Mercury in Retrograde (14 page)

“No, say you'll go,” Lipstick pleaded. “Please. I need you. I'll be with you the whole night; I won't leave your side and it will be fabulous, I swear!”

“And even if it's not—who cares?” Penelope said. “It'll be funny. Besides, I can't go. That's sweeps week for the cable news divisions, and I've been warned about the fifteen-hour work days.”

“I wasn't even your first choice?” Dana said.

“Dana,” Sally said while executing a perfect headstand, “just do it. Consider it better therapy than a Weight Watchers meeting.”

“Okay,” Dana conceded. “Fine, but have a Valium on hand, will you? I may need it.”

 

Later that night, in the privacy of her apartment, under the covers of her king-sized bed in the middle of her living room, Lipstick—who'd received two more messages from her mother that day wondering where she was and why she still hadn't contacted her—logged onto her computer and typed in “www.socialstatus.com.”

Sure enough, the top picture on the page was of Lipstick at Portia's trunk show with the headline “Lena Lippencrass Outshines Portia's Purses in a Dress by Mysterious New Designer.”

Lipstick clicked on the comments. There were fifty-five already. “Jesus, don't these girls have anything better to do than go to this stupid website?” Lipstick asked herself, missing the irony completely.

To her delight, the comments were overwhelmingly positive. But toward the end, things got a little worrisome.

 

Princessa1 (Ashley's obvious screen name): I don't
know who the designer is—Lena is very tight-lipped, but the cut is insane and it's fierce!

 

Parkavenue79: I agree. So chic. Where can we get this???

 

PookieBoo: Lena Lippencrass is such a bitch. She probably found it somewhere in the West Village where she lives and wants to keep it a secret so no one can copy her. She doesn't talk to anyone anymore since Thad left her for Bitsy. Not that anyone can blame him. Bitsy is soooo chic.

 

Princessa1: Lena is not a bitch. She probably got it in Paris with her mother last summer. And Lena talks to me every day—and she couldn't care less about Thad and Bitsy. They deserve each other!

 

ItsyBitsy: Funny, because I heard she and her mother aren't talking anymore. And that she might not be living in the West Village for much longer. She probably got that dress from a thrift store.

 

Lena's blood froze. How could Bitsy know what had happened? Her mother would never breathe a word of something that smacked of familial indiscretion.

 

JimmyChoolover: Do I smell scandal????

 

Princessa1: IstyBitsy, you are such a jealous witch. Lena is a friend of mine and everything is fine. And wherever she got that fabulous dress, it wasn't from a secondhand store. Lena doesn't do thrift.

 

Socialslut9: Well, if she did get it from a thrift store, which one? It's hot!

 

 

Lipstick sighed, turned off her computer, and went to bed.

Marge wasn't that impressed with Penelope's “Easter Bunnies in Heat” story, but in the end she conceded that the station needed a roving features reporter and there was no one else around who was willing to bow to the job's particular (and particularly odd) demands. Penelope was happy to do anything that allowed her to spend as much time as possible out of the office and enabled her to do actual reporting again—however loosely she could reconcile the definition of reporting with what she'd been doing.

In the five weeks since her “promotion”—a lateral move that came without a pay raise and didn't release Penelope from her occasional gofering or hair-spraying duties—Penelope covered a wide range of stories. There was the “Firesluts: What Pole Won't These Women Slide Down?” story, wherein Penelope had to interview women from the Firemen's Appreciation Club and hear all about the pros and cons of having sex on a parked fire truck as opposed to one in motion. There was the “Celebrities Flying Their Own Planes: A Dangerous New Adrenaline
High,” in which Marge made Penelope fly with a drunken ex–Air Force pilot who demonstrated what happens when a plane stalls at fifteen thousand feet, with John Denver blaring in the background.

“John Denver died in a glider accident, not a plane,” Penelope, still nauseous from the flight, said to Marge after watching the clip air.

“Same thing!” Marge shot back.

And, of course, there was “The Latest Plastic Surgery Craze—You'll Never Guess Where They're Getting Botox Now!” for which Penelope—who suffered from severe needlephobia—received Botox shots to the forehead, brows, armpits, and lip area, on camera. (She put her foot down when the doctor started talking about genital Botox.) A week later she still couldn't move her face properly, but on a brighter note, she didn't sweat either. There was also the “Teddy Bears with Heart” segment, in which Penelope, dressed in Trace's assistant Berry's lime-green blazer and a pink skirt that had been hanging in the makeup room for a decade and deemed a “TV friendly color” by Marge, had gone to the Make-a-Bear factory in Brooklyn looking like a human watermelon to stuff a few plush bears with “real live ticking hearts.” During that particular “exclusive,” one of the factory workers mimed a blow job behind her back using a literal tongue-in-cheek as Penelope feigned interest—or tried to, considering her face was frozen—as the factory owner described his “fun-filled lifelike love bears!”

Penelope's workday tended to follow one of two trajectories. If it was a bad day, she wasn't assigned a story and had to spend her time milling around the office, playing gofer, and dodging Trace's wandering hands and eyes. On a not-so-bad day, she was assigned a story in the morning meeting. It was always one of Marge's abnormal ideas, but it was a story nonetheless.

In the latter instance, Penelope would first do groundwork
with Thomas, rounding up people to interview and sorting out locations. If the shoot wasn't in the office, she and Thomas would pile into Stew's 1993 Chevy Suburban with Eric and drive to the location of the shoot. While Eric set up the camera, Stew would outfit Penelope with a wireless microphone while Thomas tried to corral subjects and make sure the shoot went as smoothly as possible. It almost never did.

But working in close proximity with a group of people was, to Penelope's surprise, fun. At the
Telegraph
she'd led a mostly solitary existence, doorstepping by herself or with a random photographer. Penelope had never really had work friends.

Eric and Stew were like Jack and Mrs. Spratt. Eric was a short, bearish guy in his early forties, with a permanent five o'clock shadow on his face and a large Jew-fro. He was a doughy man with an easy high-pitched giggle that would transform his face into that of a delighted five-year-old. He wore his press tags around his neck, along with a picture of his wife Marie and infant daughter Sam wrapped tightly in a Mets onesie.

Stew, by contrast, was a towering six foot, four inches, with a bald pate and rimless glasses. He looked almost manorexic, although he ate like a horse (“a metabolism to die for,” he joked), lived with his mother in Brooklyn despite being close to fifty, and had a penchant for reading Harlequin romance novels that had their covers ripped off so no one could identify his not-so-masculine reading material. “They're just so addictive,” he'd say and shrug when anyone made fun of him.

Then there was Thomas. By now she'd learned he was thirty-three, an NYU graduate who'd spent several years after college living in London and working for Channel 4 as a news producer before traveling in Pakistan as part of a crew filming a documentary series on Islam. He'd returned to the U.S. four years earlier for mysterious reasons—mysterious to Penelope, anyway, as he wouldn't tell her why. He'd gotten a job at NY Access despite
a recession and hiring freezes at the major networks. Thomas, who showed up at NY Access every day in a suit, tie, and shirt that was buttoned all the way up, worked hard and didn't talk a lot about other aspects of his life. But he genuinely seemed to like Penelope, who'd developed a raging case of puppy love for him.

The crush was turning out to literally be a crash and had worsened over the past few weeks as Thomas, unlike many other men Penelope had met, including her father, actually took an interest in her life and her history.

“So, what are your parents like?” Thomas asked one afternoon. It had been a slow day and no assignment was given, so Penelope had been relegated to office chores and Thomas was just hanging around waiting to start setting up for the evening news.

“Huh?” Penelope asked, not quite sure if she'd heard the question. She was sitting next to Laura Lopez's desk, collating files for Marge.

“Your parents,” Thomas said, leaning over the cubicle divider. “You know, the people who raised you?”

“Oh, right. They're just regular, normal, well, no, that's not quite right,” Penelope answered, chewing on a pen and trying to sound relaxed. “Mom's kind of a left-wing Jew from Queens who randomly got stuck in Ohio with my right-wing, born-again Dad. It's a long, bizarre story.”

“Ohio? Really?”

“Well, I actually graduated from a convent in Kentucky,” Penelope said, leaning back in her office-issued swivel chair.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah—I was the only Jew and virgin in the joint. Nuns included!” Penelope joked, leaning back a little farther in an attempt to look calm, cool, and collected.

“No wonder you have a good sense of humor,” Thomas said,
resting his elbows on the cubicle top. “A double dose of Jewish and Catholic guilt mixed in with some oddball parents. Nice.”

“Yep, that's me,” Penelope said, leaning farther back in her chair, as it went almost vertical. “Just one funny, fucked up—” Her chair crashed backward to the ground.

“I should've warned you not to lean too far back on those things,” Thomas said as he laughingly helped her up. “They'll get you every time. I fell over twice last week.”

Standing up, mortified but trying to pretend like nothing had happened, Penelope said, “Yeah, cool, happens all the time. No big deal. Um, what about you? Your parents?” at which Thomas had checked his watch and said, “Damn. It's news time, gotta go. Talk later,” and walked off.

Another crash came the following week. They were on assignment covering “Bat Boy”—a lame name for a stunt derived by a secondhand “magician” who was hanging upside down in Central Park for “sixty straight hours!” despite taking a break every fifteen minutes to stand up and pee. Bat Boy insisted that the only interviews he would do had to be done upside down, so while Stew and Thomas held her upside down, Eric rolled tape. All the blood rushed to Penelope's head and she looked like a giant cherry while asking Bat Boy things like, “So, um, why are you doing this? I mean, what's the point?” “Why do you have to stand up to pee if you have a catheter in?” and “What the heck does this have to do with magic?”

All was going well until Thomas, who'd been taking Zyrtec for his spring-induced allergies, sneezed so violently he dropped Penelope's leg. Thankfully, Stew held on and her NY Access microphone broke her fall, but Thomas was mortified. He'd apologized at least twenty times and the next day brought her the recently rereleased
So 80s
CD, which was a compilation of the decade's biggest hits.

“Oh man,” Penelope said, ripping open the CD to look at
the album credits. “This is awesome. Thank you. You didn't have to do that…and how'd you know I wanted this?”

“Please,” Thomas said and smiled. “You bust out singing Journey, Bananarama, and The Bangles at least once a day. Anyway, I really am sorry. I'll never drop you again.”

“I do seem to end up on the floor a lot when I'm around you,” Penelope said.

 

“He's a little uptight, but he's just so…cute,” Penelope said to Lipstick and Dana at yoga that Saturday. “And smart, and nice, and I love working with him. I know this sounds totally unromantic, but he's so efficient. I feel taken care of, like he can get me in and out of a situation pretty much unscathed. Well, except for dropping me that one time, but whatever. Is that retarded?”

“Well,” Lipstick said, upon hearing about Thomas's attributes for the nine hundredth time. “Why don't you ask him out?”

“Isn't that what a guy's supposed to do?” Penelope asked. “Besides, I think he has a girlfriend. He's always whispering on the phone and runs home after work. He doesn't seem interested in me that way.”

“He sounds okay,” Dana said, “even though he makes you do ridiculous stuff.”

“Well, that's really Marge's fault. Except for the bunny thing. But he apologized for that dumb idea later,” Penelope said.

Meanwhile, Marge forced Penelope to go clothes shopping, which rated very high on Penelope's “top ten things I hate to do list,” right after “Teddy Bears with Heart” stories. Marge—remarkably calm due to the refilling of her Good & Plenty bowl courtesy of Dr. Feelgood—explained why Penelope couldn't wear her latest Lipstick-provided dress on air, “Because it's brown. Brown does not pop. Black does not pop. Navy does not pop. Bright colors pop! You got a good wardrobe, toots, but
on TV it looks like you're in mourning. Does nothing for the complexion. You're a nice-looking girl after we straighten that hair and slap some makeup on your face, but it's no use if you're still gonna look like a morose blob on camera. If you can't wear anything that looks good on camera, then I'll find something for you to wear!”

Penelope, dreading another garment-based debacle involving anything that Trace's assistant Berry owned, goaded Marge into giving her “an appropriate color guideline.” Marge, always happy to create more rules and lists, provided the following

 

APPROVED COLORS: Hot pink, bright purple, royal or azure blue (but not indigo or navy), teal, kelly green (but not lime or army green), yellow, orange (but not burnt sienna orange), cherry red, fire engine red, or really, any shade of red, just not maroon.

 

NON-APPROVED COLORS: Black, brown (of any kind), navy, white (unless used under a bright, color-approved sweater), cream, gray, and stripes or other prints (“they confuse the eye on camera—and send epileptics into fits. We can't have that. Numbers show we are very popular in the spastic community,” Marge explained).

 

UP FOR DISCUSSION: Soft pink, light purple—or “any colors you'd see in a Tampon ad.”

 

Basically, if Penelope's outfit was the color of something a child would want to chew on, it was okay. Anything else was prohibited.

“I'm going to look like Rainbow Brite,” Penelope said, chewing her lip, before she realized she could still wear Lipstick's muted, classy clothes—just pop a bright shirt or sweater on over them.

As a precaution, Penelope dragged Lipstick to H&M so Lipstick could help her pick out some stylish, appropriate, and cheap clothes.

“Oh, sure, I'll go,” Lipstick said when Penelope asked her for some help, “I've never been there before. It'll be an adventure, and I'll tell Jack it's for research!” They arrived at the Midtown H&M on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, dressed in their best shopping camouflage. Lipstick walked into the discount clothing store in her “undercover consultant” look—a Pucci-print head scarf, oversized sunglasses, and a trench coat. (“Well, it
is
uptown and Cartier
is
across the street—so I have to be careful no one recognizes me,” she explained.) Penelope wore a sweatsuit.

An hour and $279 later, Penelope had an arsenal of cheap dresses and brightly colored accessories that would make any outfit Marge-approvable.

While Lipstick and Penelope shopped, Dana made an unexpected discovery.

She was at her desk, working on a brief for MatBank, a small bank that was being sued by the government and shareholders for defaulting on mortgage-related debt, when her secretary buzzed in.

“Mr. Kornberg wants to see you in his office.”

“I'll be right there,” Dana said, her heart starting to beat fast. She hadn't heard from the law firm's senior partner in two months, ever since she'd put in her application to become a full partner, as opposed to junior partner. It had been a ballsy move. At thirty-two, she was the youngest junior partner in the firm's
history, and there had never been a full partner who'd been under forty-five years of age. But Dana, always the straight-A student, the smartest in her law classes, the most aggressive in court, and always having to prove something to herself, wasn't going to let a little thing like age get in the way of her professional ambitions.