Piece of Work Read online

It was still light out when Julia and Peter and Leo went to bed that night. They’d turned the clocks ahead only the week before and already the days were longer. Or maybe after the strange day they had, sitting around the living room in shock for most of the afternoon and early evening, it just felt that way.

  “Can you imagine living in Norway or Sweden or Alaska during the summer?” Julia said, staring up at the ceiling as the dusk finally fell. “How can you fall asleep if it never gets dark?”

  “Imagine living there during the winter,” Peter said. “How can you get up if it never gets light?”

  Lying on top of the covers with Leo between them, Julia wondered out loud what it would be like the next morning when they woke up and Peter didn’t go to work.

  “It’ll be nice,” he said. “We’ll go out for pancakes. Then we can spend the rest of the day together and do something fun.”

  Ever since they’d first met, Peter was always talking about having fun—fun things they could do and fun places they could go—and even though back then they almost never went anywhere except each other’s apartments, she had never had more fun in her whole life. She closed her eyes and her mind reeled back to the night they first met: when she told Peter what she did, he told her he wanted to see where she worked since he didn’t know anything about entertainment public relations.

  “It’ll be fun,” he’d said.

  She wasn’t sure whether or not he was really interested in her company’s corporate culture as he’d claimed, or whether inviting himself to her office was his way of arranging a low-anxiety first date—not that she was sure he even considered it a date—and she didn’t really care. He was tall and strong-jawed with a full head of straight blond naturally streaked hair cut in a conservative chop that was so intoxicatingly other and unlike any head of hair she’d sat behind during all those years of Hebrew School. Seeing him in Creative Talent Management’s opulent reception area on the twenty-seventh floor that day and prying the drooling receptionist and two male assistants waiting for the elevator off of him, she panicked. He was way better looking than she remembered and way better looking than anyone she’d ever gone out with.

  “God, I’m schvitzing here,” he’d said, peeling off his overcoat and navy pin-striped suit jacket. “I literally just ran over from a meeting on Fifty-seventh and Sixth. I didn’t want to be late. Especially on our first date.” He handed her a white plastic bag. “I got one chopped liver and one corned beef. I figured we could share.”

  Julia was suddenly schvitzing, too, and she wasn’t sure if it was because he’d used and pronounced a Yiddish word correctly and with the authenticity of someone who had grown up speaking the language (which, of course, he most certainly had not), or because he’d brought lunch for them—two sandwiches the size of bricks from the Carnegie Deli. Not only had he paid for lunch, which most men under the age of fifty seemed genetically incapable of doing, but he’d also brought a good lunch. She remembered trying to explain to a guy she’d gone out with a few times the year before why sandwiches from Korean corner delis or from supermarkets should be mocked, not eaten.

  She and Peter talked that day for over three hours, and seven years later, they were still talking. They talked about different things now than they did then—what Leo said, what Leo did, what Leo had done one day that he hadn’t done the day before—and she suspected the topics of their conversations were about to change again, to the mortgage and car payments and savings accounts and credit card bills and spending within their means and all the other things couples talked about when their future seemed suddenly uncertain.

  Peter reached for Julia’s hand in the dark and held it.

  “It’ll work out,” he said, barely above a whisper, which is when she knew he was as scared as she was. “It’ll work out.”

  Neither of them was anywhere close to falling asleep when Julia moved Leo toward the footboard of their bed and tapped Peter on the shoulder.

  “Remember when we first met and you told me you wanted to see my office?” she asked. “Did you really want to see my office or was that just an excuse to see me?”

  “What do you think?” Peter said.

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Of course it was an excuse.”

  “Why did you need an excuse?”

  Peter rolled onto his side to face her. “Because you were a hottie. And I was afraid if I asked you out and you said no, I’d be crushed.”

  Julia rolled onto her side, too. “You thought I was a hottie?”

  “You were a hottie. You’re still a hottie.” He nudged her on the hip and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Hot. Hot. Hot.”

  “But you were a hottie, too,” she said. “So wouldn’t you have assumed that I’d say yes?”

  Peter traced the outline of her jaw and chin with his finger, then shook his head. “You can’t assume anything when you’re hunting the big game.”

  “And that’s what you were doing with me?”

  “That’s what I was doing with you.”

  2

  It was the first Saturday in September—Labor Day weekend, an uncomfortable irony that wasn’t lost on either of them—and Julia was racing around the house trying to get ready to meet her friend Patricia Fallon in the city for dinner. She was, of course, running late, and the fact that there were Thomas the Tank Engine trains all over the living room and the stairs and unfolded laundry all over her bed wasn’t helping. It was hard enough imagining what she was going to wear—Patricia was taking her to some new supercool one-syllable restaurant of indeterminate cuisine—but having to navigate the obstacle course of clutter that had gone unchecked in the five months Peter had been home and out of work only made things worse.

  Not that it was all his fault. Even before he’d lost his job, Julia was organizationally- and neatness-challenged, unsure of how to stop the suburban sprawl of toys from the living room into the dining room. Her “desk” in the kitchen consisted of a narrow landing strip of counter space near the back door and two drawers just underneath it which were barely wide or deep enough to hold much of anything besides elastic bands, broken toys she was trying to hide from Leo while she tried to fix them, and all the brochures from preschools she’d pored over the past year before deciding on the Preschool Experience in the center of Larchmont. But now that she had Peter’s crap to deal with as well—his shoes and sneakers and newspapers and books and magazines all over the house—she felt like a lab rat whose cage kept getting smaller and smaller.

  Early on in his unemployment, Julia had the ridiculous fantasy that he, a professional organizer who had made his living reorganizing disorganized companies, would use the time he now had on his hands to help her get a grip on things: that after, say, the fifth or sixth time he wondered aloud why there was only one pair of scissors in the whole house and why it always seemed to be in the upstairs bathroom instead of with the paper clips and the glue stick and the Scotch tape in one of the stupid little drawers in the kitchen, he would either buy another pair of scissors or label the existing pair “Kitchen.” But as weeks turned to months and Peter’s many trips into the executive placement office and occasional lunches with contacts proved fruitless, Julia could tell not only that no such help would be forthcoming, but that it was more important for her to try to focus on keeping his spirits up than the house neat. So she didn’t harp. She just let him do His Thing.

  While His Thing used to be getting up and leaving for work while she and Leo were still asleep and coming home right before Leo went to bed, now His Thing was getting up with Leo and Julia, eating breakfast with them, and then sometimes going into Manhattan to the executive placement office and sometimes not going—he didn’t tell her much about his job search after the first month or two, and she didn’t ask him; if he had something to tell her, she figured he would. On the days that Peter didn’t go into the city, which, as time went on, became the norm, he seemed perfectly content to be home with time on his hands: he’d go
to the gym after breakfast, take Leo to the park or to the playground after lunch, and even work on a variety of hobby-like projects he kept enthusiastically starting but never finished—building Leo a bird feeder and a clubhouse and a set of electric train tracks in the basement. To preserve his fragile ego, she hadn’t asked him to help with the housework, and she’d even asked him to stop helping with the cooking, since whenever he microwaved Leo’s chicken fingers or microwaved the macaroni and cheese, he ended up using almost every kitchen utensil they owned and producing a huge mess which she would then feel obligated to clean up since he’d been so “helpful.” To preserve his own ego, he hadn’t asked her to help him with the bills that he insisted on keeping in a gigantic stack, along with the checkbook, on the dining room table—a constant reminder to them both that they were heading down the slippery slope of credit card debt. Numbers didn’t lie and she knew it wasn’t easy for him those nights to stare down the truth, once a month, all by himself.

  Like the bills, the clutter didn’t go away, so that Labor Day Saturday she drove to Scarsdale for the grand opening of the Container Store. After making her way through the crowds and filling out a raffle form for a free merchandise giveaway, she carefully selected one color-tabbed mail and bill organizer, two clear plastic under-the-bed storage containers, and several closet shelving units that looked easy enough for Peter to install. But when she pushed her cart to the front of the checkout line and handed the overly excited “sales associate” her Visa card, Julia got an unexpected surprise: her card was denied.

  Julia could have tried another one of her credit cards—she knew they weren’t maxed out on all of them—but she didn’t bother. She’d gotten the message loud and clear—We have no income—and it wasn’t just embarrassing, but a wake-up call, too. Leaving her cart and walking back to her car through the busy parking lot, Julia decided to call Patricia to see if she was free for dinner the following week. Patricia had opened Pulse, her own P.R. firm, the year after Julia had left the business to pursue “other interests”—permanent maternity leave—and Julia thought maybe she could start taking on some freelance work from home.

  “This is your lucky day.” Patricia was at her office finishing up a few things before closing up shop for the rest of the weekend. “I’ve just had a cancellation. Want to get together tonight?”

  Julia slid behind the wheel and strapped her seatbelt across her chest. She almost said that she’d just had a cancellation, too—her credit card—but she was careful not to let Patricia see past the façade she and Peter had up until now successfully maintained—that they were fine, that it was only a matter of time before Peter found a job, and that when he did, everything would go back to the way it was before he was fired.

  But the truth was that they weren’t fine. It was hard finding a job at his level, and at this point—after almost five months of his looking for work—neither of them knew how much longer it would take for him to start bringing in a paycheck.

  Back home, Julia found Peter in the living room. He was lounging on the couch watching a Yankees game.

  “Where’s Leo?” she said, looking down at the pile of sports pages and sneakers that had re-accumulated during the hour and a half she’d been gone.

  “At your parents’ house.”

  “Again?” She was hoping to see him before she left for dinner.

  “They came and got him because they said they were going through withdrawal. It’s been almost three days since they’ve seen him.” He looked away from the television set reluctantly—baseball was, she’d been told over and over again, an exciting game—and then tried his best to ignore it. “So you didn’t find anything at the Container Store?”

  “I found lots of stuff at the Container Store but when I went to pay for it my credit card was denied.”

  He muted the sound and shook his head. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have been shopping.”

  She stepped over a gigantic pair of black suede Pumas and sat down at the end of the couch. “So what about that job you were talking to that guy about?”

  Peter shrugged. “He hasn’t offered me anything yet. We’re still just talking.”

  “Does it sound interesting?”

  “Not really.”

  “But if they offered it to you, you would take it.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “It’s just not the right job.”

  Julia tried to be understanding but every time Peter heard about something even remotely possible, he seemed to talk himself out of it, and here he was, doing it again.

  “But maybe you should take it anyway.”

  “But it hasn’t even been offered to me.”

  “But if it does get offered to you, doesn’t the fact that you have no job trump the fact that it’s not the right job?” she said. Not to put too fine a point on it.

  He shut the game off and sat up. “That’s the shortsighted way of looking at it.”

  “Well then, what’s the long-sighted way of looking at it?”

  “I want the next move I make to be the right move. I don’t want to just take something out of desperation.”

  She nodded, trying to be reasonable, but they were desperate, weren’t they? His two months of “severance” were over and every month he wasn’t earning was another month they were dipping into their savings. The longer he waited for the perfect job to fall from the sky, the more it prolonged his reentry into the workplace.

  She shrugged and made a face. “I think you’re being a little cavalier.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Is that what your mother thinks?”

  “I don’t talk to my mother about this.”

  Which was completely true. Just because her mother talked to Julia about Peter’s unemployment didn’t mean Julia talked back.

  “Then you’re scared,” Julia said, finding another more likely explanation for his excuses.

  “Scared of what?” Peter snapped. Clearly, she’d touched a nerve.

  “Scared of failing again. I mean, getting fired does a job on anyone’s self-esteem, especially a man’s. Maybe you’re feeling gun-shy, afraid to get back on your horse.” She could have thought of a dozen more clichés to go along with the first two, but Peter bolted from the room and headed for the hallway.

  “Thanks for reminding me that I failed!” he yelled as he went up the stairs.

  “That’s not what I meant!” she yelled back. But when she ran to the stairs and looked up, all she saw was the last of him right before he slammed their bedroom door and disappeared behind it for the rest of the afternoon. Which gave her plenty of time to ponder the imponderable:

  She was becoming her mother.

  Twenty minutes later, when Julia went into their room, Peter apologized. He always apologized first, which was one of the many reasons Julia had always believed he was a far better person than she would ever be since she always found it hard to say she was sorry even when she really was sorry. It was one of the many ways—including his ability to do math and his innately non-Jewish lack of the Fear of Death gene regarding water sports and winter sports—that she hoped Leo would take after him instead of her.

  “No, I’m the asshole,” she said, full of shame for saying what she’d said and for not apologizing more quickly.

  “Well, I’m the asshole, too. I’m the one who got us into this mess. And I’m going to get us out of it.”

  She nodded and smiled and almost asked, How? But she didn’t want to sound pushy.

  “You were right. The next time a job even comes close to being right—even if it’s not right at all and even if I really, really don’t want to take it—I’m going to take it. Because that’s what people who are out of work have to do. Take jobs they don’t want until they find something they do want.”

  She nodded and smiled again but her heart wasn’t in it. She hated the thought of Peter taking some shitty job that was beneath him and suffering in s
ilence just so he could continue to win the proverbial bread, but the last thing she was going to do was argue with him—or tell him that one of the reasons she was meeting Patricia for dinner was because maybe she’d ask her for some work—she didn’t want to risk emasculating him any more than she already had today—so instead she kissed him and threw on the first thing she saw in her closet since now she was extremely late: a plum-colored Eileen Fisher sweater and a pair of plum-colored Eileen Fisher slightly cropped linen pants.

  Just before she could have taken a good look in the mirror and had the opportunity to rethink her nonblack matching-top-and-pants Garanimals-type outfit, the phone rang. Assuming it was Patricia, Julia leapt for the phone without looking at the Caller ID display.

  But it wasn’t Patricia.

  It was Bob, from the Container Store, calling to congratulate her.

  “Congratulate me for what?”

  “Congratulate you for winning our Grand Opening Travel Package Raffle containing a gift certificate and more than twenty Container Store items especially designed for the well-organized traveler!”

  Despite the fact that she almost never went anywhere anymore, Julia was beside herself as she left the house—she couldn’t wait to get her hands on her big raffle prize and use her gift certificate. She got in her car and headed into the city—she would have taken the train into Manhattan instead of driving, but when she did the math, train fare and taxis were practically the same as tolls and parking. It was only after she had sped down 95 South and across the Bruckner Expressway to the Triborough Bridge that she realized she had forgotten to figure in the cost of gas, which meant that no matter how hard she tried to save money, she would end up spending more than she planned.

  Even though she was relieved that she and Peter had made up, she didn’t think it was fair that it was entirely his responsibility to support the family, especially when, before they’d had Leo, she’d brought in a very respectable portion of their joint income. Zipping down the FDR Drive and getting off at the Twenty-third Street exit, Julia wasn’t sure what she was going to say to Patricia but she did know one thing: it was time for her to start making some money.