by Lindsey Kelk
I blinked four times at the receptionist, who acknowledged me with a raised eyebrow, then skulked directly over to Jenny’s office, trying not to make eye contact with any of the girls on the floor. I’d never quizzed Erin on her hiring policy, but I was prepared to bet none of these girls had ever seen the inside of a McDonald’s. Everyone was so bright and perky. Why they were called public relations when they bore no relation to the public whatsoever was a mystery to me.
Luckily, I was soon safely inside Jenny’s office, hidden from the judgemental, overly made-up eyes of the office minions. That is to say, Jenny’s corner office. Jenny’s huge, airy, floor-to-ceiling-windows corner office. Ever so slightly mad, accidentally ended up living with a high-class hooker in LA, borderline alcoholic Jenny had it together. Forget earthquakes, hurricanes and the advent of Justin Bieber; if Jenny being a grown-up wasn’t a sign of the apocalypse, I didn’t know what was.
‘Hey.’ I knocked lightly on the door and stuck my head in cautiously. ‘It’s me.’
Jenny leapt up from behind her desk, resplendent in her sexy secretary skyscraper heels, pencil skirt and pussy-bow blouse, masses of hair levered away from her face by several thousand kirby grips. She made Joan from Mad Menlook like the office frump.
‘Hey!’ She skittered around her desk to give me a huge hug before holding up her hand for silence and pressing a button on her Star Trek phone. ‘Melissa, could you bring me two Diet Cokes, please?’
She paused, biting her bottom lip with eyes as wide as saucers and pointing at the phone with pantoesque enthusiasm. Like I said, I was so proud.
‘Sure, Ms Lopez,’ a voice chirped over the intercom. ‘Can I get you anything else at all?’
‘That’ll be fine, Melissa,’ Jenny replied. ‘And please stop calling me Ms Lopez – you’re making me feel like I’m your homeroom teacher.’
‘You love being called Ms Lopez, don’t you?’ I asked as she took her finger off the button.
‘First time the bitch calls me Jenny, she’s fired,’ she confirmed, settling back into her chair as a tiny blonde bounced through the door and deposited two icy cans of Coke on the desk in front of us before vanishing in silence. ‘God, I love having an assistant. Now, tell me everything.’
‘I’m getting kicked out.’ I picked up my drink to see it had already been opened. Melissa wouldn’t want Ms Lopez to break a nail. Melissa was a genius. ‘I don’t have a job, which means I don’t have a visa, which means I’m getting kicked out.’
‘You do have a job. You’re my therapist and personal shopper,’ Jenny acknowledged. ‘Actually, scratch that, I’m yours. What is it you do for me?’
‘Generally make you feel better about your life?’ I suggested. ‘Oh, and I get your shoes reheeled.’ I passed her a shoe bag containing the borrowed Louboutins, freshly heeled and shined to perfection by the lovely man on the corner of North Eleventh and Berry.
‘Thanks,’ she said, stashing the shoes under her desk. ‘What did Alex say?’
‘He’s sleeping.’ I shook my head hard, trying to shake away the black and white lines of the letter that had imprinted themselves on my eyelids. ‘I didn’t want to wake him.’
‘Pretty sure he’d want to be woken for this,’ she said, holding her hand out. ‘You must have really rocked his world last night, huh? Give me the letter.’
‘I flashed his friends, fell over, knackered my knee and then rocked his world,’ I said, ticking the order of events off on my hands before pulling the offending piece of paper out of my MJ bag with my thumb and forefinger. I just didn’t even want to touch it. ‘Enjoy.’
‘As long as worlds were rocked,’ she said, eyes trained on the letter. ‘Shit, Angie.’
It was never a good sign when Jenny reacted to something badly. The queen of positive thinking, I’d sort of been hoping she would laugh, ball it up and throw the letter in the bin. Instead, she was putting on her reading glasses.
‘This doesn’t look great. Did Mary tell you they were going to do this?’
‘Nope.’
Mary Stein had been my editor and ally at Spencer Media, but since we’d parted ways, I hadn’t heard a peep out of her. Not totally shocking: Mary was all business and, well, we weren’t in business together any more, but even so, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t given me a heads-up on this. I mean, it wasn’t a slap on the wrists, it was a deportation notice.
‘So, no luck with anything new?’ Jenny gave me her concerned face. ‘You email any other editors?’
‘I’ve emailed everyone I’ve ever met,’ I said. When Alex was first away, I’d spent days contacting every single editor I’d ever met in New York City. People from newspapers, websites, blogs – everything but high-school newsletters. And they were next. I’d even tried setting up my own blog with my fingers crossed for enough ad revenue to keep me in the style to which I had become accustomed, but to date I wasn’t even making enough to keep a gerbil in the style to which it had become accustomed. Those spinning-wheel things are not cheap.
‘But there’s nothing. Not even rejection emails. It doesn’t make any sense. I know I’m not exactly the world’s most renowned journalist, but after the whole James Jacobs thing, I thought I’d definitely be able to find something.’
‘The whole James Jacobs thing’ being the time I accidentally outed an actor when I was just supposed to be interviewing him. Still, as my dad always said, better out than in.
‘OK, I’m scheduling you an appointment with our lawyer,’ Jenny said, tapping away at her keyboard while I pushed my Diet Coke back and forth, leaving a wet trail across her desk. ‘He definitely works on employment visas and stuff. We have an Australian girl here, and he helped with that. You have to go and see him. Can you do this afternoon?’
‘What else do I have to do?’ I asked. This woman was truly a goddess. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘He’s hot.’
‘It won’t help.’
‘It always helps.’
‘Fair enough,’ I accepted. ‘Bad news does sound better coming from a pretty man. I don’t know, I just hate not knowing what’s going to happen.’
‘That’s because I turned you into a super-awesome take-control-of-your-own-destiny proactive ass-kicking wonder-woman,’ Jenny explained before taking a deep breath and a deep draught from her Coke. ‘But now there’s some stuff that’s out of your control and that’s hard to accept. Unless you take the control back.’
‘But how do I do that, oh genius?’
I genuinely couldn’t see a way. Granted, I was still wallowing deep in the mire of imminent deportation, but how was I going to turn it around in thirty days? No one would give me a job, and I was fairly certain the US government wasn’t going to make a special exception for me to stay here just because I asked nicely. There wasn’t even time to sleep on it: thirty days was too soon.
‘I want to take it back,’ I said, trying to sound determined. ‘In fact, I demand it back. Control, I summon thee.’ I slapped the table, making my can jump. ‘I do want to be in control, but I don’t know what to do.’
‘Honey, I am the queen of solving the unsolvable. It’s what I do, it’s what I live for.’ Jenny pulled her thinking face while I thanked my lucky stars for my wonderful friends. She was very good at putting problems into perspective. ‘To help poor unfortunate souls like yourself.’
‘Please don’t quote The Little Mermaidin my time of need,’ I begged. ‘Although, if you can strike a deal to swap my voice for a visa, I’d consider it.’
‘And the world’s karaoke bars would rejoice,’ she murmured. ‘OK, am I right in thinking if you get a job, you can get a visa, or do you need a visa to get a job?’
‘Both.’
‘That’s not going to work, Ange.’ Jenny shook her head. ‘Visa or job? Which comes first?’
‘The chicken?’
‘That doesn’t even make sense …’
Before Jenny could get up out of her chair and throttle me, the door flew open and Erin s
ailed in. That sealed it: I could never work in PR. Here I was, sitting in this sparkly, shiny office with dirty hair and jeans that hadn’t been washed for so long that they had started cleaning themselves, while Erin’s hair was so shiny, I could actually see how disgusting mine was in its reflective surface. For shame.
‘Angie’s being deported,’ Jenny answered for me. As was the way amongst our people. ‘Her visa got revoked.’
‘Shit.’
We all nodded. It was pretty much the only viable response.
We sat in silence for a moment, Erin pursing her lips in concentration, Jenny staring at her shoes, me thinking that I really should have taken my coat off before now. I was not going to feel the benefit when I got back outside. Massive concern. As was the fact that I had apparently become my mother.
‘You know what?’ Erin kicked off her high, high heels and leaned back in her chair. ‘That’s the easiest problem I’ve had to solve all day. I can’t believe it took me a whole minute to work it out.’
It was?
‘It is?’
‘Sure.’ She looked at me and shrugged. ‘Just marry Alex.’
Huh.
For a moment I felt sick. Then hot. Then cold. Then hot again because I still had my coat on.
Just marry Alex.
Ooh.
‘Oh my God, that makes so much freaking sense,’ Jenny shrieked. It was as though Erin had walked in, put two and two together and miraculously come up with a four when all we’d been getting were fives and threes. ‘You can just marry Alex! Why didn’t I think of that?’
‘Because it’s stupid?’ I suggested.
Because it was. Wasn’t it?
‘Do you think he’d say no?’ Jenny gave me her best sympathetic eyes.
What a bitch. And the second she said it, I was terrified he might.
‘I don’t know what he’d say and I don’t want to know,’ I said quickly, curtly. ‘Next idea, please.’
My brain was completely overloaded. Half of me had heard the words ‘marry Alex’ and already run off down the aisle, drowning out my worries with the ‘Wedding March’. The other half had caught the ‘for a visa’ part and was not happy. It just felt a bit grubby. In that slightly grubby, slightly exciting, but almost definitely it’s-a-bad-idea way. The idea of getting married to stay in the country hadn’t even occurred to me. And now it had been floated, it did not make me feel good about myself. In fact, it made me feel a bit sick. Not because I didn’t want to marry Alex – locking that boy down legally was absolutely on my to-do list; but not like this. A marriage of convenience was not a marriage I was interested in.
‘He would totally do it.’ Erin raised her eyebrows, a picture of innocence. ‘And that would solve all your problems, right? I mean, even if they want to investigate you guys, you get to stay here while they do it. And you’re a real couple – you’d pass.’
‘It’s not like you’re not already living together,’ Jenny added in a hurry. ‘And we’d all give testimonials. I can totally verify Alex’s sex noises.’
‘Thank you.’ I wished all the lucky stars I’d thanked earlier into an early supernova. ‘But seriously. Not happening.’
They looked at me with very different expressions on their faces. Jenny’s was somewhere between pride and optimism with just a dash of ‘what the fuck is she thinking’. Erin clearly thought I was insane.
‘Jenny –’ I decided to take a different tack – ‘how would you feel if Sigge asked you to marry him for a visa?’
‘I would have that shit on lockdown before you could sing “Here comes the bride”,’ she replied, her face completely straight. ‘Have you seen him? The dude is ridonkulous.’
‘You’re probably the wrong person to have this conversation with,’ I said, shaking off my coat. Too little, too late. ‘What I mean is, if he asked you to marry you just for a visa and you said yes, you’d never really know if he loved you, would you? Whether or not he would have asked you to marry him even if there wasn’t a visa involved. Even if you loved the arse off him, you’d never really know whether or not it would have happened out of love. It would always be hanging over you, the reason you got married. It’s like when people meet online, it’s always there. Even if they say it’s not, it is. A marriage of convenience is not a marriage.’
‘Oh, honey.’ Erin laid a perfectly manicured hand on my knee. ‘I keep forgetting this is your first. A marriage of convenience is the perfect starter marriage.’
America was a very strange place sometimes.
‘I know this is going to sound very old-fashioned,’ I said – I was going to give it one last try – ‘but I’m really hoping to just stick to one marriage. I know it’s against the odds, but I really am hoping.’
‘Angie, we’re all hoping.’ Erin held up The Letter. ‘But for real, if it’s the difference between staying in the country or not staying in the country, wouldn’t you rather marry a man you love than hightail it back to the UK?’
Hmm.
‘Back to your old life?’ Jenny added.
Gulp.
‘Back to your mom?’
Shit.
‘Fair point.’ I dropped my head backwards and stared at the ceiling. ‘I really can’t go back.’
‘Oh, Angie.’ Jenny leaned right across her desk, arms outstretched. ‘Please ask him. He’ll totally say yes – the dude still gives you puppy eyes every time you walk into a room. I’ll organize everything, all you’d have to do is show. It’s not really a visa wedding if you’re in love, if we do it properly. Please?’
‘Actually, it could be kind of awesome,’ Erin chipped in. ‘We could get you a venue super easy, dress shouldn’t be a problem, and we’d get an awesome deal on a caterer. How long do you think it would take to put together, operations director?’
I took a Twizzler from the candy dish on Jenny’s desk. Two hours ago I was fishing hair out of a plughole and looking forward to watching a repeat of Elfon the settee. Now I was organizing a quickie wedding to ensure I wouldn’t be dragged kicking and screaming from the country in four weeks’ time.
‘Like, two weeks?’ Jenny stuck out her bottom lip. ‘Ten days if we really pushed things. And if we could get her into a sample-size gown with no alterations, which we totally could if she puts that Twizzler down.’
She put the Twizzler down.
‘Brooklyn’s gonna be the easiest place to get a venue, but we could maybe pull some strings in Manhattan if we could do a Friday. We’d never get a weekend, though. How about the Bell House? Music venue, nice tie-in to the groom’s day job? Or I could pull some strings back at the Union?’
‘I could call the PR at the W,’ Erin mused. ‘Or the Hudson. That’s a little too midtown, though.’
I sat in silence, staring at The Letter, listening to my friends planning my wedding, imagining myself in some super swanky hotel, clad in a ridiculous designer dress, hobbling down the aisle in borrowed shoes. Despite the ridiculousness of the whole thing, the only real problem I had was simple. I couldn’t see Alex in any of it. This wasn’t us.
Just imagining asking him to do this for me made my eyes well up and my heart beat faster, and not in a good way. What if he did say yes? What if we did get married, then he freaked out about being stuck with me because of the visa? I didn’t want my marriage to be an obligation. Even worse, what if I asked and he said no? Maybe he wasn’t ready. He’d ask when he was ready. We’d had this conversation; I didn’t want to push him. He meant too much. He meant everything.
‘Flowers might be tricky.’ Jenny was still planning out loud. ‘We’d need to call in some favours.’
‘We’ve got favours to spare, doll,’ Erin commented. ‘I’m more worried about the lighting design.’
‘Um, ladies?’ My interrupting their creative process was not particularly well received. ‘What if we put all our creative brain-power into working out another way for me to stay in the country? I’m not being difficult, honestly – I just really, really don’t want to
do this.’
They both deflated before my eyes. I felt quite bad. There was nothing Jenny loved more than threatening people to get what she wanted. I felt like I’d taken her best toy away.
‘Aside from the fact that I don’t want to bully my boyfriend down the aisle, I want to be here because I deserve to be here.’
Now this is where I was prepared to accept I was being naïve.
‘If I can’t get a visa without getting married, then what’s the point? That will just mean I haven’t achieved anything since I got here. I’ll be right back where I started. I might as well go home, get myself at least seven cats and start referring to myself in the third person while paying for the bus with exact change. And that’s not happening. So can we please apply our not inconsiderable talents to finding another way for me to stay?’
Jenny wiped away a fake tear. ‘My baby is all grown up.’
‘So you can’t get a job without a visa?’ Erin said, accepting defeat and chomping a Twizzler. How come she was allowed one and I wasn’t? I hated the naturally skinny.
‘And I can’t get a visa without a job,’ I confirmed. ‘Basically, I think I’ll need someone to sponsor me like Spencer Media did.’
