The Pink Ghetto Read online

  “Right! Interesting!” She leaned back, clearly impressed. Clearly having no clue that I had spent the past two years combing Manhattan for jars of okra. “She knew Albert Camus, I’m sure.”

  I had no idea. I nodded. “She knew everybody.”

  “I did my senior thesis on Camus.”

  “Oh!” I was trying to remember who that guy was, exactly. Had he written The Little Prince? “How fascinating.”

  “In French, of course.” She rattled off a question at me in rapid fire, extravagantly accented French.

  I had studied French in school, but I hadn’t given it much of a thought in years. Sylvie had always spoken to me in English. And even in my heyday of Continuing French Conversation during senior year, I never knew the language so well that I didn’t panic when someone was talking at me full speed.

  In this case, I did what I always did when I didn’t exactly understand. I agreed. “Bien sur!”

  This seemed to satisfy Mercedes. “You know, I saw her mentioned the other day somewhere…”

  “The New York Review of Books.”

  “Exactly!” Mercedes seemed gratified that I would assume she read that magazine. Actually, I assumed she didn’t. Did anyone? “So…um…” She was searching her cum laude brain for my name, I presumed.

  “Rebecca,” I reminded her.

  “Right! Tell me a little more about yourself, Rebecca.”

  If there had been a BS meter on Mercedes’s desk, for the next five minutes its needle would have been tilting frantically into the red. I was an unrecognized child prodigy, torn between all of my varied interests, but what I had always been attracted to was the written word. I had edited my school literary magazine. (True enough.) We had worked mostly on student work, but also with professionals like Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley. (Almost true—I had written those esteemed women to ask if they would contribute a story, and each had written back to politely refuse.) My dream was to edit books, but I knew I needed to start small, pay my dues. Working with a woman like Sylvie had taught me all about patience. (I had to mention Sylvie again, since Mercedes seemed so impressed by her.)

  But Mercedes didn’t have a BS meter on her desk, and she didn’t seem to have one in her brain, either. All during my tall tale, she tapped a silver fountain pen on her desk blotter and didn’t appear to notice that it was dribbling puddles of ink everywhere. “Well! I am impressed.”

  The minutes were ticking away. The meeting she had needed to rush out to had surely started by now?

  “Very impressed indeed!”

  I felt a surge of hope. I started ticking the days off in my head. If I started work the next Monday, maybe I would be getting a paycheck two weeks after that. Which meant that we might fall short on the rent the next month, but after that we would be on easy street.

  Which reminded me. Money. “How much does this job pay?” I blurted out.

  Mercedes’s face fell, and I knew instantly that I had made a mistake. Her expression couldn’t have looked any more uncomfortable if I had farted.

  She tapped her fingers, shifted in her chair, and finally cleared her throat. “You didn’t go over this with Kathy?”

  I shook my head. Kathy! That’s who I should have asked.

  “Well, an assistant here starts at…generally speaking…” She named a figure in the low thirties. My heart pounded. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t help saying the number aloud.

  Mercedes’s eyes narrowed. “Did you have a specific salary requirement?”

  “No!” Then, realizing that I probably sounded very uncool, I added, “That is, not really…”

  “Because, naturally, with your experience…”

  My lips twisted. Right. With my experience I was lucky not to be asking people if they would like to supersize that.

  “I’ll be pulling for you to do well on the test,” she said quickly.

  That word, test, stopped me cold. I stopped balancing my checkbook in my head. I’d been hoping to bluff about my typing speed. “When do I take that?”

  “I’ll give it to you to take home now,” she said.

  Take home? This was obviously not a typing test.

  She turned and pillaged the top of a file cabinet stacked with papers, then came back at me with a large manila envelope. “That’s a book proposal. Read it, write an acceptance and revision letter and edit the first chapter, and then drop it off at the front desk.”

  I gulped. Edit? They wanted me to be an editor and not just some kind of secretary?

  “Oh! And let me get you some books.” She grabbed handfuls from her shelves and shoved them across the desk at me.

  I stumbled out of the building with my bundle of stuff, feeling conflicted. A job like this would be great, but what were the chances I would get it?

  Nil.

  I really needed to be more careful about these jobs I was applying for.

  Fleishman and Wendy were thrilled with my freebies. Wendy found a baggy family saga in the pile that piqued her interest. “I love stuff like this.”

  “I thought you didn’t read romance novels,” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I just like these.”

  Fleishman went straight for the category romance novels; he seemed more interested in the camp factor of it all. “Look at this! The Fireman’s Baby Surprise!” He sniggered as he leafed through the front pages. “Is that what women fantasize about now? Having babies with firemen?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “I just fantasize about having a paycheck.”

  Fleishman stole away with a little hoard of books.

  Wendy shot the manila envelope a look of concern. “What’s that? Homework?”

  “It’s an editing test. I have to edit a chapter of a manuscript and bring it back to them.”

  Wendy tilted her head. “Do you know how to do that?”

  “Oh, how hard can it be?” Fleishman piped up from the futon sofa. Then he turned back to his book. “The fireman’s name is Chance. Are there actually people in the world named Chance?”

  “Coming from a man named Herbert Dowling Fleishman the Third, I don’t think you have room to sneer.”

  He glared at me and sank down on the couch. He always hated it when I reminded him of his name. There was a good reason he went by Fleishman.

  “What are you going to do?” Wendy asked me.

  “I guess I’m going to treat myself to a crash course in editing.”

  For the next two days, I was a slave to the Chicago Manual of Style. I went through two red pencils marking up that manuscript. And in the meantime, I read several of the books. I read The Fireman’s Baby Surprise, Beauty and the Bounty Hunter, and I skimmed a long book that was a retelling of Cinderella set in Scotland in the 1700s called Highland Midnight Magic. I steeped myself in romance.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Hilariously purple prose, I guess. And it had been a long time, maybe forever, since I had heard a man’s sexual organ referred to as his manroot. But for the most part, the thing that surprised me was that the books were so not focused on sex. At least the little modern ones weren’t. (The Scottish book was half sex, half clan war.) The fireman had firehouse politics and an arsonist to deal with, along with his paternity dilemma. The bounty hunter was chasing an heiress wrongly accused of jewel smuggling—so that was a big mess to have to work out. Every step of the way, these poor people had problems, and they were falling in love.

  By the end of the week I was beginning to see the appeal. If some schmuck has time to find an arsonist, expose his boss for corruption, find good daycare, and fall in love with a sassy local news reporter, the authors seemed to be saying, there was hope for us all.

  I must have done something right, because the day after I turned in my test Kathy Leo called me to tell me to come in again, this time to talk to someone named Rita Davies.

  When I was led back to Rita’s office, I was struck at once by the mess. If Mercedes’s office was disorganized, Rita’s could have qualified as a
Superfund site. Manuscripts piled up precariously in teetering Seussian columns. I counted six different in-boxes, and all of them were full. Rita was a blousy, heavy-lidded woman with frizzy red hair. She looked up at me when I walked in and took a sip from one of the three coffee mugs on her desk.

  “Do you smoke?” she asked by way of greeting.

  I was a little taken aback. Was this a trick question? I took a deep breath and sensed a definite smell of tobacco. “Uh…not really. I mean, occasionally I’ll bum one at a bar or something…”

  She cut off my answer with a wave. “Because if you want, we can go outside.”

  It was drizzling outside. And cold. It wasn’t yet March. “No, I’m fine here.”

  “Okay, great. Just a second.” She opened a drawer, tossed out several old pens, what looked like an ancient bagel wrapped in wax paper, and a box of nicotine patches. She took a moment to slap on a patch, waited a moment for the burn to begin, then turned back to me with an easy smile. “Great job on the test, by the way.”

  “Thanks. I really liked that story.”

  “Yeah, she’s a good author for us. I’ll give you more of her books, if you want.”

  “Terrific!” I could give them to Fleishman. Ever since my first interview, he’d been on a romance reading jag.

  “Mercedes told me all about you. She said you’re just what we need around here.”

  “Oh, well…” What she really needed was a Mighty Maid service.

  “She said you had worked with Sylvie Whatsawhosit and really were invaluable to her.”

  I just shrugged modestly.

  She squinted at me. “Sure you don’t feel like a cigarette?”

  I was pretty certain there was a hard and fast rule about not smoking on your job interview. It was probably up there with not showing up shit-faced drunk or wearing flip-flops. I shook my head.

  “Nicorette?” she asked, offering me a box.

  “No, I’m fine. Really.”

  “Wish I could say the same!” She sighed and popped a piece of gum into her mouth. “I guess I should tell you how we work around here. This little area here is referred to as the Pulse Pod.”

  “Pulse?” I asked.

  “I’m senior editor of the Pulse line.” She pointed to a shelf of books with identical red and white spines that were for the most part obscured by random piles of other books, souvenir ashtrays, and, inexplicably, a pair of beige suede boots. “It’s Candlelight’s line of medical romances. You know—doctors, nurses, paramedics. Even a phlebotomist or two.” I was going to laugh, but she didn’t give me a chance. “As far as staff goes, I’m the senior editor of the pod, and I’ve got an ed assist. Then there’s an assistant editor and an associate. Another person would be such a big help, I can’t tell you. I hope you don’t mind having a ton of work thrown at you all at once. You wouldn’t have much of a learning curve.”

  “Learning curves? Who needs ’em?” I joked.

  “Right. Well, what I could use is a vacation, but I doubt that’s coming anytime soon, unless it’s in a place with padded walls.”

  She went on to explain to me that Pulse Pod people worked on all sorts of books aside from medical romances. “We also work on Hearthsongs, Flames, MetroGirl, Historicals, and occasionally Divines.”

  She might have been speaking to me in a foreign tongue. I was lost. All I could think of when she said divine was the cross-dresser who starred in Lust in the Dust. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she meant.

  She stopped. “Divine is Candlelight’s inspirational line. Those books are really hot right now. You might say preachers are the new vets. Vet heroes came into vogue a decade ago. And cops are always the rage.” She sighed. “We don’t do a lot of Divines in this pod, though. Mary Jo is pretty possessive of those. Have you met Mary Jo Mahoney?”

  I shook my head.

  “You will.” She inhaled on her pen. “Lucky bitch—she knows she’s sitting on the gold mine over there in the God Pod. It’s where the real growth is now.”

  I left the interview with mixed feelings. I couldn’t decide if the job looked like a great thing or a nightmare. When I got home hauling a totebag full of books, Fleishman was all over me. (Well, all over the totebag.)

  “More books? Yay!”

  I was beginning to worry about him. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “I called in sick.” When I leveled a stare at him, he smiled impishly. “I had to see how your interview turned out.”

  “It went fine.”

  “I’ll say—there’s a message from Kathy Leo on the machine.”

  I gasped and scrambled over to the phone. When I called Kathy, she announced, “I was calling to offer you the position of associate editor for Candlelight Books.”

  Associate? I gulped. Maybe I’d heard her wrong. “I thought…”

  She laughed. “I know. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Mercedes came to plead your case. The thing is, we can’t up the starting salary for assistants without causing a revolution around here, but she really was impressed with you, so we decided that we should bump you up a job grade.”

  Fleishman, who was practically shoving me out of hearing range so he could stick his ear next to the receiver, too, gave me a high five.

  “I-I don’t know what to say,” I stammered. “Except…” Except I think I’m in way over my head now. “Except how soon can I start?”

  Chapter 3

  Kathy Leo’s call put me in a panic.

  What was I getting myself into? Sure, I could bluff my way through a half-hour interview or two. Apparently I had bluffed beyond my wildest dreams. But how could I bluff my way through eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year?

  Answer: I couldn’t. I was so screwed.

  I didn’t even own the clothes to look the part. Aside from my Mao suit, my wardrobe leaned heavily toward the ultracasual, as befitted an ex-grocery shopper. I was utterly unprepared to enter a world where I needed to look like a grownup. I wasn’t even sure I still owned a pair of panty hose. Didn’t people still wear those?

  On Friday, the day after the call from Kathy Leo, I was still flat on my back on the futon in the living room, awash in worry. Worrying was about all I could do, since God knows I didn’t have the funds to remedy my fashion deficiency. And no amount of money would render me suddenly competent for a job I was in no way qualified for.

  I had a versatile skirt made out of some kind of tensile material that was supposed to be breathable but really felt like Saran Wrap, and I had the Mao suit. Wendy had an actual dress I could probably borrow to throw my new coworkers off my feebly garmented trail. That was three outfits—maybe five if I accessorized cleverly to disguise the fact that I was wearing the Saran Wrap skirt in three different incarnations. If I did that for two weeks, maybe three, I would probably be able to splurge for something new at Filene’s Basement with my first paycheck.

  I envisioned myself at the end of those three weeks in my gamey black skirt, already the office pariah. Possibly by then the powers that be would have found me out—that I, ahem, stretched the truth in those interviews. That I had no business even applying for such a job. That actually, despite four years of college English, none of which remotely touched on the subject of grammar, my relationship with the technical ins and outs of my native tongue was haphazard at best.

  In other words, that I was a fraud.

  Just as I was considering holding up the nearest Duane Reade for some Zoloft, the apartment door flew open and Fleishman rushed in. At least I was pretty sure it was Fleishman. His distinctive features were almost indistinguishable behind heaps of colorful shopping bags.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. “I thought you had work today.”

  “I did, but then I got a summons from Natasha.” Fleishman was the only person I knew who called his parents by their first names, a practice that in my family would have earned any kid a whack upside the head. But Natasha Fleishman never seemed to mind; sh
e seemed to think it was part of her son’s bad-boy appeal. Fleishman’s attitude toward his family was always that of a beloved scapegrace. His father might not be speaking to him, his mother might have to sneak into the city to see him, and he might profess contempt for everything they stood for (up to and including budget footwear), but he acted as though he believed they would all eventually come around to see his undeniable value and charm.

  I wondered, though. Fleishman took an awful lot for granted. No person, even a father, wanted to be called a miserly old fascist forever. I mean, language like that tended to alienate people.

  He grinned and explained his mother’s surprise appearance in town. “Natasha came to have lunch and to drop off part of the Fleishman fortune on Fifth Avenue. She called me at work before heading over, so I took the rest of the day off and here I am.”

  I eyed those bags. One said Sak’s, one said Barney’s, and a few others boasted names of stores that I didn’t recognize.

  “She took you to all those places?” I asked.

  “No, no, no. Natasha just took me to lunch. I told her that we were collecting clothes for a charity drive, though, and so before coming over she loaded up the Benz with all her castoffs.”

  “What charity?” I asked.

  “The Rebecca Abbot foundation, dedicated to clothing the intolerably attired.”

  He laid all the bags at my feet. I could hardly believe it. There had to be thousands of dollars worth of stuff in there!

  “Oh my God. It’s like having a fairy godmother burst through the door!”

  “I hope you don’t mind hand-me-downs,” he said.

  He was joking. How many times had I repeated the factoid that I had not owned a first-hand coat until I was thirteen? When you’re the fifth of six kids, you learn to look at the closets of your siblings as your own personal thrift store. But this—this was a big step up in closet class.

  I tossed my arms around Fleishman and gave him a noisy kiss on his cheek. “I can’t believe you did this for me, Fleish.”

  “Who else would I do it for?” he asked, his grey eyes practically sparkling at me.