The Pink Ghetto (24 page)

I handed them to her, then sank onto the bed. “Thought they might brighten up your room a little bit.” She already had a bouquet of roses on her windowsill.

“They are lovely. Call me a girl of simple tastes, but I have always had a weakness for the humble chrysanthemum.”

I smiled. In fact, I felt like my smile was frozen onto my face.

She looked at me, and for a moment a little of her normally brittle façade fell away. “I guess the story of my little incident last weekend has made the rounds at the office.”

“Only to a very few people,” I lied.

I encircled my hand around the metal side of the bed—the one that could be lifted on both sides to provide a cagelike barrier for the patient. All hospital beds had them, but somehow seeing one on a bed in a psych ward seemed more sinister.

“I think the doctors are going to let me go tomorrow,” Muriel continued, “and if all goes well, I hope to return to work the first of next week.”

“So soon?”

“I miss it,” she said. “And since they can’t find anything wrong with my heart, there’s no reason to keep me here.”

I leaned forward a little. “Your heart?”

“Didn’t you hear? That’s what was wrong with me—they thought I was having a little heart attack, because I accidentally took a few sleeping pills. But it turns out I am fine. Just one of those things.”

Okay. I know Lindsay isn’t the most reliable person in the world, but there was no way even Lindsay could have mistaken “little heart attack” for “suicide attempt.” And I knew I wasn’t in
The Twilight Zone.
I was in the Bronx, in a psych ward. I wasn’t mistaken about these facts.

And yet there was Muriel, very calm in her little bed jacket, telling me that it had all just been a big mix-up.

Naturally. She was crazy.

I cleared my throat and for once in my life attempted to choose my words very carefully. “Are you sure you shouldn’t take some more time off, just to be sure you’re…yourself again?”

“I’ve never felt more myself,” she replied.

And now that I considered her words, they seemed true. She looked just like Muriel always looked. Which, now that I gave the matter some thought, could be summed up in one word: Nuts.

It was unnerving. I had come up here wanting to atone for my thoughtlessness, wanting to apologize. But how do you apologize to someone in such complete denial?

“How’s your friend?” I asked.

“Which one?” Her eyes narrowed on me with a jarring sharpness. “I have more than one, you know.”

I flinched. I hadn’t meant to insult her. “The writer.”

“Melissa MacIntosh,” she reminded me with a hint of scolding in her tongue. “I’m surprised you don’t remember. It’s only been a week since you rejected her book.”

I winced, but this was sort of what I’d come for, so I didn’t mind. “I have a bad memory for names.”

“You held onto that book for months. After all that time, I would think you’d have memorized the author’s name, at least.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Well!” Muriel said with quiet indignation. “You don’t have to apologize to
me.
”

But that was the thing. I did have to apologize to her. It suddenly seemed absolutely essential to my future well-being that I apologize to Muriel-Melissa. Unfortunately, Muriel wasn’t giving any quarter, forgiveness wise. She obviously didn’t want to admit, even at this late date, that she was Melissa MacIntosh. How did you apologize to a loopy woman who wouldn’t cop to writing the book you rejected?

“Did you read my letter?” I asked her.

“Melissa showed it to me.”

Uh-huh. I wondered if she was a clinical split personality, like Sally Field in
Sybil.
I was determined to talk to her about this until she had a breakthrough. (In psychiatric poker terms, I would take her Sally Field and raise her one Judd Hirsch from
Ordinary People.
)

“What did you think of the letter?”

She plucked at the pearl button of her bedjacket for a moment, as if considering carefully how to answer. “It was very blunt,” she said finally.

There. Let her criticize me. “I should have taken more care,” I agreed.

“The tone was harsh,” she added.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I typed some of Mary Jo’s letters once when her assistant had appendicitis, and Mary Jo was never that harsh.”

Less kind than Mary Jo. Ouch. I did feel chastised. It felt good, actually. “I’m so sorry.”

Her lips twisted. “You don’t have to keep apologizing to me, Rebecca. It’s Melissa who got the letter.”

“Melissa. Right.”

“You asked for my opinion on what I thought about the letter, and I am giving it to you.”

“I know.” I thought for a moment. “It’s just that I’ve considered that letter since I wrote it, and I’ve felt remorse. Sometimes you wish you could take things back, you know?”

“Well, it is a little too late for that. Melissa read the letter and she was upset.”

I shifted, and decided to change tactics. “If I knew Melissa personally, you know what I would do?”

“What?”

“I’d like to sit down with her and, first, say that the letter was written too hastily. It didn’t give her any of the encouragement she deserves. Do you know what an accomplishment it is to finish a book?”

Muriel looked skeptical. “Even a lousy one?”

“It wasn’t lousy. It was just a little amateurish. The plot felt tired. But with a better hook, a well-developed story, and some interesting characters…”

She tilted her head. “You didn’t like the characters, even?”

My mouth clamped shut. Damn. I swallowed. “No, I did. They were the best part. But…you know…if you put Scarlett and Rhett in
The Pokey Little Puppy,
it’s still
The Pokey Little Puppy.
”

She frowned at me, and I couldn’t blame her. Suddenly, I was back at the Portland conference trying to explain how to write a book. I was starting to sweat like I had in Portland, too. “What I mean is, I wish I could sit down with Melissa, have a cup of coffee, and tell her all the things I liked about
The Rancher and the Lady.
I’d like to give her some encouragement, which I probably didn’t convey in the letter. I’d hash out some possible ideas for future projects.”

She brightened. “Would you really?”

I nodded.

“Well, you know, it
could
be arranged for you to meet with Melissa.”

Yeah, I’ll bet.

We sat for a little while longer, trying to keep the conversational balloon up in the air by talking about the weather, but after five minutes it was clear that it was time for me to go. I stood up.

“Thank you for visiting, Rebecca.” She looked hesitant, then blurted out, “And did you really mean what you said about talking to Melissa?”

“Of course!”

I made what seemed like an overly-pat hospital exit speech. I told her that she would feel better soon.

“I
am
better,” she insisted. “I’m perfectly fine.”

I was in a gloomy mood when I shuffled toward the exit of that hospital. How depressing to see the layers of denial and artifice that had been holding Muriel together suddenly peeled away. I wasn’t sure that visit had helped her or me.

I was no Judd Hirsch.

Just before I hit the doors to the outside, I heard someone call my name.

I turned, wondering who else I knew in the Bronx. But the person I laid eyes on was the last person on earth I would have expected to see again.

It was Bernadine, Sylvie’s old pal. Seeing her in such a weird spot, and feeling so forlorn as I did, I practically fell on her neck as one would a long lost friend.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I have to get my cholesterol tested,” she said. “I have cholesterol. And diabetes.”

I murmured in sympathy. I was afraid to ask the question foremost in my mind; Sylvie, I was certain, was probably not doing well. If she was doing at all. Her accountant had made it sound like she was on death’s door, and that had been months ago.

But, finally, I had to ask, “Do you still see Sylvie?”

Bernadine grunted. “See her! Of course I see her. We play canasta every Tuesday at her place.”

“Her place? Did she go home?”

Bernadine waved her hand. “Nah, she’s in an assisted living community on Elmhurst Avenue in Queens. A prison, she calls it. An old folks home.”

I frowned. “Why doesn’t she go back to her apartment?”

“Because of that crook!”

“Mr. Langley?”

Bernadine practically spat. “That’s the one.” She narrowed her eyes on me. “But of course you wouldn’t care about that. Sylvie says you abandoned her.”

“I was fired.”

Bernadine’s mouth was pulled down, as if that was no excuse.

It wasn’t, I realized. I had been with Sylvie for two and a half years, and for the past four months, I had barely spared her a thought. I had forgotten her.

“The accountant wouldn’t even tell me where she was,” I said. “He kept going on about the estate’s executors.”

“Ha! That’s him. Now he has all her money, and Sylvie’s living in a cage.” She shrugged. “It’s actually an okay place, but she calls it a cage. She misses her home.”

“Of course.” I frowned. So my instincts about R.J. Langley had been correct. “How did she get involved with Langley?”

“He’s a relation,” Bernadine said. “Poor Sylvie!”

Guilt tugged at me. “I’d like to see her.”

“That would be nice. Like she always tells me, inmates appreciate visitors.”

I got the address from Bernadine, then I took a circuitous route back to the office, looping through Harlem to get Sylvie some hot pickled okra. I would take it to her this weekend.

By the time I straggled back to my desk, it was almost four. I felt drained. I flopped down in my chair, feeling spent. I couldn’t remember now where I’d left off. I tried to think back on what I had been working on when I ran off to the hospital. That seemed ages ago now.

Something about my desk bothered me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Then I remembered, and I let out a groan. Fleishman! That damn book of his. I had been writing a rejection letter.

I searched the top of my desk, but I didn’t see the book. I swiveled toward my bookshelf; it wasn’t there, either. I started tearing my office apart, looking for it. When I came up empty, I got up and went to Lindsay’s desk.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “Did you go see Muriel?”

I nodded.

She looked eager for news. “How was she?”

For a moment I was torn between the urge to tell someone just how incredibly nuts Muriel was and to protect her. In the end, sympathy won out. I wasn’t rock solid, myself. “It was all an accident.” I fabricated a story involving a big pill-bottle mix-up, knowing it would circulate around the building in nothing flat.

“Wow!” she said. “That’s really awful. And here we’ve spent the whole day thinking she was crazy!”

It was as good a time as any to change the subject. “Did you take a book from my desk today?”

Her eyes flew open. “I didn’t go near your office, I swear!” she said defensively. “Except once to grab a peppermint from the jar on your bookshelf, but that’s all I touched, I swear. Oh, and I maybe swiped a few of your Post-it notes from your top drawer. But you had a whole package.”

“Never mind,” I said.

A niggling oddball idea scratched at the back of my mind, but just to make sure it couldn’t be true I went over to Lisa’s desk.

“There you are!” she exclaimed. “
Finally!
”

“Is Mercedes here?”

“She went home early.”

I frowned. “Did she try to find me?”

Lisa snorted. “Uh, yeah? Like, all afternoon?”

“Oh. I had to leave for a while…”

“Well never mind,” Lisa said. “She just got it off your desk.”

“What?” But of course I knew what. It was just as I feared.

“The book.”

My heart sank. “
Cutting Loose?
”

“I don’t know what the hell it was called,” Lisa said. “All I know is that for about an hour she was locked up in her office with the thing.”

“What’d she think?”

“I dunno.”

Maybe she hadn’t liked it. In fact, there was a really good chance she hadn’t. It was a weird book; not right for Candlelight at all.

“But I think she took it home with her,” Lisa said, “if that makes you feel any better.”

It didn’t.

I
practiced my speech to Fleishman on my way home. Not aloud, of course. Not that anyone on the J train would have noticed an office worker babbling to herself, but I still take pride in maintaining the appearance of sanity.

I was not going to be shrill, or a scold. I was going to be so calm, poised, and reasonable, no one would be able to confuse me with that insecure, neurotic nut Renata. Yes, she was just fiction, but in the space of one short day, she had become real to me, like the demented twin I had been trying to avoid all my life who had suddenly found my cell phone number.

One thought sent clammy waves of worry through me: What if Mercedes actually liked
Cutting Loose?
When I had been reading that book, that abomination, it hadn’t seemed like a novel so much as an elaborate insider joke. And the joke was on me. Now I had to go over it again in my memory, word by awful word, trying to figure out what the editorial director of Candlelight Books might make of the thing. Where would it even fit in our publishing universe? Signature? Fleishman didn’t have a big name. He didn’t have any name. MetroGirl? He wasn’t a girl. And it certainly didn’t belong in any of the more traditional romance lines.

That was one thing that gave me grim satisfaction. Fleishman thought he was such an authority on romance. After four months of reading them and crashing one romance conference, he fancied himself an expert. But look! His first stab at the genre, and it had come out as this insulting, twisted tale of a guy slowly dumping a woman for a rich, sexy blonde.

I was safe.

I was pretty sure I was safe.

God, I prayed I was safe.

I tramped back to the apartment, stunned to find myself crossing my threshold at just a little after five. Wendy seemed as shocked as I was. It was a rarity that we saw each other at this time of day; I was usually just beginning the long march home as she was heading off for another evening aiming Klieg lights on overemoting undergraduates.

“You look like someone just died,” she said. “Did something happen at home?”

She meant Ohio, obviously. We were still young enough that home meant where our parents were, not where we spent ninety percent of our time.

“It’s nothing like that,” I said, being purposefully vague. I looked around for Fleishman. “Where’s wonder boy?”

Wendy swooped forward. “I’ve been home for a few hours and he hasn’t been here. Is something going on with you two?”

“Well…” My voice I’d been keeping cool, neutral. But now it cracked, and with it I could feel my last shred of composure begin to crumble. Damn. Why wasn’t Fleishman here? I was so ready to confront him; I’d screwed up my courage to cast off the friendship we’d been mired in for years. Now all those fine words I had formulated in my head evaporated. The argumentative rug had been pulled out from under me.

I sank onto the futon couch, feeling hollow and trembly. It didn’t help that Maxwell jumped into my lap, wimpering. He’d been alone too long with Wendy, obviously, who as far as he was concerned was the wicked stepmother of the house.

I buried my face in his bristly fur. “This has been a hell of a day.”

“What happened?” Wendy asked, her voice looping up.

The honest concern in her voice loosened something in me. My entire day came pouring out. Of course I had to give her the lowdown on the book, including a few unsavory details from my past that had now been immortalized in
Cutting Loose.
Also, I had to explain the horribleness of going up to see Muriel in the Bronx, and learning about Sylvie. And then being thrust back into the office and hearing that Mercedes had the Fleishman book in her hot little hands.

When I finally wound down, Wendy was red in the face. “He really wrote about all those things?”

I nodded.

She tilted her head. “Am I in this book?”

I actually hadn’t considered this. “No, you aren’t.”

She rolled her eyes. For some reason, being left out seemed to make her madder than anything. She turned and made a beeline for our communal closet. “That’s it!”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m packing his bags for him. Right now.” Not one to mull things over, Wendy.

I jumped up. Never mind that I had been mentally packing him up all afternoon. Now that I was seeing someone doing it physically, now that the umbilical cord was being cut, I felt a moment of panic.

“Wait—”

“Wait, my ass. He’s outta here. Writing a book about you? This is not okay, okay? I don’t care if Fleishman thinks he is the next Jacqueline Susann, this is not acceptable behavior.”

“But—”

“This is an intervention, Rebecca. You are not going to give him time to weasel or cajole you into thinking that this is acceptable behavior from a friend. You’re my friend, too, and I’m not gonna stand for it. Not this time. No.”

If anyone could stage a one-person intervention, it was Wendy.

She yanked the tropical fish shower curtain aside and started pulling down suitcases. All Fleishman’s.

The sight of those bags didn’t make me feel any calmer. And then Fleishman walked in, his arms weighed down with flowers.

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words that sounded through the room weren’t the ones I expected. Wendy had opened her mouth, too, and her lungs had beaten mine to the punch. Forget diplomacy. Forget restraint. That wasn’t Wendy’s style.

“You sonofabitch!” she yelled, tossing a suitcase at his feet. And when Wendy got around to yelling, the earth shook.

Standing there with his luggage at his feet and the walls rattling around him, Fleishman looked, quite understandably, flabbergasted.

I was, too. I was expecting this scene to take place between Fleishman and me. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this would be a momentous occasion for Wendy, too. But she had been with us all these years. And obviously, the apartment, the weirdness between Fleishman and me, and the dog pee had all taken their toll on her psyche. She had snapped.

She zoomed right up to him, making him hold his bouquet of lilies as a protective shield. “How dare you use Rebecca that way!”

He looked mystified. “What are you talking about?”

“Your book! You wrote a piece of hideous garbage about her, and now you expect her to publish it. Well, over her dead body will Candlelight publish that story! Mine, too. Bookstores will sell that book at the same moment they start selling Eskimo Pies in hell.”

“Uh, Wendy…”

Fleishman’s gaze met mine. He looked wounded. “You didn’t like it?”

Wendy crossed her arms. “That’s putting it mildly.”

After a moment of letting the criticism sink in, Fleishman’s face looked demonstrably redder. “What was the matter with it?”

I took a breath. “You put in all—”

“You made her sound like a psycho!” Wendy shouted.

His eyes narrowed on me and he quivered impatiently. “But what did you think of the story?”

The story?
Was he kidding? He had Wendy bearing down on him in a full-tilt rage and all he was worried about was my editorial opinion?

It was the first moment I ever considered that he might really be an author.

“Do you think it’s publishable?” he asked.

I cleared my throat. “I’m not even sure. The only thing I thought while I was reading it was that I hoped it never saw the light of day.”

He looked dumbstruck. “Then you aren’t going to buy it?”

Wendy nearly howled. “
Hello?
This is what she’s been trying to tell you!”

Actually, it was what Wendy had been trying to tell him. But Fleishman wasn’t even looking at her. It was as if she didn’t exist. In those crazy eyes of his, I was the only one he was focused on, but the attention wasn’t at all flattering. It wasn’t me he was seeing, but someone who could do something for him.

“I changed the names,” he said.

“Barely,” I said. “It didn’t fool me, and I doubt it would fool anyone we know.”

“Well?” he asked. “Do you own everything that’s happened to us? It was my life, too. I can write about it if I want.”

“That’s true.”

“You’re just being hypersensitive,” he said. “Believe me, if you pass on this, you’re making a big mistake.”

“Fleish—”

Wendy brayed in the background as a flurry of Fleishman’s clothes flew out of the closet. “The only mistake we made was letting you stick around for so long. But the ride is over. You are going to have to go, Fleishman.”

He recoiled. Then he looked back at me. “Is that what you think, too?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

He put the flowers on the table, then pivoted back to us, crossing his arms. Something in his stance made me very uneasy.

“I’m the one whose name is on the lease,” he said. “Remember? I made the down payment.”

“So?” I said. “We reimbursed you for that years ago.”

“The apartment belongs to all of us,” Wendy pointed out, “and we outnumber you.”

“Yes, but it’s the name on the lease that counts. So if there’s anyone who’s going to move out of here, it’s not going to be me.”

“But you can’t kick
us
out,” Wendy said, feeling the full sting of having the tables turned on her.

“Yes, I can. I have the lease. Legally, I’m the renter.”

Wendy and I gaped at him. Then at each other. What could we say to that?

He lifted his hands. “I’ll be generous. I’ll give you a week.”

“
A week
?”

His brows darted up in warning. “That’s apparently more than you were prepared to give me.”

He picked up a suitcase, crossed to his dresser, and started shoveling things in with his long arms. “I’ll go to Connecticut for a few days, and next Wednesday I’ll expect you both to be gone.”

For some reason, whenever I had imagined the possibility of Fleishman and I—What would you call it? Breaking up?—it had always been in a big theatrical emotional scene. With tears and yelling. Or lots of replaying the events of our shared past. I had never imagined a short squabble over a lease and then ten minutes of strained silence as he threw things into bags. It seemed so cold, antiseptic. We could have been any three roommates having a fight. It didn’t seem to be doing us justice.

When the packing was finally done, he picked up his bag, crossed to the front table and grabbed his flowers. “You two can have the television. I’m getting an HD soon.” He looked at me sharply. “I’ve had it on good authority that the book will sell like hotcakes.”

Head high, he breezed out the door as gracefully as anyone could carrying two suitcases and an armload of lilies.

When he was gone, Wendy sank down on the couch, looking completely deflated. “Me and my big mouth,” she muttered. “My big homeless mouth.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “No matter what happens, you did exactly right. It was beautiful.”

I sat in a chair and put my head down on the dining table like we used to do during naptime in first grade. Maxwell pawed at my leg until I picked him up. “Who do you think he was talking about?” I asked.

“When?”

“When he said someone had told him that the book would sell. Who else do you think he gave the book to read?”

“Who knows? Maybe Natasha. But he was probably just shooting off his mouth.”

“Probably, but…”

“We’ve got bigger problems than that book now, Rebecca. How are we going to find a new apartment in a week?”

That was a more immediate conundrum. “Do you have any money?”

“What do you think?”

I sighed. “Neither do I.”

“I thought you were drawing in the bucks these days.”

“Unfortunately, I’ve also been spending the bucks. I don’t see how you can make more money and suddenly have less, but it’s happened.”

She got up, crossed over to me, and practically pulled me out of the chair by my armpits. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“Go where?” I was reluctant for mopey time to come to an end.

But Wendy was good at marshalling the forces, and so we walked to the nearest Korean deli and picked up ramen noodles, a bottle of vinegary Merlot, and the new
Village Voice.
Back at home, I boiled the water for dinner while she poured over the classifieds.

“I’d like something in Manhattan,” she said.

I let out a snort. “Upper East Side? A townhouse, perhaps?”

“If we’re going to move, we should at least decide what our ideal would be before we have to compromise it,” she said.

“Yes, it’s always comforting to know what you’re not getting.”

She ignored my snarkiness. “It would be nice not to have such a long train ride twice a day.”

That did sound nice. And while we were dreaming…“A slightly bigger kitchen would be nice. With no roaches.” I thought for a moment. “A tub!”

“And a real bedroom with a door that shuts.”

“God, that would be fantastic!” I said.

We dreamed on in this fashion all through the ramen noodles, so it was a little bit of a disappointment when we crunched the numbers and found out that about all we could afford in Manhattan was a “lge” studio somewhere down in Alphabet City. Actually, we could do better if Wendy would let me chip in more—which I could afford to do—but she wouldn’t hear of that. “If it’s not an even split, things get hinky.”

I started looking at Brooklyn listings, while her brow remained firmly furrowed. “The trouble is you pay a premium for not being able to afford much.”

“Huh?”

“A one-bedroom is astronomical in price, but a two-bedroom is only slightly more astronomical.”

She was right about that. Not that it did us any good. At the end of the evening, we had circled several possibilities in Brooklyn.

“I guess I’ll start calling people tomorrow,” she said.

“Or I could.”

“No, I will. I work at the coffee shop tomorrow. It will make playing barista more interesting if I’m steaming milk and dealing with real estate agents at the same time.”

Wendy always liked a challenge.

I was about to head off to bed when her eyes suddenly bugged. Which was disturbing, since she was staring in my general direction.