The Pink Ghetto (16 page)

“Your friend has quite a way with people,” he said. “What kind of books does he write?”

“He’s a playwright, actually,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. I was still seething. “An unproduced playwright.”

“Comedies?”

“Sort of.”

He looked as if he were considering something, then he shook his head. “I’ve never represented a playwright.”

“Probably wise. There’s not a fortune to be made in fifteen percent of zero.”

He laughed. “You’re not very supportive.”

“Oh, I’ve supported him plenty.”

His head tilted and he regarded me thoughtfully. “Are you sure you two aren’t…involved?”

“Very sure.”
After this night, we might not even be roommates anymore,
I wanted to say.

“That’s funny. I thought I sensed something.”

I flushed. “Well,
once.
” I am a very bad liar. “Twice, actually. But now we’re just roommates. We have another roommate who lives in the apartment with us. It’s a big apartment. Her name is Wendy.” I stopped. I’d made it sound as if the apartment were named Wendy.

“I think you mentioned her already.”

Had I? I was trying too hard to make sure he didn’t get the wrong impression, thus ensuring that he got the wrong impression.

But how could he possibly have gotten the right impression when my ex-boyfriend shows up on the first date I’d had in six months?

Not that Dan knew I hadn’t had a date in six months.

Not that this was a
real
date.

Right now it seemed like no kind of date at all. It was just a disaster.

When we were done, Dan very politely offered, “Should we wait for your friend to finish?”

I looked over to where Fleishman was yucking it up with his new romance writer friends. He was having the time of his life, and Darlene Paige looked like she had just discovered the love of hers.

“No, he might be a while.”

As we walked back to the hotel, I thought about explaining that Fleishman was not a love-obsessed ex-boyfriend, just a romance-novel-obsessed ex-boyfriend. But would Dan have bought that?

I wasn’t sure I did, either. Besides, a phrase Dan had said in passing had lodged in my confused brain.
I thought I detected something between you…

Part of me wanted to ask him if he had really meant that, or at least to get the details of what had made him say it, but that probably would be a real relationship ender.

Not that Dan and I had a relationship.

When we got to the hotel lobby and I worked up the courage to ask him if he wanted to go hang out in the bar a while, he shook his head. “No, thanks. I have an early flight out tomorrow.”

I nodded. My cheeks burned. I should have kept my mouth shut.

I turned, as if I were going to the desk to check my messages. “Good night then,” I said.

“ ’Night.”

All those advice books that tell you to seize the intitiative? Burn them.

“I
like that skirt.”

Renata stood in the midst of my cluttered dorm room, eyeing me as if I were playing some trick on her. “You do?”

“Yes.”

Her head tilted every so slightly. When she spoke, her throaty voice was as suspicious as if I had told her that parading through the cafeteria in her bra and panties would make her the most popular girl on campus. “What do you like about it?”

She was the first girl ever to ask me to serve as a fashion critic. In a matter of weeks I had gone from undergrad English major to
What Not to Wear
host, the coed version. In the beginning, it was fun. “It’s flirty. It shows off your legs.”

For a moment it appeared as if she might collapse on my roommate’s beanbag chair. The slightest compliment turned her beet red.

And you know what? I liked that. I liked that she asked for my opinion, then went all fluttery when I approved. I felt myself slipping into the role of her social mentor, a Svengali who could help her navigate the treacherous waters of the aquarium tank that was the social life of our little college. Who doesn’t want to be needed?

Just so you don’t fall for her,
I told myself. That probably wouldn’t work out too well. We were so compatible as we were, as friends.

Remember nineteen? When you’re nineteen, you’re convinced of all sorts of things: That you can smoke like Puff the Magic Dragon and not get cancer. That an hour and a half of sleep will leave you daisy fresh for your biology exam. That there will simply never be a better band than Weezer.

Or that you can squire around a pretty girl with great legs and willing eyes and somehow manage not to fall in love.

W
hen I finally heard the pounding at one-thirty in the morning, I decided that I was not the only person who was going to get a rude awakening on this night.

I marched to the door, already bristling for a fight. “What are you doing here?” I asked as I swung the door open. I didn’t have to wait to see who it was. I knew.

“I had drinks with some of the women I met at the restaurant,” he said. “We talked shop.” As if that were an answer to the question I had asked.

“What are you doing in my room?”

He looked flummoxed. “I’m not in your room. You haven’t let me in.”

I planted my feet. “No, and I’m not going to, either.”

After this statement sank in, his mouth opened and shut repeatedly, like a gasping fish. “The hotel is booked, Rebecca. What do you expect me to do?”

“Find another hotel.”

His voice looped up in outrage. “At one-thirty in the morning?”

“Oh?! Is it
one-thirty in the morning?
” I asked. “I didn’t realize. Maybe because I was in a sound sleep!”

“Well for heaven’s sake,” he grumbled. “Just let me come in and you can conk out again. How am I supposed to find a hotel room this late at night?”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you flew across the country to crash my business trip.”

“Is that what you’re so upset about?” He crossed his arms. “I thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face. I just came as moral support.”

“I didn’t need moral support during my dinner with Dan.”

“You said it wasn’t a real date!” The elevator doors opened and a woman I recognized as an agent I had seen on a panel padded quickly by us.

“ ’Night, Bev!” Fleishman called out with a wave.

She beamed at him, then saw me glowering in my pajamas and hurried past me.

Fleishman turned back to me. “You said it was just business.”

“And you believed me?” I screeched.

The sound of a chain lock being unbolted sounded from next door. Cynthia, dressed in a chenille bathrobe and matching slippers, came out into the hallway with her ice bucket. Because, obviously, you never know when you’re going to wake up in the middle of the night with a burning need to make highballs. My guess was that she had been listening to every word of our argument and decided she needed visual detail. My other guess was that those author Web rings would not be idle tomorrow.

“Hey, Cyn,” Fleishman called.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Oh, sure.”

When she had turned her back and started walking, very slowly, to the ice room, I reluctantly yanked Fleishman across the threshold. I didn’t want to help him out, God knows, but I was here on business and it wasn’t professional to have spats in hotel corridors. I had forgotten Cassie’s earpiece was right next door.

Fleishman strolled in and went to the phone. “I’ll have the front desk send my bag up.”

I rolled my eyes. “There’s no room in here for you, Fleish.”

He nodded toward the bed. “That’s a queen size, isn’t it?”

“It is. And I’m the queen. The evil queen. You’re the peasant who is going to be sleeping on the couch.”

He looked over, aghast. “But that’s a love seat!”

“Exactly. Sleep tight.” Tight was the operative word. In fact, he would have to fold himself in two.

He opened his mouth to protest.

“Take it or leave it,” I warned.

His mouth shut. “I’ve slept on worse, I guess.”

At this point I couldn’t have cared less whether or not he got his beauty rest. Fleishman’s comfort was really not uppermost in my mind. I would say it was pretty much bottommost. If there had been a bed of nails handy, I would have offered him that.

“What did you hope to achieve by coming here?” I asked.

“Your voice is taking on that scolding tone again,” he said, as if I might want to take corrective measures.

The man had crust to spare. “I’ve got that tone because you are jumping up and down on my nerves!”

He lifted his shoulders in a gesture of angelic innocence. “I told you, I wanted to come to the conference. I wanted to meet the authors.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I actually talked to the person who wrote
The Marquis Misbehaves.
”

I shook my head. Had he gone completely around the bend? “That’s the loopiest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve just started reading this stuff—”

“
Stuff?
Shame on you!”

“And now you’re the voice of romance! Not to mention, you’re so eager to hobnob with these writers that you were willing to make me look like an idiot.”

“How?”

“By surprising me that way.”

“What could I do? If I’d told you my plans, you would have told me not to,” he said. “Besides, no one cared that I flew out except for you and maybe that baloney sandwich you were having dinner with.”

“I saw all their faces when you showed up. They thought it was peculiar.” I stopped. “And where do you get off calling Dan a baloney sandwich?”

“He’s a phony.”

“He’s very nice.”

“Right. The silver spoon frat boy type.”

“I’ll have you know that his father is a plumber. He went to Cornell on a scholarship.”

“I don’t care if his father was a saint. The man has no soul. Can’t you tell that just by looking into those vacant eyes?”

I looked into Fleishman’s eyes now. They weren’t vacant, but I began to wonder if
he
was the one with no soul. It felt as if he were sucking all the air out of the room, out of my life.

“Honestly, Rebecca,” he went on, “if you don’t think you rate better than that Brooks Brothers-clad chunk of Styrofoam, your self esteem is beyond rescue.”

“My self esteem was doing great before you showed up.”

“Right. What was this about your vomiting all over some poor editor?”

I shuddered. “I just splattered her a little.”

“Oh my God!”

“It wasn’t that bad…”

Who was I kidding? It was horrible. Every time I remembered that plane ride, I writhed in fresh mortification.

“See?” he asked, waggling a finger. “You should have let me come with you.”

“Why? So I could have thrown up on you?”

Come to think of it, the idea had appeal.

He tossed up his hands. “I don’t see why you’re so bent out of shape. It’s like you’re not even glad to see me.”

“Because I’m beginning to feel like you’ve suckered onto my life and now you’re just draining it dry. You’re a succubus.”

He lifted his hands, stopping me before I could go further. “First thing: a succubus is a female. I believe the word you are looking for is
incubus.
As an editor, I think you need to start being a little more precise with your language.”

I fell back on the bed with a guttural roar of frustration.

“Second,” he said, looming over me, “I’m a little offended by what you’re saying. I am not leeching off you. When was the last time I borrowed money?”

I had been speaking in emotional terms rather than financial, but now that he mentioned it…“What about the cable bill?”

He blinked. “What about it?”

“You said you didn’t have the money to pay it this month, so I did. And then the next day you showed up with a new mini iPod.”

“So?”

So?
So?
Did he just not get it? “So how did you afford this trip?”

“The same way you afforded those silky pajamas. Plastic.”

I shook my head.

“What?” he asked. “Are you the only person in the world now who should be able to go into debt?”

“I don’t care if you’re in debt,” I said.

“Then what are you so pissy about?” he asked. “The cable bill? My stupid iPod?”

“I’m not pissy!” I exclaimed, sounding…pissy.

“All right!” he huffed. “When we get home I’ll write you a check.”

I lifted my head. “If you can write a check, why didn’t you write it two weeks ago?”

“I didn’t have the money two weeks ago, just at the moment you asked for it. Okay, maybe I should have put off buying the iPod till I paid you back. Or maybe I should have bought
you
an iPod, would that have made you happy?”

“Forget it.” This was so off track, anyway. I was so exasperated with him I was lashing out over details. “I don’t really care about cable bills, or iPods, or any of the rest of it.”

“It’s not like I’ve been stingy,” he pointed out.

“No—you’re generous. Too generous. Maybe because you don’t make money. You just catch it when it falls toward you.”

“I work!”

“Fleish, you don’t. Not with any regularity. You don’t work, and you don’t finish anything. I’ll bet you never even finish this thing you’re working on now.”

“Wanna bet?” he asked.

“No.”

I glared at him. He glowered back.

This was so ridiculous. We were
roommates,
yet this felt like something so much more. Like a marital spat. Like a spat in a marriage headed for divorce court, actually. If Fleishman had sashayed into the room announcing that he had to come to Portland because he felt so jealous of Dan, that would have been a different matter. I probably would have melted on the spot. His trip would have seemed gallant, almost.

Instead, he seemed to have some twisted desire to see romance writers in person, and he didn’t care whether I wanted him there or not.

“I’ll show you,” he said. “You’ll see. You’ll be surprised.”

“I will if you actually do anything.”

But what was I saying? If he actually finished this horrible play, I would probably come out of it as a laughingstock.

But as always when I became panicked about this issue, I did the numbers. Half the temp workers in New York City were writing plays. If you guesstimated a modest 40,000 temp workers, that was 20,000 plays. Each year on off and off-off Broadway and Broadway, there were about a hundred plays given productions. Therefore, the chances were only about one in five hundred that his play would even see a footlight.

Those were good odds in my favor.

“You’ll see,” he repeated.

I
awoke the next morning to a sharp rap at the door. I flopped over in bed, groaning, and prayed whoever this was would simply go away. Then I heard the chain lock unlatch and male voices in the hallway. I squeezed my eyes open in time to see a cart being wheeled into the room by Fleishman.

“Room service,” he announced, unnecessarily.

I shot up to sitting. “When did you order that?”

Fleishman seemed to have cast off the animosity of hours before like a snake that had shed an old skin. He was showered, shaved, and his old self. “Last night, after you went to bed. I wanted to surprise you. Also, I figured that since you’re probably on an expense account, why not live it up?”

I darted a look at him, but I started to feel more charitably towards him when I smelled the coffee. In all my life, I had never ordered room service. It seemed decadent…and wonderful.

A few minutes later I had a steaming cup of coffee in my hand and was dribbling croissant crumbs on the bed. I felt wary after last night, but I wasn’t going to be the one to restart the argument.

“I want to apologize,” Fleishman announced.

For a moment I had to do an aural double take.
I want to apologize
was not a phrase that came easily to Fleishman. In fact, I’m not sure I had ever heard it tripping off his tongue before. And yet there it was.

“I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I got carried away.” Then he looked over his coffee cup at me with those disarmingly expressive eyes. “I guess I was jealous.”

I gulped.
God, is this going to be our big love scene?
And there I was with croissant crumbs down my front. I dropped the pastry onto the white plate and set it next to the phone. “Jealous?”

“Thinking of you here…” He shook his head. “I guess I went a little berserk.”

I could feel myself starting to thaw. “Fleish…”

“I know it sounds weird, but I’m
so
envious of your job.”

The gooey smile that I could feel on my lips collapsed.
My job.
He wasn’t jealous of Dan, but my job?

“Because you went out and found this new career, while I’m still floundering.” I instinctively opened my mouth to try to say something, but he shook his head. “No, it’s true. Floundering.”

I bit my lip. This was not the confession I had been expecting. Or hoping for. It called for a moment of readjustment.

“And you’re right,” he said. “I have no stick-to-itiveness.”

At least he’s being honest,
I thought. “Maybe you just haven’t hit on the right idea yet. I mean, let’s face it, I’m not sure how much universal appeal
Yule Be Sorry
would have.”

He drew back, as if I had just chucked a spear at him. “What’s the matter with it?”

I tried to put it diplomatically. “It just seems a little…personal.”

“Well of course it is. All good art starts with the personal.”

“Yeah, but…” Too late, I realized I had stepped into a quagmire. “But maybe the fact that it has taken you so long to finish is evidence that it’s not the right project for you to work on at this time.”

“Man!” he exclaimed in amazement. “You really have that lame editor-speak down pat, don’t you?”

It was true. I had become fluent in gobbledegook.

“The girls and I were talking about it last night.”

“About me?”

“No, about editors in general and the language they use. We were trying to crack the code of the weird phraseology you guys employ in your rejection letters.”

He had gotten chummy with these women awfully fast.

“Still, there’s truth in what you’re saying. And I want you to know that I’m very sorry if I ruined your trip. I’ll never do it again.”

“I’ll probably never be sent on a trip again.”

“Then you can be assured that I will never do it again.”