Vanity Fare Page 2

  And Hugh was at fault, too, even before he cheated on me. He certainly didn’t try very hard. As soon as he got his JD, he became Mr. Big Lawyer and seemed almost embarrassed to have a Brooklyn Mom as his wife. So instead of talking to me, Mr. Run Away from Problems had gone out and had an affair.

  And now there was no money. Not even for jeans.

  I was saved from my musings by the phone. I sprawled across the much-too-big-now bed to grab it from the nightstand.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Molly. It’s John. I’ve got something for you.”

  John was a friend from college who was friends with both me and Hugh. Now he ran a marketing company and hired me to do occasional copyediting on his medical journal clients. A job. Which usually meant cash!

  “I’ve got an assignment for you. Something more involved than what you usually do for me.” He continued, “Can you come in today to discuss it? I want to give you some samples of the work, or else I’d just tell you over the phone.” I tried to figure out if I could make it in and out by the time I had to pick Aidan up. I checked my watch, hopped off the bed, and walked to the closet, opening the door wide.

  “Sure,” I replied, pulling my shoulder up to hold the phone so I could start going through the clothes. “Can you give me a clue?”

  He laughed. “Let’s just say it’s one of your favorite things. Is an hour okay? I know you have to be back by three.”

  “An hour. I’ll be there.” I hung up and stared at the closet, the phone dangling from my hand. The black pants? Or maybe the black pants? Hm, how about the black pants? God, there must be at least ten pairs in there, and I hadn’t worn one of them in over a year.

  I tossed the phone on the bed and pulled one of them out, resolving to wear the remaining nine by this time next year. A woman’s got to have goals, after all.

  At last I was ready. My black pants were on, my black sweater was on, my makeup (black eyeliner, natch, although my lipstick was red. I had thrown out my black lipstick when I gave up the Mohawk) had even gone on without a fight. I was ready.

  I looked at myself in the mirror, checking for obvious damage. Besides the smattering of gray threading through my black hair, I didn’t look too bad. I might even be so bold as to say I looked pretty good. I wasn’t fat, I wasn’t too wrinkly, and my eyebrows were as close to perfect as I could get them, at least without fifty dollars’ worth of hair removal help. If I squinted and turned to the side, I really did look like Sela Ward, like Keisha kept telling me, only minus the fame and the acting career. Maybe there was hope for me after all.

  Ignoring the seductive raised script of Love’s Scoundrel beckoning from my nightstand, I grabbed a copy of Henry James’s The Ambassadors off the bookshelf as I walked out the door. If I wanted to do any teaching at all, I had to refresh my memory of the classics, right?

  The wind whipped through my coat as I walked the few blocks to the subway. Although it was midday, there were loads of people walking the streets. What did they do to make money? Were they all independently wealthy? Maybe some of them were writers. Maybe one of them had written Love’s Scoundrel. Maybe she was the Mom-jeans-wearing woman holding an enormous cup of coffee from the super-pricy café up the block.

  After I passed her, a man almost bumped into me but hopped the curb right before impact. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, but had on a megaheavy fisherman’s sweater, a cranberry-red cashmere scarf, and a matching hat perched on top of his dreadlocks. He apologized to me in a lovely Caribbean accent, then walked quickly ahead, stopping to buy a Styrofoam cup full of the mysterious hot liquid the tiny Hispanic women sold on the street. One of these days, I was going to buy some myself and figure out what it was.

  I loved Brooklyn.

  Once on the subway, I avoided having to delve right into James by reading the subway advertisements ranged along the walls.

  There were ads for a series on HBO that was “Compelling. Breathtaking. Beautiful.”

  If they made a show of my life, it’d be “Boring. Weepy. Forty.” Fuck, even I wasn’t interested in that, and it was my life. Another ad caught my eye: “What would it be like to make a difference in a child’s life?”

  I got up, ignoring the furtive glances sent my way by my fellow passengers. Ever since 9/11, people—that is, New Yorkers—had been friendlier, but also much more suspicious of out-of-the-ordinary behavior. Giving up your seat in a full subway car was definitely out of the ordinary.

  I went over to the ad. Its plain, simple font declared “Become an NYC Teaching Fellow, and teach in a low-performing public school while getting your master’s degree. Applicants receive a full salary as well as subsidies toward your degree.”

  An answer to my prayers, and I hadn’t even been praying. Not for that, at least—if Hugh suddenly gouged his own eyes out, then I’d know my prayers had been heard.

  I pulled out a pen I’d jammed into my purse and scribbled the URL down on the back of a Citibank statement. Twenty-four hours ago I would have been grateful just to have a job with free coffee. Maybe there was actually something I could do that I’d enjoy. That would be a career.

  Plus John had an assignment important enough to necessitate an in-person meeting, a deviation from our normal e-mail correspondence.

  What kind of job was it? It certainly couldn’t be anything remotely like what I had edited for him before: medical equipment journals with meaty (ugh, literally) advertorials on the proper procedure on removing a kidney (so much easier with the Kidney-You-Not 3000!) or the ten best ways to distinguish vaginal warts from herpes with a do-it-yourself kit, no less.

  I got off at the Twenty-third Street stop and trudged up the few blocks to John’s office, feeling virtuous because I passed Starbucks without stopping for a venti. Or an application.

  John was in the reception area, a nicely appointed room in soft, muted colors, the kind with names that would be better in a sandwich: avocado, eggplant, mustard. He looked up as if he had been waiting for me, although I was guessing he might have been motivated by the receptionist. She had dark red hair, which she was tossing with insouciance as I walked in. Her emerald-colored blouse was so low cut I could see a light dusting of freckles on her chest, which was as impressive as her insouciance.

  “Ah, there you are, Molly,” John said, giving his receptionist one last look. She lowered her lids, then gave me a sidelong glance that said “Yeah, I’m hot, you’re not.”

  Yeah, well, at least I’m not spotted like an overripe banana.

  John had always been the most fashionable of Hugh and my college friends, and since his business had taken off, he had allowed himself the luxury of looking good in an expensive, pampered metrosexual kind of way. Today he was wearing jeans—definitely not Levi’s—even I knew cost well into the triple digits, and a boldly patterned dress shirt with its tails hanging out. His short brown hair was cut just so, and his five o’clock shadow was perfect for noon.

  “Come on in here,” John said, propelling himself off the desk and walking farther into the office. He took my coat and hung it up on a silver hook, then tossed a piece of paper onto the desk and poked his head over one of the cubicles. “Hey, Matt, can you fax that agreement back?” He looked at me and jerked his head toward his office. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get coffee. Milk, one sugar, right?”

  I nodded. There was a special place in heaven reserved for people who remembered how you took your coffee. I sat down in the chair on the left, facing John’s desk. It was made of glass and tubular steel, the kind of desk fancy male executives had in the movies. In the movies, though, they never had reams of paper spread out all over it, or a fuzzy, waving gremlin wearing an I MYRTLE BEACH T-shirt. John had kept some of his roots, at least.

  “Here you go.” John set the coffee cup on the edge of the desk. I picked it up and took a sip. John reached down to the floor and pulled some sort of pastry from a bag. Even from across the desk, I could smell the butter. He tore it in half and handed me the bigger piece.<
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  I took a bite of the pastry. Double mmm. It was light, flavorful, and had just enough cinnamon. I wasn’t sure what it was, some sort of Danish muffin hybrid—a Duffin? A Manish?—but I knew I was going to eat every bite. And, if I wasn’t careful, I might end up licking the bag, too.

  “Well.” John leaned back in his chair, still holding on to his uneaten pastry. If he didn’t eat it soon, I was going to lunge across the desk and snatch it with my teeth.

  “I have a new client. A company that needs something a little different from our usual expertise.” John was using his Corporate America voice, a language I had mastered about as well as I had being able to tell my local Chinese restaurant that I did not want green peppers in my hot spicy tofu. Which is to say not at all.

  I almost dropped the whatever-it-was in my lap, especially since I had just discovered an escaped crumb resting on my upper lip. Gotcha! No crumbs allowed. Not since the bastard walked out on me, at least.

  “So what kind of client is it?” I tried to look as if my most pressing thought wasn’t how to wrest the remainder of the pastry away from him.

  “The bakery that makes what you’re eating is my client.”

  I was confused. “Is this some sort of pharmaceutical thing?” Because, ugh, if it was I didn’t want to know what it cured. Reading John’s usual clients’ work was enough. I didn’t want to actually ingest it.

  He laughed, waving the food around in his hand. My eyes followed it like a tracking device.

  “No, a bakery. Just a bakery. It’s going to open in a couple of months, and the owner-chef is a new client. I don’t know if I told you, but I’ve got a new partner. She’ll be the lead on the project, but she needs help, someone who’s clever with words and knows a little bit about how we do things here. So of course I thought of you.”

  John poked the fuzzy gremlin with a fancy fountain pen, not meeting my eyes. I wondered what his new partner was like.

  “Me as the point person? I haven’t done copywriting before, not really.”

  “The rest of my staff just got a huge project thrown on them, so I don’t have anyone else who can. I know you can do this—you did press releases at your last job, and you’ve done some marketing copy on a few of those medical journals.” He waved his hand toward his wall. “And I’d like to have someone on the project I can trust.” He eyed me meaningfully as he popped the remaining piece in his mouth.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “But tell me more about your partner. I didn’t know you had taken one on.”

  John ran his finger around the inside of his collar. “Her name is Natalie Duran.”

  “Like Duran Duran?” Is she hungry like the wolf?

  He gave an absentminded bobble of his head. “She was at OM.” He said the name as if I would recognize it, so I nodded my head in agreement, as if I actually knew. “But she wanted to branch out and do some more interesting work. She brought several clients over with her, we’ll be expanding beyond medical marketing, and this project is the first new one we’ve taken on.

  “What I need from you,” he continued, fastening me with what I could only surmise was his Businessman’s Stare, “is to make sure the work gets done, and done well. Natalie is a hotshot, she hasn’t worked in a smaller firm before, and I want to make sure we don’t screw this up.”

  “So . . . ,” I said, tracing the curves of the chair with my finger, “you want me to keep an eye on her? And what, report back to you?”

  He smiled in relief. “Exactly.”

  “That’s spying, John.” I felt myself start to sweat. “And she’s your partner. If you don’t trust her, why are you working with her?”

  “Because,” he said, leaning back into his chair and crossing his legs, “she can land the clients I’ve only dreamed of before. She brought Simon in, for example.” He paused. “It pays five thousand dollars.”

  Oh, well, then. For that kind of money, I’d change my name to Molly Hari.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Thank you. I’ll take it. So tell me more.”

  “Simon—that’s the owner—is opening a bakery near the New York Public Library, the big one on Forty-second Street. He wants to do something relating to both the library and his store. He needs a hook.”

  “Like, to drag people in?” I was being deliberately obtuse. It gave me time to think.

  John grimaced in that “you’re being deliberately obtuse” kind of way. “No. To get people talking about his shop. I think you can help Natalie with the copy—you’re the worst punster I’ve ever met, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. She’ll do the big-picture concepting, of course, but the fleshing-out stuff will be you.”

  I sat back, finishing the rest of the coffee. “Sounds doable,” I said in a hesitant voice.

  “Great. Look, I’ll just buzz Simon and set up a meeting. He’s very hands-on, he wants to be intimately involved with the project.” He leaned back in his chair. “Simon was the pastry chef at The Modern, he’s appeared on some of those cooking shows, too. The buzz is growing on him, and this shop will be so much more than a bakery.”

  “And what about Natalie? When will I meet her?”

  He scowled. Was it just me, or was he not at all pleased with his new partner?

  “She’s out on calls this afternoon. I’d rather you met Simon alone for the first time. I’ll bring Natalie up-to-date later.”

  No, it wasn’t just me. There was something fishy about John’s new partner.

  I looked around John’s office while he punched in the phone number. He had the magazine covers of his various projects framed and hanging on the wall. My favorite had to be “Have a Heart,” published by a company that made artificial hearts. Although I also appreciated “Playing Footsie,” put out by the National Podiatrists’ Association.

  John hung up the phone just as I was envisioning what “Intestinal Fortitude” or “Braindead” would cover.

  “Great news! I got Simon on his cell, and he’s actually right down the block. He’ll be here in a few.” John checked his watch, an overly large, overly masculine timepiece strapped to his hairy wrist. “You’ve got at least half an hour before you have to be back on the subway, right?”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. Work, of sorts. Money, of green.

  John checked his BlackBerry for a few minutes, then sat back in his chair. He looked hesitant. “I want to let you in on what Natalie’s done thus far.” He scowled. “Not very much, actually. Not that I want either of us to let Simon know that.”

  I nodded encouragingly. “Of course not.”

  He sighed and planted his elbows on his desk. “So far she’s come up with Books and Bread as a name.”

  We both frowned. He continued, “But she’s good enough that if she really concentrates, she’ll be able to nail something.”

  That sounded unpleasant. As did the name she’d thought of.

  A male voice down the hall conjured up much pleasanter visions. He had a British accent, the upper-crust, devil-may-care Hugh Grant kind of accent. The kind that made me a little weak at the knees, so I was glad I was sitting down.

  “John, just give me a sec while I flirt with this lovely lady out here.” Only when he said it, it sounded as if he had just said something much naughtier. Judging by her husky laugh, the redhead agreed. And that voice came from someone who made those pastries?

  There had to be something wrong with him. I held my breath as the door opened.

  He walked into the room, and I just about fainted. He was gorgeous.

  He had curly chestnut brown hair, the kind that must’ve trailed romantically in a breeze, green eyes—green, not hazel—and a dimple. I was surprised I didn’t faint, actually. He was tall and slim with a very British detachment to his walk.

  And he was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and black flat-front slacks, and he had on faux Beatles boots: shiny, pointed, and dangerous.

  Why wasn’t I fainting? I was older than I thought.

  The God spoke.

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nbsp; “You must be John’s secret weapon,” he said, making that sound much dirtier than it should. It simply was not fair that he looked like that, sounded like that, and apparently could bake like that. He held out his hand and smiled. “I’m Simon.”

  “Hi,” I said, staring up into his face. Green eyes. Brilliant, emerald green eyes. Man, did I love green eyes. Hugh’s eyes were brown, a fact I’d always secretly resented.

  Another man had apparently walked in while I was gawking but stayed just inside the door, leaning his back against the wall. Simon gestured toward the guy without looking at him.

  “This is Nick. He represents our American investors.”

  Nick nodded. Ah, the quiet, forbidding type.

  John rushed into the conversation. “Simon and Nick are in from London, from Simon’s home office. Of course, Nick is from here, but Simon—”

  “I’m from over there,” Simon finished, taking a seat next to me. He swung one long, lean leg over the other. I brought my finger up to my mouth to make sure I wasn’t drooling. I wasn’t, but I did find another crumb. I stuck my finger in my mouth to lick it off, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

  He did. He smiled, a knowing, sensual smirk that made his eyes crinkle up at the corners.

  “You like my baked goods, then?” Simon’s eyes glowed.

  He definitely knew what he was saying. A slow heat began to build in my stomach. It wasn’t the coffee.

  “Yes,” John answered, “she was practically licking the bag.”

  Simon’s lids dropped halfway down, and he swept his gaze from my feet to my head. “Was she? I would’ve liked to see that.”

  Oh. Dear. He was . . . flirting with me. It had been so long, I wasn’t sure, but it certainly felt like flirting.

  The other man, Nick, chose that moment to speak up. Good thing, since I wasn’t quite ready for the flirting thing. “We’ve only got fifteen minutes,” he said, in a brusque voice. He definitely had an American accent, a glaring, flat contrast to Simon’s lustrous tone. “So perhaps we can talk about what we came here to talk about?”