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Carol was at her desk the next morning, incorporating the ideas the writing group had given her into the screenplay she was working on for Gregoire. She used both of John’s ideas. In her screenplay, the young girl got dressed to go to the hospital, realized her blouse was on backwards, and, angry at life for putting her sister in the hospital and for getting her so upset that she couldn’t properly dress herself, she pulled her hi-def TV off the wall and threw it down. On the movie screen in Carol’s mind, onto which she projected all her scenes as she wrote them, the electronics exploded handsomely.
As for the young man John had mentioned—
“Carol, can you come into my office?” It was Gregoire standing in her doorway, and he looked very happy.
His tone of voice stopped her heart for a second. Carol said, “Sure.” Gregoire stepped away, and she knew this wasn’t going to be good. So she quickly dug in her massive Louis Vuitton handbag for her coral lipstick. A little color on her lips would give her courage.
She straggled into Gregoire’s office. It looked out over the parking lot, which was not glamorous, except for his sporty BMW Z-3 parked right outside his window.
Inside, the office was beautiful. He had a cherry desk with little on it except a crystal elephant, as big as a fist, with its trunk raised. Carol had heard that when it came to statues of elephants, the trunk had to be raised for good luck. Gregoire obviously had enjoyed some.
He also had cherry bookshelves filled with published screenplays. If you needed “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Sense and Sensibiity,” he had them, and he lent them carefully, keeping track of who had what.
In a glass case, with cherry shelves, he had created a shrine to himself with the awards he had received, framed in cherry if they were on paper, or, if they were glass or crystal, standing proudly where the sun could hit them. She knew there wasn’t an Oscar or a Palme D’Or among them. But still, an impressive array.
“Sit down, Carol.”
She sat in a barrel chair that she suspected Gregoire had chosen to be lower than his chair. And Gregoire was a tall man. A tall man in a tight suit. So now he was looking down on her, and she was looking up at him. He was framed by light from the window behind him, and she was forced to squint up at him. He liked people to be at a distinct disadvantage.
“Carol, your contributions at our brainstorm meetings haven’t been of great caliber lately.”
How could he expect someone to improve under this demoralizing heap of criticism, she thought. Businessmen are needlessly cruel, and because of it, people can’t flourish and help them make money.
“What do you say to that, Carol?”
She thought, I think it’s a good thing John gave me those ideas last night. I joined that group in the knick of time.
“I think you’ll see that I’m doing better,” she said, “starting today. I had some great ideas last night, and I was just incorporating them into the script when you stopped by. Ideas that will add lots of drama.”
“I want to make my concern very real to you,” Gregoire said, and in reaction to his tone of voice, Carol’s shoulders slumped. “I’m putting you officially on probation for three months. Only Marine in Human Resources and I will know about this, I assure you.”
Well, that was good, she wouldn’t want her colleagues to know. But merde, this felt awful, to not be trusted to be doing her best, to be told that her best, which had pleased them for the last three years, was not good enough now. Though she had to admit, she had launched a few duds off her rocketpad lately, hadn’t she?
“I’d like to see us move through this and come out the other side as better people and better artists.”
“Yes, I agree.” Her stomach twisted as she said it. She had read that it had been scientifically proven: people who had power were less compassionate, were less able to identify with the feelings of the humans in their clutches. Gregoire had just dumped a load of his ego garbage on her and expected her to function better, not worse, as a result. What bloody nonsense!
She left his office reeling. She had to talk to someone, she had to have someone on her side. No one at Trapèze, that was certain. She made herself a cup of tea in the kitchenette and closed herself in her office, with its window onto the hallway. Colleagues not on probation passed by from time to time. She looked at the screenplay she had been happily working on before Gregoire’s little visit. Any pleasure she’d had in it was now gone. She typed each word of the next scene with pain-stiffened fingers.
