschool and whose last name she had forgotten, was taking with a tiny digital camera—Julia felt for a second that she was still in Disney World, or at an Anne Geddes photo shoot.
Making her way through the crowd with her nearly empty tote bag and her laptop case over her shoulder as the camera flashed and the children squirmed, she was amazed at what Peter had helped create out of cardboard, colored fabric, tinfoil, and colored cellophane: not just eight vegetables that weren’t even primarily salad vegetables, but the group of parents dressed as large leaves of romaine lettuce, croutons, and a saltshaker and a pepper mill, which was led by the two of them wearing foil-covered tong-shaped hats—and by her parents, who were dressed as Oil and Vinegar.
As the crowd started to move and the salad formed a loose circle in the middle of the street—the parents watching as the children waddled in their costumes and waved proudly to the onlookers and to the other groups of costumed children passing by, all on their way to the firehouse for hot dogs and candied apples in the glow of huge jack-o’-lanterns—she looked over at her parents. They were wearing their usual sweatshirts and jeans and thick-soled Merrells, and they waved, their arms coming out from under the simple sandwich-board signs Peter had made for them. Leo was bursting with joy inside his green layers of artichoke leaves, and she grabbed his hand so she wouldn’t lose him in the crowd.
Peter waved to her from the other side of the salad, over a gigantic leaf of romaine lettuce (Zanny’s dad), and smiled a huge smile under his foil-covered tong-shaped hat.
“Isn’t this fun?” he called out, pointing at all the parents and the kids and the parade marching all around him.
She squeezed Leo’s hand tighter and waved back.
“Yes!” she yelled out even though she wasn’t sure Peter could hear her. “This is fun! This is so much fun!”
Later that night—after they’d returned home and sorted through Leo’s bag of candy; after he had fallen asleep, still in his artichoke costume, on the living room floor while Peter and Julia talked about the evening but not about the latest, and seemingly final, problem with the Mary Ford campaign and Julia ate two full-size Reese’s cups and two small Kit Kat bars without the usual amount of massive guilt and self-loathing; after she and Peter had carried Leo up to his room—they went to bed, too, and, in a sugar-and-chocolate-induced haze, “did it” for the first time in weeks.
They’d turned the clocks back the previous weekend, and the room was black. Julia reached for Peter’s hand in the dark, and when she found it, they laced their fingers together.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered.
He breathed deeply. “I’m thinking that for Thanksgiving, I’m going to brine a turkey. A big turkey. We’ll have your parents, my parents, Patricia. We could have all the preschool moms over for dessert. I could make a few pies, some cookies, maybe a cake.” He turned to her. “How does that sound?”
Slipping into sleep, she patted him on the arm. It sounded great.
22
The next morning, the answer to Mary’s problems appeared in Julia’s head—a little thought balloon, bubbling up from her subconscious like a dream. It was an elegant solution, one that would solve not only Mary’s problems but Julia’s, too—how she was going to handle the media crisis, how she would get revenge on Jack, and how she would show Patricia that even though she hadn’t thought she was ready for anything more than a crappy job at John Glom Public Relations, she was back in the game.
Now all she had to do was convince Mary.
She took the train into the city and a cab uptown to the Ansonia, then collected herself in the lobby. Mary was expecting her—Julia had called from the cab on the way from Grand Central with the excuse about needing Mary’s signature authorizing the firm to cancel all future promotional appearances for Legend—but Julia was certain that even if she hadn’t called, Mary wouldn’t have been that surprised to see her. Mary knew that her abrupt decision two nights before had shocked Julia and she knew she hadn’t seen the last of her.
Mary opened the door and Julia walked into the cavernous, sprawling apartment that Mary had lived in for over thirty years—high-ceilinged rooms full of built-in bookshelves and beautiful furniture and old black-and-white framed photographs on the fireplace mantels. Hollywood film memorabilia—old movie posters from All the While and What I Did for Love—hung on the walls in the hallway, as did an impressive collection of modern art that included, among other things, an enormous Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Mary’s face of the sort that had been so popular in the 1970s. Leading Julia over to two facing couches in the living room, she motioned for her to sit down.
“So,” Mary said.
“So,” Julia said back.
“I assume you’re here to talk me into not quitting.”
She nodded.
“I have to say, Einstein, I admire your tenacity. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Of all the left-handed compliments and direct insults Mary had flung at her over the weeks, this one bothered Julia the least. Probably because it was true. She didn’t know she had it in her, either.
Mary stared at her. “It’s over. You know that. There’s no way to get around the damage Lindsay’s book is going to do to me.”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “I think that there is a way.”
“You do,” Mary said dubiously. “And what way is that?”
Knowing how counterintuitive what she was about to say might sound, Julia leaned forward on the couch and
took a deep breath.
“Embrace the book.”
Mary laughed out loud. “Embrace the book?”
Julia nodded. “For lack of a better way to phrase it. Yes.”
“You’re joking.”
Julia shook her head. “I’m not.”
“Then you’re an idiot,” Mary pronounced. “Why else would you tell me to support something that’s going to humiliate and embarrass me?”
Julia sat back on the couch and clasped her hands in front of her. “Because it’s the right decision. And because you have no other choice.”
Mary ran her hand through her hair. Her brow was furrowed and her lips were pursed. She didn’t like being told what to do and she certainly didn’t like being backed into a corner.
“The right decision, says who?”
“Says me.”
Mary waved her away and made a face. “Like you know anything about anything. Up until a month ago you were home watching Barney with little Jimmy Durante.”
Julia bristled. She knew Mary was going to get personal and mean—she always did when she felt she was being attacked or when she was on the defensive—but Julia still couldn’t help feeling a surge of murderous maternal rage whenever Mary picked on Leo.
“First of all,” Julia started, “I wasn’t even around when Jack made the deal with Heaven Scent. Secondly, Lindsay didn’t offer her services to PETA. Jack did. And thirdly, Leo and I never watch Barney. We watch Tom and Jerry.” She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms in front of her chest. She wasn’t going to dignify the Jimmy Durante reference with a response.
Mary blinked, confused, and Julia realized that this wasn’t the time or the place to defend herself—and her child—against accusations of idiocy, so she forced herself to return to the subject at hand, explaining how Jack had leaked the information about Heaven Scent to PETA, and how he’d then contacted Lindsay and put her in touch with PETA, knowing she would welcome the opportunity to get involved with a high-profile political cause that would put her in the public eye.