Mercury in Retrograde (4 page)

And so, five years ago, thanks to the long hours and the stress of making permanent associate, Dana had lost more than sixty pounds. To celebrate her new, svelte hourglass form, she'd splurged at the spring sales at Barneys and Bergdorf, incurring a year's worth of credit card debt. But it was worth it, she decided, after her latest purchases—a pair of three-inch Christian Louboutin shoes and a form-fitting Yves Saint Laurent dress that were 80 percent off—had helped catch Noah's eye.

He was behind her in line at the Neue Galerie on a warm,
sunny March day. She noticed him only when he accidentally stepped on her heel as he surged forward with the crowd waiting to get into the new exhibit, breaking a blister she had gotten from the new pair of Louboutins (“I am suffering for glamour,” Dana grumbled to her Nigerian coworker and friend, Ifoema Ndekwe).

“Ow!” Dana cried, but when she turned around, her annoyance dissipated. Behind her was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He was six feet four with black hair, black eyes, tan skin, and a chiseled face, and was dressed like he'd stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue.

“I'm so sorry,” the man said. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, um…it's okay, I don't need my heel anyway,” Dana said with a little laugh.

“You must let me buy you a coffee afterward to make up for this.”

Coffee lasted three days.

 

Dana knew from the moment their first three-day date ended that Noah Glickman was the one. He was Jewish
and
he was from Cleveland.

It turned out that Noah had even graduated from the same high school as Dana, albeit seven years earlier than she. After graduating Harvard summa cum laude he came to New York City to fulfill his capitalistic dream of owning his own apartment and house in East Hampton by the age of thirty-two. He had succeeded at both.

Ostensibly, Noah was a girl's dream come true. A handsome, wealthy investment banker for the tony firm Lazarus & Co., he lived in the penthouse duplex in a brownstone on the Upper West Side that had two decks and a wood-burning fireplace. He was funny and charming and seemed to adore Dana. But there were drawbacks. Noah was extremely competitive. What
made him so successful at work made him annoying to Dana's friends. He swam, ran, biked, hiked—he loved almost anything that could be timed and thereby quantitatively prove he was better than everybody else. When Dana met Noah, he was thirty-four, had never been married, and was looking to settle down, if only because “all the guys at the firm are married and you can't get ahead if you're not married to a wife that will schmooze the other wives. Besides, I'm thirty-four. I should have kids soon.” Dana had laughed that off. Her friends had not.

After two years of dating, Noah, an avid outdoorsman, took Dana—who hated any travel that didn't involve a made bed—on a camping trip to Maine in mid May. Dana, trying to be the perfect girlfriend, mustered up some fake enthusiasm and said, “Of course I'll go hiking in Maine. It sounds like so much…fun.”

When she told Ifoema she and Noah were going on a hiking trip, Ifoema started laughing.

“What?” Dana said. “What's so funny? Lots of people go hiking!”

“Yeah.” Ifoema snorted. “But you don't. Bring a video camera—I'm
dying
to see the outtakes. Nader once tried to get me to do something like that. I told him to stuff it.” Nader was Ifoema's sweet but mostly silent husband, who was also from Nigeria.

“Seriously,” Dana said. “I think he might propose this weekend. I will walk to Maine if I have to.” By that time she'd been waiting for a proposal for months—ever since Noah slipped a cigar band around her ring finger one night when he picked her up from a work function at 55 Wall Street, cinched it till it fit, and then slipped it back into his pocket. “He was fitting my finger!” she said over the phone to Ifoema later that night.

“Great,” Ifoema mumbled, still pissed that Noah had refused to pay his portion of the bar tab a week earlier as “you bet me I couldn't drink that Long Island Iced Tea in one gulp. I did it—
you pay!”

And so Dana had gone to hike Acadia National Park during what would later go down as the nastiest weekend in May Maine had ever had.

On the way up to Maine in Noah's Range Rover, Dana put on a CD her yogi friend Sally Brindle made her for the trip, which started off with the Lemonheads singing, “
I lied about being the outdoor type,
” and ended with David Allen Coe's “Jack Daniels If You Please.”

Noah didn't see the humor or irony in it and opted to listen to Green Day instead.

It snowed the first night they set up camp in Acadia National Park and sleeted the second. Just as Dana, who by that time was coming down with the flu, had given up hope that this was
the
weekend and was just trying to catch up with Noah. As she trudged up yet another mountainside and turned the ridge, she saw Noah, kneeling in the frozen mud.

“Oh baby!” Dana cried, “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Can I help you?”

Noah was fine. And so was the three-carat cushion-cut diamond he slipped on her finger moments later.

A week later, Dana moved out of her Murray Hill apartment and into Noah's penthouse. A year later they got married under a chuppah in her parents' backyard and, after going to Tahiti on their honeymoon, set about finishing another item on Noah's to-do list: trying for a baby.

Penelope rubbed the lump on her forehead as the West Fifty-seventh Street
Telegraph
elevator chugged its way to the third
floor, its old brown carpeting curling up from the corners. The corklike ceiling panels had brown water stains, and the faux-wooden walls were covered with graffiti that read like a nerdy bathroom wall: “Martman deserves a Donkey Punch!” “For a good time call 917-678-4763 (Martman's home number),” and “Don't hate the player, hate the editor”—all next to a metal sign that read: “Security Camera Is On. Defacing Elevators Is Punishable by Law.” The security camera's lens had been covered by a wad of gum for the past two years.

The elevator came to a stop, the doors opened, and Penelope stepped out into her own personal Fallujah. The noise was almost deafening. It was lunchtime for the 150 reporters and editors and so, in addition to the constant ringing of phones, the screaming for “copy!” and the news blaring from five television sets hanging over the main news edit desks, there was an undercurrent of munching and the crackling of fast-food wrappers.

The newsroom was an open floor plan of cubicles radiating from their focal point: Martman's desk. To the left of the Martman's desk was the photo editor's area where four or five people scoured the wires and photo sites and sifted through the staff photographers' snaps, looking for the best pictures of the day. Beyond the photo desk sat the pampered feature writers, whose luxury mystified Penelope. There were the movie reviewers (“They get paid to see movies all day! Do you think they get free popcorn too?”), the fashion girls (“How do they afford a Fendi bag on a
Telegraph
salary? And why do they always look immaculate?”), the nightlife reviewers (“Now
they
are smart—they figured out how to eat and drink for free for a living”), and the staff writers who sat in glass offices behind big desks all day in the warm office, making up trends (“Dating Disasters: Avoidable?” “Cork Wedgies Are the New Flats!” or Penelope's personal favorite, “Nudist Colonies: Worth the Embarrassment?”). Features was a Babel of disparate exceptions to traditional
newspaper frugality.

Beyond Babel was Siberia, which housed the sports, business, and op-ed sections. Penelope had only been there once, when she was a copy kid and had been forced to deliver a package to the football correspondent, who'd been watching porn-ball—a triple-X-rated football video (which he swore was instrumental to his story of the day) that involved female “football players” and a very well-endowed coach. Penelope had never gone back.

Penelope preferred to stay in the comfortable confines of her turf, which lay to the right of the main edit desks. The newsroom buzzed with reporters, tapping away and yelling into phones, “No, you did not say he was a transvestite! I have it right here in my notes that he was a drag queen” or “Hello, this is Billy Winters, I'm looking for Mr. Shapiro…Yes, it seems your son jumped off the Fifty-fourth floor today in his building, can you comment?”

The light khaki walls and the black–and–shit-brown-striped carpeting had been installed to cover up treadmarks but failed to do so—particularly in the area around Penelope's cubicle, which she shared with Thatcher.

The six-by-twelve-foot cubicle, had no walls in between the two desks but there was a clear line of trash, newspapers, and Philly beef and Swiss sandwich wrappers from the deli next door, demarcating Thatcher's territory.

Thatcher was a middle-aged lummox who'd been hired from the
Daily News
a year earlier as a GAR lifer. He was also Martman's cousin and an unapologetic slob. His desk smelled like the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island (where Penelope had once been sent to cover a story about a proposed condo development on the stinkiest property in New York City), thanks to his regular intake of three and a half Philly beef and Swiss sandwiches per diem, and his habit of throwing the final, uneaten half in the general direction of the garbage can underneath his desk. The
bits that didn't make it in the can had fermented long ago.

Penelope's desk, by contrast, was starkly empty. There was the ancient computer, a couple of notepads, a few pens, and a picture of her and Neal at Coney Island from the summer before. Penelope needed the space on her desk not only for the mountain of clothes that she shed upon entering the office but, more important, for her oscillating fan, which she positioned so that it would blow the stench emanating from Thatcher's side of the mess away from her.

“Hey, Thatcher,” Penelope said, her nose running and forehead throbbing, as she waddled up to her desk.

“Mmmhglmmph bethg,” Thatcher muffled through his full mouth.

“Can'd udderstand you.” Penelope sniffled, blowing her nose. Again. “Just swallow and thed tell be.”

Thatcher swallowed, belched, and said, “Martman wants to meet with us.”

“Okay. Whad for?” Penelope asked, unwinding her scarf, stepping out of her pink puffer jacket, and peeling off her hat.

Thatcher dropped his sub, staring at Penelope's head. “Holy shit! What happened to your head? It's all blown up like a big red balloon.”

“Thangs.” Penelope snuffled, rubbing the area around the bump.

“Yourfsmweatingsmpgh,” Thatcher, who had gone back to eating his sub, said with his mouth full.

“Whad?” said Penelope, who began to feel very hot—boiling, really. She took off her cardigan, turtleneck, sweater, and T-shirt, piling them on the metal file drawers behind her computer, leaving only her floral-print long underwear shirt on.

Thatcher swallowed. “You're sweating like a pig.”

“Loog who's talkig.” Penelope laughed before digging her
Marlboro Lights out of her bag and going around the corner to the rarely used back photo studio to smoke an illicit cigarette.

The photo studio was a tiny room hidden in the bowels of the newsroom that was used by several reporters as the illegal smoking shack—hence the yellowed walls that had once been the same light khaki as the newsroom. It was repainted every year but reacquired its sickly shade of yellow in a matter of weeks. Lately management had taken notice after one of the features girls (the self-designated “health reporter”) complained about the smoke, and so big signs had popped up all over the door that read, N
O
S
MOKING!
S
MOKE IN HERE AND YOU WILL BE FINED 10 HOURS OF OVERTIME,
and G
O OUTSIDE, IDIOTS!

“Too tired and cold to go back outside,” Penelope rationalized to herself, ignoring the signs. “Besides, no one ever comes by here. They won't care.” She slipped into the yellow room and lit up.

Feeling light-headed—whether it was from the fever or the cigarette, she wasn't sure—Penelope sat down in one of the two industrial metal chairs in the studio and took another drag off the cigarette just as she heard Martman's voice, which could travel through walls. “Mercury! Mercury! Where the fuck are you?”

A wave of nausea swept over her.

Penelope thought about whether she hated Martman and took another puff. He was promoting her, so she supposed he wasn't all bad.

She hoisted herself out of the chair, ground the lit end of her cigarette into the sole of her shoe, threw it in the overflowing trash bin by the door, not noticing that the butt, which had landed on top of a pile of old newsprint, was still lit.

 

Lipstick and Ashley finally made it to the Chanel department on the fifth floor of Bergdorf Goodman to shop for seasonal ball gowns. “The most magical place on earth,” Lipstick said, sighing.

“I knew Jack made that stuff up about a pig-embryo cream,” Ashley said, grouchy after having spent a fruitless thirty minutes scouring the basement beauty department in search of the fabricated product. “Now he's going to make me go to some chemist and have them do something with pig embryos just so he won't be called out as a liar. Maybe he'll just forget about it.”

“Probably,” Lipstick said, as a sequined dress caught her eye. “Ooooh,” she cooed, “look at this one.”

“It's only $7,500,” Ashley said. She picked up a black-and-white taffeta number with Swarovski crystals detailing the bodice. “And look at this one. It's kind of flappery.”