Corstar last February, no one was sure which direction he would take the corporation. Bob had lots of experience as a CEO, but he’d headed up companies that sold mayonnaise or toilet paper or rental cars. Television was all new to him, but when Corstar’s profits started dwindling the board had voted to try a leader who wouldn’t be bedazzled by being in the entertainment industry.
“See! See, see! You work hundreds of miles from headquarters and the CEO still notices you and takes a liking to you. That, my friend, is an achievement.”
“Numero Uno is secretly fuming about that.” Jack folded his arms and tucked his hands away from the cold. “She wants to be top dog.”
“Got to stay Numero Uno,” I said, searching for a yellow cab in the onrush of traffic. “You didn’t tell me Corstar was planning a reorg.”
Jack winged his arm around, doing air guitar Pete Townsend. “I told you they want me in Dallas.”
“We are not moving to Dallas.”
He pointed his air guitar at me with a leer. “Worried about losing your cheese?”
I dug my hands deeper into the warmth of my coat pockets, not taking the bait. Like most corporations, Corstar had periodic intraining sessions that included everything from bungee jumping to figuring out who in the corporation would have to jump ship if they were on a sinking lifeboat. At one session everyone had been required to read the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese? The CEOs had appeared with cheeseheads, people role-played mice and men in a maze, and Jack and I had spent weeks arguing about who had the most adaptable personality.
“Bob’s got all kinds of squirrelly plans,” Jack went on. “If the board lets him get his way, he’ll twist Corstar into a pretzel.”
“Okay, that’s two food metaphors in one breath. Are you hungry?” I spied a pretzel vendor with his cart across the street.
“Starved. That dinner was crap.”
He was right. Jack’s prime rib was dry and my salmon tasted fishy. Bad fishy. One of my rare nights out and the food had sucked. Welcome to my life as a wife and mommy. I crossed the street, moved into the musky smoke and bought us a large pretzel, warm from the coals. I wasn’t hungry but it felt good to hold the warm pretzel in my hands.
As I looked up to cross back, Jack had his arm out in the avenue, flagging down a cab. I scurried across and dove in under his arm. The cab reeked of some kind of boiled root vegetable, a smell so strong I wondered if the driver had a Crock-Pot stashed under the front seat.
“Where to?” he hollered.
“Penn Station,” Jack said, sliding onto the springless seat.
As he pulled away from the curb the driver cranked up his radio. I’m not sure what kind of music it was, but if I closed my eyes I saw a harem of belly dancers and a snake charmer.
“Give me that,” Jack said, breaking off a section of the pretzel.
I leaned forward, not eager to have my hair and coat touch the seat of the skeevy taxi. Someone barked in the driver’s radio in a foreign language. He answered back in rapid-fire staccato.
I turned to my husband, wanting to connect with him and shed this feeling of alienation, but he was staring out the window, miles away. I worried about Bob’s speech. What would a reorg mean for Jack? He liked his job and was so good at it, but all that could change. I felt disappointed that my night out had been a bust. Jack was out all the time, dining at the Four Seasons, the W, the TriBeCa Grill. It was Jack who caught glimpses of JLo and Marc, Jennifer Aniston, Katie Couric, Ellen. When clients were in town Jack had to see Broadway shows he didn’t even care about. At least he had the good grace not to rub it in. I didn’t begrudge him these pleasures, but at the moment I wasn’t too thrilled with being Mrs. Jack.
Before the party ended I did manage to hook up with the Dallas contingent again and finish off the conversation with CJ, Hank and Elsa. CJ and Hank were just so darned enthusiastic about my writing, about Manhattan, about my so-called life in New York. I was on the verge of offering to take them to my favorite places around town—a jazzy dark bistro in NoHo, the Frick Collection and an off-Broadway show that had been running for six years now—then I remembered with a jolt that I had three kids and a book deadline.
So sorry, kids, but Mrs. Jack has no time to play.
Fortunately, it was a short ride to Penn Station, where our train was already on the platform, the brakes angrily spewing out compressed air with a burst that always made me jump inside. The sour, greasy bowels of Penn Station sent a sting through my nostrils, reminding me that this was no way to end a romantic evening, and once again I wondered how an open chamber with trains rushing in and out all day could smell so pungently noxious.
We found an empty bank of three seats toward the back of the car and fell onto the vinyl upholstery. Once the train left, it would take thirty-three minutes to arrive in Bayside. We were close, but the mental voyage felt exceedingly long and wearying.
“What the hell are we doing here?” I mumbled.
Jack popped open one eye. “Taking the train home? Did you have one too many Lemon Drops, Rubes?”
“No, I mean, the big picture. What are we doing here, paying top dollar for real estate and racing the clock on this hamster wheel and struggling through each day?”
Jack closed his eye, his lips hardening in a straight line. “I was afraid of that. Honey, it’s too late to grapple with a cosmic question.”
“Do you know that if we lived in another city, on a night like tonight, we could get our car from a valet, a nice person who would bring it around to the restaurant so that we could ride home in toasty-warm comfort. No cabs and trains and deicing the car at the station. Door-to-door comfort in our own vehicle, which, though riddled with Cheerios, does not reek of some mysterious root vegetable.”
“Whaddaya mean? We could have driven tonight.”
“And paid seventy bucks for parking.”
“So? You have to tip a valet.”
I folded my arms. “That’s not the point. What I’m saying is, we may live in the best city in the world, but we rarely take advantage of the good things, while the bad strike us down at every turn. We still haven’t gotten the kids to the dinosaur wing of the Museum of Natural History, and each year, when the Tony Awards are given, I’m barely familiar with the shows that are nominated.” My chest felt tight as I thought of my friend Harrison, calling earlier this week to offer yet another chance to see Wicked. Of course, I’d had to turn him down again, in the throes of finishing Chocolate. “All work and no play is making Ruby a very dull girl,” Harrison had said.
He would know. We’d met in college, when we both signed up for an immersion-in-Broadway theater class. Stuck on the bus from campus to Times Square with bubbling sorority girls and football players looking for an easy A, Harrison and I had shared a seat and begun playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. A relationship was forged, and despite the passage of heartbreak and boyfriends for both of us, we’d maintained our Broadway connection.
After college, Harrison got a job as an assistant with a small public relations firm—“a hellfire of yelling, contradictions and backstabbing,” he called it. On the plus side, it helped him hone his skills, led him on to more corporate venues, and occasionally some fabulous tickets to Broadway shows landed in his lap. Still in public relations, his current account was a pharmaceutical company, where his biggest challenge was to get the word out that a drug that “put lead in your pencil” wasn’t going to cause a heart attack, as one choice study had indicated. It was a living, but it was not a profile job that would put Harrison in places to see and be seen, and free theater tickets were not forthcoming.
But when he started dating Goldberg, suddenly gobs of free tickets started landing in his lap, courtesy of Goldberg’s bank. The only downside was that you couldn’t pick the night, which was becoming more and more of a problem for me. This week, when I’d had to turn him down again I’d apologized profusely,