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“I’m not interrupting, am I?” I asked, suddenly aware that she seemed so focused on what she was doing, I was more of an obstruction than an office buddy at the moment.
“No, no. Just wanted to tie this article up before lunch,” she said, saving her file and turning to me.
Finish an article before lunch? When had Rebecca become so efficient? Not having the time to ponder such matters, I started in, “Did you hear about Sandra?”
“Oh, yeah. Marcy already made the rounds,” Rebecca said, rolling her eyes.
“I’m thinking of going for it.”
She hesitated for the briefest moment, but long enough for me to see the surprise on her face.
“You don’t think I should?” I said, suddenly becoming defensive. Just what was it about me that Rebecca thought wasn’t senior features editor material yet? And who was she to judge, having signed on only a year and a half ago?
“No, no. That’s not it.” Then she smiled. “You should go for it. If that’s what you really want.”
“Of course it’s what I want! I mean, what am I going to do? Sit around here for another four years, making the same schlocky salary? After all, it’s not like these opportunities happen every day. It took Sandra seven and a half years to up and leave that position open.”
“That’s true.” Then she sighed. “Things haven’t been the same for her since her husband left.”
“Gosh, I just heard about that office shocker. They only got married two years ago. Didn’t that throw you for a loop?”
“Yeah,” Rebecca replied, “I always thought she and Roger had the perfect marriage.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Uh-huh. Sandra had Nash and me over to dinner about a year ago. She went to Sarah Lawrence, too, graduated a few years ahead of me. I guess she figured we had a lot in common. It was a fun evening. Sandra’s really down to earth, once you get to know her.”
“Yeah…” Now this bit of news really threw me. I never would have envisioned Sandra and Rebecca as pals. Again my suspicions about Rebecca were aroused. Just how entrenched in this loony little world was she, anyway?
I found out, moments later, when I heard her next words.
“I think you should go for the senior features editor position, Emma,” she began, “if you feel that’s the direction you want to take.” Then she looked down briefly at her hands clasped in her lap, before meeting my eyes again. “But to be fair, I think you should know that I’ve already applied for the position myself.”
Confession: My inner career woman has left the building.
“Who does she think she is?” Alyssa asked, her brow furrowed in indignation as she stared at me across the table in the dimly lit restaurant. We had met for dinner at Bar Six, one of our favorite haunts in the West Village. Jade was joining us, too, though she had yet to arrive. We sat in the bar section, so that Jade could smoke once she got here, and drank cosmopolitans while I filled Alyssa in on the gory details of my newfound competition with, of all people, Rebecca.
“She hasn’t even put in the time,” I complained. “Of course, she has put in the time with good old Sandra. Sandra probably primed her on how to get the position without even trying.” I took another slug of my drink, hoping to dull my senses and ease the irritating ache between my eyeballs. “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?”
“What kind of thing is happening to you now?” Jade asked, arriving just in time to hear me gripe. She quickly swooped down to embrace each of us in greeting, before sliding into the third chair.
“Rebecca is competing with Emma for a senior features editor position at Bridal Best,” Alyssa informed her.
Jade’s gaze swung to me, assessing. “You’re going for a senior features editor position?”
“Yes,” I hissed at her. On the defensive, I argued, “Why is that so hard to believe? I’ve been writing and editing for the magazine for the past four years—and quite brilliantly, I might add. Just the other day my boss commended me on a piece I wrote about undergarments to wear with your gown. It was positively brilliant—I mean, for a piece on underwear. I even had this great inspiration for the title—‘The Bride Beneath.’”
I sat back, breathing hard, as I contemplated Jade’s carefully blank expression.
“Sounds…clever,” she said, lighting a cigarette as the waiter approached to take our order. He was young and gorgeous, as the waiters at Bar Six tend to be, with a vaguely Mediterranean look about him. I watched Jade give him the complete once-over as I retreated into myself to sulk.
I knew what was going through Jade’s mind. She was thinking about the fact that I had suddenly pledged my heart and soul, staked my entire self-worth, on a career that up until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t care less about. But she was wrong. She didn’t know that during the Derrick Years, my role at Bridal Best had taken on epic proportions. It had become my whole raison d’être. No one knew—besides Derrick, of course. Derrick, who had always admired the fact that I was one of the lucky few who had actually gotten a day job writing, while he had done everything from waiting tables to walking dogs in order to make a few bucks while practicing his “art.” Derrick, who admired me so much, he hadn’t even called yet to let me know he’d settled into his life without me.
When I tuned in again, I heard Alyssa calmly laying out the reasons why I was eminently more qualified for the senior features editor position than Rebecca was. Good ol’ Alyssa. I could always count on her to stand by me while I harbored my illusions. Jade, on the other hand, was a bit trickier.
“Okay, okay,” Jade was saying now. “I see your point.” The waiter came back, carefully placing a cosmopolitan before her while she took in his forearm, his hands. Then she glanced up at us with a look that said, “Look who’s coming for dinner.” Once the waiter had safely escaped her perusal for the moment, she lifted her glass. “So if we’re going to get behind this promotion thing, let’s do it right.” When we had lifted our glasses, too, she said, “To Emma’s next incarnation—as Leader of the Stepford Editors.”
We froze, glasses in midair. Alyssa cracked an exasperated smile. “Jade!”
“Okay, okay. Forget it. Let’s move on to a toast I can really get behind,” she said, sending a last cutting glance in my direction. “To our waiter. For being just luscious enough to keep alive that lingering hope that I will have sex again.”
We clinked, Alyssa laughing and me relieved that we had moved on to topics that didn’t have anything to do with my sudden touchiness over my next career move. Though Jade wouldn’t allow me to delude myself, she knew when to back off.
“So what’s going on with you?” Alyssa said to Jade. “Emma told me you met a great guy. Ted, was it?”
“Ted.” Jade sighed. Then, sipping her drink, she shrugged. “I guess Emma didn’t get to the part where Ted disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“What happened?” Alyssa asked.
“What else? He didn’t call.” She stamped out her cigarette, then gave another shrug.
Though she carefully tried to mask it, I saw something in Jade’s eyes which made me think this particular failure somehow got her where she lived. I wondered why. Then figured it was probably because Ted had been the first guy she’d ever dated who had disappeared into that giant vacuum of Men Who Never Call. It was the kind of void that left a woman aching not with heartbreak, but a resounding why? which tended to turn against her rather than him, with responses like “Maybe I’m too fat too boring too broke too confident too insecure too aggressive too passive too happy too depressed….” But this thought was followed by the realization that this was not Jade’s normal line of thinking but mine. Still, even the strongest could waver in the face of the silent-but-deadly blow-off. Perhaps she needed another reminder that Ted Terrific was not so terrific anyway.
“I read somewhere once that muscle size is directly disproportionate to brain size,” I began. “Didn’t you mention that Ted was pretty thick in the muscle department?”
Jade gave a half smile. “All right, all right. I know what you’re trying to do. And no, I said that Ted was lean. Like a surfer. But that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” Alyssa asked, and I could see she, too, was aware of some simmering unease in Jade.
“The point is, I thought we really had some kind of connection. I mean, we liked the same music. He was into the same clubs. And he even liked Simply Red. And you know how I feel about Simply Red.”
“Well, it was only one date,” said Alyssa, ever the logical one.
“One amazing date,” Jade argued. “And that doesn’t happen too often.”
Jade had a point. If there was one thing I knew, it was that in a city this large, where any sort of interaction with the opposite sex is swallowed up by the rush of time or traffic or whatever it is that keeps people from their mating rituals, one meaningful evening with a man constituted a serious beginning to something. Which was why losing Derrick, after two years of sharing everything from soulful conversation to toothbrushes, was something just short of disaster.
“They’re all heartless bastards,” I chimed in.
“Yeah, well, if I ever hope to have sex again, I have to figure out how to keep one of those heartless bastards around long enough.”
“Maybe you’re focusing too hard on the end result, Jade,” Alyssa said. “Maybe you should take a more Zen-like approach to this whole dating thing.”
“Easy for you to say when you have a live-in boy toy,” Jade said, though it was hard to envision Richard as a boy toy in his dark suits and tasseled loafers. Don’t get me wrong—with his chiseled good looks and tall, athletic build he was quite delectable. But Richard was the kind of man women fantasized about marching down the aisle with, not swinging from a rope in the Tarzan room of the Fantasy Land Motel. Then again, Jade did like to say I lacked vision when it came to men.
“The grass is always greener,” Alyssa said, dropping her gaze.
“Oh?” Jade countered, warming to the subject. “Let’s see about that. It’s been six weeks and four days since I last had sex—and I’m not counting Carl, because I’m talking penetration here. When was the last time you and Richard did it? And if you say last night, I will be forced to be envious.”
Still regarding her glass, Alyssa replied, “Three months ago.”
“What?” Jade and I said in unison.
Alyssa looked up at us and sighed. “Well, that’s not exactly true. We did have sex about three weeks ago, but it was the kind of effort that’s better left unmentioned. All mechanics, no emotions. As if we’re just blowing off some steam after a hard day at work.”
“What’s going on with you guys?” Jade asked.
“I don’t know. Everything has just been…different between us the past few months. As if we’re only going through the motions of a relationship.”
“Maybe you’re just in a rut,” I said, desperate to find any reason why things had suddenly gone astray for the last two people in the world I was sure were Meant-to-Be. “I mean, isn’t Richard trying to make partner? He’s got to be under enormous pressure at work. And you’ve been working on that class action suit for quite some time….”
“Maybe.” Alyssa sighed. “But it’s like we don’t really even see each other anymore. I feel more like a roommate. The girl he shares the laundry hamper with.”
“You just gotta shake things up,” Jade said. “Do something to remind him that he’s living with a beautiful, intelligent woman who any guy would snatch up.” Then she arched her brows as sudden inspiration hit. “What you need is some serious competition to suddenly show up, give old Richard a run for his money.”
Alyssa immediately glanced at me with a guilty smile, and I couldn’t help but smile back, thinking of her vet and imagining how a man who probably spent a good deal of his day dodging dog feces was going to give Richard, a successful corporate lawyer who could probably eat him for lunch, a run for his money.
“What’s going on?” Jade asked, suspicious.
I looked at Alyssa, leaving the confession to her.
“Well…the truth is…I have met someone else.”
“You’re kidding,” Jade said, and I had a feeling she was wondering, as I had, how Alyssa always managed to keep the men coming, no matter what her circumstances. “Who? And most importantly, how?”
“You have to promise not to laugh.” Alyssa looked hard into Jade’s eyes.
“Laugh, nothing. If you’ve got some method I should know about, who am I to judge?”
“Okay. Well, I don’t know if this method would work for you, because it requires you to get a pet.” Alyssa paused, glancing at me for reassurance. “You see, Lulu hasn’t been feeling well lately, so I took her to the vet. And, well, the old vet retired, leaving his practice to a new, young…gorgeous…vet.”
“You’re sleeping with Lulu’s vet?”
“No!” Alyssa and I shouted in unison, the sound of my own anxious denial making me realize just how important it was for me that Alyssa didn’t do anything to jeopardize what she had with Richard.
“Then what? You’re sharing housebreaking tips? Flea baths? What?”
“Nothing is going on really,” Alyssa said. “It’s just…”
“She has a crush on him,” I said, butting in. “You know, puppy love.” Then I glanced at Alyssa. “Uh, no pun intended.”
“I don’t know if it’s just a crush,” Alyssa protested. “I mean, it’s just like you said you felt with Ted, Jade. I feel a real connection with him.”
“Yeah, well,” Jade said, “you can take that for what it’s worth, Alyssa.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” Alyssa began.
“Look, no apologies needed, Lys,” Jade countered. “There’s just one thing you need to think about, and think hard. Just how important is this cute little pooper scooper to you? Enough to risk losing Richard for?”
When Alyssa didn’t respond, I turned to gape at her. “Alyssa!”
“Hey,” Jade said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back in a sort of blasé-about-relationships pose she’d adopted ever since Michael had torn whatever romantic streak she’d formerly had out of her. “If it means that much to you, I say go for it.”
“Jade, don’t encourage—” I began, but Jade leaned forward then, confidingly.
“But whatever you do, please do it outside of his office. I can’t imagine all those wee wee pads and antiseptics making for much atmosphere.”
“Ha, ha,” Alyssa said, lifting her drink to her mouth to try to hide her smile.
A smile, I might add, which said she was planning on doing just what Jade suggested, and with a man whose only distinction so far was in making Lulu’s most recent bellyache go away.
I had to face facts. Alyssa and Richard were truly on the rocks. And Jade, who I saw light up as our handsome waiter returned, had gone from Girl Who Couldn’t Get Enough to Girl Who Couldn’t Get It At All.
Then there was me, of course, who didn’t have a hope in the world of convincing the man I loved that he’d just made the greatest mistake in the world by moving across the country away from me, especially considering the fact that the creep hadn’t even taken a moment to call yet, even to say hi.
The question that was stuck in the recesses of my mind, wedged in tight by anxiety, suddenly wafted up, unbidden.
What would become of us?
Confession: Things could definitely get worse.
After an evening that ended with Jade—egged on by Alyssa—successfully securing our waiter’s phone number, I woke up the next morning resolved to make myself a smash success at Bridal Best. Maybe it was Alyssa’s encouragement, or maybe it was a rebellion against Jade’s utter disbelief in my decision, but I wound up spending part of Sunday preparing a presentation to make to Caroline on Monday, and giving myself a French manicure that I hoped would somehow raise me to some new professional level. On Monday I donned the only thing in my closet resembling a suit—a pair of black trousers that didn’t look too faded against the one black blazer I owned, and a white shirt that looked less than my others like your standard T—and headed for the illustrious midtown office where my new destiny awaited me. My intention was to discuss my decision with Caroline and get her approval to move on to the next step: persuading the Powers-That-Be at Bridal Best that not only was I the best candidate for senior features editor they could hope to have, but that I was, in fact, of one mind with the editorial mantra “Give me marriage or give me death.”
Once I arrived, I walked with purpose to my cubicle. I kept my gaze focused forward to avoid seeing any raised eyebrows over my sudden upgrade in office attire. “Confidence,” Alyssa had said as she hugged me goodbye after dinner. “All you need to do is show them how sure you are of your ability to do the job.” But all I could do once I sat at my desk in order to practice my seemingly unrehearsed speech was think about Sandra and Rebecca, sitting over lunch while Sandra dictated the surefire route to senior features editor to her protégée. How could I compete against that kind of inside track? Everyone knew what an incestuous business this was. It was as if the most coveted positions were carefully kept open for those chosen few who managed to emulate their superiors so perfectly that the Powers-That-Be couldn’t help but strive to make the little mini versions of themselves grow up to be the new Powers-That-Be.
Now one could argue that Rebecca, with her perfect boyfriend and her perfect bob and her stylish little silk blouses and knee-length skirts, did not even remotely resemble Sandra, who tended more toward a disheveled, layered look. But I was certain now that a bond had formed between them from the moment Rebecca had joined the staff. At the time, Sandra had recently joined the Happily Married, and I imagined her taking one look at Rebecca, with her pedigree schooling and her upwardly mobile boyfriend, and seeing enough of herself and her happy little life to reach out. After all, it had been only mere months since Sandra had landed her own financially stable husband and Upper East Side Duplex, and I’m certain she couldn’t help but see a dinner party with Rebecca and her beau as nothing less than a prime opportunity to bring out the Lenox china she had obsessed over and ultimately registered for in the months before she marched off to her ill-fated marriage. And despite the fact that Sandra had now, for whatever reason, just joined the Disastrously Divorced category, I knew that ultimately she had shared something with Rebecca that night—something that would only grow now that Sandra had given up her role as Successful and Married and needed to hand the mantle on to someone else. Someone as polished, as poised, as perfect as Rebecca.
How was I going to compete with that? Me, with my scuffed pumps pulled from the bottom of the closet and phantom boy friend?
“Looking sharp,” came Marcy Keller’s voice as she popped her head around the wall of my cubicle and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
Feeling horribly grateful for the compliment, even coming from a woman more known for her calculation than her camaraderie, I actually smiled at her, which gave her just enough invitation to slide her spindly form into my guest chair.
“So you’re finally going to do it, huh?” she asked, in a kind of harsh whisper that suggested I was going to take a machine gun to my colleagues rather than go in to my superior to ask for a promotion.
“No better time than the present,” I replied with false bravado.
“I agree,” she said, nodding vigorously, eyebrows arched above her big black frames. “Especially since Rebecca has already put together her clips and her résumé and handed them in.”
“She has?”
“Of course.”
I glanced over the gaping “to be filed” box where I had stuffed everything of personal relevance, from bedraggled clips and old vacation memos to takeout menus for local eateries. “Do you think I should put together something before I go in to Caroline?”
Her gaze followed mine to the pile of papers, and I saw her eyes widen briefly. “Nah,” she replied, swatting her hand through the air in a gesture that suggested I was worrying for nothing. “That would take too long. You’re best off going in there and at least letting her know you are interested. Then, afterward, you could pull together something for when you go in to see Patricia.”
Suddenly I saw the benefits of befriending Marcy. She was a wealth of information on how to negotiate the politics of getting promoted. I hadn’t even thought of putting together my clips. I just assumed Patricia would have seen my work at one point or another. I mean, she is the editor-in-chief of this fine periodical.
