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  Allison smiles. “Someone, although I won’t name names—and, yes, I do mean names—is feeling threatened.” Because she thinks that I’m wavering, she lowers her voice and says, “The time to strike is now. We’ll never have such an excellent opportunity again. Think about it.” Then she straightens her shoulders and returns to the morning paper, the picture of innocence.

  I sit down at my desk and try to focus on the piece I’m working on. It’s an article about engagement rings for the wedding issue, which is fast approaching. Harry Winston, always willing to have their diamonds shot on either the red carpet of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the pink burlap of a Fashionista layout, has turned oddly shy. When we requested pictures of several stars’ engagement rings, they wrote back with descriptions only. The result is an awkward feature that reads like an anthropological study. Scientists are reasonably sure that Madonna’s Edwardian ring resembles this one pictured here. Jennifer Aniston’s ring with 4.5-carat emerald-cut diamonds may have looked like this ring from Tiffany’s. It’s as though these rings are dinosaurs and we’re piecing together the historical record from their bones.

  I’m trying to make the description of Anne Heche’s ring seem like something more than pure speculation when Dot calls my name. She is standing at the entrance to her office with a pile of magazines in her arms. “Your Next Meeting— Eleven O’clock,” she says, before disappearing behind a closed door.

  I sigh, bored with conjecture, and reread Jane’s memo. Although it’s a long way from agreeing to sponsor a highly visible and controversial gallery exhibit, changing her name is a prime example of irrational behavior. For the first time, I think that their plan might work. Their plan might prevail, evil might be deposed and Fashionista might one day be a happy place to work.

  Allison is right. I am wavering.

  Drinks at the Paramount

  Maya orders a cosmopolitan tumbled. The bartender stares at her uncomprehendingly until she scoffs and says, “In a tumbler. I’d like a cosmopolitan in a tumbler.” He gives her another look before walking away to put vodka, Cointreau and cranberry juice into a cocktail shaker. “And no sugar on the rim,” she calls after him. “In my ongoing quest to identify, isolate and eliminate the elements in my life that are no longer working for me, I’ve recently settled on white, unrefined sugar,” she says, cutting a sliver of brie and putting it on a cracker. “I’m slowly letting carbs back into my life.”

  The bartender places the tumbled cosmo down on a napkin in front of Maya, puts a gin and tonic in my general vicinity and disappears. We are in the bar at the Paramount hotel. We always seek shelter here when bad things happen to Maya. Cosmopolitans are her comfort food.

  The last time we stepped foot in the dark, low-ceilinged room was scarcely a month ago. Maya, whose agent, Marcia, was moving to a new agency and not taking her with her, had been in serious need of comfort.

  “Yes, those are actual tears of frustration that you often hear about but rarely see,” she had said then, pathetically handing me her dear-Maya letter.

  But it wasn’t just dear Maya. “Who’s Dylan?” I ask, although I have a suspicion. I have a reasonable idea what happened. Marcia, in her haste to dump old, unproductive clients, had been remiss in tailoring her form letter. The part where it assures its reader that it has been a pleasure working with her was suppose to assure Maya, not someone named Dylan. “Can you believe that?” she says, her voice a sad whine. Her head dropped forward, depositing amber curls onto the bar. “I wasn’t even given the dignity of my own letter.”

  “At least you know you’re not the only one she dumped,” I pointed out.

  “That’s true,” she said, not prepared to laugh but no longer teetering on the edge of tears.

  Although I’m not that good at comfort, I recognize success and continued in the same vein. “And it turns what should be an out-and-out tragedy into an absurdist comedy.”

  “It is a tragedy,” she said, finishing her cosmopolitan in three gulps. This is why she hates martini glasses; she can’t take gulps without spilling cranberry juice all over her Donna Karan blouses. “I’m back to square one. I’m standing exactly where I stood eighteen months ago, only I’m eighteen months older.”

  Thirty loomed large in Maya’s mind. The landmark birthday wouldn’t have been a problem if she still had an agent. But the marker was rapidly approaching—she only had fifteen days left to find new representation. It seemed unlikely that she would and so she has tensed her shoulders in expectation of a heavy blow. This is the sort of thing that happens when you set objectives for yourself and try to achieve things. Goals are the real enemy.

  Despite all my hard work, tears welled up in Maya’s eyes and she backslid into heaving sobs. I understood her sorrow. For a little while, she had stood apart from all the other magazine freelancers with manuscripts under their arms. For a little while, she’d been distinguishable. Now she was tossed back into the chorus line, where we all look alike.

  I ordered another round of drinks, handed her some tissues and began muttering platitudes about things happening for a reason. I thought she’d had too much vodka to notice that I suddenly sounded like a greeting card, but she wasn’t that drunk. She wasn’t too drunk at all and she refused to let me offer mass-produced comfort, although that is what I do best. So I started slinging mud. It’s the last defense of the helpless. “You’re really better off. She was an awful agent.”

  Maya balled the tissues in her fist. This was not what she wanted to hear. “She was a good agent.”

  “And how many books did she manage to sell for you?”

  Now I’ve just thoughtlessly reminded her of her failure not just to keep an agent but to make a sale as well. Fresh tears began falling, and although she started the sentence with something resembling composure, by the end her words were scarcely more than a whimper. “Marcia got my work read and rejected. I can’t ask for…more…than…th-that.”

  “Pooh,” I said, dismissive of her logic. You can and should always ask for more, especially when you’ve set goals for yourself. “You’ll find another agent and she’ll be better than Marcia. Just you wait. The next one won’t call you Dylan.”

  She realized the truth of this. It is extremely unlikely that the next agent—if there is a next agent—will also have a client named Dylan. “But what if I never find another one?”

  I told her not to be silly, and after several more attempts at lifting her spirits with upbeat and optimistic inanities, I realized she wanted to wallow. I realized she wanted to cast herself into the thick swamp of disconsolation and loll there in the mud. I had no right to deny her its soothing coolness, and threw myself in alongside. They tell you that finding an agent is harder than finding a publisher, but Maya knows that’s not true. As hard as getting an agent is, snagging a publisher is many times more difficult. And you can’t do it from the back row of the chorus line.

  We are here now because Maya broke up with her boyfriend.

  “It’s over,” she said when I picked up the phone. No hello, no how are you, just it’s over. Thank God.

  “What about the ring?” I asked.

  “I don’t give a fuck about the ring.”

  “How does it feel?”

  “Awful.”

  “Wanna get a drink?”

  “Be there in fifteen.”

  It was the middle of the day, but I didn’t care. I’m nobody’s assistant and operate under the supposition that I should work when I want to. I often sneak away during periods of downtime to go shopping or see a movie in the theater next door. All I have to do to lull suspicion is keep my computer on, leave my jacket hanging in the corner and light a candle.

  I’m almost done with my gin and tonic when the bartender reappears to ask if we want another round. This is the great thing about the Paramount. They never let you finish a drink.

  “I just have to accept the fact that it isn’t going to happen,” she says, after the bartender has left. “I love him and I’ll m
iss him but I can’t keep doing this. I don’t know why he bought that stupid ring but he clearly never had any intention of giving it to me.” A tear slides down her cheek. Not being wanted always hurts.

  The ring is a two-carat diamond that Maya found five months ago in one of Roger’s kitchen drawers. For two weeks she was giddy and impatient and excited. For two weeks she lived life with an excess of energy. For two whole week she expected every single moment to pop. But nothing happened. Five months later, it’s clear to her that nothing is ever going to happen. The engagement ring is Roger’s pistol on the wall and Maya is tired of waiting for the third act.

  I didn’t like Roger Childe from the very beginning. He introduced himself to me as an entrepreneur, and the contempt I felt was swift and complete. “Entrepreneur” is a term magazine writers ascribe to you; you don’t ascribe it to yourself, especially not when you’re the president of a Jersey City dot-com that your father bankrolled.

  He had other pretensions—name-dropping A-list players, wearing monogrammed sweaters, using the word cinema in mixed company—but Maya didn’t mind. All she noticed were his handsome face and his lovely compliments and his coordinated J. Crew separates.

  But it wasn’t just his mail-order-catalog perfection that put me off, although having both the Barn Jacket and the Fisherman Cable Knit didn’t help. He had a prep-school patina, which lent him an air of entitlement that seemed entirely out of place in the early twenty-first century. He knew all the right people and went to all the right places and could buy all the right things and his life would no doubt follow all the right formulas.

  Maya was dazzled by his confidence. Before she lost her agent, she’d seen Roger and herself as a top-one-hundred power couple in the making. She’d change the way a generation thought with her books, he’d change the way a generation behaved with his software, and New York magazine would spotlight them in a glossy cover shoot that made her look beautiful and edgy.

  “A month ago it was no big deal that he hadn’t asked me to marry him,” she says, “but I’m thirty now and can’t live my life like a carefree twenty-something. I’ve drawn up terms of reference.”

  “Terms of reference?” Three gin and tonics have slightly muddled my brain, but I’m reasonably sure I’ve never heard the term “terms of reference” before.

  She reaches into her leather backpack and withdraws a sheet of white paper. It’s crumpled and creased and she runs her hands over it several times, trying to flatten it. The corners still curl up.

  “Today,” she announces in almost sententious tones, “is the first day of the rest of my life. Here is a year-by-year breakdown of what I hope to accomplish in my fourth decade of existence.”

  But the breakdown really isn’t year by year. It’s more month by month and in some severe cases day by day. The first term of reference— “have talk with Roger to see where this is all going”—has minutes attached.

  “He was very evasive,” she says, when I ask how the talk went. “I just wanted to know if he thought there was a point to all this. I mean, I didn’t need the ring right there and then, only a word or two of encouragement. But he kept hemming and hawing and saying things like ‘We’ll see,’ as though I’m a car he’s not sure he wants to buy.”

  He is weighing the pros and cons of marrying Maya. He is looking at all the available information and trying to decide if she’ll be a credit to him. Will his name gain luster in association with hers? He doesn’t know yet. Maya’s an incomplete stock report.

  This is the level of calculation Roger works on, the sort you read about in Edith Wharton novels and don’t believe exists anymore. He is like a great sculpture. He can make things that are hard—like his heart—seem soft. But all you have to do is get close enough to realize the truth. All you have to do is touch him to discover differently.

  “It was a mistake from the beginning,” I say, pushing the crinkled proof of her insanity to the side. I don’t want anything to do with her terms or her references. The answer to one thwarted goal is not forty more. It’s like trying to cure a hangover with Jell-O shots. “Rule number one—never date a man named Childe.”

  “I know, I know,” she says, putting her head down on the bar. “It’s just asking for trouble, isn’t it?”

  I agree that it is and order another round.

  My 102nd Day

  I was in my third month as Jane’s editorial assistant when the fax machine arrived. It came by UPS, which refuses to leave packages in front of apartment doors, so even before the beeping and squealing modern convenience entered my home, it was already a great inconvenience. In order to get it, I had to walk over to Washington and Houston, wait twenty-five minutes as they looked for it in the back and then carry it home in my arms.

  Nobody told me the fax machine was coming, and when I asked Harvey, the office manager, what it was about, he shrugged, looked abashed and mumbled something about needing to order staples from the catalog. I wasn’t completely clueless. Jane had taken to calling me late at night and telling me to fax documents to her, to the publisher, to writers, to designers, to her parents. When I’d remind her that I didn’t have faxing capabilities, she always seemed vaguely stunned, as if I were subsisting without the basic requirements of life, like food and water. She righted that injustice (“No, you don’t have to thank me. Giving is what I do”) and instantly began treating my apartment as Fashionista’s downtown annex.

  The midnight requests began to pile up (“It’s still lunchtime in Tokyo”) and after a week of the graveyard shift, I stopped answering the phone. Jane would leave long, suspicious messages—“Pick up, Vig. Are you there, Vig? Vig, if you’re there, this is very important. The future of the magazine rests on it. Don’t play with me, Vig. All right, Vig, here’s what I need you to do as soon as you get home, if you are indeed away from home and not listening to this message as it comes in”—dictating letters that I was to type up, print out and fax to studio execs and event planners immediately. But I never typed up, printed out and faxed a letter to a studio exec or event planner immediately. I always waited until I got to work the next day. Jane never noticed the difference.

  Then one day she started faxing me work. She started faxing me contracts and articles and expecting me to have everything done by the next morning.

  She’d say, “Where’s that expense report? I need it by ten.”

  She’d say, “Give me those spreadsheets I sent over last night. I’ve got a meeting first thing.”

  She’d say, “Bring the invite list to Publicity right now. They’re waiting for it.”

  As soon as I realized what was going on, I put a stop to it. I disconnected the fax machine and looked baffled when Jane asked me what was wrong with it. Six hours later there was a repairman at my door. He immediately diagnosed the problem—the dangling plug was a dead giveaway—and reminded me that most appliances need electricity to run. I submitted silently to the humiliating lecture, and the next time I interfered with the fax, I opened it up and pulled out a wire. Another repairmen was sent with undue haste. He was mystified as to how the circuit came loose. Was I sure I didn’t have any mischievous nieces and nephews who liked to play with colorful wires?

  Several months passed like this, with me breaking or jamming the machine like it were a parking meter in front of my house that I refused to pay, and Jane became increasingly skeptical. She became more and more suspicious, and although she laid numerous charges at my feet, she could never make them stick. When the motherboard short-circuited quite inexplicably (“I’m quite sure, sir, that I don’t know what that orange sticky stuff is”) the repairmen shook their heads in disgust, called the machine a lemon and walked away.

  After that, Jane made threats but she never delivered. There was much talk of faxes but she knew better than to give me another one. I was no longer an amateur. I was now a seasoned pro and what I knew about fax machines could keep them in disrepair for years. Far better to avoid a showdown altogether than to come up short twice
in a row.

  Wavering

  Maya works with strangers. She freelances at a variety of magazines and although she toils alongside the same people month after month, she barely exists to them. She hasn’t been introduced en masse in a big, splashy staff meeting, and her life and times are of little interest. When she sneezes, no one says bless you. When she comes in with a sexy tan, no one asks where she’s been. When she wears a cute new sweater, no one compliments her.

  “If it were just any sweater, I wouldn’t have expected anything,” she explains, finishing off her third cosmopolitan.

  Through the wood slats that cover the Paramount’s semi-circle windows, I can see light from streetlamps. It’s almost dark. I’m flirting with the notion of going back to the office to turn off my computer and perhaps blow out the candle when the bartender sweeps by and delivers fresh drinks. I stay firmly rooted to the spot. If Christine doesn’t feel compelled to extinguish my candle as a product of her Midwestern only-you-can-prevent-forest-fires upbringing, then the cleaning woman will.

  “But this wasn’t just any sweater,” she continues. “It had little beads and pink slivers of sequin sewn around the edges. It was darn cute.”

  “Not a word?”

  “Not a word,” she says sadly. “And I had the whole conversation planned in my head. They’d say, Cute sweater. I’d say, Thanks, I picked it up at the Donna Karan outlet outside Ithaca. They’d say, Oh, you were in Ithaca this weekend? And I’d say, Yes, I was visiting a friend. We went tubing. Them: Tubing? Me: Yes, it’s like skiing but much more repetitive.”

  Maya used to freelance for Fashionista—I had hooked her up with the copy chief—but she jumped ship after a few months because she couldn’t stand the way we do things. She couldn’t stand having to clear every single word or comma change with the editors and writers and researchers. And she hated having to justify in the margin each correction (dangling modifier, sentence-verb agreement, predicate nominative case). Copyediting is deadly dull work, the sort that requires a mind-numbing attention to detail, and it’s thoroughly unglamorous. Fashionista, with its system of checks and balances, somehow found a way to increase the tedium of the job.