Her Latest Supporting Role
a novel
Cynthia Ashworth
Copyright © 2010 Cynthia Ashworth. All rights are reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover art and jacket design © 2010 Cynthia Ashworth
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For everyone in advertising who has ever survived a pitch
JUNE
Chapter 1
"Where the fuck is Nick Wheeler?"
It was Monday June nineteenth and barely nine AM; Constable's shout erupted into the empty tenth floor corridor in a way that would have unnerved anyone. A moment later his frantic search for the missing Executive Producer took him to Jill Barber's desk, and he bobbed up and down before her, his cheeks flushed, eyes wild beneath the unruly mad-scientist brows.
"Where is Nick?"
"He's editing at Charlex ‘til lunchtime," Jill told Constable, her voice betraying a flicker of anxiety. She slapped one palm over the mouthpiece of the phone, and with her other hand looked up a phone number on her computer. "Do you want me to call his cell?"
"Give me the number, I'll call him myself," Constable demanded, still bobbing in a slightly menacing way. He snatched the Post-It note from Jill's hand and departed, muttering furiously.
Constable was the President and Chief Creative Officer of Hambleton French Advertising's New York office. Everyone in the agency was on a first name basis with everyone else: the head of Brand Planning was known to all as Trevor, the Media Director was Suzanne, Jill's own bosses, the Über-producers, were Nick and Sandi. The lone exception to this code of familiarity, their President was referred to by all as Constable—just Constable, no mention of his first name (Simon) except in the industry rags like Adweek, and of course the Times advertising column where he’d received numerous mentions over the years. Like Liberace or Moby, only one name was necessary. And so it had been, the legend went, since his days as a junior copywriter at the agency's London office in the 70’s. A rangy, loose-limbed Brit somewhere in his late forties, Constable had ruddy cheeks—his face always looked as though it had been slapped long and hard—and a thatch of curly brown hair threaded with silvery strands. His slight limp was an important part of the Constable lore, the result of a near-fatal car accident during childhood, and this handicap was further emphasized by the speed with which he moved around the agency, practically galloping through its corridors, issuing three- or four-word directives at eardrum-shattering decibel levels. Often these commands were really no more than fragments of thought, the frantic and disordered output of an advertising genius, and his minions frequently puzzled over them for hours (days sometimes) afraid to ask their mercurial leader for clarification. Volatile and profane, magnetic and pansexual, Constable’s ego was matched in size only by the rumored exorbitance of his salary.
It had been a little less than a month since Jill Barber joined Hambleton French Advertising. Her first real job: or at least, real job as it might be defined by certain of her high-achieving friends, for she was a failed actress-turned-almost-MFA straight out of New York University’s graduate film program. Some of her oldest friends, the ones who were now working on Wall Street or at Manhattan’s white-shoe law firms and who aspired to someday move back to Greenwich, Connecticut—the leafy suburban snore where they’d all grown up—might have given her a funny look when she described an average day at the New York office of America’s fourth-largest ad agency. The same funny look she’d gotten when, during her previous, short-lived and ultimately abandoned career, they’d tactlessly asked if she was still “trying to act.” But her degree and a couple of short films she’d made at NYU had helped her land a job at Hambleton French, and she was happy to have it. Much as it had pained her to admit it to her classmates, she didn’t share their burning desire to be the next Spike (Lee or Jonze), or a programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival.
The more she had learned about it, the more advertising intrigued her. It seemed like a legitimate way to stay creative, and still have the time and resources to work on her own short film projects without having to be a starving artist-slash-waitress again. She’d had enough of that during her acting days. Jill desperately wanted to get going on her career, on her life; between three years of struggling to make it as an actress, and then two more in graduate school, she was already way behind most of her friends. It wouldn’t be selling out, she would still be making films, Jill had reassured herself (and her skeptical classmates)—they’d just be really, really short ones. Jill had played small and forgettable parts in several commercials over the years, so she’d at least gotten a taste of the advertising business. Perhaps she'd been brainwashed by Melrose Place and Bewitched during her childhood, but Jill was genuinely excited to be there.
After nearly four weeks, though, she still wasn't entirely clear what it was she was supposed to be doing. The job had sounded like a fantastic opportunity but in fact seemed to be a glorified administrative position. She knew (from all the movies she’d watched as much as anything) that industries like advertising were all about paying your dues and being in the right place at the right time; still, she’d expected more, somehow, especially after having been put through so many interviews. A sequence of bubbly young HR girls first, and then the head of creative personnel, a fidgety brunette in an acid green mini-dress who bore an astonishing resemblance to Keith Richards in drag: that particular woman had kept crossing and uncrossing her legs like an under-cranked version of Basic Instinct, rapid-firing questions at Jill as if she couldn't wait to get rid of her and go "do lunch." Other agency people had looked her over with weary cynicism, as though they’d probably seen dozens like her come and go. One meeting found Jill trying desperately to impress a snarly TV commercial producer who seemed to be careening down from a cocaine high, so dark and altered was his mood by the time he'd finished with her. And now that very man, Nick Wheeler, was her boss.
Every morning Jill took a seat in a cubicle of groovy-but-fake teak covered on one side with what resembled charcoal gray Velcro; like so many of its employees, even the agency's furniture had an air of hostile irony. She had a white iMac and her own multi-line phone—it seemed so incredibly corporate, a hundred and eighty degrees away from her former life, or lives. All day long she screened phone calls for Nick, and for Sandi Cusimano—the agency's other harried, chain-smoking Executive Producer—and booked things for them: edit suites, car service, voice-over casting sessions, rooms at Shutters Santa Monica. Plus she handled their huge and complicated expense reports (they were always traveling, traveling, traveling…LA especially): stacks of dog-eared and wallet-weary receipts which had billing job numbers scrawled on them in minute, barely legible script. Nick's writing, in particular, had unnerved Jill from the very first day—the slanted, tight little scribbles of an extremely disturbed man.
By lunch time the agency gossip network had cranked into overdrive, the reason for Constable's early-morning eruption now widely known: Tellco Toys and Games, their biggest client, had called for an agency review. The newly-hired Tellco Senior Vice-President of Marketing, unimpressed by the agency's latest round of creative work to introduce a line of pre-school toys, far from delighted with the agency's strategic thinking for the launch of Rainbow Babies—a politically-correct line of ethnic-featured baby dolls—and smarting from a two year decline in market share, had that very morning given Constable official notice of the impending review. Hambleton French had less than ten weeks to get its act together and develop a presentation that would convince Tellco not to take seventy million dollars worth of business elsewhere.
Nick returned from the edit house at noon. His skin was the same ashy gray color as the smoke from the twenty or so cigarettes he had no doubt consumed while supervising the editing of Tellco’s new Dinosaur Valley spot. Puffed, vein-y lids obscured his dark eyes, and his brown hair was a shaggy mess. As Executive Producer and co-head of the department, Nick Wheeler oversaw all TV commercial production on the Tellco account. The agency created more spots for the toy manufacturer than for any other single client—nearly fifty in an average year—and probably half the production department's employees owed their jobs to Tellco. If the account went away, likely half of the department's jobs would, too—including both Nick's and Jill's.
He stopped at Jill's desk, and wordlessly riffled through a stack of pink message slips. A dark red gash about a half-inch long streaked across the bottom of his left cheek, and the front of his khaki shirt was peppered with more blood. Tiny spots formed a random pattern over his left pocket. Perhaps he had cut himself shaving? Jill doubted it, though; his hollow cheeks were covered with the customary two days growth of dark beard. On more than one occasion Jill had wondered how he managed to maintain his stubble so impeccably. Did he have some unusual electric razor made especially for the style-conscious, the only one guaranteed not to shave you closer than a blade or your money back?
"I suppose you've heard about Tellco by now," Nick said absently as he lobbed a few crumpled messages into her trashcan. Even from three feet away Jill's nose wrinkled at the smell of Marlboro Lights wafting from his hair, clothes and skin.
Jill nodded. "I guess Constable tracked you down. Sorry to hear the bad news, Nick." He merely grunted in acknowledgment. "Hey," she added. "Did you have some kind of accident this morning?"
Nick looked puzzled. Jill touched her hand against her own cheek to the approximate place where his was cut, an unconscious signal.
"Oh, yeah. The fucking just-off-the-boat, speak-no-English, turban-headed cab driver got into an accident on the way back from Charlex." Nick bristled with indignation, and for a moment stopped shuffling the slips of paper in his hand. "They had to wait for a cop, so I jumped out and hailed another cab. The first driver got really pissed when I refused to pay him and hurled something at me as I got into the other cab. Fucker got me right in the face."
He raised a hand to his cheek, then caught a glimpse of the blood stains on the shirt. His dark eyes flickered with alarm. "Jesus Christ! The bastard cut me! What the fuck did he throw?"
As Nick uttered a hoarse stream of curse words, Jill swiftly changed the subject. "So how does the Dinosaur Valley spot look?"
Still fussing over his bloodied shirt, Nick gave her a sour smile and shook his head. "Let's just say that if this is the kind of work we turn out over the next two months, we're fucked." As he walked toward his office, he shouted back to Jill. "Find Sandi for me, would you? We need to pow wow—NOW!"
Sandi Cusimano co-helmed the broadcast production department with Nick but had next to nothing to do with the Tellco account. A striking blonde of the California girl genre, tall and long-limbed, Sandi was a whippet-thin chain smoker who could match Nick Wheeler butt for butt any day of the week. Though with Jill she was unfailingly sweet and easy-going, a dream boss, Jill knew Sandi's reputation throughout the agency: that she was one tough cookie. She brought a measured, almost theatrical quality to the act of verbally beating account service guys into submission, talking them into big budget, high-risk spots with breathtaking production values, making them (and their clients) pay until it hurt. In spite of this abuse, the suits—as she called the account types, with a mixture of affection and disdain—were said to love Sandi almost as much as they feared her. Marcia Brady with biker chick attitude, and the wardrobe to match: that was Sandi.
Jill didn't fear Sandi, didn't try to avoid her or kid-glove her the way she did Nick. She liked working for her, and Sandi was trying to teach Jill as much as she could about the ad business, the big budget, commercial stuff you didn’t learn in film school. When Sandi had mentioned that she herself started at Hambleton French in the same lowly position Jill now occupied, it helped to reassure Jill that she hadn’t made yet another poor career choice, and offered a glimmer of hope that there was indeed life after expense reports and maintaining the videotape library.
It took five minutes of roaming the halls, but Jill eventually tracked Sandi down to a music producer's tiny office. She was slumped on the couch, black spike heels resting on the coffee table, ignoring the city’s indoor smoking ban. Seeing Jill's head poke into the doorway, she halted her story in mid-sentence.
"What's up?" she asked, not bothering to remove the cigarette before speaking.
"Nick needs to see you right away. He's in a terrible mood."
"Mmm," Sandi said by way of acknowledgment, and, after one final, protracted drag, swung her long legs to the floor. "There's a lot of that going around today."
Despite the agency-wide panic over the impending Tellco review, the quarterly welcome meeting for new employees was going ahead as scheduled. Sandi had insisted that Jill attend, that they could do without her for the rest of the day.
When she arrived about thirteen people were seated in rows in the big red-carpeted boardroom, and another half-dozen or so wandered in late, announcing their respective arrivals with a great noise of rattling chair legs. The boardroom was in semi-darkness. Their indoctrination to Hambleton French Advertising was presented as a PowerPoint in white type on red: it seemed to have taken its design cues from a stop sign. And after listening to an exhaustive litany of facts and figures on the international prominence of HFA (forty-two offices in nineteen countries, the flagship office in London’s chi-chi Soho Square, more than six thousand employees worldwide, a prestigious client list, awards too numerous to mention, on and on and on it went), Jill's mind began to fog with boredom.
The person on her right tapped Jill’s bare forearm twice with the eraser end of a pencil, pulling her back to consciousness. She turned her head and saw a casually dressed man in his early thirties; he had ultra-short blond hair and his thin face was pale, almost cadaverous in the half-light from the projector. The pencil end tapped again, this time on a pad of paper that rested on his knee. Jill strained in the dark to read the words that were written there in large, elegant capitals: CORPORATE MASTURBATION. She glanced up to see him sneak a look at her, and watched his lips part in a sardonic smile.
At last the lights went up and the woman charged with their corporate indoctrination—another bubbly blonde from HR—led a mercifully brief question and answer session before inviting them all to get to know each other at the back of the boardroom over a glass of one of their clients' supposedly fine wines. The audience, made up almost entirely of twenty-one year-old trainees from the accounting department, struggled from the chairs slowly, their senses dulled by the unexpected barrage of facts and figures, more than anyone in their right mind would ever want to know about Hambleton French.
The man to Jill's right didn't stand. Instead, he turned toward her and extended his hand. His mouth was drawn up in the same snarky smile she'd glimpsed in the darkness.
"Robin Devlin," he said, inclining his head as if she'd asked a question. "Art Director Extraordinaire. And you are..."
Jill shook his hand quickly. His palm was cool and dry, and she could feel all the bones in his long fingers.
"Jill Barber. I'm in Broadcast Production. How long have you been here?"
"Almost three months, and they haven't fired me yet. And you?"
"Four weeks. And ditto."
By a long table at the rear of the boardroom, the accounting trainees were guzzling glasses of Chateau Roche, a medium-sweet Long Island white. Jill watched as Robin’s gaze took in the slurping trainees, then came slowly back to her.
He tilted his head toward the group. "Are you going to hang around for a glass of Chateau Raunch?"
Jill shook her head no, and crinkled her nose in disgust. If waitressing had done anything for her (besides keeping her from starving, of course) it had turned her into a terrible wine snob.
"Then you are obviously a person of both wisdom and good taste. Would you care to join me for an adult beverage or two at The Whiskey Bar?" He rolled his eyes dramatically. "After all this corporate rah-rah I could use a real drink."
Jill shot a look at the back of the room, where their HR hostess was bravely attempting conversation with one of the fledgling accountants, a surly-looking kid in a polyester tie so wide it could easily have doubled as a lobster bib. "Do you think we should disappear yet? It’s barely five."
Robin answered with a low, reckless laugh. Jill wondered, was he mocking her or trying to be friendly?
"Live dangerously, Jill Barber," he said, jumping up from his chair. "Follow me."
Jill followed Robin to the back of the room, where he took two opaque plastic cups of white wine from the table. Passing one to Jill, he spun around to face the HR blonde, and hearing a split-second pause in the conversation, extended his hand.
"Really enjoyed the presentation," Robin announced with breezily transparent charm. Shaking her hand, he added: "Great to see you again, by the way," following it with yet another flash of his perfect, and perfectly insincere smile.
She returned his smile graciously, and nodded thanks as Robin moved behind her. Puzzled, Jill stared down into the yellow cupful of wine. A second later she felt his fingers on her elbow, and he led her toward a kitchen, which was connected to the boardroom by a narrow doorway.
"Stand here a minute," Robin whispered, positioning himself on one side of the door. “And smile."
"Do I have to drink it?" she asked hesitantly.
"Of course not—do I look like a sadist? Just try to act like you're having a good time."
Trying to act: my specialty, thought Jill. A moment later, she saw the blonde woman's gaze swivel around the room, at last coming to rest on Robin's tall form. He smiled and she nodded in acknowledgment, then turned her attention back to the group from accounting.
"We're out of here," Robin told Jill in a low voice, and pulled her through the open door. He dumped their wine in the sink and sent the empty plastic cups sailing into a nearby garbage can, but paused before opening another door that led to the corridor, and freedom. "Those little cups, that wine—strangely reminiscent of a trip to the doctor's office, don't you think?"
Jill sputtered with laughter, and obediently followed Robin out the door. The distant chorus of ringing telephones gave her second thoughts about leaving so soon; six was as early as she’d dared before (whether she was busy or not) reluctant to look like a slacker next to the other cube-dwellers on her floor. But her pangs of conscientiousness subsided when she remembered Sandi's words. Jill dashed to her desk to collect her purse, and then crept guiltily through the halls to join Robin at the elevator.
Robin led them to a bar on the ground floor of the Paramount Hotel. Though no longer particularly hot, the Whiskey Bar still had some cachet. But at this hour it was nearly empty; the poseurs, Jill knew, started drinking significantly later than mere wage slaves. A manager in a tight-fitting Euro-style shirt led them to a table near the back, and Jill slid along the cool leatherette banquette. Robin returned his Oliver Peoples sunglasses to their case with a flourish and gave a noisy sigh of relief.
"Well, wasn't that interesting," he announced, his tone very clearly communicating otherwise. "And now, class, we're going to have a pop quiz on what we learned. You in the front row, Jill Barber, can you tell me how many employees of Hambleton French Advertising work in the Abu Dhabi office?"
Jill smiled, playing along. She bit her lip in mock concentration. "Uh...forty-five?"
Robin tut-tutted, and gave her a stern look of disapproval. "I'm afraid that answer is incorrect. If you had been paying attention you would know that HFA does not in fact have an Abu Dhabi office. I'm afraid that as punishment you will have to work in accounting for a period of one week."
"Anything but that!" she pleaded, laughing.
"I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're going to have to learn that Hambleton French shows no mercy. One glass of the house wine should be enough to convince you of that. Speaking of which, I'm ready for a gin and tonic. What about you?" He raised his hand, and a cat-suited waitress glided to a stop at their table.
The Whiskey Bar soon filled with an after work assortment of fashionable downtown types who, like Robin and Jill, apparently had to suffer the indignity of working above 23rd Street. The buzz of conversation and a gray haze of cigarette smoke wafted through the air while Robin interrogated Jill. It was just like when she'd filled out the Hambleton French job application a few weeks earlier: name, address, education, work experience. Then Robin downed the last swallow of gin, and as he fought for the attention of their now rather harassed-looking waitress, smiled at Jill. She couldn't quite decide if he was being sincere. The perfect teeth were hidden, and the look in his eyes seemed, well, kinder. Perhaps.
"So what made you want to work in advertising, Jill Barber?" he inquired. His voice had the same Serious Young Man tone he'd used with the HR lady in the boardroom, but there was still a hint of the flamboyance that he'd done little to contain since their introduction. Jill frowned, and studied Robin's tanned face. His short golden hair was so groomed, his smile so white and perfect. Jill concluded that she could be as sarcastic, as over-the-top as he was. Robin wouldn't take offence, he'd probably enjoy it.
"I don't know, Robin. The dazzling glamour of typing and distributing all those production schedules, I guess. Or perhaps the tremendous challenge of trying to keep three callers on hold simultaneously."
Jill heard her words and at once regretted them. With her voice blunted by the gin her attempt at humor had sounded not funny, but sour grape-ish.
"You hate it?" His mouth drew into a little knot of sympathy.
"Just kidding," Jill said. Then she looked at Robin and broke into a lopsided smile. The seriousness had evaporated and his face now wore a comic mask of mock-concern. So he hadn't been sincere after all. "It's actually fine. Not exactly what I expected to be doing, but fine. The problem is me, not the job. I accepted it, after all."
"Well, the job will get better. With all the experience you have from film school, you’ll be a junior producer in no time."
"That's what Sandi keeps saying. She told me the story of her ascent from lowly assistant to high-powered Executive Producer, and said that could be me. So that’s what keeps me going when Nick sends me out to buy him cigarettes and pick up his dry cleaning."
"Have you been on a TV shoot yet?" Jill shook her head. "You should persuade Nick or Sandi to take you along to one. They can be a blast. I have one next week, as a matter of fact, a studio shoot here in the city. We're shooting another Tellco ad, for their Glow-in-the-Dark Space Alien, now that the Dinosaur Valley spot is almost finished. You should swing by."
“I would absolutely love to.” Jill smiled. “Thanks. So you work on Tellco?"
"Among other accounts," he said. "I suppose you heard about the review?"
Jill nodded empathetically. "And we're still producing new ads for them?"
"Oh yeah, it's business as usual until the agency's fate is decided." Robin took a long swallow from his glass and sighed, suddenly serious. "Hooray for Hell-co."
Two drinks down and Jill was shoving a handful of wasabi peas into her mouth when she saw Robin wave to someone across the crowded bar. A tall man with hair nearly as black as her own, and dressed in a navy blazer and striped shirt moved toward them. He was probably only thirty, but his attire and sober, composed expression made him seem older.
"Hello, Robin," he said, coming to a halt at the end of their table.
He flashed a genial smile at them both, and raised one hand in greeting. Up close, the first thing Jill noticed were his slightly squinty eyes—they were an unusual shade of blue, deep-water dark—and a small raised scar that curved across his chin, centered just below the bottom lip like a second smile. Otherwise he was handsome in a bland, boy-next-door sort of way, like a G-rated Hugh Grant.
"Haven't seen much of you today," he added. "Everything okay with our little pre-historic pals?"
"Oh sure, couldn't be better," Robin assured him. "I had that new employees thing this afternoon, so I wasn't around at the end of the day. But everything's fine," he repeated, and tilted his head toward Jill. "Hey, let me introduce you two. Jill Barber, this is Graham Ferguson, the Management Supervisor on Tellco Toys. He's my favorite suit, lately anyway…my suit-du-jour. We're the Dinosaur Valley team!" Robin added with mock elation.
Graham smiled and extended a hand. "Nice to meet you Jill."
"We met at the new employees thing," Robin said. "She's in Broadcast. She works with Nick Wheeler and Sandi...Sandi..."
She finished his sentence. "Cusimano."
"Well, welcome to Hambleton French," Graham said.
"Thanks."
Robin motioned to a place in the booth next to Jill. "You want to join us? I'm going to stick around for a while, and so is Jill."
"Oh. Right," she said, steeling herself for a third cocktail, and a woozy subway ride downtown.
Graham looked down at his watch. "I shouldn't even be here—what with the account having just been put into review and all—but I had plans to meet a former client, and it wouldn't really be cool to blow him off." He squeezed onto the banquette next to Jill, and tried to make eye contact with the nearest waitress. "This guy I'm meeting is one of those people who's never on time, especially when the agency's concerned. Unfortunately, I'm compulsively punctual."
"I know what you mean," Jill said. "I was even born on the exact day I was due."
"Fortunately," said Robin, "I have a predisposition towards being fashionably late. Except where work is concerned, of course," he added, turning pointedly to Graham.
Graham raised his hand again, but failed to get any response. "They do have table service here, don't they?"
"Maybe it would be quicker if you went to the bar," suggested Robin.
"Either of you ready for another?"
Robin rattled the ice cubes around in his empty glass. "Gin and tonic, thanks."
As soon as Graham was out of earshot, Robin leaned across the table conspiratorially. "Now you will be nice to poor Graham, won't you?"
Jill frowned. "What do you mean, 'poor Graham'?"
"Girl trouble." Robin thumped his empty glass down on the table. "His fiancée dumped him—it happened right before I was hired—to marry the guy who was doing the flowers for their wedding. Can you imagine losing your beloved to the only straight florist in the tri-State area? Life can be too cruel. Anyhow, the gossip mill says that he's been in pretty rough shape since then. I mean, he's a super-nice guy, but working with him hasn't exactly been a barrel of laughs."
"You think he's depressed?"
"Or something...I just thought that a little sympathetic female company—someone young and attractive like yourself, for example—might shine a ray of sunlight on his otherwise tragic existence."
"Oh, please!" Jill gave him a chastising look. "Is that why you asked me to come here with you? To pimp me out to some guy you work with?"
"No, no, not at all. Jill!" Robin chided. "Of course not. My, aren't we sensitive today!" He glanced up to see Graham returning from the bar, drinks in hand, and lowered his voice to a whisper. "But please—be nice. I feel sorry for him, I really do.”
After an hour Graham had livened up considerably, so much so that Jill couldn't see why Robin thought he was depressed and that her cheering-up services were required. Robin was keeping them entertained with his dead-on imitation of Constable—who had surfaced momentarily at the new employees' gathering—by responding to every remark with a nasal, very upper class British whine and a slightly spastic wave of his arms. Graham certainly enjoyed the show, hardly seeming to care that he'd been unceremoniously blown off by his ex-client, finally getting the call a full hour after their scheduled meeting. He laughed so loudly he even earned a couple of weird looks from the hipsters in the next booth.
At a lull in the conversation, Jill reached under the table for her purse.
"Well, guys, it's been a blast," she said. "But I'm afraid I'm going to have to call it a night."
Robin frowned, and looked insulted. His voice returned to normal. "It isn't even seven-thirty," he said sternly. "You can't call it a night when it hardly qualifies as an afternoon."
"I know, Robin. But I just signed up for a summer class," Jill was suddenly nervous about having exposed herself as a not-yet-graduate of NYU—the HR blondes had quite another idea—but neither of them registered surprise. "And I want to get a jump on my reading."
"Oh Jill, you're so gosh-darned good. You can take the girl out of Greenwich…”
"Yeah, well, good or not, one more gin and tonic and I'll be lucky just to stay awake."
"All right," he relented. "You're excused."
Graham scooted over to release her from the banquette, returning her goodbye smile warmly. Robin, seeing the expression on the other man’s face, gave Jill a knowing grin.
"I guess I'll see you both around the office then," Jill said, turning toward the door. "Ta ta for now."
She heard their goodbyes through a filter of rumbling conversation and clinking glasses as she pushed through the crowded bar and into the fresh air. The temperature dropped a full ten degrees as she descended to the subway, and Jill smelled sweat and beer and cheap aftershave in the air. She passed through the turnstile and, with the three gin and tonics beginning to take their full effect, swayed on the platform as she awaited the downtown train.
Chapter 2
When Jonathan Wunder strolled into the classroom on the top floor of NYU’s Tisch building, casually slung an armful of books onto the lectern and announced that he'd be teaching "Novel into Film Since 1965," Jill sat up straight in her seat, genuinely surprised. In the college calendar the course—a brand new offering—had been marked Instructor to be Announced, but she certainly hadn't expected anyone so young. In her experience this sort of class was usually taught by phlegmatic, jaded professors in their late forties, the ones who had once been enthusiastic graduate students, but soured on academia as they settled into tenured and boozy middle age. And in film school, her younger instructors had been frenetic, edgy, dirty and black-clothed. Way too cool for school, every one of them: Tarantino wannabes.
But this instructor was an obvious exception. He was definitely young—barely thirty, Jill was sure—but extremely clean cut, from his dark brown hair, which was stylishly, preppily cut, to his loafered bare feet. Though short, he was undeniably handsome—sort of a pint-sized Paul Rudd—and his smile was unbelievable, making Jill wonder whether great genes, or expensive orthodontia, deserved the credit. His attractiveness, however, was a little off-putting because it seemed almost calculated. Here was a man who put a great deal of effort into his image, who probably couldn't bear to pass a mirror without stealing a quick look at himself. Jill sensed this immediately, was keenly aware of that sort of thing, and all too often guilty of it herself. It was a holdover from her acting days, when, in the face of constant, audible scrutiny by casting directors (nose too long, forehead too high, too ethnic…since when was Scottish ethnic?) she became hypercritical of—and consequently obsessed with—her appearance.
And there was something else that struck her in those first minutes after he entered the classroom—he looked familiar. Jill felt a strange twinge of recognition as she watched Jonathan Wunder introduce himself to the class. But how did she know him, from where? It annoyed her that she couldn't place him.
Realizing that she hadn't been paying attention to his words at all (and he’d been talking for a while now) Jill made an effort to concentrate. He'd launched into an overview of the course, and most of the students around her were scribbling down the books on the curriculum: Jill copied their titles, and at the top of the page wrote his name—Jonathan Wunder with a U, that was how he'd introduced himself—underlining it with a series of squiggles. And then it all came together: the face, the name, everything. She suddenly knew why he seemed so familiar.
It wasn't that she and the instructor had met before. They definitely had not. But Jill was a chronic prowler of bookshops, not chains or the second-hand ones, but that charming endangered species of independent bookstores that stocked brand new volumes. Jill read voraciously, compulsively. The peculiar smell of a newly bound hardcover—especially the clean dry papery scent of pages as they flipped past her nose—intoxicated her as much as anything she'd ever smoked or snorted or swallowed. She had committed the floor plan of most of the independent book stores downtown to memory, knew the arrangement of their aisles and the contents of their shelves with a level of intimacy and nostalgia that most people reserved for their experiences with people, not things. And of all those stores, The Biography Bookshop was her favorite. Because it was so well-curated, and had such an inviting atmosphere, it attracted the city's hard-core book lovers, not just the literary dilettantes who cruised the bestseller tables at Barnes & Noble and Borders. Jill had even been picked up in its fiction section. Just once, by an earnest, faux-sensitive grad student, a PhD candidate in English Literature at Columbia who lured her out onto Bleecker Street with the promise of some lit chat and a cupcake from the Magnolia Bakery across the street, and then into his apartment by offering her a glass of cold milk to wash it down with. Jill soon learned that the doctoral student was also an aspiring pornographer—and in her admittedly amateur opinion, not even a very talented one—and he quickly abandoned their discussion of Dorothy Parker in favor of a reading from his latest composition, in an unsuccessful, though highly original, attempt to get her into bed.
It was at the Biography Bookshop—she didn't remember when, exactly—that she'd first come across the name and face of Jonathan Wunder. The photograph on the book jacket hadn't really done him justice: it was in black and white, and even from her perch in the third row she could see that he had the most extraordinary eyes, a deep, thoughtful shade of brown, long-lashed eyes that disappeared almost completely when he smiled.
As interesting as the course sounded, and as intrigued as Jill was to find herself studying under Jonathan Wunder (finally, after six years of higher education she had gotten a teacher whose book she’d actually heard of!) she hadn't planned on spending an entire summer's worth of Thursday nights in a stuffy classroom. But what had happened to Jill at the end of May, less than a month before, and delayed her graduation, had been not only unplanned, but entirely unexpected.
Gabor Czerny, an Associate Professor, taught one of the slightly provocative courses for which NYU was known, among them "Politics and Film: Espionage on Screen," and "Queer Image/ Performance”. Czerny's latest academic offering, and the one Jill had enrolled in, had been called "The Art of Anti-Communism," and studied the literary and cinematic response to the Soviet Union's power over Eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on work produced by expatriate artists from Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Czerny himself was Hungarian by birth, though in the first class had confessed that he recalled nothing of the Russian invasion, and was only seven months old when his father, a Budapest surgeon, had spirited the family away first to London, and then, more permanently, New Jersey.
The curriculum included obscure works of both fiction and film. But the course had been her lowest priority all semester. Czerny’s class was an elective, and the crushing weight of her other, compulsory classes had consumed so much of Jill’s time and energy that she'd spent an embarrassingly small amount of time on Czerny's assignments, and skipped a lot of lectures too. Though when she did manage to get herself to class she’d found it extremely interesting: she recalled Czerny, sputtering and pink-faced with enthusiasm before a semi-circle of rapt students as he savored the nuances of socio-political meaning in one particularly weighty scene of film. Her major paper, however, had been decidedly lacking in inspiration, since the due date for that particular essay was two days before her final film project had to be turned in. Unimpressed, and finding her analysis "superficial," Czerny had given her paper a mark of only 65 per cent. She needed to have equaled—or bettered—that on the final exam or she could forget about graduating with the class of 2000. Crossing the school’s lobby on her way to their appointment, Jill recalled with an uneasy shudder just how tough the final had been.
The door of Czerny's office was open wide. It was in an ugly, oppressively modern structure just south of Washington Square; Czerny, untenured even in his mid-forties—he’d bounced around a few East Coast colleges before landing at NYU—was unlucky enough to have been allotted one of the building's many windowless rooms. It resembled a cell more than an office, and the slightly eerie glow of a desk lamp shone weakly through its only opening. Jill's sandals made an irritating noise on the floor, slap, slap, slap as she walked down the hall.
He must have heard her coming. But when she reached the doorway and looked in, his back was to her; he was hunched over the desk in the far corner of his office. She raised her hand and rapped lightly on the door frame.
At once Czerny swiveled around in his chair.
"Jill...come in. What time is it?" he asked, though an elegant brushed steel clock sat in plain sight on his desk.
"Twelve-fifteen. My appointment is today, right?"
Czerny had always made Jill nervous: unsure of herself, as though he was challenging (or mocking) everything she said. It was a recurring theme. Professors nearly always made her feel like she was being tested; their mere presence put her on her guard, even the younger ones, the teaching assistants she’d had as an undergrad who had smiled nervously (creepily even) and tried a little too hard to be her pal. It could have been the lingering after-effect of the many tough House Mistresses she’d had to contend with at prep school: at the age of twenty-seven, Jill was still afraid of getting caught out of uniform or busted for sneaking into town after lights out. And Czerny’s often-discussed, and in fact well-deserved reputation as someone who played fast and loose with NYU’s Code of Conduct on student-teacher relations only increased her sense of unease.
"Of course your appointment is today," he said, and Jill thought she heard a faint note of condescension in his low, raspy voice, like he had been testing her. "I just lost track of time. I've been marking the papers from an undergrad class. You wouldn't believe how badly some of them write—not to mention the fact that only about half of them seem to have read the books on the course."
Jill swallowed a brief spasm of recognition as Czerny stood and cleared some paperbacks from the armchair next to his desk, then motioned at her to sit down. He was dressed in his customary fashion—black work shirt, black pants and black boots, a downtown Johnny Cash, the combination seeming at once both sleek and sinister—and his outfit matched the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of his little chamber perfectly. He flicked a switch and a small light came on, making the room seem somewhat less solitary.
"The Art of Anti-Communism" was not Jill’s first time studying with Gabor Czerny; the previous year he’d taught one of her compulsory courses, Introduction to Film Theory. The night after the Film Theory final Czerny had held a party at his loft for the class members and various hangers-on, the so-called permanent students who had become an indistinguishable feature of the Tisch School landscape, as much a part of the school as its vintage lounge furniture. He lived in what he referred to as the "up and coming, down and out" part of downtown, on the Lower East Side near the Grand Street Settlement. His loft was on the top floor of an unrenovated ex-factory. No Tribeca-style gentrification for Czerny, no yuppie comforts in his domestic life, or at least that was the impression Jill got as she and a classmate hauled themselves up five long flights of concrete stairs to his loft.
Inside, his place was grander and more stylish than the neighborhood would suggest. And their instructor was a tolerant host: he didn't move a muscle, didn't even wince as one of the chain-smoking film students placed a sweating glass on the immaculate rosewood surface of his dining table, while the student's girlfriend trailed cigarette ash across the strip pine floor in her search for another beer. Czerny lived with a big-boned and decidedly un-pretty woman named Tess who ran a prestigious art gallery in Soho. But as soon as the party got going she disappeared to take their Great Dane for a walk, and as midnight approached Tess was still nowhere to be seen. He didn't seem to notice that she was gone, though, and Jill watched with wary amusement the way Czerny's icy blue eyes shone and his movements grew grand, larger-than-life as he struck up an animated conversation with one of the many pretty young things from among his circle of admirers: both undergraduate and grad school women dotted the soirée. More admiring, certainly, than his faculty colleagues, who were under-represented at the party; the rumor was that Czerny barely hung on to his position, given his chronic failure to publish regularly in academic journals, or even those less-scholarly but still-prestigious forums like the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine. But among these NYU film students Czerny’s little cult-of-personality was clearly going strong.
For more than a week Jill had debated whether or not to attend Czerny's little get-together. She was a few years older than at least half of her classmates and, outside of the classroom, often felt conspicuous among them. But the one good friend she’d made in Film Theory, Patty (another unsuccessful actress who had decided to refocus her creative aspirations elsewhere) had dragged her along. And yet fifteen minutes after their arrival Patty got a cell phone summons to join her boyfriend at a party in Brooklyn, and, mumbling apologies, disappeared into the night. Jill ended up staying at the party, though, and made a real effort to talk with classmates she hadn't spoken to all term, suddenly concerned that they had mistaken her shyness for snobbery. With a glass of Cabernet working its charms on her inhibitions, she put on her party face and mingled.
"Everyone enjoying themselves?" Gabor Czerny asked, approaching her little group. He was circulating with a bottle of red wine, topping up every glass in sight with waiterly deftness.
"Nice party," she remarked. "You have a very cool loft." And Jill dropped her empty glass to her side, out of Czerny’s reach.
He looked down at her empty glass disapprovingly.
"Had two already, and I don’t want to fall asleep on the subway," she said with a little shrug of apology. “I might wake up the Bronx.”
"Such a virtuous girl, Jill," Czerny commented to the rest of her group, his tone slightly sardonic, but he paused a second before moving on to the next little clutch of guests, and in that moment Jill felt his hand, warm and heavy, come to rest very firmly on her bottom. For a split-second she thought there was no way that this bold hand—now pressing so insistently on her backside—belonged to her professor. She turned to her left, where a greasy-looking Goth stood. He was probably one of Czerny’s undergrad students—she’d certainly never seen him in any of her classes. Jill looked sharply at him, a little surprised, as if he was to blame. But that student was too busy with his beer, and just stared blankly back at her as he chugged it down. Both of his hands were in sight.
"If you'll both excuse me then, I see some more empty glasses." Czerny’s broad, heavy hand gave Jill's ass a final appreciative squeeze, and he moved on.
Jill remembered all this as she sat down on a worn armchair in Czerny’s cell-like office, and he stood by the door, which he'd shut. His back was to her again as he flipped through some folders in the top drawer of his ancient filing cabinet.
"This is the class file," he said, producing an envelope from the drawer with a flourish. He slammed the filing cabinet shut, and it clanged with an eerie metallic boom. Czerny sat down at his desk again, and began to thumb through pages and pages of Xeroxed manuscripts. "I keep copies of everyone's papers for a year. Here's yours." And he pulled it from between the others, his movement exaggerated, extravagant. Czerny flipped to the back page, where the mark was noted, but held it up so she couldn't see. Jill found this strange, particularly because she knew what he'd given her—sixty-five percent, the lowest mark a grad student could get and still pass the course. This little game, concealing the page from her, made the muscles in her stomach tap-dance.
"How did you feel about the final, Jill?" he asked quickly.
She shifted in her chair and looked at him, not quite straight in the eye. Jill cleared her throat very softly.
"I’m not going to lie, it was hard." She flashed a nervous smile, which he missed.
Jill's twill skirt was on the short side, and she had a light sunburn. She was suddenly aware of the backs of her bare and reddened thighs sticking uncomfortably to the chair's leather seat, and tried raising one leg just a little to cross it over her knee. But as Jill brought her right leg up the seat made a strange, embarrassing noise, like from lifting a piece of masking tape, or a fart. She let the leg drop down onto the seat again, self-conscious. Czerny studied the page before him, seemingly oblivious.
"I gave you 65 per cent on this paper," he reminded her. "A passing grade—barely—but I've seen you do much better work."
Jill was beyond embarrassed by the poor job she'd done on the paper, and what she expected was an equally poor showing on the final exam. It certainly wasn’t the way she’d planned to end her graduate school career. She recited the answer that seemed to work best in these circumstances: apologetic, acknowledging fault, not at all defensive, basically throwing herself on the mercy of the court. She didn't want to argue with Czerny because she got the distinct feeling that she wouldn't win.
"Well, no one's going to write an A-plus paper every time, Jill, but I'm sure you realize that the final exam is quite another matter."
"Is that why I'm here?" Jill asked. Her voice was still even, but she felt another angst-y flutter in her abdomen.
"Not necessarily." He leaned back a bit in his chair, and tossed her paper onto the desk, face down. "I ask all my graduating students to come see me after the course has ended. So I can let them have their final marks before they are submitted, but also just to talk about their experience with the class. In case they have any suggestions or observations they'd like to pass on."
"Oh, okay. That makes sense." Jill breathed a little easier, and settled more comfortably in her chair. He’d said graduating students: that at least was reassuring. Maybe this lemon was going to turn into lemonade after all.
There was a pause, a tranquilizing silence that lasted only two or three seconds before Czerny sat up straight and fixed his stare, glassy blue and intense, on Jill.
"You failed the final," he said flatly.
At first Jill thought she hadn't heard him correctly. Her mind had wandered, she'd been trying to sneak a look at her watch to see how much of her lunch hour remained, if she was due back at the agency yet. It was her first week of work and the excitement of a new job, a real job, was still fresh; she was anxious to make a good impression on Nick and Sandi. When he gave her that strange look and then let her have it Jill was more than a little shocked.
"Sorry?" she said quickly.
"I said you failed the final. Failed. To be honest with you Jill, I was extremely disappointed when I got to your exam. Did you even read any of the books on the curriculum?"
Jill swallowed hard.
"Yes, of course, of course I did. Most of them, I mean, not all of them…but…a lot." She felt a flail of panic, an unpleasant flush coming to her face, already pink from a weekend in the sun. "But with the pressure of work from my other courses, I don't know...I guess I couldn't recall as much detail as usual."
"You couldn't recall much detail, period."
Was he enjoying this, Jill wondered as she felt the muscles in her neck begin to tense up. Bastard. He appeared to be. He’d always struck her as someone with a cruel streak, a bit of a nasty edge. He didn’t even try to hide it; Jill recalled how Czerny had seemed to take special, sadistic delight in putting some of her fellow students (mostly men) in their place. She watched as he folded his hands across his chest, all the time watching her with his cold blue eyes.
She sat there for a moment, shamed into silence, before finally lowering her gaze. Jill examined her bare pink knees, then turned her concentration to the frayed Persian rug on the floor, staring down for what seemed like a year. Czerny remained in the chair behind his desk, and though she was looking down, Jill felt his presence in the room, heavy and oppressive. The air in the dimly lit office was stuffy and she felt its weight bearing down on her. Finally he cleared his throat, and spoke again.
"You’re supposed to graduate this semester, Jill, and you know the rules as well as I do."
She looked up, scanned Czerny’s face for some clue to his emotional state. He continued, and his voice was especially unsympathetic.
"You have to get a mark of sixty-five or higher to receive your degree. Those are the rules I’m afraid."
“So I won't graduate?" she asked, her voice breaking in dismay.
"I'm sorry, Jill. But you can take another course and receive your degree in January."
"In January? I'm supposed to be graduating in three weeks." Jill could hear her voice, its tone that grew thinner and higher with every word. She hated the sound of her words, hated confrontation, hated to lose control, but it was happening just the same. She stopped talking for a moment and tried to calm down.
Jill looked at Czerny's ruddy face. His mouth was closed, the corners upturned in a disagreeable half smile. More of a smirk, really, and it sent an angry rush of blood to her head. His eyes were still fixed alarmingly on her.
"I could get fired," she continued, thinking out loud. "I told them I was already a graduate on my application..." And the thought of summer school made her queasy. She was so very done with school by now, so ready to get on with her life and her career, to catch up with her friends and, too, with her own notion of where she thought her life should be by now. Not to mention the large wad of cash she’d have to fork over to enroll in another session. She groaned inwardly, then sat forward to plead her case. "You said the marks haven't gone to the department yet. Can't I do something to bring my grade up? Another essay maybe? Extra credit?" she blurted out finally, sounding desperate, trying to appeal to Czerny’s sense of decency—if indeed he had one. "Please?"
Czerny studied Jill's face, his features set into a smooth hard mask that revealed nothing. When he finally spoke his tone was flat and impersonal, and Jill was startled by its coldness, so much so that she actually felt herself flinch at his words.
"I think it would be unfair to let you do a make-up paper to raise your mark. I can't give you an advantage that no one else will get. The Dean would frown on that." Czerny leaned forward in silent contemplation.
Jill sank in her chair, and took a deep breath. The out-in movement of her chest, slow and deliberate, calmed her somewhat. "I can't believe this is happening to me. Total nightmare." Her body eased slightly. “I guess we’re done here, huh?”
It was then that the expression on Gabor Czerny's face changed, moving from detached coldness to something much more difficult to interpret. His features took on a look so strange that even Jill, still numb from the bad news, was taken aback. She gave Czerny a puzzled look, and he smiled at her, a little ambiguously she thought. But a moment later Jill felt a sudden unpleasant twitch in her abdomen, a sickening pang of intuition. She had a vague feeling she'd seen him smile that way before.
"There is just one thing," he began, leaning forward almost imperceptibly. As the chilling blue eyes held her gaze, Jill felt the hand, bold and dismayingly familiar. Its touch suddenly, unexpectedly brought to mind the incident at his party, but this time it had a whole new meaning, signaling something much more serious. It wasn't the friendly, maybe even harmless, lechery of that evening, the genial boozy grope that was practically the party-giver's due. This was more disturbing. Jill felt his thick hand move up beneath her skirt, and into the warm hollow between her legs, coming to rest against her bare inner thigh. For a moment, she was transfixed, shocked and startled into silence. It took perhaps just a half-second for the touch itself—separated from what it actually, graphically implied—to register with her brain, and then, as if convulsed, Jill shot back in her seat and her legs came together with a faint noise, the rustle of fabric, the slap of bare flesh on flesh, the sound of brisk movement as the chair legs scraped along the floor. It all happened so fast: his hand was there, Jill reacted and then the hand wasn't there anymore. She felt a couple of the lecturer's thick fingers brush her knee as he quickly pulled away, saw the place where they'd pressed her skin, the skirt pushed halfway up, her sunburned flesh revealing a pale imprint of his hand.
Jill sensed the color spreading across her face as she stared first down at her thighs—now clamped tightly together—and then at Czerny. The meaty hand, his hand, now rested casually on the arm of his swivel chair. There was nothing casual about his expression, though. His blue eyes still looked at her with alarming certainty, and his mouth was fixed in that clever, superior smile.
"You said that you wanted a chance to bring up your grade, Jill," he reminded her coolly, and leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his thick chest once more as he gauged his advantage. "So this is your chance."
Jill's head was swimming, drowning in a wave of stunned desperation. She could feel her pulse racing, but was unsure whether fight or flight would be the more appropriate reaction. And she was bewildered by how much Czerny’s action had taken her by surprise. After all, his reputation was nothing if not consistent—and of course, between the ass-grab at her party and now this, well-deserved.
Finally she groped for her handbag, and when she had the strap wrapped firmly around her wrist, hoisted it into her lap.
"I don't want anything that much," Jill answered sharply. Her throat was dry, her voice scratchy and unfamiliar. Then she stood up, looking for a moment at his shiny pink face, and stared down at him with sad contempt. "I'm not that desperate to graduate."
Czerny said nothing, made no movement as Jill turned and walked out of the tiny office. She stared straight ahead as she made her way down the darkened hallway, the only noise her sandals slap-slapping again as she walked. Placing her hand on the cool knob of the stairwell door, she waited a few seconds before opening it. And then, as if in a movie, the entire episode in Czerny's office was projected before her eyes: slow motion, larger than life, until it faded to black and she found herself inside the stairwell again, overcome by a choking sigh of relief, and a shudder of disgust.