Ear to the Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

Weird. She brushed past the landlord, and went on up the stairs.

A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND
    â€œWHY THE FUCK DID PARAMOUNT BID ON THAT SCRIPT before we did?”
    â€œI thought we …”
    â€œDon’t think, please.”
    â€œBut …”
    â€œThis office stays on top of everything! Do you understand?”
    Grace had lost the jump on Paramount. That much was true. But Ethan was such an asshole. He was proud of it, and known for it. His shirts were so starched she hoped one day his collar would slice through the tender skin of his neck. He’d bleed to death, maybe be decapitated, while the office danced around him and sang “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” Every day he trundled through those hallways, jiggling the change in his pockets, making sure his under-paid-lings did their jobs.
    He’d hired Grace because he was wildly attracted to her. And not just to her sweet smile or her bouncy blonde hair. Grace was tough, and he liked tough. She was dating a screenwriter, he knew, and he’d wondered how long it would take her to bring the guy in for an assignment. It always happened, and Grace’s predecessor—an unfortunate, freckled girl named Jessica—had waited only three weeks to recommend her lay-buddy, some dolt who wouldn’t have known a plot-reversal if it slammed him in the face.
    Everything Ethan had picked up at Harvard he took the wrong way. He became a prick where he might have been anauthority, a cutthroat instead of a competitor, snobbish rather than stylish. He’d worked hard and done well, but even his mother didn’t like him. Once she’d brushed the hair from his boyish face and told him she loved him. “What does that mean?” Ethan had queried. “You have to.”
    The first time he masturbated he’d used the image of his eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Templeton. But what appealed to him wasn’t the deep curve of her breast underneath those silky Qiana shirts, nor her long legs, which bloomed into a perfect skirt-clad ass. No, his first orgasm was accompanied by the quiet repetition of what he wanted from the deal: “ A ’s and recommendations, A ’s and recommendations …” He derived no pleasure from the present, and had little respect for the past. After college he’d changed his name from Cohen to Carson, because he preferred how it rolled off the tongue.
    Grace picked up the telephone at her desk and dialed the writer of the screenplay she had lost. She did her best to woo him to Tailspin Pictures, stating the company’s successes, omitting its failures—raising her skirt verbally, so to speak. The conversation lasted only about ten minutes, but before she hung up, she’d managed to wrangle the script away from Paramount. She then called the writer’s agent, a cold man with a lisp. When he found out she’d spoken directly to his client, he gave her a hard time, but Grace persisted. “I’d lay down on train tracks for this script. The fact is we love it. Ethan just got finished reading it and came in here, crying.”
    â€œEthan Carson crying? Don’t make me laugh .”
    But the agent came around when Grace went ahead and offered another ten thousand. As she hung up, they were even laughing about the latest O. J. Simpson joke.
    She took a short stroll on the Warner lot. A feature was shooting in the soundstage around the corner, and she peeked inside a makeup trailer where she watched a young woman suddenly grow old. Grace loved movies because, like life, when you added up all the artifice, you ended up with a kindof reality. Ian could rewrite this particular script, she thought, and might not do a bad job of it. If she brought it up to Ethan at the right moment, he’d be sure to listen.
    The worst thing about assholes concerns the vain hope their victims unceasingly maintain, that someday the asshole will smile. In a town of bullshitters and