The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  Outstanding praise for the novels of Liz Ireland!

  The Pink Ghetto

  “Liz Ireland’s breezy new novel sends a gust of fresh air through familiar chick lit territory. Ireland’s wry prose deftly captures a lovable heroine and a world where overdue rent and padded resumes are as prevalent as roommate crushes and Amex’d takeout pizza. Ultimately, this is a post-millennial Cinderella tale featuring a heroine in a hand-me-down Chanel suit—and rose-colored glasses—instead of glass slippers, entry-level grunts in place of wicked stepsisters, and a Manhattan office building standing in for a castle.”

  —Wendy Markham, author of Slightly Engaged

  How I Stole Her Husband

  “An entertaining read.”

  —Booklist

  “A hilarious and compelling story about first love, lost innocence and payback. Liz Ireland has created a cast of multifaceted characters who are deliciously twisted and yet completely sympathetic. From downtrodden diva, Alison Bell, to the serial adulterer, Pepper Smith, you can’t help being pulled into their tangled web. Wickedly clever one-liners, outrageous abuses, and a page turner of a story make How I Stole Her Husband a must-read for chick-lit fans.”

  —Jennifer Coburn, author of Tales From The Crib

  “How I Stole Her Husband is a wonderfully written, often hilarious story of a young woman’s journey from all-around discontent to hard-won acceptance of life in all its crazy splendor. Alison Bell is the most likeable heroine I’ve met in some time—charmingly down-to-earth, sometimes painfully self-aware, and just a little bit desperate to make something of her life. How she plans to pluck herself from the depths of poverty to which she imagines she’s sunk, how she rediscovers the love of her life, and how she recovers triumphantly from the havoc he wreaks makes for an utterly absorbing read. Liz Ireland takes a clever concept and raises it to an unexpected level of sophistication. Don’t miss this book!”

  —Holly Chamberlin, author of Back In The Game

  Three Bedrooms In Chelsea

  “The three-girls-in-the-city formula gets an extreme chick-lit makeover in Three Bedrooms In Chelsea, an amusing sexy read.”

  —Lauren Baratz-Logsted, author of The Thin Pink Line

  “The sexy singles occupying Three Bedrooms In Chelsea are heartwarming, funny and unforgettable. Liz Ireland has created an absolute delight!”

  —Patti Berg, author of I’m No Angel

  Charmed, I’m Sure

  “Captivating! Charmed, I’m Sure is an enchanting blend of hex and sex! A rollicking romp that will make you believe in magic.”

  —Stephanie Bond, author of In Deep Voodoo

  When I Think Of You

  “Fresh and funny!”

  —Jennifer Crusie, New York Times bestselling author

  Books by Liz Ireland

  HUSBAND MATERIAL

  WHEN I THINK OF YOU

  CHARMED, I’M SURE

  THREE BEDROOMS IN CHELSEA

  HOW I STOLE HER HUSBAND

  THE PINK GHETTO

  THIS CHRISTMAS

  (with Jane Green and Jennifer Coburn)

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  The

  Pink Ghetto

  LIZ IRELAND

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  The

  Pink Ghetto

  Contents

  Outstanding praise for the novels of Liz Ireland!

  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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  For a certain type of man—and I plead guilty to being that type to a T—Renata Abner was like catnip to a lean, hungry Siamese tom.

  When we met in college, she was frisky and eager for new experiences as only a recently slimmed-down co-ed can be. Unbeknownst to those around her, her first eighteen years had been as Renata Abner, chubbette; her highest social attainment had been co-captain of the pep choir. Due to a graduation night trauma, she had spent her postgraduate summer on a potent regimen of Jenny Craig meals and Ex-Lax, and was at last a slender shadow of her former self. Now, in her new size-ten incarnation and self-schooled in the Sex and the City Tao of high heels and cleavage, she was eager for those dating experiences her cohort had all been having since crawling out of the post-pubescent ooze.

  She certainly had me fooled. But after three beers purchased with our just-hatched fake I.D.’s, the newly acquired sophistication fell away like her resistance to the cheese straws in the bowl at her elbow, and the real story came spilling out: the rowdy houseful of siblings that a pudgy middle child could get lost in; the taunts of classmates from preschool onward; the playground depredations that led to her finding solace in imaginative but not physical play; the lack of social life in high school, the only compensations of which were an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies and a very respectable 3.6 GPA.

  So what was the big attraction, you ask?

  Simple. Some men go for the geisha types (harder to find these days, but still out there). Others inexplicably veer to those domineering, she-who-must-be-obeyed fright dolls. What’s my poison? She who has been overlooked.

  Chapter 1

  After all that’s happened, most of the people think it was that book that changed everything for me. It’s not hard to understand why. I blamed everything on the book at first, too. I was bitter, I’ll admit that. In my shoes, anyone would have been.

  But recently, thanks to the support of my friends, my family, and the personal growth section at Barnes and Noble, I’ve adopted a more zenlike attitude toward the whole episode. To put it in a string of clichés: I am bowed but not broken. That which did not kill me has made me stronger. I have washed that man right out of my hair.

  Taking the longer view, I can see that it wasn’t heartbreak or even that book that altered my life. Not really. It was the job. The job changed everything, which is weird, because at the time I was so desperate to earn money that I didn’t even pay attention to what I was applying for.

  The ad didn’t name the company. Lodged as it was in the middle of the employment section of the New York Times without a box or even much bold lettering, it seemed anonymous, non-threatening, almost forgettable. A little brown bag of an ad. Well-known publishing house seeks assistant editor, it said. Or something to that effect.

  Well-known publishing house. Lurking behind those four innocent words was a whole new world, amazing to the uninitiated and fraught with unseen traps that a novice was bound to step in, like those pits camouflaged by leaves in an old Abbott and Costello jungle movie.

  I didn’t realize it myself for months, until I was sprawled on the ground, shaking the banana leaves out of my hair.

  Not that it would have mattered at the time when I spotted the ad. Like I said, I was desperate. If Pol Pot had been hiring, I probably would have fired off my resume. I was sending out that document, so heavily padded that it could have played tackle in the NFL, to any and every business that sounded as though they required a semiliterate being to park at a desk all day. In a blizzard of cover letters blanketing the human resources departments of Manhattan that month, I professed my profound desire to be a proofreader, executive assistant, editorial assistant, or any type of flunky imaginable sought by the worlds of advertising, public relations, o
r broadcasting. I needed a job, and the sooner the better.

  For two and a half unbelievable years I had been living on easy street. Actually, the address was a floor-through in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, land of the trust fund bohemian. I had no trust fund, but I had been incomparably lucky since getting out of college, when, through a professor, I had landed a position as a personal assistant to Sylvie Arnaud.

  Sylvie Arnaud was one of those people that the early Twentieth Century popped out now and then—magic people who were simply famous for being around all the right people.

  How she had become famous, no one remembered. Perhaps sometime circa 1935 she had written something, or painted something, or slept with someone who had written or painted something. Her name would occasionally pop up in The New York Review of Books, during the course of a discussion of a review of books about German Expressionist painters, say. She knew everybody. Ernest Hemingway. Salvador Dali. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Harpo Marx. You can play a highbrow Where’s Waldo? with her in pictures of intellectuals and rich folk gathered in salons in Paris and London between the wars. Chances are she’ll be there somewhere, maybe sitting next to Cole Porter and looking impossibly elegant in her slinky bias cut dresses, with a drink in one hand and a stretch limousine cigarette holder in the other.

  By the time I knew her, she was a beaky, wizened old creature on toothpick legs, with jaundiced flesh as thin as onion skin parchment. She lived in a dark, musty brownstone on the Upper East Side, in Turtle Bay. When my old college professor who helped get me the job told me about the position, he said that I would probably be helping her assemble her personal papers so she could write her autobiography. But I was not taking down her memoirs; instead, I spent most of my time chasing after her favorite groceries, like these nasty chocolate covered apricot filled cookies that she practically lived on. Believe me, I am not picky when it comes to food. There’s nothing I can’t deem binge-worthy if I stare at it long enough, but even I would make an exception for those cookies.

  And her peculiarities didn’t end there. She also liked a specific kind of hot pickled okra that could only be found in Harlem; butter mints from the basement at Macy’s; baguettes and croissants from a French bakery in Brooklyn Heights. She preferred cloth hankies to Kleenex and Lava soap to the expensive kind I bought her once on her birthday, and woebetide the person who made the mistake of serving her ice in her drinks.

  She was one peculiar old lady.

  She didn’t talk to me much about Picasso, or Earnest Hemingway, or the Duchess of Windsor. I arrived too late for that. Mostly I heard about her ingrown toenails and her skin problems. I guess when you’re ninety-four and you itch, dead painter friends become a second tier concern.

  When I first started working for her I would bring up the subject of her memoirs.

  “What are these memoirs you are always pestering me about, Rebecca?” She had a trace of her native accent, but it was an off-and-on thing. She could lay it on thick if she wanted, turning these to zeez.

  I tried not to let on that I was disappointed not to be doing important literary work. “I just thought…if you needed any help going through your journals…”

  She would laugh throatily at that idea. “Ah, you see me as some sort of crazy old artifact, non?”

  “No, no,” I would stutter. (A lie. I did.)

  “Naturally! You want to know all my little secrets, like whether Cary Grant was good in bed.”

  “No, I…” I gulped. “Wait. Cary Grant?”

  She would bark with glee at me, tell me to take her laundry down to the basement, and then ignore me for the rest of the afternoon. I began to suspect the diaries didn’t exist anyway. Maybe she’d never been any closer to Cary Grant than I had been.

  Or maybe she had.

  Occasionally an academic would make his way to the brownstone, but he always left disappointed. He might sit in a chair with a plate of those apricot cookies and listen to Sylvie rave for a few minutes about John-Paul Sartre’s bad breath; generally it didn’t take much longer to realize that Sylvie wasn’t going to divulge much useful information. Even though Sylvie had been living in New York since the sixties, her principal visitors while I was there were not glitterati or even academics, but a physical therapist named Chuck and an old lady from the Bronx named Bernadine.

  Sylvie was a mystery to me, right down to the question of what I was doing there. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to pay even my nominal salary to have me around. I couldn’t even figure out why this old French lady was in New York.

  Then again, I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it. When I began working for her I was twenty-two and it was the first time I’d ever lived in New York City, so I wasn’t exactly consumed with curiosity about my nonagenarian employer.

  And I had nothing to complain about. On the first day of every month a check arrived from the manager of Sylvie’s estate, R.J. Langley, CPA, which made me the prime breadwinner among my roommates in our apartment in Williamsburg. At the time I was too young to appreciate that getting paid a living wage for buying an old lady’s baguettes was really nothing short of a miracle.

  Then one morning as I was getting ready to hie myself off to Manhattan, I received a call from R.J. Langley, the first time I had ever spoken to the man personally. He asked me—commanded me, actually—to go to his office in midtown first thing.

  “Why?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Actually, yes. I have bad news. Miss Arnaud has pneumonia.”

  “Oh, no! What hospital?”

  There was a pause. “I can give you more details in person.”

  During the subway ride over, I was filled with sadness. Poor Sylvie, stuck in the hospital, eating Jell-O. She hated being away from her apartment, away from all her musty old crap. I made out a mental list of her favorite things I could put into a hospital care package for her.

  When I arrived at the accountant’s office, however, I was hit by a real shocker. Mr. Langley pushed an envelope across the vast oaken plateau that was his desk. “We would like to thank you for your service to Miss Arnaud.”

  I gawped at the check, which was for twice the amount I usually received.

  “That’s for your last weeks of work, plus two weeks severance,” Langley said. “I’m afraid we have to let you go.”

  He kept saying we. “But what about Sylvie?”

  “If she recovers—”

  “If!” I bleated.

  He winced at my outburst. “Miss Arnaud is at a very advanced age, as you know, and her condition is serious. If she survives, it is her wish and the wish of her beneficiaries that she be moved to an assisted living community. You must understand.”

  I did not. And who were these beneficiaries? They had certainly not visited her while I had been there.

  “I’d like to see Sylvie.”

  The wrinkles of studied concern that had creased his brow disappeared. “I don’t think that will be necessary, or even advisable considering her present condition.”

  Growing miffed, I asked, “Will you at least tell me where she is?”

  “I will take that up with the beneficiaries.”

  I stood up, filled with righteous anger. I had a feeling I was talking to the primary beneficiary. Maybe the only one. The weasel. “Fine. Please ask them, Mr. Langley. Please assure the beneficiaries that all I want to do is bring Miss Arnaud a box of her favorite cookies.”

  I sailed out of his office, my indignation at full mast.

  Needless to say, I never got a call telling me Sylvie’s whereabouts. But to be honest, I didn’t knock myself out trying to find her on my own. I didn’t work at it at all. When it came down to it, I rationalized, I had just been Sylvie’s employee. She wasn’t my responsibility. And if her heirs worried that I would somehow winnow my way into her will, then fine. Let them comb the island of Manhattan for butter mints and hot pickled okra.

  It didn’t take long for my severance money to dry up, and no one came forw
ard offering me another cushy job. One of my roommates, an aspiring playwright named Fleishman, was working sporadically at a part-time job with a telemarketing company selling vinyl siding one day and ballet subscriptions the next. My other roommate, Wendy, was studying lighting design at NYU and honing her barista skills at Starbucks. We had known each other since college. We were the three musketeers, but without my paycheck, we were more like three shipwrecked souls on a leaky lifeboat.

  Wendy was somewhat worried, but she was too busy to do much to solve our financial conundrum.

  Fleishman was not worried, because he never worried, especially about money. He came from serious money—he was a descendent of an established chain of discount shoe store owners. He himself had no interest in shoes (at least not the discount variety), and since his parents did not consider playwriting a good use of their son’s life, at the moment he was supposed to be cut off from the family. His mother, however, would occasionally suffer a wave of maternal guilt and come into the city to take Fleishman out to lunch (and take in the stores, no doubt.) On these days, Fleishman would return to our apartment with a wad of cash in his pockets. Or maybe sporting a new leather jacket. Christmas and birthdays—even in his disinherited state—tended to be accompanied by a thin envelope bearing a fat check. Broke was always a temporary thing to Fleishman. He always had hope.