The Pink Ghetto (6 page)

“You check
every
package?”

She frowned. “Is that nuts?”

“Um….” After all, she was my boss. But no wonder she hadn’t taken a vacation in forever.

“You’re right. It is.” She released a long breath and combed her hand through her frazzly hair. “I mean, she’s my assistant, for heaven’s sake. I shouldn’t have to sneak behind her and double check every little parcel.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

Rita chuckled a little, then stopped just as suddenly. “Maybe this one last time.” Before I could get in a word about guidelines, she darted toward the hallway.

I wandered back to my office, but happened to catch Cassie’s eye as I walked by her open door. I hesitated to ask for her help, but maybe this would be a good icebreaker.

“You wouldn’t happen to have guidelines for the different lines of books, would you?”

She stretched her back as if she had been hunched over a manuscript nonstop since the last time I had seen her. “I think so—let me check.”

She swiveled toward her file cabinet and opened what could have been an advertisement for a perfectly organized file drawer. All the colored tabs were perfectly staggered. No messy stray papers sticking out of file folders.

“When was this picture taken?” I said, pointing to Cassie’s graduation photo.

“High school,” she said as she flicked through her files. “I was salutatorian.”

I made a humming sound of approbation. It seemed expected.

“I should have been valedictorian, but the varsity quarterback had gotten extra credit for doing independent study. All he turned in was a five-page paper on the history of the NFL, but he got as much credit for it as I got for calculus. It was sort of unfair.”

I frowned. It was unfair, and now she kept that photo on her desk as a…a what? A testament to having been passed over? Cheated?

“Here they are!” she said brightly, pulling out a small stack of stapled-together pages. She flipped through a couple of multicolored sheets. “I knew I had restocked recently.”

“Great.”

She smiled up at me. “You can get them from Mercedes’s assistant.”

I froze, momentarily confused. Did this mean Cassie wasn’t sharing? I looked pointedly at the pile of papers in her hand. “I just need one.”

“Oh, no. You’ll need more than that,” she said. “People ask for them every day. You should keep a stack handy.”

“Okay, so if I just took one of yours and made copies….”

She shook her head. “Mercedes wants them all to be uniformly color coded. A different color for each line of books, see?” She flipped through her stack again, to demonstrate. Or to taunt me. “We had a meeting about this a few months ago. Guidelines should be color coded—she doesn’t want the Pulse guidelines to be green, for instance. They should be this pale red color.”

“Uh-huh.” She kept leafing through those guidelines so that it was all I could do not to snatch one out of her hands and make a run for it. She clearly was not going to cough one up. “Okay…guess I’ll ask Mercedes.”

“Her assistant, Lisa, is who you should ask. She usually has a whole stack of them.”

So do you, but a fat lot of good that’s done me.
I grinned at her. “Well! Thanks for your help.”

She tilted her head and aimed a reptilian smile at me. “First day going well?”

“Going great,” I said.

“Terrific!”

I got the guidelines from Mercedes’s assistant without further ado, but the next time I saw Andrea, I had to ask her, “Have you ever sensed any animosity from Cassie?”

“Oh, that one’s a real go-getter,” Andrea said. “And a stickler for the rules, too. It’s probably eating her up inside that you got hired in a level above her.”

I told her about the guideline incident.

Andrea’s brows knit into a puzzled frown. “I’m sure Julie had tip sheets here somewhere…” She turned to my file cabinet. In five seconds, she was handing me a little stack of guidelines.

I sank down in my chair, feeling like a dope. “
Tip sheets,
” I said. “I didn’t think…”

Andrea shrugged. “Give yourself a break. It’s your first day.”

My first day. Right. I needed to get a grip. “Forget what I said about Cassie,” I said. “I’m just being paranoid.”

Andrea laughed. “Maybe, but don’t forget the immortal words of Richard Nixon: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.’”

At six-forty I straggled up the stairs to the building lugging my copy of
The Baby Doctor and the Bodyguard.
Every muscle in my body felt tired, even my mouth from holding it in a tense friendly smile for half the day. I really needed to have a Calgon evening, but unfortunately the apartment was tubless. Maybe I could have a hot shower and relax for a little bit before tackling the editing of the manuscript, which I was determined to make considerable headway on that night.

As I reached the third floor where we lived, the door was flung open. There stood Fleishman, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. “You’re finally home! The pizza’s cold.”

He took my totebag full of manuscript as I dragged myself through the door. “Cold is okay,” I said. Even after pigging out at lunch with my coworkers, I was starving now. “Sitting at a desk all day really gives you an appetite.”

Fleishman had set the little table in what we laughingly called our entertainment area. It was the ten-foot square of space into which we wedged a round eating table, a futon couch, a thirty-five-inch plasma screen television, a bookcase, and the microwave oven. (The kitchen didn’t have room for the microwave.) He had even put out cloth napkins and lit a candle. At the moment I would have been happy to collapse on the couch with a pizza box in my lap and an IV hookup to a box of wine, but it was really thoughtful of him to try to make the apartment nice for the occasion.

Though I wondered what kind of occasion he thought this was. It wasn’t as if I had never worked before.

“Have a seat.” He guided me over to a chair and pressed me into it. “I have to show you the surprise.”

“Oh.” I assumed that this was the surprise—pizza by candlelight. That would have been enough.

But Fleishman had never been one of those people for whom
enough
would suffice. He was fond of over-the-top gestures, and as he skipped back to Wendy’s closet of a room to retrieve whatever he had hidden there, I wondered what on earth he could have gotten. I mean, he had already arranged a wardrobe for me. At the moment, I felt I lacked for nothing except self-confidence and a modicum of editorial know-how.

He came running back with a large cardboard box, which he put carefully on the floor in front of me. It was just a plain brown box, though it had a big white bow around it. I was just so exhausted I couldn’t focus, because it appeared to be moving.

“Open it,” he said.

I frowned at it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“
Open it.
” When I hesitated, he yanked the bow off himself.

After that, I didn’t have to open the box. It opened itself. Suddenly, I was staring into the face of a tan colored puppy. His little pink tongue was sticking out at me, panting like mad, and his paws were scrabbling pointlessly against the cardboard. He wanted out of that box and onto my lap. Onto
someone’s
lap. Like all puppies, the eagerness in his eyes gave you the impression that he wasn’t going to be too particular. Anybody would do.

He yelped. I jumped.

“Isn’t he cute?” Fleishman said. He picked up the puppy and plopped the squirming mound of fur onto my chest. My neck and face were immediately assaulted by that tongue and the Mighty Dog breath that went with it. “His name’s Maxwell.”

“Maxwell?”

“For Maxwell Perkins, the editor. I thought your dog should have a publishing name.”

“
My
dog?” Maxwell let out another yelp, letting me know that was A-OK with him.

“I thought it would suit him better than naming him some lame author name, like Hemingway. That’s so unoriginal. Of course,
Max
isn’t exactly original, either. We could call him Perkins, but people might think we named him for Anthony Perkins—”

It was time to interrupt his soliloquy. “
My
dog?”

“Of course. He’s a gift.”

The dog was having a hard time balancing on my lap, so I put him on the ground. He proceeded to try to crawl up my leg. I had to admit he was awfully cute. His fur was short and bristly in appearance but soft to the touch, and his little face was like something you’d see in a Puppy Chow ad. The tips of his ears folded downward, giving him a look that was goofily rakish.

“He’s a purebred Norfolk terrier,” Fleishman said. “He’s even got papers.”

It was hard to believe something so small and silly looking had a pedigree. Also, pedigree was usually accompanied by a healthy price tag. Last I heard, Fleishman was supposed to be broke. “What did you do, rob a pet store?”

Fleishman laughed. “I put him on American Express.”

“Since when do you have one of those?”

He looked offended. “I’ve been a proud member since ten
AM
this morning.”

“You know AmEx makes you pay off in full at the end of the month, don’t you?”

“Okay, so at the end of the month I’ll find some money.”

Shame he couldn’t have found some when we were scrambling for the rent.

He laughed. “Rebecca, will you lighten up? I charged the pizza, too—and you don’t mind that.”

Speaking of pizza, I grabbed a piece and chewed as I stared at Maxwell. At the first whiff of food, he plopped down on his rump and started to wag his stubby little tale. His big brown eyes melted me. They could have melted the polar ice cap, what was left of it. “Hey Maxwell, you want some pizza?”

“No—no pizza. I got some Science Diet puppy formula.”

He said it with such paternal sternness, I drew back in surprise. “I can’t believe you got a dog. Dogs are a lot of work, you know. They’re a responsibility. They have to be fed regularly, and walked, and housetrained…”

Not to mention, I started thinking about Ann and her Maltese.
No life. Pathetic.
Would that be me soon?

“Yeah, but puppies are so cute,” Fleishman said. “How can you resist?”

Maxwell was chewing on my shoestring. The truth was, I couldn’t resist. Outside of a goldfish, I hadn’t had a pet since I was a little kid. I had always wanted a dog.

“I felt it was time,” Fleishman said. “We’re getting older, you know. Besides, won’t it be nice to have a warm body to come home to?”

I glanced into Fleishman’s eyes and felt the pizza like a lump in my throat. I looked back down at Maxwell, who was still gazing at me adoringly. Or maybe it was just hungrily. It
would
be nice to have a warm body waiting for me, I supposed, even if it was canine. And as long as I kept food in my hand, I would always have his undivided attention. How many relationships could you say that about?

“So what do you say…” Fleishman looked at me. “Can we keep him, ma?”

I laughed. “Did you really think I could get rid of
that?
”

As if knowing his cue, Maxwell barked. Which reminded me. “Did you check this out with the landlord?”

“It’s okay. I bribed the super when I got home.”

“How did you do that?”

“Cash advance.”

I would have loved to lecture on the fact that he would regret being so financially reckless someday, but the fact was that he probably wouldn’t. Fleishman lived in a parallel universe where the chickens never came home to roost. Or when they did come home to roost, they ended up laying golden eggs.

“So how was your day?” he asked. “I mean, up to now. I know you’re blissfully happy now.”

“Half okay and half awful.” I told him about what had happened with Cassie after I talked to him on the phone. “I think she has it in for me, I really do. If you could have seen the look in her eye when she was sitting there with those tip sheets…”

“Some people are just like that.”

“Right.” And some people were just psychopaths. I was pretty sure I had put my finger on our office psycho, but I didn’t have the evidence. “Plus I have all this work to do now.”

“Homework?” He looked alarmed at the idea of work being brought into the house, and eyed my tote bag suspiciously.

“Just till I’m caught up.”

“When will that be?”

I thought for a moment. “Somewhere in the year 2010.”

“Did you bring any more books home?” he asked.

“Just the one I’m editing.”

He seemed disappointed.

“I’d better get to work,” I said, reluctantly. It would have been so nice to play with the puppy and then just conk out.

Fleishman got up. “I’ll take Max around the block.”

I looked doubtfully at that unruly lump of fur. “Does he walk on a leash yet?”

“No, but he enjoys gnawing on it. I’ll just carry him down and set him on a patch of grass, if I can find any.”

He left and I got out the book. I was already so tired, I wondered how I would be able to stay awake long enough to get anything done. I spent ten minutes just getting myself situated—sharpening pencils, brewing a pot of coffee, doodling on a pad of Post-it notes.

When Fleishman and Max came back, I hadn’t even started yet.

“I’ll just sit here and read,” Fleishman said. “I won’t bother you at all.”

He settled on the couch with a copy of
Forgotten Nights
by Joy Silver, an amnesia book I think he had already read. Max proceeded to chew on the cover. The next time I looked up, the book had dropped to the floor next to the futon, and Fleishman was asleep with the puppy on his chest.

I wished I had a camera.

Then I shook my head. I was entertaining thoughts I shouldn’t. Like how sweet it was of Fleishman to bring Max home, even though the thought of taking care of a dog for the next fifteen years made me a little panicky. It was hard not to feel, there in that little room with just the three of us, that it had been a rather couply gesture. Not that we were a couple in the real sense…but still. It made me wonder if he still ever thought of me as girlfriend material.