The Pink Ghetto (25 page)

“Oh no!” she breathed.

“What’s the matter?”

She pointed at my lap, where Maxwell was contentedly dozing. “He didn’t take the dog.”

I tensed. Did she actually mean she wanted Fleishman to take Maxwell? “Of course not.” Maxwell was mine!

“I am not hauling that loose-bladdered furball to another apartment,” Wendy declared.

“But—”

“Uh-un.”

“But he belongs to me. He’s my responsibility. And he hasn’t peed on anything for days.”

“I thought he belonged to Fleishman.”

“Well, he was sort of both of ours, but…” Panic made me shameless. “But Fleishman was terrible with him. He spoiled him. Once you pointed out the behavioral problems he’s been much better. The crate training was a stroke of genius.”

She tilted her head. I don’t think she was buying any of it.

“He won’t be much trouble,” I promised. Max was probably the only vestige of my years with Fleishman worth hanging on to.

“It’s hard enough finding an apartment for people,” she grumbled. “Finding one that takes dogs? In a week? That’s gonna take a miracle.”

T
he next morning I was up and at’em in my usual timely fashion. I was late. I tossed on an old dress and bolted for the door, stopping short when I saw Wendy hunched over the paper, basically where I had left her the night before. “Keep this afternoon open after three,” she said. “I’m going to try to set up some apartment viewings.”

“Where?”

“There’s a huge place on the Upper West Side—way upper. It’s only three hundred dollars over our budget.”

“Where’s the three hundred supposed to come from?”

She tapped her highlighter pen against the classifieds. She was all business. “I’m not sure. We might have to start selling our ovaries.”

I scooted out the door. By the time I was squeezed onto a subway train, my mind had already turned from the apartment hunt back to obsessing over
Cutting Loose.

The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that Mercedes would like the book. Yes, it had a few chortles in it. Fleishman was a funny person. Of course,
I
hadn’t found it very funny…and I doubted anyone else would either. Why would they? To me the thing was about as entertaining as watching someone pick a scab. Mine.

At the office, I dropped my purse in my chair and looked up to find a vaguely familiar man standing in my doorway. He was medium height, with deeply tanned skin and dark hair that was slicked back in a way that made me think of Andy Garcia. When he smiled, his white teeth practically glistened against his Coppertone complexion. “So you’re the new one,” he observed.

My lips twisted into a wobbly smile. Who the hell was this? “Uh…fairly new.”

“Mercedes has told me good things about you,” he said, waving. “Keep up the good work.”

“Thanks!” I chirped toward his back. He was already walking away.

Three seconds later, Andrea poked her head in my door. “My God, what did he say to you?”

I squinted. “Who?”

“Art!”

“
That
was Art Salvatore?”

“Of course! Who did you think it was?” Her face screwed up. “I wonder why he didn’t stop by my door.”

“Maybe his stopping by mine wasn’t such a good thing,” I said.

I was already feeling uneasy when I headed for the coffee room. Lindsay fell into step with me as I passed her cubicle. “Are you ready for your closeup?”

Some sort of joke, obviously. It went right over my head.

“Your ‘Making Waves’ interview for
BM,
” she prompted. “Isn’t that today?”

Oh shit.

Belatedly, the memory of making the lunch appointment hit me like walking into a wall. I froze in my tracks.

It was one of those moments when, if I hadn’t been in a space where I was posing as a professional, I would have just let my knees buckle underneath me and sunk to the ground, beat my fists on the carpet, and wept. This was just too gruesome. I was wearing a dress that was as appealing as an NPR tote bag, no jewelry, and no makeup. Maybe I could have passed for someone making waves back in Khrushchev’s Moscow, but now I looked more like something that needed to be sandbagged. I was a disaster.

“I forgot. Completely,” I wailed
sotto voce.
“Look at me! I’m in no shape to meet the press!”

Lindsay’s face wrinkled in concern for a split second, and then she shrugged. I guess in the annals of Lindsay screw-ups, underdressing for an interview didn’t even rate. “You look okay to me…”

Those were not comforting words. Andrea told me that Lindsay had shown up for her second day of work in a thrift store tube top.

She gave me a fresh up and down scan. “But now that you mention it…”

I groaned.

“Not to worry! You can fix yourself up after the meeting.”

Those words stopped my writhing. In fact, they practically stopped my heart. “Meeting?”

“Weren’t you headed for the conference room?”

Father in heaven. The weekly ed meeting. I had forgotten about that, too. I was in serious need of a brain transplant.

I galloped toward the coffee room—no way could I face an ed meeting without caffeine—going over my options for the interview. Or my lack of options. I was supposed to meet the woman at noon at some Japanese restaurant. I didn’t have time to go home, and it wasn’t as if I had a wardrobe closet in my office. I wasn’t even sure I had an old lipstick at the bottom of my purse.

Maybe on the way to the restaurant I could swing by Bloomingdale’s and partake of free makeup counter samples. It would be tempting to buy a new dress while I was at it, but the night before Wendy had made me take a vow of fiscal responsibility.

All of these thoughts were racing through my mind as I slopped coffee in my cup and poured in a vat of non-dairy creamer. Then I arrowed straight for the conference room, landing in a seat just as Mercedes was bringing us all to order. When she spotted me, she stopped mid-gavel and exclaimed, “Genius has arrived!”

I blushed, assuming this was sarcasm. From the snorts and chuckles that rippled around the table, so did everyone else.

But Mercedes wasn’t laughing. “
Genius,
” she said again.

I looked down at the pile of paper she had in front of her. To my horror, it was Fleishman’s manuscript, and it was littered with little yellow stickies, which meant that she actually had taken it seriously. That she liked it. She’d even brought it to the meeting as a show-and-tell exhibit, something she hardly ever did.

I shrank in my chair.

“Rebecca has given me a book that will open up a whole new direction for us. We haven’t done anything like it before. I’ve already made a copy and given it to Art. He read the first chapter and loved it!”

I slid down in my chair. So
that’s
what Art’s stopping by had been about.

Mary Jo eyed the book with suspicion. “If it’s so different, why do you think it’s right for Candlelight?”

“Because it’s irresistible,” Mercedes gushed. “A combination of Nick Hornby and that Bridget Jones woman, with a little bit of Robert James Waller thrown in.”

“Who’s Robert James Waller?” Madeline asked.

“
The Bridges of Madison County,
” someone explained for her.

Her forehead showed the faintest of wrinkles. “Like that really boring movie? But that was about
old people.
”

“I only meant that it’s bittersweet and moving. But it’s funny. More Nick Hornby than anything else.”

Andrea shook her head. “I get it. The new voice in women’s fiction is a man. Brilliant.”

“This is romance with an edge,” Mercedes said. “It’s lad lit with a heart. It’s got a lovable scamp for a hero who’s exasperating and adorable. I could see John Cusack playing him in the movie.”

“Oh! I love John Cusack!” Madeline exclaimed. Or maybe the whole table said it. Everybody loved John Cusack.

They were all on board now.

I wanted to bang my head against the table. The phrase
catastrophic success
finally made sense to me.

How could she have liked it?
And what was I going to do? My worst fear was coming true. I was going to be immortalized in print as the ex-girlfriend, the neurotic Jenny Craig alumna.

Mercedes tapped her pen against her legal pad. “Which reminds me…” She craned to see Lisa, who was in the back of the room. “Lisa, we need to see that this book gets in the hands of production companies, ASAP.”

“But it’s not under contract,” I piped up.

And it never will be.
Scenes from the night before flashed through my head. I’m pretty sure Wendy had used phrases along the lines of “over my dead body” and “when hell fills with Eskimo Pies” to characterize Fleishman’s chances of having his book published with Candlelight.

This was a bind. I didn’t want this book to see the light of day, but if it didn’t, I was now screwed. I would be bumped from genius back down to bumbling fool. It was a perfect lose-lose situation.

I tried frantically to look for a bright side. Okay, it looked like the book was a shoo-in to sell. Maybe I had overreacted about the personal stuff. So what if Fleishman had thrown in a little autobiography into the story? It wasn’t as if that many people would notice. Maybe a few mutual acquaintances, sure, along with my entire family, but so what?

“There shouldn’t be a problem, should it?” Mercedes asked, jolting me back to the question of acquisition. I was slumped in my chair in a panic coma. “I got the feeling this was a first book,” she said, “and that you knew the author personally…”

The room got very quiet, it seemed to me. I cleared my throat. “That’s true, but—”

“From the dedication, I thought you were very intimate with this author, this Jack Fleishman.” Mercedes scanned the first page. “
To Rebecca Abbot, who inspired every word…
”

Mary Jo shot me a curious glance. “Is one of the characters based on you?”

“Um…”

Mercedes nearly slapped her forehead. “You are
so
like the character of Renata, aren’t you?”

“Is she the love interest?” one of the editors asked.

“No, she’s the one who gets dumped.” Mercedes hitched her throat and cut her eyes to me. “Pardon me. She gets
cut loose.
” She leaned toward me. “Did you really lose your virginity in a Chrysler minivan?”

I groaned. “It’s fiction.”

“Wait a second…” Andrea’s face was frozen in puzzlement. With a pleading glance I tried to stop her, but she apparently didn’t catch my eyeballed SOS in time. “
Fleishman?
Isn’t that your roommate? That crazy guy who flew out to Portland when you were at that conference?”

“Yes.” My voice downgraded to a mere peep.

She shook her head. “And now he’s written a book about dumping you? Cripes! That’s humiliating.”

It would have felt nice to strangle her at that moment, but maybe it was best to have it all out to begin with rather than coming out in dribs and drabs at other inopportune moments.

Apparently Mercedes didn’t mind about my humiliation. “But that’s perfect! If the guy lives with you, it should be a snap to get him under contract.”

I had to work hard to dislodge the large frog that had taken up residence in my esophagus. “Not exactly. I don’t even know if we were the only house he’s submitted to…”

That last statement created a disgruntled silence shared by all. Multiple submissions—when an author sends the same book to more than one publisher—are frowned upon. For one thing, if more than one publisher want the same book, it creates a thorny problem. The publishers have to start bidding against each other, and they hate that. It takes all the power out of their hands. And Candlelight prized loyalty from its authors. Multiple submissions, even from someone we’d never published before, exhibited a certain disloyalty in advance.

Mercedes bridled uncomfortably. She had obviously thought this would be a slam dunk. “Does he have an agent?”

“No,” I said. I was certain of that, at least.

“It’ll be a snap,” she repeated.

“20K?” Mary Jo asked.

“Tops, I hope.”

Twenty thousand?
I went all woozy in my chair. I wanted to cry. I was going to have to hand Fleishman twenty thousand dollars for insulting me in print?

As I sat brooding, the late list was distributed around the table.

“Who’s the high roller this week?” one of the editors asked.

I looked at it and gulped. I was all over the thing.

Mary Jo let out a laugh and shot me a smile. “Looks like it’s the genius.”

I
did swing by Bloomie’s on the way to the interview. And after I had made up my face one counter at a time, I swung by accessories and picked up a scarf. It was on sale—a steal at twenty-three bucks. It looked crisp and professional—like a scarf Mercedes would wear. By the time I left the store, I was at least presentable from the shoulders up.

Alex Keene, the
BM
reporter, had chosen a Japanese restaurant in the basement of a modern building on Fifth. Banquette tables lined the wall. The decoration was stark—lots of black enamel broken by a few decorative pots of bamboo. There was no sound except for the faint burbling of a goldfish pond.

The black pantsuited hostess swayed toward me, but before she could reach me, I was ambushed from behind. “Rebecca?”

I turned and had to crane my neck upwards. In her stocking feet, Alex Keene might have been five-ten, but in five-inch heels she was approaching NBA territory. She didn’t teeter on those stilts, either; she had one of those purposeful strides with nothing tentative or wobbly about it. She had been very business-like on the phone, but for some reason I hadn’t expected a red-haired giantess in a long black jacket. You would never have guessed she worked for a publishing industry rag. From the looks of her, she belonged in the Condé Nast empire.