Temporary Insanity Read online

  Ramona reviewed my résumé, and, on noting that I’d minored in English in college, asked me if I thought I could digest documents. I didn’t know the term of art (Uncle Earwax, who was my on-the-job-trainer, had never used it), and had visions of munching away like a nanny goat on sheet after sheet of legal papers. Turns out Ramona meant “digest” as in Reader’s Digest. As in summarizing the key points and reducing them to a few words or sentences. Sure, I thought I could handle the assignment, I told her.

  “You’ll start tomorrow, then,” she said, and offered to take me to lunch. Upstairs at the subsidized company dining room. The girl was a big spender.

  Actually, the dining experience at Newter & Spade was an eye-opener. I know that the caste system is still very much in evidence in India, but who knew that it flourished high above the Avenue of the Americas? Ramona permitted me a peek inside the walnut-paneled walls of the partners’ dining room, where the odor of expensive cigar smoke warred for predominance with the permeating scent of pink and white speckled rubrum lilies arrayed in the sort (and size) of displays I’ve only seen at funeral homes. Cream-colored linens and silver flatware adorned the tables. White-jacketed waiters served food and beverages, including alcoholic ones, on china and in cut crystal.

  So this was the veldt where the legal lions headed at feeding time. I thought it must also be where the government secreted its cloning experiments. My best guess was that all of the partners in this sanctum sanctorum were within a seven-year age span of one another, their hair color (gray, gray, gray), weight (high), and follicle count (low) also falling within a narrow range. The generalissimos of this empire of litigation also sported a distinctive uniform: navy, black, or charcoal pin-striped suits, white shirt, simple patterned silk tie (with dashes of red in it), black shoes. I spied only one woman at a corner table and she was in camouflage as well. Ramona spoke in hushed tones with more veneration for the Turner who was the head of the mergers and acquisitions division than for the Turner seascape that graced the wall above his balding head.

  We headed into an open area, plushly carpeted, that looked out over the street and shared the same view of Central Park with its paneled counterpart. This was the dining room reserved for the firm’s associates and their guests. Ramona’s midlevel executive position enabled her to partake of the room’s ambience on Fridays, she told me reverentially, as though she’d been granted permission to kiss the Pope’s ring. Boy, what a different world from Balzer and Price, where we scarfed down food at our desks, trying very hard not to dribble crumbs into our keyboards, grateful to snag enough time to enjoy a lunch break without all hell breaking loose from the impatient clients and the incessantly ringing phones.

  “I’ll get us a special dispensation to eat in the associates’ dining room this afternoon, but ordinarily you’ll be eating in here,” Ramona said, as we stepped into a noisy though pleasant room with a cafeteria-style atmosphere. The joint was jumping. This was where Newter & Spade’s peons ate, where legal assistants, secretaries, mailroom personnel, and temps slid their trays along shelves of aluminum tubing, busing their own dishes to tall rolling carts stacked with discarded turquoise laminated lunch trays.

  We selected our food and Ramona handed her ID card to the cashier, who scanned it to verify that Ramona was a genuine employee and not someone who worked for a company on another floor intent on scamming the law firm for a discounted meal. There might not be such a thing as a free lunch, but sodas, tea, and coffee were, in fact, on the house. My turkey club set Ramona back only $3.50, instead of at least $5.00, which is what it might have cost me at a local deli.

  I was so caught up in enjoying my complimentary root beer that I wasn’t as alert as I should have been to the guy on my right, and I accidentally slammed my tray into his with what felt like a G-force shove, “pulling an Izzy,” as my friends and I affectionately refer to such clumsy maneuvers.

  “Oh, my God, I am so sorry,” I exclaimed, panic in my voice and terror in my eyes. “Umm, I’ll clean it right up. Wait right there—” I grabbed a pile of napkins so thick that it probably accounted for the deforestation of three countries, and began to mop up the dark, sticky puddle of root beer. Without thinking, I blotted the man’s suit jacket. While he was still wearing it. I was heading for his pants leg when the guy grabbed my wrist.

  “Whoa, there, Nellie!”

  “The name’s Alice,” I replied stupidly, my face crimson, my mind more focused on the fact that I might have just won the prize for the shortest employment history at Newter & Spade.

  Nice first impression, Alice.

  I should have been more on the ball. I could have kicked myself. Shit, did I have to do this on my very first day? I am not ordinarily a klutz. Ramona regarded me through the narrow slits of her eyes. Her expression was lethal.

  She hates you already.

  Ramona? Did I really louse up her reputation that much?

  It’s not her reputation she’s concerned with. Not at the moment, anyway. But I’d watch out for that, too, if I were you. Oh, wait, I am you.

  Then what? What’s her problem?

  Look at the guy, Alice. Look at how he’s looking at you.

  Ohmigod, do you think that’s her boyfriend?

  “I guess this is why Newter & Spade so strongly discourages employees from fraternizing,” Ramona said, her smile as wide as a billboard, her eyes sparking with rancor. “Because accidents can and do happen. Sorry, Eric, we’ll go back to the commoners’ room, where the little people belong.” Ramona made it sound like a joke, but her opinions about both the law firm’s hierarchy and my egregious faux pas were layered onto her subtext with a trowel.

  “No big deal. I have no client contact this afternoon. Don’t stress it,” he said directly to me. “It’s why they invented dry cleaners. Don’t be stupid, come join us.” Eric motioned toward a table where two other men around his age—I’d guess mid-thirties—were sitting. Their attire was so similar that they might as well have been in livery. I looked around the room and a single word sprang to mind: conformity. The one person dining alone at a remote corner table, a man in a brown pin-stripe, floral tie, and a pale yellow shirt with white collar and cuffs, didn’t fit the sartorial mold. Maybe he just wanted to be on his own, although it crossed my mind, from the few observations I’d been able to make about Newter & Spade thus far, that maybe his wardrobe was reason enough for his ostracism.

  Be thankful it’s only a day job, Alice. It’s not your life.

  Yeah, that’s what I need to keep reminding myself.

  Oh, God, I don’t want to end up like them.

  “The man whose suit you might have ruined—that’s Eric Witherspoon. On the fast track for partner,” Ramona whispered in my ear as we followed the senior associate to his table. We seated ourselves and Eric then introduced himself to me, followed by introductions to his colleagues, whose names and subspecialities at Newter & Spade went in one of my ears and out the other.

  “And who are you?” Eric asked me. His manner was gentle and solicitous and seemed out of place in this hotbed of competitiveness.

  “I’m Alice Finneg—”

  “Oh, she’s just a temp,” Ramona interrupted.

  In response to her statement, Eric’s friends leaned back in their chairs and cased our immediate vicinity in an effort to ascertain who else might have overheard Ramona’s disclaimer. While Eric continued to engage Ramona and me in polite small talk, the other associates turned toward one other and resumed their conversation, refusing to make eye contact with me for the remainder of their meal. When they left the table, they curtly said goodbye to Eric and nodded at Ramona. I may not always be a good judge of character, but my acting training had made me a pretty accurate judge of characters. On the surface, the men’s nods seemed a pleasant enough gesture, yet to me they conveyed volumes of subtext. Affrontedness. Betrayal. Arrogance (theirs). Presumption (ours).

  From the few minutes I’d spent observing the Newter & Spade zeitgeist, it would see
m that everyone had eyes in the backs of their heads, the better to see who might be gaining on them or honing in on their territory. I sensed that the only way to survive and thrive in such an environment was to become either a backstabber or a brown-noser. It was going to be hard to work here without getting dragged into such negativity. Competition has always made me uncomfortable to the point of squeamish.

  So why did you become an actress who works at law firms, Alice? Hard to get much more competitive than those two professions, you know.

  Yeah, I realize that. Some things defy even the most scrutinizing analysis. Actually, I think people do things for two reasons, primarily: love or money. I work for lawyers for money. I act for love. And despite the fickle nature of show business, to give up performing would be like cutting off an arm. It’s part of who I am, embedded in my soul, and I won’t go down without an ugly fight. Gram feels the same way. She’ll still execute a triple time step from time to time, even though time has caught up with her.

  After lunch I accompanied Ramona back to her office. She handed me a typewritten list of Newter & Spade’s house rules (including what constituted billable hours—as in lunch counts as “billable” only if it’s off-site with clients or adversaries—the dress code for the dining rooms, and the rescinding of “casual Fridays”), then asked me to be back in her office at nine-thirty the following morning, giving me a limp-wristed, fish-cold handshake. “Welcome aboard,” Ramona said, looking like the first thing she wanted to do as soon as I turned my back was phone Turbo Temps to ask Tina what she’d been smoking.

  “I think I should be fine, just as long as I remember that it’s only a job; it’s not my career,” I said to Gram. I was fixing us a big jelly omelet. Every once in a while Gram liked to sort of reverse the days and eat breakfast food for dinner. It was part of her charm. That sort of coloring outside the lines always appealed to me, particularly when I was growing up. Grandparents always let you do special, off-the-wall stuff that your parents routinely frown on, however innocuous. They give you the wings to fly while your parents are trying to ground you. Gram was the first person to believe in my theatrical talent and encourage me to turn a dream into a goal. Her own experiences, however difficult, had beaten the odds and proven her own parents wrong—that the elusive brass ring of a career upon the wicked stage was indeed attainable.

  As I was describing Ramona to her, I could tell that Gram didn’t like what she was hearing. “That woman needs to get laid,” she said pointedly. I couldn’t help agreeing. “Just remember your history with people like her,” she reminded me. I laughed and said it was the first thing I thought of the moment I saw Ramona Marlboro. “It’s not only her small breasts and short hair, Alice. Sometimes there’s additional alchemy involved that can end up creating problems for you. You know, a person’s name says a lot about who they really are.”

  The Barbie I got for my seventh birthday came complete with her own trousseau. My grandmother came complete with her own brand of folklore. I thought it was fun the way we used to play her “name game” when I was a kid, because I love to play with words, but I didn’t lay too much store by her theories. Take my own name, for example. What kind of special magic is in “Alice Finnegan”? I stopped trying to find it long ago.

  I poured Gram another cup of tea and told her about meeting Eric Witherspoon, including the embarrassing details of our first encounter. “He didn’t really seem like one of them,” I said to Gram. “He struck me as being a lot more genuine. Polite, anyway, at the very least. His two friends were downright rude. I couldn’t believe it,” I added. Ramona seemed like a snake, I told Gram, a term I usually reserved for males of our species. At least I wasn’t going to be working directly with her. If I were, I definitely would be thinking twice about taking the job, even though I was anxious to have one. I’d phone Tina and ask her if Turbo Temps had any other firms where they would be able to place me. But Ramona was just going to be my supervisor. She’d sign my time sheet once a week and assign me to various cases where I’d be working with an array of attorneys, legal assistants, and other temps. I’d barely have to see her or deal with her. Or so I believed.

  “You dropped one shoe a minute ago and got me curious, Gram. So drop the other one. Let’s play your name game.”

  She finished her tea, leaving a vibrant smear of lipstick on the rim of the delicate china cup. “Okay, who’s first?”

  “Eric.”

  “What did you say his last name was?”

  “Witherspoon.”

  She closed her eyes for a half second, not much more than a blink, really, then looked at me. “You thought he was a decent guy, basically. Is that what you were telling me?” I nodded. “Wither. Spoon. Sounds to me like he’s strong and resilient, but only to a point. Then he’ll collapse under pressure like a house of cards.” She looked very earnest, like she had just rendered a verdict; but then she smiled, and her eyes—palest blue, but rimmed in a chocolate brown—twinkled and danced.

  “Oh, well, it’s only a game,” I said, finishing my last bite of omelet. “Now it’s Ramona’s turn. Ramona Marlboro.”

  Gram looked down into her teacup and I followed her gaze. I’d been a bit sloppy and let a few tea leaves get through the strainer when I’d poured her that last cup. “Marlboro, huh?” she asked. “It wasn’t me, you know, it was Shakespeare who said ‘what’s in a name,’” Gram added. “And your new boss is named for a carcinogen.”

  Chapter 3

  Speaking of carcinogens, on my first day of work at Newter & Spade, Ramona assigned me to work on a class-action lawsuit brought against a major tobacco company by a bunch of people who had lost family members to lung cancer allegedly caused by their cigarettes. Newter & Spade represented the defendant corporation. My job was to review and “digest” document after document, reading each one and typing key information about it into a computer database, so that every single document could be accessed on the computer in case the attorneys handling the case wanted to use it as an exhibit in court. The fields on the database enabled them to sort the records by various criteria; for example, all the correspondence written by one party to another.

  I plowed through several dozen internal memos, struck by the corporation’s cavalier attitude toward how potentially lethal their merchandise was, and how fully aware they were of the product’s addictive properties, some of which were deliberately added to the cigarettes in order to hook smokers and keep them that way.

  Yeah, yeah, but smoking is a choice. Ever heard of free will, Alice?

  But how much free will does a hardcore drug addict have, I argued with myself.

  I was working in the document coding room, airless and charmless but for my colleagues: four other temporary legal assistants, each of us doing the same assignment on the same matter. The boxes of paperwork were endless. According to Marlena, a long-term temp still banking on a career as an opera singer, if the attorneys on a given case were pleased with your work, they’d tell Ramona, who would then assign you to another set of attorneys on another case, and so on, once you were no longer needed on the current job. Marlena had been at Newter & Spade for two years, still technically working through Turbo Temps.

  “Ramona once offered me a permanent job but I found out that I made more money working as a temp, even without the benefits; and besides, once you realize how hard they work their permanent staffers around here, you’ll be glad you’ve got your freedom.” Newter & Spade didn’t pay its legal assistants overtime, Marlena explained. But, she added, with the temp assignments, if you didn’t have anywhere else to go after five-thirty in the evening and they still needed you, you’d pull down time and a half through the agency. After midnight, it kicked into double time. I couldn’t imagine being there for so many hours at a stretch, doing what we were doing, without losing my mind, although the overtime was certainly an attractive incentive.

  I was grateful for Marlena’s guidance. This single mother raising two teenage sons while juggling an artistic ca
reer had a very no-nonsense approach to the job. She hated Ramona, too, which I looked upon as a good sign. Marlena had once overheard Ramona say something that led her to believe that Ramona didn’t like black people very much. And apparently she’d also made some cracks about overweight people. “Carbohydratedly challenged,” as Marlena referred to herself. “I finally got reconciled to loving my body after trying to be a size eight for twenty years,” she said. “Then this scrawny bitch has to go and make some remark—within my earshot—about my bringing in breakfast every morning and eating it at my desk. Said it made her lose her appetite. She’s not even in the room with us. It was completely gratuitous. Just plain nasty.”

  “My grandmother said she needs a man,” I told Marlena, taking the liberty of cleaning up Gram’s verbatim remarks on the subject.

  “All the men I know like women with some meat on their bones,” Marlena responded. “So don’t be expecting her to lighten up anytime soon. Hey, I heard they’re assigning a new senior associate to this case,” she remarked to the room. We sat in a sort of square configuration, each facing a computer terminal, with our backs to one another, but we could swivel around in our chairs to parlay whenever someone had something to share or we simply needed to take a break from digesting the documents. The job required a lot of concentration and if you didn’t take a few minutes to look away from the screen at least once an hour, you could end up with a splitting headache. I discovered that fact at around eleven-thirty, when after only two hours on the job I felt like I had been blindsided in the temple with a two-by-four.