The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  “Would insurance cover plastic surgery for that?”

  “She could pay for it herself if she weren’t wasting all her money on her canine.”

  They asked me a few polite questions about myself, which I evaded to the best of my ability. (If Ann and her doggy daycare were worth a conversational massacre, imagine the hay they could have made out of my living with my ex-boyfriend.) By the time the fortunes cookies rolled around, it felt like I had been working with them for months instead of hours.

  When I got back, I continued to pile up accomplishments. I played a few rounds of solitaire and did very well. A few people, some of whom I had met that morning, came by to ask how I was settling in. Actually, I think they had afternoon restlessness and just wanted to get away from their desks for a while.

  At one point, I had three other editors and Lindsay the editorial assistant all squeezed into my office, talking about famous person sightings they’d had in New York City. Ann—she of the pampered pooch—had stood in a deli line behind Leonardo DiCaprio, which was pretty damn impressive. The only famous person I’d come in that close contact with was Al Roker, who Fleishman and I had seen coming up the theater aisle the night we had gone to see Gypsy.

  Lindsay had a good one. “Whoopi Goldberg goes to my dentist.”

  This revelation brought gasps. “No way!” Madeline exclaimed. “Your dentist?”

  Lindsay puffed up a little, sensing she had scored. “I saw her in the waiting room once, even. She was there for a cleaning, the hygienist told me.”

  “Where? What dentist?”

  “His name is Dr. Stein, and he’s on Eighty-fifth Street.”

  Ann’s forehead wrinkled. “Does Whoopi Goldberg have good teeth?”

  “Of course she has good teeth! She’s a movie star.”

  “I’m sure they’re capped. All actors have caps.”

  “Be crazy not to. In a movie close-up an incisor can look twenty feet tall.”

  “Wait,” Andrea said. “Our insurance pays for Whoopi’s dentist?”

  Lindsay nodded her head.

  “That’s it. I’m switching.”

  “Just like that? Because Whoopi goes somewhere else?”

  “Why should I settle for substandard?” Andrea asked defensively. “You can bet with all that money she has, Whoopi’s checked out her dental care options.”

  “Do you know she travels in her own bus?” someone asked. “Like a rock star.”

  Just as the conversation was about to turn full tilt onto the subject of celebrity transport, someone rapped on my doorjamb. Standing behind Lindsay was a woman of medium height, with dishwater blond hair cut in an unflattering page boy, and wearing an olive green pantsuit of the most aggressively dumpy design imaginable. She surveyed the crowd through an owlish pair of glasses.

  Suddenly, it was as if someone had shot off a bird gun at a duck pond. Coworkers flew out my door, leaving me floating all alone in the sights of…well, whoever this was. I still didn’t know, but a knot of foreboding formed in the pit of my stomach.

  “Hi,” I said, attempting to keep the uneasiness out of my voice.

  She smiled tightly. “I didn’t mean to break up your little party.”

  I blushed self-consciously. “No—it’s just my first day. I’m Rebecca, by the way.”

  “Hi, Rebecca, I’m Janice Wunch.”

  I really had to keep my lips from twitching. If ever a person looked like a Janice Wunch, it was this woman. Poor thing. You would think she would have changed her name, or at least her glasses.

  “I’m the production manager.”

  I kept the polite smile frozen on my face. I had no idea what this meant.

  “I have a little list here—well, actually, it’s quite long—of things of yours that are late to production.”

  “Of mine?” I asked, confused. “But I just got here.”

  “I’m sure many of these are projects that were originally Julie’s, but of course they’re your babies now.”

  “Oh, I see…”

  She handed a list to me, which filled up an entire page. It was staggering how late I could be on everything on my first day.

  “In terms of priority, of course, the edit for The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard needs to get done first. It’s nearly a month late. I have told Rita about this repeatedly, and she said she was going to get Lindsay to do a preliminary edit, but then apparently she changed her mind when Lindsay left the manuscript on a crosstown bus and they had to ask the author’s agent for a duplicate.”

  I nodded. As urgent as the situation was with The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard, there were two other late edits on the list, along with other stuff that I was completely clueless about. What was an art info sheet? I owed five of those. Where was cover copy supposed to come from? (Me? I wondered with growing hysteria.)

  “No big deal,” Janice said. “Just get it to me ASAP—or by the end of the week, if you can.”

  I gulped. The end of the week was sooner than what I had in mind. She had to be kidding. “If there’s a problem getting some of this stuff in…”

  She blinked at me with what appeared to be sincere incomprehension. “Why should there be?”

  Maybe because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing?

  My heart started to pound. This was why you should never stretch the truth in a job interview. Eventually someone was going to expect you to know something.

  When Janice Wunch left my office, I closed the door behind her and succumbed to a moment of blind panic. What the hell was I going to do now? I was contemplating simply running away and spending the rest of my life as an editorial fugitive when my phone rang. I leapt for it. I didn’t care if it was bad news. At least someone from the outside world was trying to contact me.

  It was Fleishman. “How’s the little editor doing?”

  “She’s dying.”

  He laughed. “You sound stressed.”

  I told him about the late list. I told him I didn’t even know what most of this stuff was. I told him to prepare for my impending departure from the ranks of the employed. “I’ll send the clothes back to your mom,” I promised.

  “Just go ask that assistant person what to do,” he said.

  “Lindsay? But she’ll think I’m an idiot.”

  “All the better—that’ll make her day. Assistants love to think people working over them are incompetent morons. It reinforces their own suspicions that they should actually be running things themselves.”

  “Yeah, but this girl seems…well, incompetent. I would be happy to give her ego a boost, but I don’t trust her to give me correct information.”

  “Hm. Is there anyone else you could ask?”

  I thought of Cassie, who looked as if she had never made an incompetent move in her life. “Well, I’ll give it some thought.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Fleishman said.

  “Anyway, I should be home around six-thirty.” I felt a sudden longing to be there now.

  “Good, because I’ve got a huge surprise for you.”

  “I hope it involves a large pizza box.” After this afternoon, I had a feeling I was going to need some serious comfort food.

  He laughed. “Oh, it’s better than that.”

  There was a knock on my door and I hung up the phone to answer it. James, the mailroom guy, was standing there, his stance impatient. He was wearing headphones. “Mail,” he mumbled.

  He handed me a plastic tub full of manila envelopes, business letters, and fat padded mailers, all addressed to Julie Spears. I grabbed it automatically and then staggered back under its weight. “Hey, wait a minute!”

  He frowned and asked loudly, over whatever was being pumped into his ears, “What’s the matter? You’re her now, right?”

  He pointed to Julie’s name.

  As much as I would have loved to refuse delivery at that moment, I had to admit that I was indeed Julie now. Damn.

  I began to sort through the top of the pile, separating the letters from
the packages. I decided that I would come in early tomorrow to open the packages. I needed to think of some kind of logging system, since I didn’t see any evidence of one among Julie’s stuff. Gingerly, I opened a few letters.

  Happily, most of them seemed manageable. A woman wanted to know if she could send me her book about a nurse midwife who finds herself pregnant after having a fling at her ten-year high school reunion. Sounded good to me. Another writer was dying to have me read her romantic suspense novel involving a female paratrooper who is taken hostage in a war-torn country and falls in love with a Norwegian Red Cross worker. That sounded good, too. But what did I know? I fired off letters to basically everybody telling them to mail me whatever.

  A reader wrote to inform me that she had found several typographical errors, including the misspelling of the word gynecological, in a book called Twins on His Doorstep. She wanted to know if Candlelight books wanted to hire her to proofread their books. I looked up the word gynecological.

  Then I looked up misspell.

  I put the letter aside with a note to query Kathy Leo.

  Several people had written requesting guidelines for writing romances. I searched Julie’s file cabinet, but found nothing under guidelines. When I went over to Lindsay’s cubicle to ask her about guidelines, she wasn’t there.

  I was pondering how unethical it would be to rifle through someone else’s filing cabinet when Rita flew out of her door and almost slammed into me. She looked wild-eyed. “Where’s Lindsay?” she asked, practically hyperventilating.

  “I don’t know. I came here to ask her about guidelines.”

  “She didn’t go to the mailroom, did she?” Her voice cracked on the word mailroom.

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  “I hope I didn’t miss her.”

  I tilted my head. “Is everything all right?”

  Rita sighed. “Probably. But one time she sent a manuscript to the wrong author, and since then I’ve tried to keep my eye on her when she goes to the mailroom so I can follow and double check them.”

  “You check every package?”

  She frowned. “Is that nuts?”

  “Um….” After all, she was my boss. But no wonder she hadn’t taken a vacation in forever.

  “You’re right. It is.” She released a long breath and combed her hand through her frazzly hair. “I mean, she’s my assistant, for heaven’s sake. I shouldn’t have to sneak behind her and double check every little parcel.”

  “No, you shouldn’t.”

  Rita chuckled a little, then stopped just as suddenly. “Maybe this one last time.” Before I could get in a word about guidelines, she darted toward the hallway.

  I wandered back to my office, but happened to catch Cassie’s eye as I walked by her open door. I hesitated to ask for her help, but maybe this would be a good icebreaker.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have guidelines for the different lines of books, would you?”

  She stretched her back as if she had been hunched over a manuscript nonstop since the last time I had seen her. “I think so—let me check.”

  She swiveled toward her file cabinet and opened what could have been an advertisement for a perfectly organized file drawer. All the colored tabs were perfectly staggered. No messy stray papers sticking out of file folders.

  “When was this picture taken?” I said, pointing to Cassie’s graduation photo.

  “High school,” she said as she flicked through her files. “I was salutatorian.”

  I made a humming sound of approbation. It seemed expected.

  “I should have been valedictorian, but the varsity quarterback had gotten extra credit for doing independent study. All he turned in was a five-page paper on the history of the NFL, but he got as much credit for it as I got for calculus. It was sort of unfair.”

  I frowned. It was unfair, and now she kept that photo on her desk as a…a what? A testament to having been passed over? Cheated?

  “Here they are!” she said brightly, pulling out a small stack of stapled-together pages. She flipped through a couple of multicolored sheets. “I knew I had restocked recently.”

  “Great.”

  She smiled up at me. “You can get them from Mercedes’s assistant.”

  I froze, momentarily confused. Did this mean Cassie wasn’t sharing? I looked pointedly at the pile of papers in her hand. “I just need one.”

  “Oh, no. You’ll need more than that,” she said. “People ask for them every day. You should keep a stack handy.”

  “Okay, so if I just took one of yours and made copies….”

  She shook her head. “Mercedes wants them all to be uniformly color coded. A different color for each line of books, see?” She flipped through her stack again, to demonstrate. Or to taunt me. “We had a meeting about this a few months ago. Guidelines should be color coded—she doesn’t want the Pulse guidelines to be green, for instance. They should be this pale red color.”

  “Uh-huh.” She kept leafing through those guidelines so that it was all I could do not to snatch one out of her hands and make a run for it. She clearly was not going to cough one up. “Okay…guess I’ll ask Mercedes.”

  “Her assistant, Lisa, is who you should ask. She usually has a whole stack of them.”

  So do you, but a fat lot of good that’s done me. I grinned at her. “Well! Thanks for your help.”

  She tilted her head and aimed a reptilian smile at me. “First day going well?”

  “Going great,” I said.

  “Terrific!”

  I got the guidelines from Mercedes’s assistant without further ado, but the next time I saw Andrea, I had to ask her, “Have you ever sensed any animosity from Cassie?”

  “Oh, that one’s a real go-getter,” Andrea said. “And a stickler for the rules, too. It’s probably eating her up inside that you got hired in a level above her.”

  I told her about the guideline incident.

  Andrea’s brows knit into a puzzled frown. “I’m sure Julie had tip sheets here somewhere…” She turned to my file cabinet. In five seconds, she was handing me a little stack of guidelines.

  I sank down in my chair, feeling like a dope. “Tip sheets,” I said. “I didn’t think…”

  Andrea shrugged. “Give yourself a break. It’s your first day.”

  My first day. Right. I needed to get a grip. “Forget what I said about Cassie,” I said. “I’m just being paranoid.”

  Andrea laughed. “Maybe, but don’t forget the immortal words of Richard Nixon: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.’”

  At six-forty I straggled up the stairs to the building lugging my copy of The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard. Every muscle in my body felt tired, even my mouth from holding it in a tense friendly smile for half the day. I really needed to have a Calgon evening, but unfortunately the apartment was tubless. Maybe I could have a hot shower and relax for a little bit before tackling the editing of the manuscript, which I was determined to make considerable headway on that night.

  As I reached the third floor where we lived, the door was flung open. There stood Fleishman, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. “You’re finally home! The pizza’s cold.”

  He took my totebag full of manuscript as I dragged myself through the door. “Cold is okay,” I said. Even after pigging out at lunch with my coworkers, I was starving now. “Sitting at a desk all day really gives you an appetite.”

  Fleishman had set the little table in what we laughingly called our entertainment area. It was the ten-foot square of space into which we wedged a round eating table, a futon couch, a thirty-five-inch plasma screen television, a bookcase, and the microwave oven. (The kitchen didn’t have room for the microwave.) He had even put out cloth napkins and lit a candle. At the moment I would have been happy to collapse on the couch with a pizza box in my lap and an IV hookup to a box of wine, but it was really thoughtful of him to try to make the apartment nice for the occasion.

 
Though I wondered what kind of occasion he thought this was. It wasn’t as if I had never worked before.

  “Have a seat.” He guided me over to a chair and pressed me into it. “I have to show you the surprise.”

  “Oh.” I assumed that this was the surprise—pizza by candlelight. That would have been enough.

  But Fleishman had never been one of those people for whom enough would suffice. He was fond of over-the-top gestures, and as he skipped back to Wendy’s closet of a room to retrieve whatever he had hidden there, I wondered what on earth he could have gotten. I mean, he had already arranged a wardrobe for me. At the moment, I felt I lacked for nothing except self-confidence and a modicum of editorial know-how.

  He came running back with a large cardboard box, which he put carefully on the floor in front of me. It was just a plain brown box, though it had a big white bow around it. I was just so exhausted I couldn’t focus, because it appeared to be moving.

  “Open it,” he said.

  I frowned at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Open it.” When I hesitated, he yanked the bow off himself.

  After that, I didn’t have to open the box. It opened itself. Suddenly, I was staring into the face of a tan colored puppy. His little pink tongue was sticking out at me, panting like mad, and his paws were scrabbling pointlessly against the cardboard. He wanted out of that box and onto my lap. Onto someone’s lap. Like all puppies, the eagerness in his eyes gave you the impression that he wasn’t going to be too particular. Anybody would do.

  He yelped. I jumped.

  “Isn’t he cute?” Fleishman said. He picked up the puppy and plopped the squirming mound of fur onto my chest. My neck and face were immediately assaulted by that tongue and the Mighty Dog breath that went with it. “His name’s Maxwell.”

  “Maxwell?”

  “For Maxwell Perkins, the editor. I thought your dog should have a publishing name.”

  “My dog?” Maxwell let out another yelp, letting me know that was A-OK with him.

  “I thought it would suit him better than naming him some lame author name, like Hemingway. That’s so unoriginal. Of course, Max isn’t exactly original, either. We could call him Perkins, but people might think we named him for Anthony Perkins—”