The Pink Ghetto (5 page)

She thanked me profusely, and I felt a little embarrassed. It hadn’t taken a genius to figure out what to do. Lindsay was probably a few seconds away from figuring it out herself.

Or maybe not. She obviously hadn’t figured out not to wear prom dresses to work.

“She’s a mess,” Andrea whispered to me as we walked away. “Something like that happens every day. I call it the crisis cubicle. She and Rita together are a train wreck.”

At the next office we passed, a woman about my age with dishwater blond hair was sitting at her desk with an untouched bagel next to her.

“Hi, Cassie,” Andrea said. “This is Rebecca. You know, the new inmate.”

Cassie’s blue eyes fixed on me. “Cool!” Her office was a duplicate of mine, with the exception of romance covers covering her cork board, and a single framed picture on the desk. It was a picture of a younger Cassie in a blue gown and mortarboard. Her hair was longer, but it was also frizzier; she had the Jan Brady effect going big time.

Cassie stared unblinkingly at me. “Mercedes made you sound like Wonder Girl. She couldn’t stop singing your praises.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

“She said you worked for Sylvie Arnaud.”

“Oh, right.” I nodded.

Andrea tugged on my arm. “Okay, well I guess we should—”

“You must have really wowed Mercedes at your interview,” Cassie broke in. “I thought they were just looking for another assistant editor, not an associate.”

“I had thought so, too, initially…”

Her lips tensed into a toothless smile. “I’m an assistant editor. This is my third year here. I was Rita’s editorial assistant one of those years.”

“That’s…” I really couldn’t figure out what I was expected to say. “…good.”

“You think so?” She shrugged. “I guess I just have high standards.”

Andrea laughed and told me, “We’ll probably all be working for Cassie next year.”

Cassie smiled, but I had a feeling she actually felt that we all really should have been working for her already.

The rest of the tour was a blur. We ventured out into other pods, but after twenty minutes of meeting people, my brain started to go numb. Andrea introduced me to coworkers I knew I wouldn’t remember if I bumped into them five minutes later.

But I did learn the important things—where the bathrooms were, and the mail and supply room. The mailroom was headed by a guy with a long blond ponytail named James. According to Andrea he had been a bike messenger until he had been hit by a bus. He still had the restless energy that I had noticed in bike messengers, that same way of catching your eye just long enough to let you know that he would be glad to run right over you.

The only other guy I detected in the office was the head of the art department, named Troy Raymond. His office was cavernous and wallpapered with huge prints of cover art—which was to say, men with no shirts. There were two couches in his office (“For meetings,” he explained. “I like to be comfy.”) and a huge desk, and to the side, a drafting table.

“Troy’s our link between the production folk downstairs and editorial,” Andrea explained.

“Downstairs?”

He laughed. “The mole people. Art, copyediting, production. The unglamorous folk.”

“Right, like
we’re
glamorous,” Andrea said.

Troy gave my outfit a pointed once-over. “I wonder. That’s an awfully nice Chanel there. Who’d you have to sleep with to afford that?”

I began to sputter about it being a hand-me-down, and Troy burst out laughing. “I was just zooming you.”

As Andrea and I left Troy’s office, she laughed. “Those ‘meetings’ he was talking about are his interviews with cover models. He’s the only one here who has any fun.”

I shook my head. “Not many men work at Candlelight, do they?”

“There are more in production, but editorial’s almost exclusively women right now. The president of the company is a man, of course. Art Salvatore.”

“I didn’t meet him.”

“And you probably won’t until the Christmas party. His office is over there”—she pointed to a long, dark corridor—“but he rarely walks among us.”

“Oh, I see. Head honcho.”

“More than that.” She lowered her voice. “It’s said that the Salvatore family used to be in the laundry business, if you know what I mean.”

My mouth popped open stupidly, and my voice came out in a squeak. “The mob is running Candlelight Books?” Being from Ohio, I was still fascinated when I bumped into anything vaguely Godfatherlike, even after two years of living in Brooklyn. I never expected organized crime in romance publishing, though.

“It’s all just a rumor, I think, but we like to keep it going. It’s the only thing lending this place even a little bit of mystique.”

Apparently the tour was over, but Andrea seemed reluctant to go back to her desk. “Okay—pop quiz time,” she said. “Show me the way to the coffee room.”

That was one quiz I could ace. Asking me to put names to faces of ten percent of the people I’d just met would have stumped me, but caffeine was important. I couldn’t have made it to the coffee room any faster if I had been laser guided.

“I’m impressed,” Andrea said.

“Impressed by what?” A woman dipping her Celestial Seasonings tea bag into a mug of hot water turned to us. I had met her at her desk already. Her name was Madeline, and she looked like she had stepped off the pages of a magazine cover. She towered over Andrea and me. And she wasn’t just pretty, she was stunning.

“Rebecca found the kitchen on her first try,” Andrea said.

Madeline smiled big, as if I really had achieved great things already. “That’s terrific.”

When she sashayed out with her cup of herbal tea, Andrea leaned toward me. “She’s an associate editor, and very well connected. From the mailroom to the boardroom, she’s got this place covered. Both James and Art have the hots for her.”

“What about Troy?” I asked.

“He’s got the hots for both Art and James.”

“Well! Who have we here?” a new voice asked.

“Hey, Mary Jo. This is Rebecca.”

Mary Jo smiled but didn’t stop what she was doing. She wore chic rectangular wire frame glasses and was anorexically thin. Arms stuck out through the holes in her sleeveless shirt like chicken wings that had been picked clean. She poured coffee into a mug that had a Cathy cartoon on it. Cathy was sitting behind a desk; the caption read, “
I hate Mondays!
” Into that cup Mary Jo emptied two packets of sweetener and about a quarter cup of non dairy creamer. My mouth started to pucker just looking at that concoction.

“Mercedes told me a lot about you,” she said.

She never stopped smiling, or stirring her creamer, but with one sharp flick of her eyes, I felt she was telling me something. And that something was that she had my number.

I muttered something about hoping it wasn’t all bad.

She dropped her stir stick in the garbage and picked up her mug. “No, it was mostly good.”

Mostly?

“Of course, too much praise begins to sound suspicious, doesn’t it?” She laughed tightly. “Oh, well, you two go back to your tour. Don’t let it last all day, though.”

The moment she was out of earshot, Andrea mimicked, “Don’t let it last all day!” in a snippy little whisper.

“She didn’t seem too friendly…” I ventured.

Andrea rolled her eyes. “Ignore her when at all possible. She’s a tyrant.”

I nodded.

“Don’t get on her bad side, though,” Andrea advised. “You get on her bad side, and…” She stopped and made a slitting motion across her throat.

“For some reason, I feel like I already am on her bad side.” Like my house just fell on her sister, basically.

“That’s just her way. You know the type—she’s a…” She frowned. “Well, a bitch. And she’s second in command under Mercedes, so she tends to get a little nervous if Mercedes takes too much of a shine to anyone. As if any of us would want her stupid job!”

“Yeah, that’s crazy.”

“That’s Mary Jo. You know that coffee cup with Cathy on it? She’s had it ever since she was an editorial assistant. Almost twenty years! The first year she started work, her Secret Santa gave it to her. She’s got a real thing about it.”

“Maybe there’s some deep psychological reason, or…”

“Yeah, and that reason is she’s a controlling, obsessive loon.” She sighed. “Okay, back to work.”

As we trudged back to our offices, I felt a knot of dread in my tummy, like I was being dropped off at kindergarten or something. I could handle meeting people. That was a snap.

But work.
That
was the tricky part.

B
y lunch, I was finally beginning to relax, if only because it finally dawned on me that chances were good that I wouldn’t be fired on my first day.

I had worried that once Andrea dropped me back by my office, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, besides stare at those ominous manuscript piles on the bookshelves. But if there was anything I really knew how to do, it was fritter away time. First I had to check out my computer. Solitaire had not been removed, and I even had pinball! This reminded me of the e-mail question, so I set up my account at
[email protected]
. Then of course I had to e-mail all my family and friends and brag about my new corporate identity.

My sister Ellen replied immediately. She had just finished law school the year before and was working in a law firm back in Cleveland.

 

I’m psyched about your new job. Congrats! I don’t read romances, natch, but what a hoot to be working there. Maybe you can send me a few beach books next summer. (I guess I do read a few of those…just don’t tell anyone here at the office!) XOX, E

 

Once I started looking at it,
rabbot
seemed like a really bizarre handle. Like rabbit misspelled, or a combination of rabbit and robot. I started imagining bad sci-fi movie titles.
Attack of the Killer Rabbots!

So after much contemplation and doodling on my notepad, I changed my address to the more respectable
rebecca.abbot@ candlelight.net
. And then, of course, I had to send out my change of address.

Ellen wrote back in a flash.

 

Stop procrastinating and get to work!

XOX, E

Oh, and one of my coworkers wants to know if you publish something called Regencies? I think they’re like fake Jane Austen books…which actually sounds kind of good, now that I think about it. Do you really get freebies?

 

I made a note to send Ellen books.

All in all, setting up my e-mail killed a good hour and a half. A few games of pinball later, Andrea was knocking on my door. I reduced the screen and swiveled toward her.

“How’s it going?”

“Great!” I said.

“Lunch?”

I was up like a shot. “Sure.”

Rita was right behind her. “My treat.”

“Which means she’s expensing it,” Andrea translated.

We stopped by Cassie’s office on our way out. “Want to go to lunch with us?” Rita asked her.

A plastic serving container of breadsticks and celery sat on the desk next to the manuscript she was reading, along with a half-eaten apple. “I’d love to, but I promised myself I would read this book today.” She eyed me staring at her meal. Like any veteran of Weight Watchers (ages twelve and fifteen), I was no stranger to breadsticks. I sometimes wondered if there were any other people besides WW veterans who actually ate those things.

I smiled at her, sensing a kindred spirit.

She did not smile back. “I like to stay up on things.”

“Well, carry on,” Rita said. “We’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”

Two hours later, we ambled back to the office, full of Chinese food. I had expected to get the lowdown about what they expected from me in my job. Instead, I got gossip. Gossip about everyone. There were no affairs reported, no embezzling or money scandals, no shocking Candlelight secrets revealed, although you wouldn’t have guessed it from the urgent tone in Rita and Andrea’s voices.

“Did you know Ann takes her Maltese to doggy daycare every day?”

“It must cost her a fortune.”

“What else does she have to spend it on? The woman has no life. It’s pathetic.”

“Sad. She should try online dating.”

“First she should try to do something about that acne scarring.”

“Would insurance cover plastic surgery for that?”

“She could pay for it herself if she weren’t wasting all her money on her canine.”

They asked me a few polite questions about myself, which I evaded to the best of my ability. (If Ann and her doggy daycare were worth a conversational massacre, imagine the hay they could have made out of my living with my ex-boyfriend.) By the time the fortunes cookies rolled around, it felt like I had been working with them for months instead of hours.

When I got back, I continued to pile up accomplishments. I played a few rounds of solitaire and did very well. A few people, some of whom I had met that morning, came by to ask how I was settling in. Actually, I think they had afternoon restlessness and just wanted to get away from their desks for a while.

At one point, I had three other editors and Lindsay the editorial assistant all squeezed into my office, talking about famous person sightings they’d had in New York City. Ann—she of the pampered pooch—had stood in a deli line behind Leonardo DiCaprio, which was pretty damn impressive. The only famous person I’d come in that close contact with was Al Roker, who Fleishman and I had seen coming up the theater aisle the night we had gone to see
Gypsy.

Lindsay had a good one. “Whoopi Goldberg goes to my dentist.”

This revelation brought gasps. “No
way!
” Madeline exclaimed. “
Your
dentist?”

Lindsay puffed up a little, sensing she had scored. “I saw her in the waiting room once, even. She was there for a cleaning, the hygienist told me.”

“Where? What dentist?”

“His name is Dr. Stein, and he’s on Eighty-fifth Street.”

Ann’s forehead wrinkled. “Does Whoopi Goldberg have good teeth?”

“Of course she has good teeth! She’s a movie star.”

“I’m sure they’re capped. All actors have caps.”

“Be crazy not to. In a movie close-up an incisor can look twenty feet tall.”

“Wait,” Andrea said. “
Our
insurance pays for Whoopi’s dentist?”

Lindsay nodded her head.

“That’s it. I’m switching.”

“Just like that? Because Whoopi goes somewhere else?”

“Why should I settle for substandard?” Andrea asked defensively. “You can bet with all that money she has, Whoopi’s checked out her dental care options.”

“Do you know she travels in her own bus?” someone asked. “Like a rock star.”

Just as the conversation was about to turn full tilt onto the subject of celebrity transport, someone rapped on my doorjamb. Standing behind Lindsay was a woman of medium height, with dishwater blond hair cut in an unflattering page boy, and wearing an olive green pantsuit of the most aggressively dumpy design imaginable. She surveyed the crowd through an owlish pair of glasses.

Suddenly, it was as if someone had shot off a bird gun at a duck pond. Coworkers flew out my door, leaving me floating all alone in the sights of…well, whoever this was. I still didn’t know, but a knot of foreboding formed in the pit of my stomach.

“Hi,” I said, attempting to keep the uneasiness out of my voice.

She smiled tightly. “I didn’t mean to break up your little party.”

I blushed self-consciously. “No—it’s just my first day. I’m Rebecca, by the way.”

“Hi, Rebecca, I’m Janice Wunch.”

I really had to keep my lips from twitching. If ever a person looked like a Janice Wunch, it was this woman. Poor thing. You would think she would have changed her name, or at least her glasses.

“I’m the production manager.”

I kept the polite smile frozen on my face. I had no idea what this meant.

“I have a little list here—well, actually, it’s quite long—of things of yours that are late to production.”

“Of mine?” I asked, confused. “But I just got here.”

“I’m sure many of these are projects that were originally Julie’s, but of course they’re your babies now.”

“Oh, I see…”

She handed a list to me, which filled up an entire page. It was staggering how late I could be on everything on my first day.

“In terms of priority, of course, the edit for
The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard
needs to get done first. It’s nearly a month late. I have told Rita about this repeatedly, and she said she was going to get Lindsay to do a preliminary edit, but then apparently she changed her mind when Lindsay left the manuscript on a crosstown bus and they had to ask the author’s agent for a duplicate.”

I nodded. As urgent as the situation was with
The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard,
there were two other late edits on the list, along with other stuff that I was completely clueless about. What was an art info sheet? I owed five of those. Where was cover copy supposed to come from? (
Me?
I wondered with growing hysteria.)

“No big deal,” Janice said. “Just get it to me ASAP—or by the end of the week, if you can.”

I gulped. The end of the week was sooner than what I had in mind. She had to be kidding. “If there’s a problem getting some of this stuff in…”

She blinked at me with what appeared to be sincere incomprehension. “Why should there be?”

Maybe because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?

My heart started to pound. This was why you should never stretch the truth in a job interview. Eventually someone was going to expect you to know something.

When Janice Wunch left my office, I closed the door behind her and succumbed to a moment of blind panic. What the hell was I going to do now? I was contemplating simply running away and spending the rest of my life as an editorial fugitive when my phone rang. I leapt for it. I didn’t care if it was bad news. At least someone from the outside world was trying to contact me.

It was Fleishman. “How’s the little editor doing?”

“She’s dying.”

He laughed. “You sound stressed.”

I told him about the late list. I told him I didn’t even know what most of this stuff was. I told him to prepare for my impending departure from the ranks of the employed. “I’ll send the clothes back to your mom,” I promised.

“Just go ask that assistant person what to do,” he said.

“Lindsay? But she’ll think I’m an idiot.”

“All the better—that’ll make her day. Assistants love to think people working over them are incompetent morons. It reinforces their own suspicions that they should actually be running things themselves.”

“Yeah, but this girl seems…well, incompetent. I would be happy to give her ego a boost, but I don’t trust her to give me correct information.”

“Hm. Is there anyone else you could ask?”

I thought of Cassie, who looked as if she had never made an incompetent move in her life. “Well, I’ll give it some thought.”

“That’s the spirit!” Fleishman said.

“Anyway, I should be home around six-thirty.” I felt a sudden longing to be there now.

“Good, because I’ve got a huge surprise for you.”

“I hope it involves a large pizza box.” After this afternoon, I had a feeling I was going to need some serious comfort food.

He laughed. “Oh, it’s better than that.”

There was a knock on my door and I hung up the phone to answer it. James, the mailroom guy, was standing there, his stance impatient. He was wearing headphones. “Mail,” he mumbled.

He handed me a plastic tub full of manila envelopes, business letters, and fat padded mailers, all addressed to Julie Spears. I grabbed it automatically and then staggered back under its weight. “Hey, wait a minute!”

He frowned and asked loudly, over whatever was being pumped into his ears, “What’s the matter? You’re her now, right?”

He pointed to Julie’s name.

As much as I would have loved to refuse delivery at that moment, I had to admit that I was indeed Julie now. Damn.

I began to sort through the top of the pile, separating the letters from the packages. I decided that I would come in early tomorrow to open the packages. I needed to think of some kind of logging system, since I didn’t see any evidence of one among Julie’s stuff. Gingerly, I opened a few letters.

Happily, most of them seemed manageable. A woman wanted to know if she could send me her book about a nurse midwife who finds herself pregnant after having a fling at her ten-year high school reunion. Sounded good to me. Another writer was dying to have me read her romantic suspense novel involving a female paratrooper who is taken hostage in a war-torn country and falls in love with a Norwegian Red Cross worker. That sounded good, too. But what did I know? I fired off letters to basically everybody telling them to mail me whatever.

A reader wrote to inform me that she had found several typographical errors, including the misspelling of the word gynecological, in a book called
Twins on His Doorstep.
She wanted to know if Candlelight books wanted to hire her to proofread their books. I looked up the word
gynecological.

Then I looked up
misspell.

I put the letter aside with a note to query Kathy Leo.

Several people had written requesting guidelines for writing romances. I searched Julie’s file cabinet, but found nothing under guidelines. When I went over to Lindsay’s cubicle to ask her about guidelines, she wasn’t there.

I was pondering how unethical it would be to rifle through someone else’s filing cabinet when Rita flew out of her door and almost slammed into me. She looked wild-eyed. “Where’s Lindsay?” she asked, practically hyperventilating.

“I don’t know. I came here to ask her about guidelines.”

“She didn’t go to the mailroom, did she?” Her voice cracked on the word mailroom.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“I hope I didn’t miss her.”

I tilted my head. “Is everything all right?”

Rita sighed. “Probably. But one time she sent a manuscript to the wrong author, and since then I’ve tried to keep my eye on her when she goes to the mailroom so I can follow and double check them.”