The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  I laughed. Too hard—I’ll admit it. A throaty chortle just burbled out of me, caused not so much by Dan’s dumb joke as by the confidentially husky tone he spoke in.

  “Look, I was going to have drinks with Rita at the conference…are you filling in on her social engagements, too?”

  Zing went the strings of my heart. “I’m always willing to take someone’s place at the bar.”

  “Actually, I was thinking that since we’ve never had a face-to-face, we should make it a little more festive. There’s an old seafood restaurant in downtown Portland…and if you weren’t doing anything on Saturday night…”

  I tapped my pen on my desk and counted to five, pretending to check my calendar. Which, had I looked, would have been as wide open and windy as the Great Plains. “Hm…that looks very doable.”

  “Great—then it’s a date?”

  “It’s a date,” I said.

  My first in six months. Of course it wasn’t really a date. Just a professional business meeting. At night. In a strange city. Just the two of us.

  What was I going to wear? Suddenly, all my speech worries and death-in-a-fiery-crash flashes seemed insignificant next to wardrobe woes.

  It’s not a date, I repeated to myself, while at the same time thinking that my shoe situation was going to be the real crux of my problem. I could keep on wearing Fleishman’s mom’s clothes (it would help if I stopped eating dinner and maybe breakfast, too), but my scuffed old shoes would show me up as a failed fashion aspirant.

  My hair could use some touching up, too.

  I started making a list of all the things I wanted. (Shoes, haircut, new bra, soft-sided briefcase like Ann’s.) Then, on the other side of the legal pad, I started a list of all the money I didn’t have, despite my higher salary: rent, credit card bill to pay off, and next month was my turn to pay the cable bill. I’d paid it this month, too, because Fleishman was broke.

  I dumped the idea of wowing the romance writers of Portland with a new soft-sided briefcase. Or fashion footwear. Frankly, I was already in the red when I started trying to figure a way to shoehorn a new bra into my budget.

  Damn. A few days ago I’d felt rich. Where did all my money go?

  I tried to make myself forget shopping. This was just a business trip; I didn’t need anything new. And after what Andrea had said about Dan, it was clear that he was just a romance industry Romeo. I shouldn’t take a little thing like dinner with him seriously.

  But a little voice kept niggling me. So don’t take him seriously. Have yourself a cheap tawdry fling.

  Maybe that would flush Fleishman out of my system.

  Andrea flew into my office, shut the door, and collapsed into my chair. Her arms were folded across her chest, which was heaving indignantly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just had my review!”

  “Didn’t it go well?”

  “Oh, terrific—they gave me a one point five percent raise! It’s the lowest raise they give! And to me, of all people. I’ve been slaving away at this place most of my working life. Damn it!”

  “Rita did this?”

  “Yes! Oh, she tried to fob it off as something Mercedes and Mary Jo had dictated—she did look a little embarrassed to be treating me so shabbily—but come on. She’s a senior editor! She should be going to bat for me.”

  “Did Mercedes give any reasons?”

  Andrea snorted. “She said I have personality issues! She told Rita I should take an anger management class.”

  “Hm.”

  “What?” Her eyes flashed at me. “Do you think I have anger issues?”

  “No!” I answered quickly, before she could bite my head off.

  It looked like she might anyway. All at once she leaned over, opened the door, and screeched, “Will you please give ‘Stormy Weather’ a rest, Lisa? Jesus!” Then she slammed the door again and turned back to me.

  I tried to look calm even as I shrank back in my chair.

  “They always talk about how there’s no employee loyalty anymore,” she continued without missing a beat, “but let me tell you. It’s these management types that drive us out. I have to find another job now,” Andrea fumed. “They’re forcing me out. This is just outrageous.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She frowned at my notepad. “What are you doing?”

  “My budget.”

  “Do all those little minus signs mean no money?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  She clucked. “Oh well. Hang on for another ten months, and maybe you’ll get a whopping one and a half percent raise, too!”

  “What should I wear to a RAG conference?”

  She shrugged. “Wear your office clothes. That’s what they want—to see a professional in their midst.”

  I hesitated. “Well, yeah…but then there’s the matter of going out to dinner and things, right?”

  “Dinner? With authors? Don’t worry about it! They won’t expect you to be dressed to the nines.”

  “Well, actually…” I confessed to my rendezvous with Dan.

  Andrea straightened in her chair. “Dinner? It’s usually just drinks. Maybe he really likes you!”

  “He’s never met me.”

  “So? You haven’t seen him, either.” She looked pointedly at my black pumps, which I think might have been the ones I wore to my college graduation. “You need some new shoes.”

  I groaned. “Impossible.”

  She narrowed her eyes on my messy columns of numbers. “What’s that?”

  “That’s what I owe Discover.”

  “And what’s your credit limit?”

  “Five thousand three hundred dollars.”

  Her eyes widened; she really looked stunned. “Well then, what’s the problem?”

  “I’ve been trying to pay it off, not run up more debt.”

  “So you have to make the minimum payments for a while. Wouldn’t it be worth it? For Dan the man?”

  “It’s just a business meeting,” I repeated, fooling neither of us.

  “Bloomingdale’s is having a summer preview sale this week.”

  My head snapped up.

  “You want to go during lunch?” she asked.

  “I shouldn’t,” I said.

  But I did.

  For a week I kept my loot at the office. The corner next to my file cabinet became a cache of MasterCard enabled plunder. It wasn’t that I was hiding anything…I just told myself I was too lazy to lug it on the subway. Besides, there was always the chance I would suffer buyer’s remorse and want to return something, so why haul it all the way to Brooklyn if I was going to have to bring it back to Manhattan?

  But of course I never did return anything. And finally, just before the conference, I realized I would have to carry it home. All of it.

  I left the office that day looking like an upscale bag lady.

  All the way home, I prayed Fleishman would be out. Even that he would have a date.

  But when I walked in, he was eating a bowl of noodles and watching reruns of Felicity on WE. The minute he saw me, he snapped the television off by remote.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” I said. I meant it. All I wanted to do was sneak back to my bedroom and shove all my new stuff under my bed.

  “It’s okay,” he replied. “I know the ending. She starts out an idiot, and she remains an idiot.”

  He was standing now, circling me to inspect the names on the bags. I have to confess, my little spree went a teensy bit beyond Bloomingdale’s. I had taken in quite a few Upper East Side emporiums on my lunch hours after Andrea convinced me that I was letting a generous credit limit go to waste.

  “I just ran into a few sales…”

  He lifted a bag from an expensive luggage store and peeked inside. Letting out a long whistle, he pulled out my new soft sided leather briefcase. “What’s this for?”

  “I’m going on a business trip, remember?” I turned and hurried toward my room to sock away my stuff, dropping a shoe box in m
y wake.

  “Manolo Blahnik? For a business trip?”

  “I hadn’t bought shoes in a while,” I said, as if this explained anything.

  He was right on my heels, eyeballing the familiar logo on one of the smaller bags. “An upcoming business trip also required you to go to Victoria’s Secret?”

  I glared at him. “I’m going to be giving a speech. I want to have all-over confidence.”

  “And where did you get the money for all this?”

  “I charged it.” Looking at all the bags on my bed now, I was a little astounded with myself. What had seemed like booty from a modest spree when it was shoved into a corner of my office now looked like shameful excess when strewn across my bed. Good heavens, what had I done?

  He shook his head. “My God, I always expected you to cut loose someday. But I never expected this.”

  “I have a good job. It’s not like I won’t be able to cover it…” Unbidden, an image appeared in my mind of wild-eyed Andrea scrawling out her debts and her minimum payments across a pad of paper. What on earth had made me listen to her?

  “Your salary pays for sprees at Bendels?”

  The Bendels bag was tiny. “I didn’t go on a spree there. I just bought a…” Come to think of it, I couldn’t even remember what I had bought there. I peeked into the sack. “Oh! A scarf. Just a scarf.”

  He pulled it out. At the time I bought it, with Andrea egging me on, it had seemed like a steal at $69.95. It was longer than I remembered…and it had sparkly things on it that hadn’t really seemed so prominent in the store, but here in the apartment it looked garish. Like I was flying out west to become a Vegas showgirl.

  It dragged on the ground, and Maxwell confused it for a new doggie bed. He promptly plopped his little rear down on it.

  Fleishman took in a big breath and then, to show his forbearance, did not huff it out in one impatient sigh. “You know, it’s understandable that when you’ve never had a salaried job before, you might go overboard with the spending at first.” Suddenly he was Ward Cleaver. “But you know, Rebecca, just because there’s money coming in doesn’t mean you can throw economy out the window.”

  I couldn’t believe it. This was Fleishman talking. The man who went out one afternoon to grab a slice of pizza and came back an hour later with a plasma screen television.

  My face must have been turning purple, because he added, “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You just have to watch it.”

  That was my limit. “I’m not embarrassed, I’m mad. Where do you get off telling me to economize? You’ve probably never made out a budget in your life.”

  He looked offended. “Of course I have. I budget all the time. I just do it stealthily. I don’t walk around announcing to the world that I’m poor.”

  “Neither do I,” I said.

  He raised his brows. Okay, maybe I did.

  “Besides,” I sputtered, “you’re not poor!”

  He leveled a probing gaze on me. “This is not about me, is it?”

  “What?”

  “This argument. You feel guilty, and so you’re taking it out on me.”

  For a moment, he stopped me cold. He was right, in his usual twisted way. I yanked the scarf out from under Maxwell and started folding it. Then I tossed it in my drawer. “I just don’t like being lectured.”

  “Is there maybe something you’re leaving out of this discussion?” he asked.

  I slammed the door shut. “What do you mean?”

  “Like, maybe there’s some really studly guy from Candlelight going to the conference with you?”

  That was a laugh. “There is no great looking guy at Candlelight. No straight ones, anyway. Except the mailroom guy, and I don’t think he travels.”

  But really, it was eerie how close Fleishman had come to the truth. It worried me. Was I that easy to read, or did he know me too well?

  “Some other guy, then.” He gestured grandly to all the stuff still spread across the bed. “This can’t all be for the benefit of the romance writers of Portland, Oregon. I can believe you would pace around nights working on your speech for them, but I don’t think you would be restocking your panty supply for their benefit.”

  I should have ditched the Victoria’s Secret bag, obviously. Damn.

  I decided to confess. Why shouldn’t I? “All right. There is going to be a good looking guy there, but I’ve never even met this person. I’ve only talked to him on the phone. His name’s Dan Weatherby. He’s sort of flirty, but I think he flirts with everybody.”

  “He’s a romance writer?”

  “He’s an agent.”

  Fleishman sank down onto the bed and drummed his fingers on his thigh.

  “It’s not that I’m hoping to seduce some guy at this conference,” I said in my defense. “It’s just that I suddenly realized I need to think a little bit about presentation. I went from college to running around doing errands for an old lady for two years. And now I’m supposed to go in front of a hotel full of people and pass myself off as a professional.”

  He gnawed his lip for a moment. “You’re right. Maybe we haven’t given this enough thought.”

  “We…what?”

  “You…the conference…” He tilted a glance up at me. “What are you going to wear on the plane?”

  “I don’t know. Something comfortable.”

  He imitated a game show buzzer. “Wrong. You’re going to go from the airport to the conference. It’s not as if you’ll be changing outfits in the airport bathroom when you get there. You have to look good on the plane, too.”

  He was right again. It was so irritating.

  “And what if this Dan Weatherby person is on the same flight?” he asked. “Did you ever think about that?”

  “No.” So he didn’t mind about Dan Weatherby? A few minutes ago, when he’d been pressing me to explain the shopping spree, he’d seemed jealous.

  “Portland, Oregon, is not exactly the travel destination of choice for millions,” he said. “And if you’re talking direct flights, which I assume anyone in their right mind with an expense account would opt for, your choices really shrink.”

  How does he know so much about airline flights to the West Coast? I wondered briefly. But he might have been talking out his butt, for all I knew. Fleishman could playact all sorts of expertise he didn’t have.

  I was just glad he was back to behaving like a reasonable creature. In fact, he was being helpful. There was no more whining about wanting to go on my trip. I had just intended to wait till tonight and toss as much as I possibly could into a suitcase and hope I was prepared. Fleishman insisted I go through the process more methodically, planning everything I needed down to the last earring.

  I know, I know. I was twenty-five years old and my roommate was teaching me how to pack. On the other hand, I needed to learn.

  He was worried about the dress I had bought to have dinner with Dan Weatherby. “This is low cut. Are you sure this is going to project the proper business image?”

  “I needed something nice for evenings.”

  “There’s always Natasha’s Mainbocher.” He was still a little incensed that I hadn’t taken a shine to that purple and teal dress.

  “It’s a thing of beauty, I know, but I wanted something new. I can’t go through life looking like a Jackie O wannabe.”

  “Okay—but you know it gets cold out there. You’ll need a jacket to go with this—it gets down into the forties at night.”

  How did he come up with this stuff?

  “Okay, Mom. I’ll bring my sweater.”

  “Have you practiced your speech?”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  He shook his head. “You’d better get that done. That way you can memorize it on the plane.”

  “Memorize it?” I squeaked.

  “Of course.” He blinked. “You just can’t get up there and read a speech. This isn’t going to be a radio address, you know. You have to outline what you want to say on notecards and work
from those.”

  “Right.” My God. I hadn’t thought of doing the whole thing by memory. I had sort of expected to have the speech in front of me. Damn.

  With this new worry to add to the already mounting pile, I sat down with a legal pad and started jotting down notes on plot. Fleish, seemingly satisfied with all his accomplishments, went back to watching television. “When are you going out with this guy?” he asked.

  “Saturday night.”

  “That’s good. Your speech will be over.”

  “Right.” I was living for that moment, actually.

  “Where’s he taking you?”

  “Some place downtown. Seafood.”

  “Jake’s.”

  I lifted my head. “How do you know?”

  “It’s the most famous seafood restaurant in Portland. It’s been there forever.”

  He made it sound like Dan was taking me to a clam shack. Now I knew he was bullshitting. I went back to my speech.

  Fleishman went back to the television.

  Everything seemed just fine.

  For a while I can usually fool myself into thinking that I’ll be okay. Airline travel? No big deal.

  Hundreds of thousands of people step onto planes every day, strap themselves in, and get flown to their destinations without a single mishap. Their planes are not hijacked. Or blown up in midair. Their planes do not experience electrical fires at fifty thousand feet, causing them to spiral and then plunge to the ground with their cargo of shrieking passengers. On descent, they do not hit that fatal patch of windsheer that turns an almost successfully completed trip into a nightmare of stomach roiling panic and then terror in a screeching jolt of metal hitting runway, metal being torn asunder, and screams of hundreds of people in their last horrible moments of life.

  Hardly ever happens. Hurricanes in Halifax.

  I’m not scared, not scared, not scared.

  The morning of my flight, I was all confidence. I ate a big breakfast with Fleishman, who insisted I needed pancakes. (“Airlines never feed you anymore. You’ll endure five hours of starvation.”) I scarfed down way too much, then I took the shuttle out to Newark and just had enough time to buy a new pen and some note cards at 200 percent markup at an airport newsstand.