Читать книгу The Pink Ghetto - Liz Ireland - Страница 8

Candlelight Books was located on two floors of a mammoth New York office building in Midtown. I huddled in a coffee shop in the lobby until it was just time for my appointment, then I hurried up. The only other person on the elevator was a tall, good looking man. Really good looking, I decided, doing a double-take. Dark blond hair, brown eyes. A combination of buttoned down and hott, with two Ts. I took all this as a good sign. Despite the butterflies in my stomach, I couldn’t be too nervous if I still wanted to take the time to ogle some man-flesh.

He tilted his head at me. I smiled.

He frowned.

I averted my eyes.

“Job interview?” he asked.

I swerved back toward him, amazed. It was like he had powers, or something. “My God, you could be on Oprah. How did you know?”

Laughing, he lifted his shoulders. “You looked nervous.”

I sank against the wall. Damn! “Nervous isn’t exactly what I’m trying to convey.”

“But you shouldn’t be nervous at all,” he said. “I’d hire you.”

He was just being nice, but I was grateful. “You don’t happen to work at Candlelight Books, do you?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“Just the same, you might want to check your teeth.” A fresh Kleenex materialized in his hand, and he offered it to me. “Lipstick.”

Startled, I glanced into the stainless steel of the doors and just before they opened, I saw a smudge of red on my left front tooth. “Shit!” I murmured, grabbing the Kleenex and scrubbing frantically. How embarrassing. I felt like a dumbass (with two Ss).

“Break a leg!” he called after me as I stumbled off the elevator.

I was standing in a carpeted lobby whose walls were lined with glass-covered bookcases. The cases gave the appearance of guarding something valuable, though the books inside them were rack-sized paperbacks you would see at any Walgreens in the country. Many of the covers bore pictures of men (usually shirtless) and women (usually in the process of tastefully losing their shirts), undulating against each other in various chaste and not-so-chaste ways. Some of them just had couples staring at each other, or the horizon, with dramatic urgency. A few just had a single man, usually in a cowboy hat, standing rugged and alone and staring ahead with what I supposed was meant to be a sensual glower.

A woman about my age was doing phone duty at a large, double-tiered reception desk. All that was visible of her was her heart-shaped face, long blond hair, and a Peter Pan blouse in baby blue with navy blue piping—a hideous early Donna Reed thing that I hoped for her sake was being worn as an ironic statement.

She smiled briskly at me. “May I help you?”

“I’m Rebecca Abbot. I have an appointment with Kathy Leo.”

“Kathy will be out momentarily,” the receptionist announced after buzzing her.

Momentarily left me five minutes to stare more closely at the books in the cases. I recognized very few names. I had spent all my college years reading. I had been buried in books, but I knew nothing about romances. It was like I was discovering a counterculture.

“Good, you’re on time!” a voice said to me before I knew I had been spotted. Kathy Leo strode toward me with her hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you. Come on back.”

I was ushered through a maze of hallways, all buzzing with romance novel–related activity. Little clumps of people gathered together talking looked up with obvious curiosity at me as I walked by. Along one corridor we passed a lone young woman standing at a copying machine, staring mesmerized at the flashing light of the Xerox.

My future, I thought.

But it looked good! Earning money as a copying machine zombie sounded just fine. I’d take it.

Kathy escorted me into an unadorned beige box of an office. Her desk had children’s pictures on it, a computer, and a Rolodex, but little else. “I showed your resume to the editorial director, Mercedes Coe, and she thought it looked good. Really good. So I want you to meet with her today. She’s got a meeting at one-thirty, but we should be able to just sneak you in.”

“Great!” I said, wondering when she was going to ask how fast I could type. (I was prepared to lie.)

“Good—let’s go.”

And that was that. The next thing I knew, I was being led back through the maze again, until we arrived at what was clearly set up to be an outer office—a woman in her early twenties was sitting in front of a computer next to a door with a plaque that read Editorial Director. The absence of a name made me wonder if editorial directors came and went with such regularity it didn’t seem worth the effort.

“Is she in?” Kathy asked.

“She’s in,” the assistant said, giving me a quick visual going over. Her gaze seemed to linger on my Mao suit mono-bosom.

Damn. I should have taken Fleishman’s advice and worn something else. The tricky part was, what would something else have been?

Under her breath, the assistant started singing a bluesy song as I was shown into the office. “Stormy Weather.” I flicked a glance at her to see if there was some sort of message in it, but she seemed completely absorbed in whatever was on her computer screen.

Inside the editorial director’s office, Kathy parked me in front of a desk that was a mass of stacked papers, pink message slips, paperback books, and yellow legal pads. Kathy made a quick introduction, and Mercedes Coe hopped up from her chair and came around.

“Oh good! You’re here.”

She was tall, slender, and wore a suit that was amazingly like the one I was wearing, only it was navy blue and looked a lot better on her. Her blond hair was swept up into some kind of coil on the back of her head, and her lips were bright red against her pale skin. Around her neck she had knotted a silk scarf in an elaborate stab at being Catherine Deneuve.

“I have to be at a meeting at one-thirty,” Mercedes informed us.

It was one-twenty already.

“I told her you didn’t have much time,” Kathy said.

“I’ve got a senior ed meeting,” Mercedes told me.

Kathy left us alone, and I expected a rushed five minutes full of questions, after which I would be shown the door.

Mercedes told me to take a seat, and then she lowered herself down in her leather desk chair. “I was very intrigued by your resume. Very intrigued,” she said, rifling through the mess on her desktop. “If I can find it…” she muttered. “Where did it scamper off to?”

I didn’t see it there.

She lifted her shoulders. “Oh well! I suppose it’s times like these when one is glad to have a photographic memory.”

I chuckled. I appreciate sarcasm.

But her expression wiped the grin off my face. “No, really. I do,” she said, with a little roll of her eyes to let me know what a burden this kind of super intelligence could be at times. “That’s how I ended up graduating cum laude from Stanford. It couldn’t have been hard work, I assure you!” She laughed modestly, all the while staring pointedly at the Stanford diploma hanging on a wall to my right. “And you went to school…where?”

I gave her the name of my private college in Ohio; it was a good school, a little liberal arts haven, but not that many people knew about it. We had no major sports team.

“Small schools have great benefits,” Mercedes observed consolingly. “Your major was…?”

“English literature,” I said.

“Right! English lit.” She chuckled. “Now I remember—it seemed strange to me that you didn’t major in French, because you went on to work with Sylvie Arnaud. You were her ghostwriter-editor?”

I gulped. Had I written that? I was prone to resume inflation—it’s hard not to be when you’re starting out with the flaccid balloon of resumes. “Well, some might say that I was something more like an all-around personal assistant.”

“Right! Interesting!” She leaned back, clearly impressed. Clearly having no clue that I had spent the past two years combing Manhattan for jars of okra. “She knew Albert Camus, I’m sure.”

I had no idea. I nodded. “She knew everybody.”

“I did my senior thesis on Camus.”

“Oh!” I was trying to remember who that guy was, exactly. Had he written The Little Prince? “How fascinating.”

“In French, of course.” She rattled off a question at me in rapid fire, extravagantly accented French.

I had studied French in school, but I hadn’t given it much of a thought in years. Sylvie had always spoken to me in English. And even in my heyday of Continuing French Conversation during senior year, I never knew the language so well that I didn’t panic when someone was talking at me full speed.

In this case, I did what I always did when I didn’t exactly understand. I agreed. “Bien sur!”

This seemed to satisfy Mercedes. “You know, I saw her mentioned the other day somewhere…”

“The New York Review of Books.”

“Exactly!” Mercedes seemed gratified that I would assume she read that magazine. Actually, I assumed she didn’t. Did anyone? “So…um…” She was searching her cum laude brain for my name, I presumed.

“Rebecca,” I reminded her.

“Right! Tell me a little more about yourself, Rebecca.”

If there had been a BS meter on Mercedes’s desk, for the next five minutes its needle would have been tilting frantically into the red. I was an unrecognized child prodigy, torn between all of my varied interests, but what I had always been attracted to was the written word. I had edited my school literary magazine. (True enough.) We had worked mostly on student work, but also with professionals like Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley. (Almost true—I had written those esteemed women to ask if they would contribute a story, and each had written back to politely refuse.) My dream was to edit books, but I knew I needed to start small, pay my dues. Working with a woman like Sylvie had taught me all about patience. (I had to mention Sylvie again, since Mercedes seemed so impressed by her.)

But Mercedes didn’t have a BS meter on her desk, and she didn’t seem to have one in her brain, either. All during my tall tale, she tapped a silver fountain pen on her desk blotter and didn’t appear to notice that it was dribbling puddles of ink everywhere. “Well! I am impressed.”

The minutes were ticking away. The meeting she had needed to rush out to had surely started by now?

“Very impressed indeed!”

I felt a surge of hope. I started ticking the days off in my head. If I started work the next Monday, maybe I would be getting a paycheck two weeks after that. Which meant that we might fall short on the rent the next month, but after that we would be on easy street.

Which reminded me. Money. “How much does this job pay?” I blurted out.

Mercedes’s face fell, and I knew instantly that I had made a mistake. Her expression couldn’t have looked any more uncomfortable if I had farted.

She tapped her fingers, shifted in her chair, and finally cleared her throat. “You didn’t go over this with Kathy?”

I shook my head. Kathy! That’s who I should have asked.

“Well, an assistant here starts at…generally speaking…” She named a figure in the low thirties. My heart pounded. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t help saying the number aloud.

Mercedes’s eyes narrowed. “Did you have a specific salary requirement?”

“No!” Then, realizing that I probably sounded very uncool, I added, “That is, not really…”

“Because, naturally, with your experience…”

My lips twisted. Right. With my experience I was lucky not to be asking people if they would like to supersize that.

“I’ll be pulling for you to do well on the test,” she said quickly.

That word, test, stopped me cold. I stopped balancing my checkbook in my head. I’d been hoping to bluff about my typing speed. “When do I take that?”

“I’ll give it to you to take home now,” she said.

Take home? This was obviously not a typing test.

She turned and pillaged the top of a file cabinet stacked with papers, then came back at me with a large manila envelope. “That’s a book proposal. Read it, write an acceptance and revision letter and edit the first chapter, and then drop it off at the front desk.”

I gulped. Edit? They wanted me to be an editor and not just some kind of secretary?

“Oh! And let me get you some books.” She grabbed handfuls from her shelves and shoved them across the desk at me.

I stumbled out of the building with my bundle of stuff, feeling conflicted. A job like this would be great, but what were the chances I would get it?

Nil.

I really needed to be more careful about these jobs I was applying for.

Fleishman and Wendy were thrilled with my freebies. Wendy found a baggy family saga in the pile that piqued her interest. “I love stuff like this.”

“I thought you didn’t read romance novels,” I said.

“I don’t,” she said. “I just like these.”

Fleishman went straight for the category romance novels; he seemed more interested in the camp factor of it all. “Look at this! The Fireman’s Baby Surprise!” He sniggered as he leafed through the front pages. “Is that what women fantasize about now? Having babies with firemen?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I just fantasize about having a paycheck.”

Fleishman stole away with a little hoard of books.

Wendy shot the manila envelope a look of concern. “What’s that? Homework?”

“It’s an editing test. I have to edit a chapter of a manuscript and bring it back to them.”

Wendy tilted her head. “Do you know how to do that?”

“Oh, how hard can it be?” Fleishman piped up from the futon sofa. Then he turned back to his book. “The fireman’s name is Chance. Are there actually people in the world named Chance?”

“Coming from a man named Herbert Dowling Fleishman the Third, I don’t think you have room to sneer.”

He glared at me and sank down on the couch. He always hated it when I reminded him of his name. There was a good reason he went by Fleishman.

“What are you going to do?” Wendy asked me.

“I guess I’m going to treat myself to a crash course in editing.”

For the next two days, I was a slave to the Chicago Manual of Style. I went through two red pencils marking up that manuscript. And in the meantime, I read several of the books. I read The Fireman’s Baby Surprise, Beauty and the Bounty Hunter, and I skimmed a long book that was a retelling of Cinderella set in Scotland in the 1700s called Highland Midnight Magic. I steeped myself in romance.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Hilariously purple prose, I guess. And it had been a long time, maybe forever, since I had heard a man’s sexual organ referred to as his manroot. But for the most part, the thing that surprised me was that the books were so not focused on sex. At least the little modern ones weren’t. (The Scottish book was half sex, half clan war.) The fireman had firehouse politics and an arsonist to deal with, along with his paternity dilemma. The bounty hunter was chasing an heiress wrongly accused of jewel smuggling—so that was a big mess to have to work out. Every step of the way, these poor people had problems, and they were falling in love.

By the end of the week I was beginning to see the appeal. If some schmuck has time to find an arsonist, expose his boss for corruption, find good daycare, and fall in love with a sassy local news reporter, the authors seemed to be saying, there was hope for us all.

I must have done something right, because the day after I turned in my test Kathy Leo called me to tell me to come in again, this time to talk to someone named Rita Davies.

When I was led back to Rita’s office, I was struck at once by the mess. If Mercedes’s office was disorganized, Rita’s could have qualified as a Superfund site. Manuscripts piled up precariously in teetering Seussian columns. I counted six different in-boxes, and all of them were full. Rita was a blousy, heavy-lidded woman with frizzy red hair. She looked up at me when I walked in and took a sip from one of the three coffee mugs on her desk.

“Do you smoke?” she asked by way of greeting.

I was a little taken aback. Was this a trick question? I took a deep breath and sensed a definite smell of tobacco. “Uh…not really. I mean, occasionally I’ll bum one at a bar or something…”

She cut off my answer with a wave. “Because if you want, we can go outside.”

It was drizzling outside. And cold. It wasn’t yet March. “No, I’m fine here.”

“Okay, great. Just a second.” She opened a drawer, tossed out several old pens, what looked like an ancient bagel wrapped in wax paper, and a box of nicotine patches. She took a moment to slap on a patch, waited a moment for the burn to begin, then turned back to me with an easy smile. “Great job on the test, by the way.”

“Thanks. I really liked that story.”

“Yeah, she’s a good author for us. I’ll give you more of her books, if you want.”

“Terrific!” I could give them to Fleishman. Ever since my first interview, he’d been on a romance reading jag.

“Mercedes told me all about you. She said you’re just what we need around here.”

“Oh, well…” What she really needed was a Mighty Maid service.

“She said you had worked with Sylvie Whatsawhosit and really were invaluable to her.”

I just shrugged modestly.

She squinted at me. “Sure you don’t feel like a cigarette?”

I was pretty certain there was a hard and fast rule about not smoking on your job interview. It was probably up there with not showing up shit-faced drunk or wearing flip-flops. I shook my head.

“Nicorette?” she asked, offering me a box.

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

“Wish I could say the same!” She sighed and popped a piece of gum into her mouth. “I guess I should tell you how we work around here. This little area here is referred to as the Pulse Pod.”

“Pulse?” I asked.

“I’m senior editor of the Pulse line.” She pointed to a shelf of books with identical red and white spines that were for the most part obscured by random piles of other books, souvenir ashtrays, and, inexplicably, a pair of beige suede boots. “It’s Candlelight’s line of medical romances. You know—doctors, nurses, paramedics. Even a phlebotomist or two.” I was going to laugh, but she didn’t give me a chance. “As far as staff goes, I’m the senior editor of the pod, and I’ve got an ed assist. Then there’s an assistant editor and an associate. Another person would be such a big help, I can’t tell you. I hope you don’t mind having a ton of work thrown at you all at once. You wouldn’t have much of a learning curve.”

“Learning curves? Who needs ’em?” I joked.

“Right. Well, what I could use is a vacation, but I doubt that’s coming anytime soon, unless it’s in a place with padded walls.”

She went on to explain to me that Pulse Pod people worked on all sorts of books aside from medical romances. “We also work on Hearthsongs, Flames, MetroGirl, Historicals, and occasionally Divines.”

She might have been speaking to me in a foreign tongue. I was lost. All I could think of when she said divine was the cross-dresser who starred in Lust in the Dust. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she meant.

She stopped. “Divine is Candlelight’s inspirational line. Those books are really hot right now. You might say preachers are the new vets. Vet heroes came into vogue a decade ago. And cops are always the rage.” She sighed. “We don’t do a lot of Divines in this pod, though. Mary Jo is pretty possessive of those. Have you met Mary Jo Mahoney?”

I shook my head.

“You will.” She inhaled on her pen. “Lucky bitch—she knows she’s sitting on the gold mine over there in the God Pod. It’s where the real growth is now.”

I left the interview with mixed feelings. I couldn’t decide if the job looked like a great thing or a nightmare. When I got home hauling a totebag full of books, Fleishman was all over me. (Well, all over the totebag.)

“More books? Yay!”

I was beginning to worry about him. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I called in sick.” When I leveled a stare at him, he smiled impishly. “I had to see how your interview turned out.”

“It went fine.”

“I’ll say—there’s a message from Kathy Leo on the machine.”

I gasped and scrambled over to the phone. When I called Kathy, she announced, “I was calling to offer you the position of associate editor for Candlelight Books.”

Associate? I gulped. Maybe I’d heard her wrong. “I thought…”

She laughed. “I know. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Mercedes came to plead your case. The thing is, we can’t up the starting salary for assistants without causing a revolution around here, but she really was impressed with you, so we decided that we should bump you up a job grade.”

Fleishman, who was practically shoving me out of hearing range so he could stick his ear next to the receiver, too, gave me a high five.

“I-I don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “Except…” Except I think I’m in way over my head now. “Except how soon can I start?”