Little Pink Slips (9 page)

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Manhattan Is High School in Heels

At home,
Magnolia's taste led her to Paris, circa 1965. She'd painted the living room a pale yellow to mitigate Manhattan's gray

light and loved curling up with a pile of manuscripts on the curvy,

panther-print chaise, which she'd positioned next to the baroque,

white marble fireplace that had drawn Wally and her to the place

eleven years ago. Framing the windows were gossamer draperies.

They reminded Magnolia of her prom dress at Fargo South—and the

night she and Tyler Peterson celebrated their true love in the backseat

of his father's Pontiac. The latest addition to the apartment was a

chandelier, tastefully dripping with crystal teardrops, which she

indulged herself with last year when her bonus came through.

Just looking at the chandelier made her feel like Simone de

Beauvoir—or Gigi—depending on her degree of literary pretension:

some days she saw herself as a serious person taking charge of her own

future, others as a ditz with charm around the margins. She could imag

ine stepping out for an espresso and a Gauloise at Café de Flore—or was

it Les Deux Magots?—on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, even though

she'd never smoked a cigarette in her life. Marijuana didn't count.

This morning, however, as she opened the door to her office at

Scary, she landed in a world where Little Bo Peep met Ralph Lauren. Scary hadn't wanted to spring for redecorating, so she'd inherited the

furniture of the previous editor, who was in love with American coun

try. Magnolia worked amid coffee-stained sisal carpeting, black wing

back chairs, and white walls due for a paint job. At one end of the room

sat her big, pine desk; at the other, a cozy couch with baggy, cream

colored slipcovers. Enormous bulletin boards covered two walls. On a four-week cycle—
Lady w
as a monthly—one filled up with miniature versions of layouts and full-sized cover options for the next issue. The

other had developed into a Smithsonian of postcards, pages ripped

from other magazines, and Roz Chast cartoons.

   Magnolia loved an early morning at work. She could quickly dispense with her e-mail and savor
The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and
The Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately, it was too soon to phone her parents, who'd traded Fargo for Palm Springs, feeling they'd

earned the right to sun 365 days a year.

Soon Cameron would arrive and find a warm body to fill in for the

missing Sasha. This would require Magnolia to explain her nitpicky

systems to the terrified temp. She briefly considered whether she might

tell Cam that, thanks anyway, she could manage on her own today,

then recognized that he—being all but clairvoyant in the Magnolia

department—would attribute such an action to her being worried.

On that point, he would be correct. She counted on laser-beam

focus. Just now, though, Magnolia found it hard not to dwell on how quickly she'd slid from the exhilaration of buffing
Lady
to a gloss not seen in thirty-five years, to wondering whether the poor old dear

would soon be transmogrified into a magazine carnival act. Between

Bebe's harangues on subjects only she cared about and all that bloody red, Magnolia couldn't imagine readers buying
Bebe
more than once.

There was a knock at her door, which she'd left slightly ajar.

"Mags, good morning." She liked that Cam called her Mags. He

was the only member of the staff who claimed this familiarity and he

spoke her name in a deep, commercial-worthy voice—one of his sev

eral earlier careers was acting.

"Hey," she said. "How was the weekend?" Cam owned a house

upstate, where he retreated every Friday. Magnolia had never seen it.

   "Major bike ride. Other than that, just cooking and weeding. Wrote. Reread
Middlemarch.
"

   "I'm becoming illiterate," she said. Lately she'd definitely been

more Gigi than Simone de Beauvoir.

"That can be our little secret, you with the fancy New York life."

From anyone else, Magnolia would have been allergic to the sting.

But Cam actually knew how hard she worked, how many evenings

she surrendered to Scary.

"If you're referring to Natalie's party, I came, I drank. I listened to

people pontificate. I did not lose my cool or any brain cells that I'm

aware of." Magnolia decided not to share the Harry part. She pre

sumed that Cam still had the same girlfriend, a Belgian photographer who was always flying all over the planet for
National Geographic,
and Cam was polite enough not to ask her if she'd starting dating any

one after Alec-the-architect.

"What's going to happen next?" Cam asked.

"That question may have been answered by the eighteenth hole at

Winged Foot Country Club. I can hold my breath."

"Good. That means you and I can do performance evaluations all

morning long." He said the last three words very, very slowly.

"As soon as you nab a victim to be Sasha for the day."

Cam returned forty-five minutes later, temp in tow. He and Magnolia

then began to hash out who would get a raise. Scary, not known for

generosity at the lower levels, had declared 2.5 percent as the norm.

That meant that if Magnolia wanted to reward a star employee with

an increase she'd actually notice, another staff member would get

stiffed. As far as Magnolia was concerned, every employee deserved

more than the paltry standard. She'd rather have root canal than look

a talented, underpaid editor in the eye, slather praise like Crème de

la Mer, then announce that at the end of the next year she'd be richer

by $759.31. "You're brilliant, you've slaved for twelve months, now

after taxes you can blow yourself to a weekend at Motel Six and a

Happy Meal."

They chewed through the evaluations for as long as they both could

stand. Only when Cam left her office did the temp remind Magnolia that in ten minutes she needed to be at the 21 Club to hear Candace

Bushnell speak at a luncheon. In magazine mythology, Candace held a

vaulted place. Not many assistants started by sharpening pencils at
Ladies' Home Journal
and ended with
Sex and the City,
hot novels, and the studliest dancer ever to perform with the New York City Ballet.

Sasha would have known to order a car to take Magnolia thirty

seven blocks uptown, but the temp didn't, and it was too late to book

one. Magnolia dashed out to hail a taxi. She got lucky, and only eigh

teen minutes later a cab dropped her off in front of 21, whose wel

coming lineup of puny lawn jockeys always made her think of every

jerk she'd dated since tenth grade. The interior of the old-time

speakeasy-turned-club continued the equestrian theme, with horse

paintings grazing on the walls. You could almost smell the dung.

The minute Candace started her speech, Magnolia realized that

Sarah Jessica Parker had modeled Carrie's delivery after Candace's

excitable speech—or vice versa. Candace sounded exactly like Carrie

did whenever she was drunk, especially when she described a party

she'd attended in the eighties where the men wore only diapers and

the women dressed as nannies. "Some sort of English thing," Candace

recalled, then started taking questions.

What are you writing? A book that sounded overdue to her editor.

When did you marry? Not until forty-three, which made the crowd

exhale with relief. What kind of shoes are you wearing? Candace took

off a sparkly, blue stiletto and placed it on the podium for everyone to

admire. Candace made Magnolia feel good about being a single woman

in her thirties, trying to earn a good salary.

The luncheon over, Magnolia flew upstairs to a tiny powder room

she knew would be emptier than the one the horde would hit on the

ground floor. As she emerged from the stall, she found herself face-to

face with Candace, who was even tinier than she'd appeared from the

podium—a size 2, tops. In the split second during which Magnolia

pondered if she should introduce herself and ask Candace if she'd write for
Lady
—and then decided that, no, she was way too big a deal for that—Candace greeted her by name.

"Magnolia Gold?" "Yes, oh, that's me." Magnolia felt like an idiot for not responding

in a more articulate fashion, but was flattered—and shocked—to be

recognized.

   "Is it true what I'm hearing?"

   What
was
Candace hearing? Did Candace want to be her friend? Before she could concoct a witty retort, Candace continued.

"Bebe Blake taking over your magazine? That's rich! Man, am I

glad I've left women's magazines. And I thought television was low."

With a toss of her long, blond hair, Candace was off, leaving behind

only a whiff of delicious perfume and her empty champagne flute,

which she'd parked on the marble countertop.

As Magnolia
settled back at her desk at 2:45, the temp buzzed her on the intercom. "Jack wanted to see you fifteen minutes ago,"

she said.

Jack the IT guy? Every time he touched her computer, it developed

tics in new places. "Please tell him that now isn't a good time." Mag

nolia had a December planning meeting and it would take hours. It might be almost the Fourth of July, but at
Lady
they needed to be thinking eggnog,
bûches de noël,
and, every year, a new spin on Hanukkah latkes. December was their biggest seller. By mid-November,

you could count on American women to instinctively scour their

supermarkets for a comforting magazine full of artery-clogging

cookie recipes.

"Jack's secretary said it was important."

Jack from IT had a beeper, not a secretary. "Could that have been

Jock Flanagan's office?" Magnolia may as well have asked her to

recite the periodic table. The temp stared at her, blankly. "Did the sec

retary have a name?"

"Vera? Viola?" This temp had just graduated from Penn and, four

hours ago, told Magnolia she'd kill for a magazine job.

Magnolia called Jock's office herself. "Magnolia, we were expect

ing you fifteen minutes ago," Elvira said. "Jock's waiting, and he's got

a three o'clock." He could keep you waiting, but the behavior wasn't tolerated in

reverse. "Be right up," Magnolia said. "Minor administrative snafu.

Sorry. You don't need to hear explanations."

As the elevator opened on the tenth floor, Magnolia collided with

Darlene.

"Cute skirt!" Darlene bellowed as she rushed by at her I'm-more

important-than-you pace.

Jock's door was closed. Twenty minutes later Elvira allowed her in.

His office looked like a movie set—it rarely showed any evidence of

an executive who did actual work. Jock motioned Magnolia to a black

leather chair.

"Water?"

"No, thanks," she answered, her heart thumping like Biggie's tail

when he sniffed a pig ear hiding behind her back.

   "Magnolia, you've been courageous in defending your position on
Lady.
"

   Whenever someone called you
courageous
you knew they really meant nuts.

"I'm sure you've recognized that going with Bebe is, however, too

good a deal not to do," Jock said. "It's plain and simple."

Plain, simple, shatteringly mediocre—take your pick, Magnolia

thought. She held her breath, waiting to get voted off the island, deter