The Pink Ghetto Read online

  I had just enough energy left to lift my head and glare at that maniac.

  He was smiling at me impatiently. So was the dog. “Maxwell and I have been cooped up all day long. We need air.”

  So he had skipped work again and he wanted me to walk the dog?

  “And I want you to tell me all about your day,” he said.

  I allowed myself to be persuaded. Especially when the word gelato was raised. I changed into sneakers and a pair of pedal pushers and out the door we went—my roommate, my dog, and me. We were taking little Max to the park together for the first time.

  Wendy was right. This business of having joint custody of a dog did feel intimate. But what was wrong with that? I knew it was dangerous to think this way—to let myself get carried away—but Fleishman and I did go way back. So I occasionally had a, shall we say, fondness for him…was that so bad?

  Whenever I saw Wendy or one of my sisters shaking their heads over my relationship with Fleishman, it made me want to scream. Was this or was this not the twenty-first century? In their minds—especially my family’s—there was simply no complexity allowed when it came to relations between the sexes. But surely we had progressed to the point where a man and a woman could be friends.

  Mind you, this enlightened attitude of mine did not prevent me from periodically holing up by myself and something Sara Lee and weeping over the fact that Fleish just didn’t love me. I wasn’t made of stone. The mere thought of When Harry Met Sally, a film most women thought of as the best feel-good movie of the past century, was enough to send me into a week-long funk. I knew, knew it in my bones, that there wasn’t going to be any big New Year’s happy ending scene for us at the end of the last reel.

  Nope. Wasn’t going to happen.

  See? I wasn’t completely unrealistic.

  It’s just that meeting Fleishman had changed everything for me.

  Okay, actually it was losing forty-five pounds that changed everything. But Fleishman was the first guy who ever saw me as I wanted to be seen—in other words, not as a big fat loser. Maybe it was the case of the baby duckling latching onto the first creature it sees, but when Fleishman and I paired off during our first year in college, it felt right.

  Likewise, when we split up the next year, it felt wrong. But I was willing to deal with that. To play it cool. You don’t spend eighteen years of your life feeling like one of society’s castoffs without developing a teeny bit of self-protection. Just friends? Okay, I could handle that.

  The truth was, if I tried to envision waking up on a weekend morning without him, it felt like a crater was opening up in my chest.

  “So what happened at work?” he asked.

  I told him he didn’t want to know. He insisted he did. I hedged. He cajoled. We stopped for ice cream.

  And then it all came spilling out. I told him all about Luanne, the pedophile cover, Cassie’s treachery, having to call all the authors who had been told I was an idiot, then Janice Wunch and the late list. It was good to get it off my chest.

  All the while, Fleishman sat across the wrought iron café table from me, barely touching his plastic lavender tulip cup of gelato. I really didn’t expect anything more from Fleishman than what he was giving me—a sympathetic ear and a few understanding nods.

  But when I was done, and was scraping at the last bit of rum coconut raisin in my cup, I was surprised to find myself getting an earful.

  “This is just outrageous!” he exclaimed. “You need to march up to that Cassie woman tomorrow morning—first thing, Rebecca—and tell her to give you those authors back!”

  “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “Of course you can. Tell her where to get off.” He squinted. “Who did she take? Anybody good?”

  I lifted my shoulders. “I’m not sure. I still don’t know who most of these people are. And anyway, I’m obviously swamped. I’m not sure I should go chasing after more work.”

  His jaw dropped. “It’s the principle of the thing, damn it. At the very least, you need to tell your boss what’s going on.”

  “Squeal, you mean?”

  “You have to squeal.”

  “But wouldn’t that just make me look weak twice over?”

  He whapped his napkin against the table. “Man, we need to put you on angry pills. This is the corporate world, Rebecca. You have to be ready to show your claws.”

  I know he was trying to help me, but I couldn’t help thinking, what the hell do you know about the corporate world? He’d been a part-time telemarketer for the past six months. Before that, he’d been a summer intern at Theater World magazine, and before that he had enjoyed the shortest ushering career ever in the twenty-year history of the Angelika after chucking a Mike and Ike box at a man who was talking during a Juliette Binoche movie.

  Fortunately, the box had been empty. Unfortunately, the man he’d chucked it at was Martin Scorsese.

  But I did not remind him of any of this. He was trying to help me.

  And maybe he was right. I couldn’t let things go on this way.

  “If you don’t do something now, you’ll wind up as this Cassie creature’s personal punching bag,” he warned.

  I sighed. “I wish I could just switch places with her.”

  His brows scrunched. “What do you mean?”

  “I think her nose was bent out of joint when I came in a level above her. Being associate rather than assistant doesn’t matter to me. So I wish I could just tell her, here, take your damn promotion and leave me alone. All I want is a paycheck.”

  Fleishman slammed his tulip cup on the table, I think to free up both hands so he could tear his hair out. “Where to begin?” he moaned, looking up at the heavens. He reached across the table for my hand. “First off, you don’t cede the advantage to this person, okay? Ever. So what if you got where you are through a freakish stroke of good fortune? Them’s the breaks. You’re the one who usually complains about having bad luck, remember? Well, this time luck worked in your favor. So you have to take advantage. Understand?”

  I laughed.

  “This Cassie person sounds like a classic DJB.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A demented jealous bitch. She needs to be crushed.”

  “Right. I’m just the person to do that.”

  “You have to, Rebecca. You owe it to the rest of humanity to stop this woman before she goes any further down the path of demented jealous bitchiness. You didn’t ask for it, but this is your mission now.”

  “What should I do?”

  “First off, you have to watch your back. Lock your office door if you have to.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious. Do not leave her another opening. And the second thing is, undercut her at every opportunity. Steam right over her pathetic stalled career. You’ve already got a head start on her. You can do this, Rebecca. Look how far you’ve come in the publishing world just by mistake! And I know somewhere in that jellyfish personality of yours is a will of cast iron just crying to get out. You’re the woman who lost forty-five pounds in four months, remember? You’re tougher and smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

  Damn. He was right. Why shouldn’t I succeed?

  There was just one problem. Deep down I still felt that I was only kidding myself. While Fleishman was talking at me, I could believe that I would emerge triumphant in this situation. But unassisted, I am a ten-minute optimist.

  As we walked Maxwell along the edge of a tiny neighborhood park, my self-confidence sagged back down to its normal level. I told Fleishman, “I’m so far behind, and Cassie’s a little go-getter.”

  “You’ll catch up,” he assured me.

  “How?”

  “We start tonight. First we’ll knock out all that late-list stuff out, ASAP. Also, we’ll make cookies.”

  “Cookies?” What the hell was he talking about?

  “You need to start winning friends and influencing people around that place.”

  “With cookies?”
I asked. “This is an office.”

  He nodded. “Doesn’t matter. There ain’t nobody who doesn’t love Natasha Fleishman’s chocolate chocolate chip cookies.”

  That gave me pause. Those cookies were good. “But I thought her cook made those.”

  “I’ll call her for the recipe. I know she’s got it. She collects recipes, she just doesn’t bake anything herself.”

  “Isn’t this going to be a lot of work for a week night?”

  “Week night, schmeek night. We’ll get it done.”

  I could feel my lips twisting into a wry curl. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve been throwing the word we around awfully liberally.”

  “I’m going to help you.”

  “I’ve never seen you make a cookie,” I said.

  “Then you make cookies and I’ll help you knock out some of that work.”

  “What?”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Are they going to check your handwriting to make sure you did it yourself? Who would even notice?”

  He was right about that.

  Warning bells were going off in my head, but I couldn’t quite figure out what all the ruckus was about. Fleishman and I helped each other out all the time. I’d done so much work on an Othello paper for him in junior year that I might have legally been called its author. We shared half our stuff. We even shared money.

  What could be wrong in sharing a little work?

  Chapter 6

  On Wednesday morning, Lindsay stopped by my office carrying a legal pad. I must have looked startled. It was the first time I had seen her looking slightly businesslike. And believe me, it had to be difficult to look businesslike in that tight zebra print top she was wearing.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I tried to imagine what she was talking about, but my mind was a blank. “Did I miss a memo?”

  “There’s an editorial meeting every week,” she said. “All hands, plus Janice and Troy. It’s boring and interminable. It’s also mandatory. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  I grabbed a legal pad and followed her down the hall to the conference room. Aside from being in a somnambulant daze, I was feeling pretty cocky. Fleishman and I had pulled an all-nighter. We had knocked out all the stuff I had brought home. We had made four dozen chocolate chocolate chip cookies…and I had only availed myself of five. (Everyone agrees: breakfast is the most important meal of the day.)

  The conference room was long and narrow, and almost entirely consumed by the rectangular table that ran its length. On one wall was a dry-erase board nearly as long as the table itself. On the other side stood a row of chairs. When I walked into the ed meeting with Lindsay, those chairs were filled with the ed assists, who apparently didn’t rank a place at the table. Lindsay took the last of these seats.

  “Sorry,” she said, “you have to be a plebe to be in this row.”

  Andrea waved me over to an empty seat next to her at the table. She was madly scribbling numbers all over her legal pad.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She tapped her pencil. “I’m trying to figure out how much I would have to earn to pay thirty dollars a month more on my MasterCard, which would make me completely debt free in the year 2026. It’s really not that much! I think it’s doable.”

  People started passing around Xeroxed handouts. First there was Janice Wunch’s dreaded late list (my items had shrunk down to five…a miracle no one seemed to notice). Then there was a page bearing the title, To be discussed. With the exception of Cassie and me, all the editors had a few titles under their names. I had none. Cassie had thirteen.

  Andrea tapped on my sheet of paper. “Oh! You’re supposed to turn in the slush and agented manuscript titles you’ve read during the week that you mean to pursue.”

  “Now she tells me,” I muttered.

  Not that I had read anything new. Still, it rankled to be bested by Cassie once again.

  “Cassie always overdoes,” Andrea grumbled, as if she could read my mind. “It always takes for-fucking-ever to get out of here, thanks to her.”

  The editors were all congregated for a full five minutes before Mercedes finally bustled in, scarf fluttering behind her. She sat down at the head of the long table, then took out a judge’s gavel and banged it on the table, which seemed a little odd, since all of us were already staring at her anyway.

  “A rather surprising memo came down from on high about sales figures,” she announced, getting things started. “The new hot sellers last quarter were single titles, MetroGirl, and Divines.”

  Across the table, Mary Jo and her God Pod were smiling smugly. In front of Mary Jo was her ubiquitous Cathy mug. Andrea might have viewed that beverage container as a sign of Mary Jo’s mental health problem, but I for one marveled at its longevity. It was about the same age as my little brother, who was a sophomore at Ohio State.

  “Flames also were selling briskly, as usual,” Mercedes said. Flame was supposedly the sexiest line of books we published. “So what do we learn from this, people?”

  We all looked at one another nervously before Troy blurted out, “We learn that American women can’t get enough of hot sex and Jesus.”

  I laughed, and Troy, who had been munching on some of the cookies I’d brought him, winked at me conspiratorially.

  Fleishman’s advice had turned out to be not at all bad. When I’d brought Troy the cookies and explained about the cover, and told him how upset the author was, he couldn’t have been nicer about it. He’d explained that actually he had yanked a cover once before when it was decided that the drawing of the hero had too much crotch bulge showing. They had swapped the artwork with art from an earlier foreign edition of a different book, but one which had similar looking people. “It cost us, but it saved on angry reader mail and bad sales.”

  “And you would do that for me?” I gushed.

  “Oh, honey! You sound so disgustingly grateful!” he simpered back at me. Then he laughed. “Yes, I would do that for you, and to keep Art Salvatore from firing my ass. Or worse…”

  My eyes widened in alarm. He made it sound as if he would wind up with cement shoes in the East River over a bad cover. “But that’s just a rumor, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. Totally.” He nudged me playfully in the ribs.

  There’s one ally now, I thought.

  Mercedes was the only person at the table who wasn’t chuckling at Troy’s little joke. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “Of course people don’t want religion and hot sex in the same book…”

  “How do we know?” Madeline interrupted. When the only answer she received were blank stares all around, she asked, “It worked for The Thorn Birds, didn’t it?”

  “Richard Chamberlain was so hot,” Ann said.

  Mercedes cleared her throat. “I just don’t think that now…”

  “Oh!” Lindsay piped up. “Did you ever see Richard Chamberlain in Shogun?” She made some kind of weird martial arts moved with her ballpoint pen. “My mom has that on DVD.”

  “I thought he was gay,” someone said.

  “No way!”

  All the people who were half asleep during the beginning of the discussion of sales figures were suddenly alive with opinions on the subject of Richard Chamberlain, gay/not gay.

  “I don’t care about real life,” Madeline proclaimed. “He wasn’t gay when he yanked that woman down on the beach to have sex with her.”

  “That was just like that beach scene in From Here to Eternity,” Andrea said, “with Burt Lancaster.”

  “Burt Lancaster was hot.”

  Mercedes had to gavel us again. “Of course you all know we’re talking about two different demographics—people who read for sensuality, and people who read for spirituality.”

  “What about people who are just reading something because they’re at the laundromat, bored stiff?” Andrea said. “They might like a little naughty priest action.”

  “I think we’re getting off topic,” Mary Jo said, trying to
rescue Mercedes. “What did the report say the worst sellers were?”

  Naturally, having already been assured of her bestselling status, she would want to know that.

  Mercedes lips tightened into a smile. “The Pulse books continue to flatline.” She’d obviously rehearsed that lame line in her head all morning, but she was rewarded with a chorus of dutiful titters nevertheless.

  Mercedes did not look at Rita. She so pointedly did not look at Rita that everybody else did. Rita was sucking so hard on her pen, she looked like she was about to inhale ink.

  “The lesson here is we can’t get complacent,” Mercedes said. “We need to keep generating new ideas. I don’t care whether they come from you or the authors or the crazy guy who plays spoons in front of Grand Central Station, we need to keep coming up with new twists.”

  Cassie raised her hand and waved it.

  “Yes, Cassie?”

  “Just last night I was thinking we should do a series of books about a police precinct, where every book features a different cop’s story.”

  Mercedes snapped her fingers. “See? That’s just what I’m talking about. We need more of that.”

  If Cassie’s self-love had been any more evident at that moment, she would have broken some state indecency laws.

  I was seized with the urge to come up with an idea. It didn’t even have to be an original one, apparently. I mean, a police precinct? Come on!

  “And from now on,” Mercedes continued, “if you come across a fantastic book with a new twist in it, I want it to come directly to me. Take a red pen and write a big N on the front.”

  Everyone around the table exchanged perplexed stares.

  “For new,” Mercedes explained.

  Andrea snorted softly and I had to bend my head over my notepad so I wouldn’t start laughing.

  After the meeting (which really did seem to go on forever), Rita was in an uproar. She directed us to meet her at her outer office, ASAP.

  After we had picked up our lattes, Andrea and I huddled next to the coffee shop door next to Rita, who was smoking up a storm.

  “Where’s Cassie?” she asked.

  Andrea licked the foam off her wood stir stick. “She stayed after the meeting to kiss Mercedes’s ass.”