by Wendy Wax
“I told you I was going to the expo.”
“Oh, right.”
She could tell his attention was elsewhere, most likely on the game.
“When will you be home?” he asked.
“Soon.”
“Good.”
Silence.
Once they might have chatted easily for fifteen or twenty minutes; now they couldn’t fill five.
“I, uh, didn’t really have the energy for the expo. Mandy’s going to bring the samples later.”
“That’s good.”
She heard papers shuffle in the background. A mechanical voice told him he had mail.
“I think I’m going to drive over and see Daddy before I come home. I might pick up Chinese for dinner.”
“OK,” Craig said automatically. “Give him my best.”
Before she could respond she was listening to a dial tone and feeling annoyed all over again. Craig had been a rock during her father’s emergency surgery and the frightening days immediately afterward. But once her father was out of imminent danger, Craig had made it clear he expected her to move on. Only she couldn’t seem to get back to normal—not that normal had been feeling all that attractive lately.
On the way to her parents’ she tried a glass-is-half-full exercise. After all, her father was going to be fine; she had a marriage that her friends envied, two healthy sons, and an upcoming event that she could afford to celebrate in a way befitting their place in life. She had no reason to be dissatisfied, and even less to keep teetering on the edge of tears.
At her parents’ she fussed over her father then joined her mother, who was writing thank-you notes at the kitchen table.
“Betty Halpren finally switched florists, thank God. Did you see the flowers she had sent from Raphael?”
“Uh, no.” Judy’s visits to the hospital had been too fraught with anxiety to contemplate the relative merits of the floral arrangements filling her father’s room.
“The roses never even opened. And it had mums in it! I hate to think what Betty spent on that puny arrangement.”
Judy just nodded. “Do you feel OK about Daddy’s progress?”
“As OK as I can.” Her mother laid down her pen. “The doctor says as long as he rests and takes care of himself the prognosis is very good.”
She straightened the pile of note cards and her eyes got . . . dreamy?
“We’re going to stop putting things off for the future. In fact, your father and I are going back to Europe this year.”
Her mother’s voice sounded almost girlish. This was getting very weird indeed.
“We went to Paris on our honeymoon, you know.” Judy’s mother smiled. “And I’ve always wanted to go back. Harvey can be very romantic when he puts his mind to it.”
In thirty-nine years, Judy couldn’t remember more than a handful of compliments coming out of her mother’s mouth. It was always a complaint or a suggestion as to how things could be better. And here her mother was blushing over a trip to Europe with the man she’d been married to for forty years.
“Daddy? Romantic?” Part of her wanted to file this news in the “way more than she wanted to know” category. The other part was totally fascinated and dying to ask questions. Because right now, forty years sounded like a life sentence. Given how little she and Craig spoke to each other now, in twenty-five years they’d probably be communicating via sign language.
Her father was romantic and her mother, HER MOTHER, was blushing.
Which meant they probably still had sex. And enjoyed it.
Judy listened to the rest of her mother’s chatter with only half an ear, because she was completely stuck on the fact that her parents’ marriage sounded markedly better than hers.
Which made her own life even more pitiful than she had realized.
chapter 8
On Monday morning Shelley bounded out of bed and into the shower. Eager to get to the office to show Ross Morgan whom he was fooling with, she smoothed her hair into a French twist, selected a nubby turquoise suit, and stepped into matching mid-heeled pumps. After downing a low-carb breakfast bar, she drove the twenty-five minutes to the midtown warehouse, which had been so skillfully converted into the offices of Schwartz and Associates, in ten.
The receptionist’s mouth dropped open when Shelley stepped into the high-ceilinged lobby. She turned to look at the clock on the wall, looked down quickly at her watch, then back up at Shelley.
“Good morning, Sandra. Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes,” the other woman managed. “It was, um, fine.” She held her wrist up, shook it, and tapped the watch face. “Aren’t you in a little early?”
Shelley glanced up at the clock. It read 8:55. “Doesn’t the day still start at nine o’clock?”
“Um, yes. Yes, it does.”
“Then I guess I’m right on time.” Shelley moved past reception and walked briskly down the hallway toward her office, her heels tapping on the scored and glazed concrete floors. As she passed the glass-fronted offices along the way, her coworkers looked up in surprise. Some hung up their phones, others shut their drawers or dropped their pens. As if unable to stop themselves, they left their offices and came out into the hall to silently watch her progress.
By the time Shelley reached her own door, a sizable crowd had formed. When she turned and looked back over her shoulder, a line of fascinated faces stared back.
“Good morning?” she said tentatively.
There was throat-clearing, looks of embarrassment, and finally, a collective sort of nod. One or two people lifted a hand in greeting.
“Yes,” Shelley said before stepping into her office. “It’s great to see you all, too.”
Despite an almost overwhelming need for caffeine, Shelley gave them a full fifteen minutes to disperse. Then she headed for the break room where, once again, conversation sputtered to a stop and eyes moved to the clock on the wall then back to her.
“It’s me,” she said. “And, yes, it’s nine-seventeen.” She watched the second hand on the clock go around. “Make that nine-eighteen. Does anyone want to make something of it?”
As the room emptied, Shelley tried to shrug off her embarrassment, but their amazement stung. She poured a cup of coffee and had just finished stirring in a packet of sweetener when Ross Morgan came through the door.
His shirtsleeves were already rolled up and his tie was loosened, and she felt that immediate burst of attraction and irritation that she always felt when she saw him. His head was bent over some sort of report, and he got all the way to the coffeemaker before he looked up and spotted her. He, too, did the automatic clock-check thing, but instead of avoiding her gaze, he scrutinized her carefully. In fact, he did a very thorough scan from the top of her head down to the tips of her shoes.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Doris Day?”
That amused glint was back in his eyes.
“Debbie Reynolds.”
“Just little ol’ on-time me,” she replied. “Which seems to be throwing the entire workforce into a major tailspin.”
He put his papers down on the counter and reached past her for a mug, giving her a faint whiff of aftershave and man. “It’s just the shock of the unknown, that first stab of unreality,” he said. “This is the second day in a row. They’ll get over it.” He lifted the pot and poured coffee. “Assuming you keep it up.”
“Oh, I’m going to keep it up, all right. Now that I have that spectacular client list to deal with.”
She waited while he stirred sugar into his coffee—all three spoonfuls. “Have we heard from anyone on that list over the last six months?”
He dropped the plastic spoon in the garbage. “No,” he said. “If we don’t call them, they don’t call us. Which means nothing to bill for. Which would, of course, be why I gave them to you.”
“Right.”
He studied her closely. “Do you have a complaint?”
“Me? Complain? About that list?”
He s
ipped his coffee and studied her, and she had the disturbing sense that he could see past the flip tone right down to the raw place inside her.
“What would you say if I told you it wasn’t just a punishment? That I actually thought you could do something with that list?”
She stared Ross Morgan right in the eye, not at all liking the little flutter of hope that blossomed in her chest. “I’d say you were probably lying, but on the off chance that you’re not, it’s really going to piss me off to have to prove you right.”
Shelley spent the rest of the morning at her desk. For the first few hours she alternately played solitaire on her computer and stared into space, trying not to notice the curiosity-seekers who wandered by or in, on the flimsiest of pretexts. She realized it had been a while since she’d been in before noon, but she was getting awfully tired of being looked at as if she were some new specimen at the zoo.
At eleven her stomach began to rumble. It wasn’t actually food she wanted as much as lunch, preferably in a slick upscale restaurant like Medici’s, packed with men in power suits on expense accounts.
Picking up the phone she began to punch in Nina’s number, then switched in mid-punch to Trey’s, then put the phone back in its cradle with a sigh.
She had made no calls, contacted none of her clients. She was not going to lunch or anywhere else until she’d reached at least one. Shelley read over the list one more time, hoping that it had somehow improved since the last time she checked, but they were still the losing propositions they’d been five minutes before.
Cradling her head in her hands, she groaned in frustration. What was she doing here? What was she trying to prove? And what in the world was she supposed to do with these worthless accounts?
She thought back to Ross Morgan’s irritating attempts to identify her “look” and asked herself: If this were a fifties flick and she were playing the Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day role, what would happen now?
Drumming her fingers on the desktop she seriously considered the question.
For one thing, Doris would do more than just show up. Doris would find a way to rub Rock Hudson’s nose in his attitude. She’d take the lemons he gave her and make them into lemonade, and then she’d find a way to beat him at his own game. And make him fall in love with her.
Shelley pulled out a pad and pencil. What if she went ahead and pretended these were real accounts that deserved real attention? What if she actually thought about what she might do for them? Came up with ideas. After all, anything she produced from these underperformers would be a victory. All she had to do was start.
Closing her eyes, she concentrated on opening her mind. It had been a long time since she’d done this, so she was a little rusty, but she told herself not to panic. Giving her imagination permission to wander, she sat and thought. Slowly ideas began to form. Pictures and words began to line up into concepts.
She looked back down at the list and focused all of her energies on it. And somehow she knew where to begin.
“Mr. Simms,” she said when she got the owner of Furniture Forum on the line, “this is Shelley Schwartz at Schwartz and Associates, and I just called to tell you that I love the TV spots you’ve been doing.”
She listened to his surprised murmur of gratitude. Previous AE’s had spent their time trying to talk him out of appearing in his own commercials. Previous AE’s had failed.
“And I think we can add a lot of production value to what you’re already doing.”
She popped a Tylenol. “Your nephew Charlie is your videographer?” She wrote “nephew” next to the client’s name and really listened as Brian Simms praised his nephew’s production skills and explained that he’d been mentoring the boy since his sister’s death. There was a lot more at stake here, as far as Brian Simms was concerned, than just production.
As she listened the solution came to her. She knew exactly how to get this client to buy her idea. “You know, Mr. Simms,” Shelley said, “we use an incredible director out in L.A. He and his production company could take your spots to a whole new level. And I bet we could get them to take your nephew under their wing, maybe even work out an apprenticeship of some kind. Especially if you’re going to be a long-term client.”
Brian Simms couldn’t agree fast enough. Delighted, Shelley penciled in a meeting with him and his nephew for the following week. A smile spread across her face as she hung up the phone.
Flush with success, she dialed Forever Remembered and got David Geller on the line. “Mr. Geller,” she said once she’d introduced herself, “have you watched the HBO series Six Feet Under?”
As it turned out, the Forever Remembered CEO was a big fan. Convincing him that Alan Ball, the Atlanta creator of the hit series, would be the perfect company spokesperson took a whopping two minutes. Still smiling, she placed a call to the producer’s agent in L.A. and added David Geller to her schedule.
When her stomach rumbled she remembered that it was lunchtime. Suddenly she was thinking falafels—those lovely balls of chickpea and breading sold in stands across the Middle East.
“Yes, Mr. Awadallah,” she said into the phone after she’d introduced herself, “I want four to five of everything on your lunch menu. Yes, yes. The time has come for us to really understand what we’re selling.”
Obviously thrilled, her client shouted to someone in a deep, fluent Arabic as Shelley doodled smiley faces in the margins of the menu. “And be sure to add a Fab Falafel Plate for our new president, Ross Morgan. Oh, yes, he’s a great big chickpea fan.”
After hanging up, she warned Sandra about the upcoming delivery. Then she called the falafel account planner. “Hi, Todd. This is Shelley.” There was a moment of silence. “Shelley Schwartz. I need everything you can give me on falafels. History of, national origins, sales figures, the works.”
“Falafels,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But I’m just heading out for lunch.”
“Actually, I took the liberty of ordering you lunch. We’ve got enough falafels coming to feed your whole department. I’ll let you know when everything’s set up in the conference room.”
She hung up the phone and spun joyfully in her desk chair. This AE business was a lot more fun than she’d realized.
At twelve-thirty lunch arrived, hand-delivered by Fadah Awadallah and two of his sons. Soon the smells of falafel, pita, tabouli, and other things Mediterranean filled the office.
“Lunch is now being served in the conference room,” Shelley announced over the office intercom. “I’d like everyone to try at least two dishes from the Falafel Shack. Then we’re going to brainstorm ideas.”
She pressed Sandra and Mia into helping her serve as the staff took plates and found places to perch. The smell of a Middle Eastern street corner permeated the office; the only thing missing was the camels. Everybody ate, nibbled, and shared.
“Here, try this.” Shelley handed Mia a plate of hummus (also made from the much-loved chickpea) and pita triangles. She cornered another coworker. “Put some of this tahini on that falafel ball.”
“Um, thanks.”
Shelley watched him bite into the sandwich and waited for his reaction as if she’d made the falafel herself.
“Mmm.” He chewed enthusiastically. “S’good ’n chewy.”
Shelley looked around her, pleased. Everyone was talking excitedly, their mouths crammed with food. Somebody found a Middle Eastern CD and put it on the speaker system. All they needed were some belly dancers.
She spun around at the tap on her shoulder, her mouth still full of falafel.
“What is going on here?” Ross Morgan whispered.
She held a finger out toward him, signaling that she needed to finish chewing. When she’d swallowed the last bit, she searched around in the delivery box and located his Fab Plate.
“Research.” She smiled at him. “Here, you need to eat this, and then we’re going to do a brainstorming session.”
He flipped the Styrofoam container open
, and she read the uncertainty in his eyes.
“It’s the Fab Falafel Plate. From the Falafel Shack.”
He squinted down at the four round balls sitting in sauce, onion, and cucumber.
“We’re tasting the menu to come up with a new proposal. Fadah Awadallah was thrilled.”
He looked around and she followed his gaze. There was food everywhere. People were looking very stuffed and sleepy. Shelley remembered that they slept away the afternoons in the Middle East. Possibly because of all those falafel balls sitting in the pits of their stomachs.
“I bet.” His tone was dry, dry as the desert in the land of the falafel. “Who’s paying for all of this?”
Fadah Awadallah’s oldest son stepped forward and presented Ross with a handwritten bill. “Thanking you so much for your interest in us and for the order.” He smiled at Shelley and pumped her hand. “One day Fadah’s falafels and the Falafel Shack will be household names. Shelley say so.” The Awadallah family left grinning broadly.
Ross handed her his Styrofoam container and looked down at the bill. “You spent five hundred and fifty dollars for lunch from a falafel stand?”
“Well, you told me to contact my list. How can I propose a plan of attack without sampling the product?”
“But food for the whole office?” He looked aghast, evidently trying to remember what other businesses were on that list. “You didn’t order a funeral today, did you?”
“Don’t be silly. It’s just one lunch. And we need to know what we’re selling.” She thought about the funeral homes and bit back a smile. “Within reason.”
“Yes, let’s begin applying some reason, shall we?” He handed her the tab. “And let’s make sure this”—he motioned around the room and sniffed at the accompanying smells—“comes out of your budget. I’ll expect you to fill in the appropriate paperwork.”
This was when Luke Skyler, the creative director, said, “Falafels—they’re not just for the Middle East anymore.”
“How about ‘Chickpeas . . . who knew!’ ”
“We should be targeting the vegetarian market.”