2

At this point, I thought, as I crossed over Third Avenue to the Farlucks Coffee that I frequented, whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Now that I felt change was imminent, a strange calm settled over me. Without the worry, I was free to observe. The purposefulness of people who were sure of where they were going excited me. I let their wind rush over me, listened to snippets of cell phone conversations, wondered about the “meeting” they were late for, or “that,” which apparently, “he” did again. I watched them buy coffees and oversize muffins from street vendors in steel carts that always looked quilted to me.

I picked up a copy of New York, New York at the rack by the door. Rolling it, the newsprint felt dry on my fingers. I couldn’t look yet. I knew if I looked at it after I ordered my espresso shot, it would be luckier than if I looked at it right away. I faded out while I waited in line (there was always a line), really thinking of nothing in particular, until my favorite barista, Julio, called my attention to two espressos—one for myself, and one for him. I walked, as I did every day, toward him, completely ignorant of how different this day was about to be.

In slow motion, I caught sight of the words Joe Says, on an open paper lying at the nearest table. I squeezed my eyes and prayed: Oh Lord, I’ll do anything if it doesn’t happen this way! I know I waited too long to quit, I know, but not this way! I clinked tiny paper cups with Julio and said, “To the unknown.”

“Have a good day, Julio,” I said on autopilot and huddled into a corner table, my back to the open paper just a few feet away. I wanted to find out on my own terms.

I turned to page five, where Joe’s column is laid out each day. I held my breath and stared at the page straight on.

There it was. The first page of the PowerPoint presentation was staring back under that now-sinister looking column name,

Word is, New York, New York exec Elizabeth Jackson has undergone more plastic surgery than even the eternally young Demi Moore. An inside source within Jackson’s department was overheard saying “Nasty” Jackson is “incredibly vain and “constantly fixing her fuchsia lipstick which does not do her any favors.” Not only that, but a PowerPoint presentation created by said source approximates Jackson’s body is currently at a 90:10 Plastic v. Human ratio (see inset). But Joe Says he knows just why the plastic pressure has mounted of late: It seems Jackson is secretly dating 24-year-old superstar hunk, Christopher West, the hottest, hippest, buffest man ever to be nominated for an academy award.”

My heart beat double time. The shallow breath choked me. That’s why Joe cared about Nasty! The “Chris” she was dating was Christopher freaking West! The idea was unbelievable. The flowers! The phone calls! He’d been promoting a film with Julia Roberts a while back, and we put on an event for it. They must have met then. And if Joe overheard those comments of mine, which I’d whispered to Ray over the phone two months ago, then this setup had been a long time coming.

But none of that mattered in the big picture. The important thing was—quitting voluntarily or getting fired and probably, justifiably, murdered by Nasty—a new life was starting now. I’d put it off, but now it had caught up with me. I had to get up off this chair and face Nasty. I could blame Joe or even Nasty for being so awful to me I’d gotten to this point, but really, if I’d just faced my fears, forced myself to get a new job when I really should have, then none of this would have happened.

I stood, my hands jittery, and pulled my purse over my shoulder. I saw a woman sipping an iced latte, and without warning, my mouth opened to say something I often thought: “An iced mocha latte is a dessert! Not a coffee!”

The woman’s mouth formed a stunned ring, but she couldn’t get the word out. And didn’t I know just how she felt?

“Bitch!” She finally yelled as I stormed the exit. And she was right. But no matter how much I spoke my mind now, it wouldn’t change the past.

As I walked beneath that New York, New York marquee for what I knew for sure would be my last time, it occurred to me there was significant strength in desperation. As I pass taxis, bicycles, and Rollerbladers, I didn’t worry whether they might smack into me. Not today. I stepped off the curb, even though the palm was already blinking red. I left behind five people waiting for the next WALK signal and made a taxi stop for me.

Now I had nothing to lose, I didn’t have to concern myself with being, well, concerned. It would be clear to everyone that I was the only possible departmental source who could have leaked the goods on Nasty, considering I was the only departmental source other than Nasty herself. I could say what I’d wished all along, tell people what I really wanted to tell them. Pure, unadulterated freedom. At least I’d be free from Nasty and her petty ways, not to mention the meaningless position I’d held under her—a position I knew in my heart of hearts that I could have done something with if I’d really tried, despite how difficult Nasty had made it. It was so clear now. I could have gone to Ed, the editor in chief. I could have gone to Human Resources. I could have asked for a departmental transfer. My whole life looked like a pile of could have’s from this vantage point. And I’d never been angrier at myself. The regret made everything worse; my anger at myself, at Joseph, at Nasty, it was all blending together into one giant Eeyore cloud hovering over me.

It was with that mindset that I stomped the cubicle-lined path to Joseph’s office—the office of the mean-spirited, selfish jerk who sold me down the river and probably got a big bonus for doing so! How could I have believed his printer had broken down at the exact moment I’d printed those pages! He’d been spying on me for months, obviously, just waiting for me to say or do something he could use!

“AARGH!” I screamed it like a battle cry to that receptionist who’d never given me the time of day. I didn’t even care that she laughed.

I stomped down the hall in my one good suit and a nice pair of brown sling-backs. I held my purse white-knuckle tight.

Joe was smugly reading over his column, legs draped up on a corner of his desk, stubby arms pulling the pages wide, midair like he hadn’t a care in the world.

“How dare you?” The anger welled inside me, and that is what came out. I liked the way I sounded—like a celluloid wicked witch.

I stared him down for a couple of minutes all the while thinking he must be the world’s smuggest man and what the heck is wrong with him and what kind of childhood must someone have suffered to be this much of an asshole and what exactly would happen to me if I smacked him across the face? And is he ever going to speak? EVER?

I considered ripping the paper from his hands but thought better of it. Let him come to me. Why give him the power? I crossed my arms, lowered my lids and prepared myself to wait.

Joseph turned a page by bringing the two sides of the broadsheet together, leafing with a finger, and cracking the pages wide again, like a barrier between us.

Joseph allowed one side of the paper to sag, revealing half of his face. This gave me the unfortunate view of him picking something out of his tooth, briefly shifting his attention toward it before flicking it onto the carpet. He then reassumed his former position.

I breathed deeply. Again, I didn’t know what I was about to say, but this time the breath seemed to tap an incredible strength.

“What I said is, How dare you? And the reason I asked that is because, after ignoring my existence for two years, you used me like a—like a, um, tissue and there me to the ground like, like that piece of crap you just plucked from between your grody teeth! And even now, you sit here smugly, pleased with yourself, like—like a toddler who’s just done his first pee pee in the potty! I need to work on my metaphors, but my point is pretty clear!”

Joseph lowered the paper. Finally, he spoke. “Well if you would have just come and ripped me a new one like that in the first place, Anna Walker, you’d have had your own column by now.”

A column? Really? That sounded so depressingly fabulous. Oh, it would have been so much better than working for Nasty! And rather than have to bend over backward for pain-in-the-ass journalists, I could have been a pain-in-the-ass journalist! “You know what you are, Joseph? You are a royal pain in the a—”

The suddenly chatty Joseph interrupted me. “So does that mean you wouldn’t be interested in our own column called ‘Velvet Rope Diaries,’ which the ed in chief has just slated to start this Friday, opposite my column?”

I turned, staring out through that open door—to the hallway that led to my cubicle and the evidence of the slow death I was dying. Of all the things in that cubicle, I could think only of my dad’s mug. He’d drunk his coffee from it every morning. He’d leave it outside on the stoop, where he’d sit with it and a sweet-smelling menthol cigarette. Mom would get mad each time she went out and found it staring up at her from the concrete. “Someone’s going to crack their head open tripping over this one day!” she’d yell.

I liked that memory. It was real-life—the everyday reality of him. That’s why I’d chosen the mug as my token. I could tell my mom liked to think of that, too, because sometimes—after he died—she’d go out there and sit the way he used to, though she’d never done that before. I’d taken that living symbol and killed it with my stagnancy, sitting dissatisfied with my life, holding it tight and grazing over its familiar chips until my palm rubbed the lettering off.

“Well, because it’s time. I need a writer; you need a job. You’ve proven yourself creative enough. You’ve obviously got the paper’s humor down pat.”

Well, here was my opportunity to move in some direction at least. To “save my life,” as Fenwick so dramatically put it. It wasn’t ideal—with a shady boss, whose intentions I couldn’t be sure of—but it was a chance, a really amazing chance to do something exciting, that lots of people wanted to do, that I had for so long thought I wanted to do.

“I’ll do it.” Reconsidering the last few minutes, I went on, “And I didn’t really mean your teeth are grody, so much as you know, just small, or whatever.” That wasn’t much nicer was it? I smiled and he didn’t, and I found myself bumbling on. “And you know, toddlers really should be proud when they pee pee in the potty. It’s a pretty big accomplishment. Why just last week—”

“Anna,” he cut me off—thank God—again picking at that grody (sorry, it was) tooth. “You’ve got the job. Now pull up a chair and let’s go over the specifics.”

It turns out—of all the things I am unqualified to do—the column is to detail the newest, hottest nightlife destinations in the city. The catch is, though, like everything printed in New York, New York, it has to be an exclusive. Which means it can’t appear anywhere before or at the same time as it appears in our paper. Which means—a lot of pressure! Salary, unfortunately, would remain the same. I tried to negotiate. It went something like this:

“So, I imagine I’ll be getting a raise for taking on more responsibilities?”

The portion of the meeting that left me the most harried, that gave me the shrillest ringing in the brain, which would require a minimum of four Extra Strength Tylenol to alleviate, was when I was given my deadline for the first column.

“We’ll need your piece tomorrow by five p.m. if it’s going to get to the printer on time to run in Friday’s paper,” he deadpanned.

I wasn’t even a night person. Often, Ray would wake me up at 8:45 when he found me asleep on the couch, coaxing me into bed. “Or you’ll be stiff in the morning,” he’d say.

Still, I probably wouldn’t have been so freaked about the whole thing if I was going in blindly. But I knew—as I’d been selectively granting them for the last two years—that getting an exclusive on anything was a tough deal in this city. There was bloodthirsty competition between publications and the likelihood of hearing about something before the select few who always seemed to get to information first was not an easy task. I’d have to build relationships, I’d have to make telephone calls, kiss ass, call in favors, plant myself a few important lunch spots, get on media lists from all the publicists who handle restaurants and bars, get in nice with those guys and their door brigades, and beyond that, I’d have to meet some real Manhattan insiders who knew the people who owned these places. But first, I’d have to magically transform into someone who could actually do all those things.

Just as I thought that, Nasty walked past the receptionist. She hadn’t seen me over here in Joseph’s office, but I could see her beeline to my desk where she flung my belongings, one by one, in a pile onto the floor. There went papers, folders, a Statue of Liberty paperweight, a rubber band ball, a shower of takeout menus, my Derek Jeter bobble head. She pulled my cardigan from the hook and stamped on it and the entire pile. There was crunching. The mug! My father! As ridiculous as it sounded to my own ears, this time I was going to save him.

“She disappeared into the farthest corner of the cubicle and I yelled, “No!” She knew the story behind the mug; I told her after a giant margarita at a tequila advertiser’s event. I know she remembered because for weeks after that she kept sneaking in, picking up the mug and dancing it around, saying in a pathetic Mister Bill, “Hey, it’s me, your old Dadda!” like it was the funniest thing in the world.

I sighed deeply when I saw it wasn’t the mug she’d crunched, but a company issue paperweight. That’s when I looked up and saw the scissors. She snip snipped into the air, her eyes maniacal, pupils indistinguishable as ever, her smile menacing. And then she held up the cardigan and cut it into tiny black shards that rained around her on the gray carpeting. She snipped off a particularly large piece and glared at me. The mug was safely in my hands. “Oh your pathetic little daddy mug, you pathetic little traitor! You think I give a shit about your problems?”

The funny thing was, despite it all, I thought she had. Even then, the fact that she hadn’t crushed the mug into a thousand pieces seemed to underline the idea. I wanted to be angry at her for the way she’d treated me all along and for the way she was acting now, but I couldn’t be. She’d just been publicly humiliated.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself, you . . .you . . . insignificant, plain-haired lousy-dresser?”

It was so obvious to me then that those were her own insecurities she was hurling at me that I said, “I just want to say I’m sorry this happened, Miss Jackson. It was childish for me to create that presentation in the first place, and so I have to take responsibility for the way things turned out though I never meant for anyone to see it.”

“I’ll get you back,” she said, taking a tall stack of papers from my in-basket and hurling them, so they fell all around like autumn leaves. A small crowd had gathered around us. Some people were pointing at Nasty, and others were laughing. There were lots of hands over mouths. A guy I recognized from accounting whispered, “C-rrackkk!” My heart went out to Miss Jackson.

“I’m sorry, Miss Jackson. I wish you the best of luck,” I said. And as I walked away, ignoring her cries—“You walk away from me?”—I realized that all of a sudden there wasn’t much in my life that I recognized. At least, I thought, as I looked down at my feet, I knew that little rip on the instep of my right shoe was right where it was yesterday. At least that was one thing I knew for sure.