Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

“You’re suggesting I make it a twofer? I’ll do whatever you want, if you find a spot for my young friend? That would be double the stress, Crow. I’d be doing a job I didn’t want to do, while worrying about what havoc Lloyd was wreaking.”

“Lloyd would be so thrilled to work on a set that he would be on his best behavior.”

“Lloyd’s best behavior isn’t exactly the gold standard.” Tess fell back on the rug. She was having her second psychic episode of the day, seeing the next hour in vivid detail. She could argue with Crow, eventually giving in, and he would rub her back as a reward. Or she could give in now and cut straight to the back rub.

“I’ll call tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have to inflate my usual price, to make it worth farming out some of the other gigs I have lined up, but if they agree to my price and a place for Lloyd, I’ll do it.”

“I owe you,” Crow said, leaving the sofa to lie next to her, working his fingers into her hair.

“I lost track of who owed whom in our relationship long ago,” Tess said.

Actually, she hadn’t. But it sounded healthy.

Greer put the phone back in its cradle and looked at the clock on her computer, which she knew to be accurate to the second. That was one of her jobs, making sure that every time device in the office – the wall clocks, the phones, the computers – was synced. Ten-thirty. Flip had told her to continue trying to reach Tess Monaghan every half hour until the news came on. Until the news came on – those had been his very words. She had puzzled over those instructions. If the news came on at eleven and she was to call exactly on the half hour, did that mean she wasn’t to call at eleven? Did Flip know that Baltimore had a ten o’clock newscast? Didn’t most cities have ten o’clock newscasts? And then, in those cities on midwestern time, or whatever it was called, Greer believed they had nine o’clock newscasts. Not that the Midwest was relevant to this situation, but it was interesting to think about, how even seemingly precise instructions can end up being pretty vague. Yet Greer’s attention to detail was almost irrelevant, given how scattered Flip could be.

When Lottie had talked to Greer about her desire to move into the job as Flip’s assistant – interrogated her, really, in that skeptical, suspicious way she had – she had told Greer that the biggest challenge would be knowing what Flip wanted. “Even when he doesn’t. And that’s often.” Greer had chalked the warning up to jealousy. Lottie, who had “discovered” Greer, couldn’t get over the fact that Greer wanted to stay in the writers’ office instead of training to be an assistant director. Lottie, like most would-be mentors, needed her protégée to mirror her exactly.

But Greer had no intention of leaving the writers’ office, despite Lottie’s assertion that a job as Flip’s assistant was more of a cul-de-sac than a promotion. Writers were the bosses in television. And here she was in only her second industry job, working for one of the best, Flip Tumulty, the kind of person that others deferred to, sucked up to. People all over Hollywood, people whose names left Greer a little breathless, were constantly checking in with him, sending him gifts, currying favor.

“Aw, the old Tumulty charisma,” Ben had said, when she tried to feel him out on this topic, discover why people yearned for Flip’s approval. She didn’t think that was the whole story, not quite. You could argue that Ben had more charm, while there was a hint of the – what was the word Ben had used in a different context? A hint of the nebbish about Flip, that was it, and it served him well. Disorganized as he was when it came to his life, he never lost sight of the tiniest detail in the work. He also put in longer hours than anyone else, a trial for Greer, given that she was trying to impress Flip by being the first to arrive and the last to leave every day. Not that he noticed. There were moments where Greer stood silently in the office, assuming Flip was deep in thought, waiting for him to acknowledge her and what she had just said, only to realize that it hadn’t occurred to him that her presence required any acknowledgment whatsoever.

He wasn’t mean, though. Greer knew from mean. When she had gone to California right after college, Greer had worked for the King of Mean, an entertainment lawyer-slash-manager-slash-thrower, specializing in tantrums and staplers. He had burned through golden boys and girls with better alma maters and more sterling connections, but Greer was tougher. She quickly developed a way of coping, a strategy drawn, as most of her strategies were, from the movies. She imagined that the lawyer was the Stay Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters, marching down the streets of New York. He could grimace, he could wave his big puffy arms, he could threaten all sorts of things, but what could a man made of sugar and water really do to her, ultimately? She developed her own stoic marshmallow-ness, an outward manner so soft and placid that he couldn’t find a hold or a weak spot, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. She hadn’t returned to Baltimore because she couldn’t cut it out there. Her father had gotten ill, and her parents had insisted that it was a daughter’s responsibility to help out at home, even though she had two brothers closer by, one in Pennsylvania, the other in Delaware.

As it turned out, her father had died in less than two months, so her mother hadn’t really needed her at all. Greer had been twenty-three and, in her mind, washed up. She couldn’t ask for her old job back, and she couldn’t get a new one without a good reference from Stay Puft. Sucked back into life in Arbutus, she worked at a small law firm, dating her high school boyfriend. When JJ had asked her to marry him, she had said yes because she was too beaten down to remember that she had the right to say no. She was one of the unlucky ones, who had better take what life offered, meager as it might be.

When it was announced that the Mann of Steel pilot would film in Baltimore – through an online service that kept Greer apprised of television and movie deals – she felt like a prisoner glimpsing sunlight for the first time in years. She bluffed her way into a gig as an unpaid intern, given the make-work job of cataloging Flip’s and Ben’s papers in case their alma maters wanted them one day. From there, it hadn’t taken long to persuade Ben that she should be the writers’ office assistant. And when the job as Flip’s assistant suddenly became available, she knew the gods were finally smiling on her. So what if Flip sometimes failed to notice that a breathing, heart-beating human was in the room? She had lived through the rain of staplers, through the drought of her father’s illness. There was nothing she couldn’t endure, as long as she was moving up.

“That’s it?” Ben had said, when she asked him to put in a word for her, back her for the job as Flip’s assistant. “That’s all you want, is to work for Flip?” He seemed at once relieved and disappointed. “It’s not a guarantee, you know. Of anything.”

“Well, I want to write,” she said. “What better teacher could I have?”

She knew that had been a twist of the knife, suggesting that Flip had more to teach her about writing than Ben did. But all Ben had said was, “There’s a difference, between wanting to write and writing. What are you working on? Show it to me and I’ll critique it.” Sensing her hesitation, he had added: “Honest, I’ll give you a fair read. And you know I don’t offer my services to just anyone.”

“I’m not ready yet. I’m studying scripts, getting ready. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Ben had said. “You’ve zipped through the collected works of Ben Marcus and Flip Tumulty, reading our rough drafts, following our stunning trajectory from No Human Involved to Ottoman’s Empire to Mildred, Pierced . You might aim a little higher, you know. Billy Shakespeare. Chekhov. Hell, at the very least try Robert Towne or William Goldman.”