The Pink Ghetto (34 page)

Ouch.

When I finished reading that review, I leaned back in my chair, luxuriating in the thought of Fleishman reading it, too. Schadenfreude never felt so good.

In spring, just after the nominations were announced, controversy started to rage in earnest in the pages of RAG’s monthly magazine,
The Romance Voice.
“Back to the Double Standard” was a rabble-rousing article about how it seemed to some that books written by men automatically were given more respect than those written by women. Women’s voices were dismissed as “chick lit” while Nick Hornby—and others—were written up in the
New York Times Book Review.
Publishers who treated their bread-and-butter, paperback romance novels like so many widgets to be cranked out in a month suddenly were taking out full-page ads for first-time male authors writing books that were essentially no different from what their female counterparts were writing.

The author of the piece even got a quote from Fleishman. “
I’m a huge fan of romance. Huge. But I wanted to write something that would appeal to everybody—that wouldn’t, you know, be branded as just a woman’s book.
”

It was like tossing a crippled wildebeest in front of a pack of hyenas. From our office, you could almost hear the collective howl go up across America—the howl of royally pissed off women writers.

Andrea came into my office with the article, gleeful. “Give a blowhard enough rope…”

The famous authors in the article who responded to Fleishman’s quote pointed out that they also tried to appeal to everyone, though they were rarely marketed in such a way that this would come through to anyone casually browsing through a bookstore.

“It’s blowback,” Andrea said. “It’s wonderful. Savor the moment!”

The moment dragged on. The next month, letters poured in to
The Romance Voice
either supporting the idea that the romance industry was primed for a hostile male takeover, or that the writer of the original article was fostering gender conflict among the very people who write books
celebrating
equality and respect. Then a second wave of angrier letters poured in, with one side calling the other Susan Faludi-wannabe-flame-throwers, and the other side claiming its critics were passive-throwback-mealy-mouths who wouldn’t see the error of their beliefs until the market for women’s fiction had dried up and left them self-published and royalty-free.

By May, some authors were pleading “Why can’t we all just get along?” but by then no one was listening. They were especially not listening to Fleishman, who wrote a letter of apology emphasizing his respect for the RAG, all of its members, and the romance industry as a whole. One of the proudest days of his life, he wrote, was when he was nominated for a Raggie. He said his quote had been taken out of context.

I had a few authors up for awards whom I would be sitting with at the ceremony. One, Riva Nash, was up against Fleishman for her middle-aged art student book. I tried not to let it build up in my head as a big me-against-him battle, because essentially, it had nothing to do with me. It was about them. I mean, about their books.

Besides, if Fleishman lost that would be so fantastic. And I wasn’t that much of an optimist.

For the big event, Wendy and Andrea helped me find a knockoff Missoni dress that was somewhere in the realm of affordability. It was simple, but the colors were bright and it had flow. It was also a size twelve, which depressed me. I was sliding. Too many nasty chocolate apricot cookies, which I was actually beginning to like. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a blob.

“Would you shut up about the size?” Andrea said after listening to me moan. We were all squeezed into a Bloomie’s dressing room. “So it runs small. You look fantastic.”

“Look,” Wendy said, poking at me with a forefinger. “That bone sticking out is your collarbone. And there’s your waist. It’s smaller than mine.”

“Mine, too,” Andrea complained, though I don’t think that was true.

Wendy looked into my eyes and spoke very carefully. “You’re the same size you’ve been since I’ve known you, Rebecca. You can relax. This is you now.”

I stared into the mirror.

I looked…well, okay. Better than okay. If someone had told me when I was sixteen that I would look like this in ten years, I might not have been ecstatic, but I would have been pretty damn happy. I glanced into the faces of the two other people hovering in the mirror—especially Wendy beaming proudly—and I felt a load of anxiety slipping away from my shoulders. And believe me, that was the best weight I ever lost.

“Thanks,” I said, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a scene. “I don’t know what I would have done without you guys.”

Wendy put her arm around me, and Andrea folded her arms so that she looked like she was hugging herself. “No sweat,” Wendy said.

“Right. I’m sure you would have managed to find a dress on your own,” Andrea grumbled.

“No, I didn’t mean just to—”

“We
know
what you meant,” she said. “So shut up already and buy the dress.”

A
nd the winner was…

Riva Nash, author of
Life Is an Art.
Publisher: Candlelight. Editor:
Moi!

The banquet room of the Marriott Marquis was so packed with women in formal wear that it was a little overwhelming to a newbie. I had skipped the awards banquet the year before, in Dallas, so I was unprepared for the momentous feel of it. I mean, there was music, and strobes, and presenters. It was like the Oscars minus men. Actually, there were a few tuxedos—agents, mostly, and the handful of male authors and coauthors who braved the scene. I had spotted Fleishman and shamelessly picked a seat where I could watch him. If he won, I wanted to be able to report back the awfulness of the moment to Wendy.

He was sitting at a large round table halfway across the room with Dan Weatherby and Cassie and some other people I recognized as being part of the Gazelle crew. Cassie looked kind of frumpy to me, even though she was wearing a dress that went over only one shoulder. I think it was supposed to be sexy, but on her it just looked lopsided or something. Her hair kept getting shorter, too, but that wasn’t turning out so well, either.

“Look at that,” Andrea hissed in my ear, “it’s like an albino afro.”

I laughed, and at that moment, Cassie turned and glared my way.

I looked away. Andrea’s eyes bugged. “Do you think she bugged our table?”

“What does she look so pouty for?” I wondered aloud.

Andrea smirked. “Maybe because Fleishman hasn’t spoken more than two words with her since they sat down.”

Fleishman was yucking it up with Dan. Both of them looked great. Of course. They always did.

With one exception. The moment the emcee called Riva’s name, Fleishman did not look so hot. The proactive smile he had frozen on his face for protection—or anticipation—momentarily fell away. His head jerked toward my table. To me. I, of course, was beaming.

Riva grabbed my arm. “Come with me!” she yelled over the applause as she lifted me halfway out of my chair.

I shook my head.

“Go!” Andrea gave me an unceremonious shove that propelled me to my feet.

It was so great to see Riva win. Not just because of who lost, either. She was so giddy, so shocked, her happiness infected the entire room. She spent about thirty seconds exclaiming how she never expected to win. “Never!” she drawled. “I mean, I’m a middle-aged real estate inspector from Nebraska!”

Then she gathered herself and found her way back to the traditional script, somewhat—she thanked her agent, me, Candlelight Books, her children, her parents, her grammar school teachers, Louisa May Alcott, Rona Jaffe, Susan Isaacs, Jennifer Crusie, and her divorce lawyer.

She brought down the house, but by the time she wobbled off the podium clutching her statuette, she was a mess. “I wish you’d gotten me off before I made a damn fool of myself!”

“You were great,” I told her.

From there on in, our table was in such a party mood that I barely spared Fleishman a glance for the rest of the ceremony. After it was all over, though, I did run into him. His half-empty table was on the path to the doors. Cassie was gone, and it was just Fleishman sitting alone. Dan was turned away, talking to another author.

I stopped. I had to. This was too sweet to pass up. “Hey, stranger.”

He looked up at me with a wary smile. “Hey yourself.”

“How did you like your first awards banquet?”

He smiled almost sheepishly. Almost humbly. “Better luck next time, right?”

“Oh—have you written another book already?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been working on a proposal…”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s about a woman who always thought she was being passed over—you know, at school, for promotions, in her love life. Maybe she was salutatorian of her high school class?”

He shook his head. “It’s
fiction.
”

Dan Weatherby suddenly cut in on us. “Hello, Rebecca. Gorgeous dress!”

“Thanks, Dan.”

“I hope J.F. here isn’t spilling too much about his new story.” He lowered his voice. “It’s supposed to be Gazelle’s option book, but you never know…”

I scrunched my nose. Something told me Cassie hadn’t liked the proposal. “Editors can be so fussy sometimes.”

Dan laughed. “You always make me laugh, Becca!”

Fleishman wasn’t laughing. “But we’re sure it will be picked up somewhere. After the reviews of the first book…” He was in full spin mode now. “I’ve got other projects on the burner, too.”

“Yeah, well, you know the formula. Creativity plus dedication plus time.”

“Plus I’m still working on that play,” he said.

That play. For heaven’s sake. He seemed so pathetic to me suddenly that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “That’s great. I wouldn’t want to think you were a Fleish in the pan.”

He blinked at me. I patted him on the arm and walked away.

Dan, laughing, hollered after me. “I’ll be calling you soon, Bec!”

As I left to go barhopping with the gang plus several writers, I thought briefly about Luke. He was right. Success really was the best revenge.

L
ater that summer, I had cause to wear my Missoni knockoff dress again.
Inventing My Life
was sold, and to celebrate, Luke treated Sylvie, Bernadine, and me to a big dinner.

It was great. Sylvie ordered wine and got a little looped, but hey, she was entitled. It was the first time I had ever seen her out on the town, or out anywhere. She looked even frailer in the surroundings of the French bistro Luke had chosen than she did in her own place, and I wondered if this might be her last hurrah. I wondered if she wondered that, too.

I got a little loopy myself, drinking to Sylvie’s frequent toasts. She was grateful to me, and Luke, and Bernadine. It was sweet of her to be so demonstrative, but I felt a little uncomfortable accepting thanks from someone I owed so much to myself, and I told her so.

“This book saved my life,” I said.

“Nonsense!” Sylvie said. Then she asked, “How?”

“I was spinning in circles. Working on this—working through your life—made me realize how upset I was becoming over trivialities.”

Sylvie drew back. “And you think I wasn’t concerned with trivialities, too, when I was young? That I didn’t go out and make a big dope of myself?” She laughed. “You see, you don’t know me so well after all!”

“You’ll have to write a sequel,” Luke joked.

Bernadine leaned back and laughed. “She’s right, Rebecca. You should have seen her the night we got our hands on Papa’s peppermint schnapps!”

Sylvie shot her a look, then glanced back at me gravely. “Believe me, when you write the story of your life when you’re ninety-four, you won’t be talking about these little episodes—you’ll be focused on the friends you lost, your family, the people you loved. The other stuff is just what you survive to get to the things that matter. It’s the same if you’re living through a war, or…”

I smiled. “A new job?”

It just didn’t have the same drama, but I could sort of see what she was getting at.

After dinner, Luke put Bernadine and Sylvie in a cab. We started walking—the subway I could catch to my apartment was a few blocks away. Luke took my arm.

I hadn’t been expecting that.

“You know…”

I tilted a glance at him. “What?”

“I’m pretty much done working for Sylvie. I think Langley will finally be forced to cough up the rest of the money.”

“I know—Sylvie told me. That’s so great.”

“For so long I’ve felt this conflict…”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Conflict?”

“That is…”

He stopped. This was so weird. In all the months I’d known him, Luke had never been tongue-tied. He’d never been inarticulate. He’d never had those brown eyes fastened on me with such dopey intensity.

I felt my stomach begin to flutter, but I tried to stop it. I was getting better at that.

“The thing is,” he blurted out, “is that you came to me sort of as a representative of Sylvie, and Sylvie became my client, and you were part of that, and…”

I tilted my head. “Luke, are you telling me that you didn’t want to become involved with me because you thought it might be some kind of conflict of interest?”

He nodded, looking relieved.

I confess I was relieved, too. And impressed. His ideas of tact and propriety were a little over the top, but then, given the meatheads I’d gotten involved with in the past year, that wasn’t entirely a bad thing.

I swallowed, not quite trusting the little stream of joy beginning to course through my veins. “So now…?”

“Now I’m declaring an end to the conflict,” he said.

He bent down and touched his lips to mine, tentatively. But there was nothing tentative after that first kiss. He put his arms around me and we performed a full body smooch right there on the bustle of the east twenties.

When we came up for air, it was as if the sidewalks had suddenly morphed to puffy cumulus clouds. My step had a bounce—not easy in four-inch heels. I leaned into Luke as he held his arm tightly around me. I’d never felt so happy, so wonderfully alive, and yet at ease. The world was perfect. Everything was just as I wanted it. It was a not-too-hot August evening, with plenty of Saturday night stretching ahead and a Sunday after that. Just for Luke and me.

It felt like a Candlelight romance, only it was real.

If, in that moment, you’d asked me about what I’d been doing for the last year and a half of my life, I might have even drawn a blank. It was just like Sylvie had said. People were what mattered. Love was what mattered. All that other stuff fell away.

I couldn’t imagine foolish trivialities and petty little conflicts getting to me ever again. I’d grown up. I’d matured. I’d moved on.

And Fleishman? That part of my life was over and done with. Thank God.

I’d forgotten where we were going. Luke steered us onto an Avenue—First, or Second—where there was an off-off-Broadway theater. The marquee was dark, but I stopped abruptly to stare at it. I couldn’t help myself, even though doing so nearly made Luke spin in a circle.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

I gawked up at the small marquee and pointed at the large black letters over our heads. My voice wasn’t functioning.

O
PENING
S
EPT
. 3
A
NEW PLAY BY
J
ACK
F
LEISHMAN
YULE BE SORRY