Bleak (16 page)

I realize things are desperate when I have to transfer money from my life savings to my checking account to cover my obscenely high tax bill. Even writing off the entire move as a career expense and putting away several thousand for retirement, I still owe more than four thousand dollars. It’s the set-up bonus that really does me in, and the depth of my resentment for Tipston and Field, already bottomless, grows impossibly deeper.

Needless to say, I also have to draw on my inheritance to cover April rent and other random necessities.

Watching my savings drop—from $64,682 to $55,682—for the first time ever is a profoundly uncomfortable experience, and to counterbalance it, I send résumés to the eight law firms that contacted me in January to set up interviews. They all go smoothly and by the end of the week I’m shopping for boxy suits at Marshall’s. I buy five from the sale rack to get me from Monday to Friday without repeats. They’re all loose in the shoulders, but I don’t care enough about the job to spend money on tailoring. Wearing ill-fitting clothes, like I raided my father’s closet, feels like an act of aggression. I’m rebelling.

Josiah and Barton is a midsize firm specializing in entertainment law. Their offices are downtown, near the Disney Concert Hall, and on my first morning it takes me almost an hour to get there. By the time I find a parking space and take the elevator to the thirty-second floor, I’m twenty minutes late.

Symphony Brodsky in Human Resources—tall, thin, with a black page-boy cut—scowls at me while she leads me to my desk. She purses her lips and tsk-tsks but never actually says anything critical, which is considerably worse than a tongue-lashing.

I remind myself I’m only in this for the paycheck. I might be paralegaling but I’m no longer a paralegal. I’m a screenwriter picking up some extra money while she waits for a sale.

There’s a huge difference between the two.

My desk is in the middle of a large, gray room with high-walled cubicles and bookshelves. Instead of the lively buzz of productivity—phone chatter, keyboard clicking—there’s dead silence. I neither hear nor see any sign of life.

The eerie stillness is strange and disconcerting. I’ve never worked under tomblike conditions before but I’m sure I can adapt.

Symphony points to a chair and directs me to sit down. Intimidated by her austerity, I comply immediately. As soon as I make contact, the springs in the base squeak, and the sound reverberates in the quiet room. Symphony looks down disapprovingly, as if I myself emitted the noise and not the office furniture.

I smile graciously and wait for instructions. I refuse to let her get to me.

“We like to start our new hires off slowly,” she says, laying her hand on top of a thousand-page document. “Here is the Whitman case for Bates numbering. You will report to Herb Fennessy, a junior partner. His office is around the corner to the left, down the hall, through the door, to the right, down the stairs and at the end of the corridor.”

I have a pen out, but I don’t bother writing down the directions. Clearly I’m not meant to.

“He expects all the documents to be numbered and scanned by five o’clock. If you’re running behind schedule,” she says, looking at her watch, a not-so-subtle dig at my lateness, “inform his secretary and she’ll provide another paralegal to help you. This case goes to litigation soon and we cannot afford to lose more time. Bates machines and scanners are in the supply closet. Anything you sign out you are responsible for. Lost or damaged equipment will be deducted from your paycheck. Someone will be down presently to connect you to the server. If you have any questions, please call. Have a nice day.” She turns abruptly to walk away.

“One thing,” I say, before she can disappear. “Where’s the supply closet?”

She sighs impatiently, as I’m making up questions just to torture her, and says, “Left at the exit sign, right at the water fountain, left at the end of the hall, another left at the conference room and down the stairs.”

Once again it’s complete gibberish, but this time I make her repeat it slowly and wait while I write it down word for word. Now I
am
just torturing her. But she makes it so easy.

“Thank you,” I say.

She scowls and walks away without responding.

Yikes. What a witch.

As soon as she’s gone, I stand up and look around the room, expecting to see the heads of colleagues pop up. Not a single one does and I feel the surprisingly sharp sting of disappointment. I don’t need conversation or friendship or even sympathy from my coworkers, just the extended eye contact of the oppressed.

Finding the supply closet is easy; getting supplies is somewhat more challenging. There’s no electronic record of my employment, so Nate the equipment Nazi won’t give me a Bates machine or scanner.

When all logical arguments fail, I say, “Do I seriously look like the kind of person who goes from law firm to law firm scamming supplies and selling them on eBay?”

“Well….” he says, trailing off meaningfully.

Deeply offended, I narrow my eyes. “What?”

“It looks like you scammed that suit from someone.”

I growl with frustration and do the last thing in the world I want to: call Symphony. She’s snappish and annoyed and puts me on hold three separate occasions for a total of ten minutes, but eventually she’s forced to concede that it’s her oversight that caused the confusion.

Confusion
—she can’t own it enough to say
problem.

Back at my desk, I boot up the computer and check my phone for messages. It’s been three weeks since I gave Lester my script and I haven’t heard a word. I can’t imagine what’s taking so long. It’s ninety-six pages of mostly blank space. He could whip through it while waiting for the valet to get his car.

On the so-bored-I-want-to-slit-my-wrists scale, Bates numbering falls somewhere between photocopying and redacting. It’s more interactive than the former but doesn’t require as much thought as the latter. It’s mostly mindless repetition but it has its own rhythm and with iTunes playing quietly in the background, it’s not the worst way in the world to earn thirty dollars an hour.

In complete silence it’s agony.

I look at my watch. It’s eleven-thirty and still nobody has come by to connect me to the server. I can’t go online without a login, which means I can’t listen to music or read the
Times
or check my e-mail or do anything other than stamp Bates numbers onto an endless stack of papers.

At two o’clock, I’m only halfway through the document, so I call Herb Fennessy’s secretary, Valerie Smith, and leave a brief voice mail explaining the situation. Then I dial the operator and ask who I should speak to about getting a login for the server. She puts me through to Harvey in tech services. He isn’t there either.

Drawing on my reserves of heroic stoicism, I pick up the Bates machine and return to work. The day drags at a glacial pace as I wait for Valerie or Harvey to call.

At four fifty-seven, Symphony materializes at my desk. Her face is red and blotchy and I wonder if she’s having an allergic reaction to something.

Unfortunately, it seems to be me.

“Herb Fennessy just called to inform me that you’ve neither finished your scanning nor called his secretary to alert him to the fact that you will not finish your scanning by the agreed-upon time,” she says in a huff. “He’s appalled by your irresponsibility and lack of forethought. He asked you to do one thing. One simple thing and the fact that you can’t makes him seriously doubt your future at this firm. He further believes—”

“Hold on,” I say, more puzzled than angry. Yes, my sense of justice is outraged since I did
exactly what I was asked.
It’s not my fault Valerie Smith doesn’t know how to pick up her messages. But the fact that the withering set down is being delivered by Symphony is baffling. “What does this have to do with you?”

Taken aback by the question, she actually answers it. “Chain of command.”

“What?”

“The chain of command,” she explains calmly. The red is starting to fade from her cheeks. “Lawyers speak to me and I speak to the paralegals.”

“So let me get this right,” I say. “Every time a lawyer has a problem with me, he’ll tell you about it and you’ll take me to task?”

She nods.

“All right,” I say, putting the stamp down on top of the pages yet to be numbered. Then I slide my chair back a few inches, stand up and grab my purse.

Symphony is agog. “What are you doing?”

I don’t answer. I just shake my head and walk away. My time at Josiah and Barton is done. Hello, unemployment and parental disapproval and dwindling inheritance.

I breeze past reception and into the elevator lobby, feeling curiously free.

I’m a professional. I can deal with preternaturally silent coworkers, territorial supply Nazis, snippy secretaries and irate lawyers. Being shit on by egomaniacal junior partners is in the job description, and I accept it like I do a forty-five-minute lunch break and a crappy HMO insurance plan. But I will not tolerate being shit on by some pinched-faced witch named Symphony. Maybe if she were a Carol or a Judy, I could handle it better. But a tight-assed human resources drone with a drag queen name?

No, absolutely not.

Lester assures me I’ve got a solid beginning.

“Your premise is fun and original. It definitely has a commercial edge, which is what studios look for,” he says. “The dialogue is sharp and effective. You have a real ear for natural speech patterns. But your characters don’t come alive.”

I tighten my grip on the phone, knowing this is the beginning of the negative part of our conversation. So far it’s all been cheery small talk and positive feedback. “They don’t?”

“We need to really care about these people to be invested in their future and their happiness,” he explains, his voice full of authority. “Your story needs to enthuse reality. It needs to breathe the truth. It needs to be the realest real.”

“The realest real?” I repeat, wondering what that means. I have no idea.

“Yes, the realest real.”

He says this sincerely and earnestly with no sense of irony. It’s like he doesn’t realize he’s calling from Hollywood, USA, the international capital of the fakest fake and saying
the
realest real
like it’s an actual thing. The realest real is a concept, an advertising slogan made up by men trying to sell you a talking mouse and a singing mermaid.

Frustrated, I throw myself on the couch and decide I’ll never leave it again. Bad things seem to happen when I go out into the world. First Symphony. Now the realest real.

“Don’t rely so heavily on coincidence,” he adds.

I sit up. Specific information is good. I grab a pen from the dining room table and start taking notes. “All right.”

“Coincidences are lazy. Your character interaction should be based on real mechanisms, not false ones. Maryanne should meet Tad in a more natural setting. His mother shouldn’t be her gynecologist. That’s too easy. He needs to find out about her medical condition some other way.”

Nodding, I write it down: coinc bad, real mech, natural, no meet through mom. “That makes sense. Thank you.”

“Work on characterization. Make us really love the characters.”

“In what way are they unlovable?” I ask, struggling to understand.

But he doesn’t give me examples. He pulls back and goes in an entirely different direction. “Think of John Cusak in
Grosse Point Blank.
He’s doing something we don’t approve of, but we love him anyway. That’s the important thing to remember. Or Winona Ryder in
Heathers.
These people touch us. We really believe in them. That’s the key component of a screenplay.”

“I understand that, but can you give me specific examples of why those characters are the realest real? What traits make a character the realest real?”

“Watch the movies and you’ll see,” he says mysteriously, like the oracle at Delphi.

Thoroughly defeated and suddenly very tired, I lie back on the couch and put the notepad over my eyes. Maybe if I lie very still, I’ll be back in my apartment in New York getting ready for another day at Hertzog, Wright, Penn and Silver. Those people might have been crazy but at least they made sense.

“The action is good,” he adds. “Having Maryanne go after Tad is good. Build more of that into your script.”

“But that only works because of the mother-gynecologist connection,” I point out.

“Be creative. Good storytellers don’t rely on coincidence. Wow us. Make it the realest real possible.”

And there I hit a wall—at the intersection of realest real and movie magic. There’s no Maryanne trying to kill Tad without Mom’s misdiagnosis.

Exhausted, I wonder what I’m going to do next. Talk to John, I suppose.

Remembering Simon’s cynicism, I ask if Lester knows John Vholes.

He repeats the name softly several times. “He’s a screenwriter?”

“Yes,” I say.

“A pretty decent one, too, I believe, though I can’t say if he’s sold anything recently.”

As success isn’t always an indication of quality, I feel vindicated in my defense of him. Take that, Simon.

I thank Lester for his time.

“My pleasure,” he says gracious as always. “I think you’ve got a great voice and tremendous potential, and I consider it an honor to read your work.”

His compliments are mere client upkeep, the knee-jerk minimum schmoozing of any good superagent, but I’m still flattered. Whatever the circumstance, it’s always nice to hear the word
honor
in reference to yourself.

I put down the phone and fetch the last can of Liquid Lightening from the fridge to shore up my energy as I sit down to review my notes. I rewrite them neatly in full sentences in an effort to understand them better but it’s no use. The more I try to figure out Lester’s comments, the less I understand them.

Every point he made runs counter to what I know about the movies. The contrived plot coincidence, a time-honored tradition that dates back to Dickens and Shakespeare before him, is the backbone of great filmmaking. Where would
Casablanca
be if Ingrid Bergman didn’t just happen to walk into Humphrey Bogart’s Café Americain?

And his exhortation to be the realest real—where does he see reality in today’s films? Not only are premises implausible (flighty homecoming queen with no relevant experience gets into Harvard law), time and space are frequently bent to suit the script. Books are published overnight. High school graduations fall three days after Christmas. Overweight moms shed forty pounds in two weeks.

At the core of every film is a logic hole, sometimes miniscule, sometimes gaping, and at one point or another the viewer will turn to the person next to them and say with disgust, “That would never happen.”

But this is the beauty of film, the narrative economy that makes the celluloid universe so much more sleek and beautiful than the real one. Devoid of extraneous details and the time-consuming effort of sorting through them, movies are the good-parts-only version of life. Important moments are scored with the appropriate John Williams theme so you don’t miss them.

If only people came with such easy-to-read cues. Maybe then I’d understand what Lester was trying to say.

Determined to remain open-minded, I watch
Grosse Point Blank
and
Heathers
. I get halfway through
GPB
before I have to turn it off in frustration. The man John Cusak is hired to kill is the father of his old high school girlfriend, who he’s trying to get back with.
Heathers
is just as bad. No excruciating coincidences but it scores a point five on the realest real chart.

Clearly there’s a double standard at work—one for the movies the studios want to make and one for all the rest.

My head pounding, I stop
Heathers
and close my laptop. This is way too much work. Paralegaling was almost easier.

And why do I have to work so hard anyway?

What is the studio really buying? With
J&J
it was just the premise. Obviously with Moxie Bernard lined up to play the title character, Chancery Productions wasn’t sticking to my original story. Why can’t producers do the same thing with
How Tad Johnson Got into Harvard
? Why can’t they buy the core idea and rework it until it fits their demographic vision? They’re going to rewrite it anyway. Simon calls it ego, John professionalism. But it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is no script goes to production in its original form. So why does my screenplay have to be perfect when so many other aren’t?

It’s a question without a satisfying answer, one of the infinite things in life that comes down to the arbitrariness of the universe. I might as well ask why the sky is blue.

Confused, exhausted and discouraged, I trudge into my bedroom and pull back the spread. Too tired to brush my teeth, I peel off my jeans before climbing under the covers and laying my head down across from the window, where the poster for yet another film with catastrophic coincidences and little reality shudders, breathes and mocks.