Bleak (3 page)

Impatient, I arrive for my 11 a.m. with Carson Wright ten minutes early. I know he has nothing going on—the only items on the managing partner’s schedule are his Monday morning manicure at Elizabeth Arden and his Thursday escargot with the partners at 21; in between nails and snails, he sits at his desk and reads the newspaper—but his secretary makes me wait until the clock chimes before she lets me in.

Wright founded the firm with Hertzberg in 1967 but was quickly shunted to the side as the latter became increasingly famous for high-profile clients. Hertzberg even argued before the Supreme Court in a civil rights case I learned about in a political science class in college. Carson Wright’s name was never uttered at UConn.

With all the hours he’s not practicing law, Carson has plenty of time to manage the firm and frequently sends out memos detailing new billing procedures. Each successive update contradicts the one before it, keeping the entire staff in a constant state of confusion.

Wright, with his straight, gaunt face and unruly white mane that tumbles over his Brooks Brothers collar, is the villain of my novel, the puppet master who makes everyone at Jarndyce & Associates jump to his bidding.

Uninterested in my problem, he passes me along to Victoria Penn, the youngest partner at fifty-one as well as the scariest. Famous for skewering Justice Scalia on points of Constitutional law at a Harvard luncheon, she has a withering command of Latin and a short fuse. With an ingrained sense of respect for her peers, she takes her temper out only on underlings—secretaries, junior associates, paralegals, mailroom staff, members of the cleaning crew and security guards—frequently issuing death threats whenever something doesn’t go her way. Anyone unlucky enough to be within ten feet of her when she’s angry stands in danger of losing his head to a machete. It’s mostly an empty threat—unless you’re in her office, where the aforementioned weapon is mounted on her wall as a souvenir from her trip to the Amazon.

Victoria Penn is also a villain in the book. Actually, they all are: Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
is a black comedy.

Although her secretary tells me to go right in, I knock discretely at Penn’s door. She’s on the phone with a junior associate who’s working on the London deal with her. Important documents arriving tonight need to be turned around by morning. Wendy assures her it won’t be a problem.

Victoria rolls her eyes and notices me standing in the doorway. She waves me in. “Fuck it up, Gorman, and you’re history. The police will never find the pieces,” she says. She issues the threat because it’s expected of her, but I can tell from the matter-of-fact tone that her heart’s not in it. She appears tired. Her slate-gray eyes don’t look as icy as usual. They seem more dead than cold, like a heroin addict’s.

Realizing she has no idea who I am, even though she’s offered to mutilate me on several occasions, I introduce myself. She nods abruptly.

This is hardly a warm welcome, but it’s the best I’m going to get, so I launch into an explanation of why I’m there. I start with an apology for bothering her with such a minor matter.

“Then why are you?” she snaps.

With some effort, I ignore her impatient tone and continue with my explanation.

“Requests for vacation time must be submitted at least four weeks prior to the proposed date,” she says. “It’s in the employee handbook, which is issued to every employee at orientation. I’m sure if I call down to HR they’ll confirm that you signed for it.” She eyes the phone but doesn’t pick it up.

“But,” I point out in response, “the handbook also says that partners can make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.” I don’t know if this is true, but it sounds like something a law firm would put in writing.

Victoria doesn’t belabor the point. Instead, she fixes me with her cold, vacant stare and asks why would she do that.

Throwing myself on her mercy, I explain about the book and the option and the once-in-a-lifetime party. I tell her Moxie Bernard is going to be there and the entire cast of
Getting Nowhere
and probably Bella Masters, the tobacco heiress with the best hipbones this side of an Ethiopian famine, who, according to Cindy Adams in the
Post,
wants to be in the picture with her new bestie. I stress how important this opportunity is for my career.

Every syllable I utter is another nail in my coffin. I can see it in her eyes, which, it turns out, are capable of emotion after all. Her contempt is almost palpable, and as I listen to myself rattle off the details of my exciting future, I can almost understand her scorn. I sound insufferably blessed.

But it’s not just the party. It’s the book itself and the hope it represents. I’m not supposed to have other coals in the fire. I’m a paralegal. My career is being Victoria Penn’s slave.

“Even if I wanted to give you the day off, we simply can’t spare you,” she announces without an ounce of sincerity. Her tone implies she could spare me all over the place, just not for a dazzling party among Hollywood elite. If I told her it was for my cousin’s bar mitzvah at the Friar Tuck Inn in Weehawken, she would have consented with a barely concealed smirk. “The last week of August is one of our busiest times and we’re already short-handed as it is. Every employee will have to work extra hard to pick up the slack, myself included. Knowing this, I can’t in all good conscience let you take off and make the burden heavier for everyone else. What kind of boss would I be?”

It’s hard to smile without sneering, but I somehow manage to pull it off. “Of course. I understand,” I say, realizing I’ll have to suck it up and take days without pay. They’re frowned upon because no employer wants an underling who values her life over her work, but there’s no other solution. I’m
not
missing that party.

“And let me add before I finish with this topic forever,” Victoria says as I stand up. “You
will
be here on the 21st. I don’t care if your grandmother dies in a freak anvil accident or your appendix bursts on the F train or you’re held hostage in a burning building by the ghost of Osama Bin Laden himself. The only acceptable excuse for your not being here is a death certificate, and you better make it good as I’ll be checking the body myself. Got it?”

And just like that, I’m out of a job.

Although the plan is to sleep late, then read the paper over a steaming mocha latte at the café on the corner where all the dog owners hang out, I wake up at six a.m. and lie in bed, anxious and nervous about the future. I try assiduously to fall back asleep. When that fails, I get up, turn on my computer and open the new novel I started a year ago.

I might as well make myself useful.

But by noon I know it’s a waste of time.

The problem is, I never intended to write a workplace comedy or any novel.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
began life as a series of e-mails to friends and family relaying the efforts of Marla Hertzberg to penetrate the upper echelons of HWSP management. Disgusted with her presumption as well as her reputation, the old guard closed ranks, ignoring her many memos to implement change. Unintimidated by a bunch of institutional gray-hairs doddering on the brink of doddering, she confronted Wright, Silver and Penn wherever she found them, most usually within a few feet of my desk.

I typed the first argument—about adding a one-cent-per-page surcharge on all copies to compensate for machine wear and tear—verbatim as an outraged Wright, who considers photocopiers as well as computers and faxes to fall under the rubric of office supplies, not office equipment, chewed her out for discourteous parsimony. As a famous penny-pincher himself, his response was pure contrariness, and no doubt in his tight-fisted little heart he was angry at himself for not coming up with double amortization years ago.

The squabbling continued for months, and I recorded all of it, delighting in the overt pettiness of these supposedly mature and dignified lawyers. The battles were intense and the escalation swift and fierce, as was the peace negotiation. After two financial quarters of conflict, the senior partners brokered a deal with Marla, inviting her to lunch at 21 and putting her in charge of employee affairs. Still, it was only the end of open hostilities, not the war. Too old-fashioned to embrace a woman who rose through the ranks in such a disgraceful manner—sleeping your way to the top was a time-honored tradition but not with two eighty-year-old men who were raised like brothers by the kindly old man who adopted them after WWII—the partners made sure neither Marla nor the staff forgot her humble beginnings, making snide comments whenever possible. Their spite campaign worked. The specters of Handelman and Finch are a constant presence in the hallowed halls of Hertzberg, Wright, Silver and Penn, their white flaccid penises like halos over Marla’s head.

Their revenge gave my e-mails a satisfying conclusion. I wrapped up my narrative and returned to giving the job my all, which, even at its best, is still only sixty percent of my attention.

Unbeknownst to me, my sister forward my e-mails to a friend at a literary agency, who thought they’d made a great novel if we could just punch up the through line. She thought more should be made of the Oedipal conflict between Marla and her great-statesman father. Never one to turn down a free lunch, I took the meeting, extremely doubtful that anything could be made out of a jumble of overheard conversations.

But Julie had a clear vision and worked with me until it was on the page. Taking her suggestion, I added a sexual undertone to Marla’s relationship with her dad, making him strangely envious of her gray-haired lovers, and I stepped up her frugality until Ada Clare Jarndyce is Dickensian in her Scrooge McDuck greed. In the end, she’s the only one remaining; even her father, John Jarndyce, is downsized in a final cost-cutting measure that replaces him with a cardboard cutout.

A year later, the trade paperback of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce
hit the bookshelves. It sold about thirty thousand copies, a number, I’m told, that’s fairly decent for a first-time novelist.

The problem with having a moderately successful novel with movie aspirations is everyone wants a second one. Now that I’m not working long hours, people will expect things of me. I can no longer use my job as an excuse.

But my state of employment has nothing to do with my lack of productivity. I’m not a writer.

I’d tried to get a sequel out of the discontented grumblings of my coworkers. The ninety-dollar annual subscription fee to the company’s coffee plan generated a lot of outrage among the rank and file but nothing ever came of it. Support staff is powerless to effect change; all they can do is complain. Sometimes their invectives rise to the level of poetry, sonnets of dissatisfaction fueled by diluted bagel-cart coffee that sets you back sixty-five cents. But grousing over deprivation isn’t a novel. It’s the mind-numbing routine of regular life.

And the world already has enough of that.

I don’t tell my parents about my unemployment. They were raised by Depression-era survivors to prize comfort and stability over happiness and did their best to instill their children with a fear of insecurity. For years I took business classes at UConn Storrs, studying Managerial Statistics and Information Systems for Management. My future was set: After graduation, I would work at a brokerage house just like my dad. I’d wake up every morning in my white suburban house with blue-gray shutters, thick tan carpeting and impossibly green lawn and take the same train into Manhattan for forty years before retiring to Florida, where I would form a tight-knit community of other former commuters. Nothing seemed more glamorous to me than the regularity of the 7:51 out of Norwalk.

Real life could not live up to the fantasy. My ability with numbers fell well short of passing and my marketing ingenuity failed to impress any of my professors. After five semesters of barely getting by, I admitted defeat and switched to the College of Arts and Sciences. Much to my embarrassment, I excelled at English literature. Deeply ashamed, my parents could not bring themselves to ask about my classes, even when my analysis of Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” won the prestigious Pershing Award for concision.

For several years, my name was noticeably absent from the Christmas newsletter.

Paralegaling was not instant redemption. It was too far removed from actual legaling—that is, the profession of lawyer—for my parents to embrace it. They saw the job as too dependent on the whims and wishes of an egotistical attorney who would blame those closest and least powerful for his own failings. Although this prediction has proven true, being a whipping girl has in no way impeded my ability to make a steady living. The paycheck arrives every Friday with Mussolini-like regularity. The money is decent, if not wonderful, and keeps me in the middle-middle-class luxury to which I’m accustomed. I can even afford to take my parents out to dinner every once in a while.

Becoming a full-blown, full-time lawyer has always been the long-term goal. My parents’ dreams for me are nothing compared to those I have for myself. I don’t want to bow and scrape forever, to be overlooked and underestimated, to fetch and carry and sit by a photocopier as twenty copies of a thousand-page document spit out with pathological repetition.

The only thing holding me back is the LSAT. I’ve been studying for years. With my verbal skills, I’ve got the reading parts down pat and even the analytical. The logic questions remain a problem. I’m sure I can master the section if I just apply myself. But it’s hard. I simply don’t care who the coach of the Smalltown Bluebirds hockey team will put into the starting lineup if George only starts when Bart does and Dexter and Bart never start together and George starts when Marlene doesn’t and three out of the four fastest are always chosen.

Seriously, what is that? It’s not law. In my eight years at HWSP, we’ve never had a case involving the starting lineup of any team, let alone a third-rate hockey club from a small Midwestern town.

Now that I’ve got some time on my hands, I plan to devote myself fully to the LSATs. It’s hard to come home after a long day and take out books. My brain is fried from too little thinking and sometimes it’s all I can do to sit on the couch and watch old episodes of
Buffy.

The only reason I was able to churn out a book at all was I did most of it at the office. If you type industriously enough, your boss will assume you’re hard at work on a very important case. Stop the second she walks by and you’ll have personal-e-mail guilt written all over you. Novels, like undercover work, are about believing in the part.

Although they’ve never said anything outright, I know my parents are disappointed by
Jarndyce and Jarndyce.
To them it represents a backslide into the miasma of liberal arts. Nobody ever paid the gas bill with clever ideas.

The movie is worse. Publishing is at least an industry they believe in. They’ve had books in their hands—
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People
—even if they’ve only glanced at the contents (that is, the table of contents). But filmmaking is pure charlatanism, a series of undelivered promises made to people who should know better. The last movie they saw was 1974’s
Towering Inferno.
They enjoyed it immensely, but narrative, the ongoing account of familiar and sometimes likeable characters, requires too much, holding your attention captive until it drops you cold. Now they stick to Bloomberg, which demands nothing more interesting than money, a resource they’re happy to expend in the pursuit of comfort, the only intangible they understand.

When I tell them about the party, they look at me with such worry and concern that I feel like a bad daughter for even bringing it up. Far from giving the movie credibility, the proposed event undermines it completely. Only a project with shaky foundations would have to work so hard to seem legitimate. For reasons I don’t understand, my parents seem convinced Hollywood will ruin me. It’s like buried deep in their minds is an ancestral memory of a ne’er-do-well Carstone holding out for the easy buck. They look at me and see him.

The only way to convince them I’ll be all right is to show them. When the party’s a complete success, when the media gushes over the affair, when Arcadia green-lights the film, when Moxie gives the performance of her life, when
J&J
wins an Oscar, when my book becomes a best-seller, when I have so much money I never have to work again, then they’ll get on board.

Up until that moment, I’ll leave them in the dark about my job. I hate the thought of worrying them further.

Plus, it saves me a lot of aggravation.

I call my sister and swear her to secrecy. She works for a Swiss reinsurance company doing actuarial tables and rarely has time to talk during business hours. Today, however, I convince her to take a long lunch and come to Barney’s with me. I need an outfit for my Hollywood debut.

“This is crazy,” she says as I hold up a white coat dress by Betsey Johnson. It has a round neckline, elbow sleeves and a large belt around the waist. It’s very fashion forward but I’m not sure I can pull off the poufy shoulders. They look oddly like a sketch for a Frank Gehry building. I put it back on the rack to show Carrie that I haven’t lost it completely.

She doesn’t appreciate my effort. “Look, you can’t spend”—she grabs the tag on a Narciso Rodriguez linen dress—“fifteen hundred dollars on an outfit when you just got laid off.”

I shake my head and walk over to the next rack, where a bright blue Pucci hangs provocatively. With very little effort, I can see myself in the signature abstract print. I’d be a classic. “Not laid off, quit.”

Carrie looks around stealthily. “Will you stop saying that? You can’t collect unemployment if you keep saying that.”

Collecting unemployment isn’t a simple matter of he said–she said but my sister believes so strongly in the power of semantics that I let it go. She’s too much of a Connecticut Carstone to understand impulsiveness. My job isn’t my job anymore. Victoria Penn isn’t going to let me have it back if I ask nicely, nor is she going to let my unemployment insurance papers slide across her desk.

As soon as I run my fingers over the Pucci, I know it’ll never do. Jersey is too casual a material. I’m going to a hot L.A. party, not a clam bake. I eye a white A-line skirt with teal stripes down the front and alternating black and gray square accents. It’s beautiful. I imagine it with the perfect top, something equally sleek and summery, perhaps silk in a complementing color.

Noting the interested look in my eye, Carrie grabs the skirt. “Absolutely not.” She holds up the tag. “One thousand and ninety-five dollars and that’s just for the skirt. You can’t afford this.”

Although I don’t think eleven hundred dollars is necessarily too much to pay for a skirt to wear to such a major event, it is slightly on the high side when you consider the designer, Diane von Furstenberg, has a line for Gap Kids. I seek out the Dior section.

I pause briefly over an asymmetrical dress gathered at the waist, but the neckline is too plunging. Even with fabric tape, I’d worry obsessively about a wardrobe malfunction. Next I admire a bright abstract print. The neck is a respectable V, the skirt a flattering A. The material is lovely to the touch, a warm, silver silk.

“How about this?” I ask, consideringly. It’s the first one I feel serious about. It’s lovely, summery, by a high-end designer and on the edge of edgy. And at $1,095, it’s practically a bargain—the same price as the DVF skirt but without the need for a top.

Carrie runs her hands over the hem. “I suppose you could wear it again.”

I stare at her goggle-eyed.
Of course
I can wear it again! It’s a Christian Dior, not a bridesmaid dress.

“Or,” she says, lowering her voice as she follows me to a dressing room, “you can leave the tags on and return it after the party.”

Her suggestion is so ridiculous, I don’t even dignify it with an answer. It’s obvious my sister knows nothing of Hollywood. She’s doesn’t read
People
or
Us
or even
In Style.
Embarrassing snafus like leaving the tag on a dress are exactly what the paparazzi are after. Humiliation is their raison d’être.

She continues to chastise me for my irresponsibility as I wiggle out of my jeans, and I wonder why I asked her to come at all. I should have known she’d spoil my fun. Family is always a wet sponge on a good time. When I was seven, she ruined by birthday party at the Houdini Factory in the mall by explaining how all the tricks were done. It’s almost the same thing now. She’s breaking the dress down to its components—silk, thread, dye—to take away its magic.

I tune her out as I pull the dress over my head. I don’t think $1,095 is
that
much money. My credit card can take it. And if it couldn’t, I’d pay it off in installments. Nothing is more important than this party.

Running my hands over the silk to smooth out the dress, I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t know what I think. The length is right: just above the knees. The neck is good: not too revealing. The material flows nicely over my body, revealing a shape beneath without actually clinging. My arms look a little flabby but that’s only to be expected with narrow shoulder straps.

Overall, it’s hard to imagine the finished product. I’m wearing no makeup at all and my hair is a messy ponytail.

I pull the curtain aside and step out of the dressing room, goose bumps forming as the cold air-conditioning hits my skin. Carrie turns, breaks off her litany of other bad decisions I’ve made in my life and stares. She doesn’t say anything for a long time; she just blinks and blinks. Then, in a voice so soft, I can barely hear her, she says, “Wow.”

And that’s when I remember why I brought her along.