The Pink Ghetto

by Liz Ireland

  The receptionist seemed to think I didn’t belong there. I suppose, by her reckoning, I didn’t. Unlike the two others who had checked in and settled on the faux antique furniture, I had no appointment. I was just there on hope.

  The night before, I had consulted with my sister Ellen. She thought Sylvie’s story was terrible, but not unheard of. “When someone is old, alone, and has money, there’s usually a vulture circling somewhere,” she told me. “That woman needs to work with someone who can hunt down this Langley person and put the squeeze on him.”

  When Luke Rayburn came in, he smiled cordially at me and then breezed right past. A jolt of anxiety bolted through me. He didn’t even know me. Would he think this was too weird? Would he think I had trumped up some story just to see him in a non-elevator setting?

  A few steps later he stopped, and when he pivoted back to me, his face was puzzled. “Rebecca?”

  He remembered my name! I fluttered in response as he shook my hand. I would never have remembered the name of a guy I had only met once in an elevator…unless of course I had spent months obsessing about him.

  “There’s a matter I wanted to discuss with you,” I said. “I didn’t have your card to make an appointment…”

  He shook his head as if it were offensive that I should think I had to be so formal as to call first. “Never mind that. Come on back.”

  As we zigzagged through the inner offices, he offered me coffee. I shook my head.

  “Sorry I don’t have another bagel to offer you,” he said.

  “That’s okay. At least we’re not trapped on an elevator.”

  He laughed. “I almost didn’t recognize you just now,” he said, showing me into his office. It was also woody and somber. He snapped on lamps and offered me a seat in a buttery leather chair. “You were out of context. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you on stationary ground.”

  “You weren’t thinking outside the box,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  He squinted at me, then made a show of laughing at my little joke, which was kind of him but did not stop me from feeling like a doofus. I was feeling out of my element. He was so professional, so together. He even had expensive looking hair—short, shaped, but no visible hair product.

  “You said there was a reason you wanted to speak to me,” he said. “I hope you’re not in any kind of difficulty.”

  “Actually, I’m sort of here on someone else’s behalf.”

  “A relative?”

  “A friend. My previous employer.”

  Worry lines creased his forehead. “Does she know you’re here?”

  “I told her that I was going to help her. You see, she’s ninety-four years old. Her name is Sylvie Arnaud.”

  His lips twisted and I could see him casting about to place the name. “That rings a bell. Was she an actress?”

  “In a way—if you consider someone’s entire life to be a performance.”

  He asked me to start from the beginning. I gave him the whole of Sylvie’s saga, as far as I understood it. It was still difficult for me to believe that she had led this amazing life after having started as a nobody. That she had even faked a different nationality to keep an aura of mystery.

  And then, of course, I had to tell him about the creep R.J. Langley, who had installed his aunt in a retirement home and then absconded with her money. While I spoke, Luke sipped at his coffee, nodding at the correct moments but obviously trying to stay neutral. He seemed to think Sylvie’s history was interesting, but he didn’t seem at all surprised by the behavior of R.J. Langley. Neither had Ellen. It occurred to me that lawyers, like psychiatrists, had probably heard it all.

  He didn’t even seem to think that Sylvie’s story was unusual at all.

  “Do you think there’s any way to help her get her money back?” I asked. “I think she’s resigned to living where she is, but I hate to see her nephew just get away scot-free with bilking someone that way.”

  “Me, too.” Luke thought for a moment. “There are ways we could try to hunt Langley down and get the money out of him, but I’ll need to talk to Sylvie herself.”

  I considered whether Sylvie would want to make the trip. She had been skeptical when I told her I was going to consult a lawyer for her.

  “If she can’t come here, maybe you could take me to see her,” he suggested. “Maybe Wednesday night? After an early dinner?”

  I’m not sure if my heart stopped beating, although for a few moments, as I looked into those dreamy brown eyes of his, time did seem to stand still. He was asking me on a date, sort of.

  Or maybe he wasn’t.

  “Why don’t I swing down by your office at five and pick you up?”

  I nodded. “Thank you.” I stood, feeling awkward when it came to business arrangements. “I’m not asking you to work pro bono, you know. I want to make sure you’re paid for your time.”

  “Oh, I’ll be paid,” he said, sending me a sly wink.

  He seemed so lascivious, so eager, it was as if he intended to arrange a billable-hour-for-sex trade.

  Then he continued, in the voice of a man who really loved what he did, “R.J. Langley will pay, once we’ve squeezed the money out of him.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like a silly hysteric for jumping to the other conclusion.

  Then again, in this instance, legal-aid-for-sex had a definite appeal.

  Dan Weatherby was driving me out of my mind. Every time I thought we had the Cutting Loose contract nailed down, he would call me back asking for a little something extra. A publicity tour. Higher royalties on foreign sales. More money. And then, finally, when I phoned to tell him Mercedes had capitulated to all his demands, he dropped this bombshell.

  “Actually, Rebecca, I just talked to Jack….”

  It was Jack all the time now.

  I bit back a sigh. “Oh? What are his thoughts?”

  “We’re thinking hardcover.”

  I squinted into the receiver. I was speechless. Hardcover? We had spent an entire week negotiating and the word hardcover had never been mentioned before. I had never even negotiated a hardcover contract before. At Candlelight, hardcover was reserved for the big guns—the women who had clawed their way to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and managed to keep a berth there. I had authors who had written twenty times as many books as Fleishman—that would be twenty—for whom the word hardcover was still a distant dream.

  “We’d just like to know where you are on this,” he said.

  “Frankly, we’re nowhere on it, Dan. This is an offer for a trade paperback.” I added, “And we think it’s a pretty generous offer, too.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, we realize that. But it’s not as if Candlelight couldn’t do hardcover for a first-time author they really wanted to get behind….”

  “I’ll have to run this by Mercedes,” I said.

  “Fantastic!” Dan said. “Oh, and Rebecca…”

  I bit back a sigh. “Um?”

  “Jack told me to tell you that he can’t find his iPod. Maybe it just happened to slip into one of your boxes while you were moving?”

  He was now asking his agent to accuse me of stealing? “Tell Herbert Dowling the Third that I haven’t seen it, but I will go over the apartment with a fine-tooth comb.”

  Dan chuckled. “Fantastic! And get back to me on the other thing soon, won’t you? Jack and I would really like to wrap this up.”

  When I informed Mercedes of this new hitch in the proceedings, she was livid. “He’s yanking our chain. He just wants money.”

  “He didn’t say more money. He said hardcover.”

  “But he knows that’s what it means.” She huffed, “This is very unprofessional of Dan Weatherby.”

  But very cunning.

  “Well, we could just say no, couldn’t we?” That idea had definite appeal for me.

  “Damn straight we can just say no. We could scrap the whole deal.” She drummed her fingers, then let out a sigh that deflated her. “Except that
Art wants the book. I never should have shown it to him! Now he’s taken a personal interest.”

  I tilted my head. “Why did you show it to him?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I was in a brown-nosing frame of mind,” she confessed. “Every once in a while Art likes to read one of our books, just for show. I thought he’d like that one, because, you know, it was written by a man.”

  It gave me some satisfaction to know that she had to bow and scrape to a higher corporate power, too. In fact, being responsible for two hundred and seventy titles per year, she was under more pressure than anyone.

  She let out a long, weary breath. “Fine. Hardcover.”

  Maybe Mercedes worried that she would wind up wearing cement shoes in the East River if she didn’t get this book deal. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if the mob rumor hadn’t been started by Art Salvatore himself. It was a hell of a way to keep employees in line.

  She took out a yellow legal pad and started dashing down figures. After five minutes of muttering to herself, she ripped the page off, handed me our offer, and told me to get back to Dan.

  “But wait till after lunch to call him,” she said.

  She wasn’t above yanking chains herself.

  At one o’clock I called Dan and gave him the terms Mercedes had outlined. It hurt. I was handing over more money than I would see in two years of work for a book that took a few weeks to write (and my lifetime to live). We were offering a five-city book tour, the top royalty rate, and even more author copies than I had heretofore seen offered to any author. All for a book that basically felt like it was peeling the clothes off my body and exposing me, naked, for all the world to see.

  And what did Dan say?

  “We’ll have to get back to you on this.” Not even a grunt to acknowledge that I had come through with a generous offer.

  “Mercedes is really eager to wrap this up,” I said. Which was probably saying too much, but hell, I was eager to wrap it up. I really didn’t want to spend another week of my life thinking about Cutting Loose.

  “I’ll bet she is,” Dan said before hanging up.

  As if we were the lucky ones, to have had Fleishman’s book offered to us.

  When I hung up the phone, I was fuming.

  Lindsay came by my office. “Meeting,” she reminded me.

  I groaned.

  “Yeah, I can see why you don’t want to go.” She handed me an advanced copy of Janice Wunch’s production late list. I was all over the thing. I’d barely done anything for the past week that wasn’t related to Cutting Loose.

  When I sat down, Mercedes caught my eye. “Any word yet?”

  I shook my head. “They’ll get back to us.”

  After Mercedes gaveled, the main topic of discussion was the big Romance Journal party the next week, which was being held in the ballroom at the Helmsley Park Lane. Practically the whole office was going, so it began to take on the aura of a school field trip. “We looked into hiring buses to ferry us over there,” Mary Jo said. She had been put in charge of organizing us all. “But it didn’t seem cost effective.”

  “So we just have to walk?” Madeline asked, annoyed.

  At this news, there were grumbles heard all around, until Mercedes announced, “But because we know the extra time it will take, we aren’t expecting anyone to come back to work after the party.”

  Forget field trip. It began to feel like Christmas.

  One of the books we were set to discuss was the book about the woman who falls in love with her art teacher, which I had given to Rita after Mercedes had been sidetracked with Cutting Loose. Rita announced that she had read the book and liked it, but that she worried the heroine was too old.

  “How old?” Mercedes asked.

  “She’s fifty.”

  “Fifty is the new forty,” Madeline said.

  “Not when you’re having hot flashes, it isn’t,” Rita grumbled.

  Ann, who was the head of MetroGirl—the Mod Pod—looked cautious but pointed out, “The majority of MetroGirl books now are about marriage and other midlife issues.”

  Mercedes shook her head. “Marriage is one thing, but Rita’s right. Fifty is menopausal. We have to consider demographics.”

  “I was just thinking about this,” Lindsay said. Everybody turned. It really wasn’t kosher for editorial assistants to blurt out things at these meetings, though Lindsay tended to blurt out things no matter where she was. “You know that book about the English chick, Bridget Whatsawhosis—”

  About twenty shocked people corrected her. “Jones!”

  “Uh…right. Jones. Well, everybody always talks about that book, but it’s like, ancient. I read it in junior high school, and it was meant for people, you know, in their thirties and stuff. So that means that all the people the book was written for are middle aged anyway,” Lindsay said. “So, like, that book Rita’s talking about would be perfect for them.”

  Outside of a funeral, I’ve never seen so many people get depressed so quickly.

  “My God—she’s right.”

  “I read that book in college,” Andrea said. “Christ, I’m so old!”

  “You’re only twenty-seven!” someone yelled at her.

  “Almost twenty-eight,” she moaned. “I’m pushing thirty.”

  “That’s nothing. I was thirty when I read it,” Ann with the pampered dog lamented. “I thought Bridget was me.”

  “Now Bridget would be a geezer.”

  “Shit.”

  Mercedes had to gavel us out of our collective funk.

  “And let’s not even start on how long it’s been since we all read Hop on Pop,” Troy added. “We’ll have editors jumping out windows.”

  Mercedes shot him a look. “Actually, Lindsay raises an excellent point. All those early chick lit readers are now smack in the middle of their midlife crises. Like I said, we can’t ignore demographics. That’s good thinking, Lindsay. We have to keep looking for the next thing.”

  Rita grunted. “How long before the next thing involves Metamucil and Depends?”

  “Wouldn’t it be kind of weird to stick a book about a fifty-year-old woman into a line called MetroGirl?” I asked.

  “Maybe we could rebrand it,” Mary Jo said, tapping her pencil and biting her lip in concentration. “Metro…”

  “I’ve got it!” Andrea said. “MetroGrannies!”

  “MetroMatrons?”

  “MetroGeezers!”

  “GeezerGirl!”

  The smack of wood on wood cut the brainstorming short. “Meeting adjourned,” Mercedes announced.

  When I went back to my office, my message light was not flashing. I went to the reception desk to check the wheelie thing, just in case. Muriel was back this week. “Hello, Rebecca,” she said. “No messages for you this afternoon. How was your meeting?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good!”

  I still felt a pang of guilt whenever I saw her. And I still felt that curiosity to get to know her better. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

  Those eyes were like a stone wall. I could put my hands on the padded shoulders of her sweater and shake her and she would never confess to having written that book. She would just keep staring at me without those unblinking eyes.

  I wasn’t back in my office five minutes when the phone finally rang. It was Dan.

  “I’m so sorry, Rebecca, but we have to decline your very generous offer.”

  I was stunned. “The hardcover offer?”

  “Yes. Jack has decided to accept an offer from another house.”

  “Which house?” Maybe I wasn’t supposed to ask, but I was so flabbergasted it just popped out. I felt robbed, and a little panicked. At least when Cutting Loose was my project, I felt like I was going to have some control. Now that book would be in the hands of some stranger.

  And then it would be in the hands of tens of thousands of strangers…

  “I don’t think I should really say,” Dan replied.
“But I did think it was the wisest choice, and that is what I advised Jack.”

  So they had both turned on me.

  I hung up the phone and stomped straight over to Andrea’s. She was sitting at her desk, reading and listening to headphones. I had to knock loudly enough that she would hear me, which wasn’t difficult. The way I was feeling, I could have put my fist though the door.

  She looked up. “What’s wrong?”

  “He went with another house!” I blurted, not even bothering to explain what I was talking about. She knew. “After all that negotiating—he bailed out on us completely.”

  Her brow knit in sympathy. “What a douchebag!”

  I bemoaned having to inform Mercedes of Fleishman’s defection, and then I looked down at the little iPod sitting on Andrea’s desk. It was one of the minis. “Where did you get that?”

  Andrea looked stricken. “Wendy gave it to me. She said she found it in a box and didn’t know where it had come from. She thought it might have been left by somebody when we moved. Is it yours?”

  I considered for a moment. Maybe this would be the closest I ever came to vengeance. I wouldn’t even have to lie.

  I shook my head. “No. It’s not mine.”

  When five o’clock rolled around, I still wasn’t in a great mood. I almost wished I hadn’t told Luke I would go out with him that evening. Almost. I felt like I needed a night of drinking hot cocoa and watching reruns.

  But of course, all that changed when I saw him waiting in reception for me. The man was a tonic.

  Luke took me to a Thai place near the office, where we were the first diners to arrive. It made me feel a little self-conscious, since we were the only objects of the hovering waitress’s attention. Even after a few other tables started to fill up, it occurred to me that she was still hovering. Our water glasses were refilled every three sips.

  “I think she likes you,” I said after she had made a special trip to check the temperature of the hot water in our teapot.

  He grinned. “I’m her best customer. I live just down the street here. I usually come in here in lonely bachelor mode.”