Younger (7 page)

“Are you telling me,” I said, my heart starting to beat faster, “that you—”

“No no,” she said, her face turning even redder than it already looked thanks to the light shining through the fabric of the tent. “No no no no no no no. But that reminds me of something I need you to do for me. I'm going for my first insemination this week, and I need you to be my partner.”

“You mean you told your doctor,” I said, “that I was your—”

“No,” she said. “No no no. It's just that my doctor believes insemination has a better chance of taking if you have a loved one with you to, like, commune with in a soothing way afterward. And right now, you're the closest thing I have to a loved one.”

“Oh,” I said, picturing us sipping champagne and laughing—gently, of course—in a dimly lit examining room. “Okay, sure. When is it?”

“Ten on Tuesday morning.”

“Tuesday morning! That's my second day at work. Teri Jordan wouldn't let me take off if it was my own insemination. Can't we do it in the evening? Or at lunch hour, even?”

“I don't schedule it, my body does,” Maggie said. “That's what my doctor says. It's got to be the morning.”

“Oh, Maggie,” I said, taking her hand in my sweaty one. The mere idea of telling Teri Jordan I needed a morning off summoned a vision of her looming over me, wielding a whip. Or more likely, coolly firing me as she had done to so many before. “Isn't there any other way?”

Maggie shook her head. “This is it. And depending on my hormones, it may be my only chance.”

All this year, I'd been the one who'd needed Maggie. All this year, she'd been there for me, taking my midnight phone calls about Gary, holding me upright at my mother's funeral. And now she was asking for something, the first thing, back.

“Of course,” I said, squeezing her hand. As the vision of the whip-cracking Teri rose up again, I whipped her back. “Don't worry; I'll figure something out.”

“A
lice!”

My bottom had just touched the seat, but already Teri was calling me back into her office. It had been like this all morning.

I rushed to her deskside.

“My coffee's cold,” she said, without looking up.

“But I just poured you a fresh cup.” As in, 1.5 seconds ago. “I even put it in the microwave, to be sure it would be super-hot, like you like it.”

The woman drank her coffee so hot, her mouth must be lined with asbestos.

“Microwave hot is not the same thing as real hot,” Teri said. Still without looking at me, she lifted her cup and dropped it into her wire mesh wastebasket—I mean a real cup, not paper, full of hot coffee, which was even now seeping onto the floor.

“You'll have to clear this away,” Teri said. “And bring me a new cup of coffee.”

As I carried the dripping wastebasket from the office, I told myself that if I wanted a young person's job, I had to be willing to be servile, obedient—to act, in other words, like a young person. An extremely meek, self-effacing young person, much like the young person, in fact, I'd actually been.

Except now I was determined to be different—and the fact was, I actually was different. All those years of life had made me more self-possessed, better able to know what I thought and more willing to say it out loud. That was the spirit with which I wanted to invest my new young self.

But my new boss would have none of it, I could tell. She wanted an employee even quieter and more frightened than the real entry-level Alice Green had been.

I could do it, I told myself. If I could bring my smarts to bear to get myself this job, I could put them to work keeping it, whatever that involved. Teri Jordan might act like a terror, but the truth was she was younger, more overwhelmed, and a way bigger jerk than me. I could definitely handle her.

I brewed a new pot of coffee, adding an extra scoop of coffee to the filter, running the water until it was really cold, waiting until the entire pot had dripped through so that Teri's cup would be of maximum strength. Then, arranging a smile on my face, I carried it to her.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

“I made a whole new pot,” I said, wondering what I'd done wrong this time.

“No, it's this report,” she said. “Like every other publisher, we want to market to the book group ladies, and like every other publisher, we have no fucking idea what they want.”

This was funny to me, because Teri Jordan could very easily be one of the “book group ladies” herself. She was a mom, she lived in the suburbs, she was balancing job and home and marriage. And, presumably, she liked books. But for some reason, she saw the women in the book groups as “them,” very different creatures from “us” here in our bastion of publishing know-how.

“I think they want what we all want,” I said, “a book that's going to keep them awake beyond half a page at the end of a long involved day. A book that's going to feel like it was worth the fifteen or twenty bucks they might have spent on a new top or a nice lunch with a girlfriend because it lifts them out of their lives for a few hours. A book that's rich enough to make that book group night—which might be the only night they get out without their husband or kids—one of the most stimulating, fun nights of the month.”

I hadn't realized I had so much to say on this subject, but I guess after a couple of decades of book group attendance, my thoughts were pretty well honed. I was certainly holding forth, and Teri was sitting there staring at me, her mouth slightly open, exposing the points of her sharp little teeth.

“We're not editors,” she said. “We have nothing to do with the quality of the books.”

I felt myself color. I guessed what I'd been talking about did have to do with editorial, not marketing.

“Our job,” Teri said, pronouncing very clearly as if I was hard of hearing, not hard of marketing, “is to get the books in the hands of the book groups. And no one has figured out an effective way to do that: not via the Internet, not through display techniques, not in the books themselves.”

“Maybe we could give special discounts,” I blurted.

Teri looked at me as if I'd spoken Croatian.

“You know, for volume. If a book retails, with discounts, for eighteen dollars, offer it to book groups who order eight or more for fifteen dollars a copy.”

Teri looked away

“My book group was always very price-conscious,” I tried to explain. “We wanted new books, but we didn't want to pay hardback or even full trade paper prices.”

Now she was shaking her head. “I'm not interested in what some impoverished assistants' or college girls' book club is doing,” she said. “We're marketing to grown-up women with families and houses and professional jobs.”

I opened my mouth to explain, but then realized I couldn't without incriminating myself.

“I thought I made it clear that I was the only idea person in this department,” she said. “I thought you said you were comfortable with that. Have you changed your mind?”

I pressed my lips together and shook my head no, keeping myself from welling up by focusing on the photos of the angel-faced children smiling in their picture frames, my sole piece of evidence that Teri Jordan was human.

“Good, then,” she said. “Mrs. Whitney has called a staff meeting for three thirty this afternoon. I can't imagine why she wants assistants there, but she does. Your function will be to occupy a chair.”

She lifted the new cup of coffee I'd made her and took a sip.

“Ugh,” she said, spitting it back into the cup. “This is horrible. You're going to have to learn to make a decent cup of coffee if you're going to last in this job.”

 

When I filed into Mrs. Whitney's huge corner office for the staff meeting along with, it seemed, virtually everyone else who worked at the company—there were more than fifty people filling the big beige and gold room—I tried to hide behind one of the other assistants and chose a seat in the far corner of the room, as far as possible from where Mrs. Whitney sat near the door. I took out my notebook and kept my head down, relieved I'd let Maggie talk me into cutting long bangs that, if necessary, would cover half my face. I bent my head and let them hang down now, but even so, when everyone was seated and quiet and the meeting finally came to order, I looked up only to find Mrs. Whitney staring hard at me.

Mrs. Whitney looked exactly the same as I remembered her, impressively tall and erect even sitting down in her office chair. Her hair was short and white, and her dimples showed even as she sat with her lips pressed together. She seemed if anything younger than she had when I worked here more than twenty years ago. She was even wearing the same clothes—possibly the exact same clothes—as she'd worn when I last attended a meeting in this office: black patent leather Ferragamos, pearls, and a burgundy wool dress that might have dated from any time in the past forty years.

The fact that she was so unchanged made me feel exposed, as if I too must look utterly as I'd always looked, must be completely recognizable. She kept staring at me, and finally I could no longer stop myself from smiling at her, suddenly wanting only to be myself, hoping for a nod of recognition in return. I idolized Florence Whitney, and I had been one of her favorites, an editorial assistant she'd believed would rise to the top. I'd always dreamed of one day getting the chance to restore her early faith in me, to show her I hadn't failed but had just taken an extended time-out.

But Mrs. Whitney only looked confused and looked away. Unsure of whether I felt disappointed or relieved, I turned toward the door just in time to see Lindsay, the young editor I'd met in the ladies' room the day I got the job. She looked even paler than I remembered, again dressed all in black, and she flashed me a big smile as she took the last chair in the room.

“By now you've all seen the new sales figures,” Mrs. Whitney began abruptly. “They're abysmal.”

People shifted in their seats.

“Who can help me with this?” she said, impatience tingeing her voice.

One of the only men in the room ventured, “The economy—”

“Yes, yes, the economy,” said Mrs. Whitney dismissively, waving a hand as if to shoo a fly. “Of course that's the problem. What are we going to do about it?”

Bring her solutions, not problems: I remembered that as the mantra from the last time I worked at Mrs. Whitney's publishing house, founded with the proceeds from her own best-selling feminist tract,
Why Men Must Die
. Instead of dwelling on setbacks or mistakes, the entire staff was trained to think in terms of solutions, an approach I'd found as useful when dealing with a tantruming toddler or an incompetent roofer as with a manuscript that was two years late.

Emboldened by both our eye contact and Mrs. Whitney's failure to recognize me, I raised my hand. “We might do some special marketing to book clubs,” I said.

Everyone in the room turned to stare. Teri was glaring.

“What Alice means,” Teri interrupted, “is that book clubs are very price-conscious these days. They want new books, but they don't want to pay full price, even for trade paper.”

Mrs. Whitney was nodding. I felt the color creep into my face as I heard Teri parroting my words, but giving me no credit.

“My idea,” said Teri, “is that we offer book groups a discount for volume—say two or three dollars off if they buy eight copies or more. We could start a special Web site for book groups, outlining the discounted titles each month.”

At least that part was her own idea.

“That's very interesting,” Mrs. Whitney says. “But I don't know if it really addresses the problem with our classics, which as you know still make up the bulk of our business.”

Again, I raised my hand, but this time Teri simply started talking.

“We have to work harder than ever to get young women's attention these days,” Teri said. “Plus the popular images of women have become so sexy and idealized—think Paris Hilton. I think we have to revisit our cover look—”

That's when the song started. The loud digital rendition of “Here Comes the Bride.”

All talk ceased as everyone looked around the room for the perpetrator. There was confusion at first over where the sound was coming from—Was there a radio somewhere? Was someone playing a joke?—until the man who had blamed the economy for Gentility's woes said, “That's somebody's cell phone.”

Everyone looked around the room. Who would bring a cell phone into a meeting? A cell phone that was turned on? A few women rummaged through bags and men reached into their jacket pockets, only to find their phones silent. I knew it couldn't be mine because mine rang like a normal phone. And stopped ringing, going over to voice mail, if I didn't pick it up after four rings.

But when the song kept playing, louder and louder, and all the people who'd already checked their phones had come up with nothing, I took my phone out of my bag, simply to declare my innocence.

My phone was flashing. It was vibrating. And, now that it was literally out of the bag, it was playing “Here Comes the Bride” loudly enough to waltz to.

“Oh, God,” I said, feeling as if I could drive the phone, like a stake, through my own heart. “I'm so sorry.”

I pressed the button on the back of the phone to turn it off. Nothing. Again. It kept playing.

Finally, in desperation, I flipped it open and tried to press the Off button, not caring if I hung up on the caller before we even spoke.

The song played on.

As the whole room watched, I brought the phone to my ear.

“Hello?” I said tentatively, expecting to hear Diana's faraway voice, or maybe Maggie's.

But there was no one there. The phone was now blasting the wedding march.

“Hello?” I said, jamming my finger down on the Talk button. “Hello?”

“Oh, for God's sake!” Teri cried. “Get out of here! Get out of here right now.”

Did she mean leave the room, or leave the company? Was I about to set the world record for marketing assistant fired in the shortest time ever?

My face flaming, I stood up and began to push my way across the entire length of the room, like a bride making her way down the aisle. When I reached the door, Lindsay leaped to her feet and followed me out into the hallway.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I'm so embarrassed.”

She reached for the phone. “I know what it is,” she said. “I have this same phone.”

Expertly, her fingers played across the keys until the music finally, thankfully stopped.

“It was your alarm. Apparently you're supposed to have drinks tonight with someone named”—she peered at the phone—“Josh?”

Josh. It all came flooding back to me. New Year's Eve. The guy I kissed. Him programming my phone for our date on the twenty-fifth at Gilberto's. Which was right downstairs.

“So who's Josh?” Lindsay asked. “Your boyfriend?”