by Carol Snow
He put his elbows on the table, leaned forward, closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. I recognized this gesture. It had always made me feel inadequate. He leaned back, opened his eyes. “You’re perfectly positioned,” he said. “You’ve got the title, you’re affiliated with this”—he searched for an adjective that wouldn’t annoy me—“non-threatening publication. People will be relaxed around you. Anyone you talk to will assume you’re only going to say positive things about them because that’s all Salad ever does.”
He’d gone as far as he could on the Internet, he said, spending hours searching under “call girls,” “prostitution,” and “Mercer College.” He was now on the e-mail lists of at least thirty porn sites, but he’d gotten no closer to breaking the story. “Deirdre says they keep it under wraps—it’s all word of mouth.”
He outlined his proposal: together, we would “blow this thing open.” The story, under the byline, “Tim McAllister (with Kathy Hopkins, Salad magazine),” would break on-line in New Nation, and follow in print a day later in Salad. Any reprint or syndication fees would be split seventy-five/twenty-five in favor of New Nation. “I’ll run it by my publisher,” I said, wishing I could pitch a story on dorm decorating instead. (“Move over, plastic milk crates!”) “He might not like it.”
five
“I love it,” Richard said. “I LOVE IT.”
“Is it really us, though?” I asked desperately. “We’ve got to keep our identity consistent.”
“Sex in higher education.” He walked to his window, looked out at the traffic, strode back to his desk. He was too excited to keep still. “This will get Salad the recognition we’ve been looking for. This will sell magazines. This will sell ad space!”
Sheila backed Richard up, of course. “Don’t be afraid of a challenge, Kathy.” She squeezed my arm in a show of sisterly support. This was what Sheila did every time she wanted to be convincing: she touched you and she inserted your name into conversation. “Kathy,” she continued. “You’ve got to be willing to stretch sometimes, Kathy.”
“It’s not my ability I’m questioning,” I hissed, suddenly wondering if I should have gone to law school like most of the other English majors I knew. “It’s the magazine’s reputation.” Actually, Salad didn’t have much of a reputation, good or bad, which was its real problem.
Only Jennifer was on my side. “Call girls? At college? That’s, like, so Inside Edition.” Jennifer, clad in a turquoise spandex mini dress and silver spike heels, was looking a bit like a professional herself today.
I tried every defensive tactic I could come up with. The advertisers might be put off by a story that revolved around illicit sex, I said. “Then why do advertisers pay so much to advertise in People?” Richard roared. “In Cosmo? In U.S. News and World Report, for Chrissakes? Because sex sells!”
I defended some of the important stories I had in the pipeline and expressed my concern that they might be neglected. “Nobody gives a rat’s fuck about Shakespeare in the elementary schools!” he yelled. “What kind of a jackass really thinks a bunch of ten-year-olds are going to like Hamlet?”
“Richard, honey,” Sheila murmured, rubbing his thigh. “You’re a passionate man, and I love that about you, but think if this is the kind of language you really want to be using, Richard.”
I couldn’t talk my way out of it. It was settled: I was to make the coed call girls story my top priority, spending as much time in Western Massachusetts as needed. Richard’s main concern revolved around Tim, whom I’d described as “an old friend from college,” and the collaboration with his on-line publication. Richard said, “We don’t want to get lost in this deal, leave all the credit to New Nation.”
I didn’t care about any of that, of course. “What about the stories I’m working on? I can’t just abandon them.” I was feeling very defensive on the bard’s behalf.
“Jennifer can help with the filler pieces,” Richard said, brushing the air.
“But I need her as my sec—” I caught myself just in time. “As my assistant.”
“She’s still your assistant,” Richard said. “She’ll do both.”
“She’s up to the challenge,” Sheila chimed in.
Jennifer looked up from her nails, which appeared to have been decorated with glitter glue. “This is so going to cut into my novel,” she muttered.
I called Tim to give him the good news. “I knew you wouldn’t pass this up,” he said. And I wondered, yet again, if he knew me at all.
Once I’d thought Tim knew me better than anyone else on the planet. After we met for the second time, in the lecture hall, he offered to buy me a cup of coffee, and I said yes even though I hadn’t started drinking coffee yet. I said yes because he was sophisticated enough to “need a shot of caffeine.” He drank his coffee black, which I found impossibly worldly.
I don’t remember everything we talked about in the snack bar that day, but I remember how he looked at me, like there was no one else in the room. I’d had a couple of boyfriends in high school, gone to formal dances, made out in the back seat of a few station wagons. But no one had ever looked at me like that before. For years, he looked at me like that. Then, gradually, he didn’t. Since Tim left, there have been days when I’ve wondered if anyone will ever look at me like that again.
For now, at least, Tim and I had something in common, a shared goal. My first task was to “feel out” my contacts. I spent maybe three minutes thinking of the best way of approaching the dean. “Oh! I forgot to ask in my interview the other day—do you have hookers at your school?” I headed to the library instead.
I love any excuse to leave the office, and a visit to the Boston Public Library, which just manages to be too far from the office to walk to, meant a trip on the T. To prepare for the journey, I popped into an Au Bon Pain for a croissant and an iced coffee. One must keep up one’s strength. Then, because I’d need something to read while on public transportation, I bought a decorating magazine entitled, Windows and Walls, both of which I happen to have in my apartment.
At the library, I tried the computers first, but most of the information I sought was labeled “restricted”—meaning, I guess, that if you want to look at porn, you have to be a librarian. Instead, I hit the stacks. My first valuable piece of retail material: Mayflower Madam, by Sidney Biddle Barrows. I settled into a comfy chair and smirked at the thought that I was getting paid for this. Most people who make the kind of money that I do have to spend their days flipping burgers or punching cash registers. Thirty pages into the book, I was convinced I had chosen the wrong profession. As told by Barrows, prostitution was even better than being a lawyer, which, after all, involved endless briefs and gray suits with skirts that fell below the knee. Forty pages in, I realized that call girls had to do more than wear fabulous clothes and answer to a name like Camille. They actually had to have sex with the old farts.
The library was pleasant: noise and temperature-controlled. Maybe I should have been a librarian.
I leafed through some other books and clicked through some unrestricted on-line articles. By the end of the day, I was an expert on all the things they don’t teach you about in college: sexual role-playing, garter belts, and vaginal condoms. I developed a new appreciation for law-abiding madams who paid taxes. I discovered that most masseuses really aren’t hookers and that dominatrixes rarely have sex with their clients. Finally, I confirmed what I’d always suspected: that everyone was having sex more than I was.
How I was supposed to apply all of this to Mercer College, I hadn’t a clue. On Monday, I’d “poke around” at the campus. I didn’t really know what that entailed, since my interviews had always been “soft,” engaged with willing participants who often approved my final draft before it went to print.
Meanwhile, I had a weekend to endure.
six
It could have been worse. I could have been eating Häagen-Dazs from a carton and watching cartoons when Dennis showed up at my door on Saturday morning. I use the
term “morning” loosely. It was just past noon. And I was asleep.
I don’t know why I even answered the door. A single woman living alone should know better. He could have been a rapist. Or a Mormon.
At least I was decent, clad in the bathrobe my mother had given me when I was in college and she thought I was still a virgin. High-necked, flowered and frilly, it would arouse any man whose first sexual fantasies had revolved around Laura Ingalls.
“Oh God. I should have called to confirm.” Attired in an apricot polo shirt and white Bermuda shorts, he looked crisp and clean, like he’d risen with the sun and energized himself with yoga and a supplement-laden smoothie. “I just—I thought we had plans . . .”
I do not wake easily, especially after a mere twelve hours of shut-eye. “Uh,” I said. “Nuh. S’okay. Jus’ napping.” I am one of those inflexible types who hates it when someone shows up without calling first, even when I’m awake and my apartment is clean. As it was, I had an empty bottle of wine on my coffee table (it had started half empty, but how was he to know?) and Oreo crumbs all over the floor. Against my better instincts, I had spent Friday night planted in front of the television, watching Dirty Dancing and An Officer and a Gentleman on cable. I hated myself for being such a girl—and a sloppy one at that. My kitchen counter, which overlooks the living room, hadn’t been cleared in weeks, and it was buried under catalogues, candy wrappers and overdue bills. Had I been a “look on the bright side” sort, I would have appreciated this encounter in the hope that Dennis would lose interest in me, an obvious pig. Instead, I saw myself through his eyes and was repulsed.
“I thought we could go shopping,” he said. “But I can come back.”
“Nuh, nuh. I’ll get dressed.” I motioned him into my living room and attempted a smile, which probably reeked of morning mouth. “Coffee,” I intoned. “Jus’ need coffee.”
Women are so much better than men. A woman would have sensed my discomfort immediately and done her utmost to diffuse it. “Oh! I’m so sorry I didn’t call first! I love sleeping late, too,” she would have confided, assuring me that the only reason she was up before lunch today was because those pesky neighbors next door—or that noisy truck or that high-strung dog—were making such a racket. Then she would have shrugged it off and gotten out of my way as quickly as possible. “You go back to sleep,” she would have commanded. “I’ll give you a buzz later and tell you about all the good shopping you missed out on.”
But Dennis wasn’t a woman. (Which was the problem, now, wasn’t it?) He merely settled himself on my floral plum couch (“Nice pattern,” he did have the decency to say) and told me he’d be there whenever I was ready.
He didn’t even want to buy anything—that was the real kicker. All he’d put me through, and he merely wanted to browse. His company had just gotten a big account with Mission Accomplished, a yuppie furniture store, and he was the account executive.
“The creatives ran some ideas past me, and I’m just not satisfied. I’d like you to tell me what you think.” He walked briskly through the warm city streets. I practically had to jog to keep up with him. Mission Accomplished was in Back Bay, normally a fifteen minute walk from my Beacon Hill apartment, but we reached it in only ten. My stomach gurgled, my head hurt, and I was sweating like a pig. I needed more coffee, preferably iced. I hoped the next guy who had a thing for me would be more into wining-and-dining me and less into furthering his career.
As its name implied, Mission Accomplished carried a lot of mission style furniture, along with other simple, complementary and equally inoffensive items. There were mid-priced Mission tables, ladder back chairs, oatmeal-colored couches. It was like Pottery Barn without the panache. I found it a little too dull, a little too safe—a good bet for yuppies who have no sense of style but want to show they have class.
We stood in the middle of the showroom, thinking, comfortable for once in our silence. “What do you think?” he finally asked. Soft jazz played in the background while young couples dressed in polo shirts and khakis tiptoed across the plush carpeting, hesitantly fingering the furniture.
I tried to think of a nice word for “boring.” “It’s inoffensive,” I finally said. “Doesn’t thrill me.”
“It doesn’t have to,” he said. “How would you sell it?”
“I have no idea.”
He squinted at me for a minute. “The creatives are fixating on understatement. ‘Furniture shouldn’t shout, it should whisper.’ Or, ‘For people who don’t need to prove anything.’ Is it just me, or is that ho-hum?” We stopped in front of an overstuffed beige-and-white-striped couch and sat down. The couch was really comfortable, actually. Surrounded by the right accent pieces, it could really make a room.
I grinned. “It’s not just you.”
He picked up a sage chenille pillow and pulled at the fringe. “But how else do you get the message across?”
I looked around again, searching without luck for a single eccentric, colorful piece. “Define it by what it’s not.”
“I don’t follow.”
“People shop here because they’re afraid of making a mistake, because they’d rather be boring than risk looking tasteless.”
“Catchy,” he said. “But I don’t think management would go for it.”
“No,” I laughed. “You don’t actually say that. I’m just trying to understand why someone would shop here in the first place.”
“How do we tap into that?”
“You tap into their fears . . . and then make light of them. Okay,” I said, thinking as I spoke. “Say you have a picture of this really ugly, really fussy couch. Bad color, lots of flounces. And underneath you have a line that says—wait! I’ve got it! Right in the middle of the couch is this bumper sticker that says, ‘My other couch is a Mission Accomplished.’” I actually clapped my hands and was immediately appalled at such reflexive corniness.
Dennis didn’t say anything. He just smiled and gazed at me with far too much delight.
I settled back into the cushy couch. “Beginner’s luck.”
“You like this. Admit it.”
“It’s fun.” Next to the couch was a vase that I actually liked: sandstone, spherical, simple in the best sense. “But I can’t imagine doing it every day, getting paid to do it.”
“Isn’t that the ultimate goal? To get paid for something that seems too fun to be work?”
I picked up the vase and checked the tag: too expensive for a writer’s budget. “You’ve been reading too many self-help books.” I put the vase back on its glass and wrought iron pedestal.
We went to a fifties style diner for brunch. It was considerate of Dennis to suggest brunch, I thought, when the rest of the city was thinking about dinner. The restaurant’s air-conditioning made me shiver. I hate that about summer: it’s always too hot outside, too cold in. I warmed my hands on my chunky coffee mug and rubbed the goose-flesh on my arms. Dennis asked the waitress to adjust the temperature.
Dennis twisted his neck around to inspect the neon and chrome. “What do you think of this place? Too kitschy?”
I shrugged. “There’s good kitsch and bad kitsch. You get a diner that no one’s bothered to update since the fifties—that’s good kitsch. But at least in a place like this, you know you won’t get hepatitis.”
Our banter felt easy, natural—just as it had before our dinner date. Maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I should just relax and see what happened.
“What are you doing this evening?” he asked. “There’s this new bar in Harvard Square I’ve been wanting to check out.”
Whoa. Too much, too soon. So much for relaxing.
“Sounds fun, but I’ve got a million things to do,” I said, suddenly anxious to return to my empty apartment.
seven
Monday I headed to Mercer College. I made the mistake of leaving at the height of rush hour, and even the reverse commute on the Mass Pike put me into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Traffic started moving once I hit the suburbs, and
I know it was mean-spirited to feel smug at the sight of the inbound traffic, which was still inching along, but hey: you grab your pleasures where you can. A short time later, the traffic cleared and the land opened up, green and even, and I would have driven eighty miles an hour but for my four-cylinder engine and my deeply ingrained fear of speeding tickets.
Shortly before I hit the Mercer, I stopped for fuel because I wasn’t sure the town was big enough to support a gas station. My faded beige Civic got excellent mileage, but I kept the gas receipt anyway. Richard was famously lax about reimbursing expenses. If he ignored enough of mine, I could simply refuse to visit the college again, and he’d start giving me some more of the usual, boring but normal assignments.
Yeah, that might work.
Higher up on my list of worries was finding a parking spot when I returned home. I’d bought my car (used) when I’d turned thirty because I felt that being an adult meant owning a car. Growing up in the suburbs spawns some twisted thinking. I had a Beacon Hill resident sticker for on-street parking, but spots were still scarce, especially in the evening, when people drove home from work; although Beacon Hill is within walking distance of most Boston businesses, a surprising number of residents commute out of the city. If I returned too late tonight, I might have to pay to park my car in a garage only to reclaim it and repark in the morning, when the commuters had left.
At last I reached the “blink and you’ll miss it” town of Mercer, Massachusetts. It was one of those villages where life revolves around the college for the simple reason that there isn’t a heck of a lot else there. After driving past College Cleaners, College Liquors (“We check ID’s”) and College Drugs (Did no one else find that funny?), I stopped at a gas station (there was one, after all) to ask for directions, which turned out to be, “Keep going down the road. Can’t miss it.”
My first step as an investigative reporter was to visit the admissions office and acquire a course catalogue. “I’d like a catalogue,” I told the middle-aged, soft-bodied secretary.