Reality Check

by Leslie Carroll

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1/ - The Contest

  2/ - The Audition

  3/ - The Job from Hell

  4/ - The Hunk

  5/ - The Pitch

  6/ - The Envelope, Please

  7/ - Crunch Time

  8/ - The Dinner from Hell

  9/ - Where’s George Clooney When You Need Him?

  10/ - Pre-show Jitters

  11/ - The First Episode

  12/ - The First Round

  13/ - A Toxic Shock

  14/ - By the Numbers

  15/ - Rick’s Pitch

  16/ - Jem’s Quest

  17/ - Charmed, I’m Sure

  18/ - Blonde Attack

  19/ - The Roach Motel

  20/ - The Love Grotto

  21/ - The Siren’s Song

  22/ - Pet Projects

  23/ - A Night for Surprises

  24/ - Animal Instincts

  25/ - Moving On

  26/ - Design for Loving

  27/ - Animal Husbandry

  28/ - Taking the Bull by the Horns

  29/ - An Offer I Could Refuse

  30/ - The Revelation

  31/ - Risky Business

  32/ - When the Shoe Fits . . .

  33/ - Circling the Wagons

  34/ - The Final Episode

  35/ - The Real Jackpot

  Also by Leslie Carroll

  Copyright Page

  For d.f, who . . .

  “Excuse me. Are you Liz?” he asked me, pocketing his red yo-yo. “I hear you’re in advertising.”

  “And you’ve got all your hair!” I blurted like an idiot, thinking about how many guys I knew who needed Rogaine after they turned thirtyfive. I consider myself a very verbal person, but his looks robbed me of words. Intelligent ones, anyway.

  “Yes, I do, but it’s not as nice as yours.” He smiled—the kind of smile that radiated kindness as well as humor, a smile with the eyes as well as the lips. “It’s so shiny, you could be on one of those shampoo commercials.”

  I threw caution to the winds. We weren’t even properly introduced, but I wanted Jack to touch me; I wanted to know how it would feel to have him run his fingers through my hair. I don’t know how to explain it. It was something new for me, something primal. Maybe it was pheromones. “You can . . . touch it . . . if you want to,” I offered, in a fit of lust and chutzpah.

  The man didn’t reach out and tentatively run his palm along the length of my hair. He grasped a handful of it. In one bold gesture. Jack ran his fingers through my hair like he wanted to memorize its texture, color, weight. Instinctively, I found myself leaning backward, toward him. Before I could even consider editing my reaction to his touch, I realized I’d just let out a tiny moan. . . .

  1/

  The Contest

  Are you perennially single?

  Do you want to make $1,000,000.00?

  Have your dating experiences been “doozies”?

  You could be a contestant on

  BAD DATE

  The new reality-based TV game show coming to you this fall from the people who brought you last season’s hit series Surviving Temptation .

  14 lucky contestants’ll share harrowing tales of

  their hard-luck laps on the dating circuit.

  Our studio audience will vote on who has

  the worst date of the week.

  If you’re the solo single standing

  at the end of the season,

  YOU WIN ONE MILLION DOLLARS

  Plus an all-expense-paid trip for two to romantic

  Paris, the City of Lights.

  Auditions March 15 in NYC, Chicago, and LA Phone 1-800-Bad-Date for audition information.

  I was the first one to see the ad. It must have been a karma thing, as my roommate Nell would say, because I never read the New York Post. I’m a Times kind of gal, and these days I read even that on the Internet. Jem, my other roommate, buys the Post for the horoscopes. You would think a professor of communications at a local community college, a grown woman with a Ph.D. on her wall and three pairs of Manolo Blahniks (bought retail) in her closet would have more sophisticated journalistic tastes. Not Jem. I know for a fact, though, she reads more than the horoscopes. She reads all four of the tabloid’s gossip columns, too.

  I’m a sharer, so I thought it would be unfair to my other apartment mates to leave a gaping gash in the newsprint and smuggle the ad into my room. Besides, it wasn’t like I was the only “perennially single” woman in the country, let alone in the city, to see it. I was convinced, however, deep down in that unknowable way, that the jackpot was mine, though in the great collective unconscious, that was probably the thought shared by every unmarried person in the contiguous forty-eight states within a three-thousand-mile radius of either coast.

  “C’mon you guys, let’s audition! I think we’re all photogenic enough to be on the show,” Nell said. I thought that was mighty charitable of her since Nell is perfect. She even has a perfect-sounding name, Anella Avignon. Nell has the naturally straight honey blonde hair that every movie star on all those awards shows pays a fortune to replicate. She’s got a metabolism like a tiger shark and never needs to exercise. She’s also got a trust fund. Nell is drop-dead gorgeous and does absolutely nothing all day, but since she pays the rent on time, I can’t complain. She could easily afford her own apartment but she says she gets lonely and has a horror of ending up like a modern day Miss Havisham, wandering aimlessly for decades around a warren of overdecorated rooms, so she prefers the company of roommates. Nell is also one of the most generous women on the planet. Witness her complimentary remark about all three of us vis-à-vis this Bad Date show. Nell is perfect. A perfect blonde goddess. This morning I started to face it—I’ve got Venus envy.

  “Nell, you don’t need the million dollars. Why would you humiliate yourself on national television?” Jem asked her.

  “Well,” Nell said thoughtfully, gazing into the middle distance, “it’s something to do. Besides, Daddy’s fed up with giving me something for nothing.”

  Jem and I gasped in tandem. “What?!”

  “Since I’ve got to eat and pay rent, it means I may actually have to get a job,” Nell said sadly. “So if I win the million dollars then I can afford to do nothing. And still give half the money to charity if I want to.” Nell got that “epiphany” look in her blue eyes. “That’s what I would do. I’d throw charity balls with it. Dress up in an evening gown, meet rich, great-looking guys, and give a bunch of dough to the Fresh Air Fund or something. I could do that. I’m good at throwing parties.”

  See, this is why I can’t hate Nell. She really is such a generous soul despite the fact that she mentioned the chance to dress to the nines as her primary motivation for giving to charity. “I’ve never quite understood how you can do nothing all day and not get bored,” I said.

  “Well, I do nothing now,” Nell insisted. “It’s only until I find something I really like to do. I’d rather do nothing than something I don’t like.” She added, looking straight at me, “I don’t know how you can do that, Liz.”

  “Because some of us don’t have daddies who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies,” I sighed. “And because people actually pay me money to write. Even though half the time these days I have zero belief in the product I’m writing the copy for . . . which makes it a tad hard to promote. And occasionally makes the client a little testy.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see that,” Nell said helpfully.

  I used to get a thrill out of coming up with an ad campaign from scratch, writing clever copy that would hook the consumer. Lately, though, I’d been getting my creative kicks by writing a parody of a Regency-era novel called The Rake and the ’H
o.

  “I feel so soulless now, you guys. When I started copywriting, I enjoyed its creative challenges. There was an alchemy to it. Spinning words into gold. Smoke and mirrors. It was rewarding to know that my public service campaigns were reaching other people and perhaps making a difference in their lives. Maybe one more battered wife would seek help. Maybe one more mother would warn one more child about the dangers of ingesting lead paint. But over the past few months, every day I feel more and more like a charlatan. One of our clients—a very big account— household name—launched these little computer screens called ‘The Intelligencer,’ mounted inside elevators. The screens flash headline news, traffic conditions, weather, sports for the captive audience. A fifteenword visual bite that changes every five seconds or so. Not even enough time to remember what you read, or enough information to make it truly useful.”

  “You’re on your soapbox, girlfriend. It’s just a new form of communication,” Jem said. “What’s the matter with that?”

  “The matter is that I was struck with how useless the product really is. My agency is being paid to pitch something that no one needs or would have even known they wanted if it hadn’t been invented. Complete manipulation of the consumer and a totally useless waste of technology.”

  “So, if you won the contest . . . ?” Jem asked me.

  “I’d open my own cutting-edge ad agency that specializes in PSAs—smart public service messages for companies with a conscience. A million bucks would pay for the start-up.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Nell said, dog-earing a page in her Victoria’s Secret catalogue. “This bathing suit wouldn’t make me look fat, guys, would it?”

  Jem and I rolled our eyes.

  “Honey, it could be down-filled and you wouldn’t look fat,” Jem answered her.

  “Why would you enter this contest?” I asked Jem.

  Jem may be the most hypereducated woman I know, but she’s finally—after years of psychotherapy— coming to terms with her name. “How can a black woman name her daughter Jemima?” she used to rant. The true genesis of Jemima’s name came when her mother saw the movie version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when she was pregnant. She fell in love with the name of the little girl, Jemima, in the film. But Jem claimed that she was stigmatized, traumatized, and every other kind of “-tized” for the rest of her life by the appellation.

  Jem laughed. “I think it would be a damn kick, that’s why. And kind of an interesting experiment to be part of. From a sociological point of view.”

  “What would you do with the money if you won?” Nell asked her.

  “Get out of teaching apathetic college students who are taking my courses merely to satisfy a requirement. Not have to deal with the unwanted sexual advances of a department head who’s a self-professed warlock. I’d bank the money so I could afford to teach inner-city first-graders. Mold their sweet little minds; teach them to read.”

  “You’re incredibly noble,” I told her.

  “I mean it,” Jem said.

  And that was how we all decided to shelve our dignity in the name of a commitment to community service and audition for Bad Date, the reality game show.

  I pointed to a pile of what looked like fluffy Kleenex. “What is that stuff, by the way?” I asked.

  “Snatch,” said F.X. Avanti, using one of the cloths to clean the lint from his thick eyeglasses.

  “Correction. Floral-scented Snatch.” Jason rolled his eyes. “And it is our job to make the dustcloth-buying public forget they ever saw the Swiffer and switch to Snatch.”

  I practically choked into my napkin. “You are kidding me, right? This isn’t one of your post– Thanksgiving April Fool’s jokes, is it?”

  “Would we kid about a thing like this?” Jason asked.

  “I, Francis Xavier Avanti, swear on the grave of my maternal grandmother, Nona Rosanna, may she rest in peace, that I would not, nor did not, invent this ad campaign just to make you giggle, Liz.”

  Jason rattled the ice in his Fresca. “It’s actually a British product. Lillian snagged the account and is handling it from the Berkeley Square office, but they want to roll out an American mass-market launch within the next three months, so the New York office was tapped. They have sales totaling five million pounds sterling and they’ve only been on the market in the U.K. for less than half a year.”

  It was really hard for me to keep a straight face. “First thing we should do is ask Ms. Swallow if we can change the name for the U.S. market. Talk about two countries divided by a common language. Does Lillian know that snatch doesn’t exactly mean over there what it does over here? At least I don’t think it does.” I waved my hand dismissively at the product, wishing I could make it go far, far away. “That box doesn’t bear the royal coat of arms on it, does it? I can just imagine Her Majesty’s endorsement.” I brandished the dustcloth as though it were an Irish linen hanky and launched into my best impression of Queen Elizabeth. “I don’t go anywhere without my Snatch. It traps all sorts of rubbish in its fluff and leaves every surface clean as a whistle.” I dropped the English accent. “And Lillian wants us to position new ‘floral-scented Snatch’? I mean, come on, guys!”

  “It’s pretty funny, if you ask me,” F.X. snickered. “But you sounded more like Elizabeth Hurley than Elizabeth Windsor.”

  “By the way, we’re doing print and commercials for this one. Think ‘out of the box,’ you should pardon the expression.”

  “That’s really funny, Jason,” I said. “What am I supposed to do with this? Have a nubile teenager dressed in hot pants like Daisy Duke or Daisy Hazzard or whatever her name was, hose down and wipe up the family SUV with the product, smile provocatively into the camera, and purr ‘Grab some floral-scented Snatch now’?”

  F.X. furrowed his monobrow beneath his Coke-bottle lenses. “That could work,” he said. “But you don’t wet them to use them. That’s the whole point. So come up with something else.”

  “Aaargh.” I took a breath. “Oh. So we want America to be turned on by a dry snatch. Just what the free world needs. An opportunity to purchase myriad brands of electromagnetic dustrags. Snatch or Swiffer: You decide.”

  “Sounds like scratch ’n sniff. Ugh.” Jason rose from the long conference table. “The ball’s in your court, Ms. Pemberley. Get something back to me by the end of next week. We’ve got the client coming into town then. I want a minimum of three campaign ideas.”

  “Only if I can have Demetrius as my art director,” I lobbied. Demetrius was SSA’s most talented graphic artist. “Only a gay Rastafarian who roller-skis to work every day is off center enough to come up with some visuals on this.”

  “Just remember: Snatch is a family-oriented product,” snickered F.X.

  So you see, I already compromise my integrity for far less than a million dollars. What did I have to lose by auditioning for a dopey game show?

  2/

  The Audition

  Jem, Nell, and I sat in a long corridor outside the executive offices for the Urban Lifestyles cable channel with our brown standard issue clipboards in our miniskirted laps. The deeply curved configuration of the orange plastic chair was giving me premature scoliosis, so I shoved my purse between my lower lumbar region and the seat back in order to get a bit more comfortable.

  “Hey!” Nell leaned past me to speak to Jem. “What are you putting down under ‘race’?”

  Jem suppressed a smirk. “Well, it’s multiple choice and ‘mixed’ doesn’t seem to be an option, so I’m going with ‘other.’ ” She paused for dramatic effect. “I wrote ‘four hundred meter hurdles.’ ”

  “You didn’t,” Nell squealed.

  Jem shoved her clipboard under Nell’s nose.

  “She did,” I said somewhat dryly.

  “What did you two put down for ‘age’?” Jem asked us.

  “Twenty-nine and holding,” Nell said proudly.

  I read verbatim from my information sheet. “ ‘Age is a number and mine is unlisted.’ I read that in someone
’s obituary once. Words to live by.”

  “Shit. I put down my real age. Maybe I should change it.” Jem studied her own response and angled the eraser portion of her mechanical pencil toward the page.

  A production assistant who looked like she hadn’t yet completed puberty walked toward us with the brisk efficiency of someone who wanted desperately to be regarded as a responsible grownup.

  “Hi, I’m Tara,” she said, introducing herself. “Are you ladies ready?”

  We nodded our heads in assent.

  “Cool! I’ll be taking you one at a time to meet with our producer. It’s a really informal thing, so don’t be nervous. He’ll just talk a little bit with you to get a feel for who you are, so just try to act as natural as possible. There are no right or wrong answers, nothing specific he’s looking for, other than people who are comfortable about being candid.” Tara looked at her list of interviewees. “Okay, number forty-seven. Liz Pemberley.”

  “That’s me.” I stood up and shouldered my purse, noticing for the first time a tall, suntanned man leaning against the opposite wall. Suddenly, I felt as though he’d been watching me the entire time I’d been sitting there. When our gazes met, his was so penetrating that I felt he was drinking me in, somehow managing to learn everything there was to know about me in that single look. Yet oddly enough, his gaze didn’t feel intrusive or invasive; it felt warm, comforting in the strangest way. Maybe it was the fact that he was also playing with a red yo-yo, executing the most elaborate tricks without even looking at either his hands or the toy, that made me feel so relaxed.

  “Liz?”

  “Huh?”

  “Hi, Liz. Pleased to meet you.” Tara shook my hand. “And you’ve answered all of the questions on the information sheet as fully as you can?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, then. Let’s rock ’n’ roll.”

  I turned back to my compatriots and gave them a little smile, which was returned by a thumbs-up sign from each of them. Tara led me down the hall to a glass-walled office. The beige linen vertical blinds were closed for privacy.

  Tara rapped gently on the glass, then let us into the room. A young, puppyish man was seated in a large brown leather chair, with his legs extended, feet propped up on the massive desk. There were shiny pennies in his cordovan loafers. “Rob, this is Liz Pemberley,” Tara said, then handed him my clipboard and quietly closed the door, retreating into the corridor.