Best Friend for Hire

by Mary Mary Carlomagno

  If you were not related to my work life, I was unable to perform the necessary maintenance that a good friendship entails. My only friends were from publishing, more specifically, people from my old company. In need of authentic conversation and camaraderie after a grueling first week out of work, I was looking forward to spending time with people I knew.

  Lunch had been planned with my semblance of a support system, Emily and Daniel, at a French bistro located not far from Smith & Drake. I settled into a corner booth in the back of the restaurant, where, hopefully, we would not be noticed by any Smith & Drake personnel who just happened to walk in. Emily spotted me and began her signature handclapping as she galloped past the bar to arrive at the booth, literally jumping for joy at the thought of us getting together. I stood to greet this overwhelming welcome, which was the least I could do under the circumstances. She lunged forward with a huge, clingy hug that caused me to grab for the banquette to keep myself from falling. I ended up banging my head on the specials board chalked in French on the wall behind me.

  “OMG. You look super skinny, just perf. Did you lose weight?” she asked.

  Emily had a habit of using the conversational equivalents of texting initials such as LOL and OMG. She would regularly punctuate her conversations with “perf” for perfect and “ridic” for ridiculous, as though life was too short to fill out all the other syllables in those words.

  Funny thing about being on the outside, everyone seemed to think you look different, better, less stressed. Perhaps what Emily was picking up on was the absence of frenetic urgency that had existed during my usual workday. Today, I was calmer than what she had been used to seeing.

  Daniel swept in behind her, trying to wrap up a caller who was reluctant to say goodbye. He rolled his eyes and gestured with his hands as if the caller could actually see his visual cues to end the conversation.

  “Gloria Steinem…” Emily mouthed to me.

  “Yes…yes…the third button, the one with the little bird…yes…yes it’s cute. Of course, call me if you need more help. Ok. Ok. Ok. Ok. Bye-Bye.”

  “Funny thing about these thought leaders, they can duke it out on the Fox channel, but half of them can’t figure out how to send a tweet,” Dan remarked.

  In minutes, I was swept back into the mania of office politics. Because we had so much ground to cover, Daniel had brought an agenda with him so that no topic would go uncovered.

  The very first topic was STS and her decision not to replace me. Instead, I learned from Emily, she had doled out my authors to the existing staff, causing even harsher work conditions than usual. Publishing houses were known for this tactic, asking people to do double work without any extra compensation. Management assumed that people were clamoring to work with a prestigious author. In reality, booking hotels and radio show appearances for Dr. Ursula, or Dr. Oz, was the same kind of mundane work.

  This was only one of the many misconceptions people had about the publishing industry. Another was the perception that people enjoy it or that publishing people are called to the higher purpose of getting essential information to the public. And last, the culmination of the above, which was that people who enjoy their work and provide a service should get paid less. Publishing, like Zen Buddhism, was a struggle. Of course, this theory began with the large assumption that authors are nice and interesting people. And many of them are—until you work with them. There is a publishing cliché that asks what the best kind of author to work with is. The answer is, simply, a dead author. I did not share that belief every day, but some days I did. We all did.

  Publicists were envisioned to sit in media green rooms all day long, eating free catered food and getting showered with accolades. The accolades were rarely, if ever, delivered, and on most days publicists felt like order takers overwhelmed by the pesky details of limo services, flight departures, and restaurant reservations.

  And Daniel was smack in the middle of a week’s worth of pesky days wrangling his authors’ travel plans. He was so busy that he had little time to sit down, much less eat. I was honored that he had managed to get away from his desk to see me.

  “Seriously, this has been the first time I’ve had lunch in the last three weeks, and I don’t care how busy I am, I was not going to miss seeing you.”

  Apparently conditions at Smith & Drake had deteriorated from a place where people work really hard to a slave labor camp. Aside from the usual “take more work and like it” philosophy that most publicity departments were built upon, the climate of the company had shifted since STS became the newly crowned queen of all things.

  “She is ridic with the power thing,” Emily added. “I used to think she was a really nice lady, but I guess it’s because I never had to deal with her directly. You were amazing at that,” she added.

  My role as buffer, support system, and all-round fairness monitor had not been replaced, and with STS on a power trip not unlike Stalin during the Purges of the late 1930s, the entire structure had turned into a dictatorship. In truth, all this bad news was making me feel quite good for a few reasons. Not only had I been good at my job, but also my work friends really missed me, a lot. In the absence of having any life outside work, I had done a pretty good job picking these two people to be my support staff. Sure, I hired them, but they actually liked me, and I liked them.

  I missed being with people who knew me, knew that I did the right thing, supported me in any event, and this knowledge made me feel like I was not only good at my job, but also a good friend.

  “She cut my expense budget for Naomi Wolf’s tour in half and gave it to Gloria Steinem…” Daniel said. And then he paused for dramatic emphasis. “Out of nowhere. STS had lunch with Camille at the Gramercy Tavern, got starstruck, and started making promises to her that I’ll be forced to keep.”

  “And now we have to keep them. We have a new name for these people too. FOS. Friend of Susan,” Emily chimed in.

  Admittedly, I was no expert on acronyms or friendships at that point, but STS having any friends at all seemed unlikely to me based on the way she treated her co-workers. I was confident that my actions were never like hers. I was a much better friend than she was. In her defense, the author lunch can be a confusing event for those who have never attended. Susan, as a super-executive in the firm, rarely had the chance to interact with authors; she was usually in boardroom meetings with financial people and stockholders. Her foray into my world was new, and she greedily scooped up the perks of her new job. So what if she made promises that someone else would have to keep. She was the boss.

  All of this information was starting to add up. How could they afford to keep me on staff with the expensive demands of STS? My dismissal had been because of her, not because of my performance. It was because there was not enough money to keep me and satisfy her extravagant habits. While it was comforting to know that my performance was not the reason for my dismissal, it was sad to realize that my job could so easily be reallocated for a greedy executive’s frivolity.

  “And that’s not even the half of it. She and Alex Sheffield are at war. And the entire office is being forced to choose sides because of one new addition to the self-help list,” Daniel explained as he crossed off item #2 on his list.

  Our Salade Niçoise and unsweetened ice tea arrived unnoticed as we feasted instead on this agenda item. Dan had been forced into the Alex camp after adding the unruly Dr. Ursula to his roster of high maintenance authors. He and Alex Sheffield worked closely to fend off another threat of her jumping publishers. The children’s publisher, Newberry Press, had approached her to write a Young Adult novel. To get the doctor to stay at Smith & Drake, Alex and Daniel had pitched the idea of a series of self-help books aimed at adolescent girls. Of course, she loved the idea of shaping all those young minds and making them Dr. Ursula acolytes for life. I was glad I had missed out on that ego boost.

  They had little time, though, to relish the victo
ry of keeping Dr. Ursula on the list when another FOS popped up. This time STS had signed up a three-book deal with her new best friend, Goddess Marina. Goddess Marina was a fixture on the Manhattan lecture circuit. Her sold-out workshops, the Corporate Kama Sutra, likened finding the perfect career position to finding the perfect sexual position. Apparently, one was easier to achieve than the other, but her claim was that you could rarely have one without the other. With the big news of a national syndicated television show on the horizon, publishers around Manhattan were clamoring for the book rights to Goddess Marina’s maiden offering.

  Maybe it was because I was overwhelmed by the power of reading The Power of Intention which has the working principle that people are all connected that made me think that I knew the Goddess Marina, even though we had never met.

  While the premise was certainly compelling and would no doubt sell many books, I was unsure that the material could be applied to real life. But that did not seem to be necessary to gain success in the television world, where licensing deals and sponsorships gave people brand name credibility overnight.

  On some level, while it felt good to know that my leaving had caused such chaos, I took no joy in seeing my colleagues suffer. On the outside, I wondered if there was some way I could help. And just like that, the universe answered. Not only was Emily dealing with a new boss, sans the Jessie buffer, but also she was knee-deep in wedding plans after her wedding planner had abruptly quit the week before.

  “What happened to your planner?” I asked.

  “She eloped.”

  It seems that the wedding planner had had it up to her eyeballs with wedding planning and instead of planning her own took off with her fiancée for unchartered Caribbean territory. She simply could not stand to plan one more wedding, even her own. This was all recounted to Emily via text from the tarmac at the Charlotte Amalie airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

  “Isn’t love grand?” remarked Daniel.

  Daniel was the only person I knew in a stable relationship. He and his partner, Patrick, had been together for 20 years and were not convinced that a showy wedding was for them or anyone else, for that matter, gay or straight.

  “We were gay before gay was gay…you know what I mean?”

  I was not really sure what he meant, but I nodded in solidarity because that’s what friends do. I had found something to fix. Emily needed me again, this time to help with her wedding. Before Emily went into any more detail, I took a deep breath, took a pause to increase the suspense of the moment, and volunteered to become, of all things, a wedding planner.

  “I can do it. I can plan your wedding.”

  “REALLY?” said Emily.

  “Really?” said Daniel.

  “Really,” I said.

  This leap of faith into the high pressure of world of wedding planning seemed logical for many reasons. First, the couple would be married in New Jersey and I was from New Jersey. Second, I wanted to continue to be viewed as “amazing” in her eyes. And last, I needed to find something to do. None of these reasons were good ones, mind you, but I wanted to be back in the mix and this was a good way to do it. Emily was ready to start the following weekend when Brendan, perhaps already fatigued by coupledom, was heading back to Villanova for a boys’ weekend.

  The couple had graduated two years ago, but they conducted many aspects of their life together as if they were still in college. Many of their friends had moved in together to save on rent in Manhattan, or went solo in the lower-costing boroughs. Emily and Brendan lived the city life during the week, but on the weekend returned to their college routine, bar crawling till 3 a.m., waking up late, and heading to brunch after noon to consume large amounts of fried cheese and bacon. And they’d then repeat the entire process all over again on Saturday evening. This behavior had somehow convinced them that they were ready for marriage.

  Daniel and I referred to this rushed Generation Y union as the starter marriage, as opposed to my peer group, the generation Xers, who meandered into their 30s, married solely to career, a choice that usually resulted in a complete forfeiture of all other unions. The few people I knew who married young also divorced young, and were out there again looking for husband or wife number two. In the end, it all equaled out, I figured.

  Emily was not the typical princess bride type. Upon first glance, you would think her a tomboy, a little heavyset, probably an athlete of some sort, but always impeccably groomed. She had embraced the new pampering trend where you can get a manicure and pedicure upon a moment’s notice for $20 or have your hair blown out for $45 (with a complimentary glass of wine). The competition for walk-in appointments was so fierce and the demand so great that nail salons outnumbered coffee shops and sushi places combined. And what modern girl could ever get her hair straight enough? A salon that could combine mani, pedi, and blow out was sure to be a gold mine. Note to self: Think about opening multi-purpose salon.

  Crazy straight-haired brides made most people uncomfortable, with their unreasonable demands and unrealistic expectations. But I did not expect any of these behaviors from Emily, who was an easygoing, make-no-enemy kind of person. As her first boss at her first job, she was enamored by my confident (or jaded) career woman independence. She viewed me, she had once said in a moment of candor, as “like so much more than a boss.”

  But, come to think of it, I really didn’t know much about Emily outside of the office. Emily as a bride had a more direct side. And before you could say role reversal, I had signed up to work for my old assistant.

  “This is perf! It’s like I am your boss now!” she giggled.

  “OMG.” Daniel added.

  OMFG, I silently amended. What had I gotten myself into?

  Before I could ponder my new role as a wedding planner, I had to return the errant bathroom keys to MFB. My intention was to slip them back into their slot without Diane noticing. Keys returned to their vertical metal home, I would then attend to my new life’s purpose, Emily’s wedding. But like most of my life as of late, I couldn’t bank on things going as expected. My new MFB support team had a different plan for the morning. They had an order to things; accustomed to the emotionally fragile state of ex- employees, they were used to people wandering off the reservation, which is why they had put stringent controls in place.

  The second round of counseling was scheduled for that morning, designed, no doubt, to mimic the meeting-heavy schedule of the corporate world. We were being re- trained to live on the outside once again, like prisoners receiving group therapy or drug addicts being scared straight. The counselors were preparing us for our precarious return to the world of employment and would not be stayed from that mission. Diane greeted me once again with a smile. And I tried to make it look like I just arrived back from the ladies room. If she knew that I was the key thief, she thankfully did not let on.

  “Jessica, here’s your name tag, and the conference room is down the hall to the left. Follow your group down the hall past conference room A to conference room B.”

  Like a mindless sheep, I followed the person in front of me to conference room B, another glass-enclosed room, barely distinguishable from its next-door neighbor, conference room A. Our next instruction was to pick up one oversized piece of paper.

  “Be sure to write your name on both sides, so that everyone at the table can see your name,” Christine, the moderator, explained. Then her tone turned cautionary.

  “Bring these nametags to every meeting. You will only get one.”

  Some of us did that little breathless gasp where you start to laugh and then realize that no one else is laughing, so you stifle yourself and make it look like you are coughing or suppressing a sneeze. She wasn’t kidding. Christine was one of those quintessential human resources people who uses the “icebreaker” to ease the awkward tension when people who do not want to be in a meeting together are placed in a meeting together. Icebreakers are supposed to make
people more at ease, but usually the opposite is true.

  Regardless of the awkward nametag transition, we realized quickly that anonymity and a sense of humor, for that matter, were no longer an option. Once reserved for people who have real troubles, like alcoholism or gambling, we could not keep our names to ourselves and soon all would be revealed. Names on the table, we awaited our next instruction, which Christine was parceling out in an effort not to overwhelm us.

  “First, I want you to tell us what you did in corporate. And then tell us what you want to do, outside of corporate.” The latter part of her two-pronged question caused puzzling looks on some faces, while others were busy jotting down notes. Perhaps coming up with better descriptions or ways to lend more importance to their former positions.

  Chad Braddock, a handsome, lean, graying at the temples type, got the ball rolling. His former position as the CEO of Sierra Nevada Salsa, the nation’s largest salsa manufacturer, met with approval from the group. Despite the obvious show of support for salsa, Sierra Nevada sales had been slipping lately due to a host of competitors, and were no longer considered the number one salsa. Chad, like the condiment he produced, felt similarly demoted. Caught up in the wave of sympathy from the group, he neglected the critical part two of the question.

  “And…what would you like to do…” Christine prompted, speaking in a melodic way so as to encourage Chad to finish her sentence.

  “It’s pretty unlikely that I’ll stay in the premier condiment business,” Chad admitted. “I still like food, but I’m not sure that I want to work in it….”