The Pink Ghetto (9 page)

As we walked Maxwell along the edge of a tiny neighborhood park, my self-confidence sagged back down to its normal level. I told Fleishman, “I’m so far behind, and Cassie’s a little go-getter.”

“You’ll catch up,” he assured me.

“How?”

“We start tonight. First we’ll knock out all that late-list stuff out, ASAP. Also, we’ll make cookies.”

“
Cookies?
” What the hell was he talking about?

“You need to start winning friends and influencing people around that place.”

“With
cookies?
” I asked. “This is an office.”

He nodded. “Doesn’t matter. There ain’t nobody who doesn’t love Natasha Fleishman’s chocolate chocolate chip cookies.”

That gave me pause. Those cookies
were
good. “But I thought her cook made those.”

“I’ll call her for the recipe. I know she’s got it. She collects recipes, she just doesn’t bake anything herself.”

“Isn’t this going to be a lot of work for a week night?”

“Week night, schmeek night. We’ll get it done.”

I could feel my lips twisting into a wry curl. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve been throwing the word
we
around awfully liberally.”

“I’m going to help you.”

“I’ve never seen you make a cookie,” I said.

“Then you make cookies and I’ll help you knock out some of that work.”

“
What?
”

“Why not?” he asked. “Are they going to check your handwriting to make sure you did it yourself? Who would even notice?”

He was right about that.

Warning bells were going off in my head, but I couldn’t quite figure out what all the ruckus was about. Fleishman and I helped each other out all the time. I’d done so much work on an
Othello
paper for him in junior year that I might have legally been called its author. We shared half our stuff. We even shared money.

What could be wrong in sharing a little work?

O
n Wednesday morning, Lindsay stopped by my office carrying a legal pad. I must have looked startled. It was the first time I had seen her looking slightly businesslike. And believe me, it had to be difficult to look businesslike in that tight zebra print top she was wearing.

“Ready?” she asked.

I tried to imagine what she was talking about, but my mind was a blank. “Did I miss a memo?”

“There’s an editorial meeting every week,” she said. “All hands, plus Janice and Troy. It’s boring and interminable. It’s also mandatory. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

I grabbed a legal pad and followed her down the hall to the conference room. Aside from being in a somnambulant daze, I was feeling pretty cocky. Fleishman and I had pulled an all-nighter. We had knocked out all the stuff I had brought home. We had made four dozen chocolate chocolate chip cookies…and I had only availed myself of five. (Everyone agrees: breakfast is the most important meal of the day.)

The conference room was long and narrow, and almost entirely consumed by the rectangular table that ran its length. On one wall was a dry-erase board nearly as long as the table itself. On the other side stood a row of chairs. When I walked into the ed meeting with Lindsay, those chairs were filled with the ed assists, who apparently didn’t rank a place at the table. Lindsay took the last of these seats.

“Sorry,” she said, “you have to be a plebe to be in this row.”

Andrea waved me over to an empty seat next to her at the table. She was madly scribbling numbers all over her legal pad.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She tapped her pencil. “I’m trying to figure out how much I would have to earn to pay thirty dollars a month more on my MasterCard, which would make me completely debt free in the year 2026. It’s really not that much! I think it’s doable.”

People started passing around Xeroxed handouts. First there was Janice Wunch’s dreaded late list (my items had shrunk down to five…a miracle no one seemed to notice). Then there was a page bearing the title,
To be discussed.
With the exception of Cassie and me, all the editors had a few titles under their names. I had none. Cassie had thirteen.

Andrea tapped on my sheet of paper. “Oh! You’re supposed to turn in the slush and agented manuscript titles you’ve read during the week that you mean to pursue.”

“Now she tells me,” I muttered.

Not that I had read anything new. Still, it rankled to be bested by Cassie once again.

“Cassie always overdoes,” Andrea grumbled, as if she could read my mind. “It always takes for-fucking-ever to get out of here, thanks to her.”

The editors were all congregated for a full five minutes before Mercedes finally bustled in, scarf fluttering behind her. She sat down at the head of the long table, then took out a judge’s gavel and banged it on the table, which seemed a little odd, since all of us were already staring at her anyway.

“A rather surprising memo came down from on high about sales figures,” she announced, getting things started. “The new hot sellers last quarter were single titles, MetroGirl, and Divines.”

Across the table, Mary Jo and her God Pod were smiling smugly. In front of Mary Jo was her ubiquitous Cathy mug. Andrea might have viewed that beverage container as a sign of Mary Jo’s mental health problem, but I for one marveled at its longevity. It was about the same age as my little brother, who was a sophomore at Ohio State.

“Flames also were selling briskly, as usual,” Mercedes said. Flame was supposedly the sexiest line of books we published. “So what do we learn from this, people?”

We all looked at one another nervously before Troy blurted out, “We learn that American women can’t get enough of hot sex and Jesus.”

I laughed, and Troy, who had been munching on some of the cookies I’d brought him, winked at me conspiratorially.

Fleishman’s advice had turned out to be not at all bad. When I’d brought Troy the cookies and explained about the cover, and told him how upset the author was, he couldn’t have been nicer about it. He’d explained that actually he had yanked a cover once before when it was decided that the drawing of the hero had too much crotch bulge showing. They had swapped the artwork with art from an earlier foreign edition of a different book, but one which had similar looking people. “It cost us, but it saved on angry reader mail and bad sales.”

“And you would do that for me?” I gushed.

“Oh, honey! You sound so disgustingly grateful!” he simpered back at me. Then he laughed. “Yes, I would do that for you, and to keep Art Salvatore from firing my ass. Or worse…”

My eyes widened in alarm. He made it sound as if he would wind up with cement shoes in the East River over a bad cover. “But that’s just a rumor, right?”

“Oh, yeah. Totally.” He nudged me playfully in the ribs.

There’s one ally now,
I thought.

Mercedes was the only person at the table who wasn’t chuckling at Troy’s little joke. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “Of course people don’t want religion and hot sex in the same book…”

“How do we know?” Madeline interrupted. When the only answer she received were blank stares all around, she asked, “It worked for
The Thorn Birds,
didn’t it?”

“Richard Chamberlain was so
hot,
” Ann said.

Mercedes cleared her throat. “I just don’t think that now…”

“Oh!” Lindsay piped up. “Did you ever see Richard Chamberlain in
Shogun?
” She made some kind of weird martial arts moved with her ballpoint pen. “My mom has that on DVD.”

“I thought he was gay,” someone said.

“
No way!”

All the people who were half asleep during the beginning of the discussion of sales figures were suddenly alive with opinions on the subject of Richard Chamberlain, gay/not gay.

“I don’t care about real life,” Madeline proclaimed. “He wasn’t gay when he yanked that woman down on the beach to have sex with her.”

“That was just like that beach scene in
From Here to Eternity,
” Andrea said, “with Burt Lancaster.”

“Burt Lancaster was
hot.
”

Mercedes had to gavel us again. “Of course you all know we’re talking about two different demographics—people who read for sensuality, and people who read for spirituality.”

“What about people who are just reading something because they’re at the laundromat, bored stiff?” Andrea said. “They might like a little naughty priest action.”

“I think we’re getting off topic,” Mary Jo said, trying to rescue Mercedes. “What did the report say the worst sellers were?”

Naturally, having already been assured of her bestselling status, she would want to know that.

Mercedes lips tightened into a smile. “The Pulse books continue to flatline.” She’d obviously rehearsed that lame line in her head all morning, but she was rewarded with a chorus of dutiful titters nevertheless.

Mercedes did not look at Rita. She so pointedly did not look at Rita that everybody else did. Rita was sucking so hard on her pen, she looked like she was about to inhale ink.

“The lesson here is we can’t get complacent,” Mercedes said. “We need to keep generating new ideas. I don’t care whether they come from you or the authors or the crazy guy who plays spoons in front of Grand Central Station, we need to keep coming up with new twists.”

Cassie raised her hand and waved it.

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Just last night I was thinking we should do a series of books about a police precinct, where every book features a different cop’s story.”

Mercedes snapped her fingers. “See? That’s just what I’m talking about. We need more of that.”

If Cassie’s self-love had been any more evident at that moment, she would have broken some state indecency laws.

I was seized with the urge to come up with an idea. It didn’t even have to be an original one, apparently. I mean, a
police precinct?
Come on!

“And from now on,” Mercedes continued, “if you come across a fantastic book with a new twist in it, I want it to come directly to me. Take a red pen and write a big
N
on the front.”

Everyone around the table exchanged perplexed stares.

“For
new,
” Mercedes explained.

Andrea snorted softly and I had to bend my head over my notepad so I wouldn’t start laughing.

After the meeting (which really did seem to go on forever), Rita was in an uproar. She directed us to meet her at her outer office, ASAP.

After we had picked up our lattes, Andrea and I huddled next to the coffee shop door next to Rita, who was smoking up a storm.

“Where’s Cassie?” she asked.

Andrea licked the foam off her wood stir stick. “She stayed after the meeting to kiss Mercedes’s ass.”

“That’s probably what I should have done,” Rita muttered. “That meeting seemed ominous to me. Didn’t it to you?”

“Ominous, how?” I asked.

“Didn’t it seem to you like Mercedes was telling me that I was going to be fired?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Well! Naturally I’m going to be fired. It’s just a matter of when.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Everybody gets the ax eventually.”

“Like cows in the feed lot,” Andrea mused.

“And I’m the oldest editor here.” Rita exhaled. “I’m old enough to be Mercedes’s mother, did you know that?”

“Yeah, like maybe if you were giving birth when you were six, Rita,” Andrea said. “You’re not going to get fired.”

Maybe she wasn’t, but she was so nervous she was making me feel sure
I
was going to be fired.

I tried to think positively.
Me!
Not exactly your best example of a Pollyanna. But dear God, around these two,
somebody
had to inject a little hopefulness or we were all doomed. “All Mercedes was saying was that we need to punch Pulse up a little…”

“Maybe the series is played out,” Andrea said, interrupting me. “People just don’t want to read about nurses and doctors all the time.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Rita asked, getting a little of her spunk back. “They’ve watched
ER
forever. We just need to think of some way to make medical romances a little more exciting. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

Andrea remained unconvinced. “Do you have any ideas for achieving this feat?” she asked me. “Any big
N
s swimming around in that head of yours?”

“Well, no,” I admitted.

“Just think about it,” Rita said. “Comb your slush for possibilities.”

Dismissed, Andrea and I turned to go back up.

“Rebecca, wait,” Rita said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Wow, is she in trouble already?”

Rita shot Andrea a look. “Why don’t you go to lunch?”

“Thanks, I will.” Andrea laughed as she headed down the street toward the deli.

Rita frowned at me, then stubbed her cigarette under her heel. “Before the ed meeting I got a call from Darlene Paige’s agent. She said Darlene was working with Cassie now. When did this happen?”

“Oh.” I shifted uncomfortably. “Yesterday.”

Rita crossed her arms. “You just decided to give your authors away?”

“I didn’t give them away, exactly,” I confessed. “Cassie took them. Well, four of them.”

“And you were going to inform me of this fact…
when?
”

I tried to think fast, which is difficult when you’re working on three hours of sleep and five chocolate chip cookies. “I wanted to raise hell about it, Rita—but what could you do? The authors were already in an uproar. You couldn’t force them to work with a new editor now that they’ve decided they want a change, could you?”

Rita tilted her head. “What caused these authors to get in an uproar, do you think?”

Much as it pained me, I gritted my teeth and stared into the air. It was like some old school camaraderie kicked in, even toward the odious Cassie. All the world hates a squealer. “I’m not sure,” I finally said. “Someone said something about a panic on a Web ring.”

“Geez,” she muttered. “Well, you’re right, unfortunately. It wouldn’t be a good idea to tell the authors they couldn’t change.”

I nodded.

She thought for a moment and grumbled, “Well, you’ve got one thing figured out.”

“What?”

“How to lighten your load.”

An idea struck me. Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I was actually saying them. “Well since I’m four authors short, if there’s anything you want me to do for you…”

Her eyes widened. “Actually, I do have a few edits…” She drummed her fingers against her jacket sleeves. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all.” What were a few more weeks of sleepless nights?

“That would be great,” Rita said. “I could almost get caught up.”

She was smiling. Which made it worth the trouble.

Besides, it was one less batch of cookies I’d have to bake.

“W
hat did you bring me?” Fleishman asked when I got through the door.

I tossed down two tote bags of manuscripts on the futon and picked up Maxwell, who treated me to a welcome home faceful of slobber.

Wendy, making one of her rare appearances at the apartment at the dinner hour, was sitting at the table with a newspaper and the toaster in her lap. She wrinkled her nose at this canine show of affection. “That’s disgusting.”

“But it’s adorably disgusting.” I gave Maxwell a big kiss on the nose.

Fleishman peered into the tote bags with visible disappointment. “No books?”

“What are you talking about? That’s nothing but books.”

He sank down on the futon. “But I like the ones with the covers on them.”

“I’ll bring you some tomorrow. But tonight I need to go through those and see if there’s anything good.”

He perked up. “Oh! I can do that.”