The Pink Ghetto (28 page)

“We can’t afford it,” I insisted.

“Or maybe you could,” Andrea said. I had almost forgotten that she was standing there.

Fifteen minutes later, I had paid Greg the last of my money as a bribe for the dog and we were signing the lease. All three of us.

M
oving out of Williamsburg seemed grim. It wasn’t just watching my stuff go into boxes and milk crates that made my misery index rise, it was what wasn’t going in: Fleishman’s stuff. His books, his tchotchkes, the furniture. I was extra careful not to take anything that could in any way be construed as his. I didn’t covet his material possessions; but for so long I had thought of them as
ours.
Our DVD collection. Our rug. The great kitchenware Natasha Fleishman had given
us.

It had all been an illusion, I realized now. We had never been a real couple. I might as well have been playing house with an imaginary friend. Actually, that would have been better. Now I found myself not only having to deal with being separated from Fleishman, but also from his Viking cookware.

To make things worse, on my way to and from work every day, I had to pass all our places. Our Italian restaurant. Our bakery for weekend mornings. The thrift store where we’d found the Pillsbury Doughboy kitchen clock. Our Korean deli.

I felt wounded in a way I never had before. Part of me wanted to withdraw from everyone, to foreswear friendship and simply do without social interaction altogether. I mean, if someone I had loved and trusted for seven whole years could write a tell-all book that was the literary equivalent of poking my burned body with a stick, if I could have misjudged him so completely, what was the point?

There were moments when I visualized myself living in a cave somewhere, or becoming one of those urban hermits you see around sometimes, the ones who mutter to themselves as they’re rooting through garbage cans. I used to wonder about people like that. Now I just wondered how many of them had a Fleishman lurking somewhere in their past.

Fortunately, I realized picking through garbage was not for me. I can’t even bring myself to take a sip from someone else’s glass.

Another part of what made me not want to renounce society altogether was my friends. Wendy was so great. Even though she was thoroughly obsessed with finding sheers for the windows and picking out paint colors, every afternoon she would rent one of my favorite movies and leave it for me to watch when I came home from work. So instead of brooding alone in the apartment, I would pack while I watched
Ninotchka,
and
Tootsie,
and
Pillow Talk.

The
When Harry Met Sally
DVD disappeared.

At work, Andrea monitored my mental state, which was increasingly shaky. Every day I had to scrap with Dan Weatherby over the offer we were making for Fleishman’s manuscript. Dan decided he wanted a twenty-five thousand dollar advance. Which, for a first book in paperback, was Candlelight’s outer limit. Mercedes summoned me to her office several times a day, trying to decide whether Fleishman should be allowed to go where no freshman Candlelight author had gone before.

“You told him we would be doing promotion, didn’t you?” she grilled me.

I nodded.

“You told him he’d get full-page ads?”

“Full-page, color.”

“And he knows the 20K threshold is sacrosanct?”

I was new at this, so I was doing everything Mercedes told me to, basically. I was her negotiating handmaid.

“He knows,” I said, “but Dan Weatherby is not the big believer in the 20K threshold that we are. In fact, I think he just views it like a steeplechase horse views a hurdle.”

“
Merde!
” she exclaimed. Then she let out a naughty laugh. “Pardon my French.”

I don’t think she understood that expression was what you said when you
weren’t
speaking French.

After these meetings, Andrea was always there to prop me up. “Don’t worry so much about this stupid contract. Or that book,” she would tell me as I slumped in despair at my desk. “It’s just another book. With any luck, it’ll flop.”

“Right,” I moaned. “It would be great to have a flop on my hands.”

“Nobody would blame you. That’s the beauty of being an editor. You get all this reflected glory if something hits the bestseller lists—then you’re a genius. But if your pet project flops, there’s always this great scapegoat: the author.”

I wish I could say that the idea of Fleishman being a flop didn’t make my heart pitter-pat with delight. But sometimes the vision of
Cutting Loose
on a remainder table was all that was keeping me going.

The night we signed the lease, Andrea, Wendy, and I had been giddy at the prospect of our new digs, so we went for a powwow at a local bar in our new neighborhood. It was an old taverny place—probably the past watering hole of many failed writers of Manhattan—that served generous Rat Pack style drinks heavy on the liquor and the maraschino cherries.

Wendy sucked on a whiskey sour and gave us a soliloquy on color schemes. For Andrea, the excitement was all in the act of moving. She had a brother with a truck, and she was sure she could wheedle him into ferrying her stuff from Queens into Manhattan.

My own jubilation ended sometime midway through my second Tom Collins, when it occurred to me that this would be the first place I lived without Fleishman since my junior year in college.

Wendy noticed me sinking first. “We’re losing her,” she warned Andrea.

“You want my orange peel?” Andrea asked, stabbing at the bottom of her glass with her swizzle stick.

I shook my head.

“Don’t mope,” Andrea said. “That’s what they want you to do. What you need to do is go out and find yourself a fantastically handsome yet hedonistic sex puppy.”

“That’s what I told her!” Wendy jumped.

“Sounds great,” I grumbled. “But who?”

“What about Elevator Man?”

“Oh, right.”

“Well why not?” Wendy said. “Just take the initiative.”

What did she mean? Jump him on the elevator? For some reason, the whole thing made me cringe. Taking the initiative had never worked out for me in the past. (Paging Jason Crane…or Jake Caddell
.
Even I was getting my past mixed up, thanks to that damn book.)

“It would never work. He’s older. He’s rich. He’s suaver than shit.” I shook my head wistfully. “That kind of guy would never go for me.”

“That’s what what’s-her-name said about Max de Winter in
Rebecca,
” Andrea said. “And look who she ended up with. Laurence Olivier!”

I frowned. “Yeah, but she ran around paranoid for months and was gaslighted by a crazy woman.”

Wendy frowned. “And then her gorgeous house burned down.”

Andrea sighed. “Fine. Leave him roaming on the loose. Someone else will take him—and it might just be me.”

Wendy sent me a sympathetic look. “Maybe we should go to Bed Bath and Beyond and pick out a new bedspread for you,” she suggested.

She had gone round the bend with this home improvement stuff. “I don’t really have money for that.”

“Oh! But there’s this show called
Design on a Dime
that has all sorts of ideas for fixing up places…”

“A dime is about all we have,” I reminded her. “I’m not even sure how we’re going to afford a man with a van to get us over here next week.”

Wendy frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Maybe I could get my brother to swing by your place after he’s done with mine,” Andrea said.

That didn’t seem fair, seeing as how we had nothing to pay him. Also, we had too much stuff.

“Well what if he just picked up the big stuff, like beds and bookcases?”

“And what about the rest?”

“We could just haul it ourselves in dribs and drabs.”

“That’s a lot of dribs.”

“This is when you miss school,” Andrea lamented. “Back in the day when for the price of a pizza you could convince your friends to help you move.”

“Right,” I said.

Wendy’s eyes rounded. “Wait a second! I
am
in school. And even the people I know who aren’t in school would help us if we gave them free food.”

In other words, actors.

“You obviously travel in elite circles.”

“Theater people will work for food,” Wendy explained. “Hell, they’ll actually work for nothing. For food they’ll do things none of the rest of us ever would. Otherwise advertisers would never find people to be in Kotex commercials.”

Now that we’d pinpointed a group of people we could exploit, Andrea was all enthusiasm. She slapped her hand on the table. “An evacuation party! This could work.”

Thirty minutes later we were stumbling into an Internet café to send an all-points bulletin to everyone we knew, telling them to be at our apartment in Brooklyn on Saturday night. They were instructed to wear comfortable shoes and bring their MetroCards. They were promised food, drink, and fun.

I was skeptical about the fun part. I was doubtful anyone would show up.

Then, the next day, Mary Jo stopped by my office. “Should I bring anything?”

I tilted my head, puzzled. “Where?”

“To the party! I make a fantastic spinach dip,” she said. “I can’t wait to see your place.”

I flinched. When we’d invited everybody at work, I’d hoped we could persuade Lindsay to show up. Maybe the mailroom guy. It never occurred to me that Mary Jo would want to come.

Now the reality of having any of my coworkers tromping through my apartment with its shower curtain doors and roach infested closet of a kitchen began to sink in. In horror, I imagined Mary Jo hovering in the doorway in Brooklyn, puffing from the three-flight climb, her nose wrinkling at the faint whiff of doggy odor.

But what could I do? The die was cast. I couldn’t uninvite them.

“You don’t have to bring anything,” I told her.

“But I’d love to! I’m going out to buy a MetroCard at lunch!” she chirped, as if it were part of a treasure hunt party.

Andrea, who had heard the whole thing from her office, came in a few moments after Mary Jo left. She was shaking her head. “It’s like when fishermen throw out their nets for tuna and they end up with a hammerhead shark.”

“She doesn’t have a MetroCard?” I asked, puzzled.

“She lives in Mount Kisco.”

“Where is that?”

“Somewhere south of Canada. The subway doesn’t reach.”

Throughout the course of the day, I discovered that Lisa was also coming, and Troy, who promised to bring good-looking men, and Madeline. Mercedes RSVP’d
non,
thank heavens. Having Candlelight’s editorial Big Kahuna there might have done me in.

At the end of the day I button-holed Lindsay at her desk to see if she would be attending.

She tilted her head. “I don’t know. I’m getting so many invitations these days.” She handed over a card that she’d been studying.

At first glance it looked like a wedding invitation. It was a cream colored card with raised gold lettering.

Marguerite, the Contessa of Longchamps cordially requests your
presence at a
showing of her new line of jewelry,
The Contessa Collection

“This just came for Rita, but I think everybody’s getting one.”

I frowned. The invitation was for two weeks from that day, at two in the afternoon. “It’s in the middle of a workday.”

“I know, isn’t that fabulous? Mercedes is bound to let us all go.”

True. She wouldn’t want to alienate anyone at the
Romance Journal.

“And yes, I’ll be at your party. Even though it sounds like there will be work involved.”

“Don’t worry. No one has to carry more than ten pounds.”

“Can I bring Rowdy?”

“Of course! Bring any able-bodied person you know.” Then I frowned. “Are you still living with that guy?”

“Yeah—he’s hard to shake. Sweetest guy, though.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky at the party. I mean, maybe
he’ll
get lucky. There might be some cute Starbucks girls there who work with my roommate.”

We had the night all worked out. Books would be ferried in small batches in old grocery and shopping bags. Clothes would be packed in small boxes, as would miscellaneous stuff, like toiletries and random knickknacks. Pictures would just have to be hauled by themselves.

The party began in Brooklyn, with drinks (and Mary Jo’s spinach dip, which really was fabulous). Andrea’s brother had come by with his truck that afternoon and moved our beds and the television, so the place already looked forlorn, even with Fleishman’s stuff still there and boxes and shopping bags stacked everywhere. Within an hour of the appointed time, the apartment was jammed with people, and the noise they made, along with music blaring from Fleishman’s Bang and Olufsen stereo, probably would have gotten us evicted if we weren’t moving already.

I hadn’t expected it to work. Call me an old cynic, but I didn’t think an evacuation party would be a big draw. But its interactive nature apparently appealed to some people, who dutifully showed up ready to roll. More than a few brought champagne to christen our new apartment with.

Andrea took several bottles with her when she left with a few of her friends. They were to be the advance team who would be waiting for us at the apartment in Manhattan.

At the appointed time about twenty minutes later, Wendy started whipping our ranks into shape. She was a perfect troop mover, handing each guest just what they were willing to carry. The able-bodied lugged boxes or awkward items like pictures, lamps, or end tables; the rank-and-file hauled two shopping bags apiece; the high-heeled were given comforters and pillows in Hefty bags. My job was to close up the apartment, leave a note to latecomers informing them that the party had moseyed on without them, and to bring up the rear, rescuing any stragglers if need be.

I never thought it would work, but as I stood on the stoop after locking up and looked up and saw two blocks of coworkers, friends, and strangers filing toward the subway station with our stuff, some of my faith in humanity was restored. Which was funny, because they didn’t resemble humans so much as a line of ants.