“Tru, sweetheart, girlfriend, how can you expect to be flush with a broken bathroom? Fix it!” She leans in to tap a perfectly French-manicured nail on my handbag, which is propped in front of the jukebox. “And what’s with the red bag? Do you see what’s going on here? Do you know what I’m saying?”
“It was on sale,” I lie, quickly snatching the strap of the purse and taking it off the table.
“It was not! And it’s not just about the price, it’s about the color. Red, girlfriend, red! This bag is sending the wrong message. You want your finances to be in the black!”
I take a gulp of coffee and pick at the top of the muffin. I love the bag but if that’s all it takes, I guess it’s worth the sacrifice. I dump my wallet, makeup, keys, and credit cards onto the table and I call over our waitress.
“Here, would you like this?” I say, resigned to relinquishing the fire-truck-red Birkin I waited six months to get. Vy looks suspicious, but before she has a moment to consider, Suze seizes the pocketbook and tosses it into a nearby wastebasket. “What’s up with that, sister? You want our friend Vy here to go bankrupt, too?”
“A twenty-percent tip would be fine,” Vy says, warily.
“You see, our girlfriend here’s got her head on straight,” says Suze, motioning for Vy to sit down and join us.
“You want to hold cash and bonds but stay away from domestic and foreign stocks and for heaven’s sake, burn those credit cards!” Suze rat-tat-tats. Lacking access to a book of matches, she reaches for my Visa and American Express cards and determinedly starts to saw through them with a butter knife.
“But …” I say.
“No buts,” says Suze. “You have to bite the bullet. No credit, credit is bad. I own seven homes and I don’t have a mortgage on any of them.”
“I just put down all cash for a one-bedroom condo,” Vy says.
“That’s what you should have done, Tru,” Suze says, as I slink down a little farther on my side of the booth. “So your husband’s out of work and you’re racking up debt. Boo-hoo! Snap out of it, sweetheart! My father sold chickens. When his business failed he took in boarders. When one of the boarders fell down a flight of stairs and sued us my mother became an Avon lady.”
“I love their Skin So Soft!” Vy says.
“Did you know that it’s not only a moisturizer, but it works as a bug repellant? Mom kept a roof over our head selling those products door-to-door, one sale at a time. Though she never told anyone she was working—she was embarrassed about being the family breadwinner.”
“You do what you gotta do,” says Vy, the philosopher of the Four Brothers Coffee Shop.
“After college I became a waitress, just like you!” Suze says clapping her hand over Vy’s. “One of my clients gave me fifty thousand dollars to start my own business and I invested the money with a stockbroker, but the son of a bitch stole every last dime. Did I crawl under the covers and cry? Not a chance!” Suze says, turning toward me and, although I didn’t think it was possible, opening her wide eyes even wider, so that she looks like one of those unnaturally bug-eyed children in a Keane painting who are supposed to evoke pathos but frankly give me the willies. “I became a stockbroker myself and made a ton of money. Then I made a ton more money teaching other women how to make money!”
Suze’s story reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara’s I’ll-never-be-hungry-again speech. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that at one time in her life, Suze had made a ball gown out of curtains, too. I lean in, waiting eagerly for Suze’s words of wisdom.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, do you know what you have to do?” she asks urgently.
“Kill chickens, learn to sling hash, stay away from bad stockbrokers? Please, Suze, tell me!”
“Get a job!”
“Get a job?” I sputter. “That’s it? Don’t you have something like … like an insider trading tip?”
“If that’s what you wanted you should have called Martha Stewart. Of course then you’d wind up in jail. Get a job!”
“But I haven’t worked in twenty years. Who would hire me? What would I do?”
“Start by checking with your last employer, maybe they’ll have something or can give you some leads.” Suze pulls a copy of her latest book out of her handbag—her green, color-of-money handbag—writes an inscription and hands it to Vy. Then she stands to leave and gives me a go-get-’em thumbs-up. “Remember, sister, today is the beginning of the rest of your life!”
“The rest of my life,” I repeat numbly. But first, I have a more pressing problem. Now that I’m bagless, I have to stuff my lipstick, keys, and limited cash into the pockets of my beautiful Chanel suit jacket. And then there’s the matter of the check. It takes me a moment before I realize—thank goodness!—that Suze already paid it on her way out.
I ZIGZAG ACROSS Fifty-fourth Street and walk up Madison Avenue at a glacial pace, even an eighty-year-old woman with a walker races past me. If I knew how to play Tetris on my cellphone I could probably delay the inevitable a little longer, but finally, I find myself standing in front of the Addison Gallery, the site of my one—gulp—and only job.
“Suze said get a job,” I plead with my feet, imploring them to move just another five steps to the left so I can open the gallery door. But no luck, my Tod-shod tootsies refuse to budge. “Fine, we’ll just wait till you’re ready,” I say in the same reassuring tone I used with the girls when they needed a few minutes before jumping into the pool. I press my nose to the gallery’s glass-fronted window and look inside.
When I first started working at the gallery after college I was passionate about being in the art world. It seemed exciting and glamorous and I looked forward to the same sorts of heady debates I’d had as an art history major—one time we stayed up half the night just arguing about whether it had been a disservice to clean the windows at the cathedral in Chartres. (Without eight hundred years of grime, now they’re as brightly colored as a handful of Skittles.) But at the Addison all we ever talked about were auction prices and stealing other gallery’s artists. My title was “gallery assistant.” Ha! “Underpaid Kreskin” was more like it. I was expected to magically Windex fingerprints off the glass before they even appeared, beat the meter maid to a client’s car even though the clients never remembered exactly where or at what time they’d parked, and deal with artists’ egos, which are as delicate—and inflated—as soufflés. When I wanted to quit after only eighteen months, Peter was all for it. By then he’d landed a promising position in one of the city’s largest investment banks and we agreed that we’d both be happier if I took charge of making a comfortable home.
“It was a lousy fit. They’d never give me a job again anyway. The director of the gallery always graded my Windexing abilities as ‘below par.’ You were right, feet,” I concede, deciding that what I really need is to go home and start looking through the want ads. I’m just turning around to find a subway when I see Georgina Wright, (the very same director of the gallery who gave me that C-minus in window cleaning all those many years ago), bounding out the door in my direction.
“I thought that was you!” Georgina says, throwing her arms around me and practically pulling my shoulder out of the socket to haul me inside. Georgina’s hair is gathered in a chic knot at the nape of her neck and her tiny body is overwhelmed by a crinkly black dress that looks two sizes too big, but actually fits as its Japanese designer meant it to be worn. When I was her employee, the best I ever got from Georgina was a vague nod in my direction. But today she’s practically giddy.
“It’s really you!” she gushes.
“And it’s really you!” I echo, having learned from the Discovery Channel that if you don’t want to be eaten by a wild animal, you should model its behavior.
After the usual opening pleasantries about how I haven’t aged a day, she loves my Chanel, and what a clever girl I am to actually use the suit pockets (“So few people do,” Georgina coos, although we both know that Coco must be rolling over in her grave),
the reason for Georgina’s thaw becomes transparent. “Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve come back to us! I hear that you’re married to a very rich investment banker.”
“I was, I am, well yes.” Now that Georgina’s got me here, I guess I might as well try to ask about that job. Still the one thing I know about human nature is that people only want to give you something if they think you don’t need it. Why else did Converse airlift crystal-studded sneakers to both Brangelina twins? With the fourteen million dollars People paid for their baby pictures those kids could have bought shoes for the entire planet Earth—with some money left over for the Republic of Pluto. So no, I can’t possibly say something simple, like I need work. “I’ve been missing you,” I say sweetly. “The art world, the gallery, all of it. Now that my girls are getting a little older, I was thinking I might like to dip my toe back in the water, maybe …”
“Start buying art! We have just what you need!” says Georgina, taking my elbow and leading me through the exhibition: slick Technicolor pictures of pole dancers. Different from the pole dancers you see in Playboy, of course, because the artist, according to the foot-high letters after his name, is a Rhodes Scholar. Georgina stops in front of the brashest, most lurid picture in the group.
“This one’s a little large,” I say, diverting my eyes from the young lady’s fifteen-foot-high triple-D breasts and her X-rated pose. “I still have teenagers in the house. And what I really was thinking …”
“… was that you wanted something a little more subtle, right? You always were a sly girl!” Georgina says, buttering me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “You know we keep the best work in the back room for our very favorite people. Come with me right now!”
Just as in the old days, when Georgina speaks, I listen. I have no choice but to trail behind her, past those arty-farty photos of pole dancers. And past a half dozen weary-bleary-eyed gallery assistants—all doing the job I used to do, and not one of them over the age of twenty-five.
This was stupid. What on earth gave me the harebrained idea that Georgina—or anyone else in the art world—would be interested in hiring me? Get a job! But doing what? I make terrible coffee and I can’t even wear a miniskirt anymore. (According to Naomi, I never could.) I spent sixty thousand dollars on a college education to major in medieval art with a minor in women’s studies. About the only thing I’m qualified for is writing a Wikipedia entry. It’s a miracle that the Addison Gallery hired me in the first place.
All I want in the whole wide world right now is to get out of here—but no such luck. Georgina’s got me secluded in the insiders-only back office.
“Sit down and take off your shoes,” she commands. She snaps her fingers and yet another in the seemingly endless supply of gallery assistant appears with a basin of water. “Now sit back, relax, and soak those pretty feet.”
“That’s okay, I don’t really want to …”
“Soak them!” Georgina orders. The gallery assistant shrugs helplessly and clamps her hands on my heels. The water is pleasantly warm and soothing, but within moments I feel a tickling sensation.
“What the heck!” I exclaim, hastily retreating from the basin—and at least a hundred tiny fish that are nipping at my feet. “This isn’t what I meant by dipping my toes back into the water.”
“Don’t tell me this is your first fish pedicure?” Georgina chuckles, motioning for the gallery assistant to force my feet back into the tub. “Asian carp, natural exfoliators. They just love dead skin! A little something extra for Addison Gallery clients that I think you won’t find anywhere else.”
A little something extra for Addison Gallery clients that keeps them forcibly glued to their chair while Georgina makes her pitch, is more like it. Having a hundred marine animals snack on your toes takes some getting used to. Still, it’s nothing compared to a ferocious assault by one hungry-to-make-a-sale piranha. Georgina walks over to a custom-designed chrome file cabinet and rifles through a stack of candy-colored photos.
“I simply won’t take no for an answer,” she says, wagging her finger, a bony metronome of determination. “If we have to stay here all night, I’m going to get you to take one of these fabulous pictures. Steve Martin collects them. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“That he’s into soft porn?” I dip my fingers in the water to try to swat the fish away. But to the cuticle-eating carp my hand is just another meal.
“Silly girl, it means that you simply have to have one!”
“Georgina,” I say, pulling my wrinkly toes out of the tub. “Can I please get something to wipe my feet?”
Georgina ignores me. She’s focused her laserlike concentration on flipping through the photos, and like Jack the Ripper, she won’t be sated until she’s nabbed her next victim. Finally, she settles on a close-up of a dancer’s leg wrapped around a pole with just a hint of red satin G-string. “This is it! Forty-eight hundred dollars, that’s as low as I’ll go. All right, for old time’s sake, forty-five. You always did drive a hard bargain.” Georgina turns to another one of the overtaxed, overtired gallery assistants. “Wrap it up!” she says with a grin. “And bring Tru a towel.”
Four
Another One Bites the Dust
“YOU BOUGHT A PICTURE?” Sienna hoots, when I tell her about my unimpressive attempt at job hunting.
“Georgina thinks I did. But I ditched the photo by the gallery doorway and then I made a quick getaway.”
“And the fish pedicure?”
“Not bad. But until they train the carp to apply polish, I’m sticking with the nail salon.”
I’ve come over to Sienna’s studio straight from the gallery. I couldn’t face Peter and the girls without any good news. Sienna points to a canvas-back chair and tells me to take a seat. “I just have a quick rehearsal, then we’ll get a bite to eat,” she says.
In person, the high-ceilinged set—littered with booms, tangled wires, and all shapes and sizes of monitors—always looks a little cheesy. The lighting is way too bright, the backdrop of towering skyscrapers is the same view of midtown Manhattan you can buy on any fifty-five-cent souvenir postcard, and the curved “wood” desk is actually particle board covered with a veneer of plastic laminate. But somehow on camera it all comes together. The assistant director cues up the show’s theme song and the TelePrompTer operator rolls the script for Sienna and her cohost to run through their lines. Sienna’s new cohost is the very blond, early-thirtysomething Tom Sandler, a golden boy replacement for the veteran newscaster who, until he was unceremoniously fired last week, had been Sienna’s partner for fifteen years.
Tom straightens his tie and smoothes a palm along the mountain of moussed hair that rises onto his forehead in a gentle slope. “Good evening, I’m Tom Sandler,” Tom Sandler reads off the screen, as if he might not get it right without a prompt.
“And I’m Sienna Post,” she purrs. Simultaneously, Sienna reads her lines, sorts through some mail and fiddles with a nail file, until the show’s executive producer, Jerry Gerard, comes storming over to the anchor desk. He’s wearing a brown shirt and brown pants tucked into shiny black boots and looks just like the fascist Sienna’s described him to be. Jerry Gerard yanks the nail file from Sienna’s grip, and for good measure, he throws it on the floor and stomps on it, hard, with the heel of his boot.
“This is a fucking newsroom, people, get a grip! We’ve got fucking serious work to do. The U.S. Open scores will be coming in any minute … and fighting just broke out in Tajikistan … or Turkmenistan … or some fucking ‘T’ country. Find out which fucking ‘T’ country is at war!” Jerry Gerard growls to an assistant. “And get me two Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffees. Fucking now!” Within minutes the assistant is back with the coffees and Jerry Gerard tells him to place them on the anchor desk. “With the logos on the container facing out, toward the camera, you moron!”
Tom Sandler smiles amiably and takes a sip. “Thanks for the freebie, boss!”
Sienna spins around in her chair.
> “We are not, I repeat not, having this argument again, Jerry,” Sienna says, snagging the cup from Tom and handing it, along with her own, to a passing assistant.
“That’s right, we’re not,” Jerry Gerard says, snatching the cups back. “Orders from the head of the news division. Product placement is a go, honey.”
Honey? He called her honey? I can’t wait to see what happens next! But instead of duking it out with Jerry Gerard, Sienna puts on the kid gloves.
“Listen, Jerry,” Sienna says sweetly, as her face muscles relax into her practiced newscaster smile. “I know Randy Jackson holds a big red Coke glass on American Idol and I’m sure the only reason they give out Doritos to those poor hungry bastards on Survivor is that Pringles wouldn’t pay as much for the privilege. But we’re newspeople. What happens if there’s an outbreak of donut poisoning? Or the company president is indicted for, I don’t know, stealing the donut holes? Are we going to report it while we’re sitting here like idiots with their coffee cups in front of us? Are we going to not report it because they pay us to sit here like idiots with their coffee cups in front of us?”
“Why don’t you just worry about those bags under your eyes and leave the morality issues to me?” Jerry Gerard smirks. He chucks Sienna under the chin and turns her face from side to side. “Stop by to see me on the way out. I have a name of a plastic surgeon. Could extend this little career of yours by a good four or five months.”
“Fuck you,” Sienna says, speaking to Jerry in the only language he understands. She unhooks the wireless microphone from the lapel of her Armani jacket, throws it on the floor, and stomps away from the desk.
The Best Laid Plans Page 4
