The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

“To be perfectly honest, Rebecca, the reason I want to speak to you is on behalf of a friend. She’s written a book.”

  I frowned at a little heap of curried eggplant on my plate. “You want me to read it?”

  “Could you?” Muriel asked. “Would you? My friend Melissa keeps pressuring me to give her advice because I work at Candlelight, even though I persist in telling her that I am a receptionist, not an editor.”

  “Do you have the manuscript?”

  “It’s back at the office.”

  She didn’t have to drag me out to lunch to ask me to read a book. I almost told her that, but then decided it might be impolitic. At any rate, she didn’t argue when I insisted on splitting the bill for the two-for-one buffet.

  I was impatient to get back to the last chapter. I made a beeline for my office, shut the door, and finished Heartstopper. Then I typed up a report for Rita and trotted the project across the hall. When I plopped the five hundred page manuscript in front of her, she frowned. “What’s that? War and Peace?”

  “You’ll want to read it,” I said. “It could change everything.”

  She looked doubtful. I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t believed Fleishman, either.

  “It’s sort of a cross between a Pulse and a medical suspense book.”

  She waved a hand. “Then it probably belongs as a Signature.” Signature was Candlelight’s single title program of big books. The trouble was, those titles were usually reserved for our best-selling “name” authors.

  “If medical suspense books do well, why not market them through Pulse? Then you’re sitting on top of a goldmine.” I added, shamelessly, “Just like Mary Jo is with Divine.”

  Rita tapped her pen. “This must be some book.”

  “Just read a few pages,” I suggested, and left her to it.

  When I left the building that night, Rita was hovering outside the coffee shop, a cigarette in one gloved hand and Heartstopper balanced in the other. She didn’t even hear me tell her good night.

  I smiled.

  Chapter 7

  The book Fleishman found lit a fire under Rita. She started calling meetings like mad. Meetings in her outer office, meetings in her real office. Meetings with her staff, and then private meetings with Mercedes. She wanted to make Pulse more thriller oriented, perhaps to take the mandatory medical element out altogether. “I mean, think about it. The name of the line is Pulse. Pulse. Sounds suspenseful, doesn’t it?”

  We nodded.

  “Then why the hell have we been kicking medical thrillers over to other lines? Who was the genius that decided these books would all be country doctor sagas and nurses falling in love with millionaires?”

  No one was touching that one with latex gloves.

  Cassie had been mostly silent through all the meetings about Pulse. But I could tell there was something simmering beneath that calm exterior. Her idea for the police precinct brainstorm had been scuttled. Troy remembered that Gazelle Books, one of our biggest rivals and where he used to work, had already done a continuity series with that exact theme.

  “Maybe that’s where you got your idea,” he told Cassie during a meeting.

  I think he was suggesting that she might have absorbed the idea on a subliminal level, but judging from the Coke-can hue of Cassie’s complexion, she felt she had just been accused of being an editorial thief, a plagiarizer, a second-rate conceptualizer.

  Sweet.

  The downside was, she had it in her head that I had trumped her somehow. It’s true, Rita was giving me credit for finding Heartstopper, which in turn made her rejigger the Pulse line a little. But it wasn’t as if Cassie blurted out her precinct idea and I ran home trying to think of something to top it.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Cassie said as she bustled ahead of Andrea and me as we returned to our offices after the umpteenth Pulse refocus meeting. “This kind of story has been popular for years.”

  Andrea sniggered. “Oh, right, but your police precinct idea was a bolt from the blue. You know, if you’d thought of adding music to the concept we could have called it Cop Rock.”

  Cassie stopped in her doorway, looking as if she wanted to kill one of us. And that one was not Andrea. Andrea had sneered at her, but Cassie was glaring at me.

  I followed Andrea into her office and closed her door, if for no other reason than to escape the sharp daggers of Cassie’s gaze. My back was prickling from it.

  “Shouldn’t you take it easy with her?” I asked. “She looks like she’s about to go ballistic.”

  Andrea picked up the new Bookworld Monthly—or as we at the office called it, BM—and flipped straight to the back. “Oh, let her,” she said, scanning the classifieds. “Maybe that would help dislodge the bug that’s been up her ass.”

  “She seems unnecessarily competitive.”

  Andrea darted a glance at me. “And what about you and your new author finds? Little miss gangbusters! Are you trying to make us all look bad?”

  Even though I was getting used to Andrea’s style, I still froze when she trained that acid tongue on me. I stammered, “N-no, I just…”

  She was shaking her head. “You’re going to force me to find a new job before I actually have to start working hard.”

  My jaw dropped. I would force her to get a new job? Force her?

  “I kid.” She laughed. “My God, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

  I returned to my office. A second later, just as I was settling down to think about getting to work, Lindsay collapsed into the chair next to my desk. She was shaking, which was actually audible, since she was wearing a shirt with beaded epaulettes.

  “I’m fired!”

  “What?”

  “Or I will be.”

  “What happened?”

  “I screwed up. I sent an author Rita wanted to acquire a rejection letter, and then I accidentally stuck Rita’s revision letter for the author she wanted to acquire into someone’s slush manuscript.”

  I was beginning to see why Rita was paranoid about the mail.

  “What do I do?” she moaned.

  “I think you should go into Rita’s office and confess. Tell her you’ll call the authors and explain the screw-up. Apologize all over the place.”

  On top of shaking, Lindsay was now squirming. “That’ll be so awful! Can you imagine being an author who’s waited six months for an answer and then hearing from some twit like me that we have screwed up?”

  I could, actually. Sometimes I was surprised some angry writer hadn’t stormed into the building with an AK-47 long ago.

  “There’s no other way,” I counseled. In her shoes (or in this case, platform boots), I would have been squirming, too. “You have to suck it up. We all make mistakes.”

  Lindsay slumped in dread silence. Then she flopped back. “Okay. Yes, you’re right.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “You know what? I like you. Would you like to go on a date?”

  The question caught me off guard. “With you?”

  “No.” She rolled her eyes. “You see, I know this guy, and he’s really great…”

  “Uh-huh,” I said doubtfully.

  “I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him. He’s perfectly fine.”

  She said it in that voice my mom used when she was trying to convince us to eat cottage cheese that had been sitting around for a while. Mentally I was already flapping my arms and backing away.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Rowdy.”

  Now that wasn’t a name you heard every day. It was intriguingly Clint Eastwoody. I leaned forward with more interest. “Is he a cowboy?”

  “No, God no. He’s from New Hampshire.” She shrugged. “His real name is Harold Metzger. His father gave him this nickname when he was a kid to—I don’t know—make him seem less like a Harold, maybe.” Her forehead crinkled. “Which, when you think about it, he could have prevented by not naming him Harold to begin with.”

  “Did it work?”

 
She looked up at me. “Did what work?”

  “Calling him Rowdy. Did it make him less of a Harold?”

  “Not really.” Noticing she was losing me, she added quickly, “I mean, he’s really nice. I’ve known him for years.” She sighed. “It’s not like he would be sloppy seconds, or anything like that. We don’t even get along anymore really.”

  “Wait,” I said. “This guy is your boyfriend?”

  She nodded.

  “Your current boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like we’re, you know, in love. We just live together.”

  “Lindsay…”

  “He’s this really good person, I just think he’d be happier with somebody else. I was going to shop him around at the office Christmas party, but that’s months away. I’ll probably be fired by then.”

  “Why are you trying to get rid of him if he’s so nice?”

  “Because we’re so boring together it terrifies me. We used to go out clubbing. Last night we watched March of the Penguins on DVD and went to bed at ten.” She added quickly, “Not that he’s dull or anything. Not really. Before he worked in nonprofit sales he was a bass player for a really cool band. He’s just dull because I know him already. And he’s so normal. He wants to get married and have kids. I keep telling him that I’m, like, twenty-three. I wasn’t expecting to do anything drastic till I was thirty, at least. Rowdy would have been the perfect guy to meet when I was thirty.”

  “Then why don’t you move out? Or tell him to?”

  She writhed in agony. “Because he’s so nice! Like, a puppy. A puppy who does my laundry on weekends.”

  Okay, now she had my attention. “He does the laundry?”

  “And our building doesn’t have a laundry room,” she said. “It’s not like he drops it off someplace, either. He sits in the Laundromat for two hours every Saturday doing it himself.”

  “Holy cow, Lindsay.”

  She looked miserable. “I know, I know. You can’t just dispose of a guy like that. It would be wasteful, and wrong. That’s why I’m trying to recycle him.”

  “Why did you ask me?”

  She bit her lip. “I just thought maybe you were single. You never talk about a boyfriend or anything.”

  “Oh.”

  “So…what do you think?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going near this. Though I was sort of curious to find out what someone in nonprofit sales did.

  “Just one date?” she asked. “Come on. What can it hurt?”

  I was pretty sure it was sneaking up on the six-month territory since the last time I’d had a date. Still. Going out with Lindsay’s boyfriend was out of the question. That would be too weird.

  But was it normal to be living with a guy I liked and feel so frustrated all the time?

  Probably not.

  But look at Lindsay. She had a steady boyfriend and was trying to pass him off like a baton in a relay race.

  She released a long, sad sigh. “I’m never going to get rid of him, am I?”

  I couldn’t answer that, but when I watched her go, it was not without pity. Maybe it was as trying to have what you assumed was going to be a brief whoop-de-do turn into a permanent relationship as it was to have what you hoped was the one become just one of many.

  Then I thought of it from Rowdy’s point of view. My God, that was brutal. To have your girlfriend shopping you around without your knowledge. I’d have to remember that the next time I thought my life had reached a new pathetic low.

  There were several benefits to this corporate employment racket. The first was my salary. At the beginning of the month, I was actually able to pay the rent and I had enough left over to take Fleishman and Wendy out for a celebratory brunch. And to get Max groomed and buy him a snappy new studded collar. And to dribble away a big chunk on CDs and new sheets, and a buy a nice watch to send my mom for her birthday. Even after these modest excesses, attempting to balance my checkbook now was not something that made me want to toss myself off the Williamsburg Bridge.

  And then there was prestige—I mean, let’s face it, being a Frenchwoman’s flunkie doesn’t give you a lot of authority. Now I had the trappings of corporate power all around me for the first time. An office. Personalized stationery. The day I got my business cards I must have spent thirty minutes just staring at them…and wondering if there were enough to send one to all my old friends. And a few who weren’t friends. I imagined Brooke Meininger—the girl I’d overheard in a bathroom my sophomore year of high school comparing me with Rosie O’Donnell—opening an envelope and having this fall out:

  CANDLELIGHT BOOKS

  231 THIRD AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10055

  REBECCA ABBOT

  ASSOCIATE EDITOR

  212*555*0273

  CANDLELIGHTPUBLISHING.ORG

  “Books Are Our Passion”

  The lettering was crimson over eggshell white. Raised lettering. Classy. I didn’t send one to Brooke Meininger—I restrained myself—but I did sprayhose my relatives with them.

  My parents were so impressed with me. Among others, they had a son who was a pediatrician and a daughter who was a lawyer, but they still acted as if I had achieved something extraordinary. I think they had expected me to wind up living in a refrigerator box.

  My mom kept calling to tell me all the people she knew who read Candlelight books.

  “I never read romances myself, of course,” she said. “Except for the occasional one I’ll pick up at the library. I like the short ones. They’re easy to read when I need a break after the grand-kids leave.”

  “Okay, I’ll send you some short ones,” I told her.

  “No, don’t do that!” Her voice was anxious. “I’ll buy them at Target now that your livelihood depends on them.”

  I laughed. “Don’t worry, Mom. Candlelight already makes piles of money from all the other people who don’t read romances but keep buying our books.”

  Dad couldn’t have cared less about the books. He was all brass tacks. “What kind of benefits package did you get?”

  “Um…pretty good, I guess,” I said.

  “You guess? Didn’t you talk about this before you took the job?”

  “Well, it didn’t seem like something I could negotiate, Dad. I mean, I know I’ve got medical and dental.”

  “You should go get yourself a checkup,” Dad said.

  “A what?”

  “A physical. Good God, don’t you know you have to take care of your health?” This from a man who loved chicken fried everything. “What about vacation?”

  “I think it’s two weeks…or something like that.”

  I could hear my dad putting his hand over the receiver and calling back to my mom, “Listen to this! She thinks!”

  “Dad…”

  “The best part,” he said, “is maybe now you can get yourself an apartment.”

  “I do have an apartment.”

  “Well…” He sighed. Immediately, I knew what was coming. “At least get a place by yourself. Or have one roommate.” A female roommate, he meant. He had never been a Fleishman fan. “That fellow always hanging around you…what’s his name? That fellow who acts like your boyfriend only he isn’t?”

  “You know his name. He was at your house last Christmas.”

  “Right. Maybe now you can tell him he needs to scoot. Though I don’t know why you didn’t do that years ago. You’re an attractive girl now, you know.”

  Now, he said. As opposed to all those years when he’d told me I was attractive in spite of being a blimp.

  I tried not to let his words stir me up. I knew he didn’t mean it that way, really; over the years I had programmed my brain to root out the hidden insults in the most innocuous of comments. Like right now, and all his talk about wasting my time with Fleish. I couldn’t help thinking that my dad worried I wasn’t going to strike husband material before I ballooned back to obesity.

  “Fleishman’s my friend, Dad.”

  “You know, I was reading something
in a magazine about men like him. I was at the doctor’s office. See, I take advantage of my healthcare options.”

  I squinted at the wall. “Wait. You were reading about Fleishman?”

  “Oh, sure. They’ve come up with a whole new category for his type. He’s what they call a metrosexual.”

  I covered the receiver so he wouldn’t here me whoop. I loved to envision my square dad at the doctor’s, catching up on his pop sociology. “I think you’re right.”

  “Do you think that’s a good thing?” he asked me in a worried tone.

  “Well, they’ve done studies, Dad. It’s innate. Some men are just born to exfoliate.”

  “If you’re going to be a smart aleck, I’m going to hand this phone back to your mother so she can tell you more about what all the world and its wife have read for the past thirty years.”

  I laughed. I knew he wasn’t going to do that, because he was one of those people who would talk for ten minutes and then start exclaiming that the call was costing somebody a fortune. (Which I believe was code for half-time’s over.) He made me promise to work hard and go to the doctor, and I promised not to get fired before I had.

  “Fired!” he exclaimed. “Why would they do that? They’re lucky to have you, Becca-bunny.”

  I hung up the phone quickly, so I wouldn’t start snuffling. That was my Dad in a nutshell. He could put you through the ringer, and then slap you on the back and try to tell you you were the greatest thing to come down the pike since twist-off bottlecaps.

  But after a few weeks I was beginning to think he might be right. Not that Candlelight was lucky to have me, but that I might not need to be quite so paranoid. I began to relax a little. To socialize. I was calm enough now that I didn’t always panic when I heard my phone ring, or feel my stomach churn with dread when I stepped on the elevator every morning.

  In fact, I almost looked forward to getting on the elevator in the morning. There was always a chance that I would be able to share a solitary ride with Suave Guy.

  That’s how desperate my romantic life had become.

  One morning I got on and found myself sharing the car with Andrea. She looked slightly depressed.