See Jane Date (2 page)

“Jane!”

Right on time. I ran down the foot-long, foot-wide hallway into the tiny kitchen, kneeled down on the black-and-white linoleum floor and opened the cabinet under the sink. “Hey!” I shouted over the little garbage can.
“Come on up. I need help! Don't forget the Super-Straight hair balm, okay?”

“Gimme ten minutes!” Eloise Manfred shouted back from the depths of the cabinet.

Eloise lived in the apartment below mine. The walls, floors and ceilings were so thin in our six-floor walk-up that we'd discovered we could chat the night away if she shouted toward her kitchen ceiling and I opened the under-the-sink cabinet. If either of us was ever being murdered in our kitchens, the other could call 911. I'd once told Aunt Ina that, thinking she'd stop worrying about my doorman-less building. She didn't.

Eloise and I worked together at Posh Publishing. During my first week at Posh, I'd mentioned I was apartment hunting, and Eloise told me about the vacancy right above her. She'd shown me a picture of her place and said the studio upstairs had the same layout. Rent-stabilized had been all I needed to hear. I'd rushed to the landlord's office with my entire life's savings in cash, which almost equaled one month's rent and one month's security (I had to borrow two hundred from Ina). With the exchange of cash, a clean credit check and the signing of a two-year lease, the little box was mine. My studio looked nothing like Eloise's decor-wise. She wasn't Posh's assistant art associate (a title almost worse than mine) for nothing. Eloise had done the most amazing things with flea market screens, sheer, silky curtains and blown-up black-and-white photos. I'd lived at 818 E. 81st Street for six years and still had the hot-pink plastic Parsons table I'd bought for my college dorm room.

If you were wondering how I could afford the apartment on my salary—which, trust me, was even more pathetic six years ago—it was all about budgets and credit cards. Aunt Ina taught me something about budgeting that
I actually listened to. It really worked. I got paid twice a month, so I put aside half my rent and utility bills with one paycheck, and half with the second paycheck. Then I paid myself fifty bucks in a savings account. The rest was walk-around money, food and subway fare. Everything else, like clothes, and shoes and stuff for the apartment went on credit cards. I had four: Visa, Ann Taylor, Macy's and Bloomingdale's. The only thing I ever bought in Bloomies was MAC makeup, but I liked having the card. Anyway, thanks to Ina's system, come bill-paying time I always had two halves of my expenses.

I heard Eloise lock up her apartment and jog the steep staircase to the sixth floor. Then I heard her stop, jog back down and unlock her door. She must have forgotten the hair balm.

Among the many things I loved about Eloise Manfred was that she was two years older than I was (the big three O), and didn't mind being single. In fact, she relished her freedom and the choices out there. She dated constantly. Younger men, older men, cute men, ugly men, musclemen, short men, bald men, hot men. All nationalities and colors and professions. Aunt Ina had met Eloise once. The three of us arranged to meet in my apartment for a trip to the designer outlets in Secaucus, New Jersey. This was during Eloise's Swarthy Man phase. She'd brought Abdul upstairs to introduce us, and Ina's arrival had coincided. Ina had taken one look at Abdul and instructed him to take Second Avenue to 42nd Street, then to go crosstown to the Lincoln Tunnel. Abdul, whose English wasn't too great, nodded politely and smiled, having no idea what she was talking about. Eloise and I hadn't either, for that matter. Until Ina had whispered to me, “Isn't he the car-service driver?” I'd held my breath. But Eloise had laughed and kissed Ina on the cheek. According to Eloise,
Aunt Ina was a classic. Another of the reasons I loved her so much.

Right now Eloise was dating a Russian immigrant hair-stylist named Serge. He looked like an Eastern European John Travolta, if you could picture that. They'd been seeing each other for three months, and he adored her. Serge was an old-fashioned gentleman. He stood up when a woman entered a room, brought Eloise flowers before every date and complimented her pathetic attempts at cooking. A month ago, he'd raved about the new hairstyle that was all the rage in Moscow, and Eloise, being game for anything, had let him do his thing. When he triumphantly spun her around to face the mirror, she had the Jennifer Aniston “do,” circa
Friends
six years ago. She didn't have the heart to tell Serge that
Friends
was a few years ahead in America. Or that she'd already
had
this very hairstyle, like every other woman in the United States.

Eloise knocked her special triple knock, and I unlocked the dead bolt, the three lesser locks and slid off the safety latch. She was beaming, with her hazel eyes twinkling, which meant she was about to do me a very big favor. She liked making people happy.

“Don't say no,” she ordered. She held out her hands and opened her fists; a one-carat diamond stud earring sat gleaming in each. Her mom had given her the heirloom earrings just weeks before she'd passed away from ovarian cancer. Those earrings were the most precious things that Eloise possessed. I knew what it felt like to cherish what your mother left you. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. Eloise laughed her don't-make-me-cry-too laugh.

I'd once asked her if she thought we'd be best friends if we didn't have the loss of our mothers (to cancer) in
common. Eloise had said definitely. I agreed. My mom died when I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. I'd already lost my father when I was nine. Eloise's mother had passed away when she was eighteen. She never talked about her dad, but she was very close to her mother's mother.

“You're wearing them tomorrow, end of story,” Eloise announced, closing the door behind her. She pulled the tube of Super-Straight out of the waistband of her jeans and placed it on the Parsons table. “Natasha will definitely notice them. And they
say
Senior Editor.”

I took the diamond studs and put them in my ears, pushing back my hair to model them for Eloise. I mouthed a
thank-you,
then admired the brilliant gems in the full-length mirror attached to the back of my bathroom door. “But El, do they say, My Very Successful Boyfriend Gave Them To Me, So Take That, Natasha Nutley?”

Eloise laughed. “Say” was
the
word at Posh Publishing. That was how the big cheeses (meaning William Remke and Jeremy Black) decided if a book was worthy of being published. It had to
say
something that would make everyone buy it.

Last year, my boss, senior editor Gwendolyn Welle, had stuck me with a former child actor's autobiography that said: If You Read Me You'll Be Depressed For A Week.
Sitcom Kid: No Laughing Matter
had landed on the extended
New York Times
bestseller list at number twenty-three, which for small Posh Publishing was as good as number one. Remke had been thrilled. He threw a big party in our loft office to celebrate. As the project editor of the memoir, I got to take a two-hour lunch (whoo-hoo). Gwen, who'd
acquired
the manuscript (but did only one quarter of the work) got a huge raise. Jeremy, who'd done nothing but green-light the deal, got his
gorgeous mug and a special interview in
Publishers Weekly,
where he was heralded as the “brilliant mind behind the success of Posh's Real Life Books imprint.” Posh's only imprint, mind you. And Remke got a gazillion stock options from our parent company.

A major television network was making a movie-of-the-week out of
Sitcom Kid: No Laughing Matter.
Eloise and I joked that the child actor playing the role of the sitcom kid would also end up homeless and addicted to drugs one day. Not that that was funny. Oh, wait. That reminded me. I
did
get something else for being project editor on the book: depressed for a week.

Eloise went into the kitchen and rooted around in the refrigerator. She came back into the main room with diet Snapple iced tea, then settled herself on the futon that dominated the small room. She leaned back against the pastel throw pillows, hugging one to her stomach.

“Okay. We've gotta focus. Which is more important?” Eloise asked, tucking her auburn Jennifer Aniston layers behind her ear. “Impressing the Gnat, scoring a drinks invitation from Jeremy or getting that promotion from Remke?”

That was easy. I grabbed the Snapple and took a sip, then handed it back to Eloise. The promotion would begin to negate the necessity of lying to semi-famous former classmates about my pathetic title at age twenty-eight.
And
it would impress Jeremy, who
could
possibly ask me out to celebrate my hard work and dedication to the Posh family.

“The promotion takes care of everything else,” I explained, picking up the pack of Marlboro Lights. I almost knocked over the cheap plastic Parsons table; Eloise saved the bottle of Snapple just in time. I couldn't get a real coffee table until I had a real apartment, with a bed
room. I had to move the table every night in order to unfold the futon, which I folded back up every morning. Such was life in a studio apartment.

“Ugh! Only one left,” I complained, lighting the cigarette. I took a good long, satisfying drag and blew out the smoke toward the ceiling.

Eloise plucked the cigarette from my fingers and took an equally long puff, then passed it back to me. “We have to quit.” She said that once a week or so.

“Yeah, because walking down and up six flights to get a pack is the
real
drag.” I inhaled, then exhaled. “Maybe we can get the bodega on the corner of First Avenue to deliver.”

“One pack of cigarettes?” Eloise asked, searching the tips of her hair for split ends.

“The night clerk has a crush on you,” I reminded her. “He's always staring at your chest when we go in there.” Which, I should note, was much smaller than mine. She was a B, and I was the C. But she attracted more men. Maybe it was because she wore tight ribbed turtlenecks. I tended toward serious Ann Taylor jackets. As an artsy type, Eloise didn't have to dress too corporately.

She rolled her eyes and gestured for me to pass her the cigarette. She took a puff. “So your big meeting with Remke is first thing tomorrow, right? Nervous?”

I nodded, watching the stream of smoke rise up and disappear. Perhaps arranging a meeting to discuss my fate on a Friday wasn't such a hot idea, after all. If Remke laughed in my face (or the professional equivalent), it would ruin my weekend. I bit my lip and peered at myself in the mirror.

“You'll get the promotion,” she assured me. “You've earned it. You just have to go in there and state your case. Don't let him intimidate you, Jane.”

Ha. That was a joke.
Intimidating
was William Remke's middle name. He was very New York, very sophisticated. He looked like a less handsome version of Blake Carrington from that old television show
Dynasty.
Remke was meticulous—his hair, his suits, even his in-box. He liked his “team” to have a certain look, so he'd know we were his kind of people. Therefore, everyone at Posh had a very streamlined appearance and wore muted colors.

I'd modeled myself after Gwen, since it was her job I aspired to. She never wore jeans to work, so I never did. She worked till seven at night, so I worked till 7:01. She drank green tea and ordered exotic salads for lunch; I gave up Coke and brown-bagged ham-and-cheese sandwiches from home. She wore DKNY; I did my best to copy the look. I wasn't too great at style, but I had Eloise to help me. Eloise had the look naturally, but that was because she was from here—Manhattan, I mean. Private school on the Upper East Side and everything. She'd been obsessed with Anna Wintour as a teenager. Natasha Nutley and Fran Drescher from
The Nanny
had been my role models during high school. Natasha because she was everything I wished I could be. And Fran because she was from Queens.

I'd changed since graduating from Forest Hills High. That old saying about taking the girl out of wherever, but not the wherever out of the girl didn't hold true with me. You couldn't make it in the world of New York City publishing with the boroughs on and in you. So I'd worked hard. There wasn't a drop of Queens on me, accent included. No one would ever guess my bridge-and-tunnel origins. Sometimes I wondered if my own mother would recognize me. If she were still alive, that was. I think she'd be proud. Virginia Gregg always said I'd be
a big-deal something someday. Aunt Ina always said I was trying too hard. But she didn't know how
hard
it all was.

“I can't take it,” Eloise announced, blowing out a perfect smoke ring and smushing the butt in the ashtray. “I'm going down for a pack. I'll be right back.”

I gratefully unlocked the door for her. I needed cigarettes to get through tonight. Tomorrow was major. I had the appointment with Remke, my first meeting with Natasha (over lunch), and because tomorrow was Friday, it was the last chance for Jeremy to suddenly realize I had breasts and a vagina and ask me out for Saturday night.

Like
that
would ever happen.