“Only if it’s a stage version of Raging Bull, you moron! Are you out of your tiny fucking mind?!” Izzy yelled.
“I can let you in if you show me your Equity card, but I can’t let your friend in,” the guy told Izzy. Meanwhile the line behind us was backing up and people were grumbling loudly.
“Jesus Christ, just let her in!” one of the actors shouted.
“It’s not like she’s going to be any competition for us anyway,” an actress readily agreed. “Just look at her face!”
“Yeah, just look at my face!” I repeated, before I realized what a left-handed remark the woman had made.
But the Equity staffer remained stubborn; he insisted that he couldn’t even ask a supervisor to bend the rules until someone came in at nine-thirty. Defeated, Izzy and I went out to the elevator bank, where she handed me her entire bottle of premenstrual medication—the only painkiller she had on her—gave me a hug, and offered to accompany me up to Newter & Spade.
“Nope. At least one of us should get a shot at this audition,” I told her. “From someone with a broken face, break a leg,” I added, wishing her good luck. I headed to my temp job still clutching the makeshift ice pack to my face. It was barely sunrise and already it had been quite a day.
Chapter 8
I had to do some fancy footwork to get up to Newter & Spade as well, but the security guard on duty in the lobby of the office building recognized me, even in my disfigured state, and allowed me to go upstairs without my employee identification, which of course was also in my wallet.
The good thing about getting paid by the hour was that I was logging in a bit of extra time this morning, having arrived at work well before nine A.M. Ramona was in early, too. “Do you think you should see a doctor?” she asked me.
I doubted it. Izzy was right; I had suffered only cuts and bruises, as ugly as they now were. There was probably nothing an M.D. could have done that Isabel hadn’t taken care of already.
Ramona looked at me and clucked her tongue a couple of times. “I’m sorry I can’t let you turn around and go home; we got a whole new shipment of boxes to code on the AllGood probe. Of course, that being said, you’re a temp, so I can’t really make you stay today. I guess it depends on whether you need the money…”
She was way off base with that comment. But she was also correct. I did need the money. A whole day’s pay was a considerable enough amount to warrant slogging through the pain. “I’ll stay,” I said quietly. Actually, I was edgy at the thought of getting right back on a subway anyway. Over the course of the day I’d be able to overcome my anxiety. The mugging had been an unfortunate random incident. In the hundreds of thousands of mass transit trips I’ve taken during my lifetime, it was the only time anything bad had happened to me.
Ramona smiled. “Just so you know, in case you get hungry later—I’d rather you didn’t take your lunch upstairs in the dining room this afternoon. You might put people off their food.”
“You are one sorry bitch,” Marlena muttered under her breath as she entered the document coding room with her usual Egg McMuffin and diet Coke. She was putting in a little extra time as well. I don’t think Ramona heard the remark; she was too focused on turning up her nose at Marlena’s meal. Ramona put her hand to her mouth. “Excuse me, that smell makes me sick,” she said, then quickly left us alone.
“If that woman were walking down the street and accidentally fell down a manhole, no one would mourn her,” Marlena said. “She’s pure evil. I think she was separated at birth from Lady Macbeth. My God, what happened to you? Are you all right?” she asked. She came over and gently touched my face. “You poor baby. Does it hurt?”
I nodded. “Like hell.” Then I told her I would save my narrative until Natalie, Roger, and Lisa had arrived so I only had to relive it once. The consensus around the coding room was that I should forget about the money and just go home and get some rest.
I opted, however, to remain at Newter & Spade for the rest of the day, preferring to spend the time with friends, rather than home alone mulling over what I should-have-could-have done to prevent the attack, and bemoaning my busted-up face.
I got lonely at lunchtime when all four of my colleagues went upstairs to the cafeteria. At least I was busy, combing through file after file of internal memos regarding the AllGood probe.
When my co-workers returned from lunch they found me staring at a single sheet of paper. “Can you believe this?” I said. I read them the memo from Raymond Spade to all of the firm’s senior partners. The correspondence reflected the company’s significantly weakened financial situation as a result of the AllGood Telecom congressional hearings. Not only were relatively minor changes enumerated—such as a moratorium on expenditures for firm “perks,” like skyboxes and costly summer associate outings, including the weekly sunset harbor cruises—but Newter & Spade was considering a hiring freeze, as well as layoffs of existing “deadwood” within the firm. The cutbacks would hit every division and each department, from marginally productive partners all the way down to the mailroom.
“I’m surprised this hasn’t been redacted,” I remarked, as the other coding temps gathered around to read the contents of the memo for themselves. “Or stamped ‘confidential’ all over it.”
“It should have been,” Ramona said, entering the room and snatching the memo out of my hand. Had she been lurking outside the door? “Alice, come with me,” she added curtly, crooking her finger. Her thin lips pressed tightly together, she marched me, mini-martinet that she was, into her office, closing the door behind us with the heel of her shoe.
She didn’t even offer me a chair. Ramona picked up the phone and dialed an extension, impatiently drumming her fingers on the desk as she waited for the line to connect. “This is Ramona Marlboro. I’d like an escort sent to my office on the twenty-third floor, please.” She waited another moment. “As soon as possible,” she replied in response to a question I didn’t hear. Ramona replaced the receiver and turned to me. “When you leave this room, you will go into the coding room and collect your personal belongings. A security guard will accompany you to ensure that you don’t take any of Newter & Spade’s property out of the building. You will not speak to the other temps in the room while you are collecting your things. The security guard will then escort you down to the lobby and out to the street. You are not to enter the premises ever again.”
If the stinging blows dealt to my face by this morning’s mugger had blindsided me, Ramona’s slap bore twice the impact. “I-I don’t understand,” I found myself stammering. “What did I do?”
“Sit down, Alice.”
Tentatively, I took a chair.
“The reason I felt it was an imperative to let you go immediately was your dissemination to temporary employees of Newter & Spade the contents of a confidential interoffice memo.”
“It was one of the papers in the box you’d assigned me to input into the AllGood database,” I protested. “That memo was part of my job—”
“It’s not your job to disclose the contents of any of the documents you input like it’s storytime,” Ramona replied. “We prize discretion at Newter & Spade.” She opened a drawer of her desk and retrieved a lined yellow notepad. “Your transgressions since your employment commenced here are numerous, but I chose to retain you because your work has been good.” She read from the list. “Of course, we could begin with your unforgiveable behavior in the associates’ dining room on the very afternoon I hired you, when you spilled soda all over one of the senior associates. You went on to enter a relationship with that associate. You over-stepped all bounds appropriate for a temp, appearing at baseball games and other office functions with him—”
“Excuse me, but isn’t what I do on my own time my own business?”
“Not in this case,” Ramona said tartly. “I also understand that you’ve been living with him for the past several weeks. There are no secrets here, Alice,” she added smugly, reading my expression.
“You rea
lly are a bitch,” I said.
There was a knock on the door and the security guard entered. “And you’re fired,” Ramona said. “I’ll inform the agency that we’ll no longer be requiring your services.” She looked like a cat with a dish of cream; I could have strangled her. “Take Ms. Finnegan back to the document-coding room,” Ramona instructed the guard. He looked glum.
“I’m real sorry about this,” he said softly as he herded me back to my desk. “But I gotta—”
“I know. You’re just doing your job. And I thought my day couldn’t get any worse,” I added, in a feeble attempt at self-deprecating humor.
“We’d brought you something from upstairs,” Natalie said, defiantly handing me a wrapped sandwich. “Because Ramona wouldn’t let you go up and have lunch,” she hissed, for the guard’s benefit.
He pretended to look the other way as Natalie stuffed the sandwich into my purse. “She’s not supposed to talk to you guys from now on,” he said, blocking the doorway with his bulk. “But go ahead and say goodbye to your friends,” he told me. “Ramona Marlboro’s a real witch, anyway. Do you believe in karma?” He didn’t wait for an answer from any of us. “Well, she’ll get what’s coming to her one day. That’s what I think.”
“If you want us to go to the mat for you on anything, we will,” Marlena assured me. I would have liked to believe her but I recalled what had happened the day I went to Ramona championing our collective complaint against Bart Harrison.
Halfway back to Brooklyn, stunned, crying, my head pounding in pain once again, in between bites of the tuna sandwich Natalie had sneaked out of the Newter & Spade cafeteria I realized I hadn’t even thought twice about getting on a subway to go home.
When Eric showed up sometime in the middle of the evening, he found me in bed with a fresh, though probably useless by this time, ice pack pressed to my left cheek. “I am so sorry, muppet,” he said, sitting on the side of the bed. He rubbed my leg affectionately. “I am so sorry.”
“So you heard about what happened?”
“You mean the mugging or—”
“Or the mugging?” I interrupted, trying to make a joke out of getting fired.
“Natalie told me about the assault this afternoon, when I stopped by to say hello for a moment. I was out at a deposition all morning or I would have come down to the coding room much earlier. Then I was in AllGood powwows for the rest of the day. You know I would have called, don’t you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Honey, you should have gotten me out of bed. I would have gone with you to the station.”
“Thanks, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was attacked on the train itself. Under the East River.” Then I added, “Did Ramona tell you about this afternoon?”
He nodded. “Her own version of events, I’m sure,” he said, disgusted. “But I already knew. News travels fast around Newter & Spade. There are no secrets…”
“That’s what she said.”
“If there’s anything I can do,” he offered, “—except get you your job back—you know I’m here for you.”
“I don’t want my job back. At least not that job,” I said weakly.
Eric sat beside me on our bed and held me. “When you decide what you want to do,” he said, gently kissing the top of my head, “you just tell me. That’s what I’m here for, muppet.”
The following morning, after Eric had left for work and I had the sun-drenched apartment to myself, I phoned Izzy at her temp job.
“Feeling any better?” she immediately asked me.
“Yes, but—” I replied, and proceeded to share the previous afternoon’s nightmare.
“I think you should take advantage of the situation,” Izzy advised. “Look on it as a great opportunity to focus on your acting career. Don’t go back to Turbo Temps just yet. File for unemployment. They wrongfully terminated you, that’s for sure.”
“Ramona as much as admitted that she had been keeping me on because my work was good,” I agreed. “Everything else seems suspiciously like a vendetta to me.”
So I took the day to relax, recuperate, and take stock of my circumstances. And the following morning, bright and early, I fired up the computer and filed an unemployment claim on the New York State Department of Labor’s website.
Nothing is ever easy, however. Or should I say, nothing is ever simple. And sometimes God is on your side…and sometimes…well, He just isn’t. My face healed with barely a trace of the subway attack. Without the distraction of dayjob detritus I resumed attending auditions and won numerous callbacks, due in part, I believe, to renewed confidence in my ability to become a full-time working actress. And I did get some nibbles, including a three-line “under-five” role on a soap, where the size and shape of my nose appeared of no concern whatsoever to the casting director.
On the home front, things were going swimmingly, although Eric was so busy at the office that he and I had to work at finding quality time to spend together.
After a few weeks of collecting unemployment, I received a letter in the mail. Just looking at the envelope, I felt my stomach sink. I had a sixth sense that it carried tremendous portent, and I come by my hunches honestly—through Gram—who of course had been right about Ramona Marlboro being toxic.
Newter & Spade was challenging my unemployment claim. A hearing date had been arranged for mediation in front of an adjudication officer from the New York State Department of Labor.
FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!
Apart from the fact that I firmly believed my claim was justified, I had thought that my nightmarish days at Newter & Spade were well behind me. I had started afresh, free of the temporary insanity of my day job, and was diligently working toward my own goals—those for which I had years of education and training behind me. The Department of Labor envelope and its contents sat on our dining table like radioactive material; I didn’t even want to go near it until Eric came home so we could discuss how best to proceed.
His arrival, however, made the situation even worse.
“I…was hoping…you’d represent me at the hearing,” I told him, my voice wavering. “The papers say that you can bring a legal representative.”
Eric exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath underwater for five minutes. “How am I supposed to do that, muppet? How can I? How can I represent my girlfriend against my own employer?”
“I know that it’s really sticky…believe me, I appreciate that…but you know that their charges against me are more or less trumped up. They didn’t fire me because my work sucked. It was without cause. Totally.”
“Alice—”
“I know I’m on the side of the angels on this. Hey, I got screwed by Ramona, and Newter & Spade is just using its legal muscle to bully me. If I don’t fight it and stand up for what’s right, I’d be kicking myself in the butt forever. Who knows how many other people they’ve dealt with this way?”
“Alice. I can’t do it. No way. I want to make partner; it’s only a matter of months before that happens, and after that I’ll be pretty much set for life. Do you know how important that is to me?”
“More important than me?”
He looked exasperated.
“Alice—”
“If you love me, then there’s nothing more important than that. In Ivanhoe, Brian de Bois-Guilbert is willing to risk everything, including his life, to champion Rebecca before the Knights Templar.”
Eric’s face became crimson. “This isn’t a fucking fairytale, Alice!” he thundered. It was the first time in our relationship that he’d ever raised his voice. “It was already a risk for me to shack up with one of the firm’s temps! If I defend you against the firm, can’t you see what’ll happen? I’ll become a pariah. It will wreck my career! I’m this close to partner,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. He then had the gall to try to reach out and stroke my hair, but I found myself flinching at the thought of his touch.
“You know something, Eric Witherspoon? You�
�re a real asshole!” I spat, and went into the bathroom, slamming the door. When I emerged, maybe fifteen minutes later, he was gone. He didn’t return to the apartment until well after midnight. His clothes and hair reeked of cigarette smoke and he smelled like he’d been drinking heavily.
I had nothing else to say to him, so I pretended to be asleep.
Over the next few weeks, the looming unemployment hearing did take a toll on our relationship, although we both tried very hard to work at making it work. For a while, everything was fine between us as long as we didn’t discuss anything having to do with Newter & Spade.
And I didn’t end up engaging a lawyer to represent me. I couldn’t afford it, and besides, a very sympathetic woman over at the unemployment adjudication office assured me that the mediation hearings were more or less pro forma confirmations of the claimant’s position and tended to last no more than fifteen minutes.
Or so she told me. In good faith, I’m sure.
However, drawing professional litigants into a litigation situation was like feeding a big-ass chunk of chum to a great white shark. And I was the chunk of chum chump.
The hearings lasted three days. Newter & Spade—represented by some outside counsel I’d never heard of, who probably charged as much per hour as the entire weekly unemployment benefit checks they were fighting so hard to deny me-—brought in witnesses. Poor Natalie, under threat of her own job, I’m sure, had to corroborate that I went to the ladies’ room a lot, and therefore was not at my desk in front of my computer for as much of the time as I was claiming were billable hours. Bart Harrison, his voice and manner as dry as a Tanqueray martini, complained of having been dragged down to the hearing—him, a top attorney whose time was billed out at $350 per hour—to refute my preposterous fabrications of sexual harrassment. Since we weren’t in a court of law, there was no punishment for perjury. Natalie was brought back into the room, accompanied by Marlena, to lie under oath that Mr. Harrison had never made any untoward remarks vis-à-vis their appearance or apparel, nor had they ever heard such remarks issue from his lips with regard to Ms. Alice Finnegan. Marlena was glum; she quite clearly didn’t want to be there. Natalie’s attitude was so defiant, she was practically telgraphing to the adjudication officer that her testimony was full of shit, and coerced, to boot.
Temporary Insanity Page 13
