So Kelly and Margaret met without her. On Friday, they devised their strategy in Kelly’s home office, a sunny room strewn with baby toys and piles of press kits for companies like HyperGiz and Inno-Modo. The baby itself—a fat little ball of flesh named Audrey—slept in a Bugaboo stroller that Kelly pushed back and forth with her foot while she rapped out e-mails on her BlackBerry.
Kelly called their PR campaign a “public shaming” and noted that this tactic had worked very effectively for Jack Welch’s wife when she’d revealed the astonishing details of his GE perks. “She walked away with half of his net worth, which was a flipping fortune,” Kelly said as she pulled newspaper clippings out of a file cabinet. “Your mom—poor woman, I just feel so
bad
for her—is going to get tons of sympathy. God, I can only imagine. Anyway, we’ll start by getting a story Monday in the
New York Times,
for legitimacy. What the
Times
will write won’t be as
colorful,
but we can leave that to the also-rans that will pick up the story Tuesday.” The stroller zipped back and forth, the baby’s head wobbling sleepily from side to side.
Margaret, lulled into a hypnotic state by the movement, nodded. “How much will this cost?” she asked.
Kelly hesitated. “Usually I charge two hundred dollars an hour,” she said. “Three hundred for corporate. But I’ll do this for you pro bono, as an old friend. At least for the first twenty hours. Sound good?”
“That’s great,” said Margaret. “Better than great.”
“We’ll need a statement from your mother.”
Margaret pulled a folded paper from her purse. “I have one. I wrote it for her.”
Kelly released the stroller and read it. “This is
perfect,
Margaret!” she said. “‘Pained beyond words.’ Like something from a movie! God, I hate writing statements, it’s always such a
minefield.
Maybe you should consider a career in PR—you’re a natural!” She dipped into a bowl of jelly beans on her desk, picked through them, and proffered a few pupalike remainders. “Do you like the banana ones?”
Margaret found herself admiring Kelly’s focused efficiency, as Kelly commandeered the legal documents the newspapers would require, briskly composed a half dozen e-mails, and set two assistants in her central office to the task of collecting relevant press clippings. If she had hired Kelly as her CFO perhaps
Snatch
wouldn’t have been such a financial disaster, she found herself thinking, and she warmed to this woman, despite the fact that Kelly, complacently suburban and content to live in the shadows of other people’s renown, was the antithesis of everything Margaret had ever wanted to be.
“Thanks,” she said, recalling how dismissive she’d been of Kelly at the movie theater. “You didn’t need to be so nice to me.”
Kelly fluttered a hand, as if shooing away a fly. “I always looked up to you in high school,” she said. “I can’t say it’s not an ego boost to be needed.”
The baby woke up and began to cry. Kelly swept her up with one hand, calmly unbuttoned her ruffled blouse, and clamped the baby to her nipple. The baby suckled greedily, as Margaret averted her eyes. “I should change her and get started on calls,” Kelly said.
Margaret rose quickly and moved toward the door. Kelly followed, propping the front door open with a hip, and as Margaret squeezed by she gripped her elbow with her free hand. “You know, I always run into these creeps who dump their wives for trophy girlfriends after they make it big,” she said, looking down at her blissed-out baby. “They’re crawling all over the tech conferences with skinny pretty little assistants who follow them around carrying their briefcases, fetching their coffee, acting like they’re gods. And they treat us—their publicists—like maids whose only purpose is to cover for their mistakes.” She paused and looked up at Margaret. “I know I shouldn’t say this, because he’s still your father, but I always thought your dad was an egotistical opportunist. I admire your balls.” And she swept Margaret through the door.
For a while, Kelly’s words kept Margaret floating on a cloud of vindication—she was doing the right thing—until yesterday morning, when she woke up in a panic thinking she had made a terrible mistake. How could she betray her father so completely? If he was dismissive of her before, she could only imagine how he would feel about her after this.
You don’t care,
she told herself, but twenty-eight years of habit informed her otherwise. Now, as she looks at her words in the
New York Times,
she knows that it doesn’t matter either way because it’s too late to stop this train.
The story is six short paragraphs on the bottom corner of the page—barely an article at all—across from the Nasdaq listings, where APPI appears at 134½ a share. She had hoped for a front-page exposé or, at the least, a photograph. It is deflating to see that what felt to her like an epic—a six-hour opera of Sturm und Drang—did not merit even a cover blurb.
Paul Miller, CEO of Applied Pharmaceuticals, is due in court this Friday for the first hearing in a divorce suit against his estranged wife, Janice Miller. According to court documents, Mr. Miller is seeking to prevent his wife of 29 years from splitting his stock grant from Applied Pharmaceuticals, valued, at today’s share price, at $376.6 million.
Central to the suit is an unusual “postnuptial” document—signed by Mrs. Miller at the time of Mr. Miller’s assumption of the CEO position—that cedes any rights to Applied Pharmaceutical–related assets, including stock and stock options. Mrs. Miller asserts that she was unaware of the contentious one-paragraph clause, inserted into a 411-page document otherwise intended to address the logistics of Miller’s compensation package from Applied Pharmaceuticals. She is countersuing for half of all joint assets, citing California divorce law.
“My client was coerced into signing documents that were presented to her as standard Applied Pharmaceutical documentation and, trusting her husband, she failed to employ counsel that might have noted this disadvantageous wording,” said Mrs. Miller’s attorney, Lewis Grosser. “What person in the world would have signed away that much money had she not been deceived? More importantly, what kind of husband would do such a thing to his wife?”
Janice Miller offered a written statement, via her attorney. “I am pained beyond words by the dissolution of my family and am optimistic that the California legal system will be fair and just.”
Margaret reads that line again, now hating the florid flourish of “pained beyond words”—she would never have let that cliché into the pages of
Snatch,
so why did she think it was appropriate for the
Times
? It doesn’t sound like something her mother would say, even if Janice had signed off on it. She reads on:
According to divorce filings, which the
New York Times
has obtained, Mr. Miller plans to offer $72,000 a year in alimony to his wife, plus $4,000 a month in child support. The Millers have two daughters, Margaret, 28, and Elizabeth, 14. Mr. Miller’s current compensation is listed in S-1 filings as $489,000 a year, with an additional 2.8 million shares of Applied Pharmaceutical stock. Coifex, Applied Pharmaceutical’s much-anticipated hair-regeneration drug, is due to arrive on pharmacy shelves this fall, after clinical trials showed an unprecedented 96 percent success rate. Due to delays, Applied Pharmaceutical (APPI) shares have dropped from a height of 148.75 a share in the weeks after Applied Pharmaceutical’s IPO on June 28 to a current share price of 134½.
Mr. Miller declined to comment. Applied Pharmaceuticals spokeswoman Linda Lockly said, “We don’t discuss the personal matters of our staff.”
And it ends there, abruptly. It seems so inconsequential—just words on paper, disposable pages that will be lining birdcages and starting barbecues before the end of the day. Probably nothing is going to come of it all. And yet, looking at this tiny little blip of a story, she remembers the glow of accomplishment she used to get when a new issue of
Snatch
came back from the printer’s and she held the pages for the first time, lifted the bales of magazines off the delivery pallet and lined them up in towers on the living room floor. There they were, her words, manifested as a physical
thing,
ready to go out and make an impact on the world. She should pop open a bottle of champagne, she thinks bizarrely, and wishes someone—her mother, Lizzie, James, anyone—was there to celebrate with her. But Lizzie is upstairs in bed, and James is long gone to Mexico, and Margaret suspects that Janice will not be eager to raise a toast to the airing of the family’s dirty laundry in public.
Margaret refolds the paper and leaves it lying on the kitchen counter as she takes a tray holding a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice up to Lizzie’s bedroom. Lizzie is propped up on a mound of pillows, watching soap operas. Five days after her miscarriage she is no longer confined to bed rest, but she has been wallowing in the role of invalid anyway, and no one is stopping her. When Margaret walks into the room, she emits a tiny moan.
“Uhhhhhhhhh. My stomach is
killing
me.” She eyes the breakfast tray. “Is there any bacon?”
“Mom isn’t up yet,” says Margaret, as she fits the tray over Lizzie’s legs. “And I don’t fry.”
Lizzie lifts a spoonful of soggy cereal to her mouth and slurps it down. “So,” she says. “Did they print it?”
“The story?” Margaret says. “Yes.”
“Was it good?”
“I’m not sure ‘good’ is really the right word to use. But I think so. I’m not sure.”
“Is Dad going to, like, freak out?”
“Maybe,” says Margaret. “Don’t answer the phone. Can I get you anything else?”
“Something to read, maybe?”
“Sure,” says Margaret. “What about something by Joan Didion? Have you read her yet?”
Lizzie hesitates. “I was thinking more like…the new
Us Weekly
?”
Margaret considers the libraries of fine literature that Lizzie is never going to read, the great philosophers Lizzie will never ponder, all the feminist thinkers whose names Lizzie will never remember. She thinks of her sister’s brain cells, winking out one by one, like insects drifting into a bug zapper, as Lizzie wastes the rest of her life worrying about movie stars’ love lives and pondering the secrets of Hollywood personal trainers. “Anything you want, kiddo.”
Lizzie beams, and Margaret swims for a moment in her sister’s guileless pleasure. “Thanks,” Lizzie says. “I promise I’ll read a book next.”
Downstairs, Margaret finds her mother in the kitchen, dressed and drinking a cup of coffee. She is still pale and thin in her jogging suit, but the hollows under her eyes are starting to vanish and she looks sturdy again, like a sailor rediscovering his sea legs. She stands over the kitchen counter, skimming the front page of the newspaper and blowing on her steaming cup of coffee. The business section sits next to her, still folded. Margaret pours herself a cup of coffee and sits down beside her at the counter. She picks up the entertainment section and flips through it, past a full-page advertisement for
Thruster
(“Pumping, thrusting summer fun!”—
Sioux City Journal
; “Johnson is a real man’s man!”—KKBX, Fargo), a story about reality television stars who launch their own clothing lines, and a profile of a twelve-year-old boy whose novel has just made the best-seller list. A concrete-mixing truck growls by out front, en route to a construction site down the road.
“Aren’t you going to say something about the article?” Margaret finally asks.
Janice looks down at the business section at her elbow, as if noticing it for the first time. “I’d rather not read it,” she says. “I only want to know when it’s over.”
The phone starts to ring, and Margaret lunges for the receiver, realizing as she does that this is probably the first time in months she has been eager to find out who might be on the other end of the line. “Hello?” Her eyes meet Janice’s across the kitchen island. Janice peers at her over the top of her mug, where it has frozen just below her nose. Tiny tremors vibrate across the surface of the coffee.
“Hi there, I’m calling from CNBC?” says a woman’s voice. “I’m trying to get in touch with Janice Miller?”
by midmorning it is clear that the story has had more impact than five inches of type might have implied. The
San Francisco Chronicle
calls, and so does the
Wall Street Journal.
CNET. CNN. Janice will not answer the phone, so Margaret does it for her, referring each call to Kelly Maxfield, saying nothing except “no comment” (an infuriating phrase, because of course she has comments, lots of them, and it is physically painful to hold them back). Through the kitchen window she can see Janice sitting in the garden, her ramrod back the only sign that her mother is listening, intently, to every word Margaret speaks into the receiver.
At the close of the stock market, when Margaret checks online, shares of Applied Pharmaceuticals have dropped from 134½ a share to 128. She considers this—normal market fluctuation? or a sign of her father’s impending doom?—before clicking away to Google. There she types in the phrase “credit card debt,” then chooses the button “I’m feeling lucky.” The summons lies on the desk beside her, still creased from her pocket.
She ends up at a Web site called
Debt-B-Gone.com
. Here Margaret can order a series of tapes for $99.99 that will teach her how to consolidate her credit card debt and outmaneuver her creditors. For $799.99, she can meet on the phone with a special counselor who will help her come up with a “lifetime affluence plan.” “Face your debt demons one step at a time,” the Web site offers, and Margaret thinks that modern life is just an endless series of traps, each one lying just beyond the last. There is no safe, direct path anymore, no bread-crumb trail to follow. Existence has become an evasive maneuver.
In the hallway she hears her mother’s footsteps, and then Janice appears in the door of the study with a plate of sliced fruit. “Summer peaches,” she says, looking down at the fruit. “It’s almost the end of the season, so you should enjoy them while you can.” She comes over to where Margaret sits at the desk and then stops, her eyes drawn to the document near her daughter’s hand. Margaret watches as her mother scans the summons upside down, not even bothering to be discreet about her curiosity, while the plate in her hand makes a steep trajectory toward the desk.