The Pink Ghetto (11 page)

She looked doubtful. I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t believed Fleishman, either.

“It’s sort of a cross between a Pulse and a medical suspense book.”

She waved a hand. “Then it probably belongs as a Signature.” Signature was Candlelight’s single title program of big books. The trouble was, those titles were usually reserved for our best-selling “name” authors.

“If medical suspense books do well, why not market them through Pulse? Then you’re sitting on top of a goldmine.” I added, shamelessly, “Just like Mary Jo is with Divine.”

Rita tapped her pen. “This must be some book.”

“Just read a few pages,” I suggested, and left her to it.

When I left the building that night, Rita was hovering outside the coffee shop, a cigarette in one gloved hand and
Heartstopper
balanced in the other. She didn’t even hear me tell her good night.

I smiled.

T
he book Fleishman found lit a fire under Rita. She started calling meetings like mad. Meetings in her outer office, meetings in her real office. Meetings with her staff, and then private meetings with Mercedes. She wanted to make Pulse more thriller oriented, perhaps to take the mandatory medical element out altogether. “I mean, think about it. The name of the line is Pulse.
Pulse.
Sounds suspenseful, doesn’t it?”

We nodded.

“Then why the hell have we been kicking medical thrillers over to other lines? Who was the genius that decided these books would all be country doctor sagas and nurses falling in love with millionaires?”

No one was touching that one with latex gloves.

Cassie had been mostly silent through all the meetings about Pulse. But I could tell there was something simmering beneath that calm exterior. Her idea for the police precinct brainstorm had been scuttled. Troy remembered that Gazelle Books, one of our biggest rivals and where he used to work, had already done a continuity series with that exact theme.

“Maybe that’s where you got your idea,” he told Cassie during a meeting.

I think he was suggesting that she might have absorbed the idea on a subliminal level, but judging from the Coke-can hue of Cassie’s complexion, she felt she had just been accused of being an editorial thief, a plagiarizer, a second-rate conceptualizer.

Sweet.

The downside was, she had it in her head that I had trumped her somehow. It’s true, Rita was giving me credit for finding
Heartstopper,
which in turn made her rejigger the Pulse line a little. But it wasn’t as if Cassie blurted out her precinct idea and I ran home trying to think of something to top it.

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Cassie said as she bustled ahead of Andrea and me as we returned to our offices after the umpteenth Pulse refocus meeting. “This kind of story has been popular for years.”

Andrea sniggered. “Oh, right, but your police precinct idea was a bolt from the blue. You know, if you’d thought of adding music to the concept we could have called it
Cop Rock.
”

Cassie stopped in her doorway, looking as if she wanted to kill one of us. And that one was not Andrea. Andrea had sneered at her, but Cassie was glaring at
me.

I followed Andrea into her office and closed her door, if for no other reason than to escape the sharp daggers of Cassie’s gaze. My back was prickling from it.

“Shouldn’t you take it easy with her?” I asked. “She looks like she’s about to go ballistic.”

Andrea picked up the new
Bookworld Monthly
—or as we at the office called it,
BM—
and flipped straight to the back. “Oh, let her,” she said, scanning the classifieds. “Maybe that would help dislodge the bug that’s been up her ass.”

“She seems unnecessarily competitive.”

Andrea darted a glance at me. “And what about you and your new author finds? Little miss gangbusters! Are you trying to make us all look bad?”

Even though I was getting used to Andrea’s style, I still froze when she trained that acid tongue on me. I stammered, “N-no, I just…”

She was shaking her head. “You’re going to force me to find a new job before I actually have to start working hard.”

My jaw dropped.
I
would force her to get a new job?
Force
her
?

“I kid.” She laughed. “My God, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

I returned to my office. A second later, just as I was settling down to think about getting to work, Lindsay collapsed into the chair next to my desk. She was shaking, which was actually audible, since she was wearing a shirt with beaded epaulettes.

“I’m fired!”

“
What?
”

“Or I will be.”

“What happened?”

“I screwed up. I sent an author Rita wanted to acquire a rejection letter, and then I accidentally stuck Rita’s revision letter for the author she wanted to acquire into someone’s slush manuscript.”

I was beginning to see why Rita was paranoid about the mail.

“What do I do?” she moaned.

“I think you should go into Rita’s office and confess. Tell her you’ll call the authors and explain the screw-up. Apologize all over the place.”

On top of shaking, Lindsay was now squirming. “That’ll be so awful! Can you imagine being an author who’s waited six months for an answer and then hearing from some twit like me that we have
screwed up?
”

I could, actually. Sometimes I was surprised some angry writer hadn’t stormed into the building with an AK-47 long ago.

“There’s no other way,” I counseled. In her shoes (or in this case, platform boots), I would have been squirming, too. “You have to suck it up. We all make mistakes.”

Lindsay slumped in dread silence. Then she flopped back. “Okay. Yes, you’re right.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “You know what? I like you. Would you like to go on a date?”

The question caught me off guard. “With you?”

“No.” She rolled her eyes. “You see, I know this guy, and he’s really great…”

“Uh-huh,” I said doubtfully.

“I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. He’s perfectly fine.”

She said it in that voice my mom used when she was trying to convince us to eat cottage cheese that had been sitting around for a while. Mentally I was already flapping my arms and backing away.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Rowdy.”

Now that wasn’t a name you heard every day. It was intriguingly Clint Eastwoody. I leaned forward with more interest. “Is he a cowboy?”

“No, God no. He’s from New Hampshire.” She shrugged. “His real name is Harold Metzger. His father gave him this nickname when he was a kid to—I don’t know—make him seem less like a Harold, maybe.” Her forehead crinkled. “Which, when you think about it, he could have prevented by not naming him Harold to begin with.”

“Did it work?”

She looked up at me. “Did what work?”

“Calling him Rowdy. Did it make him less of a Harold?”

“Not really.” Noticing she was losing me, she added quickly, “I mean, he’s really
nice.
I’ve known him for years.” She sighed. “It’s not like he would be sloppy seconds, or anything like that. We don’t even get along anymore really.”

“Wait,” I said. “This guy is your boyfriend?”

She nodded.

“Your
current
boyfriend?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like we’re, you know, in love. We just live together.”

“Lindsay…”

“He’s this really good person, I just think he’d be happier with somebody else. I was going to shop him around at the office Christmas party, but that’s months away. I’ll probably be fired by then.”

“Why are you trying to get rid of him if he’s so nice?”

“Because we’re so boring together it terrifies me. We used to go out clubbing. Last night we watched
March of the Penguins
on DVD and went to bed at ten.” She added quickly, “Not that he’s dull or anything. Not really. Before he worked in nonprofit sales he was a bass player for a really cool band. He’s just dull because I know him already. And he’s so normal. He wants to get married and have kids. I keep telling him that I’m, like, twenty-three. I wasn’t expecting to do anything drastic till I was thirty, at least. Rowdy would have been the perfect guy to meet when I was thirty.”

“Then why don’t you move out? Or tell him to?”

She writhed in agony. “Because he’s so nice! Like, a puppy. A puppy who does my laundry on weekends.”

Okay, now she had my attention. “He does the laundry?”

“And our building doesn’t have a laundry room,” she said. “It’s not like he drops it off someplace, either. He sits in the Laundromat for two hours every Saturday doing it himself.”

“Holy cow, Lindsay.”

She looked miserable. “I know, I know. You can’t just dispose of a guy like that. It would be wasteful, and wrong. That’s why I’m trying to recycle him.”

“Why did you ask me?”

She bit her lip. “I just thought maybe you were single. You never talk about a boyfriend or anything.”

“Oh.”

“So…what do you think?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t going near this. Though I was sort of curious to find out what someone in nonprofit sales did.

“Just one date?” she asked. “Come on. What can it hurt?”

I was pretty sure it was sneaking up on the six-month territory since the last time I’d had a date. Still. Going out with Lindsay’s boyfriend was out of the question. That would be too weird.

But was it normal to be living with a guy I liked and feel so frustrated all the time?

Probably not.

But look at Lindsay. She had a steady boyfriend and was trying to pass him off like a baton in a relay race.

She released a long, sad sigh. “I’m never going to get rid of him, am I?”

I couldn’t answer that, but when I watched her go, it was not without pity. Maybe it was as trying to have what you assumed was going to be a brief whoop-de-do turn into a permanent relationship as it was to have what you hoped was
the one
become just one of many.

Then I thought of it from Rowdy’s point of view. My God, that was brutal. To have your girlfriend shopping you around without your knowledge. I’d have to remember that the next time I thought my life had reached a new pathetic low.

T
here were several benefits to this corporate employment racket. The first was my salary. At the beginning of the month, I was actually able to pay the rent and I had enough left over to take Fleishman and Wendy out for a celebratory brunch. And to get Max groomed and buy him a snappy new studded collar. And to dribble away a big chunk on CDs and new sheets, and a buy a nice watch to send my mom for her birthday. Even after these modest excesses, attempting to balance my checkbook now was not something that made me want to toss myself off the Williamsburg Bridge.

And then there was prestige—I mean, let’s face it, being a Frenchwoman’s flunkie doesn’t give you a lot of authority. Now I had the trappings of corporate power all around me for the first time. An office. Personalized stationery. The day I got my business cards I must have spent thirty minutes just staring at them…and wondering if there were enough to send one to all my old friends. And a few who weren’t friends. I imagined Brooke Meininger—the girl I’d overheard in a bathroom my sophomore year of high school comparing me with Rosie O’Donnell—opening an envelope and having this fall out:

C
ANDLELIGHT
B
OOKS
231 T
HIRD
A
VENUE
, N
EW
Y
ORK
, NY 10055
R
EBECCA
A
BBOT
A
SSOCIATE
E
DITOR
212*555*0273
CANDLELIGHTPUBLISHING
.
ORG
“Books Are Our Passion”

The lettering was crimson over eggshell white. Raised lettering. Classy. I didn’t send one to Brooke Meininger—I restrained myself—but I did sprayhose my relatives with them.

My parents were so impressed with me. Among others, they had a son who was a pediatrician and a daughter who was a lawyer, but they still acted as if I had achieved something extraordinary. I think they had expected me to wind up living in a refrigerator box.

My mom kept calling to tell me all the people she knew who read Candlelight books.

“I never read romances myself, of course,” she said. “Except for the occasional one I’ll pick up at the library. I like the short ones. They’re easy to read when I need a break after the grand-kids leave.”

“Okay, I’ll send you some short ones,” I told her.

“No, don’t do that!” Her voice was anxious. “I’ll buy them at Target now that your livelihood depends on them.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry, Mom. Candlelight already makes piles of money from all the other people who don’t read romances but keep buying our books.”

Dad couldn’t have cared less about the books. He was all brass tacks. “What kind of benefits package did you get?”

“Um…pretty good, I guess,” I said.

“You
guess?
Didn’t you talk about this before you took the job?”

“Well, it didn’t seem like something I could negotiate, Dad. I mean, I know I’ve got medical and dental.”

“You should go get yourself a checkup,” Dad said.

“A what?”

“A physical. Good God, don’t you know you have to take care of your health?” This from a man who loved chicken fried everything. “What about vacation?”

“I think it’s two weeks…or something like that.”

I could hear my dad putting his hand over the receiver and calling back to my mom, “
Listen to this! She
thinks!”

“Dad…”

“The best part,” he said, “is maybe now you can get yourself an apartment.”

“I do have an apartment.”

“Well…” He sighed. Immediately, I knew what was coming. “At least get a place by yourself. Or have
one
roommate.” A female roommate, he meant. He had never been a Fleishman fan. “That fellow always hanging around you…what’s his name? That fellow who acts like your boyfriend only he isn’t?”