by Liz Ireland
I was not going to be shrill, or a scold. I was going to be so calm, poised, and reasonable, no one would be able to confuse me with that insecure, neurotic nut Renata. Yes, she was just fiction, but in the space of one short day, she had become real to me, like the demented twin I had been trying to avoid all my life who had suddenly found my cell phone number.
One thought sent clammy waves of worry through me: What if Mercedes actually liked Cutting Loose? When I had been reading that book, that abomination, it hadn’t seemed like a novel so much as an elaborate insider joke. And the joke was on me. Now I had to go over it again in my memory, word by awful word, trying to figure out what the editorial director of Candlelight Books might make of the thing. Where would it even fit in our publishing universe? Signature? Fleishman didn’t have a big name. He didn’t have any name. MetroGirl? He wasn’t a girl. And it certainly didn’t belong in any of the more traditional romance lines.
That was one thing that gave me grim satisfaction. Fleishman thought he was such an authority on romance. After four months of reading them and crashing one romance conference, he fancied himself an expert. But look! His first stab at the genre, and it had come out as this insulting, twisted tale of a guy slowly dumping a woman for a rich, sexy blonde.
I was safe.
I was pretty sure I was safe.
God, I prayed I was safe.
I tramped back to the apartment, stunned to find myself crossing my threshold at just a little after five. Wendy seemed as shocked as I was. It was a rarity that we saw each other at this time of day; I was usually just beginning the long march home as she was heading off for another evening aiming Klieg lights on overemoting undergraduates.
“You look like someone just died,” she said. “Did something happen at home?”
She meant Ohio, obviously. We were still young enough that home meant where our parents were, not where we spent ninety percent of our time.
“It’s nothing like that,” I said, being purposefully vague. I looked around for Fleishman. “Where’s wonder boy?”
Wendy swooped forward. “I’ve been home for a few hours and he hasn’t been here. Is something going on with you two?”
“Well…” My voice I’d been keeping cool, neutral. But now it cracked, and with it I could feel my last shred of composure begin to crumble. Damn. Why wasn’t Fleishman here? I was so ready to confront him; I’d screwed up my courage to cast off the friendship we’d been mired in for years. Now all those fine words I had formulated in my head evaporated. The argumentative rug had been pulled out from under me.
I sank onto the futon couch, feeling hollow and trembly. It didn’t help that Maxwell jumped into my lap, wimpering. He’d been alone too long with Wendy, obviously, who as far as he was concerned was the wicked stepmother of the house.
I buried my face in his bristly fur. “This has been a hell of a day.”
“What happened?” Wendy asked, her voice looping up.
The honest concern in her voice loosened something in me. My entire day came pouring out. Of course I had to give her the lowdown on the book, including a few unsavory details from my past that had now been immortalized in Cutting Loose. Also, I had to explain the horribleness of going up to see Muriel in the Bronx, and learning about Sylvie. And then being thrust back into the office and hearing that Mercedes had the Fleishman book in her hot little hands.
When I finally wound down, Wendy was red in the face. “He really wrote about all those things?”
I nodded.
She tilted her head. “Am I in this book?”
I actually hadn’t considered this. “No, you aren’t.”
She rolled her eyes. For some reason, being left out seemed to make her madder than anything. She turned and made a beeline for our communal closet. “That’s it!”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m packing his bags for him. Right now.” Not one to mull things over, Wendy.
I jumped up. Never mind that I had been mentally packing him up all afternoon. Now that I was seeing someone doing it physically, now that the umbilical cord was being cut, I felt a moment of panic.
“Wait—”
“Wait, my ass. He’s outta here. Writing a book about you? This is not okay, okay? I don’t care if Fleishman thinks he is the next Jacqueline Susann, this is not acceptable behavior.”
“But—”
“This is an intervention, Rebecca. You are not going to give him time to weasel or cajole you into thinking that this is acceptable behavior from a friend. You’re my friend, too, and I’m not gonna stand for it. Not this time. No.”
If anyone could stage a one-person intervention, it was Wendy.
She yanked the tropical fish shower curtain aside and started pulling down suitcases. All Fleishman’s.
The sight of those bags didn’t make me feel any calmer. And then Fleishman walked in, his arms weighed down with flowers.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words that sounded through the room weren’t the ones I expected. Wendy had opened her mouth, too, and her lungs had beaten mine to the punch. Forget diplomacy. Forget restraint. That wasn’t Wendy’s style.
“You sonofabitch!” she yelled, tossing a suitcase at his feet. And when Wendy got around to yelling, the earth shook.
Standing there with his luggage at his feet and the walls rattling around him, Fleishman looked, quite understandably, flabbergasted.
I was, too. I was expecting this scene to take place between Fleishman and me. It hadn’t really occurred to me that this would be a momentous occasion for Wendy, too. But she had been with us all these years. And obviously, the apartment, the weirdness between Fleishman and me, and the dog pee had all taken their toll on her psyche. She had snapped.
She zoomed right up to him, making him hold his bouquet of lilies as a protective shield. “How dare you use Rebecca that way!”
He looked mystified. “What are you talking about?”
“Your book! You wrote a piece of hideous garbage about her, and now you expect her to publish it. Well, over her dead body will Candlelight publish that story! Mine, too. Bookstores will sell that book at the same moment they start selling Eskimo Pies in hell.”
“Uh, Wendy…”
Fleishman’s gaze met mine. He looked wounded. “You didn’t like it?”
Wendy crossed her arms. “That’s putting it mildly.”
After a moment of letting the criticism sink in, Fleishman’s face looked demonstrably redder. “What was the matter with it?”
I took a breath. “You put in all—”
“You made her sound like a psycho!” Wendy shouted.
His eyes narrowed on me and he quivered impatiently. “But what did you think of the story?”
The story? Was he kidding? He had Wendy bearing down on him in a full-tilt rage and all he was worried about was my editorial opinion?
It was the first moment I ever considered that he might really be an author.
“Do you think it’s publishable?” he asked.
I cleared my throat. “I’m not even sure. The only thing I thought while I was reading it was that I hoped it never saw the light of day.”
He looked dumbstruck. “Then you aren’t going to buy it?”
Wendy nearly howled. “Hello? This is what she’s been trying to tell you!”
Actually, it was what Wendy had been trying to tell him. But Fleishman wasn’t even looking at her. It was as if she didn’t exist. In those crazy eyes of his, I was the only one he was focused on, but the attention wasn’t at all flattering. It wasn’t me he was seeing, but someone who could do something for him.
“I changed the names,” he said.
“Barely,” I said. “It didn’t fool me, and I doubt it would fool anyone we know.”
“Well?” he asked. “Do you own everything that’s happened to us? It was my life, too. I can write about it if I want.”
“That’s true.”
“You’re just being hypersensitive,”
he said. “Believe me, if you pass on this, you’re making a big mistake.”
“Fleish—”
Wendy brayed in the background as a flurry of Fleishman’s clothes flew out of the closet. “The only mistake we made was letting you stick around for so long. But the ride is over. You are going to have to go, Fleishman.”
He recoiled. Then he looked back at me. “Is that what you think, too?”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
He put the flowers on the table, then pivoted back to us, crossing his arms. Something in his stance made me very uneasy.
“I’m the one whose name is on the lease,” he said. “Remember? I made the down payment.”
“So?” I said. “We reimbursed you for that years ago.”
“The apartment belongs to all of us,” Wendy pointed out, “and we outnumber you.”
“Yes, but it’s the name on the lease that counts. So if there’s anyone who’s going to move out of here, it’s not going to be me.”
“But you can’t kick us out,” Wendy said, feeling the full sting of having the tables turned on her.
“Yes, I can. I have the lease. Legally, I’m the renter.”
Wendy and I gaped at him. Then at each other. What could we say to that?
He lifted his hands. “I’ll be generous. I’ll give you a week.”
“A week?”
His brows darted up in warning. “That’s apparently more than you were prepared to give me.”
He picked up a suitcase, crossed to his dresser, and started shoveling things in with his long arms. “I’ll go to Connecticut for a few days, and next Wednesday I’ll expect you both to be gone.”
For some reason, whenever I had imagined the possibility of Fleishman and I—What would you call it? Breaking up?—it had always been in a big theatrical emotional scene. With tears and yelling. Or lots of replaying the events of our shared past. I had never imagined a short squabble over a lease and then ten minutes of strained silence as he threw things into bags. It seemed so cold, antiseptic. We could have been any three roommates having a fight. It didn’t seem to be doing us justice.
When the packing was finally done, he picked up his bag, crossed to the front table and grabbed his flowers. “You two can have the television. I’m getting an HD soon.” He looked at me sharply. “I’ve had it on good authority that the book will sell like hotcakes.”
Head high, he breezed out the door as gracefully as anyone could carrying two suitcases and an armload of lilies.
When he was gone, Wendy sank down on the couch, looking completely deflated. “Me and my big mouth,” she muttered. “My big homeless mouth.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “No matter what happens, you did exactly right. It was beautiful.”
I sat in a chair and put my head down on the dining table like we used to do during naptime in first grade. Maxwell pawed at my leg until I picked him up. “Who do you think he was talking about?” I asked.
“When?”
“When he said someone had told him that the book would sell. Who else do you think he gave the book to read?”
“Who knows? Maybe Natasha. But he was probably just shooting off his mouth.”
“Probably, but…”
“We’ve got bigger problems than that book now, Rebecca. How are we going to find a new apartment in a week?”
That was a more immediate conundrum. “Do you have any money?”
“What do you think?”
I sighed. “Neither do I.”
“I thought you were drawing in the bucks these days.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve also been spending the bucks. I don’t see how you can make more money and suddenly have less, but it’s happened.”
She got up, crossed over to me, and practically pulled me out of the chair by my armpits. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“Go where?” I was reluctant for mopey time to come to an end.
But Wendy was good at marshalling the forces, and so we walked to the nearest Korean deli and picked up ramen noodles, a bottle of vinegary Merlot, and the new Village Voice. Back at home, I boiled the water for dinner while she poured over the classifieds.
“I’d like something in Manhattan,” she said.
I let out a snort. “Upper East Side? A townhouse, perhaps?”
“If we’re going to move, we should at least decide what our ideal would be before we have to compromise it,” she said.
“Yes, it’s always comforting to know what you’re not getting.”
She ignored my snarkiness. “It would be nice not to have such a long train ride twice a day.”
That did sound nice. And while we were dreaming…“A slightly bigger kitchen would be nice. With no roaches.” I thought for a moment. “A tub!”
“And a real bedroom with a door that shuts.”
“God, that would be fantastic!” I said.
We dreamed on in this fashion all through the ramen noodles, so it was a little bit of a disappointment when we crunched the numbers and found out that about all we could afford in Manhattan was a “lge” studio somewhere down in Alphabet City. Actually, we could do better if Wendy would let me chip in more—which I could afford to do—but she wouldn’t hear of that. “If it’s not an even split, things get hinky.”
I started looking at Brooklyn listings, while her brow remained firmly furrowed. “The trouble is you pay a premium for not being able to afford much.”
“Huh?”
“A one-bedroom is astronomical in price, but a two-bedroom is only slightly more astronomical.”
She was right about that. Not that it did us any good. At the end of the evening, we had circled several possibilities in Brooklyn.
“I guess I’ll start calling people tomorrow,” she said.
“Or I could.”
“No, I will. I work at the coffee shop tomorrow. It will make playing barista more interesting if I’m steaming milk and dealing with real estate agents at the same time.”
Wendy always liked a challenge.
I was about to head off to bed when her eyes suddenly bugged. Which was disturbing, since she was staring in my general direction.
“Oh no!” she breathed.
“What’s the matter?”
She pointed at my lap, where Maxwell was contentedly dozing. “He didn’t take the dog.”
I tensed. Did she actually mean she wanted Fleishman to take Maxwell? “Of course not.” Maxwell was mine!
“I am not hauling that loose-bladdered furball to another apartment,” Wendy declared.
“But—”
“Uh-un.”
“But he belongs to me. He’s my responsibility. And he hasn’t peed on anything for days.”
“I thought he belonged to Fleishman.”
“Well, he was sort of both of ours, but…” Panic made me shameless. “But Fleishman was terrible with him. He spoiled him. Once you pointed out the behavioral problems he’s been much better. The crate training was a stroke of genius.”
She tilted her head. I don’t think she was buying any of it.
“He won’t be much trouble,” I promised. Max was probably the only vestige of my years with Fleishman worth hanging on to.
“It’s hard enough finding an apartment for people,” she grumbled. “Finding one that takes dogs? In a week? That’s gonna take a miracle.”
The next morning I was up and at’em in my usual timely fashion. I was late. I tossed on an old dress and bolted for the door, stopping short when I saw Wendy hunched over the paper, basically where I had left her the night before. “Keep this afternoon open after three,” she said. “I’m going to try to set up some apartment viewings.”
“Where?”
“There’s a huge place on the Upper West Side—way upper. It’s only three hundred dollars over our budget.”
“Where’s the three hundred supposed to come from?”
She tapped her highlighter pen against the classifieds. She was all business. “I’m not sure. We might
have to start selling our ovaries.”
I scooted out the door. By the time I was squeezed onto a subway train, my mind had already turned from the apartment hunt back to obsessing over Cutting Loose.
The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that Mercedes would like the book. Yes, it had a few chortles in it. Fleishman was a funny person. Of course, I hadn’t found it very funny…and I doubted anyone else would either. Why would they? To me the thing was about as entertaining as watching someone pick a scab. Mine.
At the office, I dropped my purse in my chair and looked up to find a vaguely familiar man standing in my doorway. He was medium height, with deeply tanned skin and dark hair that was slicked back in a way that made me think of Andy Garcia. When he smiled, his white teeth practically glistened against his Coppertone complexion. “So you’re the new one,” he observed.
My lips twisted into a wobbly smile. Who the hell was this? “Uh…fairly new.”
“Mercedes has told me good things about you,” he said, waving. “Keep up the good work.”
“Thanks!” I chirped toward his back. He was already walking away.
Three seconds later, Andrea poked her head in my door. “My God, what did he say to you?”
I squinted. “Who?”
“Art!”
“That was Art Salvatore?”
“Of course! Who did you think it was?” Her face screwed up. “I wonder why he didn’t stop by my door.”
“Maybe his stopping by mine wasn’t such a good thing,” I said.
I was already feeling uneasy when I headed for the coffee room. Lindsay fell into step with me as I passed her cubicle. “Are you ready for your closeup?”
Some sort of joke, obviously. It went right over my head.
“Your ‘Making Waves’ interview for BM,” she prompted. “Isn’t that today?”
Oh shit.
Belatedly, the memory of making the lunch appointment hit me like walking into a wall. I froze in my tracks.
It was one of those moments when, if I hadn’t been in a space where I was posing as a professional, I would have just let my knees buckle underneath me and sunk to the ground, beat my fists on the carpet, and wept. This was just too gruesome. I was wearing a dress that was as appealing as an NPR tote bag, no jewelry, and no makeup. Maybe I could have passed for someone making waves back in Khrushchev’s Moscow, but now I looked more like something that needed to be sandbagged. I was a disaster.