Читать книгу The Pink Ghetto - Liz Ireland - Страница 9

Kathy Leo’s call put me in a panic.

What was I getting myself into? Sure, I could bluff my way through a half-hour interview or two. Apparently I had bluffed beyond my wildest dreams. But how could I bluff my way through eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year?

Answer: I couldn’t. I was so screwed.

I didn’t even own the clothes to look the part. Aside from my Mao suit, my wardrobe leaned heavily toward the ultracasual, as befitted an ex-grocery shopper. I was utterly unprepared to enter a world where I needed to look like a grownup. I wasn’t even sure I still owned a pair of panty hose. Didn’t people still wear those?

On Friday, the day after the call from Kathy Leo, I was still flat on my back on the futon in the living room, awash in worry. Worrying was about all I could do, since God knows I didn’t have the funds to remedy my fashion deficiency. And no amount of money would render me suddenly competent for a job I was in no way qualified for.

I had a versatile skirt made out of some kind of tensile material that was supposed to be breathable but really felt like Saran Wrap, and I had the Mao suit. Wendy had an actual dress I could probably borrow to throw my new coworkers off my feebly garmented trail. That was three outfits—maybe five if I accessorized cleverly to disguise the fact that I was wearing the Saran Wrap skirt in three different incarnations. If I did that for two weeks, maybe three, I would probably be able to splurge for something new at Filene’s Basement with my first paycheck.

I envisioned myself at the end of those three weeks in my gamey black skirt, already the office pariah. Possibly by then the powers that be would have found me out—that I, ahem, stretched the truth in those interviews. That I had no business even applying for such a job. That actually, despite four years of college English, none of which remotely touched on the subject of grammar, my relationship with the technical ins and outs of my native tongue was haphazard at best.

In other words, that I was a fraud.

Just as I was considering holding up the nearest Duane Reade for some Zoloft, the apartment door flew open and Fleishman rushed in. At least I was pretty sure it was Fleishman. His distinctive features were almost indistinguishable behind heaps of colorful shopping bags.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “I thought you had work today.”

“I did, but then I got a summons from Natasha.” Fleishman was the only person I knew who called his parents by their first names, a practice that in my family would have earned any kid a whack upside the head. But Natasha Fleishman never seemed to mind; she seemed to think it was part of her son’s bad-boy appeal. Fleishman’s attitude toward his family was always that of a beloved scapegrace. His father might not be speaking to him, his mother might have to sneak into the city to see him, and he might profess contempt for everything they stood for (up to and including budget footwear), but he acted as though he believed they would all eventually come around to see his undeniable value and charm.

I wondered, though. Fleishman took an awful lot for granted. No person, even a father, wanted to be called a miserly old fascist forever. I mean, language like that tended to alienate people.

He grinned and explained his mother’s surprise appearance in town. “Natasha came to have lunch and to drop off part of the Fleishman fortune on Fifth Avenue. She called me at work before heading over, so I took the rest of the day off and here I am.”

I eyed those bags. One said Sak’s, one said Barney’s, and a few others boasted names of stores that I didn’t recognize.

“She took you to all those places?” I asked.

“No, no, no. Natasha just took me to lunch. I told her that we were collecting clothes for a charity drive, though, and so before coming over she loaded up the Benz with all her castoffs.”

“What charity?” I asked.

“The Rebecca Abbot foundation, dedicated to clothing the intolerably attired.”

He laid all the bags at my feet. I could hardly believe it. There had to be thousands of dollars worth of stuff in there!

“Oh my God. It’s like having a fairy godmother burst through the door!”

“I hope you don’t mind hand-me-downs,” he said.

He was joking. How many times had I repeated the factoid that I had not owned a first-hand coat until I was thirteen? When you’re the fifth of six kids, you learn to look at the closets of your siblings as your own personal thrift store. But this—this was a big step up in closet class.

I tossed my arms around Fleishman and gave him a noisy kiss on his cheek. “I can’t believe you did this for me, Fleish.”

“Who else would I do it for?” he asked, his grey eyes practically sparkling at me.

When people ask me to describe Fleishman, I usually say he sort of resembles the young Martin Landau from his North by Northwest days, only that doesn’t really do him justice. He’s that tall, thin, and angular, but he’s dapper. When you look at him—and he’s so distinctive that people always do crane around to look at him on the streets or in restaurants—you would think that he must be an actor, or some other person used to being in the public eye. He might not be handsome in the way Brad Pitt is handsome, but he carries himself like a man accustomed to thinking of himself as exceptional. Aside from his bearing, he has these steely blue-gray eyes—they can seem intense, or full of humor. They are mesmerizing.

On many an occasion those eyes have been my undoing.

I knew better now than to get tripped up by those eyes now. I knew my limits. Both of our limits. I was well aware of what all the sparking and smoldering could lead to: Wild abandon chased quickly by abject regret.

“Well, c’mon,” he said impatiently when I broke eye contact. “Let’s see what the old dame brung you.”

Say this for her, Natasha Fleishman did not skimp on charity. From those shopping bags, which still had a perfumey smell lingering on them, we pulled out a wealth of stuff. Twinset cashmere sweaters, fabulous lightweight wool outfits in rich tweeds and checks, silk shirts, and so-called casual wear that would only be casual to people who actually wore formal wear on a regular basis. Putting on Natasha Fleishman’s casual chic, I would feel like a kid playing dress up.

Yet after a few minutes I was pawing over garments bearing tags with Prada and Dior with a critical eye. The trouble was size. Natasha Fleishman was both taller and smaller than I was. That ruled out pants. I could, however, squeeze into most of the skirts and tops if I was careful to keep my breath sucked in.

Fleishman, who had begun to look like he was losing interest, dug out a vintage dress. “Wow—I think this was my grandmother’s.” It was a fitted turquoise and deep purple houndstooth shift. “I think you should wear this on your first day.”

I took the dress from him and frowned as I looked it over. The tag read Mainbocher, whom I thought was a really big designer at some point. “I’m not sure…”

Fleishman looked hurt. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not the kind of thing you wear on your first day to a job. Unless your job is as a guest star on The Doris Day Show. It’s loud.”

“You need to be louder,” he grumbled, putting the dress aside.

I wasn’t so sure. It was both loud and fitted, and things that were so fitted played right into my paranoia about body issues. Growing up, I had been fat. The kind of girl to whom people would say things like, “You have the loveliest brown eyes!” Or, “You look just like Winona Ryder!” Meaning, Winona Ryder, but fat. I had brown hair and brown eyes, and there our similarities ended.

When I lost weight, I actually did look a little more like Winona Ryder, but by then she was more known for shoplifting than good box office, so the resemblance was no longer in my favor.

“Do you think this is too tight?” I asked Fleishman as I stepped out a few minutes later to model a newer black scoop-neck dress with a Prada tag. I couldn’t believe this stuff was from someone’s discard pile.

Fleishman eyed me critically. “Sit-ups,” he said. “A week of sit-ups xand you’ll look like a million dollars.”

“I don’t have a week,” I reminded him. “Besides, I haven’t done a sit-up since P.E. in seventh grade.”

“Okay, we just won’t eat for the next three days.”

I nodded. If it meant fitting into a free wardrobe, that sounded like a reasonable suggestion.

That was the other thing about Fleishman. We’d known each other so long, he knew my history. He knew that growing up I was the little girl other kids had called Shamu in swim class. My weight had been a torment, but in a perverse way it had also seemed like my security blanket. Fat was who I was. The idea of losing weight and showing up at school thin (I always dreamed that it would happen overnight or something), which according to everyone was supposed to be my dream, made me feel even more self-conscious. I would be like the bald guy who suddenly shows up at work with a toupee.

The summer after high school, though, I took the plunge. I dropped forty-five pounds, and not by a method I would recommend to anyone. But by the time I got to college, I was average size. No one there knew I was only masquerading as a normal person.

At first, Fleishman was the only one at college I told about my deep dark secret. He knew all about me, and understood the yo-yo diet mentality and why I would panic when my size ten jeans started to feel tight. I have developed discipline over the years, but it’s the cockeyed kind of discipline that says that it’s fine to inhale a Krispy Kreme donut (or two!) for breakfast as long as you don’t eat again for the rest of the day.

It’s the kind of discipline Fleishman understood.

“Okay, modeling time’s over,” Fleishman said, two outfits later. “I’m taking you out.”

I tilted my head. “Out where?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “Natasha made a generous donation to the Fleishman fund, too, so I’m treating us both to haircuts.”

Fleishman and I had been so tight knit for so long that we tended to treat financial windfalls as community property. We were so close we sometimes acted like twins with an extra set of parents. The fact that we had actually been an item—and that we had weathered not only a breakup but also a romantic lapse since—only made us that much more inseparable.

Wendy was always telling me that I should be more cautious; if Fleishman considered me his scold, Wendy was mine. Typically, she would wait until Fleishman and I had one of our periodic dust-ups to swoop down on me with advice.

“Someday you might want to put a little distance between yourself and the boy wonder,” she would warn. “I like him, too, but I’ve never been in love with him.”

“I’m not in love with him! We’re friends.”

That was her cue for the piercing stare. “Works out great, too. You get a Svengali, and he gets an entourage.”

I think the old college ties were beginning to grow frayed for Wendy. Luckily, she was in the middle of graduate school now and didn’t have a lot of time for conversations like these anymore. She was too busy working on lighting designs for Waiting for Godot. She was up to her armpits in lighting gels and asbestos cables and didn’t have as much time to devote to our ongoing domestic drama.

It was a beautiful winter day and Fleishman and I larked off into the city like two teenagers playing hooky. First we headed to Soho, where we were coiffed, and then we flitted down busy streets, in and out of stores, buying shoes and little trinkets and basically depleting the Fleishman fund to its previous shaky state. I charged a few things I shouldn’t have, and accepted a few freebies from Fleishman, including the haircut, without much protest. After all, I was usually the big breadwinner.

When we had worked our way all the way up to Union Square, Fleishman sighed contentedly. I’ll say this for him—you’ll never meet a man happier to be down to his last dime. Maybe that was because he was always assured that it never really was his last dime. Another dime was always around the corner. Poverty was just a temporary mix-up to him. “I have just enough for dinner and train fare back to Brooklyn.”

“I thought we weren’t eating until Monday,” I reminded him.

“But all this shopping—I’m starved!” he whined.

Fleishman was never big on deprivation.

“Okay,” I said, “but after this…”

Let’s face it. I wasn’t big on deprivation, either.

We ambled over to an Indian place we liked.

Once he and I were settled in our booth soaking in the comforting scent of curry, with our respective beverages of wine and tea, we both took what seemed like our first deep breaths since we had started our retail debauch.

Fleishman slipped down in the booth until his torso formed a leisurely C. He sipped his wine. “You know what? Your big success at finding work has given me a shot of ambition myself.”

I tilted my head. “You mean you’re going to look for a job?”

His eyes widened in alarm. “What? Why would I do that? I have a job.”

“A permanent job, I mean.” One that you actually go to.

He shuddered. “I still feel that I’ll make my mark in the world through writing. I haven’t given up on Yule Be Sorry.”

I groaned. “I wish you would.”

We had been over this before, gingerly. “It isn’t about you and me,” he assured me for the hundredth time.

“No, it’s about an idealized you and a caricature of me.”

“Not at all. You make Ramona sound like a cartoon. She just has a few traits you share. I’m culling from all over, though. She’s a composite.”

Don’t be fooled; the woman was me.

And really, I had to wonder. Because the woman was doggedly conventional and a bit of a killjoy. One of those tiring people who believed every argument had a flipside—who would come out with expressions like “different strokes for different folks” as if she were delivering original kernels of wisdom. (I never said things like that!) The boyfriend, an artistic free spirit, comes to realize that what is holding him back is this girlfriend he’s attached to who doesn’t believe in him and reins in his phenomenal creativity out of subconscious jealousy.

That’s just what I gleaned from the first act.

I didn’t want to be unreasonable. I knew that writers had to cull a little of their work from real life. This one just seemed a little too culled. But what was I going to do, take his computer away from him? I suppose I could have put my foot down, but the hold-it-right-there-buster impulse was never strong in me. And as much as I hate to admit it, I was scared. I liked having Fleishman for a friend, if nothing more; I didn’t want to alienate him.

I consoled myself with the knowledge that it would probably never be finished, or if it were, that it would never see the light of day. The theater world was a lot tougher to crack than we had assumed back in our little college in Ohio. Wendy was going the academic route and following her dreams that way, but Fleishman professed to be burned out on school.

“I’m glad you’re feeling inspired,” I said. Supportively.

Maybe he would feel inspired to write something else.

He raised his glass of cheap house wine. “To new beginnings,” he said.

I clinked my chai tea against his glass. “Here, here.”

He leaned back and sighed dreamily, pinning me with that gaze of his. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

I chuckled uncomfortably. “You make it sound as if you’re either about to accept an Oscar or to ship out overseas.”

“It just seems amazing to me sometimes. We’ve been friends for so long.”

“Six whole years,” I said.

“Isn’t that a long time?” he asked.

“An entire lifetime…if we were six.”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s longer than most friendships I’ve had, and the amazing thing is what we’ve weathered. How many ex-boyfriends have you stayed friends with?”

I had to admit that he was it.

“And you’re the only ex-girlfriend I’ve ever been able to be around, too. Most of the time I duck down store aisles and sidestreets to avoid them.”

“I feel honored.”

“I guess the difference is we always knew getting together was a mistake,” he said.

I swallowed. We did?

He explained, “It would be like the old Dick Van Dyke Show, if Rob had run off with Sally.”

I laughed, then stopped abruptly. Being compared with Rose Marie wasn’t exactly my dream.

Besides, what if Rob had run off with Sally? Would that have been so awful? Sure, she wasn’t Mary Tyler Moore, but she could make up jokes, and she could sing. Think of how much fun Rob had at the office. At the Alan Brady Show they were always laughing, but at home, it was just mixups and headaches, the Helpers and Little Richie. (Sally would never have saddled him with Little Richie.)

Fleishman snapped his fingers. “Rebecca!”

I jerked back to attention. “Huh?”

“You were about to start defending Sally, weren’t you?”

I choked on my tea. “Okay, I get your drift. We weren’t meant to be.”

“Right. Most people aren’t meant to be. The miracle is that we realized it was all a big mistake before our feelings got hurt.”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

At the end of the meal he looked at his watch and nearly knocked over his water glass in his hurry to wave down the waiter for the check.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I gotta get back,” he said.

I frowned. “Back where?”

“To the apartment. I have a date.”

So much for companionability. I gritted my teeth. “Really? Who?”

“This woman from the telemarketing job. Dorie. She’s got a painting at some gallery, but I think the gallery’s more like a coffee shop. It’s probably going to be really lame, but I promised to go.” He shrugged. “Dorie’s not really my type. She’s mousy and insecure, but for some reason she’s latched onto me a little.”

I bolted the rest of my tea, cold by now. Fleishman generally went out a lot on weekends. I went out too, if less frequently. (Confession: A lot less frequently.) Still, every time I heard him say he was going out with someone, I could feel a little knife twisting in me.

I could also hear Wendy’s warning voice.

But I ignored it. Like Fleishman said, he and I were lucky that we had realized our mistake before any feelings got hurt.

My first day of work, and wouldn’t you know it, it was pouring rain. The cats and dogs kind of rain where there’s no way to avoid getting soaked. I had a dorky all-weather coat that I threw over one of Natasha Fleishman’s suits. It was Chanel, and pretty snazzy, if I did say so myself. Then I grabbed the biggest umbrella I could find and shivered and sloshed my way into Manhattan. When it rains the subway can be so gross. Even when it’s not hot, there’s something about so many wet bodies crowded into a confined space that starts making everyone look limp and slightly mildewed. Glancing around my crowded car, the moment did not seem to auger great things for the new beginning that Fleishman had been toasting a few days earlier.

As I was scurrying toward the building, I walked through a cloud of smoke and heard someone call my name. I turned. Rita, AKA my new boss, was huddled under a plaid umbrella, puffing away.

She had to speak loudly over the sound of the rain beating down. “Aren’t you early?”

“First day,” I confessed, though I had never had a boss complain about someone being on time. “I wanted to make a good impression.”

She lit another Benson and Hedges. She looked anxious. “I should show you around…”

“I can find my office,” I assured her, even though I was a little doubtful about whether I actually could. My memory of that place was that it was a confusing maze of hallways.

She flagged down a passerby. “Andrea!” Another figure under an umbrella stopped in mid-scuttle toward the doors. “This is Rebecca Abbot. She’s starting today. Think you could give her the tour?”

Andrea and I gave each other once-overs. She had dark curly hair, a Roman nose, and a mouth that turned down at the corners. She was tall and, I have to say, slightly intimidating. “So you’re the latest victim.” Her voice was loud, with a little bit of a scratch in it. “Okay, let’s go in before you float back to wherever you came from.”

“I’m right behind you!” Rita called after us.

We shook ourselves out like rain-drenched dogs in the lobby, causing the marble floor to get that much more slippery. In the elevator, Andrea turned to me. “So where else did you interview? Did you get in over at Avon?”

“No…”

She looked surprised. “They were looking for someone. But they didn’t call me back, either.”

“You applied there?”

She laughed as though I had delivered a zinger. “My resume has been to every company in this whole damn town. I’m not going to get myself out of this place depending on telepathy, you know. Did you interview at Warner?”

“Uh, no…I did interview at a trade publication. I think it was legal books…”

Andrea shook her head disdainfully. “Oh God! You’re better off here.”

An uneasy feeling nibbled at me. Could it be a good sign when the first coworker I met was scrambling to find a job elsewhere?

“I noticed Random House was looking for a full editor,” she said. “You didn’t apply there, did you?”

“No.”

She nodded. “Probably best not to waste your time. I interviewed with them before I came here.”

“What happened?”

“They hired someone else. Jackasses!”

We faced forward for a moment.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Four years.” Before I could register whether I thought this was a long time or not, she answered the question for me. “I know, I know. I gotta get out—but the market is so tight right now.” She sighed. “My luck, I’ll probably spend the rest of my life in an efficiency in Queens.”

The doors opened, and Andrea waved me out with a sarcastic flourish. “Welcome to Alcatraz.”

First stop on the tour was the receptionist desk, where the woman with the Peter Pan collar still sat at attention with her headset, looking like the proverbial operator standing by in those TV commercials of old. And was that actually a cameo she was wearing today?

“Muriel, this is…um…” Andrea darted an uncomfortable glance at me.

“Rebecca,” I said.

“Yes, Rebecca, I remember you,” Muriel said. “Kathy Leo alerted me to your arrival this morning, so I have already put you into our message center.” She whirled a little plastic caddy around to the point where my name in a red colored tab was prominently displayed. “This is where you may retrieve messages left in person, or urgent messages that callers do not wish to leave on your answering service. But please keep in mind that the answering service is the most efficient way of retrieving your messages. I do my best to relay communications efficiently, but the human factor is always fallible, and I have noticed that some people forget to check for their message slips. So do set up your answering service at your earliest possible convenience. Your extension is fifty-six, which is written on the phone in your office, along with detailed instructions about setting up your personal recorded message. Of course if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to help. Welcome aboard!”

She ended her introductory monologue with a smile that was one hundred percent lips.

I felt like I should applaud. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Rebecca.”

Andrea tugged impatiently on my sleeve. During Muriel’s monologue, she had removed her raincoat and shaken herself out a little more, spilling droplets on Muriel’s carefully tended simulated wood grain work surface.

“Let’s show you to your cave so you can dump your junk and start to dry off,” she said, ignoring Muriel’s pursed lip parting glare. When we were out of earshot, she said, “She’s always like that.”

“Like what?”

“Prim,” Andrea grumbled. “I don’t know how she keeps it up. It makes me wonder if she’s not moonlighting as a lap dancer.”

We made our way through a labyrinth of hallways that I vaguely remembered from my last visit. As we were turning a corner, Andrea looked around furtively and asked, “When you were at Random House, did you talk to Margaret Wyberry?”

“I didn’t interview there,” I reminded her.

“Oh, that’s right.” She let out a puff of breath. “Oh well. I’ve heard there isn’t a lot of opportunity for advancement there anyway.”

“Is there here?” I asked.

She arched her brows. “Why? Are you bored already?”

“Well, no…I…” I had just been making small talk.

“Here!” She stopped at a small windowless office and flipped on the lights. There was a seascape watercolor gracing one wall and a large empty peg board over the desk. Andrea gestured grandly, like the hostesses on The Price is Right. “Home sweet home. I stole your chair and gave you my shitty one. Hope you don’t mind.”

I looked at the desk chair, which looked like standard issue office rolling thing. “I’m grateful not to be sitting on a plastic crate.”

“That’s only the ed assists,” Andrea joked.

I took off my coat and tossed it on the spare chair in the corner. As I did so, I noticed a bookshelf with piles and piles of manuscripts on it. “What’s that?”

“Your inheritance.” Andrea went over to inspect it. “Looks like slush, mostly, but there are a few agented proposals in here…” She whistled. “This one’s cover letter is dated 2003! Damn! That Julie had more nerve than I gave her credit for.”

“What happened to Julie?”

“It was very sad. One day she decided to end it all right there at her desk.”

I swerved in alarm, whereupon Andrea blasted out a laugh. “Kidding! She got knocked up.” She sighed. “That’s one way off the treadmill.”

“Yeah, but then you have a baby to deal with.”

Andrea snorted. “Here you have twenty.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“Otherwise known as authors.” She gave my suit a once-over and whistled. “Snappy!”

“Thanks—it’s a hand-me-down.”

“What, are there tycoons in your family?”

“In my roommate’s family, actually.”

“Nice!” She frowned. “But can you breathe?”

I sucked in. I had never gotten around to those sit-ups.

Or starving.

When we ventured out again, our first stop was Rita’s office, which was dark. “She must still be downstairs,” Andrea said.

In the cubicle outside Rita’s office, there was a commotion, and we turned as one. Before, I hadn’t noticed anyone sitting there. “Lindsay?” Andrea asked, her tone doubtful.

A figured hunched on her hands and knees on the floor jerked up, banging her head on her desk. “Shit!” she cried. Then she saw me. “Oh—sorry.” She jumped to her feet and darted out her hand for me to shake, then thought better of it since it was holding a paper towel that was dripping some sort of fluid all over the carpet.

And that wasn’t the only odd thing about her. She was wearing a nubbly tweed jacket over what appeared to be an old taffeta formal. I usually wasn’t too judgmental about outfits. I had been around theater people, so I was used to creative dressing. But this girl looked bizarre. Plus, I have this thing about taffeta. I don’t like it. (It’s a long story.)

“I’m having the worst morning.” Lindsay gestured to her desk, where an overturned Starbucks cup told the whole tale. “I spilled my latte all over this manuscript. Rita’s going to kill me!”

Andrea waved off all her worries. “It’s no big deal. Stuff like that happens.”

“But it’s a Rosemary Cain proposal—and she’s rejecting it!”

Andrea went still. “Oh.”

I knew the name Rosemary Cain, but not well enough to be able to name any of her books by title. But I got the gist of what was going on. Big author, stupid boo-boo. “It’s just a few pages,” I said. “Why don’t you retype them? The author probably won’t even notice.”

It seemed a pretty obvious suggestion, but Lindsay latched onto it as if it were a pronouncement coming straight down from heaven. “That’s right! I could retype them. She’ll never know! Rita won’t even have to know.”

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.