Reality Check

by Leslie Carroll

  Nell had a heart as big as the Adirondacks. I threw my arms around her. “Nell,” I sobbed, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

  “Oh, honey . . .” Nell was crying, too. We dried each other’s tears with our fingers. “You’ve been so busy playing Cupid for me and Jem that you can’t get your own house in order. I think you should make sure Jack knows how much he means to you. Don’t let him get away, Liz.”

  A couple of days after she had moved out, I began to feel extraordinarily lonely.

  Jack bristled at my idea. “I told you this could end up worse than the quiz show scandals of the 1950s,” he insisted firmly.

  Over the phone, we were rehashing our major issue: I adamantly wanted to “go public” with our relationship, expressing again to Jack that because we had to sneak around like we were conducting some hole-in-the-wall backstage intrigue, despite our declaring our mutual love for each other, the relationship somehow didn’t seem entirely “real” to me. The situation was becoming exasperating.

  “Liz, you’ve got to know that it’s potential Bad Date suicide. We even kept our relationship a secret from Nell and Jem for weeks. What’s the big deal about waiting a little longer? Soon, we can get on with our lives. If you want to make out on every street corner in Manhattan, then deliberately bail out of the show, like Jem and Nell did,” he urged. “If not, what’s the real harm in waiting another month or so? Five more Sundays, to be precise. The time’ll be gone before you know it.”

  “I hear everything you’re saying,” I acknowledged, “but I can’t make my head and my heart see things the same way. As each other, I mean.”

  “Liz, you’re driving me crazy here.” Jack sounded like he meant it. There wasn’t a trace of humor in his voice.

  I tried to explain the conflict raging around inside me. “My head says, ‘Pragmatic Jack makes perfect sense,’ but my heart keeps . . . well, the best way I can think of to describe it is that it’s sort of throwing a temper tantrum, saying, ‘I want what I want when I want it . . . and I want it now!’ ”

  “I think you should tell your heart to stop acting childish and ‘Snap out of it!’ as Candy would say. If you want to get to the final episode, keeping ‘us’ a secret is for your own good, Liz.” I could hear the rising tension in Jack’s voice. It practically crackled through the phone lines.

  “It’s like what I said to you out on the sidewalk in front of Serendipity about wanting a win-win outcome—to have things be the way I want them with us and also to turn out the way I want them to on Bad Date. Remember what I told you that night on the pier in Miami about always feeling that I had to ace everything or be ‘perfect’ all the time?”

  “Fine. If that’s how you feel, I’m not going to let you fuck it up.”

  “Since when do you call the shots?”

  “When I think you’re being unreasonable,” he said edgily.

  “I’m so confused. And so frustrated. And I know I’m in danger of making a mess of things all around, because I want it both ways. This much I know: It’s driving me nuts for us to be in love with one another and have to worry about where we go, who sees us, and what it looks like when we converse in front of people. It’s crap, that’s what it is. It’s unhealthy for the relationship, and I don’t want to live like this anymore, Jack. Not for one more minute.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. I mean a really long silence.

  “Then you don’t have to.”

  “What?” I wasn’t sure whether my heart should rise or sink at his response.

  “I’ll make it easier on both of us. You don’t have to be in a relationship that’s a secret,” he reiterated, his voice sounding tense and strained. There was another nearly interminable pause. “You’ve created an untenable situation and you’re asking the impossible of me. The way I see it right now, I’m standing between you and your pot of gold. So, I’ll help you by removing a major obstacle. I think we should call it a day, Liz. At least until you get to the end of that Bad Date rainbow you’re so sure you’ll arrive at.”

  I felt like I’d been slammed in the solar plexus by an Olympic heavyweight. The air had suddenly become strange around me. I looked dizzily down at the floor to see if my guts had reached the parquet yet. “Wha . . . ? But I love you, Jack. I love you so much.”

  “Yet you won’t walk away from the show the way your roommates—excuse me, your former roommates—did when they fell in love. And they weren’t even in love with a guy on the show. You know that if we got discovered, we’d get kicked off and likely have to forfeit everything we’ve won thus far. Frankly, I don’t give a shit, but you seem to.” Jack sighed deeply. “You’ve made your bed. And I am incredibly sorry I won’t be lying in it with you. See you at the studio on Sunday. I . . . do love you, Liz.” He hung up the phone first.

  I sank to the floor by the wall phone and sobbed as hard as I had when my grandmother died. I don’t know how long I was there for. I was desperate for someone, something, to hug and hold close, and there was nothing readily available but a tapestry-covered throw-pillow from the living room sofa. I clutched an image of an eighteenth-century rustic idyll—a marzipanlike shepherd and shepherdess—to my chest, staining the blue watered silk around the image with my tears.

  When I finally pulled myself to my feet and padded into the bathroom to inspect my face, my eyelids were as swollen as though I’d gone ten rounds with that prizefighter who’d slugged me in the solar plexus when Jack dumped me.

  My thoughts were so jumbled, banging around in my brain with such zigzagging speed that I couldn’t harness any one of them and try to get them to make sense.

  No job, no money, no roommates, and now no lover. I poured myself a glass of really dreadful chardonnay and wished that the apartment had a baby grand like the one my parents had when I was growing up. Whenever I was miserable, I would grab a glass of apple juice and curl up on the giant faded red silk pillows under the piano until the pain went away.

  In my head I kept replaying the conversation I’d had with Jack. He’d made so much damn sense, and I’d behaved like a selfish baby. Why was fighting so hard to have everything my way worth it if the result was losing Jack? Was I nuts?

  Tonight I vowed not to wallow too much in my misery and assured myself, like Scarlett O’Hara, that tomorrow would be another day. A better one. It had better be.

  29/

  An Offer I Could Refuse

  The phone rang Sunday evening as I was getting ready to head over to the television studio for episode nine. I let the machine get it. Whoever it was could wait. I was anxious enough about the show, as I was every week, and I was anxious about seeing Jack for the first time since he’d decided to put the brakes on our relationship.

  When the answering machine beeped I could hear Jason Seraphim’s singsongy voice chirping away, while I was deep in contemplation about what would look terrific on television that I hadn’t already worn on the show.

  “Hi, Liz, Jason here. Just wondering how you’re doing . . . what you’re up to.” He paused. “Liz . . . something’s come up here at SSA and I wondered if you . . . no, F.X. and I are asking you to come in for a breakfast meeting tomorrow morning. Say, eight-thirty? Tell you what, I’m sure you’re probably getting ready for tonight, so don’t call me back unless you can’t make it in the morning, okay? Really hope to see you. Bye.” Jason hung up before the answering machine was ready to cut him off.

  He’d certainly piqued my curiosity. I had nothing to lose by strolling down to SSA for a free breakfast, which reminded me . . . I headed into the kitchen for a caffeine fix, pouring myself a large glass of black iced coffee to energize myself for that night’s broadcast.

  Once at the studio, it was like the famous Yogi Berra line “déjà vu all over again,” insofar as Jack’s behavior toward me was just like it had been more than two months prior when we’d appeared for the very first episode of Bad Date—in other words, aloof. I tried very hard not to look at him, not even to make
eye contact, because I was so sure I would start to cry all over again. I missed just looking into his eyes and trying to read his soul. I missed kissing him. I missed the way our bodies melded together. I missed his sense of humor and his thirst for fresh adventures.

  Tensions ran high that evening. Looking around, I realized that the three remaining women—Rosalie, Candy, and I—were, of all the women who had been cast on Bad Date, the ones most likely to behave like firebrands. The three remaining men—Double-E, Milo, and Jack—couldn’t have been more different from one another. Jack was above the fray, but Milo and Double-E carped at one another once again, like some politically incorrect interracial version of The Odd Couple. Rosalie kept glancing at Candy and me, as if she were continually sizing us up. Every time either one of us said something, Rosalie would realign her body and strain to listen, just in case we were talking about something we might plan to say on the air.

  I tried to ignore her, but Candy got annoyed with being stared at. “Fuhgeddaboutit, cookie,” she said sharply. “I know something you don’t.” This made Rosalie shiver and finally go back to minding her own business.

  What Candy knew was what she had been planning for the past two weeks, which was how to get herself kicked off the show so she could move out to LA and spend the rest of her life in Allegra’s lithe, alabaster arms. “I shoulda remembered,” she confided to me in the dressing room, just before we went onto the set. “My strategy last week was all wrong. Never fake it; it only comes back and bites you in the ass.” Nevertheless, she refused to divulge this week’s game plan to me.

  When it was her turn to ascend to the cone throne, she told a story about how she’d gotten stood up once by a blind date. Compared with many of her tales of woe wherein her dates invariably ended up whacked, iced, or otherwise liquidated before they reached dessert, this was about as vanilla as a date could possibly get, particularly for a woman with as colorful a life as Candy Angela Fortunato. The audience, visibly and audibly disappointed by her little performance, made it the swan song she so gleefully coveted.

  And so, for the sake of her new true love, my greatest female competition on the show removed herself from the running.

  With four of the fourteen of us pairing up with a co-contestant, Bad Date was becoming a bit like Noah’s Ark.

  I had no idea what to expect from my ex-bosses at SSA. I showed up ten minutes early, poked my head around the place, and felt my heart plummet when I saw that my former office was now occupied by a young woman who barely looked old enough to be out of college. Was that how young I looked when I’d started working there? She had a cute little plaque on her door that read JACKIE’S OFFICE. WELCOME TO MY WORLD.

  I couldn’t walk in there and introduce myself. I didn’t have the spirit for it. I was feeling an odd mixture of relief and regret and was afraid I would do something inappropriate in front of this total stranger.

  Jackie looked up when she noticed me sort of lurking in her doorway. “Can I help you?”

  I wavered for a second. “N-No. I’m okay.”

  “Are you here to see someone? Are you a client?”

  “Yes, I’m here for a breakfast meeting with F.X. and Jason and no, I’m not a client.”

  Jackie studied me for a few moments. Then it looked like a light went on behind her eyes that soon zoomed up to full wattage. “I know who you are!” She leapt to her feet and came out from behind my—I mean her—desk. “You’re Liz Pemberley! My God, we studied your ad campaigns in school. I’ve always wanted to write like you.”

  I started to laugh. “I’m just a former hack.”

  “I can’t believe I’m actually getting to meet you. I mean, you’ve won Clios.”

  “They’re not the Nobel Prize,” I told Jackie. “I’m using them for dust magnets at home now.” I felt flattered, yet at the same time I felt silly. Although it’s true that I had been rewarded by my peers for what I did, I was neither a Hemingway nor an Edna St. Vincent Millay. Meeting Jackie this morning reminded me of the love-hate aspect of my work that had so torn me apart to the point of not being able to do it capably anymore.

  “I’ll run and tell Jason you’re here,” she said, practically sprinting down the hall to the conference room. A few moments later, she dashed back. “They’re all waiting for you,” she reported. Jackie returned to her desk. “I shouldn’t be keeping you,” she added. “The client is really cute, by the way. I wish I were in there,” she said a bit wistfully.

  I hadn’t the vaguest idea what Jackie was talking about. Why would Jason and F.X. bring a former employee in to meet with a client? We’d parted on the best of terms, but still . . .

  I opened the door to the conference room. F.X. and Jason were sitting near the far end of the long table, facing me, with a number of jars arranged in front of them, stacked like a brick-red pyramid. Seated opposite them was Jack Rafferty. When our eyes met, I couldn’t decipher the inscrutability of his expression. Jason waved his arms at me. “Welcome back, Liz!”

  “That is, if you want to be welcomed,” F.X. added quickly. “Have a seat.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to sit next to Jack or alongside my former bosses. “What’s this all about?” I asked them. I could feel myself growing edgy.

  “First, let me say,” F.X. began as I squeezed into a chair at the head of the table, with the SSA partners on my left and Jack by my right elbow, “how sorry I am to see Candy Fortunato get kicked off Bad Date. What was up with her? I mean, she’s got this wild life and last night she talks about a busted blind date that wouldn’t have made the Virgin Mary blush.”

  I looked at Jack. He was never privy to Candy’s strategy, although her trying to get kicked off the week that Nell did had been no secret to anyone. Besides, I’d told him about her and Allegra. Jack didn’t answer F.X.’s question. “I have no idea what her deal was,” I lied.

  “Did you ever check out her Web site?” F.X. asked the rest of us excitedly. “It’s fantastic! You sign on and the first thing you see is an image of a big pink pussy—”

  I shot him a dirty look.

  “—cat. And it says ‘Welcome to Candyland.’ ” His glasses were already beginning to fog up.

  “He has a thing for Candy, in case you couldn’t tell,” I said to Jack. Then I turned my head back to Jason and F.X. “Okay, guys, why am I here? Aside from the prune danish, which I love but which I didn’t need to pull myself out of bed for. And what’s he doing here?” I added, pointing at Jack.

  “Obviously, you two know each other,” Jason began. “And you know about the restaurant in Miami where Jack is part-owner.”

  “In fact, you guys did a whole riff on this product on the very first episode of Bad Date,” F.X. said, picking up the thread. “Remember when Rick Byron asked you to come up with an instant ad campaign for Tito’s Famous South Beach Salsa?”

  “I don’t even remember what I said at the time.”

  Jack smiled at me. It was his old warm smile. “It took you all of about three seconds before you fanned yourself somewhat seductively and purred, ‘Is it hot in here or is it Tito’s Famous South Beach Salsa?’ ”

  “I think I was just trying to extricate myself from an embarrassing situation, being put on the spot on national television and all.”

  “Well,” Jason said. “Jack approached us last week and told us that he’s been working on plans to launch his salsa in a big way in the northeast.”

  I recalled running into Jack in the Chelsea Market, when he’d told me the same thing, obscuring the competitor’s product with jars of his own. My mind flashed to a series of images as to where this chance encounter had led. Had he contacted SSA before or after he’d broken up with me? Either way, it was an enormous gesture.

  “Are you okay, Liz?” F.X. asked me. “You look a little glazed.”

  “I’m . . . I’m fine. Thanks.”

  F.X. leaned toward me. “Jack has been working on marketing the product up here, in mass quantities— not just in specialty shops like Bald
ucci’s and Zabars, and he came to us to do his advertising campaign.”

  “With one proviso,” Jack added.

  “That you be the copywriter,” Jason said.

  Jack looked over at me. “You’re the only one I want to handle this, Liz. Otherwise, it’s a no-go.”

  I took a deep breath. “So you’re getting me my job back?” I studied the faces of all three men.

  “You’re an ace,” Jack replied. “From Tito’s perspective—the restaurant, not the man—it’s a sound business strategy.”

  “It’s a freelance assignment,” Jason said, making a steeple with his fingers. “Work here. You’ve got the run of the shop. Whatever you need.”

  “Whatever I need?” I asked, forming the words slowly and carefully.

  Jason and F.X. nodded.

  “I need . . . to say no.”

  “What?” Jack looked incredulous.

  My former bosses looked confused.

  I spoke very softly. “F.X., Jason, you’re not out any money that you didn’t have yesterday. And if you think I screwed you out of a new client, I’m honestly sorry. But I can’t do this. It’s a kind gesture, but no thank you. I’ve known these guys for years,” I said, nodding at Jason and F.X. “So there’s probably very little personal dirty linen we don’t feel relatively at ease airing in front of one another. Jack, I don’t need you to play my White Knight. I don’t want to be rescued by you, or want you to be the sole reason I have a source of income.”

  I rose from the table. “So, I’m taking a pass. Thanks for breakfast. Enjoy the rest of your day.” I picked up my purse and walked toward the door, touching Jack on the shoulder as I went by. His scent made me miss him all the more, and I noticed, in the tiny glimpse I took as my hand rested ever so briefly on his jacket, that there was a small rip in the weave.