The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  Because she was an established author, Darlene Paige didn’t come with a pitch. She seemed nervous, though. She was all apologies for having dumped me. Which really wasn’t all that comforting when it came down to it. I tried to be understanding, even though I had been given the hot potato treatment.

  “Of course,” she said, “I have no complaints. Cassie’s been so nice…”

  “Yeah, she’s one of a kind.”

  Darlene’s smile quavered. “She is a doll, but…”

  I leaned forward. “But what?”

  “Well…when I was working with Julie, she always seemed more enthusiastic, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t. I didn’t let on, though. “I never met Julie.”

  “Oh! That’s right.” Darlene’s cheeks went pink at the reminder that I was the person who had replaced Julie, who she had deemed not good enough. “Well! The thing is, Julie always said that Candlelight saw me as someone to build up. You know, to be given a continuing series, maybe with some special covers…maybe with my name in puffy lettering.”

  “Puffy?” I hadn’t heard of this before.

  “You know,” she said, “the raised kind.”

  “Oh!”

  “With foil,” she added quickly.

  I nodded. If this woman thought she was going to get foil lettering on a category series book, she was living in la-la-land. Foil was expensive, and therefore meted out like dwindling rations on a lifeboat. I knew this because Rita and I worked on Troy to put red foil lettering on Heartstopper. He had agreed, but only after weeks of cajoling, and because Heartstopper was going to be the launch book for the revamped Pulse.

  “Right now I’ve got this amnesia trilogy for the Flame line called Forgotten Grooms,” Darlene went on, “and it just doesn’t seem like anything special is being done for it.”

  “That’s a shame.” Sounded like Miss Cassie wasn’t doing right by her authors. Evil thoughts did a little fire dance in my head.

  I am not a vindictive person by nature. I am not the type to escalate tensions.

  But this was too tempting.

  “Actually, I always find it refreshing to have authors be proactive in these matters,” I said.

  Darlene’s head tilted slightly. “Proactive? But what could I do?”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s cocktail hour. Could I treat you to a drink, and we could discuss it?”

  It wouldn’t hurt to give her a few ideas. Just a few.

  After my pow-wow with Darlene, I was able to escape to my room. I was actually considering taking a nap, but the minute I was alone I found myself with a bad case of the jitters. Which was ridiculous.

  Just a business dinner, I reminded myself.

  That sexy smile, my irrational brain countered. That husky laugh.

  I soaked in the tub until the skin was ready to fall off my bones. There was something wonderfully decadent about having a hotel room all to myself. A startling fact occurred to me: This was one of the few times in my life when I had been alone. Really alone. Growing up, I had never been by myself. In college I had always had roommates, a trend that continued when Fleishman and Wendy and I picked up to move to New York together.

  And now here I was. Solo. I had all the privacy I’d ever dreamed of. To celebrate, I stewed in suds for another ten minutes. I also sang to myself—“Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’.” The bathroom had great acoustics. I had never been able to sing in the bathtub before without someone banging on the door or shouting “Spare us!” Granted, this had as much to do with my puny voice and tone deafness as it did with privacy concerns, but now I felt as alone and as free as if I were marooned on a desert island. As an encore, I performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for the water spout. And I must say, if Judy Garland had done it my way, she could have gone back to being plain old Frances Gumm and saved herself a lot of grief.

  I left my hotel room feeling pretty good, actually. My new dress fit me perfectly—I really did have all-over confidence. And because it’s not like me to have even partial, localized confidence, I was savoring the moment.

  I had just closed my door and was heading for the elevator when the door of the room next to mine opened and out popped Cynthia. I flashed a big smile at her. Her lips tilted up more tentatively. All right, I thought, feeling cocky. Be that way. We stepped onto the elevator and punched the L button. It was a chilly ride down.

  The lobby was full of people, and most of them looked like romance writers. I wasn’t expecting that. Technically, the conference was over, but most of the industry people from New York were in the hotel until Sunday morning, when they would fly out.

  Barbara, the conference organizer, passed me looking as rattled as I felt.

  “What’s all this?” I asked her.

  “The president of the Greater Portland chapter made her first sale, so her agent and all the girls are giving her a big dinner at Jake’s.” She flurried away.

  Jake’s. That sounded familiar.

  A hand touched my elbow. Startled, I turned and found myself gazing up into those blue, blue eyes. And, immodest as it sounds, Dan was giving me an up and down look that let me know that all the money I’d spent on my outfit had not been in vain.

  “Amazing!” he said.

  I broke into a smile, then felt uncertainty start to creep in. Did he mean that I was dazzling him, or simply that it was amazing that I had managed to clean up so well?

  Of course, he was no slouch himself. He had changed suits—this one was more of a charcoal gray—and he smelled expensively after-shavy.

  “Come on,” he said, laughing, “let’s get away from this crush.”

  “I forgot to ask,” I mentioned as we were swinging out the lobby doors, “where are we going?”

  “Jake’s. It’s just a few minutes’ walk from here.”

  I stopped.

  He frowned. “What’s the matter?”

  “I think the crush will be following us.”

  Concerning travel time, Dan was true to his word. We walked to the restaurant—just five blocks—before my impractical new shoes could do irreversible damage to my feet.

  The restaurant was not too full when we were seated at our booth. Fleishman had led me to think this would be some kind of greasy seafood dive, but the restaurant was huge, consisting of several rooms of rich dark woodwork and paneling. It felt like something from the days of the robber barons.

  Next to us there was a long table set up, around which waiters were hurriedly putting on the finishing touches. I nodded to it.

  “Looks like we’re about to be invaded.”

  He laughed. “This place doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.”

  About fifteen minutes later, the onslaught began. The restaurant was turned into the hotel lobby all over again, but by that time the rest of the tables were filling up, too. Dan and I were settled and comfortable enough that looking over and making small talk with the writers seemed like a harmless diversion.

  When we were through exchanging small-worlds and what-a-coincidences with our neighbors, Dan and I swung right back into our conversation where we had left off, which was right in the middle of Dan’s life story. He had attended Cornell, graduated with a degree in international relations, but then got a job at a major New York publishing house through an uncle who worked there. He fell in love with the business. And because he possessed both a love of books and a natural head for contracts and figures, he veered quickly toward becoming an agent.

  “It’s been a rewarding career.”

  Judging by the Italian cut of that suit, very rewarding. Apparently if you got fifteen percent of enough, it eventually amounted to something.

  Or maybe he was just rich to begin with. He seemed the type. And if he had an uncle who was a publishing muckety-muck, that was not unlikely.

  When our dinners arrived, he asked me to tell him about myself, and I quickly sketched out what I could, leaving out details like I was a former fatso with no real qualifications to be doin
g what I was doing. I did tell him that my dad owned a plumbing supply business.

  His eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Is that so surprising?”

  I admit it. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to my dad. People always assume that if your father has anything to do with plumbing you must have grown up thinking of nothing but sinks and toilets.

  Dan shook his head. “No, but I’d say it was an amazing coincidence. My father runs Weatherby’s AAAA Plumbing Service in Buffalo!”

  “Really?” was all I could think to say. I was shocked. Dan just didn’t seem the type to have grown up…

  Well, you know.

  I hadn’t been joking, but Dan laughed as if I had. “I know, I know. It’s as if certain professions have this stamp on them. People used to be even more surprised when I would tell them my dad was a plumber who loved light opera. I guess the idea of drain clogs and Gilbert and Sullivan doesn’t sit well with most people.”

  “Exactly.” My dad, of course, was not a fan of opera, light or otherwise. But like Dan said, he wasn’t completely unsophisticated. “Dad put every one of us through college. He said his biggest regret was not going.”

  Dan nodded. “I was lucky enough to get a scholarship myself, but my own father had that same kind of dedication.”

  The next five minutes became an ode to our working class backgrounds, with Dan both embracing his parents’ blue-collar status and assuring me they were atypical. I couldn’t blame him too much. I had done a lot of that schitzo stuff, too.

  Besides, even when he was being full of himself, the man had a mesmerizing way about him. He brimmed with confidence; I am so riddled with self doubts that seeing someone who seems to have none fills me with awe. It wasn’t hard to see how this guy could break hearts and send distraught career women fleeing back to Buffalo.

  I was listening to him recount the incredible job he had done with an auction of one of his author’s books when someone stopped at our table. Seeing a pair of black slacks and assuming it was the waiter, I barely spared the person a glance.

  “Rebecca? Is that you?”

  That voice was so out of context here, and so startling, that I almost didn’t recognize it at first. I turned slowly. Then I froze.

  It was Fleishman.

  Fleishman?

  What the hell is he doing here?

  “My God! How strange!” That lunatic was acting surprised to see me. He flicked a glance at Dan, then back to me.

  I looked over at Dan, who was wearing a puzzled smile. And rightfully so. “Uh, Dan? This is my friend Fleishman. Fleishman, Dan Weatherby.”

  Fleishman darted out his hand for Dan to shake. “I don’t think I’ve heard Rebecca mention you…”

  Have I mentioned yet that I wanted to strangle him? I did, but I was also still in such a state of shock that I was frantically trying to imagine scenarios that would explain his being here. Maybe he had an aunt in Portland who died in the past eight hours.

  Maybe he followed me because he is crazed.

  To my irritation, he plopped himself down on the bench seat next to me, then scooted over until I was wedged against the paneled wall.

  A terrible thought occurred to me.

  “What about Max?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Fleishman assured me blithely. “He’s with Wendy.”

  “Wendy!” I exclaimed. “She hates him.”

  “So? She’s not going to starve him.”

  I wasn’t so sure. A few days before, Max had peed on her bathrobe—which Wendy had not realized until she had stepped out of the shower and actually put the bathrobe on. My whisking Max out for a walk had just barely prevented a puppycide.

  Dan was looking from Fleishman to me and back again. He seemed worried. “I hope Max isn’t a child?”

  “My dog,” I said.

  “Our dog,” Fleishman replied at the same time.

  Dan’s face slackened a little. “Then you two know each other well? I mean…you’re not just old acquaintances?”

  Fleishman laughed so hard he nearly choked and had to down half my glass of Chardonnay. “Didn’t you tell him?” he asked me.

  “Oddly enough, the subject of you hadn’t come up,” I said.

  “Oh! Then he has no idea.” He turned to Dan. “We live together.”

  “We’re roommates,” I clarified, tossing him a warning glance. “We have another roommate named Wendy.” I flicked my gaze around the restaurant. “Maybe she’ll show up, too.”

  Fleishman laughed. “Oh, no. She has rehearsals.”

  My irritation was beginning to bubble over. “What are you doing here?”

  “Attending the conference.”

  “What?”

  His eyes flashed in triumph. “I was here all afternoon. I wanted to make it for the morning, too, but my flight got delayed.”

  “How come I didn’t see you?”

  “I don’t know. Where’ve you been? I went to a workshop this afternoon on building sexual tension. Very informative!”

  I waved for the waiter so I could order more wine. I needed it. “How could you?” I asked. “You don’t even belong to RAG!”

  “I do now.” He smiled at me. “West Brooklyn Chapter. I had to pay a visiting member’s fee to get in here, but it was worth it.”

  When the waiter arrived, Fleishman went ahead and ordered dinner for himself. “You two just go ahead with dessert—or wherever you happen to have left off,” he offered generously.

  Dan seemed like a man who never got flustered and was experiencing the sensation now for the first time. In fact, he looked flummoxed, and the way his eyes narrowed on Fleishman I was sure he assumed Fleishman was my boyfriend. Which seemed, weirdly enough, to be the vibe that Fleishman wanted to put across.

  Had he really come all this way because he wanted to attend a conference, or was he jealous?

  The long table full of authors had received their food and was quieter than before. The scene at our booth had not gone unnoticed. A few people were shooting curious looks our way, and Barbara actually bent toward us. “Did you run into an old friend, Rebecca?”

  Fleishman swiveled. “Rebecca and I live together, actually.”

  “Roommates,” I bit out.

  “Oh!” Barbara said. Clearly, my clarification did not mean a lot to her. Her eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you the young man who was sitting next to me during Alison Rooney’s speech?”

  He had missed my speech but gone to Alison Rooney’s?

  “Wasn’t she awesome?” he exclaimed to Barbara.

  I sighed. “Barbara Simmons, this is Herb—”

  “Fleishman,” he finished for me. Then his jaw dropped. “Wait a second! Are you Barbara Simmons who wrote The Marquis Misbehaves?”

  She drew back. “Yes, I am.”

  “I loved that book!” He looked around the table, practically licking his lips. “Are you all romance writers?”

  “We’re the Greater Portland Chapter.”

  The whole banquet table of women grinned at him invitingly.

  And within ten minutes, Fleishman knew them all. When his lobster was ready, it was brought to the long table, where he had insinuated himself between Barbara and Darlene Paige. Even Darlene, who had seemed so nervous and unassuming with me that afternoon, appeared animated and at ease. She smiled, she laughed, she made comments that caused everyone in earshot to break out in whoops. Something about Fleishman seemed to bring her out of her shell.

  Dan and I had picked at our cheesecakes and now were watching in muted awe as Fleishman worked the crowd.

  “Your friend has quite a way with people,” he said. “What kind of books does he write?”

  “He’s a playwright, actually,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. I was still seething. “An unproduced playwright.”

  “Comedies?”

  “Sort of.”

  He looked as if he were considering something, then he shook his head. “I’ve never represented a playwright.” />
  “Probably wise. There’s not a fortune to be made in fifteen percent of zero.”

  He laughed. “You’re not very supportive.”

  “Oh, I’ve supported him plenty.”

  His head tilted and he regarded me thoughtfully. “Are you sure you two aren’t…involved?”

  “Very sure.” After this night, we might not even be roommates anymore, I wanted to say.

  “That’s funny. I thought I sensed something.”

  I flushed. “Well, once.” I am a very bad liar. “Twice, actually. But now we’re just roommates. We have another roommate who lives in the apartment with us. It’s a big apartment. Her name is Wendy.” I stopped. I’d made it sound as if the apartment were named Wendy.

  “I think you mentioned her already.”

  Had I? I was trying too hard to make sure he didn’t get the wrong impression, thus ensuring that he got the wrong impression.

  But how could he possibly have gotten the right impression when my ex-boyfriend shows up on the first date I’d had in six months?

  Not that Dan knew I hadn’t had a date in six months.

  Not that this was a real date.

  Right now it seemed like no kind of date at all. It was just a disaster.

  When we were done, Dan very politely offered, “Should we wait for your friend to finish?”

  I looked over to where Fleishman was yucking it up with his new romance writer friends. He was having the time of his life, and Darlene Paige looked like she had just discovered the love of hers.

  “No, he might be a while.”

  As we walked back to the hotel, I thought about explaining that Fleishman was not a love-obsessed ex-boyfriend, just a romance-novel-obsessed ex-boyfriend. But would Dan have bought that?

  I wasn’t sure I did, either. Besides, a phrase Dan had said in passing had lodged in my confused brain. I thought I detected something between you…

  Part of me wanted to ask him if he had really meant that, or at least to get the details of what had made him say it, but that probably would be a real relationship ender.

  Not that Dan and I had a relationship.

  When we got to the hotel lobby and I worked up the courage to ask him if he wanted to go hang out in the bar a while, he shook his head. “No, thanks. I have an early flight out tomorrow.”