Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  ALSO BY ALEX WITCHEL

  Girls Only: Sleepovers, Squabbles, Tuna Fish

  and Other Facts of Family Life

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2002 by Alex Witchel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Witchel, Alex.

  Me times three : a novel / by Alex Witchel.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81655-9

  1. Periodicals—Publishing—Fiction. 2. Women journalists—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  4. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.185 M4 2002

  813′.54—dc21 2001038108

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  For John,

  whom I miss

  For Frank,

  whom I cherish

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I must thank my editor, Peter Gethers. Virtually every smart suggestion that ended up in these pages is his. He is, you should excuse the expression, a prince.

  As for Knights in Shining Armor, I have three: John Breglio, whose constant and generous support is invaluable to me; John Montorio, formerly of the New York Times, whose patience and understanding were crucial in helping me finish the book; and Bob Bookman, the closest thing to a sorcerer I’ve seen in real life.

  I thank Kathy Robbins and Rick Kot for shepherding me through the unglamorous parts; Benjamin Dreyer for his expert, painstaking care; Jon Fine for his humor and guidance; and Kathleen Fridella, Jeffrey Scales, and Abby Weintraub for making the insides and outsides of the book so much better.

  I am also grateful to Barbara Denner, Cynthia LaBorde, Phoebe Kahanov, Suzanne Goodson, Ron Albrecht, Evelyn Witchel, and Sam and Barbara Witchel for all the help they are to me, always.

  And as for my husband, Frank Rich, he is still the true gift of my life.

  Prologue

  Looking back, I wonder about that day of the party at the Met. What article was I editing? What did I eat for lunch? I can’t remember.

  In the years since, I’ve tried to imagine what would have happened had I stayed home that night. Nothing, for a while. A few weeks, a month, maybe, before the inevitable occurred. It couldn’t stay a secret forever.

  But when I woke up that April morning in 1988, none of that mattered. I was twenty-six and my future was written in gold: I would marry Bucky Ross, my prom date, the love of my life. I wouldn’t have a maid of honor like everyone else. I would have my own best man, Paul Romano, my closest friend. I would work at Jolie! magazine as an editor until I got pregnant and moved to a Tudor mansion in the suburbs, where I would write children’s books in a studio over the garage and never miss a car pool. Bucky would grow more and more powerful at the agency. Paul would visit, and our kids would love him. He would take us to all the movies he produced, and when he won Oscars we would stay up late and cheer.

  Actually, the day after Bucky proposed, I was so excited that I finally opened the green velvet book with gold leaf trim that he had given me to write my stories in. On the first fresh white page I wrote:

  #1 A Classic Is Always in Style

  by Sandra Berlin

  The poor Prince! It felt as if he had been searching forever to find his bride. Where could she be? He had looked high and low in the Emerald City but couldn’t find anyone who fit his glass slipper.

  When he finally arrived at the very last house on the left along the Yellow Brick Road, he dutifully asked for the resident maiden, got down on his knee, and pulled out the slipper. But she, a veteran bookworm with incipient bunions, was too smart for such tricks.

  “I don’t wear glass,” she sniffed, which surprised the Prince, who spent most of his time playing tennis and knew nothing about retail.

  “But I thought this was the way to get a princess,” he said, puzzled. “Isn’t the glass slipper what everyone in the Emerald City talks about?”

  “No, that’s the ruby slippers,” she corrected him.

  He looked up at her, helpless. “Well, would you marry me if I brought some of those?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Ruby is out,” she proclaimed. “What I would prefer are black peau de soie pumps. A classic is always in style. I will also require an unlimited clothing allowance for the premieres of Paul’s movies, and, naturally, a car and driver.”

  “Certainly,” the Prince promised, and he rushed back to the Royal Shoemaker, who made him the pumps, posthaste. The shoes fit like magic, so the Prince swept the maiden up onto his white horse while all the Munchkins waved and serenaded them. And the other fair maidens, who had cut off their toes to fit the glass slipper, glued them back on and raced out for some black peau de soie pumps of their own—even Dorothy, because she knew that if she went back to Kansas wearing red shoes, Auntie Em would kick her behind right out of the house.

  “My darling,” the Prince said to his bride, “I bless the day I found you. Everyone follows your advice and lives happily ever after. I will love you and your pumps forever.”

  And he did.

  The End

  So, it wasn’t exactly original. Even though I wanted it to be true.

  This is the story of what happened instead.

  1

  I knew nothing about art.

  That wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily, except that it was 1988 and art was a spoil of war for the Wall Street and Madison Avenue guys in Armani who made up the bulk of our eligible dates. Their staggering bonuses had already purchased new duplexes with marble bathrooms and climate-controlled wine closets, where they could properly store their requisite cases of Château Margaux. One guy I knew liked to make a ceremony of opening a prize bottle, then chugging it as his friends cheered him on. You could just imagine what he’d be like in bed.

  More important than owning wine, however, was owning art, preferably a major piece by a hot SoHo star—though it would be useless, of course, unless it matched the custom-made couch. Those details were left up to the decorator—that’s what the guys were paying her for, after all. She would buy all the right things and then tell her clients what they were, so they could tell everyone else at cocktail parties. It didn’t take me long to realize that knowing nothing didn’t look half bad when set upon a landscape of cash.

  Besides a lack of cash, my immediate problem was that after two years of hard labor at Jolie! magazine—fetching coffee and telling the p
ublisher that the senior editors were in meetings when they were really at the Plaza, in bed with the guys from ad sales—I had become the leading candidate for the position of Arts and Entertainment Editor.

  These days it seems that Jolie! has been around forever, but it only began in 1986, the new thing, fresh from Paris. Apparently, pictures of models jumping in the air wearing five-dollar T-shirts and three-thousand-dollar organza skirts were just what the world had been waiting for, and Jolie!’s instant success sent editors at the other women’s magazines into a competitive frenzy.

  We were off base in one way, though, and that was the reason why someone who knew nothing about art was being considered for the position of Arts and Entertainment Editor. Unlike other fashion magazines, Jolie! had a policy that kept movie stars off the cover—we used models only. This was because Jean-Louis, our art director and aesthetic heir of Roman Polanski, decreed most female stars over twenty-one to be “old and ugly.” Banned from cover consideration, none of the big names would come near us, which meant that the editor with the fancy title would spend many miserable hours on the phone each day listening to desperate publicists pitch star wannabes for a measly three paragraphs and a head shot.

  To be fair, I hadn’t really spent my entire time at Jolie! fetching coffee, though it often felt that way. During my second year I was promoted to assistant editor (on the same day that Les Misérables opened on Broadway, which I tried not to take personally). This new job meant that someone else scraped the curried chicken salad out of the seams of the conference table after the lunchtime story meetings while I started dealing with writers and “the words.” This was a fearsome concept at a fashion magazine where the pictures ruled, so I learned fast that the fewer words there were the better everyone liked them, and when Susie Schein reviewed the results—most of the time, at least—she approved.

  The words at Jolie! were supervised by Susie, the number two editor and my boss. Just as I had worked all my life to please my parents and my teachers, I now worked to please Susie Schein—which was a little like trying to cuddle up to Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. Unlike most of Jolie!’s staff, who seemed to view life as an endless Mardi Gras, dressing in everything from pastel Chanel suits to tiny black rubber dresses, Susie wore gray pants, a white buttoned-down shirt, and no makeup. Every day. Her contacts never fit properly, so she almost always squinted. And rarely smiled.

  She was pushing fifty, I knew, and had been married once. I also knew that more than one person had seen her at clubs making out with Norma Wilder, an editor at a downtown art magazine. Susie never mentioned Norma Wilder, probably because she was a world-class denier about anything having to do with pleasure. Bagel, no butter. Chicken, no skin. Susie Schein was one grim broad.

  It was she, for example, who instituted the policy of signing in and out each day. I tried explaining that the reason I was coming in past nine each morning was that I needed to stay until eight most nights, since Hollywood was three hours behind us and no one in the movie business returned calls until they got back from lunch, but Susie was unmoved. She herself worked twelve-hour days, though she seemed to occupy most of those hours filling her date book with appointments she almost always canceled.

  Be it a cocktail or a comma, Susie had a problem with commitment. She would read a piece I had edited and remark distractedly, “Oh, yes, very good,” and then two hours later, after canceling a lunch so that she could read the piece again (while eating only half of a hastily delivered portion of tuna packed in water, so that at five o’clock she could fall on the remains like a starved wolf), she would come back to me and say ruefully, “Well, you know, maybe this could use some work.” By the time the writer and I had gone back through all of Susie’s “maybe”s, we didn’t even remember the original assignment.

  Unfortunately, I had little skill at hiding my irritation every time she wavered. Since the first grade, when I got a “Needs Improvement” in the “Following Directions” category of my report card, this criticism had remained a sore point with me. I would try to be conscientious about doing my job correctly, and so would the writers, but the first round of Susie’s directions bore no resemblance to the third round, or the fifth. Sometimes I would catch Susie looking at me during one of our editing sessions, studying whatever my face was saying as if she were trying to remind herself why she had hired me in the first place and considering whether I should be allowed to stay.

  Then, as if to test me, she would mention some other writer whose work I should know, a genius among women everywhere whom I had invariably never heard of, an expert on rape in Haiti, say, which, of course, was exactly the kind of article you wanted to read in a fashion magazine. If Susie had been a man I could have turned my inexperience to my benefit, playing just dumb enough so that she could, for the sheer rush of hearing herself talk, explain why that writer was so important. But being a woman meant the opposite of sympathy. “If I’ve worked hard enough and long enough to know all this,” she implied, “then you should too, and now.” The only thing that kept me calm at those moments was knowing that the possibility of Susie making a lasting decision about my future at Jolie! (or about anything else) was not on the agenda in my natural lifetime.

  I eventually grew accustomed to the fact that I seemed to truly bother her. If it wasn’t my editing, it was my smoking, which she loathed. And if it wasn’t my smoking, it was the way I dressed, in clear violation of her “few good pieces” philosophy, which was that even though her inevitable gray-and-white getup might resemble a prison matron’s, it was made of the finest materials and cost a fortune. I, however, was of the “many not-so-good pieces” persuasion, so that I wouldn’t die of boredom.

  Despite her prevailing dismay at finding me on her staff, there were some occasions when Susie did seem to like me. Or, more to the point: After two years of trial and error, I had learned some tricks about dealing with her. Mainly concerning story ideas.

  “A writer in Texas called to say that there’s an old Hispanic woman there called Pastor Brico who runs a church out of a parking lot near her house,” I announced one day, stepping into Susie’s office.

  She glanced up from her ink-smeared, indecipherable date book and squinted, waiting for the payoff.

  “When she’s not running the church, she’s a psychic, and people line up for hours in the parking lot to see her. She also does readings by phone.”

  Susie snapped to attention. She was obsessed with psychics. She always had a call in to yet another one, desperately waiting for word that her life was about to begin. “She does? Is she expensive?”

  “Well,” I went on, glorying in the rare spotlight, “I understand that after a reading, she asks for a donation to her church, and most people send one because they’re afraid she’s going to put a hex on them otherwise.”

  “Do the piece,” Susie ordered. “And get me her number.”

  A few hours later she summoned me to her office. She was so animated, there was even a hint of pink on her forehead.

  “She told me she saw an arm,” Susie said breathlessly. “My mother’s been having trouble with her arm and needs an operation, and it’s been on my mind. The pastor picked up on it immediately!”

  “Wow, that’s incredible,” I said, though secretly I was disappointed. I had been hoping that Pastor Brico would encourage Susie with visions of a career change—shouldn’t someone get down to Haiti and help that expert? But Susie was an immediate convert, and for at least a month I could do no wrong.

  The two of us soldiered along in this delightful pas de deux until the day the one other hardworking assistant editor, who had been there as long as I had, quit after it was revealed that she’d been routinely vomiting her lunch in the ladies’ room on the floor above ours. The women up there, less than enchanted, had asked her to stop, and when she tried the floor beneath ours, they had already been warned. The assistant editor was then reprimanded by the publisher, to which she replied, “Fuck this, I’m getting married anyway,” and left
with all the stocking samples she could carry. A bunch of the remaining staff, including two of the three assistant editors with whom I shared an office, gathered in the fashion closet to pick over those she’d left behind. The majority opinion was that she should not have said “Fuck this,” because in a business like publishing you should never burn your bridges. What if the marriage didn’t last? The stockings, everyone knew, mattered not at all.

  A few days after the big blowup, Susie Schein called me in to say that Miss Belladonna, the editor in chief, wanted to have lunch with me. This was an especially big deal, and I knew that Susie must have engineered it, so I tried being extra-friendly and helpful, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  Miss Belladonna, whose first name was Giulia, although I never heard it said aloud, was the absolute opposite of Susie Schein. The first time I saw her, she was just in from Paris and wearing a hat that must have been four feet across. Her mouth was fire-engine red, her skin was as white as the orchids on her desk, and even though she wasn’t as skinny (and certainly not as young) as the models, they seemed humbled, somehow, in her presence. She spoke her expert Italian and French in a throaty voice burnished by Bordeaux and Gitanes, and whenever any of the male executives from the business side barged into her office, she would cross her legs so that her stockings gleamed and they promptly forgot what it was they had come for.

  Although Miss Belladonna’s real job was to gallop the world with people like Valentino and Azzedine Alaia in Milan or Paris or down the Nile in the name of Jolie!, she always returned to New York to approve each issue, and it was usually just in the nick of time. As Susie reached the pinnacle of her holier-than-thou behavior, holding the sign-in sheet up to the light to see if anyone had faked her times, Miss Belladonna would appear, snapping her crimson-tipped fingers, and Susie would heel like some sad dog whose hiding place had just been discovered. Together they would go to face The Wall, as it was known, the surface on which the following month’s issue was being laid out in preparation for closing. The bad news was that facing The Wall meant that someone was going to have to make a decision. Which photographer’s spread would be bumped, if not enough advertising pages had been sold? Which writer’s masterpiece would be cut in half (again), to save space?