trying to prop me up for my meeting in fifteen minutes at the Tudor Room bar to placate the unreasonable newswoman Delsie Arceneaux. If I didn’t always have the keen sense that Murray believed in me, and if I hadn’t always witnessed him doing the mensch-y thing, like promoting all the smartest women in the office, I would have quit doing crazy things for him long ago.
Sitting at the bar, Delsie Arceneaux glanced over and winked at Murray through her signature large tortoiseshell glasses as she barked into her phone before our meeting started. She was the impetuous, African American news anchor of the “all Delsie all the time” cable news network, most famous for draping her fortysomething, voluptuous body over an army tank while she interviewed the commander of the U.S. forces in Kabul. The perennial glasses had been Murray’s idea to disguise her beauty queen looks and highlight her legitimate cerebral side.
“No,” I replied. “You got the big job. I service your requests and put your crazy notions on paper.” Today’s particular request was to placate a news anchor, known for alienating her staff by overriding their every decision and action. “Does she even know we are also representing the people who are asking her to speak …”
“Order some broth, Allie.” Conflict of interest was a concept that Murray Hillsinger found utterly tiresome. “Calm the fuck down. Nothing wrong with us booking our own clients for our other clients and taking a little cut on both sides.” He pushed the tan parchment paper menu too close to my face and pointed at the appetizers.
Georges came over to hover and pour two thousand more calories of dill cream into the dip ramekin.
“I don’t want any soup, Murray.”
“Give her the soup, Georges. She works too damn hard and deserves a little pleasure once in a while. You know the good one I mean. The light one, the brothy one. With those duck balls.”
“Foie gras wontons, sir.” Georges wrote the request down with his dainty fingers wrapped around the tip of a miniature gold pen.
“Really, Murray?” I pleaded. “Thirty-eight dollars for consommé I don’t even want?”
“She’ll have the consommé.” Murray looked at the maître d’ and then back at me. “You got some time before your meeting. It’ll settle you down. Gimme the lobster salad before my guest arrives as a little preappetizer. Double order.” Georges nodded and left the table.
“Why are the most famous people also the most neurotic about public speaking gigs? She looks into a camera and speaks to four million viewers and she can’t give a speech to two hundred people?”
He patted my hand. “All the news anchors do this. The camera is her guardian and her barrier. Without it, the live audience terrifies her. Just go handle her nerves for me. And have some soup.”
Next to me, a glamorous newspaper publisher in a sunny yellow Oscar de la Renta spring dress and matching bolero sweater raised her index finger in the air at Georges and mouthed Charge it to my account as she sashayed toward the door.
I leaned toward Murray, whispering, “I don’t need the soup because I don’t like to throw money away like all your friends in here.”
“It’s not about the money in this room. It’s about what you’ve accomplished.” He stole my nose with his finger like I was five years old. “M-E-R-I-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y, kid. ’Tis the beauty of this room. Money gives you power in here, but only if it’s ‘fuck you’ money you earned. There’s no one with Daddy’s inherited cash in here. Self-made or get the hell out.” Murray’s voice was thick, more truck driver yelling at someone to get out of the way than genius spinmeister. As Murray turned his head to wave with feigned friendliness to a rival, two little curls of hair behind his ears bounced out from the hair gel meant to smooth them down, making the flat part of his comb-over seem that much more incongruous.
I looked at my watch. Five more minutes before my meeting. Across the room, I saw Delsie throw the long end of her spring, lime-green cashmere scarf around her neck and behind her shoulder. “What about Delsie with her four-point-five-million-dollar annual salary you worked so hard to leak?” I asked. “It’s not about the money in here?”
“That broad’s got raw star power and black and white viewer appeal no one can touch. Delsie took over that cable network and got the ratings they’d coveted for years. No one can say she didn’t do that on her own.”
“On her own? Really? You believe everything you peddle, Murray? Delsie secretly pays us to doctor her appearances and often her scripts. Did you forget you have me fixing her lame copy at all hours?”
He smiled at me. “Even a fuckin’ genius like me can’t spin something out of nothing. Everyone in here has to deliver the goods.”
I didn’t try to argue. I knew he was right on some level: Manhattan did harvest a huge crop of people who came to this city from small towns across the land and rose to become the lead players in their fields of art, fashion, publishing, or banking. Most of those tried-and-tested winners were in this very room.
The consommé arrived, and I know Murray made me order it just to prove his point: that a foie gras wonton floating in a small bowl of duck broth could actually command a $38 price tag. I tried the broth first. It went down smoky, gamey, with a big hint of honey. Even though it was a clear soup, it was so rich that just two sips made me thirsty. Like their patrons, the chefs had also overachieved to create something outstanding: they must have roasted three hundred duck carcasses to produce the heft of this broth.
I smiled. “You’re right. I mean, it’s not worth thirty-eight dollars of my money for a small cup of soup, but if you can afford it, I guess, yes, it’s very special.”
Murray splashed his big spoon in my broth, spilled a little on the table, and slurped up some for himself. “No. It is worth that money!” He was almost yelling at me. “It’s supply and demand and the effort to …”
There were supersized personalities back home in Squanto, Massachusetts, for sure—many of them in fact. My own father had led the pack. He had had no money to speak of, but I remember so much about how he behaved around the house: he always had his fellow fishermen over after they’d all chartered their boats out or had come in from a day on the sea. Everyone would bring burger patties or beer and they’d sit around pontificating just as loudly and confidently as the men and women in this restaurant. My father was one of the loudest and most charming ones—boisterous and charismatic—but he didn’t think everyone had to agree with his every opinion just because he walked into a room.
“And don’t forget to tell Delsie I want her covering the Fulton Film Festival I’ve worked so fuckin’ hard to put on the map. Art films. Science. Action. Whatever. Fuck Sundance!” Murray picked up an entire lobster claw from his salad with his fingers, put it on half a roll, and mashed both into his mouth. “Mark my words, Allie, maybe you’ll never have big money or pick up the check. But you’re going to be respected ’cause you did something great. You saved people. You invented people. Your PR helped them reach their greatest potential.”
Creating illusions had never actually been my plan. My plan had been to write novels or long magazine essays, not use my MFA creative writing degree to craft press releases that got people out of trouble or made them appear to be something they weren’t.
“Take that guy over there for starters,” Murray yelled as he glanced over to the podium at the entryway of the restaurant where Wade stood to have lunch with a potential interview subject. My husband came to the Tudor Room as a way to network with important people he needed to put in the magazine or to entertain potential advertisers. He was able to play in the power brokers’ sandbox by charging every lunch to his parent company.
“Maybe,” I allowed. Across the room, Wade smacked Georges’s shoulder while whispering some delicious bit of gossip into his ear. I adored my husband’s ability to get everyone on his side, but his arrival also made me feel even more out of place here, like everyone but me had a code and language and sense of humor I could never quite grasp.
When I first met