into her act. “How could this happen?. . . How could you be flying five or six days a week?. . . How could you not get a per diem for lunches or petty cash to pay for your taxis?”
“Don’t know,” I said, cowering.
“Whose fault is this?!” she bellowed.
“Meg, I don’t know. I’ve just been doing my job like everyone else.”
“Get me Gib on the phone,” she buzzed to her assistant. “Try him at home! He’s responsible for this.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “He’s just doing his job too.”
“Look, Jane, you might as well know. I saw the e-mail. I’ve had someone checking Gib’s work emails ever since he was put on leave.”
“Leave?” I asked, bewildered. “I thought he was still in the office.”
“No, he’s on leave,” Meg spat. “That’s all you need to know.”
“With all due respect,” I said, “what right does someone have to forward you a personal e-mail of mine?” Corinne flashed through my mind briefly. Would she? Could she?
“Jane, as I’m sure you know, your office e-mails, written on our computers, and sent through our network, are our property. Read your contract!” Now fully annoyed, she again buzzed her assistant, “Get me Gib on the phone!” Clearly, whatever was most wrong with the system was of little concern to Meg.
“This is about me. Not Gib. Just me,” I said with regret. “I’m the one with the problem. And it’s not just the hours or the airplanes. That’s only the half of it.”
“What’s the other half? You feel, as you put it, like a drone? You’re a robot now?”
“Sort of.”
“What else, Ms. Hot Shot?”
“Well, I. . .” I said, hesitating.
“Go on.” Her eyeballs bulged.
“Per the e-mail,” I said, trying to maintain my composure, “I don’t think this show is helping—”
“Oh, right,” she said flippantly. “So, Jane, what do you want to do here, journalism or philanthropy? Because you can’t do both!”
Her phone buzzed. “Still haven’t reached Gib,” her assistant said over the intercom, “and Mr. Barlow’s on the line.”
“I’ll take it.” She looked at me with one of her forced smiles. “Two minutes. I’ve got to take this.”
Her walls were an off-putting peach color, with a single painting of a Mediterranean landscape housed in a cheery gold frame. A shot of two young boys on a sailboat sat on her desk. They were laughing. I stared at it, feeling unprepared for this meeting. I sounded dumb, inarticulate.
Her red fingernails clanked along her keyboard as she checked e-mails and said the occasional “uh-huh” to the man on the other end of the phone. I noticed a large, chunky diamond on her ring finger, which looked out of place on her bony hand. She looked up at me, phone attached to her ear, apparently on hold.
“Listen,” she said, directing her voice toward me in her most business-like manner, “I’m not upset with you. In fact, I want you to wait a week. I can’t give you details now, but I promise you, a promotion is in the works. Things are about to become really good for you.”
She was unemotional, matter of fact. I looked at her with a half-smile and began shaking my head slowly.
“I’ll get back to you tomorrow,” she said, shooing me from her office.
“Don’t bother,” I whispered as I walked out the door. “I quit.”
“You should at least try to give them two weeks’ notice and a formal letter,” Penny said from the other end of the telephone.
She was the only lawyer I knew personally and my closest friend from college—also, the single mom I’d referred to with Corinne. I was sitting with my editor’s cell phone attached to my ear on the steps of the fake City Hall on the studio lot, surrounded by concrete columns and wooden storefronts that appeared entirely authentic. It was all a stagefront.
“But can I get out of it? I’m worried.”
“Depends. Every employee contract, whether with a Hollywood entertainment company or something else, carries with it an implied ‘good faith’ clause that assumes the artist or employee will be provided reasonable working conditions. And I must say, repeated 90-hour weeks, not to mention no meal times, are unquestionably unreasonable. That’s your out.”
“But what if they blacklist me after I leave?”
“Seems ridiculous to do that, but it is Hollywood, after all.”
“So this is the Hotel California they talk about: ‘Check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’”
Penny laughed. “Ah, Jane, always dramatic.”
Slumping back into our building, I felt the walls closing in on me. The bullpen, ordinarily a proud