Despite the butterflies in my stomach, I couldn’t be too nervous if I still wanted to take the time to ogle some man-flesh.
He tilted his head at me. I smiled.
He frowned.
I averted my eyes.
“Job interview?” he asked.
I swerved back toward him, amazed. It was like he had powers, or something. “My God, you could be on Oprah. How did you know?”
Laughing, he lifted his shoulders. “You looked nervous.”
I sank against the wall. Damn! “Nervous isn’t exactly what I’m trying to convey.”
“But you shouldn’t be nervous at all,” he said. “I’d hire you.”
He was just being nice, but I was grateful. “You don’t happen to work at Candlelight Books, do you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
“Just the same, you might want to check your teeth.” A fresh Kleenex materialized in his hand, and he offered it to me. “Lipstick.”
Startled, I glanced into the stainless steel of the doors and just before they opened, I saw a smudge of red on my left front tooth. “Shit!” I murmured, grabbing the Kleenex and scrubbing frantically. How embarrassing. I felt like a dumbass (with two Ss).
“Break a leg!” he called after me as I stumbled off the elevator.
I was standing in a carpeted lobby whose walls were lined with glass-covered bookcases. The cases gave the appearance of guarding something valuable, though the books inside them were rack-sized paperbacks you would see at any Walgreens in the country. Many of the covers bore pictures of men (usually shirtless) and women (usually in the process of tastefully losing their shirts), undulating against each other in various chaste and not-so-chaste ways. Some of them just had couples staring at each other, or the horizon, with dramatic urgency. A few just had a single man, usually in a cowboy hat, standing rugged and alone and staring ahead with what I supposed was meant to be a sensual glower.
A woman about my age was doing phone duty at a large, double-tiered reception desk. All that was visible of her was her heart-shaped face, long blond hair, and a Peter Pan blouse in baby blue with navy blue piping—a hideous early Donna Reed thing that I hoped for her sake was being worn as an ironic statement.
She smiled briskly at me. “May I help you?”
“I’m Rebecca Abbot. I have an appointment with Kathy Leo.”
“Kathy will be out momentarily,” the receptionist announced after buzzing her.
Momentarily left me five minutes to stare more closely at the books in the cases. I recognized very few names. I had spent all my college years reading. I had been buried in books, but I knew nothing about romances. It was like I was discovering a counterculture.
“Good, you’re on time!” a voice said to me before I knew I had been spotted. Kathy Leo strode toward me with her hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you. Come on back.”
I was ushered through a maze of hallways, all buzzing with romance novel–related activity. Little clumps of people gathered together talking looked up with obvious curiosity at me as I walked by. Along one corridor we passed a lone young woman standing 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
