The Cinderella Pact (21 page)

Children love it.

So do I.

“Has a woman arrived looking stricken and confused?” I ask the hostess, who is wearing a safari outfit, natch. “Oh, and she'll be in all black.”

“Is she stick thin with big, big glasses?” Momsai, the hostess, holds up her index finger.

“I'm guessing.”

“Right this way,” she grabs a plastic menu. “I already got her a martini. I guess the macaws make her nervous or something.”

Something, I think, following Momsai through the jungle of tables and palm trees and paper kid-menus with crayons, hunting, as we are, for the elusive New York agent, trapped outside of her concrete and power-laden natural habitat of Manhattan.

Charlotte stands out among the young mothers and shouting toddlers like a British soldier surrounded by spear-wielding Zulu warriors. Her hand is shaking as she carefully sips her martini, eyeing her surroundings in horror.

She is white, very white, though being in her fifties, maybe mid-sixties, not really old. Her bleached hair is pulled back severely from her forehead and clasped in place by a thick black hairband. It is the only color on her face besides the sloppy smear of bright pink on her lips. Her eyes are hidden behind the largest pair of black-framed glasses I've ever seen. It's a mystery how the sales clerk sold them to her. What could have been the pitch?

“Charlotte?” I say as fake lightning flashes over us.

Charlotte looks up and flinches at the sight of me. Or was it the thunder followed by the sound of torrential rain? “Yes?”

“I'm Nola. Nola Devlin. Belinda's editor.”

Her mouth makes an
O,
but no sound comes out.

“Do you want something to drink too?” Momsai asks.

“Coffee,” I say. “Skim milk on the side, please.” (1 point.)

When Momsai leaves, I sit across from Charlotte, whose eyes are grotesquely magnified by the coke-bottle lenses in front of them. “This is quite a place,” she says. “Though not a
quiet
place.”

“I chose it for a reason,” I say. “I have something to tell you about Belinda.”

“Oh?” She carefully puts down her martini glass.

“Yes.” I smile confidently, take a deep breath, and let 'er rip. “You're looking at her.”

It is the first time that I have confessed my secret identity and I can barely sit still, I'm so nervous.

Charlotte blinks her big magnified eyes. “I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“I'm Belinda Apple,” I try again, wishing she'd just get it so this ordeal would be over with. “I've always been Belinda Apple.”

“But you're not British.”

“That's true. But one doesn't
arf
to be
veddy
British, does one, to fake it?”

Charlotte cringes. “That's an awful impersonation. You sound like Maggie Smith.”

“No, Maggie Smith sounds more Scottish: ‘Gurrls. We willl not be trrraipsing about.' Believe me, I know. I've become an authority on faking British accents.”

Charlotte takes a long sip of the martini. “So you
are
a fraud, exactly like that DiGrigio person claimed.”

“Not exactly.” I pinch the skin on my arm, a crude acupuncture technique to keep me from panicking. “I'm very real. I'm just not very British or, for that matter, very thin.”

“I'm glad you said it. I didn't want to sound rude.”

Momsai comes by and brings me coffee. As she's about to leave, Charlotte clutches her sleeve and asks—no, begs—for a second martini (3 points).

When Momsai's gone, I tell Charlotte the whole story, starting from the application Lori DiGrigio tossed to how I applied merely as a test and then took the job. Charlotte says nothing, though she does manage to drink down to her olives.

“If you want to stop representing me . . .” I say.

“Don't be daft. This is the best thing that could have happened. I love this.” She removes her cell phone, punches in her numbers, and winks at me. “B. J. Martin, please. This is Charlotte Dawson.”

She bites an olive and waits while B.J. gets on. “B.J., I am sitting here with Belinda Apple. She's just informed me that she is leading a double life, that she is under investigation by
Sass!
magazine, and may be in jeopardy of running afoul with the IRS.”

“What?” I say. It hadn't occurred to me that I might be in trouble with the IRS. I'd paid all my taxes, hadn't I?

Charlotte puts a finger in her ear to block out a screaming baby at the next table. “You either put a figure on the table now, or I'm going over to Boardwalk Productions.”

I can't help but be fascinated by Charlotte's wheeling and dealing.

“I'll give you five minutes,” she says.

She clicks the phone shut and casually picks up the plastic menu. “This is awful,” she says.

“Awful?” It sounded pretty good to me. It sounds like I'm about to get a movie deal.

“There's nothing to eat. I'm on a diet, of course.”

The phone rings. Charlotte picks it up, says, “That's great,” and hangs up.

“Well?” I say, so excited I could erupt like the volcano behind me.

“There's no choice but the chicken Caesar salad.”

“No!” I screech. “What about the film deal?”

“Oh, that.” Charlotte blinks her heavy lashes. “A tentative offer of a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar signing and five hundred thousand if they make the movie of the week, with five percent royalties. It's not bad.”

“Not bad? It's fantastic.”

“There is a caveat, however. They want to make sure you are as exciting in person as I've made you to be. That's why they're planning to fly you to L.A. soon. If I were you, I'd brush up on that hideous British accent. I have no intention of telling them that you're really Nola Devlin from New Jersey.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The three-foot-high pile of red-skinned potatoes on my parents' kitchen counter should be the first clue that Eileen's wedding preparations have sent my mother over the edge.

“Looks like your mother's cornered the spud market,” my father says, the morning's paper shoved under his arm as he strolls through the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee.

My father used to work for Johns Manville until the asbestos company was sued so often for scarring people's lungs that it declared bankruptcy, pulled up roots, and moved west and made paper products. This sent my father into early retirement and my mother to work full-time down at the muni clerk's office in Princeton. Part of his grand scheme, as he likes to say, to get the house to himself.

Dad was born to retire. He spends his uneventful days joyfully fishing, reading, and puttering around, contributing little to the world besides carbon dioxide. Every day he wears a flannel shirt and a gray pair of Dockers. It could be 102 degrees in the desert, and he'd be in a long-sleeve flannel shirt and Dockers. He is a man of few wants and needs.

“All this for a family Labor Day picnic?” I say, eyeing the two pots bubbling madly on the stove and the one waiting on the counter for its turn. “This'll make way too much potato salad. I'll be boiling and peeling for hours.”

Dad sits down at the kitchen table with a groan. “Guess you haven't heard. It's not just the Labor Day family picnic anymore. It's Eileen's ‘impromptu' engagement party. For fifty.”

“What?” He must be mistaken. No one told me about an engagement party. I haven't even bought a gift and I have nothing to wear.

“Bubbles, that hairdressing friend of Eileen's, heard a rumor that Jim's mother was planning a big fancy shindig. Well, you know your mother. She couldn't stand to be beaten to the punch. Or rather, the punch bowl.”

I can see Mom now, calling all our relatives, summoning them to our house for Labor Day. No way would she allow Jim's mother the first crack at an engagement party. The wedding is her domain.

“Eileen doesn't know. It's a surprise. Come to think of it, you're not supposed to know either. Whoops,” he deadpans, “maybe I said too much.”

If my mother is keeping the party a secret from me, then she must be feeling guilty about something. “What's going on now?”

“Everyone, meaning your mother, is worried that you're J-E-A-L-O-U-S.”

There is an uncomfortable silence as the letters form into the word I have learned to despise. “You don't have to spell stuff anymore, Dad. I'm not a kid.”

“Then you're the only one. These days I feel like I'm living in a kindergarten, what with all the pettiness going on. Your mother and your sister are on the phone at the crack of dawn and they don't get off until the eleven o'clock news. I'm going to live in my camper if this keeps up. And I'm taking the TV with me.” He opens up the paper and buries his head.

“OK, I want to hear exactly why Mom and Eileen think I'm jealous.”

Dad pretends to be fascinated by the article in front of him, though peering over his shoulder I find it's nothing but an advertisement of a Labor Day sale—for lingerie.

“If you don't spill,” I threaten, “I'll tell all the guys down at Frank's Chicken House that you spent Saturday morning checking out the prices on C-cups.”

He lets out a resigned sigh. “Your mother thinks you're jealous because you left Eileen's birthday party early after Jim popped the question and then your sister stupidly chose that Jolinda—”

“Belinda.”

“Yeah, her, to be maid of honor. I dunno what the big hullabaloo's about, but your mother is convinced you're on the verge of suicide. And that if you knew tomorrow's picnic was an engagement party for Eileen you wouldn't come—that is, if you hadn't thrown yourself off the Raritan Bridge.”

This is so insulting that I don't know how to respond without sounding like one more whining Devlin girl. “That's such a lie. Does Mom actually take me for being that petty, that I wouldn't go to my own sister's engagement party because she's getting married before me?”

“That's what I told her. She told me to shut up and mind my own business. Said I couldn't know because I'm not a girl. So from now on, I'm staying out of it.”

“That's so not true.” I pound the cutting board, sending a stack of potatoes rolling to the floor.

“You mean I
am
a girl?” he asks, lifting his head from the paper.

Mom walks in with her arms filled with cut flowers from the garden and nearly trips over one of the potatoes on the floor.

“Jeez Louise,” she exclaims, falling against the counter. “You guys have a potato fight, or what?” Then, seeing how Dad is studying the two-for-one bra ad and how I'm fussing and fuming, she says, “Oh, no, Pete. You told her.”

He puts down the paper. “You can't expect an intelligent girl like Nola to walk in, see two hundred pounds of potatoes, and not guess something's up.”

“Mom.” I pitch a potato into the sink. “I am
not
jealous of Eileen.”

“Is that what you told her, Pete?”

My father knows better than to answer.

Mom turns off the stove and spreads the flowers across what space is left on the counter, maniacally picking out weeds from the red bee balm and black-eyed Susans and blue bachelor's buttons.

“I don't blame you for being jealous, Nola.”

“I'm
not
jealous.”

“OK, angry, call it. Especially after that married man bought you that car and wined and dined you and God knows what else and then never called you again.”

This is my mother's new theory, that Mystery Chip—as our family has come to call him—is married. It's not a bad theory, actually. In fact, it's probably true. Truer than I would like to admit. But I wish she wouldn't bring him up in every conversation.

“I am over Mystery Chip, Mom. And nothing happened anyway. I'm not angry.”

“Not about Mystery Chip, maybe, but certainly about Eileen. It's a disgrace, her picking a woman she doesn't know instead of her only sister to be her maid of honor, just because she's a celebrity. It's so upsetting, I've spoken to Father Mike about it.”

“Not Father Mike!” Lord. Does she keep anything secret from that man?

“He had a lot of insight, Nola, not only into Eileen's motives but also what you're going through out there. You know, he's young. He's . . .”

“Good with the youth,” Dad and I singsong together.

“Anyway”—Mom flicks a slug off a blade of grass—“he explained that there's a tremendous amount of pressure on a single woman these days. It's as though a girl's personality, her virtue, and spiritual qualities don't count one hoot if she's not putting out in bed. Sex, sex, sex—that's all men these days want.”

“And you had to go to a celibate priest to find that out?”

There is a snicker from behind the Sports section.

Mom ignores us. “Society's not fair to you, honey. Here you are a good Catholic girl—unlike your sister, I might add—saving yourself for a man who will respect your commitment to God, and what happens? Some married, free-loving liberal from Californication—”

“Sorry to interrupt your sermon,” Dad says, “but this is Nola you're talking about, right?”

Mom flips him the bird.

“OK. Just checking.”

“Father Mike and I also talked about the”—Mom's standard throat-clearing here—“the weight issue.”

In an instant I bristle. That's all it takes—the throat-clearing followed by a mention of “the weight issue”—for the old triggers to fire. Dad is dead silent as Mom stuffs the flowers into a vase and I stare at the floor.