The Cinderella Pact

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  More importantly, how can I go to California by the end of the week when I don’t exist?

  OK. I must not panic. Chances are, knowing Hollywood, the film deal will never come through. But what if it does? What if Mr. Bigshot pays for me to fly to L.A. and “brainstorm” and sees that I’m nothing but an overweight, low-level editor at a third-rate women’s magazine slash tabloid? Then what?

  No choice but to call Charlotte. I retrieve her cell number, press Send, and leave a convoluted message made even more convoluted by the fact that I am slipping in and out of an English accent.

  “Hello, Charlotte. Belinda. Well, I don’t know what to say, honestly. Talk about fab. Is this really a film offer? What does that mean? Who’s the producer?”

  Beep. Beep. Beep!

  I have no idea who’s leaning on the horn outside my window, but they really need to cut it out. I focus on my message. “Please call me as soon as you can. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your message until now. You can call me at any hour tonight or tomorrow. Bye!”

  Beep. Beep. Beep!

  “Nola! Nola! Open up!”

  Oh, great. It’s Bitsy, my landlady, at the door. Shouting, no less. Probably coming up to complain about my pacing the floors. Hey . . . I sniff the air, which smells odd, like . . .

  Burning cardboard.

  I click off the phone, dash out of the bedroom, and find the hallway filled with smoke and that my kitchen stove is, in fact, about to burst into flames. I must have left the half-empty box of spaghetti by the burner.

  Screaming, “Fire! Fire!” like an idiot, I run back into the bedroom to get the patchwork quilt from the guest bed. Never mind that it was the one my grandmother sewed and gave to me on my sixteenth birthday. I can’t think about that as I throw it on top of the fire just as Bitsy bursts in with an extinguisher.

  Billows and billows of smoke rise up and both of us are bent over coughing. My eyes are burning. I rush to open the windows and, in the process, accidentally push off Otis, who lets out a frightened “Yeoowww!” as he falls two stories into the bushes below.

  All I can think is: my second fire in the same month. Something is very wrong.

  “You nearly burned us all down,” Bitsy barks between gasps and coughs. She is a vision of bright pink and green in the smoke, a fireman in Lily Pulitzer. Bitsy is quintessentially Princetonian, right down to her espadrilles and her “tireless efforts”—the phrase she always uses—for the Princeton Historical Society.

  “I was writing,” I say by way of lame explanation. The top of the stove is charred black, as black as the spaghetti pot. My grandmother’s quilt is a soggy heap of burned, smoldering memories and my apartment reeks of the acrid smell of fire extinguisher and fire.

  We are standing there, the two of us, gaping at the damage, dumbstruck by the mess, when the phone on the wall rings.

  “Fire department,” Bitsy says, taking the phone off the wall and handing it to me. “I called them.”

  Fire department? I hesitatingly put it to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Nola. How’s it shakin’?” It’s a man’s voice. A bit laid back, one would think, for the Princeton Fire Department.

  “And this is?”

  “Aww, I’m sorry about that. Should have introduced myself. Chip. From the gym.”

  Oh, brother. Chip. What’s he calling for? Then I hear in the background the unmistakable cacophony, the rise and fall of shouts peculiar to a liquor-serving establishment, and I imagine the worst.

  “Are you at a bar?”

  “As a matter of fact, the Annex. Listen, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind doing me a little favor. It seems as if I’ve gotten myself into kind of a scrape . . .”

  From the hallway comes the staccato ring of something more ominous. The familiar, stirring refrain of “Rule Britannia.” Damn! I must have dropped the phone in the confusion of the fire. Please don’t answer it, Bitsy, I pray, as Bitsy wanders down the hall in her flowered wrap skirt like a baby toddling toward a cliff.

  “I’ll get it,” she chortles.

  “See, there’s this woman here,” Chip is saying. “She’s all over me. I’d be indebted to you if you could stop on by and save me from her.”

  Is he crazy? My apartment’s been on fire and now Bitsy’s answering Belinda’s phone. I don’t have time to rush to the Annex and save a man I hardly know. Plus, after my dead-lift experience, I’m not sure my legs can make it.

  “I don’t know, Chip, I’m kind of . . .”

  “It’ll take no more than ten minutes, honest, and then you can get back to your Saturday night. All you have to do is walk in and declare you’re my girlfriend or something, throw your arms around me, and insist I go home. Oh, hell. Here she comes.”

  In the hallway I hear Bitsy saying “Hello” and then, “Belinda? Belinda who?”

  Charlotte! Charlotte calling to tell me all the amazing news about this film offer. Wait. I can’t let her chitchat with Bitsy. Bitsy is the Mrs. Kravitz of Princeton proper and the greater Princeton area. She can gossip faster than a teenage girl with a party line. What if . . . ?

  A surge of anxiety shoots through me. I must put an end to this right now.

  “Hold on, Chip.”

  I put down the phone and run to where Bitsy is standing, her bright coral lips smiling broadly. “It’s actually eight o’clock here, not one a.m.,” she says, checking her watch. “Yes. No. No.” She frowns. “We’re not in London. Why would we be . . .”

  I snatch the phone out of her hand. “Charlotte?”

  “Belinda?” Charlotte coos. “For a while there I thought I had the wrong number, but it couldn’t be the wrong number because right there on my teeny tiny phone screen it said Belinda Apple. Bright as day. Belinda Apple. And my cell is never wrong. You are Belinda Apple, aren’t you?”

  Lucky for me, Charlotte is three sheets to the wind, which is rather a refreshing change of pace, really.

  “Of course I’m Belinda. Who else would I be?” I give a nervous laugh and notice too late that Bitsy’s eyes are wider than saucers.

  She has overheard everything.

  “Would you mind,” I say, covering the mouthpiece of Belinda’s cell phone, “taking care of my other call for me? This is business.” I point to the kitchen where Chip is dangling in the air on my landline.

  “Sure.” Though I can tell Bitsy would much prefer hanging around me and eavesdropping.

  “So what’s this about the film deal?” I say, slipping into the guest bedroom.

  “Oh, darling, it’s all so . . . big. Or bullshit. You never can tell with this madcap business. Hey there, boy. Not so fast with that tray.” There are a few seconds where Charlotte is munching and then she gets back on. “Shiitake ravioli. Delicious. At a gawdawful opening on Long Island. Wouldn’t be here if my husband hadn’t . . . Listen, Belinda. Let’s talk Monday. There’s someone here I absolutely have to meet and I can’t wait a minute longer.”

  And that’s it. She’s off. Two minutes of tipsy conversation. Not enough for me to learn anything of significance, long enough for my web of lies to be destroyed by Bitsy the one-woman telegraph office.

  Steeling myself with a deep breath, I sign off from my e-mail and close down the computer, shoving it under the guest bed. Maybe if I stall long enough, Bitsy will be gone.

  She’s not. She’s on the other side of the door with my phone to her ear.

  “Uh-huh. Sure,” she’s saying. “No problem.”

  I stand there, hands on hips, expecting Bitsy to hand me the phone. Instead, she hangs up and says, “Boy, does he sound sexy. Men with slow drawls. Oh, man.”

  “Who are we talking about, Bitsy?”

  “Your boyfriend at the bar.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “I know that.” Bitsy walks past me to my bedroom, right to my closet, as bold as all get out. “He’s pretending to be your boyfriend. I picked that up on the first bounce. That woman who’s after him apparently showed up while he was on the
phone and he had to pretend he was talking to you. You know, there’s something about him that’s very familiar. Do you know if he went to Princeton Day? Or maybe Lawrenceville?”

  I have no truck with Bitsy’s obsession with prep schools. “Why couldn’t he pretend he was talking to you?”

  “Because I’m not his girlfriend.” She holds up one of my 2,064 pairs of black pants and my low-cut white silk blouse that Eileen gave me for my birthday and which I’ve never worn. It still has tags. “This looks nice. I have a darling necklace I picked up in Captiva that would go well with your eyes. Do you want to borrow it for tonight?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend!” I exclaim again.

  “Not with that attitude.”

  “And by that you mean?”

  “Boys like girls who are upbeat. Perky. Now stop standing there in those ugly sweats and get dressed. Unless you’re planning to blow him off. We can always hang out together instead. I would so love to hear why that woman kept calling you Belinda Apple.”

  I am dressed in five minutes.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bitsy, who should sell used cars, she’s so persuasive, has done my hair into a rather alluring twist, smeared on some makeup, and doused me in Estée Lauder. I am wearing Donna Karan heels and a funky lapis lazuli necklace. I have to admit I look relatively hot—almost as hot as my burning deltoids.

  What I am doing tottering on these heels to meet a man I know briefly from a car ride and a dare at the gym, a man who wants me to pretend to be his girlfriend, is something else entirely.

  What’s even more disturbing is how much fun it is. God, I love pretending.

  The Annex is a historic, subterranean restaurant off Nassau Street that serves a great grilled cheese and bacon sandwich and beer late at night to college students. In my mind, Chip’s a bit too old to be picking up women at the Annex, but who am I to judge? I mean, besides being his girlfriend and all.

  On a Saturday night it is hopping. As I descend into the dimly lit, wood-paneled bar I can barely make out the faces. I feel a bit nervous and more than a little self-conscious standing by the doorway, surveying the room. Men are assessing me quickly and, just as quickly, rejecting me, while women are giving me looks that indicate I am both overdressed and overweight.

  I hate bars. Hate them. Hate them. Hate them.

  “Hey there, good-looking!” I hear as the crowd parts and Chip emerges. He has cleaned up from the gym, though still casual, wearing a white T-shirt that hangs off rather broad, well-rounded shoulders, and those jeans. His bleach-blond hair is an alluring combination with his heavy-lidded baby blues.

  “ ‘Good-looking’?” I say, just to make sure I heard right.

  “You’re late.” He leans over and kisses me on the cheek, just like that. There’s not enough time for me to react, so I stand there with all the acuity of a transfixed deer, my brain trying to catch up to what just happened. He smells terrific. Dial soap. Yup, that’s it. Newly showered with Dial soap.

  “You OK?” There’s a slight smile at the corner of his lips. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He leans toward me again and I flinch, anticipating another kiss. “Relax. I’m not going to bite,” he whispers in my ear. “I’m really very gentle.”

  “Uh-huh.” Geesh. I’m thirty-five years old. Why am I such a girl still?

  “Let’s get away from this bunch.” As easy as one, two, three, he leads me by the hand to a wooden table where there is a sweating glass of ice water and a nearly full glass of white wine. The other woman’s, I suppose.

  He pulls out a chair. “Sit next to me and I’ll have my arm around you or . . .” He pauses and thoughtfully taps his chin, which happens to sport an appealing dimple. “It might be better if you’re standing. You know, as though you just walked in and caught me.”

  “Standing. Yes.” I don’t think I’m ready to have Chip’s arm around me quite yet. I’m still recovering from the kiss.

  “Excellent.” He sits and gives me a wink.

  “Where is this other woman, by the way?”

  “Angie? She’s in the bathroom. She’s only had a dozen glasses of wine. I’m amazed she’s still vertical. Have you recovered from your dead-lift contest?”

  I don’t get a chance to answer, because behind me I hear, “Excuse me!”

  I do believe it is the unmistakable call of a Northeastern Native Bitch. I will have to check my Peterson’s field guide.

  “Hello,” I say graciously. “You must be Angie.”

  Angie is a little slip of a thing in a brown tank top, skintight white jeans, and long, chestnut hair. Her eyebrows are plucked to neat arcs and her lips are outlined in plum with the degree of exactitude I’ve never quite mastered sober, much less schnockered, as this woman seems to be.

  “Who the hell are you?” she barks.

  I’ve never known what to do with this question. Should I reply that I’m a sensitive, caring, woman in my mid-thirties who enjoys the odd rerun of the Dick Van Dyke Show, felted slippers with cushy soles, the complete works of Jane Austen, as well as knitting socks? Or should I simply hand her my résumé?

  I give it my best shot. “I’m . . .”

  “This is Nola,” Chip says, coming to my side protectively. “My girlfriend. The one I was telling you about.”

  OK, I know it’s wrong to be thrilled by hearing those words pronounced out loud to the kind of woman who has made my life hell since seventh grade, but I’ll admit it: I swooned.

  “Your girlfriend.” Angie surveys me from head to toe. “Get out. She is your girlfriend.”

  As if to drive home the inconceivable girlfriend angle, Chip reinforces the point by giving me an affectionate squeeze and another kiss on the cheek.

  I could get used to this role. I really could.

  Angie remains the true skeptic. “I don’t believe it. This is the one you were talking to on the phone?”

  “Yup. I told you I had a girlfriend, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “A girlfriend I’ll buy, but not a tractor trailer.”

  Ouch! Such nastiness. I reflexively lunge toward her, but Chip holds me back.

  “Come on, Angie,” he says, trying the mature, calm approach. “You’re better than that. Why don’t we call it a night?”

  “Bullshit. You don’t seriously think I believe this is your girlfriend. This cow?”

  Five minutes, that’s all I ask. Five minutes with Angie’s head in a toilet and we’ll be even. Is that so much?

  “I’m sorry,” Chip whispers. “I had no idea she’d be this bad. I thought—”

  “You thought I’d go away, right?” Angie is so loud now that the Annex has quieted down. “Sleep with me and then dump me, is that the way it is?”

  Whoops!

  “That was almost twenty years ago,” he says patiently, “in high school. And if I recall, you dumped me for Mark Shrews-bury. The same night.”

  Angie flashes him a dirty look.

  “Why don’t we go outside and I’ll get you a cab?” he says, letting go of me to take her hand.

  “Who needs a cab when she’s here?” Angie sneers. “Looks like she’s used to carrying around plenty of wide loads.”

  That’s it. My blue-collar Manville, New Jersey, upbringing can’t take a minute more. “You want a lift? I’ll give you a lift.”

  And before Angie can close her stupid, gaping jaw and her perfectly outlined plum lips, I deliver the neatest uppercut I’ve ever thrown, complete with a satisfying crack! Angie totters back and Chip grabs her so she doesn’t fall down on the chairs.

  For the second time that day, I am applauded roundly by a group of strange men.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I couldn’t take it anymore.” I push past them, past the clapping waitress who tells me that Angie is “an idiot who had it coming, the barfly” and out to the fresh air.

  Thank heaven that’s over with. I teeter in the fresh air, getting my bearings before attempting to walk home, though I am shaking slightly and feel ill. L
isten, I may have been raised in Manville, a town known for its bars, churches, and lethal asbestos snow in July, but I’m a lover, not a fighter. It’s not like I make a habit of slugging women I don’t know.

  “Nola! Wait!”

  It’s Chip. Super. The Typhoid Mary of mortification. I resolve to keep on walking.

  “Listen, I never expected that to happen,” he says breathlessly, catching up to me. “I figured she’d see us together and leave us alone and then we could, you know, go out.”

  I stop to stare at him in disbelief. “Go out? This is how you ask women for a date, invite them to a catfight and then escort the winner home?”

  He holds up his hands in protest. “No, no. That wasn’t my idea at all. I figured—”

  “Or maybe that’s how you get your kicks, seeing two women go at it.” I am about to make a fat comment, but in a moment of rare prudence, demur and return to trudging homeward.

  “What? No. It was a stupid idea because I am a stupid man.”

  “Though very popular. Angie was ready to claw my eyes out for you.”

  “Angie was too blind drunk to see anything.”

  “Except you.” I pick up the pace.

  “At least let me walk you home. You can’t go by yourself. You might get mugged by a Princeton preppie. I understand those Burberry plaids can leave awful welts.”

  Despite my fury, I have to smile.

  Chip sees his opening and tries to wedge his way in further. “The thing is, I’ve lived around alcoholics all my life. Dramatic, goblet-smashing, Rolls Royce-crashing lushes.”

  I take mental notes. Something here is not jibing with my image of the computer geek slacker who gave me a lift in his beat-up Toyota.

  “And what I’ve learned is that the worst thing you can do when they’re in one of their ‘moods,’ as my mother used to call it, is confront them. Better to try to extricate yourself.”

  We get to my apartment, where Otis is silhouetted menacingly against the second-floor window. I have no idea how he climbed up there after falling off the ledge during the fire. One of those cat things. “So you called me,” I say. “The Extricator. Makes me sound like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and a toilet plunger.”