Piece of Work

by Laura Zigman

  “Like CPR,” Julia said, trying to get the metaphor right so Jack would see that she was smart. “Bringing someone back from the proverbial dead.”

  Jack smiled, deeply satisfied. “Exactly.”

  It was clear that she got it, and it was clear that he got that she got it, and even though it didn’t seem to her to be that hard a thing to get, she couldn’t help basking in his approval and in the coconspiratorial way he smiled and lowered his voice:

  “There are certain things only other publicists can understand.”

  Julia nodded.

  Jack DeMarco fancies himself a philosopher.

  Jack drummed his fingers on the desk and flashed her a smarmy smile. She got a weird feeling, suddenly, like he was going to make googly-eyes at her, so when all he did was wink and make his fingers into a gun she was repelled but relieved.

  “So. Who’s your favorite actor?” he finally asked.

  She tried to remember who had been on Entertainment Tonight the night before when she was microwaving Leo’s fish sticks even though according to the box in order to maximize crispiness they weren’t supposed to be microwaved: “Sean Connery.”

  Jack nodded. “Who else?”

  And the night before that. “Johnny Depp.”

  Jack drummed his fingers on the desk again. “What’s your favorite movie?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t seen one in about two years.”

  Jack stopped drumming. Whatever momentary attraction he may have felt seconds before was clearly gone.

  Julia laughed. “That’s what happens when you have children.” You become so detached from the real world that when you finally try to reenter it you’re not allowed to because you scare people off with how dumb and detached from the real world you sound.

  He stared at her. “Two years. That’s a long time,” Jack finally said.

  Julia waved her hand at him dismissively, dropping her pen in the process.

  “I was exaggerating,” she said as she struggled to pick it up, her skirt so tight when she bent down that she almost lost consciousness. “It was probably only a year.” She could feel her eyes blinking rapidly the way they always did when she lied. “A year and a half tops.”

  He nodded, registering the big hole she had dug for herself.

  Shut up.

  Jack shrugged, stared down at her resumé for what seemed like the first time. “So, is that why you left Creative Talent?” he said, pausing to do the lapse-in-employment math. “Three years ago? Because you had a baby?”

  She closed her eyes, hoping she hadn’t completely blown it. “Yes.”

  “And what did you have, a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Leo,” she said, even though they sometimes called him Scooby.

  Or Scooby-Doo.

  Or The Scoob.

  As Jack continued to scan her resumé, an image of Leo’s soft-cheeked face that morning—wet with tears, twisted with the agony and betrayal of unexpected abandonment, pressed up against the living room window pleading for her to Come back, come back as he watched her make her way out the front door and into the car and drive away—popped into her head. She winced at the memory of her own quick-dissolve on the drive to the station, and felt her throat start to seize up again. On Tuesday mornings the two of them usually went to the Whole Foods in Scarsdale to get fleeced on organic produce and Pirate’s Booty—the rich man’s Cheetos—and then to the Food Emporium for everything else. Sometimes they even went all the way to the Cute Butcher’s for marinara sauce. Though she’d been away from him for only a few hours, she missed Leo like a lost limb, which made her worry about how she would survive much longer separations when and if she went back to work full-time.

  “And who’s your husband?”

  “Peter Morrissey.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a management consultant,” she offered quickly without embellishment.

  “Let me ask you something else,” Jack said, putting down her resumé and clasping his hands on top of his desk. “What do you think of Mary Ford?”

  Despite trying to stay focused on the interview, she couldn’t help being completely distracted by whether or not Leo had found the battery-powered Thomas train that he had misplaced right before she was leaving the house and which had added to the intensity of the misery of her departure since she didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to conduct a thorough search. Maybe it was under the couch. Or inside his Thomas lunchbox. Or stuck behind the booster seat of her car that she had driven and parked at the train station—the actual train station with real trains that took people to real places, like into the city for horrible job interviews.

  “Mary Ford?” she repeated.

  “Mary Ford is a client.”

  “Right.” She should have known that. And five years ago, she would have known that because she would have done actual homework before an interview like this instead of just reading a few back issues of People magazine at her parents’ house.

  Jack smiled. “She’s terrific.”

  Julia smiled back. “Great.”

  “Terrific” was P.R.-speak for “a real piece of work.”

  “I was wondering if the opportunity to work with her might be something you’d be interested in.”

  Julia had, in fact, never seen a Mary Ford movie from start to finish—she had never been much of a film buff or a fan of old movies—but she needed this job, so she forced herself to snap to attention, block everything else out, and concentrate. And lie.

  With abandon.

  “Absolutely! Mary Ford is one of my all-time favorites!”

  “Really.” Jack looked quite pleased. Finally.

  So she lied again.

  “Yes!”

  And again: “My mother loves her, too!”

  And again: “And so does a good friend of mine!”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Patricia Fallon.”

  Jack sat back in his chair and smiled broadly. “Patty Fallon!”

  “Patricia,” Julia corrected. She couldn’t help herself—Patricia hated being called Patty.

  “She and I go way back,” he continued. “We were both assistants at Hill & Knowlton years ago.”

  Julia tried to stop the knowing smirk from spreading across her face, but she couldn’t. Jack swiveled—back-forth-back, back-forth-back, back-forth-back—then started in with the drumming again. “So is Patricia still in P.R.?”

  “Yes. She is.”

  “Still in P.R.!” he repeated cheerfully, as if she were as stuck in a dead-end career as he was.

  “Actually,” Julia clarified, knowing she was going too far, “she started her own firm about three years ago, called Pulse. She handles mostly big entertainment clients: magazines, publishers, film and television people.” She paused for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to break publicist-client privilege and reveal to Jack that Oprah considered Patricia not just a publicist but also “a friend.” Which of course she did since she was already feeling guilty for blowing Patricia’s cover and figured she could atone for her bad behavior by rubbing Jack’s nose in her success.

  He swiveled a few more times, then cocked his head. “So why aren’t you working for Pulse?”

  Julia forced a smile and rolled her eyes as if working there was more than someone like herself could ever dream of when in reality it was just an incredibly sore subject.

  “No openings.”

  “No openings for the boss’s close personal friend?”

  “Nope!” Julia’s smile broadened to the point of muscle strain. “Plus,” she added, trying to spin Patricia’s recent rejection to her advantage, “even if there was an opening, it wouldn’t be a very good idea. I wouldn’t want to ruin a perfectly good friendship by working together.”

  Jack stared at her again. “Why? Are you difficult to work with?”

  “Sometimes.” She laughed, since of course she wasn’t
difficult to work with, but it was such a supremely stupid time to make a stupid joke that Julia suddenly realized she was unconsciously trying to sabotage herself.

  Think. Of. Leo. You. Selfish. Pig.

  Jack finally stopped swiveling and went back to Mary Ford.

  “Anyway, in about a month the new fragrance created especially for Mary Ford—Legend—will be in stores, and we’ll be using Mary Ford to promote and market it through media appearances and personal appearances at select department stores across the country over a four-week period starting in mid-October. Legend is intended as a comeback vehicle for her, so obviously it’s an extremely important project for both Mary Ford and John Glom Public Relations.” He turned toward his credenza. “I’d let you smell it but I can’t find my sample bottle. Anyway, we all have a lot invested in the success of this particular venture. Which is why whoever we hire for this position has to be able to handle a client and a tour of this magnitude.”

  Julia felt her attention waning yet again but when Jack glanced again at her resumé, this time favorably, she sat up straight in her chair.

  “Although I will do most of the traveling with Mary Ford, there will be certain trips I’ll need someone else to cover—for the obvious reason that, given my position here, I can’t spend all of my time out of the office with one client. As you know, this business is all about perception.”

  And deception.

  “Anyway, it’s a plum assignment for the person assigned to it. I mean, how many people can say they’ve worked with a true Hollywood legend?”

  Depending on how loosely one defined the term “true Hollywood legend,” hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unfortunate publicists could make that claim. Including Julia.

  “So are you on board?”

  She nodded, and Jack sat back in his chair, so deeply relieved that he couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear. And before they started to discuss particulars, Julia made one more note on her pad:

  Just sold my soul for $$.

  4

  Having accepted the job she didn’t want, all Julia wanted to do was leave Jack’s stupid office. She was dying to go home already and see The Scoob, who had, just the day before, discovered his penis (which he called his “peanut”) and who needed—according to two different books she referred to only in emergencies and at crucial developmental milestones because she found them so excessively child-centered she feared following their instructions would produce a Chia Pet of a child narcissist—to have his discovery “acknowledged and validated.”

  Not to mention the fact that she couldn’t wait to get out of her interview suit, which was, by now, cutting off circulation to her limbs and internal organs.

  Taking the commuter train from Grand Central back to Larchmont, then driving the half mile from the station, she arrived home in the late afternoon to find her parents’ bright blue Ford Taurus parked in front of her house.

  She pulled her “preowned” black Volvo wagon that still wasn’t paid off and that needed a tune-up into the driveway and turned off the engine. Sitting behind the wheel in silence, she stared at the house—a modest, slightly shabby Tudor, half an hour outside the city, that she and Peter had moved into about a year after Leo was born. The paint was worn and some of the gutters were sagging and even though they couldn’t afford now to do any of the work on it that they’d intended on doing when they’d bought it—a new kitchen, a second full bath, maybe even an addition with a family room and an outdoor deck—she still loved the house.

  And the neighborhood.

  Though she had always been too embarrassed to admit it to most of her single urban friends like Patricia, she and Peter, both coddled products of the suburbs (Westchester and Long Island, respectively), actually liked the suburbs. They couldn’t imagine raising children in a concrete jungle; there was too much noise and traffic, too much sophistication and not enough bad taste. They wanted Leo to grow up going to malls, playing in finished basements and playrooms, and learning—the way native New Yorkers don’t—how to drive before the age of thirty.

  Her eyes moved to the lawn. They’d had to let the landscaper go at the beginning of August and now it was obvious that it needed cutting and edging. She wondered what would become of it if they never bothered to hire the landscaper back and continued to let the grass grow—how high it would get, how quickly into the fall it would become covered over with leaves, how long it would take for Rita Janeway, the neighborhood watchdog, avid horticulturist, and committed conservationist and recycler with the fake British accent (she was from New Jersey) who lived across the street, to threaten to sue them if they didn’t tend to their property properly. But then she remembered: her parents were there and she had to go into the house and explain to them that just because she was going to be working for a third-rate public relations firm when she used to work for a first-rate one didn’t mean that they were complete failures as parents.

  But still she didn’t move.

  The car windows were all rolled up and the unexpected heat and humidity of the mid-September Indian-summer day seemed to be rising audibly—cicadas hissing in the trees, insects dropping onto the windshield and walking silently across the glass, children’s bicycle bells ringing in the distance. She had grown up less than five miles from where she sat now, and when she closed her eyes she remembered what it was like playing alone in the backyard of her parents’ house after dinner as the sun went down—jumping from one piece of flagstone on the patio to another without stepping on the blades of grass and the little blue flowers that grew in between them. Right before dusk on those long summer evenings she’d always hear the out-of-tune tinkling notes of the ice cream truck make their way through the trees. She didn’t get an ice cream sandwich or Popsicle every night, but it wasn’t because her parents didn’t let her. It was because she didn’t always ask. After her brother had died she’d tried not to ask them for things that weren’t absolute necessities.

  When a bead of sweat rolled down her back, she collected her things—her briefcase, her commuter train and taxi receipts for tax purposes, and the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times (she was going to see a movie this year if it killed her). Then she took what was left of two glazed Dunkin’ Donuts—a short stubby elbow curve of dough still in a wax bag—that she’d bought at Grand Central to console herself and got out of the car.

  Julia put her key in the door but, as usual when her parents were waiting on the other side of it, it opened before she’d even had the chance to turn the lock.

  From the doorstep her eyes readjusted from bright sunshine to dim indoor light, and when they did she saw her parents and Peter looking back at her. For a second or two they all stared at each other—her mother at Julia, her father at Julia, her father at her mother, her mother at her father, Julia at Peter, Peter at her—all trying to gauge each other’s mood and figure out what not to say.

  “We brought dinner,” her mother said nervously as Julia finally squeezed past them all in the foyer and closed the door behind her.

  “We figured, after your interview, you wouldn’t feel like cooking,” her father finished, his voice so heavy with a sympathetic presumption of failure that Julia felt, the way she generally did when her parents rushed in trying to be supportive, like she was being suffocated with a huge white pillow.

  Julia was going to say I never feel like cooking, but before she could get the words out, Peter pointed toward the kitchen.

  “Your mother made chicken! And a salad,” he said, with the same sort of desperately forced enthusiasm that she herself had used all that morning during her conversation with Jack DeMarco, and which, she realized now, was a farce. He looked sharp and casually well dressed in his usual weekday khakis and button-down striped shirt intended to create the illusion that he just happened to be home for the day instead of indefinitely unemployed, and Julia still wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Looking across the kitchen, her stomach sank. Her mother was
n’t just a terrible cook, she was the worst sort of terrible cook: a terrible cook who thought she was a good cook and therefore refused to stop cooking. She forced herself to smile as she walked to the counter and stared down at the sad little meal her mother had prepared, so well-meaning yet so inedible: once-frozen, now-defrosting boneless skinless chicken breasts sprinkled with paprika, of all spices, stuffed with Uncle Ben’s rice pilaf, and lined up like dimpled little fists in a foil-covered rectangular Pyrex glass dish; canned peas or green beans or wax beans or Veg-All on the counter, ready to be opened and emptied into an aluminum saucepan and boiled beyond recognition; and a salad of iceberg lettuce, sliced cucumbers, and supermarket tomatoes with low-calorie Thousand Island bottled dressing.

  Though Peter had always gotten along with her parents and had always felt very grateful for all the free babysitting they provided and for the fact that they had never made him feel any worse about being Catholic instead of Jewish than he already felt (growing up in Great Neck and spending his college years and most of his adult life living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he had long since felt like a Jew trapped in a non-Jew’s body), he could not abide her mother’s cooking, leaving Julia to come up with a vast array of polite excuses for why they were never able to eat dinner at her parents’ house but were always more than happy to have them over to their house.

  She headed toward the kitchen table and took off her unbearably dull black Ferragamo pumps with the two-inch heels and the decade-blurring squarish toe (were they from the early 1980s or the late 1990s?) which she’d always hated and wore only once or twice a year to temple on the High Holidays and the occasional funeral or other family function. Her parents surrounded the table as she pushed and prodded her briefcase into the corner with her nude-colored nylon-hose-covered toes. As always, they were dressed exactly the same, in durable sweatshirts (her mother’s maroon, her father’s navy blue), pressed jeans, and matching black suede Merrells with skid-resistant rubber soles as thick as tires—postretirement uniforms that were practical, comfortable, indestructible, and ready for almost anything: food shopping, babysitting, or early-bird dinners.