by Jane Heller
Well, I was so angry, I could hardly speak. She was accusing me of being depressed? Envious? Still hot for her husband? Talk about patronizing! Talk about insufferable! It wasn’t bad enough that I’d had to sit in her sunroom and listen to her lecture me on ways to reduce water retention? Now I had to listen to her feel sorry for me because I wasn’t—how had she put it?—“able to hold on to him.” I wanted to tell her to take a flying leap! But I had to keep my mouth shut, had to keep my cool, or risk losing my job. I had to put a pin in my fury, or sublimate it, or perhaps rechannel it.
Yes, rechannel it, I thought. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll show both of those bozos that I’m not someone to be pitied—but I’ll do it by embracing them, not by rebuffing them.
“I’ve changed my mind. My fiancé and I will come for dinner,” I said to Tara, aware that I was about to go from garden-variety liar to budding sociopath. Judge me if you must, but I’d had enough of her bullshit and felt like slinging a little of my own.
“You will?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll come in the very near future, but I’ll have to get back to you with the date.”
Not to mention the name of the date.
I was upset about my conversation with Tara and desperate for a good long unburdening in front of the compassionate yet costly Marianne. I was looking for support, as well as sound, objective advice, but, as I’ve said, I didn’t want to crawl back to her like a kid who flunks a grade and has to repeat it. And so I did the next best thing: I twisted Connie’s arm into coming over after work. Usually, she rushed home to Murray each night, but when I told her I’d accepted Tara’s invitation on behalf of me and my fiancé, she agreed that I was needier than Murray was.
I lived in a two-bedroom, two-bath condo on the tenth floor of a twenty-story building that was relatively new, and well maintained, and in a desirable part of the city. The apartment had hardwood floors, high ceilings, and a balcony, and I’d furnished it with a combination of Pier 1 items, flea market finds, and relics from my college dorm. It had a style I’d call “calculated funky,” and until I’d visited Tara at her palace, I’d felt really good about it. But now that she’d raised the bar by reinserting herself in my life, I wasn’t sure how I felt about anything.
“Just call her and say you can’t make it after all,” Connie suggested as she gnawed on what was left of the chicken leg I’d cooked on my George Foreman grill. She was a little wisp of a thing, as I’ve described, but she could pack it away.
“If I did, she’d only keep bugging me about it.” I sighed. “This is the problem with lies. They multiply, like some scary bacteria.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“The only thing I can do. I have to find a guy to pretend to be my fiancé. As a favor. For one night.”
She surrendered the leg, wiped her hands and mouth with her napkin, and took a sip of white wine. “You do realize that the pickings are slim if we’re talking about a guy at L and T.”
“What choice do I have? Tara’s convinced that my heartthrob is someone I work with, so we might as well start there.”
“We?”
“Yeah. You’re going to help me think of someone.”
Several seconds of silence went by. Connie didn’t so much as clear her throat.
“Well?” I said.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “and coming up empty.”
“Think harder.”
More silence. “Most of the guys are married,” she said finally. “Their wives aren’t gonna let them play kissy face with you at some author’s house.”
“I know.”
“What about Scott?”
“My Scott?”
“Yeah. He’s cute and gay and not seeing anybody. I bet he’d do it.”
I shook my head. “He can’t keep a secret to save his life. He’d blab about this to anyone who’d listen, including Celebetsy’s assistant, who’d tell Julie’s assistant, who’d tell Julie, who’d tell Tara. Keep thinking.”
“What about Eddie Glickman?”
“Yech,” I said, picturing our VP of sales. “He’s not my type.”
“I didn’t think the guy had to be your ‘type.’ I thought he just had to be willing to play your fiancé for a night.”
“True, but Eddie is overweight, obnoxious, and smells bad.”
“Like I said, you don’t have to give birth to his love child.”
“Connie, the whole idea is to show Tara up, to impress her, to prove to her and to Stuart that I’m over them both. I can’t do that with a fiancé who’s a total turnoff. I need someone who’s bright, articulate, funny, and great-looking—someone who’ll make Tara and Stuart go, ‘Wow. Amy sure has landed on her feet after what we put her through.’”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have any single men at L and T who are bright, articulate, funny, and great-looking. Oh, wait. There’s Michael Ollin in Business Affairs, but he’s an accountant, so I can’t vouch for the ‘funny.’”
“Let’s put him on the list.” I scribbled his name on the pad I’d brought to the table.
“What about Alex Cashman?” She was referring to our science fiction and fantasy editor. He and I had dated briefly. It was going pretty well until I admitted to him that I’d fallen asleep during the first Lord of the Rings movie. He dropped me so fast, I didn’t know what hit me.
“I doubt he’d do it,” I said. “Who else?”
“Can’t think of anyone else.”
“What about agents and authors? I didn’t tell Tara my fiancé was on L and T’s payroll, exactly. I just told her he and I worked together and that we weren’t supposed to fraternize.”
“Can’t think of any agents you’d go for. And forget my mystery writers. They’re a strange breed, which isn’t all that surprising, considering that they spend their days plotting murders. What about your contacts in the media? Isn’t there some book reviewer you can coax into doing this?”
“Never,” I said. “Book reviewers are the most difficult people on the face of the earth. Look at how hard it is to get them to like a book. They sneer at every—”
I was interrupted by the ringing of Connie’s cell phone. It was Murray calling. He was hungry, he said, Connie told him to look in the freezer for the lasagna. He said he saw the lasagna but didn’t know how to defrost it. In the microwave, she told him. “I don’t know how to use it,” he told her.
“Gotta go home,” she said after giving him step-by-step instructions. “Murray’s lonely.”
“Speaking of Murray,” I said, “does he have any artist friends who’d pose as my fiancé for a night? They’d get a free meal out of it.”
She laughed. “Murray’s artist friends don’t have clean clothes, don’t wear shoes, don’t even use utensils when they eat. I wouldn’t invite them to dinner at a zoo.”
“That bad?”
She nodded.
“Oh, Connie. Can’t you stay for dessert?” I said, trying to tempt her with the chocolate cake in the refrigerator.
“Thanks anyway,” she said, “but I’d better head home if I wanna make sure Murray doesn’t nuke the whole place. The last time he tried to use the microwave, he forgot to put the food in it.”
As I walked her to the elevator and hugged her good night, I thought how lucky she was. She didn’t have to pretend to have a man who loved her. She had a real one. He wasn’t rich and he couldn’t operate your basic kitchen appliance and his passion, other than her, was painting black squiggles on blue canvases, but he was faithful and true, which, given my experience with the opposite sex, was saying something.
7
I went to work the next morning dressed to kill—or, rather, to attract the attention of hunky Michael Ollin in Business Affairs. Since I didn’t know him very well and didn’t have a lot of time to get to know him, I thought some slinky attire was in order. Normally circumspect in terms of my appearance, I threw on a clingy black dress, strappy black heels, and a little more ma
keup than usual.
“Hi, Michael. How’re you doing?” I said after sashaying into his office. As a pretext for the visit, I was carrying a file containing the expenses an author had incurred on his book tour. This author had a drinking problem and expected us to pay his triple-digit liquor bills.
“I’m super,” said Michael, who was tall, dark, and handsome. Oh, and he was tan, and it wasn’t even summer yet. He was dressed nicely, too—expensive suit and tie, pinstriped shirt, wing-tipped shoes. I wasn’t crazy about the gargantuan Rolex and the equally gargantuan gold bracelet, but even more off-putting than his jewelry was his cologne. Not only was it overpowering in its woodiness and muskiness but he applied it with a very heavy hand. In other words, his office needed to be fumigated.
“I was hoping to talk to you about some author expenses,” I said as I imagined asking him to pretend to be engaged to me. I also imagined telling him he’d have to wash the cologne off his face, not to mention have his entire wardrobe dry-cleaned, before I could even think of putting him in the same room with Tara.
“Sure. Have a seat, Amy. You’re looking mighty fine today, by the way. Migh-ty fine. And I don’t mind telling you it’s nice to see a woman dress like a woman for a change. This place isn’t exactly a magnet for bodilicious females.”
Okay, so this wasn’t going to work. There had to be other men inhabiting the offices of L and T—men who’d be up for helping out a coworker but wouldn’t use words like bodilicious.
But just to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t jumping to conclusions or being too judgmental, I hung in a little longer. After we chatted about the alcoholic author, I asked Michael if he was enjoying the warm spring weather.
“You bet,” he said. “I’ve been going to the Hamptons on weekends. You should come out to our place sometime, Amy. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My girlfriend and I.”
His girlfriend? He was flirting with me even though he was seeing somebody else? Living with somebody else?
“Why the look?” he said. “My lady’s very sweet. She gives me my space.”
“Are you saying she lets you—”
“Be with other women? She doesn’t let me. I just do what I want, figuring what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Our Hamptons place has a very private guest room, so if you come out there, I could arrange for us to have lots of time alone together.”
I just stared at him.
“Are you shocked?” he said.
“Of course I’m shocked,” I replied.
“Why? Because I’m an accountant and accountants are supposed to be square?”
“No. Because you’re a human being and human beings are supposed to be trustworthy.”
God, what a creep. It was thanks to men like him that therapists like Marianne had thriving practices.
Fine, so he’s not the one, I thought, calming myself, remembering that I just needed a guy for one night. I mean, how hard could it be to find him?
Even though he’d dumped me for not seeing the merits of The Lord of the Rings, I decided to try Alex Cashman, the science fiction editor, thinking maybe he’d mellowed toward me. He was interesting-looking in an unconventional way—curly brown hair, beard, mustache, suspenders, bow tie, sneakers even when it snowed—and very smart. Smart enough to impress Tara, I figured.
“Hey, Alex,” I said after knocking on his office door. “Mind if I come in?”
He smiled. “Why should I mind?”
Oh good, I thought. Maybe he really has forgotten that he was mad at me about the Hobbit thing.
I entered his office and sat down. “I’ve been thinking about you lately,” I said brazenly, since I didn’t have time to waste. I had to skip the foreplay and find out if the guy was on or off the list. “I was just wondering how you’re doing.”
“That’s funny, because I’ve been thinking about you, too,” he said, playing with his mustache, which didn’t have handlebars but did curve upward at each end.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m glad.” His answer bolstered my confidence and spurred me on. “What I’ve been thinking, Alex, is that we had a good thing going for a while there, you and I.”
“We did,” he agreed. “And I might as well confess that I feel like a pompous ass the way I acted toward you. People don’t have to have the same taste in movies or books or any form of art in order to be compatible as a couple. I see that now.”
“Really? I feel that way, too.” Boy, this was going better than expected. So what if Alex went to Star Trek conventions and spoke in alienspeak when surrounded by like-minded individuals and collected rubbery toy monsters and accessorized his apartment with them? He was bright and presentable, and he’d really liked me once. Maybe he would really like me again—enough to do me a favor and be my fiancé for a night. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here,” I went on, “because I was hoping we could pick up where we left off and resume our friendship.” I looked down at the floor, shy suddenly.
He reached across his desk and took my hand. “You’re the best, Amy. You always have been.”
I looked up again. “Great. Then let’s have dinner, so I can talk to you about something. How’s tonight, for example? I’ll cook for you at my place.”
He released my hand and moved his across the desktop, then lifted the picture frame that was resting there and pulled it toward him. “I can’t have dinner and I can’t pick up where we left off,” he said, then showed me the photo in the frame. It was of a woman in a ballet tutu, and she was in the midst of a rather athletic leap. “Her name’s Claudia. She’s a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, and we’ve been going out for three months. She didn’t like Lord of the Rings any more than you did, but I asked her to marry me last night, and she accepted. That’s why I was thinking about you, Amy. She made me realize what a jerk I was with you.”
Swell. So I’d found one who was ready and willing to be a fiancé, just not mine. Timing is everything, isn’t it?
I wished Alex well and went to the ladies’ room, where I sat on the toilet and pondered my situation. I didn’t have a next move—that was my situation. There was no one left on the short list of prospective fiancés except Eddie Glickman, the loud and obnoxious and bad-smelling vice president of sales, and he wasn’t really on the list, since I’d vetoed him. But maybe I’d been too hasty.
I freshened my lipstick and ran a comb through my hair, then marched off to Eddie’s office. He was on the phone, sucking up to some buyer at Barnes & Noble or Borders. “Yeah, yeah, you are sooo right about that book,” he was saying, loudly enough for everyone in the city to hear him. “You’re a genius with covers, Cynthia. You didn’t like the big black gun with the smoke coming out of it, so we ditched the artwork and used a samurai sword instead. That’s right, we listened to you, so now let’s see you double your order for the chain, huh?” He laughed, then spotted me in his doorway and motioned me inside. “Yeah, I’ll talk to you. Give my best to your better half, huh? Your puppy dog, too.” He laughed again and hung up.
“Hi, Eddie,” I said. I’m not even going to tell you how foul his BO was. After my description of Michael’s cologne, you’ll think I’ve got odor issues.
“Amy. What’s up?” he said. While he waited for my answer, he grabbed the bag of Cheez Doodles on his desk, reached in for a handful, ate them, reached in for more, ate them, then licked the orange dust off his fingers, all the while showing me more than I ever wanted to see of his tongue.
“I was just wondering how the Georgette Peterson novel is selling,” I said, for lack of a better conversation starter.
“It’s not,” he replied, then grabbed the can of Coke on his desk and slurped some soda. A trickle of brown liquid escaped from underneath his double chin and dripped down his neck and onto his shirt.
Yep, my first instinct was right about Eddie Glickman. He was a decent guy, but not the one I wanted Tara and Stuart to drool over. He did enough drooling of
his own.
“I don’t think this scheme of mine is going to work,” I told Connie later that day, after sticking my head in her office before running to a meeting with Celebetsy.
“You’re giving up after one day?” she said.
I shrugged. “I checked out every guy on the premises, and none of them fits the bill.”
“I wish I could help, but I’ve got an author coming in. He should be here any minute.”
“Who?”
‘Tony Stiles.”
I groaned. “I think I’ll make myself scarce.”
“He’s not so bad, Amy. He’s kind of a charmer, once you get past the gruff exterior.”
“Believe me, there’s a gruff interior, too. Every time he does publicity, he gives the interviewers fits with his one-word word answers and his ‘I’m above all this’ attitude. It’s like pulling teeth to get him to grace the Today show with his presence on publication day—a booking most authors would be thrilled about. Does he think he’s Hemingway or something? He’s a mystery writer, not some ultraliterary novelist, and his characters are con artists, hit men, and other nut jobs, not exactly the upper crust of society. Anyhow, he needs to get over himself and his aversion to the media, and stop taking his ‘oeuvre’ so seriously. He’s like the Sean Penn of writers.”
“Maybe, but he makes a lot of money for us, so we have to treat him like a movie star.”
“You treat him like a movie star. I’m off to my meeting with Celebetsy.”
I was backing out of Connie’s door just as Tony Stiles was backing in, and we inadvertently head-butted each other.
“Hey!” I said, whirling around to face him just as he was whirling around to face me.
“Hey yourself,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Would it be too much to ask that you watch where you’re going?”
“No,” I said, “but I didn’t bang into you on purpose. I may be clumsy, but I don’t actually try to injure our authors.”
“I’m sure nobody meant to hurt anybody,” said Connie. “Now, why don’t you two make nice for a change.”
