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?”
I shook my head. Kathy! That’s who I should have asked.
“Well, an assistant here starts at…generally speaking…” She named a figure in the low thirties. My heart pounded. It was unbelievable. I couldn’t help saying the number aloud.
Mercedes’s eyes narrowed. “Did you have a specific salary requirement?”
“No!” Then, realizing that I probably sounded very uncool, I added, “That is, not really…”
“Because, naturally, with your experience…”
My lips twisted. Right. With my experience I was lucky not to be asking people if they would like to supersize that.
“I’ll be pulling for you to do well on the test,” she said quickly.
That word, test, stopped me cold. I stopped balancing my checkbook in my head. I’d been hoping to bluff about my typing speed. “When do I take that?”
“I’ll give it to you to take home now,” she said.
Take home? This was obviously not a typing test.
She turned and pillaged the top of a file cabinet stacked with papers, then came back at me with a large manila envelope. “That’s a book proposal. Read it, write an acceptance and revision letter and edit the first chapter, and then drop it off at the front desk.”
I gulped. Edit? They wanted me to be an editor and not just some kind of secretary?
“Oh! And let me get you some books.” She grabbed handfuls from her shelves and shoved them across the desk at me.
I stumbled out of the building with my bundle of stuff, feeling conflicted. A job like this would be great, but what were the chances I would get it?
Nil.
I really needed to be more careful about these jobs I was applying for.
Fleishman and Wendy were thrilled with my freebies. Wendy found a baggy family saga in the pile that piqued her interest. “I love stuff like this.”
“I thought you didn’t read romance novels,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said. “I just like these.”
Fleishman went straight for the category romance novels; he seemed more interested in the camp factor of it all. “Look at this! The Fireman’s Baby Surprise!” He sniggered as he leafed through the front pages. “Is that what women fantasize about now? Having babies with firemen?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I just fantasize about having a paycheck.”
Fleishman stole away with a little hoard of books.
Wendy shot the manila envelope a look of concern. “What’s that? Homework?”
“It’s an editing test. I have to edit a chapter of a manuscript and bring it back to them.”
Wendy
