The Pink Ghetto (27 page)

Her brow creased. “Oh, okay…” She seemed disappointed. I think she wanted to spend the rest of the meal basking in her heroism.

After that, there didn’t seem much left to say.

Except, come to think of it, there
was
one thing I wanted out in the open.

I brushed past Fleishman, then looked Dan Weatherby square in the eye. “Just for the record, Dan. Your new client, the new Nick Hornby? He thinks you’re a baloney sandwich.”

O
n the way back to the office, I underwent a complete willpower meltdown. I passed Food Emporium, then doubled back and came out minutes later with an M&M two-pounder. Unashamed, I tore it open on the street with my teeth, sending colored candies flying like confetti. I popped a fistful into my mouth, then barely restrained myself from upending the entire bag into my mouth.

When I got off the elevator, the temporary receptionist gestured to the message wheel. “You’ve got a bunch.”

The messages were all from Wendy.
Left you a voicemail,
one said. Another:
Where the h are you?
Then,
Meet at 3 at the NW corner of 96th and B’Way.

I groaned and popped another fistful of M&Ms. Apartment hunting. Which meant dealing with supers, or worse, real estate agents. Would this day never end?

“How’d the interview go?” Lindsay chirped at me. She was planted next to the Xerox machine. I murmured abstractly as I whisked by her.

“You look one hundred percent better than when you left!” she called after me.

I shut myself into my office and leaned back in my chair, popping M&Ms by the palmful and letting them melt in my mouth for a moment before starting to chew. God it felt good. I can’t tell you. I leaned farther back, then finally just gave in, kicked off my shoes, and propped my bare feet on my desk.

Pure sugar oblivion, that’s what I was looking for. And blessed silence.

It’s not what I got. As I sank into my M&M reverie, my door opened and closed with a slam. And then, in the blink of an eye, Andrea was on my floor, in a fetal ball, rolling from side to side. And moaning. The most awful sound I’d ever heard was coming out of her—a horrible, otherworldly keening noise. Like a large rodent with stomach cramps. It was as if she were going through some sort of weird reversion therapy.

I brought my feet down and leaned toward her. “Um…Andrea?”

She turned slightly. What a sight she was! Her hair was in her face, her skirt was bunched up around her thighs. “I…AM…SO…SCREWED!”

They were the first intelligible words she’d spoken since flinging herself down on my carpet. Maybe this was a positive sign. “What happened?”

The question made her go slack, and she lay facedown on the floor, like a penitent. “I applied for a job…”

“So?” She was applying for jobs all the time.

“At
Candlelight!
”

I was mystified. “How could you have done that?”

“I
don’t know!
” she howled. “I didn’t know what I was doing! They didn’t put the name of the company in the ad.”

I remembered the ad I’d responded to. I hadn’t known I was applying to Candlelight, either. Of course, to me it hadn’t made any difference. “Who received your application?”

“Kathy Leo! And instead of coming to me, she bumped my resume right over to Mercedes. The traitor!”

“Shit.”

“And Mercedes called a conference with Rita, and Karen…”

“Shit.”

“And then invited
me.
They ambushed me.”

And I thought I was having a bad day.

Andrea heaved a deep, deep sigh. “For a minute there, I thought I was being promoted. Then she brought out my resume and cover letter, and I knew the jig was up. It was over. I was toast.”

I shuddered sympathetically. “Oh God.”

Her head lifted. “It’s worse than
oh God,
Rebecca. I had put in all sorts of cover letter bullshit about how I had been with my present company forever and was now seeking greater challenges. Mercedes read all the awful bits back to me in front of everyone.”

“Ouch.”

“The worse part is, the ad made the company sound so fantastic! I thought I was applying to this great publishing house that would shower me with money and prestige.” In a sign that she was snapping back from adversity, she grumbled, “Kathy Leo ought to try her hand at becoming an author. The drivel she concocted was pure fiction.”

“What did Mercedes say to you?”

“Plenty.”

“Did she fire you?”

“No—but you know Mercedes. She jawed on forever about what a valued employee I was. And how she was so disappointed that I wasn’t happy, but hoped that I wasn’t actually planning to leave.”

I mulled that over for a moment. “You know, that doesn’t sound like you’re screwed, Andrea. In fact it sounds like she was trying to be, you know, encouraging.”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “When were you hatched? She knows I’m trapped here like a bug on a web. She’s got my number now. I’ll be watched, tormented, and persecuted. I’ll only be sent to conferences in North Dakota. Just when I think I’ve finally cleared my name, the noose will tighten.
That’s
when I’ll be booted out.”

She seemed to take perverse pleasure in seeing herself as the Jean Valjean of Candlelight editorial. “Maybe Mercedes was telling the truth,” I said.

“Oh, no. I’m doomed, I’m sure of it. I’m going to lose my job, my apartment, everything. Not only will I not be able to tread water in Queens, I’ll be forced to move back to my parents’ house in East Orange. I’ll be lucky to get a job as a grocery scanner. I will die a spinster.”

“There aren’t spinsters anymore.” One of Andrea’s authors wrote very popular western romances.

“They just don’t call them that anymore.” She poked at her chest. “Maybe that’s where I’ll be a trendsetter. I’ll single-handedly bring back the pathetic, middle-aged no-hoper.”

I tried to imagine Andrea as a modern-day old maid. Zazu Pitts with a potty mouth. “I don’t want to disillusion you, but I think you’re overreacting. I don’t think Mercedes has it in for you.”

“
Ha.
”

“Think about it. She had your resume. She could have had it for days. She had plenty of time to sit around deciding what to do with you. But instead of firing you, she called in all your superiors and staged this intervention.”

Andrea crossed her arms. “She just wanted to see me squirm.”

“Or there’s another possibility.”

“What?”

“She really doesn’t want to lose you.”

I was ready to be barked at, belittled, and told I was a gullible rube. Remarkably, Andrea’s head slowly tilted, as if she were actually thinking over what I’d said. “Is that some kind of joke?”

“No, I mean it. Why shouldn’t she want to keep you? You’re a good editor. I would have been sunk without your help these last few months.” Which, I realized, was actually true. In her own curt way, Andrea had been invaluable to me.

“But she knows I want to leave!”

“So?” I shrugged. “A lot of people have their eyes out for better jobs. Didn’t you notice Mary Jo looked awfully good a day or so after that ad appeared in
BM
for a senior ed at Avon?”

“Get out of here.”

“It’s true. And remember what Mercedes said after Cassie left? She said she wanted to prevent that from happening again. Maybe she was actually telling the truth.”

We both took a moment to chew over the possibility that corporate groupspeak wasn’t entirely BS. That we actually were valued employees. It was an unsettling thought. Briefly I thought I saw tears welling in Andrea’s eyes.

Or maybe not. She frowned at the candy bag on my desk. “Jesus Christ. Is that a two-pounder?”

I nodded, ashamed.

“That’s disgusting!” she said. “Can I have some?”

I offered the bag, and, sitting cross-legged, she emptied about half the contents into her skirt. “I love these things.”

“I needed chocolate therapy.”

“Why? What happened to you?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to enter into a game of one-upmanship.

But Andrea egged me on. “C’mon. It couldn’t have been worse than what happened to me.”

I couldn’t resist the challenge. I told her all of it. Andrea’s lavish reactions to my tale of woe were very gratifying. Her eyes bugged when I went into the details with Fleishman, she issued profane exclamations when I explained what had happened over the weekend, and she agreed—whole-heartedly—that my dress was hideous. By the time I told her what went down at the Japanese restaurant—or rather, what came up—she was staring at me, slack jawed.

“That is seriously fucked up,” she finally declared.

In the battle of the bad days, I guess it was a draw.

She devoured a few more M&Ms. “What were you doing sleeping with Dan anyway? I thought you were holding out for elevator man.”

“Elevator man is the impossible dream. Dan was available.”

“I’m beginning to think what’s out of reach is safest in the long run.”

“You mean abstinence?”

She shuddered. “I
am
becoming a spinster. Maybe I should go out and get a few cats for my apartment.”

Apartment!
I bolted straight up in my chair and squinted at the clock on my monitor screen. The tiny numbers said twenty till three. “Crap! I’m late.”

I jumped up, and so did Andrea. M&Ms went flying. “Where are we going?”

“We?”

“You can’t leave me alone here,” she said.

There was something almost touching about Andrea in needy mode. “I have to go look at an apartment with my roommate. I’ve only got twenty minutes to get to the other side of town and up to 96th Street.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You’re going to live up
there?
”

“We’re just looking. We have to find a place…”

“Right. The new Nick Hornby has rendered you homeless,” she said. “I’m definitely going with you.”

Thanks to the unexpected timeliness of all the trains, we were only five minutes late to meet Wendy. She was standing at the corner, arms crossed, looking as if someone had just died.

“I’m not going to install myself in your apartment,” Andrea said to her. They had never met. “I just came along for the exercise.”

“You’re late,” Wendy said.

“Just five minutes.”

“Well, I was ten minutes early, so I went ahead and looked at the place.”

I supposed that’s why she looked so grim. “Bad?”

“No, fantastic. It’s beautiful. Huge.” She sighed. “Expensive.”

“So we can’t afford it.”

“No, we can’t.” Wendy looked like she was ready to throw herself in front of a downtown bus.

I shrugged. “Oh, well…”

“I want to see it!” Andrea said.

“You do?” Wendy asked. She brightened a little. But to me it looked as sinister as the brightness of an addict finding a crack pipe.

“Fantastic, huge, and expensive is just what I love.”

“But if it’s too expensive,” I said.

Resistance was futile. Those two wanted to go in. Masochists.

The super of the apartment was a skinny, scruffy guy named Greg who looked really annoyed to be showing the place twice to the same person. “You again?” he asked Wendy as he handed the key over.

“Sorry to make you knock yourself out,” she said.

Greg scurried back into his first floor apartment like a cockroach diving for a crack under the baseboards.

Inside the apartment, Wendy and Andrea were all exclamations.

“This is
so
cool!” Andrea said. “Look at these floors!”

“Parquet,” Wendy said. “Lovely!”

“And the ceilings—they have to be nine feet.”

“Eight and a half, I think,” Wendy said. “But they’re coved, so I think they look higher.”

The Home and Garden Channel had taken control of Wendy’s brain.

It
was
a nice apartment. While those two squealed over glass doorknobs and the river view (I couldn’t see it, but I didn’t drag an old folding chair out of a closet and stand on it like Wendy did), I took a quick tour. There were two small but real bedrooms and a little room—a bonus. The kitchen was a galley but it was bigger than ours, and the bathroom had a claw-foot tub
and
a shower. It seemed like stupendous luxury.

I made a complete circle in the time it took them to go from the front door to the kitchen.

“Two problems,” I said. “It’s too expensive, and it’s too expensive.”

“But look how big the kitchen is,” Andrea whined, as if she had a stake in any of this. “It’s bigger than mine.”

“It’s twice as big as ours,” Wendy said.

I couldn’t believe her. All these years
she
had been the levelheaded one about money. She had been the person who counseled frugality, and she had frowned more than me at Fleishman’s lack of realism when it came to paying bills. Now—after seeing one nice apartment—her inner spendthrift had come unhinged.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s kitchen stadium from
Iron Chef,
we can’t afford it. Besides, if you wanted to be closer to NYU, this isn’t the place. It’s geographically farther away than Williamsburg.”

“Not exactly,” Wendy said. “It’s a straight shot down on the subway. And maybe Starbucks would let me transfer to a store closer to home.”

“Besides, the layout of this place is all wrong.”

Wendy put her hands on her hips. “How much more wrong could it be than the place we’ve been living? Which, you know, doesn’t even have rooms. Or doors on the closets. Little amenities like that.”

“I know, but…” I looked at the small room, which had obviously been an office. One wall was solid floor-to-ceiling bookcases. For the first time, apartment yearning began to take hold of me, too. It would be the first place I ever lived with enough shelves.

Not that we were going to live there. Why on earth had Wendy chosen this moment to become a head-in-the-clouds dreamer? Last night she had been talking about fiscal responsibility. Now all she cared about was coved ceilings and closet space.