Julia's Child (9781101559741) (25 page)

“If you join us here, I
promise
you'll have the opportunity to set the new standard for consciousness! You could help me, Julia. You could be a force for good at GPG.”

There was a tap on the door. Smythe stuck his head in. “How are we doing?”

Ralph swung his feet off the desk and rose. “Where did you find this feisty entrepreneur, Smythe? She's a firecracker.”

Smythe grinned. “So you found something to talk about?”

“Plenty. Didn't we, Julia?”

I was just about to answer when Smythe said, “Hey! Is that the new xPhone?” He pointed at a sleek titanium device on the CECO's desk.

“Yeah! It's pretty great. I thought the G5 was awesome, but this one is even cooler.” He picked it up, touched something on the screen, and handed it to Smythe, whose face lit up.

I watched the two of them fondle the phone. Surely the CECO would have heard about unconscionable coltan mining? Wouldn't he?

Smythe set the phone longingly down on the desk. “I'm supposed to walk Ms. Bailey back to Smith's office now.”

“Later, man. And, Julia—it was truly a pleasure to talk policy with you. I do hope we can do it again in the very near future.” He shook my hand graciously.

I followed Smythe back through yet another corridor.

“There she is!” Smith said, appearing from inside an office. “Ms. Bailey, thank you so much for meeting with us today. If it's okay with you, we'd like to learn even more about Julia's Child. Can you have your lawyer draw up a nondisclosure agreement you can live with?”

Just as I began to process his request, my attention was drawn away by a series of posters on the wall beside us. Each was a framed advertisement for food, obviously GPG brands. I recognized the California vintner Luke and I had spied on the GPG website and the premium ice cream. But one of the posters really caught my eye, because the picture was already so familiar to me.

It was an advertisement for the Zamwich.

I felt dizzy then, as if the merry-go-round had just sped up to twice the speed.

“Julia? Ms. Bailey? After we sign the nondisclosure agreement, we'll be able to look at your books, orders, facility, products in development. That sort of stuff. Okay?”

Woozily, I forced myself to respond to Smith's request for a second date. “My lawyer. Yes,” I stammered. “I'll call you.”

“Excellent! Excellent. We like how you're thinking, Julia. Good stuff.”

Still feeling light-headed, I allowed myself to be steered toward the elevators. My coat was produced and my hand was shaken a couple of more times, and then I was on my way back into the real world.

I rode the escalator toward street level. The corporate bees still buzzed around me, but the lunch bags had been replaced by afternoon coffee cups. Nobody wore a coat, in spite of the fact that autumn was firmly advancing toward winter. In corporate land, any human need could be met without leaving the building.

I pulled my coat tightly around me and headed for the revolving doors. I didn't know if I could do it. Could I really sell out?
Sell out
. I tried out the words my head: I'm a sell out.

I sighed, stepping into the wind. First I had to get them to make me an offer. Then I would worry about the moral implications.

Chapter 21

O
n any other day, I might have rushed back to the office for two more hours of work. But with the business teetering between bankruptcy and corporate domination, I had reached a point where I could safely say that the additional effort wouldn't make or break Julia's Child.

So I went home, where, when I walked into the living room, I was treated to a look of joyful surprise from both Jasper and Wylie. And they were all too happy to ditch Bonnie for an unexpected excursion with me.

The taxi ride to Sixty-third and Fifth Avenue was short. I even let the boys take turns jabbing at the touch screen controls of the TV that some nitwit decided should sit in the back of every yellow cab. These days, instead of looking out the window at some of the finest prewar architecture in America, my children watched restaurant reviews on Taxi TV.

I was just about to give a ten-dollar bill to the driver when Wylie snatched it out of my hand. “I do it
b'elf
!” he cried, thrusting the bill through the Plexiglas window.

“He always gets to pay the man,” Jasper grumbled.

I opened the door. “Let's not fight,” I said with forced cheerfulness. “I can't take grumpy boys to the petting zoo!”

I waved our membership card for the lonely soul in the ticket booth, and the boys sprinted up the ramp ahead of me. I watched them disappear through the concrete entrance gate, which had been molded to spectacular effect into the shape of a hollow tree. I parted the plastic strips that hung down like a curtain, meant to deter the escape of any of the animals, and entered Central Park's children's zoo.

Jasper and Wylie were already climbing on the cement bunny sculptures. We'd been coming here since Jasper was a baby. While the animals weren't exotic—overweight rabbits, waterfowl, and farm animals—the exhibit itself was inspired. It had been whimsically designed by some genius clearly still in touch with his or her inner child. Every sculpture was climbable. There were three-foot turtle eggs from which to hatch and rubberized giant lily pads to leap upon.

The children found their way over to a cave containing a generous tank in which enormous catfish circled. Jamming my hands into my pockets, I found my phone.

Luke answered on the first ring. “What did they say? How did it go?”

“It went well, I think,” I told him, “with Mr. Smith and his sidekick, Mr. Smythe. And now they want to know more. So they told me to ask my lawyer for a nondisclosure agreement, and then they'll look at the guts of the company.”

Luke whistled. “That sounds serious. So then what would happen? If they like what they see, would they buy the brand? Would you work for them? In their office?”

“I . . . I'm not sure,” I admitted.

“Well, would they just buy a stake in it? Or do they buy the whole company and then hire you back to run it?”

“We didn't, um, cover those details yet,” I stammered. In retrospect, I realized how little information I'd gotten from the meeting—and how much I'd given. Though I'd done a poor job of explaining it to Luke, the experience had been less a meeting of the minds than a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the state fair, leaving me breathless and sweaty.

“Okay,” Luke said gently. “You can tell me all about it tonight.”

“Perfect,” I said, “because right now I'm at the zoo with your sons.”

“Sounds like fun. Love you,” Luke said before the click.

“Want it goats.” Wylie tugged on my coat. His cheeks appeared even rounder underneath his fleece hat.

“Okay, honey,” I said. I took his mittened hand, and we sidled up next to Jasper, who had pressed his forehead against the aquarium wall. I took Jasper's hand, too, which he allowed. Together we navigated the rubber lily pads and made our way to the petting area.

Jasper went straight for his favorite feature of the children's zoo—a giant spiderweb made of fisherman's rope, where he could climb away and play out his Spider-Man fantasies. I dug in my purse for change to buy some feed pellets for Farmer Wylie. I let him put the quarters into the machine, but then I quickly turned the crank myself, because he didn't have enough torque to manage it, which usually made him scream.

“Why we not have dis in Vermont?” he asked, patting the shiny red dispenser.

“Well . . .” Because, Wylie, this is an urban construct that only pretends to show you life on a farm. “Because in Vermont we just keep our feed in a bin.”

“Dis one better,” he proclaimed, before marching toward the goats. I sat down on a concrete bench, one that pretended to be a fallen tree.

Predictably, Wylie managed to drop his handful of pellets on the ground in front of the goat enclosure. But that was okay with him. He got down on his knees, pulled off his mittens, and commenced picking up the pellets one by one and passing them through the metal bars to a couple of eager goats on the other side.

This was where the rich Upper East Siders brought their children to experience nature. And it was arguably as tidy and inspired as a children's zoo could be. But it was also utterly artificial. There was none of the authenticity that stepping over cow pies in a real meadow delivered. That sweet mixture of sunshine and the air tinged with gently composting manure—it was missing from this urban oasis.

Instead, we had a rubberized mat on the ground, so nobody got hurt if they fell down. And there were Purell dispensers on the wall, so we wouldn't encounter—dear God!—any country germs.

It was November, a gray month when New Yorkers forget about the zoo. There were only a couple of other families around us. One mother encouraged her one-year-old to “Look at the cow! Look at the cow!” I guess she hadn't looked under the hood. I checked my urge to correct her. That's actually an arthritic bull, dear.

The only other family was also feeding the goats. I studied them. They were dressed awfully nicely for a petting zoo. The father stood a little apart from the animals, perhaps so his cashmere coat wouldn't get soiled. I smiled to myself. Cashmere comes from goats, of course, but Cashmere Dad would want to keep their saliva off of the wool. They, too, had purchased some feed pellets from the machine. The well-coiffed mother held them in her cupped, leather-sheathed hands so her own toddler didn't have to pick them off the ground like Wylie.

My children were happy. So I pulled out my phone again to make the necessary call to my lawyer. The faster she drew up my nondisclosure document, whatever that was, the faster I could unravel the mystery of whether or not GPG could help me.

“Hello, Julia!” Nina Schwartz, Esq., was at my service. And that meant that her meter was running—at two hundred and fifty bucks an hour.

So I gave her a speedy description of my meeting with GPG and the document they'd requested. “So what is it really for, anyway?” I asked her, when I'd finished my download.

“The document I'll draft, and that they'll sign,” she said, “will forbid their company from using your proprietary market information to compete against you. It binds them to secrecy about all aspects of Julia's Child's business and any future plans and products you disclose to them.”

“Great.” There went another five hundred dollars down the drain. It was a nice idea, this document. But my secrets probably had a wholesale value of approximately zero. Last week I'd stood on the floor at ANKST, blabbing to anyone who would listen about every aspect of Julia's Child. I was an open book.

The true purpose of the nondisclosure agreement, then, would be to maintain the illusion that I knew what I was doing. I'd show up with my slick little document, play the role of the hard-hitting, successful businesswoman. If that didn't work, I could always resort to throwing myself prostrate across the GPG corporate logo, begging for salvation.

“All right, Nina. Draw it up,” I said. All the past year's optimism had been replaced by resignation.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Julia?”

“Yes, but why are you asking?”

“Well, nondisclosure agreements are a good idea. But if this group really wants to rip off your ideas, this won't stop them. And you won't find out for months, until you see the competing product on the store shelves. Of course, you'd have grounds to sue them, but that would be expensive and slow. Do you trust these guys?”

I considered the question and its relevance. If I sat down to rank my anxieties about Julia's Child, the idea that they'd poach my business model wouldn't even make the top ten. Whether or not they were trustworthy, I would be forced to walk my poor old mare of a business into the glue factory. “I don't know if I have a choice,” I told her truthfully.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “Who's watching that baby?”

I looked up fast. A zookeeper, in his tall rubber boots and uniform jacket, pointed at Wylie. My enterprising toddler had climbed the goat enclosure, thrown a leg over the top rail of the fence, and was trying to figure out how to drop down onto the other side.

“Uh, can't wait to read it! Gotta go,” I managed to say to Nina. I snapped my phone shut, stuffed it into my pocket, and trotted toward Wylie.

The well-coiffed mother reached him first, throwing her arms around his back, as if rescuing him from the lion's den. “No, honey!” she said to a startled Wylie. “Dangerous!”

I arrived in time to pluck him off the rail myself. “Sorry, Wylie,” I said quietly. “At the zoo, we're not allowed in there.”

“You should be more careful,” the cashmere father said.

My neck got hot. I was partly embarrassed but also indignant. After all, Wylie was used to climbing in with the goats in Vermont, thank you. And goats don't
eat
toddlers, although sometimes they nibble on them a little bit.

But I held my tongue.

“Me a goat farmer,” Wylie whined when I set him on the ground.

“You'll have to do your farming from this side of the fence,” I told him. “That's the rule here.”

My face continued to burn. The other family probably expected me to thank them for “saving” Wylie, but I let the moment pass. They moved off toward the alpacas.

Jasper wandered over. “Whatsa matter, Mama?”

My eyes fluttered.
Everything.
“Nothing. Now, who wants to go find a hot pretzel with me?”

Chapter 22

I
f you can't stand the heat, you're supposed to get out of the kitchen. I was already sweating through my carefully chosen shirt, and Smith and Smythe hadn't even arrived yet. “Okay, girls!” My loud voice betrayed my nerves. “Do you suppose we should prop the recipe on the countertop, which will make us appear organized? Or should we make it from memory, like we always do, and appear experienced?”