The Subway Girls_A Novel

by Susie Orman Schnall

  “Jesus, Olivia, I told you to go with the first creative Pablo came up with.”

  “That was the wrong creative, and you know it, Thomas. The second creative was much stronger,” Olivia said, and stood up, grabbing her phone and her latte. Walking toward the door, she stopped and looked back at Thomas, who was picking spinach out of his teeth. “You could say, ‘Nice work, Olivia.’ That would have been the smarter thing to do, because who knows where we’ll all end up? It’s pretty likely you’ll be begging me for a job one day.” She threw open the door and walked toward her office.

  * * *

  Olivia slammed her office door behind her. She woke up her computer and saw 117 emails waiting, their bold font an aggressive affront. She turned up the music on her computer, the Coldplay she’d been listening to when she got into the office that morning, early. She hadn’t been able to sleep.

  “Damn it!” she yelled to the ceiling. But that was the only indulgence she allowed herself. She immediately began compiling a document with all her accounts and billings in preparation for the meeting with Matt, who decided at that very moment to make an appearance.

  He never knocked.

  “Sorry, Liv,” Matt said when he opened the door. He stood in the doorway, the morning sun from the window behind Olivia shining into his eyes and making them glow. He was about six feet tall and had the look. The look shared by successful men up and down glorious Manhattan island: investment bankers, mergers and acquisitions attorneys, media executives. The look that said, shouted, really: I’m confident. I’m successful. And I would be lying if I pretended I had no idea I could have any woman I wanted.

  “Thanks, Matt. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost a piece of business, and it probably won’t be the last.”

  “True. But it still stings. You nailed that pitch. Best I’ve seen you do,” he said, walking toward the chairs across from Olivia’s desk. “JWT? How could they have chosen JWT? They’re so … corporate.” The word made his mouth look like it had bitten hard into a lemon.

  “Don’t know. I really thought I was going to pull it off for us. Sorry about that.”

  “Stop that, Liv,” Matt said, reaching for her hand. She didn’t pull it away.

  “Fine, but those billings were the only way to make up for losing the Green Goddess account. I don’t blame her, but I still wish Katherine Whitney hadn’t left the company. That awful woman who replaced her, Maggie, never gave us a fair chance.”

  “Hopefully we’ll be okay.”

  “Do the numbers work out at all?” Olivia asked with a worried expression, finally pulling her hand back.

  “I’m not sure. I was working on that all night. Not”—he gave a kind smile—“that I wasn’t confident in you and thought we wouldn’t win the business, but just in case.”

  “Turned out to be a prudent exercise.”

  “I didn’t have all the updated billings with me last night, so once you and Thomas and I meet, I’ll be able to see where we stand.”

  “I’m trying not to be pessimistic,” Olivia said, pressing the palms of her hands to her forehead.

  “Ha!” Matt said, laughing at her.

  Olivia managed a smile. “I know, I know. I’m terrible at not being pessimistic. But I know if the numbers don’t square, you’re going to have to let Thomas or me go.”

  “Liv, there are loads of things we can do to cut costs before I would have to let you or Thomas go,” Matt said, raising his left eyebrow. Always his left.

  Olivia had been concerned that Thomas’s and her salaries were too high. She didn’t think Matt could justify keeping them both with so little business in the agency. He had been bleeding the reserves dry keeping things afloat, hoping they’d win this account. She had been so worried about this eventuality. She hadn’t expected them to lose, but now that they had, Olivia was nervous in a way that felt foreign to her. Extreme, as if she were visiting another planet and not one thing, the color of the sky, the feel of the earth, the taste of the air, was familiar.

  “You know I’ll work harder for you than Thomas ever will. I still can’t understand why you asked him to join the agency, Matt. Really. Possibly the worst decision ever.”

  “Okay, okay, old news, Liv. I’m going. But I’ll see you in the conference room in”—he looked at the Rolex—“fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  “Remember when you took that guy home and he decided he didn’t like you, so he stole all of your small kitchen appliances when he snuck out of your apartment early the next morning?” Olivia asked. She was on her phone, walking home from work. All she wanted was to take a bath, eat the whole box of frozen corn dogs in her freezer, and get into bed with a glass of wine and her remote.

  “Um, yes,” James said on the other end of the line.

  “It was worse than that.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Where are you? Meet me for a drink.”

  “I’m spent. I’m going home.”

  “No, you’re not. Meet me at Barcanto’s.”

  “You mean that pretty little bar I’m standing directly in front of right now?” Olivia smiled to herself. She could use a bit of James right now.

  “Be there in a flash. Tell Ian to make my mojito strong.”

  * * *

  “Olivia, gorgeous, sit down,” the bartender, Ian, said as soon as he saw her. She and James came to Barcanto’s frequently, and she came on her own sometimes on her way home from work when she wanted to have a glass of wine and unwind. She’d also come a few times with Matt.

  “Hi, Ian,” Olivia said, giving him a kiss as he leaned over the bar.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Pinot Grigio.”

  “You got it,” Ian said, taking a wineglass and wiping the rim with his towel.

  “And James will have a mojito. A very strong mojito, he said,” Olivia said, smiling.

  “Oh, he will, will he? That tease.” Ian and James had dated for a year or two back in the day when James was comfortable letting his boyfriends treat him kindly.

  Olivia answered emails while she waited for James. She noticed a trio of businessmen come in and sit at a four-top in the back corner. One of the men smiled at her as he passed. Olivia smiled back and took a sip of her wine.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Ian said, and Olivia looked up.

  “Hello, Ian,” James said. “And hello, Olivia,” he said, planting a kiss on her cheek.

  The three chatted and laughed about work, James’s new guy, and their mutual friends. Olivia and James decided to order dinner at the bar. Lamb chops and sautéed spinach for Olivia. A Barcanto burger and fries for James. When Ian handed over a second glass of wine to Olivia, she protested and said she was stopping at one.

  “Compliments of the gentleman,” Ian said, winking at Olivia and directing her gaze to the table in the back of the restaurant.

  The man Olivia had noticed when he walked in lifted his glass in the air and smiled. She did the same.

  “Are you still dating that gorgeous boss of yours?” Ian asked Olivia.

  “Matthew Osborne?” James said in a dramatic voice, making a sweeping motion with his hand and ending it by smoothing over his hair. Or lack thereof. James was completely bald, but he did it for effect.

  “Matthew Osborne of the perfectly coiffed hair and glinting azure eyes,” Ian said, a dreamy look in his eyes.

  “Come on, guys. He’s not my boyfriend. Never was and never will be.”

  “Well,” James said. “Forgive me, dear friends, but a certain blond investment banker is waiting for me right now in his apartment, so I’m going to go, even if he is most likely going to take advantage of me and break my heart.”

  James took out his wallet and handed Ian a hundred-dollar bill. “That should cover Olivia and me, Ian. Whatever’s left, use it to pay a barber to shave off that awful goatee. It’s so … expected. And if there is nothing left, well, then remind me next time, and I’ll make up for it.”

  Ian smiled
and they gave each other a kiss over the bar. James gave Olivia a hug and he was off.

  Olivia sat for a minute and finished the second glass of wine as the businessmen walked by the bar toward the door.

  “Thank you for the wine,” Olivia said to the one who had bought it for her. He was tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and green eyes. Late forties. Olivia immediately looked down at his ring finger. Bare.

  “I hope you enjoyed it. I almost sent you a glass of my favorite Pinot Noir, but I saw you were drinking white. I didn’t want to impose my tastes on you.”

  “How refreshing,” Olivia said. “A man who doesn’t want to turn a woman into what he wants her to be, but rather lets her be who she is. Quite revolutionary.”

  The man stared at Olivia for a moment. Without a word, he joined his friends who were waiting for him at the front of the restaurant. Olivia turned to see. He shook hands with them and came back to where she was.

  “They have to be on the next train back to Westchester. But I don’t. So will you let me buy you another glass of wine?”

  “That’s so nice of you, but I really have to be getting home.”

  “If I told you I just had the most boring dinner of my life and I could use ten minutes of pleasant conversation, would you reconsider?”

  Olivia was weakening. The wine was smoothing lines and lessening urgencies.

  “How do you know my conversation would be pleasant? I’ve had a shitty day.”

  He laughed. “See what you did there? I don’t even know your name and you’ve already made me laugh.”

  “Olivia.”

  “Jack.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

  “So will you stay for another glass?”

  “Sure,” she said, deciding it couldn’t hurt to flirt for a bit with a man who she’d most likely never see again. She’d been working so hard lately that her dating life had been nonexistent. And however much she objected, James told her that her mostly one-sided infatuation with Matt did not, thank you, count as a dating life.

  “So, this shitty day, tell me about it.”

  “I thought you were in need of pleasant conversation.”

  “I was. But vent away, Olivia. I’m all ears.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said, sinking into her seat and enjoying the smile Jack was directing her way. The third glass of wine was going down a little too easily, and Olivia placed the glass on the bar to slow down her rate of consumption. “First tell me: What do you do, Jack?”

  “I’m in transportation.”

  Olivia loved when men said they were “in” and then named an entire industry. How much vaguer could they be? Like one of the first guys she dated when she moved to New York. “I’m in hospitality,” he had said. It had sounded glamorous to Olivia until she found out he refilled the mini bars at the Plaza.

  “Would you like to be more specific?” Olivia asked.

  “Not really. It’s pretty boring.” Jack smiled. “And what do you do? Let me guess: you’re in fashion.”

  Olivia tightened her smile and turned her head. “No,” she said. “Why was that your first guess?”

  “My bad. I hope that didn’t offend you in any way. You just, I guess, look quite fashionable.”

  “Thank you, but no. I’m in advertising. I’m an account director at a firm called The Osborne Agency.”

  Luckily the bar had gotten crowded and Ian was busy, so Olivia didn’t feel self-conscious that he was listening to their conversation. But she did notice out of the corner of her eye that he had refilled her wineglass.

  “What led you into advertising?” Jack asked. “Don Draper?”

  “You mean Peggy Olson? Actually, I’ve always been creative, and for some very strange reason, as a little girl, I used to make up ads. I created my own magazines in my bedroom out of construction paper. I wrote a few articles, but there were mostly ads,” Olivia said.

  “You started young.”

  “I’ve worked very hard to get where I am.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “In a little coal town in Pennsylvania, just outside of nowhere.”

  “But you seem to fit in quite nicely in the big city.”

  “Smoke and mirrors, Jack. Smoke and mirrors,” Olivia said, taking a sip of her wine.

  “And how is the advertising industry treating you?”

  “Well, not the best day to ask,” Olivia said with a sarcastic smile.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. We’d been pitching a piece of new business and we lost it. It was my presentation, and it didn’t go nearly as well as we had all thought. It was a big blow to the agency, and I feel totally responsible.”

  Olivia sat with Jack for the next hour. They ordered dessert and, when he offered her another glass of wine, she asked for club soda instead.

  “You know, I don’t usually talk about myself as much as I did tonight. I’m also usually a lot more restrained about accepting wine from strangers. I can’t believe I told you all that about my life and career.” Olivia was starting to feel exceptionally tired and was angry at herself that she’d been so open.

  “What if I told you I have a very bad memory and I’ve already forgotten everything you said?” Jack asked.

  “I would say that I appreciate that very much,” Olivia said. “But I also think it’s time for me to go home. I need to get some sleep.”

  “Can I put you in a cab?”

  “No, thanks. I’m nearby. I can walk.”

  “I’m happy to walk you home.”

  “That’s okay. I’m just around the corner. I’ll be fine. It was nice meeting you, Jack.”

  “You as well, Olivia. Keep up the good work. I think you’re going to be a tremendous success.”

  “Thanks,” Olivia said, a little confused by Jack’s suddenly avuncular behavior. She had found him attractive and was thinking it might be nice to see him again. And not one to shy away from giving a man her card and suggesting he call, Olivia also knew that in a situation like this, if the man didn’t make some sort of overture, he probably wasn’t interested.

  Not the first time and probably won’t be the last, Olivia thought, realizing the day was taking on a rather depressing theme.

  Jack gave her a kiss on the cheek, told her the pleasantness factor of their conversation had exceeded his expectations, and said good night.

  Olivia shouldn’t have been so convinced she’d never hear from Jack again.

  CHAPTER 3

  CHARLOTTE

  THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 1949

  Dear Miss Friedman,

  We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as a finalist for Miss Subways. Please report to the John Robert Powers Modeling Agency at 247 Park Avenue, New York City, on Monday, March 7, at 1:00 P.M. sharp for your interview. We are unable to reschedule this appointment.

  Sincerely yours,

  Diana Fontaine

  Director of Model Services

  John Robert Powers Modeling Agency

  Charlotte had forgotten all about Sam’s cockamamie idea to enter her into the Miss Subways contest. Thinking back now on that night a group of them had been out for ice cream, she remembered it was actually Martin who had raised the flag.

  “Say, what do you think of submitting Charlotte’s photograph for Miss Subways?” he had said to Sam and Charlotte while the others in their group heatedly debated the Dodgers’ prospects for the upcoming season.

  “You’re a regular Jack Benny!” Charlotte said. “I could never be chosen for Miss Subways.”

  “Well, sure you could, Charlotte,” Sam said. “You’re just as pretty—scratch that—prettier than any of the girls I’ve seen on those posters.”

  “My agency runs the whole program and my boss told me that they’re always looking for pretty girls. Let me enter you, Charlotte,” Martin said. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  “Whatever you say, Martin. As long as you get me an interview at your agency.”

&nb
sp; “You can be sure of that, Charlotte. J. Walter Thompson would be lucky to have a girl like you in the typing pool.”

  Let’s just see what happens, they had said to her. Live a little, Charlotte. “Why not?” she had ultimately told them, trying, though it wasn’t easy, to be game and easygoing. Charlotte had been 99 percent certain that nothing would ever result from them entering her besides a curtly worded letter thanking her for her interest and sending her on her pleasant good-luck-ever-being-a-model way. Make that 100 percent.

  But, she now realized, she was wrong. Something had come of it. Charlotte laughed aloud at the cruel irony. Two letters in one day. The first denying her entrée into the industry she so desperately wanted to be part of. The second inviting her to participate in one she couldn’t care less about. How she wished their contents had been switched. Yes, Miss Friedman, we’d love for you to type our memos and fetch our coffee. We’re terribly sorry, Miss Friedman, you’re not lovely enough to be featured in our subway beauty pageant.

  Charlotte crumpled the letter at the inanity of it all.

  “Who was it from, Charlotte?” her mother called.

  Charlotte returned to the kitchen and threw the balled-up letter into the garbage. “Miss Subways. Sam’s friend entered me. And they chose me as a finalist.”

  “How about that?” Mrs. Friedman met Charlotte’s eyes for the first time that day.

  “It’s ridiculous,” Charlotte said, waving her hand dismissively.

  “Your father would never allow it.”

  “Which is fine, because I would never do it. I have no time for silly things like Miss Subways. Speaking of having no time, I’m going to JoJo’s to study and then I’m meeting Sam for dinner.”

  * * *

  “Miss Subways! That’s marvelous, Charlotte!” JoJo said when Charlotte told her. The girls were sitting on JoJo’s bed, their econ books and notes strewn across JoJo’s matelassé.

  “Did you pinch a shot of your father’s whiskey again?”

  “I’m serious. Miss Subways is a big deal.”

  “Maybe. For silly girls who have nothing better to do than fuss over their looks.”