The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  I could smile at the well-groomed airline lady who took my boarding pass and sent it spitting through the electronic scanner. With an almost insouciant nonchalance, I strode through the twisty carpeted tube that leads to the plane. I was a trooper. My new soft-sided calfskin briefcase, practically empty, was slung jauntily over one shoulder.

  And then I stepped on the plane and my knees wobbled. The flight attendant greeted me. I experienced a brief flash of her being sucked out of the plane. Then I shook my head. That never happens.

  The queue of passengers was shuffling along past first class, where men in suits were already staring at their Powerbooks and drinking Bloody Marys. I’ve never flown in first class. I probably never will. But that’s okay, because I’ve heard it’s really the most dangerous part of the plane to be in the event of a crash. I shook my head. Those poor oblivious men with their laptops and booze. Enjoy it while you can, chumps.

  The line slowed as I neared my strategically chosen seat (rear centerish, on the aisle). The plane was starting to feel stuffy. There was no more overhead room left in this area, and people were getting aggravated. They were sputtering. Someone asked for a pillow, and a flight attendant called from the back that there were no pillows anymore. Your comfort is no longer factored into our business model, she might have said.

  Or, This is a flying cattle car. Get over it.

  I was finally able to flop down in my seat. God, it felt uncomfortable. I shouldn’t have eaten so much. Or worn such a tight skirt. Fleishman’s short stack was straining against my waistband.

  Luck was with me in one respect—the other person on my row, the person next to the window, was already seated, so there would be no awkward hopping up and letting her squeeze by me. I decided that the best way to avoid brooding over whether this flight was going to mark the end of my tragically short life was to get right to work. I pulled the conference schedule and the legal pad with my speech on it out of my briefcase.

  “That’s where I’m going,” my seatmate announced.

  I glanced up. Did she mean Portland? We were all going to Portland. (Fleishman was right. This was the only direct flight there was.)

  She tapped on the schedule. “That’s me. Alison Rooney, from Gazelle.”

  I took a closer look. Alison Rooney was in her forties, with dark brown hair (dyed—her roots showed), and deep lines around her mouth. It looked as if she had been pursing her lips for twenty years.

  “I’m Rebecca Abbot. I’m with Candlelight.”

  Her dark brows pinched together. “I’ve never heard of you.”

  “I just started two months ago. I work with Rita.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that poor thing!” A laugh barked out of her. “Of course I love Rita—everybody does—but she was an editor when I was there.”

  “You worked at Candlelight?”

  “Everybody has done time at that place. Or maybe it just seems that way.”

  Just then, there was a rumble and a roar as the plane’s engines fired up. Little screens came down and the airline safety video was played. I tried to pay attention—had anyone in the history of aviation ever successfully used a seat cushion as a flotation device?—but Alison Rooney was chatting away next to me.

  “Do you know Maris?”

  “Who?” I worried about those oxygen masks. How often were those checked? What if mine didn’t come down?

  “Jesus Christ, if you work on Pulse books, you must know Maris Godfrey.”

  I scanned my brain. I was bad with putting names to faces, but I was pretty sure I had never seen the name Maris on an employee list. Alison insisted I should have.

  “Oh no! Scratch that. She’s some muckety-muck at NAL now.” Alison shrugged. “It’s this neverending game of editorial musical chairs. You lose track of people. Where did you work before?”

  “This is my first job in publishing.”

  “Well it won’t be your last!”

  Not unless the plane goes down and I can’t make it to the emergency door. Too late, I realized I should have chosen an exit row.

  The plane was taxiing, and the flight attendants were doing their last sprint to make sure all of our seats were upright.

  “What did you do before?” Alison asked.

  “Nothing—that is, I was sort of a private assistant.” That didn’t sound very good. “To an author.”

  “Oh, interesting!”

  “Actually…” The plane stopped and the engines revved again. My heart tripped, and then my breath started coming in gasps. Sweat beaded on my upper lip.

  Alison Rooney’s face loomed closer. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded quickly and offered her a limp smile. “Takeoffs are the worst.” There was always the chance that you could hit an air pocket, too, caused by the wakes of other planes taking off. That could be fatal.

  “You don’t look too good.”

  “It’s fine…I’ll be fine…”

  “Are you faint?”

  “Just a little nauseous.”

  “Oh God.” That voice, so clipped and self-assured just moments before, developed a quaver. Alison rifled through the magazines and safety cards in the pocket of the seatback in front of her. “Dammit, have they gotten rid of barf bags, too?”

  “Barf…?”

  I lifted hand to my mouth. The plane lifted in a deafening roar. Feeling a new urgency, I, too, began thumbing past magazines and in-flight catalogs, but came up empty. How could this be?

  As if things weren’t bad enough, the plane chose that moment to dip, and then to roll. Maybe it was just turning slightly. Adjusting course. Happened all the time. But that didn’t matter to my stomach. A wave of clammy heat hit me, and I felt Fleishman’s big breakfast climbing back up my esophagus.

  “Oh no,” I moaned.

  Alison Rooney saw the problem immediately, and the solution. “Here!”

  She grabbed my soft-sided briefcase out of my lap, undid the top flap, upended the papers and pens out of it, then held it open for me.

  See? I knew that briefcase would come in handy.

  Chapter 9

  Here’s a word of advice: If you’re a bad public speaker, and you haven’t given a speech since high school anyway, do not listen to those who tell you it is amateurish to bring a copy of your speech with you to the lectern. Do not simply prepare a sheet of paper with talking points. Do not rely solely on note cards. That is a recipe for disaster.

  I did not realize this, of course, until I was right smack in the middle of my own disaster. I stared at the talking points I had scrawled on the notepad, trying to make sense of them. For instance:

  A. PLOT ENGINE!!

  i. Toyota

  ii. Ford Pinto

  At one point, maybe back when I was in my hotel room sucking down minibar vodka, those notes had made some kind of sense to me. I think I was trying to say something about how a plot was supposed to be the motor that moved the story along. And that a good plot was like driving a Toyota—taking you dependably to the end of the story. And then there were those Ford Pinto plots that would blow up on you. Ha. Ha.

  Now, in my slightly hungover state, listening to my trembly voice vapor on through this nonsense, staring into the eyes of about thirty women, I had my doubts. This wasn’t the Latvia speech; my audience wasn’t asleep. They were sizing me up. They were frowning. Their brows were furrowed.

  These women were writers. What was I doing up here telling them how to write? I had never written a novel. Never attempted it.

  I had never owned a car, either.

  A wave of overwhelming certainty hit me, though: I needed to get off that podium.

  “And if any of this seems confusing—or if all of it does—I would be happy to take questions now,” I concluded in a rush.

  There.

  My audience seemed surprised, and no wonder. A few people looked up at the clock. My speech, which was supposed to be twenty minutes, was about fourteen minutes too short.

  “Any questions?” I a
sked.

  Thirty pairs of eyes blinked at me. No one had a question. These guys were cold.

  I couldn’t just stand there and say nothing. “Of course, there are some things…for instance, you should never start a chapter with the words Nine months went by…”

  In the tremulous pause that followed my voice petering out, I could hear the hand on the clock behind me clicking away the seconds. Sweat trickled down my back.

  “And don’t use adverbs,” I blurted out.

  “Wait!” someone from the back belted out in exasperation. “You’re telling us not to use adverbs? We’re supposed to ignore entire parts of speech?”

  Grumbling began.

  “Yeah—and what if nine months do go by?” another writer said.

  Just when I thought I would have to slink off the stage in failure—or maybe run for my life—a hand shot up. “What if your plot is a Lexus and it still breaks down?” a woman asked me.

  Laughter rippled through the group, defusing a little of the tension. Unfortunately they were now waiting for an answer.

  I didn’t have one.

  Shit. I swallowed. “I guess you would…” I looked down at my overpriced notecards. I’d already used up all my talking points. My stomach turned. I was the cartoon coyote who had just run off the cliff—suspended in the blue, waiting for gravity to yank me down.

  And my mind was a complete blank.

  “Well…I would say…”

  “Find a good mechanic, Mary!” some wiseacre called out.

  There was more laughter. But in that moment, I wondered if that smart aleck in the audience had just tossed me a lifeline. “Actually…” I began, speaking slowly so I would eat up more time, “…that’s true. When you’re sure what you’ve got is solid but it still doesn’t seem to be working, the best thing to do is consult someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone you can trust. Your critique group, for instance. Or your best writer buddy.”

  Heads nodded. It was the first time in ten minutes that something I said made sense.

  In the blink of an eye, a realization hit me. These writers didn’t need technical advice from the likes of me. There were editors who could probably hold them in thrall on the subject of plot for hours; I wasn’t one of them. I was just a messenger from New York. All I had to offer was encouragement.

  I drew a breath. “You know, I could stand up here all day and talk about writing, but you know better than I do that every story is individual. There’s no formula—we’ve all heard that, right? What’s the formula for writing a romance novel? People ask that all the time.”

  Heads bobbed indignantly.

  “And there is a formula, but it’s not what people think. The only formula is your own creativity.”

  Someone whooped.

  “Plus dedication.”

  God, I was channeling Fleishman. But it was working. People were nodding now, and I’d heard a spontaneous clap from the back.

  “Plus time,” I said. “You know—that time that some of you steal to write early in the morning, before the kids go to school. Or late at night, after the kids are asleep.”

  By the end of the question and answer session, after I had delivered practically all of Fleishman’s talking points, I practically had them on their feet. I felt like a preacher at a revival meeting. When I stepped down from the podium, people were applauding me in earnest and smiling at me. A few women came over to talk to me.

  An elderly lady with short iron-gray hair reached out to shake my hand. “Aren’t you the girl who vomited on the plane yesterday?”

  I had to admit I was. “I get airsick.”

  “Bless your heart!” a woman standing next to her said. “And that’s a long flight, too.”

  It’s even longer when you’ve splattered your breakfast all over your seatmate, I could have told them.

  “Then you came here and gave such a wonderful speech!”

  Wonderful speech? I wanted to weep in gratitude. The little coterie gathered around me smiled and nodded, sweeping me up on a wave of love.

  I left that conference room—the same one I walked into forty minutes earlier with all the enthusiasm of a convict walking the last mile—feeling about ten feet tall. My new shoes, ghastly uncomfortable things, carried me along as if I were walking on clouds. I was elated. I was not a complete failure, after all.

  Barbara Simmons, the organizer of the conference, who, I had sensed on my arrival, had been disappointed that I had been sent as a substitute for Rita, flagged me down across the hotel lobby. “Jennifer, I heard you were just great.”

  I smiled awkwardly. “Actually…”

  “Your speech is getting raves.”

  A man joined us. He was about six feet, which made him loom conspicuously above most of the other people around him. He had sandy blond hair and wore a snappy gray suit with a blue tie over a blue shirt. (The blue brought out the blue in his eyes, which were hard to look away from.) When he smiled, his teeth were pearly white and perfect.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  His voice went through me like a bolt.

  “This is Jennifer Abbot.”

  Those blue eyes widened. “Rebecca?”

  Oh my God. Of course I knew that voice. Dan Weatherby. He really did look like a soap star.

  My knees went weak. Sweet Jesus, I’m having dinner with that?

  Never in my life had I been so glad to have all new underwear.

  The rest of the day felt like I was at summer camp. I had one activity after another to attend to—appointments and luncheons and a group session with editors from other houses where we all sat in a line and answered fairly softball questions from authors. Other than a pointed joke from Alison Rooney about wanting to keep a safe distance from me on the dais, I felt swept along through the day by the current of camaraderie.

  Andrea had gotten me quite nervous. She could be a little combative towards authors as a species—she was that way toward everyone, actually—but she had me convinced that I would really have to watch myself. “You can’t even use public bathrooms at those conferences without having an author slide a manuscript at you under the stall door. They’re animals.”

  But honestly. I went to the bathroom five times (nerves) completely without incident. The only conversation that took place in a restroom was when an author offered me a spritz of her perfume. It was Contessa! That stuff got around.

  I was beginning to like the smell of it, too.

  Still, all through the day, butterflies fluttered around my stomach. This, of course, had nothing to do with authors or chicken breast luncheons and everything to do with the fact I was going out with Dan Weatherby that evening. I kept ticking off the minutes, like a countdown.

  Seven hours.

  Five and a half hours.

  Now that I knew what he looked like, I kept seeing him everywhere. He was hard to miss. He loomed over everyone. Plus he had that halo of blond hair. (Dyed or naturally sun bleached? Hard to tell.) And that smile with teeth so white they occasionally seemed to glint off the fluorescent lighting in the hotel. He was sitting at the next table from me during the luncheon, and I could occasionally hear that husky, sexy laugh of his, which would cause a frisson of anticipation in me that was wholly inappropriate for business.

  Four hours and forty-five minutes.

  The only downside to the afternoon was sitting next to Cynthia Schmidt, Cassie’s favorite author, at this luncheon. I had a whole table of Candlelight authors around me, but Cynthia dominated my attention. “I drove in from Medford last night,” she informed me. “I have the room right next to yours, I noticed.”

  That disarmed me a little. I wasn’t aware that my room was being watched. “How did you notice?”

  “I volunteered with the hospitality committee to put the goody bag in your room.”

  All visiting editors and agents got a little totebag stuffed with books from Oregon writers and author promotional material like bookmarks, pens, and notepads advertising t
heir Web sites, and my personal favorite, a chocolate bar with an author’s recent book cover as the label. I was saving the goody bag to bring back to Fleishman as a souvenir. He would be over the moon.

  “You all have done so much,” I said, hoping to draw some others in. “I’ve never been in the position of feeling like a VIP before.”

  “That’s right.” Cynthia craned a tight smile up at me. “Cassie told me it was your first conference.”

  “It is,” I admitted, trying to pretend I wasn’t feeling the frosty vibes.

  “Well, I thought it was very gracious of her to let you come in Rita’s place.”

  My jaw nearly went off its hinges. Let me come? What kind of delusional crap was Cassie feeding her authors now? I was tempted to announce that Cassie had never been scheduled to fill in for Rita, and that Cassie’s graciousness was all in her own fevered little salutatorian brain.

  “But that’s Cassie all over, isn’t it?” Cynthia remarked.

  I could tell that my answer was going to be relayed back to New York sometime very soon. I swallowed, smiled, and though it nearly killed me, gushed, “Yes! Cassie’s one of a kind!”

  I decided I should double check my goody bag for explosives.

  Even though I met Darlene Paige, the other Cassie author from Oregon, at the luncheon, she had scheduled an editor-author appointment with me. These appointments were usually for unpublished authors to talk about a story to an editor; given fifteen minutes to pitch their life’s work to an actual warm body from New York, most authors were so nervous they were no more adept at explaining their stories than I had been lecturing on plot. With just a few months on the job, I really didn’t feel like I had earned the right to make anyone nervous.

  To put them at their ease, I told one and all that I would love to see what they had, even the woman who came in to pitch a story called The Reluctant Vampire, the main conflict of which was that the title character, an emergency surgery anesthesiologist, had to spend his nights looking at the exposed necks of unconscious people and hiding his true nature from his colleagues, including a sexy female heart surgeon.