at a copying machine, staring mesmerized at the flashing light of the Xerox.
My future, I thought.
But it looked good! Earning money as a copying machine zombie sounded just fine. I’d take it.
Kathy escorted me into an unadorned beige box of an office. Her desk had children’s pictures on it, a computer, and a Rolodex, but little else. “I showed your resume to the editorial director, Mercedes Coe, and she thought it looked good. Really good. So I want you to meet with her today. She’s got a meeting at one-thirty, but we should be able to just sneak you in.”
“Great!” I said, wondering when she was going to ask how fast I could type. (I was prepared to lie.)
“Good—let’s go.”
And that was that. The next thing I knew, I was being led back through the maze again, until we arrived at what was clearly set up to be an outer office—a woman in her early twenties was sitting in front of a computer next to a door with a plaque that read Editorial Director. The absence of a name made me wonder if editorial directors came and went with such regularity it didn’t seem worth the effort.
“Is she in?” Kathy asked.
“She’s in,” the assistant said, giving me a quick visual going over. Her gaze seemed to linger on my Mao suit mono-bosom.
Damn. I should have taken Fleishman’s advice and worn something else. The tricky part was, what would something else have been?
Under her breath, the assistant started singing a bluesy song as I was shown into the office. “Stormy Weather.” I flicked a glance at her to see if there was some sort of message in it, but she seemed completely absorbed in whatever was on her computer screen.
Inside the editorial director’s office, Kathy parked me in front of a desk that was a mass of stacked papers, pink message slips, paperback books, and yellow legal pads. Kathy made a quick introduction, and Mercedes Coe hopped up from her chair and came around.
“Oh good! You’re here.”
She was tall, slender, and wore a suit that was amazingly like the one I was wearing, only it was navy blue and looked a lot better on her. Her blond hair was swept up into some kind of coil on the back of her head, and her lips were bright red against her pale skin. Around her neck she had knotted a silk scarf in an elaborate stab at being Catherine Deneuve.
“I have to be at a meeting at one-thirty,” Mercedes informed us.
It was one-twenty already.
“I told her you didn’t have much time,” Kathy said.
“I’ve got a senior ed meeting,” Mercedes told me.
Kathy left us alone, and I expected a rushed five minutes full of questions, after which I would be shown the door.
Mercedes told me to take a seat, and then she lowered herself down in her leather desk chair. “I was very intrigued by your resume. Very intrigued,” she said, rifling through the mess on her desktop. “If I can find it…” she muttered. “Where did it scamper off to?”
I didn’t see it there.
She lifted her shoulders. “Oh well! I suppose it’s times like these when one is glad to have a photographic memory.”
I chuckled. I appreciate sarcasm.
But her expression wiped the grin off my face. “No, really. I do,” she said, with a little roll of her eyes to let me know what a burden this kind of super intelligence could be at times. “That’s how I ended up graduating cum laude from Stanford. It couldn’t have been hard work, I assure you!” She laughed modestly, all the while staring pointedly at the Stanford diploma hanging on a wall to my right. “And you went to school…where?”
I gave her the name of my private college in Ohio; it was a good school, a little liberal arts haven, but not that many people knew about it. We had no major sports team.
“Small schools have great benefits,” Mercedes observed consolingly. “Your major was…?”
“English literature,” I said.
“Right! English lit.” She chuckled. “Now I remember—it seemed strange to me that you didn’t major in French, because you went on to work with Sylvie Arnaud. You were her ghostwriter-editor?”
I gulped. Had I written that? I was prone to resume inflation—it’s hard not to be when you’re starting out with the flaccid balloon of resumes. “Well, some might say that I was something more like an all-around personal assistant.”
“Right! Interesting!” She leaned back, clearly impressed. Clearly having no clue that I had spent the past two years combing Manhattan for jars of okra. “She knew Albert Camus, I’m sure.”
I had no idea. I nodded. “She knew everybody.”
“I did my senior thesis on Camus.”
“Oh!” I was trying to remember who that guy was, exactly. Had he written The Little Prince? “How fascinating.”
“In French, of course.” She rattled off a question at me in rapid fire, extravagantly accented French.
I had studied French in school, but I hadn’t given it much of a thought in years. Sylvie had always spoken to me in English. And even in my heyday of Continuing French Conversation during senior year, I never knew the language so well that I didn’t panic when someone was talking at me full speed.
In this case, I did what I always did when I didn’t exactly understand. I agreed. “Bien sur!”
This seemed to satisfy Mercedes. “You know, I saw her mentioned the other day somewhere…”
“The New York Review of Books.”
“Exactly!” Mercedes seemed gratified that I would assume she read that magazine. Actually, I assumed she didn’t. Did anyone? “So…um…” She was searching her cum laude brain for my name, I presumed.
“Rebecca,” I reminded her.
“Right! Tell me a little more about yourself, Rebecca.”
If there had been a BS meter on Mercedes’s desk, for the next five minutes its needle would have been tilting frantically into the red. I was an unrecognized child prodigy, torn between all of my varied interests, but what I had always been attracted to was the written word. I had edited my school literary magazine. (True enough.) We had worked mostly on student work, but also with professionals like Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley. (Almost true—I had written those esteemed women to ask if they would contribute a story, and each had written back to politely refuse.) My dream was to edit books, but I knew I needed to start small, pay my dues. Working with a woman like Sylvie had taught me all about patience. (I had to mention Sylvie again, since Mercedes seemed so impressed by her.)
But Mercedes didn’t have a BS meter on her desk, and she didn’t seem to have one in her brain, either. All during my tall tale, she tapped a silver fountain pen on her desk blotter and didn’t appear to notice that it was dribbling puddles of ink everywhere. “Well! I am impressed.”
The minutes were ticking away. The meeting she had needed to rush out to had surely started by now?
“Very impressed indeed!”
I felt a surge of hope. I started ticking the days off in my head. If I started work the next Monday, maybe I would be getting a paycheck two weeks after that. Which meant that we might fall short on the rent the next month, but after that we would be on easy street.
Which reminded me. Money. “How much does this job pay?” I blurted out.
Mercedes’s face fell, and I knew instantly that I had made a mistake. Her expression couldn’t have looked any more uncomfortable if I had farted.
She tapped her fingers, shifted in her chair, and finally cleared her throat. “You didn’t go over this with Kathy?”