The Job by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online

success as his due, his inalienable right-whereas I always felt as if the corner table, like success, had to be fought for. Just as I also found myself wondering: Once I finally made it to the table, would I ever feel secure enough to sit
    That’s the problem with being a small-town kid in New York: No matter how well you do in Gotham, deep down you always consider yourself a fraud. Still looking up in amazement at “all them tall buildings,” desperately trying to exude high-gloss sophistication, constantly wondering if your urbane act is as transparent as Plexiglas.
    “Look who’s sitting in the left-hand corner,” Geena said, in an attempt to move the conversation on after my impolitic comment.
    Ian glanced over in that direction, then said, “Oh yeah. Him.” Then shooting me an ironic grin, he added, “Now there’s a guy who owns his own tennis court.”
    “Edgar Bronfman, Jr.?” Lizzie asked.
    “You are good at this,” Geena said.
    “She’s the best,” I said.
    Lizzie shrugged.
    “I just read the gossip columns, like everyone else.”
    I smiled-because that comment was pure Lizzie. Though she was an adept player of the Manhattan “in-the-know” game, it really didn’t define her. She saw the game for what it was: nothing more than a basic component of her work. Information was the central currency she traded in.
    Shortly after we first met, she explained her job to me.
    “In public relations, only two things count: who you know… and who you know.”
    “Don’t you have to land the deals as well?”
    She ran her finger across the top of my hand and gave me a sly smile.
    “You close,” she said.
    “I influence.”
    Talk about a seductive sales pitch. No wonder I was instantly bewitched. And looking back on it now, meeting Lizzie came around the same time (spring of ‘93) when my New York luck finally began to change. Up until that point I was scratching out a living as a “recruitment executive” at a big commercial employment agency in midtown. It was one of a string of dead-end jobs I’d landed since first hitting the city six years earlier. Professionally speaking, I was starting to feel like a loser-unable to graduate beyond the sort of dreary career prospects offered in the back employment pages of the New York Times. At first, just getting myself established in the city seemed like a real triumph. I found a shabby, railroad-style one-bedroom apartment for $850 a month on Seventy-fifth between First and York (complete with that ultimate low-rent touch: a bathtub in the kitchen). Then I grabbed the first job I could land (“telephone sales associate” for Brooks Brothers-i.e.” the guy who takes your chinos order on the phone). I didn’t exactly have defined career objectives. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. All I did know was: New York was the center of the cosmos. A place that anyone like me (armed with both boundless ambition and boundless workaholism) could eventually conquer.
    Boy, was I in for a kick up my Horatio Alger ass. As I quickly discovered, a kid from Maine with a degree from a third-rate state university and no connections didn’t exactly take Manhattan overnight. Sure, I tried to make inroads on Wall Street-but the competition for jobs was brutal, and those “in the loop,” or from the good schools, always won out. Guys like me, on the other hand, were trapped in mid-level employment hell.
    Though I was desperate to find something “executive,” I kept bouncing from lowly position to lowly position, always hoping that it might lead to a promotion. Even when I was taking phone orders for Brooks Brothers, I kept trying to find a way into the management division of the organization-only to be told that, given my piss-poor entry-level status, I would have to put in several years’ service before being considered for advancement.
    But I didn’t want to spend three years wired to a headset, asking customers questions like, “And do you want the