The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  “I forgot. Completely,” I wailed sotto voce. “Look at me! I’m in no shape to meet the press!”

  Lindsay’s face wrinkled in concern for a split second, and then she shrugged. I guess in the annals of Lindsay screw-ups, underdressing for an interview didn’t even rate. “You look okay to me…”

  Those were not comforting words. Andrea told me that Lindsay had shown up for her second day of work in a thrift store tube top.

  She gave me a fresh up and down scan. “But now that you mention it…”

  I groaned.

  “Not to worry! You can fix yourself up after the meeting.”

  Those words stopped my writhing. In fact, they practically stopped my heart. “Meeting?”

  “Weren’t you headed for the conference room?”

  Father in heaven. The weekly ed meeting. I had forgotten about that, too. I was in serious need of a brain transplant.

  I galloped toward the coffee room—no way could I face an ed meeting without caffeine—going over my options for the interview. Or my lack of options. I was supposed to meet the woman at noon at some Japanese restaurant. I didn’t have time to go home, and it wasn’t as if I had a wardrobe closet in my office. I wasn’t even sure I had an old lipstick at the bottom of my purse.

  Maybe on the way to the restaurant I could swing by Bloomingdale’s and partake of free makeup counter samples. It would be tempting to buy a new dress while I was at it, but the night before Wendy had made me take a vow of fiscal responsibility.

  All of these thoughts were racing through my mind as I slopped coffee in my cup and poured in a vat of non-dairy creamer. Then I arrowed straight for the conference room, landing in a seat just as Mercedes was bringing us all to order. When she spotted me, she stopped mid-gavel and exclaimed, “Genius has arrived!”

  I blushed, assuming this was sarcasm. From the snorts and chuckles that rippled around the table, so did everyone else.

  But Mercedes wasn’t laughing. “Genius,” she said again.

  I looked down at the pile of paper she had in front of her. To my horror, it was Fleishman’s manuscript, and it was littered with little yellow stickies, which meant that she actually had taken it seriously. That she liked it. She’d even brought it to the meeting as a show-and-tell exhibit, something she hardly ever did.

  I shrank in my chair.

  “Rebecca has given me a book that will open up a whole new direction for us. We haven’t done anything like it before. I’ve already made a copy and given it to Art. He read the first chapter and loved it!”

  I slid down in my chair. So that’s what Art’s stopping by had been about.

  Mary Jo eyed the book with suspicion. “If it’s so different, why do you think it’s right for Candlelight?”

  “Because it’s irresistible,” Mercedes gushed. “A combination of Nick Hornby and that Bridget Jones woman, with a little bit of Robert James Waller thrown in.”

  “Who’s Robert James Waller?” Madeline asked.

  “The Bridges of Madison County,” someone explained for her.

  Her forehead showed the faintest of wrinkles. “Like that really boring movie? But that was about old people.”

  “I only meant that it’s bittersweet and moving. But it’s funny. More Nick Hornby than anything else.”

  Andrea shook her head. “I get it. The new voice in women’s fiction is a man. Brilliant.”

  “This is romance with an edge,” Mercedes said. “It’s lad lit with a heart. It’s got a lovable scamp for a hero who’s exasperating and adorable. I could see John Cusack playing him in the movie.”

  “Oh! I love John Cusack!” Madeline exclaimed. Or maybe the whole table said it. Everybody loved John Cusack.

  They were all on board now.

  I wanted to bang my head against the table. The phrase catastrophic success finally made sense to me.

  How could she have liked it? And what was I going to do? My worst fear was coming true. I was going to be immortalized in print as the ex-girlfriend, the neurotic Jenny Craig alumna.

  Mercedes tapped her pen against her legal pad. “Which reminds me…” She craned to see Lisa, who was in the back of the room. “Lisa, we need to see that this book gets in the hands of production companies, ASAP.”

  “But it’s not under contract,” I piped up.

  And it never will be. Scenes from the night before flashed through my head. I’m pretty sure Wendy had used phrases along the lines of “over my dead body” and “when hell fills with Eskimo Pies” to characterize Fleishman’s chances of having his book published with Candlelight.

  This was a bind. I didn’t want this book to see the light of day, but if it didn’t, I was now screwed. I would be bumped from genius back down to bumbling fool. It was a perfect lose-lose situation.

  I tried frantically to look for a bright side. Okay, it looked like the book was a shoo-in to sell. Maybe I had overreacted about the personal stuff. So what if Fleishman had thrown in a little autobiography into the story? It wasn’t as if that many people would notice. Maybe a few mutual acquaintances, sure, along with my entire family, but so what?

  “There shouldn’t be a problem, should it?” Mercedes asked, jolting me back to the question of acquisition. I was slumped in my chair in a panic coma. “I got the feeling this was a first book,” she said, “and that you knew the author personally…”

  The room got very quiet, it seemed to me. I cleared my throat. “That’s true, but—”

  “From the dedication, I thought you were very intimate with this author, this Jack Fleishman.” Mercedes scanned the first page. “To Rebecca Abbot, who inspired every word…”

  Mary Jo shot me a curious glance. “Is one of the characters based on you?”

  “Um…”

  Mercedes nearly slapped her forehead. “You are so like the character of Renata, aren’t you?”

  “Is she the love interest?” one of the editors asked.

  “No, she’s the one who gets dumped.” Mercedes hitched her throat and cut her eyes to me. “Pardon me. She gets cut loose.” She leaned toward me. “Did you really lose your virginity in a Chrysler minivan?”

  I groaned. “It’s fiction.”

  “Wait a second…” Andrea’s face was frozen in puzzlement. With a pleading glance I tried to stop her, but she apparently didn’t catch my eyeballed SOS in time. “Fleishman? Isn’t that your roommate? That crazy guy who flew out to Portland when you were at that conference?”

  “Yes.” My voice downgraded to a mere peep.

  She shook her head. “And now he’s written a book about dumping you? Cripes! That’s humiliating.”

  It would have felt nice to strangle her at that moment, but maybe it was best to have it all out to begin with rather than coming out in dribs and drabs at other inopportune moments.

  Apparently Mercedes didn’t mind about my humiliation. “But that’s perfect! If the guy lives with you, it should be a snap to get him under contract.”

  I had to work hard to dislodge the large frog that had taken up residence in my esophagus. “Not exactly. I don’t even know if we were the only house he’s submitted to…”

  That last statement created a disgruntled silence shared by all. Multiple submissions—when an author sends the same book to more than one publisher—are frowned upon. For one thing, if more than one publisher want the same book, it creates a thorny problem. The publishers have to start bidding against each other, and they hate that. It takes all the power out of their hands. And Candlelight prized loyalty from its authors. Multiple submissions, even from someone we’d never published before, exhibited a certain disloyalty in advance.

  Mercedes bridled uncomfortably. She had obviously thought this would be a slam dunk. “Does he have an agent?”

  “No,” I said. I was certain of that, at least.

  “It’ll be a snap,” she repeated.

  “20K?” Mary Jo asked.

  “Tops, I hope.”

  Twenty thousand? I went all woozy
in my chair. I wanted to cry. I was going to have to hand Fleishman twenty thousand dollars for insulting me in print?

  As I sat brooding, the late list was distributed around the table.

  “Who’s the high roller this week?” one of the editors asked.

  I looked at it and gulped. I was all over the thing.

  Mary Jo let out a laugh and shot me a smile. “Looks like it’s the genius.”

  I did swing by Bloomie’s on the way to the interview. And after I had made up my face one counter at a time, I swung by accessories and picked up a scarf. It was on sale—a steal at twenty-three bucks. It looked crisp and professional—like a scarf Mercedes would wear. By the time I left the store, I was at least presentable from the shoulders up.

  Alex Keene, the BM reporter, had chosen a Japanese restaurant in the basement of a modern building on Fifth. Banquette tables lined the wall. The decoration was stark—lots of black enamel broken by a few decorative pots of bamboo. There was no sound except for the faint burbling of a goldfish pond.

  The black pantsuited hostess swayed toward me, but before she could reach me, I was ambushed from behind. “Rebecca?”

  I turned and had to crane my neck upwards. In her stocking feet, Alex Keene might have been five-ten, but in five-inch heels she was approaching NBA territory. She didn’t teeter on those stilts, either; she had one of those purposeful strides with nothing tentative or wobbly about it. She had been very business-like on the phone, but for some reason I hadn’t expected a red-haired giantess in a long black jacket. You would never have guessed she worked for a publishing industry rag. From the looks of her, she belonged in the Condé Nast empire.

  “You are Rebecca, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  She gave me a once-over. “You’re not at all what I expected.”

  Not the making waves type, obviously. I smiled. At least I was wearing the newest fall lipstick color from Estee Lauder. It was my only source of confidence at the moment.

  The hostess ushered us to our table. I was glad to see we were separated from the next couple of diners by one of those bamboo pots. Nothing like those awkward sidewise glances from diners too close together, pretending that they are not hearing every syllable of your conversation. Thanks to that bamboo, their voices were no more than two masculine murmurs.

  Alex and I ordered our bento boxes and sat back, sipping hot weak tea. “Mercedes Coe spoke so highly of you, it really swayed me.”

  I frowned. “Swayed you?”

  “To include someone from Candlelight in the article. We hadn’t intended to, initially.” She shrugged. “I mean, romances are great. My grandmother buys them by the truckload. They’re just not…”

  “Prestigious.”

  “Right!”

  I smiled as I tried to figure out how to respond to that. Getting up and walking out would have felt good, but Mercedes had really wanted me to do this interview. I couldn’t blow it.

  “We’re always trying to change people’s minds about that,” I told her. “Maybe I can change yours.”

  She laughed doubtfully. “Well, Mercedes changed my mind about doing this interview. Mercedes, and the fact that the person I was going to interview from Knopf got fired when I was setting everything up. Mercedes said you were terrific, and you had all these terrific new ideas. Where did you go to college?”

  When I told her the name of that little liberal arts haven in Ohio, her eyes glazed over. I was losing her.

  I was beginning to feel uneasy…and not because Alex Keene so looked like she wished she was eating lunch with some young blade from Random House, say. There was something else disturbing me. And then I figured it out. Those male voices coming from the next table sounded familiar to me. Very familiar.

  While Alex bloviated about how worried she’d been that she would be late for our lunch because she was talking to Jonathan Franzen on the telephone, I took the opportunity to peer through the bamboo shoots at our neighbors. I’m not sure if I actually let out a bleat. I certainly heard one in my own head.

  Sitting right next to me was Fleishman. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  Sitting across from him was Dan Weatherby.

  Chapter 17

  I stood so abruptly I caused Alex Keene to sploop tea on herself. She emitted a muted shriek and immediately dunked her napkin in her ice water. “What happened?” she asked as she dabbed at herself. “Are you okay?”

  It was a ridiculous question, considering the fact that I was so obviously not okay. I stood rigid peering over the bamboo, eyes bulging first at Fleishman, then at Dan, and then at Fleishman again. At first I couldn’t make sense of it. What were they doing, comparing notes?

  When he spotted me—and how could he not?—Fleishman looked ruffled, too, but he managed not to come unglued. I could tell he was upset by the welts of red just under his cheekbones. His gaze narrowed on me.

  Dan composed himself first. Of course. He was half man, half Pat Sajak. One of his eyes fluttered in a wink. “Hiya, Becca.”

  Hiya? Even under the most casual circumstances, that is not a greeting I care for. I especially don’t care for it when the last time I saw the person saying it was just after a mad romp in a hotel room. It had only been three days! Hiya. That stung.

  At the sound of a familiar voice, Alex’s eyes widened and she bobbed her head up, down, to and fro for a moment trying to see around the bamboo. Finally, she just had to hop out of her chair. “Dan?” she squealed. “Dan Weatherby?”

  Spotting her, his smile broadened. He stood up, too, and they exchanged an air kiss over the foliage. She rated, apparently. Maybe she hadn’t slept with him yet.

  “Where have you been all my life?” he said.

  She rolled her eyes, turning from a no-nonsense business-woman into a six-foot coquette before my eyes. “Working!”

  “I so know how that is.”

  It was like old home week with those two.

  “This has been a brutal couple of months,” she said. “Just a terror. Half the magazine’s out on maternity leave.”

  “Must be something in the water cooler.” Dan chuckled, then winked at her. “Better watch out, Al.”

  She hooted. Which was probably just as well, since it covered my groan.

  It took the two of them a few more seconds to notice that both myself and Fleishman, who, not to be left out, was now standing, too, were staring at them in stony silence. Dan made the introductions. “Alex Keene, this is my newest client, Jack Fleishman.”

  I gasped. “Your client?”

  Dan’s brows wafted aloft. “Didn’t you know?”

  “No, I didn’t know,” I said hotly. I darted a glare at Fleishman. “No one told me.”

  Fleishman shrugged. “It’s a new development.”

  “Are you published?” Alex asked him.

  He answered modestly, “Not yet.” Though I couldn’t help noticing that the gaze he aimed at Alex was so intense it was borderline smoldering.

  Dan broke in, “That will not be the case for long. Isn’t that true, Bec?” He was smart enough not to wait for my response. “Jack’s going to be the next big thing. The new Nick Hornby.”

  “Excellent!” Alex exclaimed.

  While I gnashed my teeth, I tried to remember that I was supposed to be a business person. I tried to distance myself professionally. Dan was just another agent; Fleishman was just a commodity. Mercedes had ordered me to go forth and buy that book. There was something else at stake here besides my own personal pride. There was my job.

  Unfortunately, those stakes involved future public humiliation.

  “Mercedes was full of praise for Cutting Loose.” I spoke the words so reluctantly, so resentfully, they came out a mere rasp, as if they had been through a meat grinder.

  There. I’d done it. I had officially swallowed my pride and brought up the subject. I had inched one step closer to buying that odious book. With his agent, no less.

  His agent! That was still confounding
me. When had these two joined forces?

  But rather than seeming pleased that I was putting professional interest before my personal ones—waaaaaaaaay before—Dan merely smiled blandly.

  He and Fleishman exchanged a look.

  “That’s a good sign, I guess?” Fleishman asked.

  He guessed? He knew who Mercedes was. I could feel the wrinkles gathering on my forehead like thunderclouds. “I would say it’s a very good sign,” I said.

  The dastardly duo exchanged another look, and I took more time analyzing it this time around. It contained an off-putting combination of amusement and discomfort.

  “Actually, Bec,” Dan said, “Jack and I aren’t quite sure yet which way we’re going to go with the project.”

  Which I interpreted to mean that the cabal I had just interrupted was a strategy session.

  “Naturally he was happy to give the manuscript to you when you asked for it, since you’re a close personal friend….” Dan said.

  I could only hope they couldn’t all hear my teeth gnashing.

  Fleishman grinned at me. “The long and short of it is, I’ve had nibbles.”

  “How?” I was aware of my voice rising, but I couldn’t help it. There was an awful ringing in my ears. “A few nights ago you told me I was one of the first people you had shown the book to, and I haven’t had it for two days!”

  How could he already be getting responses from other publishers? How could they already be thinking of acquiring it? How could anyone else already be nibbling?

  Obviously, I had been lied to. The big surprise there was that I was still surprised. I hadn’t known that Fleishman had an agent, either. Dan Weatherby!

  The waitress came by, carrying two elaborately carved bento boxes. She seemed surprised to see us all standing and chatting across the bamboo. Or rather, to see three people chatting and me yelling.