I went to work the next morning dressed to kill—or, rather, to attract the attention of hunky Michael Ollin in Business Affairs. Since I didn’t know him very well and didn’t have a lot of time to get to know him, I thought some slinky attire was in order. Normally circumspect in terms of my appearance, I threw on a clingy black dress, strappy black heels, and a little more makeup than usual.
“Hi, Michael. How’re you doing?” I said after sashaying into his office. As a pretext for the visit, I was carrying a file containing the expenses an author had incurred on his book tour. This author had a drinking problem and expected us to pay his triple-digit liquor bills.
“I’m super,” said Michael, who was tall, dark, and handsome. Oh, and he was tan, and it wasn’t even summer yet. He was dressed nicely, too—expensive suit and tie, pinstriped shirt, wing-tipped shoes. I wasn’t crazy about the gargantuan Rolex and the equally gargantuan gold bracelet, but even more off-putting than his jewelry was his cologne. Not only was it overpowering in its woodiness and muskiness but he applied it with a very heavy hand. In other words, his office needed to be fumigated.
“I was hoping to talk to you about some author expenses,” I said as I imagined asking him to pretend to be engaged to me. I also imagined telling him he’d have to wash the cologne off his face, not to mention have his entire wardrobe dry-cleaned, before I could even think of putting him in the same room with Tara.
“Sure. Have a seat, Amy. You’re looking mighty fine today, by the way. Migh-ty fine. And I don’t mind telling you it’s nice to see a woman dress like a woman for a change. This place isn’t exactly a magnet for bodilicious females.”
Okay, so this wasn’t going to work. There had to be other men inhabiting the offices of L and T—men who’d be up for helping out a coworker but wouldn’t use words like bodilicious.
But just to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t jumping to conclusions or being too judgmental, I hung in a little longer. After we chatted about the alcoholic author, I asked Michael if he was enjoying the warm spring weather.
“You bet,” he said. “I’ve been going to the Hamptons on weekends. You should come out to our place sometime, Amy. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My girlfriend and I.”
His girlfriend? He was flirting with me even though he was seeing somebody else? Living with somebody else?
“Why the look?” he said. “My lady’s very sweet. She gives me my space.”
“Are you saying she lets you—”
“Be with other women? She doesn’t let me. I just do what I want, figuring what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Our Hamptons place has a very private guest room, so if you come out there, I could arrange for us to have lots of time alone together.”
I just stared at him.
“Are you shocked?” he said.
“Of course I’m shocked,” I replied.
“Why? Because I’m an accountant and accountants are supposed to be square?”
“No. Because you’re a human being and human beings are supposed to be trustworthy.”
God, what a creep. It was thanks to men like him that therapists like Marianne had thriving practices.
Fine, so he’s not the one, I thought, calming myself, remembering that I just needed a guy for one night. I mean, how hard could it be to find him?
Even though he’d dumped me for not seeing the merits of The Lord of the Rings, I decided to try Alex Cashman, the science fiction editor, thinking maybe he’d mellowed toward me. He was interesting-looking in an unconventional way—curly brown hair, beard, mustache, suspenders, bow tie, sneakers even when it snowed—and very smart. Smart enough to impress Tara, I figured.
“Hey, Alex,” I said after knocking on his office door. “Mind if I come in?”
He smiled. “Why should I mind?”
Oh good, I thought. Maybe he really has forgotten that he was mad at me about the Hobbit thing.
I entered his office and sat down. “I’ve been thinking about you lately,” I said brazenly, since I didn’t have time to waste. I had to skip the foreplay and find out if the guy was on or off the list. “I was just wondering how you’re doing.”
“That’s funny, because I’ve been thinking about you, too,” he said, playing with his mustache, which didn’t have handlebars but did curve upward at each end.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m glad.” His answer bolstered my confidence and spurred me on. “What I’ve been thinking, Alex, is that we had a good thing going for a while there, you and I.”
“We did,” he agreed. “And I might as well confess that I feel like a pompous ass the way I acted toward you. People don’t have to have the same taste in movies or books or any form of art in order to be compatible as a couple. I see that now.”
“Really? I feel that way, too.” Boy, this was going better than expected. So what if Alex went to Star Trek conventions and spoke in alienspeak when surrounded by like-minded individuals and collected rubbery toy monsters and accessorized his apartment with them? He was bright and presentable, and he’d really liked me once. Maybe he would really like me again—enough to do me a favor and be my fiancé for a night. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m here,” I went on, “because I was hoping we could pick up where we left off and resume our friendship.” I looked down at the floor, shy suddenly.
He reached across his desk and took my hand. “You’re the best, Amy. You always have been.”
I looked up again. “Great. Then let’s have dinner, so I can talk to you about something. How’s tonight, for example? I’ll cook for you at my place.”
He released my hand and moved his across the desktop, then lifted the picture frame that was resting there and pulled it toward him. “I can’t have dinner and I can’t pick up where we left off,” he said, then showed me the photo in the frame. It was of a woman in a ballet tutu, and she was in the midst of a rather athletic leap. “Her name’s Claudia. She’s a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, and we’ve been going out for three months. She didn’t like Lord of the Rings any more than you did, but I asked her to marry me last night, and she accepted. That’s why I was thinking about you, Amy. She made me realize what a jerk I was with you.”
Swell. So I’d found one who was ready and willing to be a fiancé, just not mine. Timing is everything, isn’t it?
I wished Alex well and went to the ladies’ room, where I sat on the toilet and pondered my situation. I didn’t have a next move—that was my situation. There was no one left on the short list of prospective fiancés except Eddie Glickman, the loud and obnoxious and bad-smelling vice president of sales, and he wasn’t really on the list, since I’d vetoed him. But maybe I’d been too hasty.
I freshened my lipstick and ran a comb through my hair, then marched off to Eddie’s office. He was on the phone, sucking up to some buyer at Barnes & Noble or Borders. “Yeah, yeah, you are sooo right about that book,” he was saying, loudly enough for everyone in the city to hear him. “You’re a genius with covers, Cynthia. You didn’t like the big black gun with the smoke coming out of it, so we ditched the artwork and used a samurai sword instead. That’s right, we listened to you, so now let’s see you double your order for the chain, huh?” He laughed, then spotted me in his doorway and motioned me inside. “Yeah, I’ll talk to you. Give my best to your better half, huh? Your puppy dog, too.” He laughed again and hung up.
“Hi, Eddie,” I said. I’m not even going to tell you how foul his BO was. After my description of Michael’s cologne, you’ll think I’ve got odor issues.
“Amy. What’s up?” he said. While he waited for my answer, he grabbed the bag of Cheez Doodles on his desk, reached in for a handful, ate them, reached in for more, ate them, then licked the orange dust off his fingers, all the while showing me more than I ever wanted to see of his tongue.
“I was just wondering how the Georgette Peterson novel is selling,” I said, for lack of a better conversation starter.
“It’s not,” he replied, then grabbed the can of Coke on his desk and slurped some soda. A trickle of brown liquid escaped from underneath his double chin and dripped down his neck and onto his shirt.
Yep, my first instinct was right about Eddie Glickman. He was a decent guy, but not the one I wanted Tara and Stuart to drool over. He did enough drooling of his own.
“I don’t think this scheme of mine is going to work,” I told Connie later that day, after sticking my head in her office before running to a meeting with Celebetsy.
“You’re giving up after one day?” she said.
I shrugged. “I checked out every guy on the premises, and none of them fits the bill.”
“I wish I could help, but I’ve got an author coming in. He should be here any minute.”
“Who?”
‘Tony Stiles.”
I groaned. “I think I’ll make myself scarce.”
“He’s not so bad, Amy. He’s kind of a charmer, once you get past the gruff exterior.”
“Believe me, there’s a gruff interior, too. Every time he does publicity, he gives the interviewers fits with his one-word word answers and his ‘I’m above all this’ attitude. It’s like pulling teeth to get him to grace the Today show with his presence on publication day—a booking most authors would be thrilled about. Does he think he’s Hemingway or something? He’s a mystery writer, not some ultraliterary novelist, and his characters are con artists, hit men, and other nut jobs, not exactly the upper crust of society. Anyhow, he needs to get over himself and his aversion to the media, and stop taking his ‘oeuvre’ so seriously. He’s like the Sean Penn of writers.”
“Maybe, but he makes a lot of money for us, so we have to treat him like a movie star.”
“You treat him like a movie star. I’m off to my meeting with Celebetsy.”
I was backing out of Connie’s door just as Tony Stiles was backing in, and we inadvertently head-butted each other.
“Hey!” I said, whirling around to face him just as he was whirling around to face me.
“Hey yourself,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Would it be too much to ask that you watch where you’re going?”
“No,” I said, “but I didn’t bang into you on purpose. I may be clumsy, but I don’t actually try to injure our authors.”
“I’m sure nobody meant to hurt anybody,” said Connie. “Now, why don’t you two make nice for a change.”
I smiled sweetly as I shook Tony’s hand, and as I did, I had to admit that there was something movie starish about him. He certainly had the bad-boy looks of a Sean Penn—wavy dark hair, bushy dark eyebrows that hung over piercingly blue eyes, a slightly crooked nose, a pouty, thin-lipped mouth, and a boxer’s body, muscular but compact—and he was the right age for a brooding leading man: mid-thirties. If only he didn’t have such a chip on his shoulder, I thought. His books were a lot of fun, with their cast of entertaining rascals, as well as their lovable hero, Joe West, a burned-out cop, and his feisty yet devoted wife, Lucy. Well, maybe Connie was right and there was more to him than I realized.
“So, what’s the hurry today, Amy Sherman, queen of flacks?” he said with a smirk, tiny lines crinkling around those blue eyes. “Is there a publicity emergency going on somewhere? Do you need an author for an appearance at a Tupperware party? Or are we talking about a bigger, more prestigious booking—like a segment on the Home Shopping Network?”
On second thought, Tony Stiles didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He had a bug up his ass. But as I stood there close to him, so close that I could see glints of red in the strands of hair that curled around his ears, I found myself wondering if he ever dropped the wise-guy routine and, if so, what it would be like to be around him when he did. He was never without a girlfriend, rumor had it, so he had to be capable of at least some tenderness. Just none I’d ever witnessed.
“Actually, Tony, I’m about to pitch you to the Food Network,” I said on my way out the door, my voice as perky as a publicist’s should be. “They’re doing a segment on what to do with beef that’s extremely tough and hard to swallow. I think you’d be perfect.”