Miss Independent (11 page)

              It was Maurice calling from his desk at work. He was sitting up, fiddling with the pencil in his hand and spinning it between his fingers.

              She laughed and sat back on her desk. “You’re the only person who has ever said that to me,” she responded. “And I can’t imagine why.”

              “V!” He feigned surprise. “I thought it was one of your assistants.”

              “If you talk to my assistants like that, it’s no wonder they all end up leaving. They get too preoccupied with hearing your voice, they can’t seem to manage to do their jobs correctly.”

              “Do I have that effect on you?” he asked.

              “Not in the slightest.”

              “Not yet.”

              “Mo, if it hasn’t happened
yet
, then I don’t think it’s ever going to.”

              “You can be pretty coldblooded, Vanessa.”

              “So I’ve been told.”

              “Might be why you keep going through assistants.”

              “Not true, my mother just doesn’t know who to hire for me. She thinks of herself and her personality, not me and mine. Luckily, Samantha is working out just fine so far. I’ve put her through the ringer and she’s catching on more than any of the other twits ever did. I think the last one lasted half a day. And I like this girl, which is rare.”

              “You don’t like anyone,” he said. “She must see that as some sort of accomplishment.”

              “Well, I’m no devil in Prada, but that’s not to say I couldn’t be.”

“I sometimes imagine you wearing Prada heels and not much else.”

She felt her cheeks get warm and cleared her throat. “
Mo
--”

“By the way, what up’s with putting the invite from hell on the fridge?”

“I’m using it as a motivation.”

“Motivation for what?”

“Just, motivation.”

Her eyes roamed down toward the picture sitting on the corner of her desk. It was one of her, Nikki, and Maurice embracing each other from their freshman year of high school. (Sheila and Nathan had been completely removed after senior year thanks to Vanessa’s heavily improved photo shopping skills.) She realized how far they had come since then and stood away from it, anxious.

“I don’t think putting that thing up on display is a good reminder for you, V.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said quickly, ignoring him as her mind had already moved onto something more important. “Hey, did you talk to Nikki this morning?”

              “Maybe,” he said, shifting his eyes in suspicion and dread. “Why?”

              “Well, she called me asking if I thought she was a moocher.”

              He dropped back in his chair and tossed his pencil across his desk. “I wasn’t saying it to be a dick.”

              “You apparently weren’t saying it to be sincere, either.”

              “Maybe not. I’m sorry.”

              “I’m not the one who needs the apology,” she said.

              “You’re right, I’ll apologize to her tonight.”

              “Good, because I don’t need her being pissed off over something like this when we’ve already got so much shit to deal with as it is.”

              “V, I said I’ll apologize.”

“Ok. Fine. What exactly were you calling me for anyway?”

He looked down at his watch and began tapping his foot on the floor. “I called because I have lunch in thirty minutes and was curious to know if you wanted to join me?”

              “I’d like to, but I’ve got tons of shit here I have to get done since I skipped out yesterday.”

              “No, I understand. It’s just, um…” He loosened his collar and elongated his neck. His nerves went into overdrive. “There’s a new Thai restaurant that opened up on East 52
nd
next door to Fig & Olive. One of my coworkers was just telling me about it. He and his wife visited last night. And I know you like that kind of food, so I thought it’d be a good place to try out.”

              “Mmm.” She moved her head back and forth, wavering. “How good is it supposed to be?”

              “One of the best new places in the city with a 5 star rating in the Times.”

“That doesn’t really encourage me, Maurice.”

He winced and yanked a pen from beside him. He began stabbing his forehead with the clicker. “Um…” He thought for a long time, then quickly dropped the pen and began typing the name of the restaurant into the Bing search network on his computer. “I found a few sites,” he said.

As he scanned, he found one site that would be the perfect indicator, at least according to Vanessa, whether she was personally going to like the food or not.

“The ratings are great on Yelp.”

“Ok, well… that’s a little more encouraging. You know I trust reviews from actual people more than paid ones.”

“So it’s a date? I can come and pick you up.”

              She continued wavering, then refocused her eyes down at all the papers on her desk, covering her monthly calendar. Everything was sprawled from one side to the other and highly disorganized. It just seemed like a giant mess that she wasn’t the least bit interested in cleaning up. Alexis was going to freak, but that was the least of her worries.

She sank down a little in her chair and exhaled in defeat.

              “Eh, screw it. Maybe I can escape this madness for a bit and then come back to it later or tomorrow.”

              “Alright,” he said, enthused. “I can meet you outside of your building in thirty minutes.”

              “Ok. I’ll see you then.”

              After hanging up, he sat back and placed his hands behind his head, feeling enormously satisfied.

Part Six

              After leaving her audition, Nikki felt more than a little bit discouraged. She was told by both the producer and director of the film that she didn’t do as great of a job as she was certain she had, and informed by the casting director before she had even made it out of the building to not bother showing up for the second round of auditions later in the week. The door slammed in her face before she could even ask what she had done wrong, to improve for the next role that came calling, or one she chased down the cobblestone streets like children after an ice cream truck. Instead she stood there, stunned and feeling as if she had just been kicked out on her ass by a john who was readying the room for another hooker, one who happened to be worth more money and turned far more tricks than she would ever know.

              She drowned her sorrows at a dive bar near SoHo, with a few shots of tequila followed by large glasses of water and a few cups of coffee to keep from becoming completely plastered midday, then wandered around town for a while, thinking of what Maurice had told her earlier in the day. She wondered if it had subconsciously worked against her in her ability to perform well, before heading to the coffee shop in the hopes of getting a pep talk, and maybe something more, from Oscar. Unfortunately, she wasn’t expecting his wife, Melanie, to be all over him first when she arrived.

She was, however, still expecting her to be in Los Angeles.

As she watched them embracing one another from where she stood in the opening of the doorway, she saw a kind of love and closeness between them that she knew she would never have with him. It was the kind of love and closeness only shared between a man and his wife, the kind shared between two people who have had children and been intimate in more ways than one quite recently as opposed to over a year, which is what she had always been told and believed.

             
Where exactly
did
he go when he took unexpected days off from work?
she wondered. Especially during times when she couldn’t reach him. She always assumed it had to do with their children, but she was beginning to think otherwise the longer she stared at them.

              She swallowed the lump growing in her throat like a fungus on a tree as she watched him brush her cheek in a similar way that he always had with her. His wife complained that the tips of his fingers made her tickle, and turned her face away from him. When she noticed Nikki standing across the shop, afraid to move forward and peering at them like a wild rabbit who feared she was going to be eaten by one or both of them at any moment, she smiled wide. They had only met once, at last year’s Christmas party that Oscar and Melanie had put together for all of his employees, her coworkers and their mutual friends. It was held at The Palace in a spacious room filled with food, dancing and more than the economy’s fair share of liquor provided especially for the elite of Manhattan and those who had flown in from Los Angeles. That night, Melanie hadn’t even noticed her husband missing from her side. She was too busy mingling with bigwigs like Moonves and Bloomberg, attempting her very best to score more funding for one of the many children’s charities in which she served as Chairman of the Board. As the current president of CBS Films, Melanie Bruchesque-Malone knew that money talked much louder than the pundits of this country. And she used every power in her arsenal to keep it that way.

              When Oscar took note of Nikki’s presence, he immediately backed away from his wife like a child who was caught with their hand in the forbidden candy bowl. The one you were told to never dig into unless you had permission first. Melanie turned from him, without noticing the sudden change and stiffness in her husband, and waved Nikki inside the shop.

              She stood for a moment like a deer in headlights, pondering whether or not to take the chance or run out into the street and wait for a passing car to flatten her like a pancake on the pavement.

              She chose the former, if only by default. Someone standing behind rudely pushed her inside as they made their way in as well.

              “You must be freezing out there!” said Melanie in a light and airy sing-song voice, her bright white smile becoming even wider the longer she stared.

She must have veneers
, Nikki thought, the snide tone in her head getting louder and louder the closer she moved. She stared at each of them, once together as a couple and then separately as two individual people, wondering if they had had sex that morning, and if so, how many times, and if he often used his tongue in the same ways with her that he had his wife. Were his techniques new, or recycled? Was she really as special as she had always believed, or was she just a body he liked to use to get off from time to time when his wife was in town and uttered those dreaded words, ‘Not tonight’.

He likes my breasts
, she thought.
Hers look extremely small. I wonder does he call her ‘sexy’ in spite of it,
Hermosa,
and if it sounds the same as when he says it to me?

She didn’t want to think like that, she tried everything she could to keep from thinking like that, especially in front of them because she couldn’t control the strange expressions forming on her face as she approached, but she couldn’t help herself. This was a man she had fallen in love with, thought of sharing a life with, and quite possibly would have given up a lifelong dream to have more babies with. And here he was, standing happily with his wife as if nothing had ever happened, as if nothing had been happening for all of this time between any of them.

She felt used, and discarded, and she wasn’t happy.

Melanie looked back at her husband, tossing her flawless blond hair over her shapely shoulder. It sat right at the middle of her back, layered to a Farrah Fawcett like perfection. Nikki could tell she worked out, possibly yoga six times a week or something. She was tiny, looked bendy, every man’s dream woman in bed. And the hair salon was most likely a daily activity because there wasn’t a split end in sight.

“I can’t imagine why the weather is so cold in May. The last few days have been absolutely dreadful.”

              “Global warming,” Nikki informed her, half kidding, half not. “The weather is all screwed up. Warm in the winter, cold in the summer. People have messed with the ozone layer and now everything is out of whack. It’s like the ozone’s way of telling us ‘FU’.”

              A part of her started to fear she was still drunk.

              “Right,” Melanie replied, confused at her answer but attempting amusement and interest in hopes of placating her. “What can I get you to drink? Have you seen our menu?”

              “Erm.” Nikki slightly stammered and looked over at Oscar, visually begging him to come to her aid and speak up.

              He laughed nervously, realizing what she needed from her expression alone, and moved up next to his wife, gently patting her on the back as if she were a hairless dog.

              “She doesn’t want coffee,” he informed her. “She serves it. She works here.”

              “Oh my gosh!” Melanie said with a giggle. It, like the rest of her, continued to be nearly too perfect to truly exist in this world. Or maybe any other except her very own.

Are her brown eyes actually twinkling?
Nikki thought.