The Pink Ghetto (8 page)

Mercedes, a woman who clung ferociously to her misperceptions. God bless her.

I sputtered modestly, “I don’t know about that…”

He laughed. “I told Luanne that it’s always good to have a new editor anyway. That you’ll probably work extra hard on her behalf.”

I would, I swore I would.

At this point, it didn’t even matter whether Dan Weatherby looked like Russell Crowe or just a plain ol’ dead crow. He could have had a face like roadkill for all I cared. I was pretty sure I was in love with him. Such was the power of a seductive phone voice.

We exchanged a few more moments of chitchat before he rang off, with me still assuring him that I was going to see what could still be done about
Pursuing Paula,
and him assuring me that it would all work out, because I was such a sharp young whippersnapper of an editor. By the time he rang off, I was thoroughly schmoozed.

I leaned back in my chair, savoring the image of myself that Dan Weatherby had imprinted in my head. I was one of those go-to types. A problem solver. The sharpest knife in the drawer, and glamorous to boot.

The seconds ticked by. The image began to fade.

I was me again.

I looked at the clock at the bottom of my computer screen and gasped. It was almost noon! And all I had done all morning was deal with this one cover controversy.

And I still had all those authors to call.

I looked at the list, crossed off the four Cassie had stolen, and considered nipping out to a Chinese restaurant I’d spotted around the corner. A large order of lemon chicken and some potstickers would really bolster my courage.

It would also make the already tight button on my skirt pop.

My stomach rumbled. The sad little sack lunch I’d brought from home mocked me. Could I really face twenty-one—no, seventeen—authors on nothing but tuna salad and an apple? Authors who had been told already that I was a hapless newbie idiot, and maybe worse?

Lemon chicken, lemon chicken, lemon chicken.

Sighing, I picked up the phone and dialed. Let the awkwardness begin.

B
y the time five-thirty rolled around, I felt like something that should be carted off and rendered for pet food. As if being on the phone with authors for three straight hours wasn’t enough, at four o’clock Janice Wunch appeared at my door with an updated late list. Somehow my portion of it had grown by another half page in the past day. Something—perhaps the impatient tapping of Janice’s Naturalizers—told me I wasn’t managing my time wisely.

At the end of the day, I filled up an old Candlelight totebag with homework and staggered to the elevator.

“Good night, Rebecca,” Muriel said. The phones were silent, but in her headset she appeared poised for the slightest hint of a ring. The model of efficiency.

“ ’Night.”

“Is it your intention to burn the midnight oil tonight?”

I grunted.

There was an awkward stretch while Muriel stared at me with her amazing blinkless eyes as I fixed my own drooping gaze at the elevator doors. Finally, they slid open and I escaped inside.

When I got on the elevator, there was someone already on I thought I recognized. At first I thought he must be a movie star or something, then I realized he was the suave elevator guy from the day of my first interview. The one who told me not to be nervous, then informed me I had lipstick on my teeth. He must have thought I was a complete bozo.

“Well, hello!” he said, recognizing me.

He was looking as dapper as he had the last time we had met, while I was sure I had that washed out after-five thing going on. My hair, not brushed since eight
AM
, hung in hanks around my ears, my makeup had long since faded under the fluorescent lighting, and my skirt had very pronounced sit wrinkles. I was not up to Suave Guy’s standard. Suave Guy didn’t even have a five o’clock shadow.

“So you got the job,” he said. “Congratulations.”

I felt like weeping on his shoulder. “Thanks. Never has the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ seemed more apt.”

“That’s just that new job feeling. It’ll pass when you get that first paycheck.”

Paycheck! I had forgotten all about that concept, even though it was my entire reason for being here. Now the prospect appeared to me like the light at the end of the tunnel. Or a carrot before the donkey. I was going to be paid for all this eventually. The very idea made my spine straighten.

At the ground floor, Suave Guy held the door and waited for me to exit first. (As a suave guy should.) “Good night,” he said as I stepped out.

“Good night.” I walked ahead of him out of the building and headed for the subway, feeling a little more hopeful than I had when I’d stepped onto the elevator. I needed a Suave Guy with me twenty-four hours a day. A pocket size Suave Guy.

On second thought, full size was awfully nice.

The train took forever to arrive and then managed to get stalled in a tunnel, so when I finally climbed the stairs to the apartment, it was almost seven o’clock. The door flew open and Maxwell came bounding out like a carnival performer just shot from the cannon. He quivered with energy and let out a series of yips. Finally, seeing that not even his boundless enthusiasm would hurry me along, he slapped his rump down at the top of the stairs and watched with an eagerly thumping tail as I climbed the last flight. Looking at those adorable brown eyes and those goofy folded ears, I had to smile and make a few cooing sounds.

Fleishman leaned against the doorjamb. “How’d it go?”

That was a hard question to answer, mainly because I wasn’t sure if there were enough synonyms for the word bad to encompass everything I had to explain. I crossed the threshold with the puppy in my arms and deposited him on the floor. Our apartment smelled doggy now. “Where’s Wendy?”

“Where else? Stuck in the NYU gulag.”

I collapsed onto the futon—right on top of Max. How had he jumped up so fast? He hadn’t been wasting his day, obviously. I let him crawl up on my chest and lick the bottom of my chin. I was too tired to be grossed out.

“Are you okay?”

I slit one eye open. Fleishman was bent over me, looking as one might when trying to discern whether that homeless person you just passed was actually dead or alive.

“Fine.”

“Good. How about some dinner?”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Rebecca. You have to eat.”

“No I don’t. Eating will only prolong it.”

“Prolong what?”

“My life.”

I could hear his foot tapping. My life was full of foot tappers today. “You aren’t on some kind of funky diet, are you?”

“I’m on the exhaustion diet,” I said.

“The best thing for that is to go for a walk.”

I had just enough energy left to lift my head and glare at that maniac.

He was smiling at me impatiently. So was the dog. “Maxwell and I have been cooped up all day long. We need air.”

So he had skipped work again and he wanted
me
to walk the dog?

“And I want you to tell me all about your day,” he said.

I allowed myself to be persuaded. Especially when the word gelato was raised. I changed into sneakers and a pair of pedal pushers and out the door we went—my roommate, my dog, and me. We were taking little Max to the park together for the first time.

Wendy was right. This business of having joint custody of a dog did feel intimate. But what was wrong with that? I knew it was dangerous to think this way—to let myself get carried away—but Fleishman and I did go way back. So I occasionally had a, shall we say, fondness for him…was that so bad?

Whenever I saw Wendy or one of my sisters shaking their heads over my relationship with Fleishman, it made me want to scream. Was this or was this not the twenty-first century? In their minds—especially my family’s—there was simply no complexity allowed when it came to relations between the sexes. But surely we had progressed to the point where a man and a woman could be friends.

Mind you, this enlightened attitude of mine did not prevent me from periodically holing up by myself and something Sara Lee and weeping over the fact that Fleish just didn’t love me. I wasn’t made of stone. The mere thought of
When Harry Met Sally,
a film most women thought of as the best feel-good movie of the past century, was enough to send me into a week-long funk. I knew, knew it in my bones, that there wasn’t going to be any big New Year’s happy ending scene for us at the end of the last reel.

Nope. Wasn’t going to happen.

See? I wasn’t completely unrealistic.

It’s just that meeting Fleishman had changed everything for me.

Okay, actually it was losing forty-five pounds that changed everything. But Fleishman was the first guy who ever saw me as I wanted to be seen—in other words, not as a big fat loser. Maybe it was the case of the baby duckling latching onto the first creature it sees, but when Fleishman and I paired off during our first year in college, it felt right.

Likewise, when we split up the next year, it felt wrong. But I was willing to deal with that. To play it cool. You don’t spend eighteen years of your life feeling like one of society’s castoffs without developing a teeny bit of self-protection. Just friends? Okay, I could handle that.

The truth was, if I tried to envision waking up on a weekend morning without him, it felt like a crater was opening up in my chest.

“So what happened at work?” he asked.

I told him he didn’t want to know. He insisted he did. I hedged. He cajoled. We stopped for ice cream.

And then it all came spilling out. I told him all about Luanne, the pedophile cover, Cassie’s treachery, having to call all the authors who had been told I was an idiot, then Janice Wunch and the late list. It was good to get it off my chest.

All the while, Fleishman sat across the wrought iron café table from me, barely touching his plastic lavender tulip cup of gelato. I really didn’t expect anything more from Fleishman than what he was giving me—a sympathetic ear and a few understanding nods.

But when I was done, and was scraping at the last bit of rum coconut raisin in my cup, I was surprised to find myself getting an earful.

“This is just outrageous!” he exclaimed. “You need to march up to that Cassie woman tomorrow morning—first thing, Rebecca—and tell her to give you those authors back!”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Of course you can. Tell her where to get off.” He squinted. “Who did she take? Anybody good?”

I lifted my shoulders. “I’m not sure. I still don’t know who most of these people are. And anyway, I’m obviously swamped. I’m not sure I should go chasing after more work.”

His jaw dropped. “It’s the principle of the thing, damn it. At the very least, you need to tell your boss what’s going on.”

“Squeal, you mean?”

“You have to squeal.”

“But wouldn’t that just make me look weak twice over?”

He whapped his napkin against the table. “Man, we need to put you on angry pills. This is the corporate world, Rebecca. You have to be ready to show your claws.”

I know he was trying to help me, but I couldn’t help thinking,
what the hell do
you
know about the corporate world?
He’d been a part-time telemarketer for the past six months. Before that, he’d been a summer intern at
Theater World
magazine, and before that he had enjoyed the shortest ushering career ever in the twenty-year history of the Angelika after chucking a Mike and Ike box at a man who was talking during a Juliette Binoche movie.

Fortunately, the box had been empty. Unfortunately, the man he’d chucked it at was Martin Scorsese.

But I did not remind him of any of this. He was trying to help me.

And maybe he was right. I couldn’t let things go on this way.

“If you don’t do something now, you’ll wind up as this Cassie creature’s personal punching bag,” he warned.

I sighed. “I wish I could just switch places with her.”

His brows scrunched. “What do you mean?”

“I think her nose was bent out of joint when I came in a level above her. Being associate rather than assistant doesn’t matter to me. So I wish I could just tell her, here, take your damn promotion and leave me alone. All I want is a paycheck.”

Fleishman slammed his tulip cup on the table, I think to free up both hands so he could tear his hair out. “Where to begin?” he moaned, looking up at the heavens. He reached across the table for my hand. “First off, you don’t cede the advantage to this person, okay?
Ever.
So what if you got where you are through a freakish stroke of good fortune? Them’s the breaks. You’re the one who usually complains about having bad luck, remember? Well, this time luck worked in your favor. So you have to take advantage. Understand?”

I laughed.

“This Cassie person sounds like a classic DJB.”

“What’s that?”

“A demented jealous bitch. She needs to be crushed.”

“Right. I’m just the person to do that.”

“You have to, Rebecca. You owe it to the rest of humanity to stop this woman before she goes any further down the path of demented jealous bitchiness. You didn’t ask for it, but this is your mission now.”

“What should I do?”

“First off, you have to watch your back. Lock your office door if you have to.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious. Do not leave her another opening. And the second thing is, undercut her at every opportunity. Steam right over her pathetic stalled career. You’ve already got a head start on her. You can do this, Rebecca. Look how far you’ve come in the publishing world just by mistake! And I know somewhere in that jellyfish personality of yours is a will of cast iron just crying to get out. You’re the woman who lost forty-five pounds in four months, remember? You’re tougher and smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

Damn. He was right. Why shouldn’t I succeed?

There was just one problem. Deep down I still felt that I was only kidding myself. While Fleishman was talking at me, I could believe that I would emerge triumphant in this situation. But unassisted, I am a ten-minute optimist.