Marrying Up

JACKIE ROSE

lives in Montreal, Quebec, with her husband, daughter and dog. After cutting her teeth in the publishing world editing a travel magazine, she decided to devote herself to writing full-time (and not just because she prefers to work in her pajamas). Jackie is the author of Slim Chance, also published by Red Dress Ink. Marrying Up is her second novel.

When she’s not looking herself up on the Internet, Jackie likes to spend her time sleeping, shopping and musing about the meaning of it all. She’s currently hard at work on her third book.

Marrying Up
Jackie Rose

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For Dan, the bookends of my love life.

Eternal thanks to…

My amazing editors: Sam Bell, for your kindness, calmness and can-do-ness (I’ll miss you terribly!), and Farrin Jacobs, for your thoughtful, artful guidance in shaping this story. My devoted agent, Marcy Posner, for all your wisdom and patience. Superdesigners Margie Miller and Tara Kelly for another wonderful cover. Margaret Marbury and the rest of the brilliant group at Red Dress Ink for making it all happen so beautifully yet again.

A truly stellar team of baby-sitters—Sandy, Bubba, Rachel, Nelu and Allison Ouimet—for loving my kid as if she were your own. Galit, for letting me adopt and abuse your laptop (I hope it’s still under warranty). Shoel, Issie, Rose, Ted, Dan, Darline, Selena, Dino, Keenan, Jordy and Sarah, and all the girls, near and far, for asking, caring and sharing.

Dan, most of all, for being my live-in motivational speaker. Your passionate sincerity, sympathetic soul and boundless enthusiasm for all things me remind me daily why I married you. And, of course, Abigail—the littlest, loveliest person I know.

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Three

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

prologue

The Last First Day of the Rest of My Life

BUZZ BUZZ! “Looks like another scorcher today folks! Eighty-eight degrees and—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—rising fast! But we’ve got twelve uninterrupted minutes of cool tunes coming up—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—so stick around for some Culture Club, Metallica and Phil Collins—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—right after these—”

My first conscious thought is that I want very much to stab myself in the eardrums to make it stop. But I smack Snooze instead, the blessed silence returns, and I bury my aching head beneath the pillow.

Soon, instead of cursing Buffalo’s Number One Home of the Eighties, Nineties and Beyond with all the fire and venom I can muster, I’m dreaming fitfully about Phil Collins. He’s holding a crisp white bouquet of stephanotis and riding naked on a unicycle down the aisle at my brother’s wedding….

BUZZ BUZZ! “—and the seventeenth K-HIT caller who can tell me Axl Rose’s real name—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—will win a pair of tickets for tomorrow night to see November Rain—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—the rockingest tribute band Buffalo has ever—” BUZZ BUZZ!

Oh, for God’s sake!

(SMACK!)

I lift the pillow and squint, one-eyed, at the glowing green numbers…. 8:10. Crap. But everything gets fuzzy and warm again and I drift off… Ahhh…there’s Phil again, and he looks lovely—

BUZZ BUZZ!

Grrrr…

(SMACK!)

I squint again… 8:23? Damn. I squint harder… 8:28! Shit!

Painfully, excruciatingly, I open the other eye. A pack of Canadian cigarettes next to the alarm clock comes slowly into focus….

No. Please no. Oh God, NO! NOT AGAIN!!!

I wipe the sleep from my face, panicking now. On the floor, ripped spandex shorts, a bicycle seat and a muddy tire….

Maybe it’s a dream. A bad, bad dream.

I pinch myself—hard—just in case, and wait.

Nothing.

Hoping against hope, I turn over….

Ugh. There he is—Jean-Jean. On my formerly very white Egyptian polished-cotton sateen jacquard sheets by Ralph Lauren. Still wearing that dirty baseball hat. Still sleeping. Snoring, even. The audacity.

Maybe he’s just a hallucination.

Yes, that’s it! A hallucination induced by alcohol poisoning!

But as last night’s events bleed through my slowly waking mind like a spreading stain, I recall that I only drank two and a half martinis over a four-hour period. Barely enough to give me a hangover, let alone mental delusions or visual disturbances of any kind.

But wait… Hold on a second… I did have several olives, come to think of it, and hadn’t I once read somewhere that gin-soaked olives have been known to cause, in some suggestible individuals, effects not unlike those of the storied tequila worm?

Perhaps not. But surely there was an explanation other than the obvious: That I’d slept with the idiotic French-Canadian bicycle messenger from work.

Again.

And yet here he is, all wrapped up in my fine 400-thread-count bedding like a birthday present from hell. Happy 29th, Holly! Here you go—humiliation incarnate. Hope you like it! What, pray tell, could I look forward to next year? A tumor?

But it isn’t my birthday. Thank God at least for that. Nope, it’s just a plain old Friday morning. Which means that last night’s senseless debauchery was both desperate and stupid, completely devoid of any excuse—rational, alcoholic, depressive or otherwise. Understandable for a Saturday night maybe, when the symptoms of singlehood flare up and otherwise disgraceful hookups might be forgiven, but on a Thursday?

I should be ashamed of myself. Beyond ashamed, really. Why hadn’t I just stayed home alone and watched an E.R. repeat with a cheap bottle of wine like all the other normal, hopeless, single women in Buffalo?

“Excuse me,” I say, and nudge him with my heel. Hard.

He turns over, grunts and smiles.

“Ahem!” I say loudly, covering myself.

“Heh?”

“Please, Jean-Jean, wake up! Allez vous!” I don’t know much French, but I can assure you my tone spoke volumes.

“Come hon now, ma petite. Believe me when I tell you I know you don’t want dat! For sure I know dat!”

“Jean-Jean, it’s like this, so please listen carefully. Last night was a mistake. I know I’ve said this before and I’m sorry, but this time I really mean it—I don’t want to see you anymore! So please just go home, okay? Please. Just go…”

He grins and rolls his eyes at me. “Dat’s what you said hlast week, ’Olly, and da week before dat! But you halways come back to Jean-Jean for more!”

“Well, I can promise you I’ll be sticking to my word this time and—”

“Eh!” He puts a nicotine-stained finger to my lips. “Why say someting you regret? Jean-Jean, you know, is twice da fun! And to love ’im is to deserve ’im more dan once, ma petite. Many, many more time dan dat! So now dat you ’ad ’im, you can’t forget. No never!”

With that, he hops out of bed and begins collecting the T-shirts and rags and rubber bands which comprise his work uniform.

“What does that even mean?” I moan to no one in particular, and fling his cigarettes toward the door. “Please hurry, will you? I’m late for work….”

“Jean-Jean is halways ’appy to oblige you, ’Olly. See you—layter!”

The cheeseball winks at me twice, in case I didn’t catch it the first time. He stuffs his crap into a mud-splattered backpack and swaggers out the door, leaving me alone with a beer bottle full of cigarette butts and unwelcome memories of last night’s awkward fumblings.

I pull the covers back up over my head for a few precious moments and vow to try and see the bright side of this latest romantic debacle. Like…at least I was getting some! That has to be worth something, right? And to be completely honest, Jean-Jean isn’t such a bad guy, anyway—he just needs to grow up a little. With some career counseling and maybe a Queer Eye makeover, he might even make a nice boyfriend for someone someday. Just not for me. In the meantime, what did it matter? Nobody would ever have to know…

Except moi, that is.

Fortunately, my history with Jean-Jean taught me that while the nausea and self-loathing born of my temporarily misplaced affections may linger for a while, eventually they dissipate along with most of the gory details. (Mother Nature is no fool—if the passage of time didn’t take the edge off our labor pains, our heartbreak, our bikini waxes, the human race probably would have died out aeons ago!) And thanks to a few modern amenities—namely condoms, soap and water—potentially unwelcome reminders of such ill-advised trysting are practically a thing of the past.

The regret, though…well I suppose that’s a little different. It never fully disappears. It just sort of fades away until it becomes a tiny little pinprick of shame, part of the growing list of things I wish I’d done differently, or not at all. Yes, the regret is unfortunately quite permanent. Kind of like the new grease spot on my pillowcase.

Two showers later—including a violent exfoliating session that would have skinned a lesser woman alive—I am officially late for work before I’ve even left my apartment.

No, the day has not begun well.

On difficult mornings such as these, I try to find solace in a series of uplifting aphorisms I’ve collected over the years. They help me salvage whatever shreds of optimism I can from the wreckage of my life. So I try to tell myself that the world is my oyster, that comedy is just tragedy plus time, that today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life?

The perfect mantra for chronically regretful yet eternally hopeful sorts like me. Most of the time, the simple, wonderful truth of it is enough to put the spring back in my step.

Only today the slate is not clean, the start is not fresh.

The start, in fact, stinks.

part one

chapter 1

The Day I Died

It would probably go something like this:

Hastings, Holly. 1975–2060. Passed away of chronic liver disease on Friday, December 31, 2060, alone again on New Year’s Eve, since she didn’t have a date, and hadn’t in many, many years. She was 85.

Miss Hastings, was born in Buffalo, the fourth child and only daughter of the late Louise McGillivray Hastings, a bookkeeper, and the late Lawrence Hastings, a schoolteacher, both also of Buffalo.

After completing a three-year degree in Journalism and Professional Writing in slightly more than five years at Erie County College, Miss Hastings took a job at this newspaper, which she believed would be an important stepping stone in her fabulous career as a writer. The single Miss Hastings quickly found her place among the many talentless hacks at the Buffalo Bugle, penning obituaries and taking classified ads for more than fifty years, until her forced retirement in 2052.

During college, Miss Hastings took up social drinking, which eventually evolved into full-blown alcoholism after a string of failed relationships. Due to her inability to write the Great American Novel, or even a Not So Great One, the mateless Miss Hastings never left the Bugle, as she had planned. In fact, she never left the Buffalo-Niagara Region. Hell, during the last five years of her life, she never even left her house!

Miss Hastings leaves behind nobody—not even a cat. The bulk of her meager estate will be divided among her many creditors, and her body will be donated to medical science, unless somebody claims it before noon tomorrow.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, really. I’ve almost certainly—no, make that definitely—come across worse lives, written lamer obits for real, actual people. Haven’t I?

Hmmm…

Okay, so even if I haven’t, technically speaking, there’s no cause for alarm just yet. The whole point of the exercise is to imagine the way things might turn out, you know, if everything stays the same. To see where my life is heading, worst-case scenario. But even if it all comes true, so what? Cats, after all, are pretty crappy compared to dogs, so if ever there were a pet not to have… And let’s not underestimate the ultimate satisfaction of sticking it to the credit-card companies from beyond the grave.

I print my final draft, fold it up until it’s a tiny little square and shove it way down into the bottom of my bag.

Okay, Holly. Back to work. No need to feel sorry for yourself.

Despite the fact that I hardly have a thing to do except sit around and wait for someone to call, I try to keep busy. I hone my pitch for a story about the Buffalo fashion scene (don’t laugh—we can’t all live in New York or London or Paris, no matter how much we might like to, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are oblivious to life’s finer things) and color-code my files until at last the phone rings. Will it be a trumpet seller? A passport found? A grieving relative? My boss, Cy, telling me he finally needs my feature, A.S.A.P?

“Holly Hastings,” I say into the receiver.

“Um, hi.” A woman’s voice. Very shrill. “I want to place an ad. In the personals.”

“All right,” I sigh. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. It’s for the ‘Women Seeking Men’ section.”

Of course it is. “Yup. Go ahead.”

“Will you tell me if you think this is okay?”

“Sure.” Poor thing. I knew she didn’t have a chance, and I hadn’t even heard it yet.

“Okay,” she exhales purposefully. “This is what I have. ‘Cuddly thirty-five-year-old princess seeks knight in shining armor. I love babies, four-star restaurants and international travel. You’re a gorgeous, tall, marriage-minded physician or lawyer, between thirty-three and forty. I’m five foot one, have brown hair and brown eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” I say, taking it down.

“You think?”

“Definitely.”

“Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m doing this!” she shrieks. “I’m so excited! Can you get it in for tomorrow morning? Before tomorrow night, I mean? Can you? I have an extra ticket to The Vagina Monologues at Shea’s!”

“Sure thing.”

“Great!”

I take the details and hang up.

Women Seeking Men. As if. Had she ever taken the time to actually read our little rag, she might have noticed that for every ten women seeking men via the services of the Buffalo Bugle there is only one man seeking woman.

It is all just so sad. Sad and funny. Sad that she dares to believe Dr. Right will call her by tomorrow night to begin with. Funny that she thinks a show about female sexuality and the c-word will make suitable first-date entertainment anyway. And sad again that The Vagina Monologues is not just a theatrical experience, but also a fairly accurate way to describe so many of our sex lives. Because only the rare, the proud, the few can claim to be involved in any coed, long-term, mutually respectful…er…dialogue.

And that’s okay.

Just because it’s sad doesn’t mean it has to ruin your life.

You see, some women wallow in singlehood the way pigs wallow in shit. But that’s just not me. There’s no shortage of far worthier sources of anxiety and self-reproach, like bioterrorism and ozone depletion and flat-chestedness. I also find obvious desperation of any kind profoundly futile, since I know that men—even the most uninformed, unenlightened, uninspired of them—unerringly pick up on that scent a mile away. In theory, therefore, there’s no point in being miserable simply because one happens to be flying solo, while broadcasting your panic at the thought of it will simply ensure that things stay that way.

So even though the prospect of dying alone and poor and completely catless might faze some, I will probably handle it quite well; as a person who’s experienced near-epic singlehood, I don’t even know what it’s like to be in a meaningful relationship, save for one long-term mistake and a few flings here and there, all of which ended in varying degrees of disaster and confusion. Truthfully, it has never really bothered me before. I’ve always trusted that fate will bring me together with the man I’m designed for, some day, some way.

Until now, I suppose.

I reach back down into the bottom of my bag and feel around for the little square of paper. For the first time ever, as I reread my pitiful obituary, twinges of doubt make inroads into the romantic certainty that has served me so well for so long.

What if he never comes? What if he doesn’t exist? What if we never meet, and just pass each other by in the street over and over again until we marry the wrong people, divorce, grow old, get senile and die? More likely still, what if I screw it all up when we finally do find each other, and all that lonely, crazy, catless stuff really, truly happens?

The seeds of self-pity had been sown that morning, when Jill, my roommate, whose life I’d always thought was at least a little bit worse than my own, threw some sympathy my way after she saw Jean-Jean exiting my room.

In the kitchen, she and her everpresent but vaguely mysterious boyfriend exchanged knowing glances across the table as I frantically ripped open a box of Pop-Tarts.

“There’s fresh coffee,” Jill offered. “Hazelnut-vanilla decaf. I just made it.” I could tell that what she really meant was, Holly, you poor, poor thing. What a horrible ordeal you’ve been through. Perhaps a hot beverage might distract you from the memory of it, if only for a few moments.

“No time,” I said, fighting with a silver package. “You’d think there was gold inside these bloody things….”

She looked at me with sad eyes. “You’re so meticulous about everything, Holly. Except what you put in your body.”

“Thanks, Jill. I know.”

The girl is a health fiend. Yoga, soy, supplements—the whole package. How someone can go through life like that is beyond me. The way I see it, we only have five senses, and to squander one of them on the likes of kale and lentils is akin to blinding yourself voluntarily, no matter how much cumin is involved.

Somehow, though, she manages to make me feel like a child every time I order a pizza or sleep in on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong—I love her to pieces. In some ways, Jill Etherington is like the mother I never had. Well, that’s not exactly fair, since I do in fact have a perfectly serviceable mother, albeit one who never really minded if I ate Count Chocula for dinner in front of the TV or skipped phys ed in high school.

To save a few minutes, I decided to eat my Pop-Tart raw. She shook her head as I stuffed the broken pieces into my mouth.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I informed her.

“Why don’t you at least sit down to eat?” she suggested.

“Why don’t you stand up?” I snapped back.

Despite my impatience with her that morning, one of the things I admire most about Jill is how she’s always ready and dressed for work two hours before she has to leave the house. Granted, she goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., but still—being early for anything is an excellent quality I hope one day to have. Maybe it has to do with being excited to get where you’re going—work, date, spinning class, whatever—but since Jill is a clerk at a paper-processing plant, and I know for a fact that she despises her job, that theory couldn’t possibly explain her rise-and-shine attitude.

Not to say that I’m late for things. Actually, I’m often on time, even if it’s just barely. When I have to be somewhere, the digital clocks in my life govern my every move. In the morning, I know precisely how long it takes me to shower, to get dressed, to eat. A mere minute one way or the other might make the difference between panic and calm. I’ll even blow a traffic light to save a few seconds on my way to work.

A therapist of mine (I no longer remember which one, exactly) once suggested that my personal game of Beat the Clock has nothing to do with valuing punctuality, but rather that it’s part of a need to inject drama and adventure into my daily life. While that may be true, I also know that waltzing in past your coworkers twenty minutes after nine makes a bad impression, no matter how late you stay to make up for it, and is definitely not a good way to get ahead.

Lately, though, despite knowing better, I seemed to be having an awful lot of trouble getting to the Bugle on time, and not just on those mornings after the night before. Since it was becoming clear that I was never going to get ahead there no matter how early I showed up, I suppose I was finding it a little hard to stay motivated.

“Don’t be grumpy, sweetie,” Jill said.

“Huh?”

“I said, don’t be grumpy.”

“I’m not grumpy. I’m late,” I mumbled.

Boyfriend, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet until that point, slammed his mug down on the table. “No way! I hope that dupa with the bicycle seat isn’t the father!”

“No, you idiot. Late for work,” I said.

Boyfriend was a bit of a moron, and a lot of an asshole, though Jill chose not to see it. His name, for the record, is not at all important. Although my dear roomie is quite taken with the idea of having a boyfriend in general, she doesn’t seem to care all that much about who fills the position, and is content to overlook all manner of glaring biographical inconsistencies in order to enjoy the perks of coupledom. She hasn’t been single for more than forty-eight hours since junior high, and this latest prize was simply one in a long line of subpar rebound guys who’d morphed into serious boyfriends.

“Seriously,” Jill said. “What’s going on with you and Jean-Jean?”

“Umm, we… I mean he and I were just… I was… I mean, he was…”

She waited patiently for me to finish, but there really wasn’t much I could say in my own defense. It was a rotten, unholy lust whose name I dared not speak for fear of giving it any more power than it already had.

Boyfriend glanced up and offered, “Well, I think you two are perfect for each other.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed, Holly,” Jill added kindly. “Your personal life is your business and I’m sure you have your reasons. And he’s…not so bad, really. So why don’t the two of you consider dating more seriously?”

“Are you joking? I can’t tell…”

“Well, you obviously can’t keep your hands off each other. I suppose you have chemistry or something. What’s so terrible about that? It’s…nice. Embrace it.”

The girl was obviously insane. Served me right, answering an ad for a roommate from the bulletin board in my therapist’s waiting room.

“I don’t want your pity.” I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.

“There, there,” she said, and began stroking my hair.

But Boyfriend would not be deterred. “I think Holly’s hot-hot for Jean-Jean!”

Brilliant.

“Yeah, I think maybe she is,” Jill agreed.

Walking in to work late was definitely better than this. “I think one of you’s extremely jealous and incredibly hot for Jean-Jean, and the other one’s crazy. And I think Jill’s the one who’s crazy.”

“I suppose that makes me jealous,” he deduced.

“Among other things.” I got up and headed for the door. “And if you don’t mind, keep your nose out of my business.”

“She must be on the rag,” he said loudly to Jill, who rolled her eyes and looked at me as if to say, “I know he can be a little insensitive, but at least he’s got a pulse.”

The beauty of my job is that I know, better than almost anyone, how even the most pathetic of existences usually reveal at least some merit when you simmer them down to a mere two hundred and fifty words. Vacuous socialites, crooked politicians, celebrity pornographers and yes, even old maids—all leave their mark in one way or another. Sometimes you just have to read between the lines.

Take the life of John Michael Whitney. Local boy, beloved son and brother, star of his high-school football team—that part was easy. Unfortunately for Johnny, though, his True Defining Moment—most every life has one, subtle or not, and the best obituarists can nose them out like blood-hounds—came a bit later on, when he ran over and killed the mayor of a small town on the Texas-Arkansas border while fleeing the scene of a botched liquor-store robbery in the mid-’80s.

Of course, poor Mrs. Whitney loved her son dearly despite his many vices, and requested that we gloss over the incident in his obituary. “He was so good at football,” she told me plaintively over the phone, “and crafts, too.” Turns out the guy was the Martha Stewart of Death Row, finding solace among his beeswax candles and Christmas wreaths, which he sold to the guards’ wives for cigarette money. But the state wasn’t nearly as impressed, and in the end, not even his God-given talent for macramé was enough to save him from Old Sparky. But I made sure to include it in his final tribute.

It may sound overly forgiving—what of the poor mayor (a bigot and a drunk!) and his grieving widow? (a two-timing tramp!)—but that’s just part of what we obituarists sometimes have to do: rewrite people’s less-than-stellar lives into pleasant little blurbs to help friends and relatives feel all warm and fuzzy about them. It’s the ultimate final makeover, and I believe everyone deserves at least that.

Everyone except me, it seems.

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about my life lately, unless you count the chenille throw I’d taken to huddling beneath on the sofa, emerging only for work and a few hours of drunken weekend abandon, with the occasional booty call from an idiotic bicycle messenger thrown into the mix. If there is merit in there somewhere, damned if I can see it.

The upside of such a mundane existence is that I am left with plenty of time to wonder about the meaning of it all. Where is my life going? Will I ever have a real boyfriend? Do I have a destiny? And if I do, and it turns out to be a shitty one, will it be possible to change it?

Answering these questions has recently become Number One on my priority list, relegating to Number Two for the first time in three years my plan to save up enough money for a set of large but not huge breast implants. The tasteful kind.

As the waves of existential angst wash over me day after day, week after week, month after month, much as they had in high school (minus the haunting Bauhaus soundtrack), it has begun to dawn on me that there might be more to it all than an okay job and a rundown two-bedroom flat over Marg’s Olde-Tyme Medieval Shoppe.

Which brings me back to why I really spent the better part of this morning writing my own obituary and cursing the cats I didn’t have. It’s not as morbid as it seems, actually. Plenty of obituarists while away the hours in between jobs perfecting their own final tributes, as well as those of friends and loved ones, or even, if the mood for vengeance strikes, those of enemies, bosses, ex-lovers and so on.

Of course, I usually while away those very same hours taking classified ads for free puppies and used cars, since I wear many different hats at the Bugle. Many ugly, unflattering hats, including one Get-Me-A-Coffee-Will-Ya-Holly fedora, ungraciously bestowed upon me most mornings by the Life & Style Editor, Virginia Holt. Not that I even work for her, but what can I say—no? I don’t think so. Not if I want her to accept one of my story pitches before the end of time. One day, I hope she and her enormous crocodile Hermès Birkin bag—which I would bet a year’s salary was the only one in the entire city—will be kissing my arse, but until then, my lips are glued to hers.

Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m superstitious, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I wrote my own obit, there would suddenly be occasion to use it, like the second I left the building a giant anvil would fall on my head and pound me into the pavement à la Wile E. Coyote. The same reasoning prevents me from signing the organ-donor spot on the back of my driver’s license, something which I believe is tantamount to suicide. It’s like saying, “Hey! Whoever’s up there—I’m ready! Take me now and feel free to use my parts!”

I explained all this to Dr. Martindale last week after he suggested the exercise as a way to pinpoint the source of my growing anxiety, but he wasn’t buying it.

“Nope. It’s a bad idea,” I told him. “Definitely a bad idea. Hits too close to home.”

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“Ummm, dying?”

“That’s original.”

“I’m in no position to be taunting the gods, Doctor M. No way.”

“It’ll help you learn a little bit about yourself. Writing one’s own obituary is a fantastic impetus for action. I recommend all my patients do it—even the ones who don’t happen to write them for a living.”

“Ha, ha. But seriously…I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to confront my own mortality?”

That sounded good.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But maybe…just maybe…you’re afraid of confronting your own vitality.” He pronounced the last word slowly, as if I needed help figuring out how very witty he was. Utterly spent, he leaned back in his big leather chair and folded his hands triumphantly over his belly.

I squirmed on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing my book any time soon, I thought maybe you could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”

“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”

“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”

He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”

Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.

“Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”

“He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the real thing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”

“I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”

“Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”

“Huh?”

“Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”

Nice. How could I beat that?

“I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”

“Not so much, no.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.

Hmmm…

Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a little worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than the truth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.

I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any real problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.

The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.

I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the antiProzac set.

Despite my misgivings about Martindale’s commitment to the seriousness of my complaints—I had to admit that his obituary exercise sounded a lot more promising than Berenice’s solution (which involved some sort of birth reenactment), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give the obituary thing a shot. There was just too much junk swirling around in my mind, and it seemed like a decent way to start clearing it out.

As I reread the news of my passing, one possible path laid out before me, I have to wonder: What would it take to rewrite this life? Defined by one horrible crime and faced with years of boredom and loneliness and regret on death row, John Michael Whitney clung hopefully to his pine cones and glitter glue. I’m sure, in his own mind, he saw himself not only as a murderer, but as an artist, with something positive to offer the world. But what about me? Is there anything out there to redeem my existence, before it’s too late?

The prospect of emerging from Berenice’s giant plastic womb a brand-new person suddenly sounds a whole lot easier than figuring that out.

chapter 2

Writer’s Block

Even though I knew George was probably busy—Fridays being the day she rips the covers off mercifully unsold fantasy novels at the Book Cauldron and sends them back to the publishers—I called and asked her to meet me for an emergency lunch. I calmly explained that if she didn’t come and rescue me from myself, I was bound to dash immediately across the street and buy seventeen cartons of cigarettes, after which I would be only too happy to ditch work and spend the rest of the afternoon in the park, smoking one after the other until there was nothing left of me but a bit of charred lung and one diamond earring. (I’d lost the other last week, and was hoping that the remaining stud, in its loneliness, might magnetically guide me to its partner’s hiding place.)

“Why all the doom and gloom?” George asks as she plops down into the booth.

“Look, you know me,” I say. “I’m an optimist.”

“Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. You’re too superstitious.”

“Fine. Then I’m a guarded optimist….”

“More of a fatalist, I’d say. But a cheery fatalist.”

“George! Just listen. The point is, I think I’m losing my grip on happy thoughts. Something’s got to be done.” I pull the tattered obituary out of my purse and slide it across the table.

“What’s this?”

“Just read it,” I tell her, exhaling dramatically.

As she does, I signal the waitress. “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, a double order of fries, and a Jack and Coke.”

She looks up from her pad and pushes her sliding glasses back up her nose with her pencil. “We don’t have a liquor license here, ma’am.”

Nice. The one day when I could really use a bit of liquid lunch.

“Fine. Make it a milkshake, then. Chocolate.”

“I’ll have the Nicoise salad,” George says. “With the dressing on the side, and no potatoes. Oh, and are there anchovies on the salad?”

The waitress nods.

“Were they packed in oil?”

“I would say so, miss.”

“Hey!” I interrupt. “Why is she a miss and I’m a ma’am?” The nerve.

They stare at me blankly, then return to the business at hand. “Well, then forget the anchovies,” George tells her. “No, wait. Keep them. No wait! It depends on the tuna. Was that packed in oil?”

“I don’t know, miss.”

George is utterly confounded. “What should I do?” she asks me.

I shrug.

“How about I just bring you a nice green salad?” The waitress suggests.

“Okay,” George smiles, relieved. “Oh, and a Diet Coke. With a wedge of lime.”

The waitress shakes her head and shuffles off in her sensible orthopedic shoes.

“Dressing on the side!” George calls after her. “God. That was close. Which do you think are worse—carbs or saturated fats?”

“Are you kidding? I have no idea,” I say impatiently, motioning for her to keep on reading. In the meantime, I snack on my fingernails.

As soon as she finishes, she reads it again, then ponders for a minute or two. “I think you’re nuts. Why did you write this? Didn’t you say you’d never do your own?”

“Yeah, but Doctor M. said it would help me see where my life is going, give a voice to my hidden fears and then identify new goals for myself.”

“And the problem is…what exactly? You’re afraid you’ll never have a cat? ’Cause if that’s it, we can get you a cat. I think there might even be a sign up at the store. Black kittens or something…”

“Ha, ha,” I manage weakly.

“Look, Holly. If you’re for real about this…”

“I am. I so am. Help me.”

George nods seriously. “Okay. Where to begin? Well, I guess everyone’s afraid of dying…”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” I tell her. “I’m afraid of dying alone. I’m afraid my life will have meant nothing to anybody.”

“I get it, I get it.” She thinks about it for a second, then adds, “Look. It’s okay to want to change your life, to write a book or whatever. It’s okay to want a better job. Work on that. Fine. But you’re afraid of being single? Come on. That’s so…mundane.”

“I know. But all of a sudden I can’t help it. I just never thought my life would turn out like that. And looking back over my eighty-five years—what did I really contribute? Nothing! God, what a waste! And I had so much love to give…so much love to give…!”

My throat tightens and my ears begin to ache. I flash back to Dr. Pink, a self-styled “lacrimal therapist” from a few years back whose clinical methodology involved systematically reducing her patients to tears. She believed that public crying was not a sign of weakness and emotional instability, but rather a healthy purging of inner turmoil and a sacred statement of communal trust to be celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to witness it. But I hated crying—here, there, anywhere. No wonder Pink only lasted three sessions.

I gulp back the tears, but George is unimpressed. “Okay, first of all, Holly, you’re still alive. All right? You didn’t die single. You didn’t even die. For God’s sake, you’re only twenty-eight. So it’s not like you can say your life ‘turned out’ like anything, because you haven’t even lived it yet.”

“Exactly,” I whimper.

“Huh?”

“I’ve got to do something, G. Before it’s too late.”

“So do something. Take action, girl!”

“But what? That’s the problem.”

“Why don’t you just try to write something?”

Just what I need to hear. “You write,” I snap, a little too cruelly. It’s a sore point for her. George has been working on the same Star Trek screenplay since our second year at Erie. By the time she gets around to finishing it, the actors who play the characters will all have boldly gone into retirement.

She twirls a dark and frizzy curl around her finger and stares down at the table.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should try. I really should. But…but you know how hard it can be. It’s like, I work all day, and I finally get home and the last thing I want to do is stare all night at another screen.”

She snorts.

“TV doesn’t count.” Just try and come between me and my set.

The waitress delivers our meals and leaves before I can complain.

“This is wrong,” I whisper, knowing George will forgive me if I can make her laugh. “Didn’t I ask for chocolate? What’s the point of vanilla? Who would want a vanilla shake? It’s the complete antithesis of chocolate—it’s the absence of flavor!”

The waitress glances over at me from the cash with a dour look.

“You want me to get her back?” George giggles as she wrings every last drop of flavor from the lime wedge into her Diet Coke.

“Don’t you dare!” She knows I am deathly afraid of incurring the wrath of food-service persons. They have so much power. Complain one too many times and God only knows what might find its way into your tuna-salad sandwich.

“You’ve seen too many Datelines,” she informs me as I sullenly drink my shake.

“Hidden cameras will be America’s new conscience in the twenty-first century,” I say between slurps. Vanilla isn’t so bad, really.

“Now there’s a topic worth exploring….”

I’ve spent the past five years trying to come up with a great idea for my book, and George is always trying to help.

“Naw, it’s already been done.”

Since September 11th, countless writers have taken fear and ignorance to the bank, but I feel that people are ready for happier thoughts, instead of just another paranoid title like The Osama Next Door, or Nine Legal Ways to Watch Your Nanny, or Why Vegetables Cause Cancer. Unfortunately, though, thoughtful critiques of consumer-health alerts and diatribes decrying the end of privacy have also been done to death. But what if I incorporated those themes into a novel? Hmmm… It just might be crazy enough to work.

“Holly?”

…a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary meets 1984 meets Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution…

“Holly? Hello?” George snaps her fingers.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and promptly lose my train of thought. Ideas for my book are so exquisitely rare and delicate that the mere act of remembering them crushes their goodness into oblivion. I’ve all but resigned myself to the impossibility of writing a single word.

“You just need a little inspiration.”

“How can I get inspired when all I do is work, come home, watch TV and boink the bike messenger?”

Oops.

“Aw, tell me you’re kidding! You didn’t! Not again! Ew!”

“I did,” I reluctantly admit.

“But he’s so…he’s so…”

“Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”

“I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings good. Bicycle boy bad.”

“I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”

“Mmm-hmm…”

“Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and the previous day’s corrections.

She peers at me skeptically. By now, George has long since inhaled her salad and has moved on to eating her dressing-on-the-side with a spoon.

“Well, I was home alone, and would have been delighted to go out for a drink.”

“Umm…didn’t you have that coven thing with your mom last night?” As the product of a mixed lesbian marriage, George was half Wiccan, half Jewish.

“Oh please, Holly.”

It was worth a shot. I knew full well that the next Wiccan day of worship wasn’t until the fall equinox.

“Okay, so maybe I just needed to be held.”

“But by Jean-Jean?”

“What can I say? I’m pathetic,” I groan. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re just a lonely, lonely woman. You know, I bet if you found a job you liked better, everything else would fall into place. And one that uses FedEx instead of that shitty messenger service.”

Oh, if only it were that simple.

“There’s nothing really wrong with my job. I can think of at least a half dozen people who would kill to work there. It’s me, G.I know it is! It’s like all of a sudden, I’m so bloody bored and frustrated and negative about it that I don’t know what to do with myself. And it’s not like I’d be able to find something better in Buffalo, anyway… I’d have to move to New York for that, and God knows that would be a little more than I could handle right now! Besides, I’d rather be at the Bugle even if there’s no chance of me ever getting promoted to anything, ever, than at some boring software company or bank writing internal newsletters. My job’s fine. It’s me that isn’t!”

“Well, that’s a relief. Because frankly, just being bored at work isn’t a good enough reason to drive you into the arms of Jean-Jean.”

“I’m teetering on the brink!” I shriek. “I’m playing Russian roulette with my love life…. God! I must be insane. Who knows what else I’m capable of!?”

She nods sympathetically and glances around to see if my ranting is disturbing any of the other patrons. “I know, Holly. It sucks.”

But there’s no stopping me. “You know, up until a couple of years ago, everything was fine…. I liked work. I was proud of my job. Yeah, I was! I learned something new every day, even if it was just useless stuff like how much Sabres tickets were going for, or how to spell the names of rare diseases. And you know what else? I was even able to write. Not that I always did, mind you, because usually I didn’t, but I could, you know? When I wanted to…”

“Calm down. I remember. There was that short story about the big empty house with all the locked doors and the kid with the key-shaped fingers. It was very Twilight Zone. You could have submitted that somewhere, you know. It was good. Really good.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Maybe I should have written a whole book of short stories,” I sigh. “It was totally my genre.”

“Still could be.”

“Don’t you ever just feel like things used to be better in general? Like weekends. Weekends used to be so much fun, remember? Clubbing Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes even Thursdays. Waiting in line at Blaze all night. Who cares if we even got in? That was fun! Why don’t we ever do that anymore?”

“Blaze burned down. And I think you might be romanticizing things a little…. We mostly just got drunk at McGinty’s. There was never any lineup there.”

I laugh. “Probably because there were no doors on the stalls in the bathroom. What a dive! Still, it was great, wasn’t it? But now whenever we go somewhere, I feel like everyone’s five years younger than me and five times hotter and has better clothes and better jobs. Don’t you find?”

“Um, this is still Buffalo we’re talking about. You may very well have one of the best jobs in town,” she points out. “And nobody has good clothes.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Except you,” she corrects herself.

“Thanks. But I have to buy everything over the Internet because you can’t find so much as a Louis Vuitton key fob in this town, not that I can afford one, anyway. I hate Buffalo, I feel like I’m over the hill at twenty-eight and…oh, screw it—I’m just going to say it. I want a boyfriend! I know it’s wrong, but I want a boyfriend. I want to be in love. So badly. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m ready for my man. I really am. I’m tired of being above it all.”

George stares at me blankly. I’ve broken a sacred secret contract, and admitted That Which Should Never be Admitted by enlightened twenty-first-century women.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Sorry. I was just wondering what a key fob is.”

“I guess I thought that once I truly stopped caring about being alone, I wouldn’t have to be.”

“Like attaining nirvana the moment you shed all of your worldly concerns?”

“Exactly.”

The waitress, who has been listening in on most of our conversation, pops over to strike while the iron is hot. “Dessert, ladies?”

“Cheesecake,” I manage faintly.

“And two forks,” George adds. “You will find him, Holly. You’re both just doing your thing until you’re ready to meet, remember? And when you do, it’ll be forever. Isn’t that your theory?”

It is, but the whole Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come thing just isn’t working for me anymore. What I need is a warm body. With a heart. And a head. And a… Hell, who am I kidding? I want the whole damn package.

“All these years…” I moan weakly. “All these years, and I’ve just been sitting on the shelf, like an unwanted carton of milk about to expire.” The painful truth is that I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and that was back during my first year at Erie.

“That’s not exactly true…”

“Jim doesn’t count. Our relationship was based on a lie.”

After the crushing disappointment of graduating from high school still a virgin (I was pretty enough in a plain sort of way, just ridiculously shy around guys), I allowed myself to be tricked into a relationship with one of my brother Bradley’s loser friends. Jim was four years older than me, something that impressed me to no end, and still a virgin, too. I would later discover that as part of Bradley’s continuing efforts to get poor Jim laid, he and his friends decided I would make the perfect sacrificial lamb, since apparently none of the girls his own age would have anything to do with him and my thoughtful brother had overheard me crying to a friend about the humiliating prospect of entering college never having gotten any myself.

Bradley told me Jim liked me, and I eagerly fell in love with him before our first date. Things really blossomed from there. Jim and I were both glad to finally be having sex, so much so that he was even willing to endure the constant ribbing from his friends at not kicking me to the curb the morning after I gave it up, precisely seventy-two hours into our courtship. For my part, I was happy to overlook his dubious career goals—any job that allowed him to collect a paycheck while still being able to smoke pot all day long, a plan that came to glorious fruition in a part-time gig he landed driving one of those mini sidewalk-snow-removal buggies. Naive young thing that I was, and because Jim wasn’t exactly an evil person, I was also able to overlook those defects in his hygiene and intellect that had likely offended every other woman he’d met prior to me in order to experience the joys of couplehood for the first time.

Alas, the beautiful thing that was us casually dropped dead at a New Year’s Eve party about a year and a half into our romance, when Jim’s beer-soaked buddy Wojack marveled aloud at how much money had changed hands over the consummation of our relationship. I dumped Jim on the spot, after he high-fived Bradley instead of trying to lie his way out of it. And if I could have dumped Bradley that night, you can bet your life I would have. Making book on the Sabres was one thing, but your sister’s virginity? It’s no wonder my self-esteem’s a little shaky when it comes to men.

“The years are flying by, G. By the time someone wants me, I’ll be rotten and lumpy.”

“Lumpy’s not so bad,” George says. “I’m already lumpy.”

“But you’re good lumpy.”

My best friend’s waist-to-hip ratio is fairly generous, though it certainly doesn’t seem to bother anybody except her. When we walk down the street together, George’s jiggles and curves and curls garner far more lustful stares than my straight lines do. Still, she’s pretty timid when it comes to men, and almost completely oblivious to her effect on them. Her “sort of” boyfriend—one of our old creative-writing profs, a serial student-dater who’s been toying with her for years—isn’t helping her self-esteem much, either.

“Good lumpy? I wouldn’t go that far.” She snorts at the suggestion that such a thing might actually be possible. “I’d take an A-cup any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“So why hasn’t it happened for me yet?”

The closest I’d ever come to a relationship since Jim (and now Jean-Jean, I suppose) was a string of three one-night stands with the same guy. Over the course of two semesters. He was a fairly cute bartender at a popular club just off campus—quite a coup, but I could never shake the feeling that Freddie thought I was a different person each time.

“Just give it time, Holly. It will. I promise. For both of us. And we’re in it together till then…”

At least I have that. With George around, I know I will never really be alone. We sit in silence for a bit, finishing the cheesecake. Good old cheesecake. How can you be sad when it’s giving you a great big hug from the inside?

“Maybe I just need to regroup,” I say finally. “Get a handle on things. Figure out where my life is going.”

“That’s the spirit!”

We pay the bill and head outside. It’s late August, and very, very hot. Three blocks away, the mirrored windows of the Buffalo Bugle tower shine brightly before the mostly older buildings of the city skyline. Inside, I know exactly what’s going on: absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever. Today is exactly the same as yesterday, which was exactly the same as the day before that, and the day before that. I want to walk in the other direction.

“I haven’t taken a holiday since Christmas, you know.”

“Nobody could fault your work ethic.”

“It’s not doing me any good. Nobody notices. I’m there late all the time, working on all kinds of things that aren’t even part of my job description.”

“They notice, Holly. You’re really good at what you do. Look, call me later and we’ll figure it out. Just promise me you won’t start smoking again! At least not today…”

“Smoking, drinking, snorting—what’s the difference?” I laugh. “Remember, I know how it’s all going to end, anyway, so I may as well have a good time now. In fact, we should probably go out tonight and toast my long, lonely life. Like a premortem wake!”

“Oh, yeah!” She grins. “Now, that’s my girl!”

We part ways and George heads back toward the dingy bookshop and her own lame job, which is just as boring and futile as my own, although, it suddenly occurs to me, she never really seems to complain about it.

Fortified by diner food and the promise of a good night out, my optimism surges. And thinking about John Michael Whitney reminds me that my life—even the sad and lonely one I’d envisioned for myself that morning—reads like an absolute fairy tale. My obituary will be a call to arms; things are going to change.

Cy will have to understand. Though ground down by years of unpaid overtime, he rarely takes a day off, opting instead to live and eat and sleep in his office and take it all way too seriously. It’s not that Cy’s nasty, or even sexist—something I’d heard implied more than once by my oft-over-looked female coworkers—but he just doesn’t seem to get that not everybody can give one hundred and ten percent for $24,500 a year and no dental benefits.

“I need to take some personal time,” I tell him as soon as I get back from lunch.

Personal time, I am fully aware, does not count toward employees’ vacation time, of which I still have one week left and am hesitant to squander before Christmas. Though a right guaranteed by law, taking personal time usually imparts a faint whiff of mental instability, unless of course there’s been a death in the family. If Cy perceives my asking for it now as crazy or, even worse, frivolous or lazy, it might move me down a notch in his books, and I need him on my side if I am ever to get ahead at the Bugle.

“I see,” he says without looking up from his screen. “How much?”

“A week.”

“When?”

“Starting Monday?”

He glances at me. “That’s soon. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “But I’m a bit…burned out.”

That oughta work.

Most of the senior reporters and editors I know seem to regard journalism as a sort of religion, with cynicism standing in where faith should be. It’s their lives, twenty-four/seven, and it’s easy to become weary under the weight of it all, whether you’re reporting live from the trenches of a war-torn Iraq like Christiane Amanpour or penning “The Buffalo Entertainment Beat” like the Bugle’s own Bucky Jones. In theory, it should be no different for me. Invoking a burnout, like losing the faith, is a serious admission, and one not to be taken lightly. Plus, it might even have the added benefit of suggesting to him that I take my job more seriously than I actually do.

“Okay,” Cy says. “Just get that intern whatsisname to cover you.”

“That’s all?”

“Yup. Have fun. And shut the door on your way out—I can’t seem to get a fucking moment’s peace today.”

So that’s it. I am so easily replaceable that an unpaid intern whose area of expertise is photocopying his ass is able to do my job on a moment’s notice.

I back out of his office and shut the door. His name, stenciled in stout black capitals, stares me square in the face: CY THURRELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR. Cy had finished school nearly two years after I did, though he was only one year younger. He’d started at the Bugle as a lowly free-lancer three years ago and moved up the ranks at the speed of light.

It has actually turned out to be a pretty big news day for Buffalo—a small warehouse fire and a hit-and-run involving a monster truck and a traffic light downtown—so the frenzied comings and goings of my coworkers are more than enough to distract me. The prospect of an accidental death or two has whipped me into stand-by mode, and I await intelligence of any fatalities with my usual combination of concerned journalistic professionalism and detached personal curiosity.

Now I suppose I should ask anyone who might find my anticipation of tragedy distasteful or inappropriate to please keep in mind that this is what I do, day in day out, and am no more eager for news of someone’s death than a garbageman is eager to see the can on the curb. But I will admit that five years at this gig may have hardened me a little to the whole concept of death and dying, to the point where I can probably think of it and speak of it with more ease than most. I consider this a blessing of sorts, since it has freed me from the usual hang-ups and sentimentality associated with the whole mess, provided the death in question is not my own, of course.

The key, in my line of work, is to strive for balance. And what could be more life-affirming than someone who makes you thank heaven you’re alive? Jesse, a reporter for the City Desk and deliverer of a crush that comes and goes, scoots over on his chair to apprise me of the situation.

“Fire’s not too bad. Team’s there now,” he says, with a crack of his gum. Normally, that sort of terse sexiness would be enough to send me into a tizzy of stuttered responses and imagined wedding-planning, but today I’m not up for it, even though he is in Abercrombie & Fitch from head to toe.

“What about the monster truck?”

“No word on any casualties yet, Hastings.”

“Except for the light, of course.”

“Ha! Except for the light, yeah.”

I’m always my bravest around Jesse when the crush is in its dormant phase. Nevertheless, I half hope my sympathy for defenseless city property and humor in the face of senseless tragedy might awaken him to all the many wonders of me, but instead of asking me out, he just grins and propels himself backward down the corridor on his squeaky old office chair, quads bulging suggestively through perfectly worn-out khakis.

I long ago dismissed the possibility of anything ever happening between us, owing in equal parts to his gorgeous girlfriend and the fact that he rarely gets my jokes, which I know make me come off as an absolute idiot. Still, I can’t resist, meaning the better part of my interaction with Jesse consists of awkward explanations. So the traffic light quip was a significant achievement, and by the end of the day, I’ve decided that we’re going to have exactly four children: two boys and two girls, all black-haired and blue-eyed like him, but the girls would have my adorable freckles.

In the end, the monster truck claimed no human victims, so I have no subjects today other than the usual cancer-stricken and myocardially infarcted—and myself.

chapter 3

Goodbye, Norma Jean

Saturday afternoon and it’s Madison’s sixth birthday party. I have spent the past week trying to change my future and this is my reward. I brought George along to dull the pain, since I’ve already spent three out of the last five weekends watching my various nieces and nephews blow out candles and tear through stacks of gifts like tornadoes. Don’t get me wrong—I love each and every one of the little brats dearly (except for maybe the twins), but they do try the patience. To complicate matters further, I am seriously considering hooking up with the usual entertainment: the guy in the furry purple Barney suit. Not that I’ve ever seen his face, but that’s part of what intrigues me about him.

In addition to the possibility of seeing my mystery man, I am also hoping the party will give me a chance to talk to my brother about his job. Cole works at a car-parts factory in a depressed little rust-belt town northeast of the city.

“If I’d known there was going to be so much food, I would have stayed home,” George complains sullenly as we settle into lawnchairs as far removed from the mayhem as possible. “I’ve resolved to lose ten pounds by Thanksgiving or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’m blaming you.”

“Auntie Holly! Auntie Holly!” My niece Savannah comes squealing around the corner and jumps onto my lap. “Save me! AAAAHHH!!! Don’t let them get MEEEEEE!!!” Two boys I don’t know and one of the twins—Harrison, I think—are close on her tail, brandishing neon plastic weapons of some sort.

“Stop right there,” I demand. “What are those?”

“Thuper Thoakers!” Harrison growls.

“What?”

“Super Soakers,” George explains. “They’re water guns.”

“Oh, don’t even think it…” I tell them as I try to pry Savannah’s sticky fingers from around my neck.

“She said we were worm barf,” one of the boys explains matter-of-factly. “And now she must die.”

With that, they all open fire. Savannah takes off shrieking, but we’re already soaked.

“Fuck,” George says as she stands up to shake herself off. “I think it’s lemonade.”

I try to use the hose to wash off, but there’s no water.

“We turned it off this time,” Olivia, my sister-in-law, explains as she dashes by with a tray of hamburgers. “They kept spraying into the house last time.”

“Great.” As I go inside to wash up, I can’t help but notice that Cole and Olivia’s house might benefit from a spray or two. The decor, courtesy of their three small kids and two large dogs, is suburban eclectic: broken plastic toys in primary colors, couch-pillow forts, Elmo paraphernalia as far as the eye can see and fur-covered wall-to-wall carpeting, which thanks to a little foresight on Olivia’s part, is roughly the same shade as the dogs. At four-year-old hand level, black splotches of what might once have been grape juice provide a lovely focal point for the room.

When I finally make my way outside again, George is talking to my parents. Well, just my mother really, because my dad doesn’t talk so much. He just sort of stands there next to my mom thinking about other things. Or maybe he’s just standing there not thinking anything. It’s impossible to tell.

“George just mentioned you took the week off?” Mom says while trying to untangle the chains from the three pairs of glasses dangling around her neck. “Do anything fun?”

I glare at George. “Nope.”

“That’s too bad. Did you have any cake, dear?”

“Yes.”

“And did you see the kids?” she asks, looking past me toward the sandbox where Madison is hitting another little girl in the face with a plastic shovel.

“What kids?”

“Well, we’re going to go on over and say hi to the birthday girl. C’mon, Larry.” She makes a beeline for the sandbox and my dad shuffles off behind her.

We lie around in the sun for a while drinking beer, waiting for the entertainment to arrive. Alas, my furry purple hunk of burning love is a no-show, or maybe this particular group of kids has just seen enough of Barney for one summer, and so we are left with an adolescent acne-scarred magician. The kids, of course, are more interested in trying to steal his wallet than any of the handkerchief tricks he’s performing.

George, who’s been scanning the scene of frenzied, foaming six-year-olds and their wasted Stepford parents with as much interest as she can muster, turns to me languidly and slurs, “I don’t think I want kids.”

“Oh, come on—don’t base your maternal future on one six-year-old’s party.”

She waves me off. “I just don’t think I’m the breeding type. It’s too much responsibility, raising a kid.”

The thought of remaining childless by choice seems odd to me. “But what will you leave behind? It’s our duty as human beings to make sure our genetic material continues its evolutionary march toward perfection.”

“Big deal. There are plenty of others willing to carry that torch.”

“I suppose.”

“And you could choose to be single too,” she adds. “Imagine the freedom. To actually try to stay single forever.”

“That’s warped.”

“Think about it, Holly—it sure would take the pressure off. Men do it all the time. And it’s not like either of us will have to deal with any backlash from our parents or anything like that….”

George’s mothers, while perhaps overly involved in their daughter’s life, would never dream of pressuring her into couplehood or marriage. The possibility that a woman’s happiness or self-esteem might be dependent on anyone with a penis was simply beyond their sphere of comprehension. And my parents are more like spectators in my world, instead of active participants. They’re pretty old (I was a fortieth birthday surprise package for my mom) and besides, their urge for grandkids has already been filled eight times over by my brothers. So my mother isn’t all that interested in my social life, while my dad is so obsessed with model trains that he’s hardly come up from the basement since he retired and probably wouldn’t notice if I brought Marilyn Manson home for dinner.

“…although, since I am so truly fabulous it would be a crime…no, a sin—a sin of omission!—to deprive the world of my offspring. Hey, I know! Maybe I could just be an egg donor instead!”

George always gets a little cocky and grrl-powerish when she’s drunk, and the Perlman-MacNeill family values come flooding through, unrestrained by her usual mild-mannered self-deprecation.

“Sounds great,” I tell her.

“They pay you, like, a couple thousand bucks a shot for that, you know. And it would be a real mitzvah, helping an infertile couple get pregnant….”

The thought of George in stirrups with some mad gynecologist harvesting her eggs was a little far-fetched. “This from somebody who’s afraid of tampons.”

“Yeah, but I still use them,” she giggles, propping herself up on a plump elbow. “I’m sorry, but if you really think about it, the idea is just totally gross. Admit it!”

After debating internal vs. external feminine hygiene products for a good twenty minutes, I’m ready to go bug my brother for a job. By the time I make my way over to the patio, Cole is a bit drunk and bleary-eyed himself, and his face is smudged and sweaty from standing over their old barbecue all afternoon.

“Aw, come on, Holly. You don’t want to work with me. You’re a writer, not a drill-press operator…aw, shit…would ya look at that? Mackenzie! Mackenzie!”

Three little girls turn their heads.

“But Cole—”

“Mackenzie go inside if you have to go potty! Sorry Holly, what did you say? Goddamit, like the dogs don’t do enough damage to the grass….” Fluffy glances over at him from his spot in the shade and growls. Cole shakes his head and tosses him a hot dog that has been charred beyond recognition.

“Look, the truth is my job is totally dead-end, anyway. I’ve got to make better money so that I can save up and then take a year off to write a book.” Not a bad plan. I’d come up with it during a Roseanne rerun—one of the episodes after the Connors win the lottery and we find out that Roseanne the writer had been imagining the windfall all along (a dreadful ending to a perfectly good sitcom, but inspirational for my purposes nonetheless). Since I couldn’t count on winning the lottery, I needed to find a way to make good money fast.

“I don’t know…”

“Please! I need you to get me in.”

“Olivia! Olivia, goddammit! Skyler’s playing with dog poop again!”

“Come on, Cole—you’re union. You make tons of cash and you get amazing benefits.”

“Yeah, compared to you, maybe, but I have all this to pay for.” He makes a vast sweeping gesture with his spatula, indicating the yellowing sliver of lawn and modest house owned, for all intents and purposes, by the bank. “You don’t want to work on the line, Holly. And you’d suck at it, anyway.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Yes, you would. It would kill you. Shit. It’s killing me. You think this is what I wanted to do with my economics degree?”

Before I can respond, the back of my mom’s red helmet of hair blocks my field of vision. “Cole, your brother wants another cheeseburger,” she says, holding out a paper plate.

“Mike, you lazy bastard!” Cole yells. “Come and get it yourself! You’re ten feet away! Ma, he’s ten feet away…”

Mike, who’d been dozing in a lawnchair for three hours, flips him the bird, inspiring a hard punch from his wife, Lindsey.

Cole shakes his head and puts another burger on the plate for my mom to bring him.

“That’s his fourth one,” Cole says. “No wonder he looks more pregnant than Lindsey.”

My three older brothers are nothing if not virile. Cole has three, Mike’s waiting on his fourth (as if the twins weren’t enough), and Bradley, who lives in Detroit, has two, but his wife Bonnie is also pregnant.

“Cole, you’re not listening to me.”

“Why should I? It’s a stupid idea.”

“Hey—I think it’s a great idea!” Mike pipes in from behind.

“Shut up, Mike. No one’s talking to you.”

I’ve learned the hard way not to expect any genuine support from Mike. (My brothers really are a bunch of jerks—until the age of thirteen, I honestly believed my mother was planning to sell me to the circus when I was born, but that my father had discovered her plan at the last possible moment and intervened, saving me from a life of shoveling elephant shit.) Cole’s the only one of them who takes any responsibility for the endless teasing and torturing they subjected me to while growing up, and I’m pretty sure that’s because Olivia talked some sense into him over the years (she’s like the older sister I never had). Mike and Bradley still snap my bra strap, and sometimes even practice wrestling moves on me when my parents leave the room.

But old habits die hard, and Cole feigns intrigue. “So tell me, bro—why should I get her a job?”

“Well, she has skinny fingers, so she might be useful for fixing the machinery…”

“True. Go on…”

I can see exactly where this is going. “Shut up, Mike! Cole, don’t listen to him,” I beg.

“…and she wouldn’t be a distraction to the other guys, that’s for sure.”

“She wouldn’t? Why not? Because I was kinda thinking she would…”

“Naw…no boobage!”

Cole stifles a laugh and elbows me playfully in the ribs, while Mike endures two more punches from Lindsey.

“Fuck off. Both of you.” I grab another beer and make my way back to George.

“What was that about?”

When I tell her, she laughs. “Great idea, Norma Rae. So this is what you’ve come up with after a week on the couch?”

“Could it be any worse than what I’m doing now?”

“Uhhh, yeah.”

“At least I wouldn’t be broke.”

“Please. You would not last a single day working on an assembly line,” she says between bites of an empty hot dog bun. Apparently, she’s decided that fat is indeed worse than carbs. “Your brain would revolt.”

“I’ll adapt. I’ll write my book in my mind while I work,” I inform her. (I’d thought it all through very carefully.) “The blue-collar experience will also contribute to my growth as an artist. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, you know.”

“Maybe, but it also hurts a hell of a lot.” She shakes her head and starts in on another bun.

“G, I am so sick and tired of being broke. And I’m tired of saving up for months to buy a proper pair of black boots.”

I’ll admit that it took me quite a while to realize that just because I had a real job didn’t mean I could actually be Cosmo Girl and go out and buy all the pretty things I saw in In Style magazine. It required more than three years of scrimping and saving for me to pay down the unholy credit-card debt accrued during my first six months at the Bugle—something George will never let me live down. Despite that initial lapse in judgment, however, I remain a proud member of the Spend-a-Lot-on-Your-Bag-and-Shoes school of fashion. A true classic never goes out of style, and expensive accessories have the power to redeem the rest of a lackluster wardrobe.

“Well, no one said they had to be Jimmy Choos,” she says coolly.

They were my one splurge this year; an investment certain to yield years of pointy-toed pleasure.

“Yeah? Well, I’m even more sick of having to shop online. I can’t believe I live in a city that doesn’t even have a Prada store….”

“As if you’d be able to shop there, anyway! You can’t even afford the Saks outlet!”

“Maybe not, but I bet just knowing a Prada’s around is a damn good feeling.”

“If you want to move to New York, just do it already, Holly! You’ve been talking about it for years. But if you decide to stay, then we can probably both agree it doesn’t really matter if Buffalo has a Prada store or not because unless their spectator pumps come in a steel-toe version, I highly doubt they’d pass the safety codes at the factory. And if they did, it would spoil your plan to save up enough money to take a year off, anyway!”

She’s right. I am afraid. Afraid of New York—where real writers live, where rent exceeds my current annual income, where people toss last season’s Jimmy Choos out with the trash. Why did it all have to be so damn hard? Why couldn’t I just be one of those lucky people who has everything she wants, from guys to Gucci and back again? I quietly eat the icing off my third slice of birthday cake.

“This party sucks,” I conclude.

“No available men.”

We survey the scene. Aside from my brothers, my dad and a few other bored-looking fathers, the magician appears to be the only unattached postpubescent male.

As if she could tell what I was thinking, George shoots a dark look my way. “I think he might be a bit young for you.”

“Maybe, but I bet he has a few tricks up his sleeve….”

“Cute. Very cute. At least you can still joke about it.”

“I don’t want to be a sad singleton,” I sigh.

“Better a sad singleton than a happy breeder.”

“Enough with the Camille Paglia. Tomorrow you’ll be begging Professor Bales for a booty call.”

“Yeah? Well the day after tomorrow you’ll be back at work.”

“Oh, that was cruel.” I clutch at my heart. “So, so cruel.”

She shrugs. What can she say? I’m trapped and we both know it.

We sip warm beer from sticky cups for the rest of the afternoon.

“So?”

George is demanding an answer. It’s Sunday, the last day of my “vacation.”

“Well, as you know, I’ve been doing some thinking….”

“Mmmm. Come up with anything since yesterday?”

“Well, I can admit you were right about the whole factory idea. I wouldn’t want Cole to be my boss, and he’d probably just make fun of me all day long and I’d end up pushing him into some sort of giant turbine or whatever they have there and that wouldn’t really be fair to Olivia or the kids.”

“Obviously not.”

“So I guess I’m still sort of mulling things over. Trying to see the big picture…”

“And?”

“These things take time, George. There’s no telling when my epiphany might come. Could be tomorrow. Could be next month. Could be next year.”

“Could be never.”

“You can’t force it.”

“Enough’s enough, already, Holly. I’m coming over.”

“Knock yourself out. But I’m warning you—I’m profoundly depressed, and in no mood for company.”

“Whatever,” she says, and hangs up.

I am, of course, feeling fine. Things are much better now that I’ve had a full week to catch up on The Young and the Restless. Something about having a peek at the problems of others—especially the rich and fictional—always makes my concerns seem almost trivial. Who cares if a single Burberry scarf is enough to throw me into debt for six months? I have a job and a roof over my head. Does it really matter that my cup size is an A while my grades were always Cs, instead of the other way around? I can’t change the past, but one day I might get the boobs I’ve always wanted. And so what if I don’t have a boyfriend? At least I’ll be spared the pain of him cheating on me with my devious stepmother and then developing amnesia after being thrown overboard from his twin brother’s private yacht while fleeing to the Cayman Islands to escape some dark secret of his nefarious past. Plus, I don’t have to worry about anyone leaving the toilet seat up.

By the time George shows up it’s after eight and I’m starving. Not only is George incredibly slow-moving to begin with, but she still lives at home with her mothers out in Williamsville, so for her to shlep her ass into the city by bus takes forever. I’ve been on her case for years to get her own place, but with her salary, she’d need at least two roommates to make it work.

“Sorry,” she says when she finally arrives. “There was an accident on the Kensington.”

“You at least need to get a car if you’re going to live out there.”

“I know, I know. But then I’d have to get my driver’s license, too.”

Even though George claims to still be full from too much birthday cake and hot dog buns the day before, we order an extralarge pizza and wait for it to arrive.

“How’s Jill?” George asked. “I never see her anymore. Where is she?”

“Oh, she’s pretty much always out.”

“That’s good for you. It’s like having the place to yourself.”

“I guess.” Truth is, I’d rather have someone around to talk to. “She’ll probably be home soon. I think she does an underwater bicycling class on Wednesday nights. Or is it Pilates in a steam room? Something like that.”

“Does she stay at whatsisname’s a lot?”

“No. He usually stays here. I doubt if he even has a fixed address. He’s such a weirdo. I caught him going through the Dumpster out back yesterday.”

“What? Why?”

“He said he threw out some important paperwork by accident or something. Not that he has a job, so I have no idea what he was even talking about.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, plus I’m pretty sure I saw him on America’s Most Wanted.”

George’s big green eyes widen in horror. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“Well, the actor sure looked an awful lot like him.”

“Who are they looking for? What did he do?”

“Some guy from Wisconsin who disappeared from a halfway house about six months ago. He apparently slips in and out of a violent state without knowing it, and he’s already responsible for three murders in the Midwest—”

“No!”

“Yes. But the really creepy part is that all of his victims look exactly like his mother—”

“Get out!”

“Yeah, and first he stalks them and then he lures them into this creepy van and then he—”

We both jump as we hear the key in the door.

“God! Oh my God!” George whispers frantically.

But it’s just Jill.

“Is this pizza boy yours?” she asks. “I found him in the lobby.”

“Yup!” I say, jumping up to get my wallet.

“Hi Jill,” George says as I pay for dinner. The pizza boy ignores my attempt at a flirty smile and I consider taking part of his tip back.

“Hey,” Jill answers, tucking a blondish strand behind her ear. “Long time no see.”

“I brought a movie over, if you want to watch with us.”

“Thanks, but I’m exhausted. I’m going to try and go to bed early. Don’t let Holly stay up too late, ’kay?”

“I won’t,” George said. “She has a big day of doing nothing tomorrow.”

“I hear you!” I yell from the kitchen.

“Yeah, well, get a life!” Jill yells back. “I’m not complaining,” she continues to George. “Holly’s been doing a lot of things around the house.”

Since Saturday, I’ve reorganized the pantry, installed three new coat hooks in the hallway, laminated a list of emergency phone numbers to put on the fridge and found time to watch at least six hours of TV every day. All in all, time well spent.

After Jill watches us eat (she grabbed a sprout sandwich earlier), she retreats to her bedroom to talk on the phone. Boyfriend, apparently, is away on “business,” and missing her terribly.

“Well at least she has someone to make her happy,” I conclude sadly after we’ve torn apart his many flaws as quietly as we could.

“That’s no excuse,” George says. “She can do better.”

“Do you have a pash on her or something?”

“What’s that?”

“A girl crush.”

“Oh,” George giggles. “As if.”

“Anyway, you’re a fine one to talk about standards.”

She sits up abruptly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that maybe you should try taking your own advice for a change.”

“Oh, really.”

“Don’t be annoyed. You know you can do better than Professor Bales, but I don’t see you turning him down when he invites you over for a quickie every once in a while.”

“Would you stop calling him that already? And for your information, what I have with Stuart is totally different. I consider myself single. I’m still in the game. Jill’s not. And I don’t just drop everything and run whenever he calls me, by the way. I go only if and when I want to.”

“When was the last time you didn’t go?”

“I’m not a teenager,” she frowns. “I don’t keep track of things like that.”

“Oh, admit it—if he wanted to get serious, you would in a second, even though he’s a total player.”

“We’ve agreed to keep it casual. It’s worked for us for this long.”

“You mean it’s worked for him. Because casual or not, it sucks for you and you know it. You’re afraid to call him. The sex is lousy, I’m sure. How could it not be? He’s, like, at least fifty. And he won’t even bring you out in public…”

“Umm, hello? It’s, like, totally inappropriate for us to be seen together.”

“Come on! I can’t believe you’re still buying into his bullshit. He’s not your teacher anymore, G. No one gives a crap if you’re together. I bet he’s just afraid one of the dozen or so students he’s probably sleeping with will see you.”

She pouts for a while and stomps off to the bathroom. I put the pizza away and file what’s left of my nails while I wait. After about five minutes, she returns with a dour look and puts the movie in the DVD player. As it’s about to start, she lets out a big sigh and gets up to pause it.

“Not that I have to defend myself to you, Holly, but I still like him, okay? And I’m using him as much as he’s using me. No more, no less. So until I find someone better, I see no reason to call off a perfectly good thing.”

Poor George. She really believes what she’s saying.

“Just as long as you keep your options open,” I tell her. “Because he’s never going to change.”

“Why does everyone say that about him? He might. Stuart’s very sweet when he wants to be.”

“Don’t confuse sweet with charming,” I warn her. Although she tries to put on a feminist front, George is incredibly naive about men. Maybe it’s because she had virtually no exposure to straight men growing up or maybe it’s because she’s just overly trusting in general. In any case, her instincts are notoriously off when it comes to the unfairer sex.

“You don’t really know him, Holly.”

“Well, I know that he gave me a D in ‘Journalling for Profit, Part II’ and that was enough for me. As if I needed Humbert Humbert to tell me my memoirs wouldn’t sell a million…”

George rolls her eyes.

“What?”

“Don’t even go there,” she says.

“Fine. All I’m gonna say is that I can tell you for an absolute fact that that man will never change. How do I know for sure? Well, let me enlighten you, G—it’s because he doesn’t want any more out of the relationship. And he can tell that you do. That’s why he only calls every couple of months—he doesn’t want to give you the wrong idea. Because then the whole thing would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

I’ve tried to explain to George many times this most basic of all dating truths: that neediness is like new-relationship poison. This fact is one of the few things I know for certain about men. In much the same way that sharks can smell a drop of blood in the water from miles away, men can pick up on even the slightest whiff of neediness. A more sporting type might circle your lifeboat for a while, letting you think you have a chance of surviving, but don’t kid yourself: He’s just playing with you. He knows you’re wounded in there, and he’s smacking his lips. If, on the other hand, you put out the ice queen vibe right away—let him think he wants you more than you want him—then you’ve got some breathing room. And I’m not just talking about sex. Getting a man into bed is easy, no matter how desperate you may appear. The hard part is sustaining your desirability. The hard part is convincing him that he wants to stick around long enough to fall in love with you. Once you figure out how to do that, you’re in business.

“Yeah? Well maybe the reason you’re single is because you never let anybody know you’re actually interested in them,” George suggests. “Did you ever think of that? All you do is go on like a million first dates, and then reject every one of them before he has a chance to reject you!”

“Well, duh.” It isn’t anything that hasn’t occurred to me or a half dozen of my therapists before. But at least I’m reasonably confident that once I find a worthy prospect, I’ll be able to keep him. In the meantime, I’ll protect my heart from any further damage.

“Not all men are Jims, Holly. They’re not perfect, God knows, but they don’t have to be. Because neither are we.”

“How perfect is your professor?”

“Let’s just watch the damn movie,” she grumbles.

“Fine,” I say and press Play. “What is it, anyway?”

“How to Marry a Millionaire. It’s with Marilyn. And I don’t care if you hate it.”

“Wasn’t there anything with Brad Pitt?”

“I don’t know. Who cares? This is so much better… God, Holly. You’re, like, totally boy-crazy these days.”

George loves Marilyn Monroe because she was sexy and powerful and vulnerable all at once, and also because she was a size 12 and the whole world loved her for it. She’s seen all of her movies a thousand times. For me, though, Marilyn’s sadness fills every frame of every film she made. I imagine I would have liked her better before, when she was just Norma Jean Baker. Plain and simple.

“There must have been something with Brad Pitt…”

“There wasn’t.”

“Not even an old one?”

“Just shut up and watch.”

Purple moonlight filters through the gauze panels covering the open window, giving my bedroom an almost fluorescent glow. I glance at the clock—4:15 a.m. Everything is perfectly still.

Since insomnia is one of the few anxiety-related problems I don’t normally suffer from, I’m a bit confused. After thinking for a while, the image of Marilyn Monroe sneaking her glasses onto her face playing on a constant loop, a memory of Dr. Zukowski surfaces from among the usual places my mind goes when it wanders. She’s a behavioral therapist who once berated me ferociously in the middle of Pearl Street during an exercise to get me to step on sidewalk cracks. Something she said, lost on me then, flashes into my mind.

“Life isn’t really about luck or coincidence, Holly. Nor is it about destiny or kismet or any of that other stuff. You won’t win a Pulitzer just by sitting around collecting good karma and then waiting for your fingers to accidentally strike the right keys. And if your mother ever breaks her back—”

“Bite your tongue!” I’d interrupted.

She ignored me and went on. “…and if your mother ever breaks her back, it’ll probably be because she tripped over something. Not because you walked down the sidewalk like a healthy, well-adjusted person. The world just doesn’t work that way.”

“Doesn’t every action have a reaction?”

“No.”

“But I’ve always thought that life is like the game of pool…”

“It isn’t.”

“Pinball?”

“Nope… Well, maybe. But only if you think of yourself as the flippers and not the ball, see? Remember, Holly—you were the one who told me you want to be an actor, and not a re-actor.”

“Look,” I sighed. “I know you’re right. I want to be the flippers. And I know that my mom’s probably going be okay if I step on that crack, and that her health isn’t something I have any control over—but it feels wrong to do it. It seems so… I don’t know…reckless. Like, why take the chance?” It was lunchtime, a weekday, and pedestrians swarmed around us, irritated by our lack of motion.

Zukowski shook her head. “It only feels that way because you’ve been avoiding the cracks for so long. This problem isn’t something I can just turn off inside your head. To overcome it you’re going to have to actually do it. Over and over again until it doesn’t feel wrong. Until it just feels normal. And soon it won’t feel like anything at all. Okay?”

I nodded.

“So let’s start with our deep breathing…good…good…and now we can try visualizing it, just like we did upstairs in my office…”

Bravely, brazenly, I took a step in my mind. And another. And then another, letting my feet fall where they might. It wasn’t so hard.

“Now do it,” she prodded.

I raised my foot and started to move forward, but an image of my mother in traction weaseled its way into my brain. My chest tightened and my palms began to sweat. I retreated.

“Holly,” she sighed. “How do you expect to move forward if you can’t take one simple step?”

She could barely conceal her exasperation, even though my insurance company was paying her $115 an hour.

“I’ve been getting along fine for years,” I informed her. “You were the one who seized on this whole thing. I just mentioned it in passing, and jeez, look at us now.”

“Let me put it in perspective for you. I have patients who can’t leave their houses. Patients who can’t work or eat or sleep. People who are so paralyzed with fear that their lives are barely lives at all. I can help you through this, Holly, but you have to be willing to move.”

“I’m pretty happy, you know,” I said. “I just want to be more happy. I want to be able to write my book.”

And this is what she said: “The difference between a dream and reality is the difference between a goal and a plan. If you want to write a book, then commit yourself to doing whatever it takes to make that happen, because things will never change unless you change them.”

Now, two years later, Zukowski’s words resonate within my very empty bedroom as loudly as if someone had struck a gong. If I ever want my dreams to become reality, I know what has to be done.

The goal? To free myself from the bonds of serfdom and write my book, the subject of which was now also plainly evident.

The plan? To marry a millionaire. Or at least date one seriously.

chapter 4

A Room of One’s Own

The cursor blinks hopefully. Chapter One, I type. Finding a Mark. How hard can it be?

I dial George’s number at work. “Can you get out early?”

“I guess so.”

“Meet me at Taylor’s at six.”

“Why? That place sucks.”

Taylor’s is an upscale-ish piano bar in the business district. The only reason I even know about it is because it happens to be next door to the only place in town to get decent Chinese takeout after 11:00 p.m., probably thanks to all the late-working lawyers and financial types in the neighborhood.

“I know, G.” I tell her. “Just indulge me.”

It’s Friday, the end to a fairly crappy week. I’ve spent pretty much the whole of it tied up on a comprehensive 2500-word piece on the best fall getaways in upstate New York—a rare and pleasant change from the usual bland tasks I’m entrusted with.

Maybe they really are beginning to value me here, I dared to dream as I handed it over to Cy just before deadline yesterday afternoon. I was actually quite pleased with how the story turned out, especially the cute little sidebar on the haunted inns of the Finger Lakes district. After thanking him for the opportunity for the umpteenth time (even though it was actually Mark Axelrod, Travel Editor, who okayed the pitch in the first place), Cy cleared his throat and informed me he’d decided to bank the story indefinitely and reprint something similar he’d seen that morning in the Times’s travel section instead. “Maybe we’ll run it next fall, Holly, although you’d have to update it. No big deal.”

Not to him, maybe. But at that very moment I knew for sure that I didn’t want to be at the Bugle next month, let alone next fall. And although it was just one silly story on chintz-stuffed country inns and pick-your-own-pumpkin patches, and Cy hadn’t even read it (which meant he couldn’t possibly hate it), panic set in. The proverbial coffin was being nailed shut—I could feel it in my bones.

I had to compose myself in the ladies’ room before I could go back to my desk and begin inputting the ads I’d been neglecting all week. Getting through the stack would surely take me the rest of the afternoon…

“Holly?”

I spun around. Virginia Holt, Life & Style Editor, tapping her tweed-wrapped toes like she’d been waiting there all day.

“Oh. Hi, Virginia.”

“Did I interrupt you?”

“Uh…”

“Not working on anything important, then?” Her nostrils flared in anticipation while she smoothed back her brassy red bob.

You know perfectly well that I rarely work on anything important, Virginia, thanks in large part to you turning down every story idea I’ve ever had.

“Well, actually—”

“Good. Because I need you to run these down to accounting immediately. It’s the contributors list for last month, and the check numbers don’t match up with the invoice numbers on any of them. Wait there for those halfwits to redo each and every one of them and then bring them back up to me personally. Do not give them to my assistant—she’s been completely unfocused since she came back from mat leave and this absolutely has to be fixed before the end of the day, ’kay?”

She threw a pile of envelopes and papers down onto my keyboard and clicked away before I could refuse. Apparently, the fact that my desk happened to be within fifteen feet of her office automatically cast me as her backup lackey.

But I couldn’t. Not today. I opened my top drawer and slid Virginia’s papers inside, knowing the blast of shit I’d catch for not doing exactly what she’d asked, but somehow unable to stop myself, either. Through bleary eyes, I entered one ad after the other, vowing with each new garage sale and adorable puppy giveaway to set my new plan into motion the following day, the first day of the rest of my life.

The real first day of the rest of my life.

I meant it this time.

In Buffalo, where ninety percent of the bars cater to either the college crowd or career beer drinkers, Taylor’s is probably the best place I know of to meet an eligible young bachelor of generous means. Even if nothing happens tonight, I figure it would be a good chance to explain The Plan to George while scoping out the scene for future reference.

I see my best friend bobbing up the street from a distance. I can tell it’s her because she looks like Stevie Nicks with brown hair, all flowing scarves and bohemian bangles. A curious splash of color in a sea of gray suits.

When she notices me she smiles. “I almost couldn’t make it. The new Mists of Avalon limited-edition DVD/illustrated-hardback combo boxed set came in early and I had to call everyone on the list—”

I pull her into the alley around the corner. “My God, George. What on earth are you wearing? Do you mind if we tone this down a bit?” I giggle, tugging at a sparkly purple fringe. “We should probably try and maintain a minimum level of professionalism here, for appearance’s sake.”

That morning, I’d dug deep, deep into the back of my closet for the sleek charcoal suit purchased for my grandfather’s funeral two years ago. I thought it helped highlight some of my better assets—small waist, decent backside, well-turned ankles. Being cleavage-challenged is definitely a plus when it comes to professional wear, so I decided to forgo the more obvious choice of a crisp white blouse in favor of a lacy black camisole instead. I even punched it up with some lipstick and blush, a ton of black mascara to bring out the hazel flecks that rescued my eyes from coffee-brown, and tied my too-long dark hair back into a chignon for a change.

More than a few heads turned when I showed up at work. “Got a job interview, Holly?” Cy shouted out as I passed by his office. He was kidding, of course, but he didn’t sound overly concerned at the thought of it, either. Virginia just growled at me without looking up when I brought her the files from accounting that she’d wanted yesterday, and to add insult to injury, Jesse never even got the chance to see me in all my gussied-up glory; he was out of the office all day working on assignment.

George twists free of my grasp. “What? What are you talking about? It’s too dark in there to see anything, anyway. And besides, who gives a damn? I like what I’m wearing today.”

“Look. Let’s just go in. I have a lot to tell you.”

“You are such a weirdo,” she says, and sashays past me into the bar.

I suppose now would be an excellent time to explain how my decision to try and be…well…less poor and single doesn’t make me shallow or evil or a victim or ignorant of sexual politics or anything like that. Okay, maybe it makes me a teeny, tiny bit shallow—I can admit it!—but the honest and sincere way in which I intend to go about the whole thing will infuse that shallowness with a certain depth. I promise.

Because The Plan was not born out of greed, envy, lust or any other deadly sin, but rather from a genuine desire for self-actualization, I know I’m going to have no problem justifying it to myself or others. And I can also tell you that like all great romantic adventures, it’s about a whole lot more than just having a warm body to sleep next to or being able to buy Creme De La Mer moisturizer at $110 an ounce without thinking twice. It’s not like I’ve been sitting around for years, crying and wishing I’d simply been born rich, or anything as ugly or unenlightened as that. Yes, this is going to be a love story of my own creation, inspired by my need to write something vital and necessary, and fuelled by my desire to grow and change into the person I want to become.

I will achieve everything I’ve been working toward in therapy in one fell swoop.

And there’s one other thing…one other reason. Marilyn Monroe and her merry band of husband-hunters aside, I’ve seen the glorious effects of the marriage between love and wealth first-hand. Which is why I also had Asher and Zoe to thank for planting the idea of The Plan within me, at least subconsciously. Our lunch earlier in the summer had sparked a bit of a self-pity fest, so it should come as no great surprise to anyone that, in my weakened condition, I ended up indulging in one of those singlehood meltdowns I’d always felt so immune to. Only my meltdown was different, because from it, great change would soon be born.

Zoe and Asher were old high school friends, and I hadn’t seen them in ages. Back in the day, the three of us were thick as thieves. Sure, we were big losers—boys who wear black eyeliner and girls who wear combat boots fall somewhere between band geeks and the janitor on the popularity spectrum in suburban American high schools—but we didn’t give a shit. Cheerleaders mocked us and football players spat on us, and we loved every single minute of it.

Asher was supersmart and received a partial scholarship to Brown. His parents, though stunningly cheap, were so terrified he was gay that they liquidated their 401(k) plans to pay for the rest of their wayward son’s Ivy League education, hoping that four years at what they assumed was a nice, conservative East Coast campus might be enough to straighten him out.

Although Asher wasn’t even remotely into guys, he truly enjoyed letting his parents think he was, so he was more than a little peeved when he could no longer avoid telling them he and Zoe were getting married (“It worked!” Mr. and Mrs. Blake had apparently shouted to each other when he gave them the news). I was a bit surprised myself when I learned that they were together, since none of us had ever hooked up in high school, except for the time Zoe and I got drunk at a Pearl Jam concert and made out just to see what it would be like. After Asher left for school, Zoe says she just sort of realized he was The One, and so she eventually followed him out to Rhode Island. I suppose two years of soul-crushing, booze-blurred bar-hopping with me and George was enough to give shy little Zoe the courage she needed to profess her undying love to an old friend.

Happily, the feeling was quite mutual. Now they live in Philadelphia, where Asher works as a lawyer for the A.C.L.U. and Zoe has a dog-grooming business. These days, they’re quite wealthy, too, courtesy of Zoe’s generous dad, who had recently come into more money than he could ever spend, due to a substantial patent payout on some computer-chip thingie he’d dreamed up years ago. That’s basically it. We still keep in touch, though not as often as we should.

When the two of them walked into the restaurant, they were as luminous as the last time I’d seen them, at their wedding almost a year earlier. Asher and Zoe were one of those couples who were completely unaware of how wonderful they were together. You know the type, I’m sure—that they didn’t make you sick is almost enough to make you sick.

After the usual catching up, complete with mutual berating for not visiting more often, I could see that they were anxious to tell me something. Naturally, I figured they were pregnant.

“Are you kidding? Me? Pregnant? No way!” said Zoe.

Asher rolled his eyes.

“Why not?” I asked. “What’s so crazy about that?”

“She tells me we’re not even close to ready yet,” he sighed.

“But you’re the only married friends I have,” I pleaded. “You’re also the only normal people I know who are married. I need you to have kids. You’ve got to restore my faith in the whole process.” Thinking of my nieces and nephews, I figured it would be nice to know there was such a thing as a non-obnoxious child before having one myself.

“Have your own damn kids,” Zoe laughed, pushing her long blond bangs out of her eyes.

“Maybe later,” I said.

“I’ve told her I’m ready to plant my seed,” Asher said, grinning.

“My field needs to lie fallow for a while. But you can plant your seed in the shower, if you like.”

“Mock me, hun, I don’t mind,” he said as he turned to face her. “But the simple truth is, I want to decorate the earth with as many beautiful babies as you’ll let me give you. It’s the only thing I know to do to keep from sliding into the abyss, to make it all mean something. Otherwise, it’ll be like we were never here at all.”

Zoe stared at him quietly for a moment. If a guy ever said anything like that to me, I’d be on my back with my legs in the air praying for fertilization before the waitress even noticed we were gone.

“Sorry.” She sniffed a little and tried to smile.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He can wait until you’re ready.”

“It’s not that…” Asher said as he squeezed her hand. “It’s her dad. He’s not well.”

“What?” My heart tightened. Douglas Watts was a true sweetheart—a hardworking single dad who’d raised Zoe and her sisters into three strong, self-assured women.

He leaned in and said quietly, “They found a spot on his liver. He’s having a biopsy tomorrow, but it doesn’t look good. That’s why we came home for a bit.”

Zoe looked at the wall behind me and blinked back tears.

And I’d thought they were pregnant. I knew there wasn’t much I could say to reassure her.

“I’m here if you need me.”

That was more than three months ago—when all this started, I suppose.

In a typical addition to the Bad-Things-That-Happen-To-Good-People file, Mr. Watts’s spot did turn out to be cancer. He had surgery, followed by a round of chemo, and he’s doing okay for the time being, but there’s really no way of knowing for sure. On the plus side, Zoe and Asher visited as often as they could throughout the summer, so at least I was able to see them a bit more than usual. And there’s nothing like the heady combination of hanging out with a great couple and a reminder that death can knock on your door at any moment to make you sit up and reassess your own life.

The more I saw of my two old friends—truly in love, free from money trouble, oozing career satisfaction, leaning on each other in a time of crisis—the more I wanted what they have for myself. If that makes me a pathetic throwback to the 1950s, unable to feel complete without a man on my arm, then so be it. I can live with that.

But I also began to see how Zoe’s substantial cash flow likely has a lot to do with their overall happiness, their success, both as a couple and professionally. It’s what has allowed each of them to be living exactly the lives they want to be living, which in turn frees them from ninety percent of the stresses the rest of us have to deal with every single day—the little things, like mortgage payments and business trips and mean bosses, which, in turn, all too often lead to the bigger things, like bankruptcy and divorce and broken dreams. Zoe and Asher are blessed with the freedom to put into their relationship the tremendous effort it requires to sustain a happy one, no matter how perfect or loving, while the rest of us are left bickering over bills, too exhausted by the end of the day to do anything but watch TV and not have sex.

Yes, the money really does seem to be a crucial part of the equation. And if actively looking for a partner who has some makes me materialistic, shallow, whatever…then I can live with that, too, provided he’s there by my side to lovingly fib to me and tell me it isn’t at all true, that I’m not like that, while we toast each other’s successes in the hot tub.

“Virginia Woolf said that a woman can’t write without a room of her own.”

“But Holly, you already have a room of your own,” George points out. We are well into our second drinks, huddled in a dark booth at the back of the bar. So far, she isn’t overly impressed with The Plan. Bringing her onside isn’t going to be easy.

“And I spend fifty hours a week at work so that I can have that room! How can I be expected to write if I work fifty hours a week?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But you rarely work fifty hours a week, Holly, and if I’m correctly remembering the bedtime stories of my youth, Woolf was talking about the dearth of women writers throughout history and how the root cause wasn’t that women were inferior to men, obviously, but rather how having the physical space in which to write and the time to devote to it are necessary prerequisites to sustaining any kind of artistic endeavor. She was bemoaning the fact that most women didn’t have that luxury, as well as the fact that even the wealthier ones who did also had to contend with meddling husbands and demanding children and a spate of oppressive sociocultural expectations that stifled their creativity beneath the endless, mindless minutiae of everyday existence. I don’t think she was urging women to marry rich so they don’t have to work. Quite the opposite, actually. Woolf believed that—”

“George!” I interrupt. “Never mind all that right now. I was just trying to make a point.”

“And that point would be…”

“Well, basically, that if you want to turn your dreams into reality, you need more than a goal, G. You need a plan. And in order to execute that plan, you need a time line. And this…” I gesture expansively to include the entire bar, from the shiny black piano at one end to the velvet-draped windows at the other, “…this is the first step in the process.”

“Huh? What process?”

“It makes perfect sense.”

Still, a blank stare.

I sigh. “We’re here to find rich men.”

George practically chokes on the honey-roasted peanuts she’s been inhaling. “Oh… My… God… Did you really just say that? How completely disgusting. What a disgusting concept.” She shakes her head and stares at me in disbelief. “What happened? What’s going on with you? How did you get sucked into this whole Must-Find-A-Man syndrome all of a sudden? And a rich one? Even worse…”

“Don’t you see, George? It has nothing to do with that, it’s about the big picture, although I have been feeling a little down and out these days, as you know. First with the whole Jean-Jean thing…” I shake it off. Better not to think about that anymore. Those days are behind me. “Look. It’s not just about ‘finding a man.’ That’s just a secondary perk.”

“I suppose the money’s the primary reason, then?”

“No, no. Of course not. The writing is the reason. The motivation. The call to arms! G, you know I’ve been crazy lately, with work, with my love life, with Zoe. But something’s finally changed. It’s like I’ve been trying to read the writing on the wall for years and just now it’s coming into focus for the first time.”

George raises a skeptical eyebrow. “So what does it say?”

“It says, ‘You’ve got to do something, Holly Hastings, before it’s too late!’”

“I see. And tell me, how exactly do you plan to justify this scheme of yours?”

“Because ultimately, The Plan is to realize my own potential and make positive life changes—to write my book. The Plan is not just to hook up or get rich. Those are just parts of the process. Fringe benefits, if you will.”

“I don’t know, Holly. Those are pretty small distinctions.”

“Not to me! Nothing’s changed, except that I’ve finally figured out a way to do what I’ve always wanted to do. Besides, I’ve pretty much lost my faith when it comes to finding Mr. Right. And what sense does it make to wait around forever for someone I don’t really believe exists anymore? So I figure I might as well start looking for Mr. Financial Stability instead.” As I explained it to her, the whole thing was beginning to make even more sense than it had at the outset.

“Mr. Financial Stability? Sounds romantic…”

“For the first time, I feel empowered, George, actually empowered. Like something great is about to happen. I am no longer going to accept being a leaf blown about by the breeze. I will be the mistress of my own destiny! I will do what I want with my life, and what I want is to be a writer. A real writer. Not an obituarist at a small paper or a drill-press operator who writes on the weekends…a real writer. Full-time. And the only way I can think to make it all happen is to find a sweet but wealthy guy who believes in me just a little bit. Is that so wrong?”

“I don’t know. Is it?” She seems genuinely confused.

“And I’ll tell you something else…” I pause just long enough to prepare her for the enormity of what I am about to say.

“What?”

“I can now see that my existence makes very little difference to the vast majority of people on this planet. Whether I like it or not, I don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. And quite frankly, I want to change that.”

“Well, Holly, we can’t all be Ghandi or Oprah,” she intones seriously.

“Can’t we, though? I’ve been thinking…”

“Haven’t you done enough of that lately? Maybe you should just take it down a notch for a while and—”

“Bear with me please. A big part of what I’ve realized is that I want to help people. I want to make a difference in real people’s lives. I want to be a philanthropist. A writer-philanthropist. And since I don’t have any money, and I can’t make any money writing until I actually write something, and I can’t write something until I don’t have to worry about making money, marrying rich—no, wait. That sounds so ugly, doesn’t it? Let’s call it ‘actualizing financial freedom.’ Yeah, so actualizing financial freedom is the perfect solution. It’s like killing two birds with one stone, see? Because once I’m a successful author, I will not only be deliriously happy and personally fulfilled, but I will able to use my various sources of wealth to do some good on a much larger scale!”

George, by now completely stunned, shakes her head in amazement. “You’re being manic, Holly. Are you okay? Do you want me to call Dr. Martindale?”

“I just want to make a difference, G. That’s all. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

“God help me for even getting into this with you, because you’re obviously beyond out of control with this, but I don’t think being a philanthropist qualifies as a real aspiration. With all due respect to Grace Kelly, it’s like saying you want to be a princess when you grow up. It’s ridiculous.”

“Well of course it sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, but it isn’t. It’s complicated, and it may be hard to justify in some ways, but it makes perfect sense to me. I’m sure of it. This is what I want.”

“Do you really think you need a man to get what you want out of life?”

“A valid question, George. But look at it this way instead. I want a man so I can get what I need out of life.”

“That’s very cute.”

I pull out my notebook and write it down so I won’t forget.

George looks at me wearily. “What’s this about, now?”

I scooch over so that we’re right next to each other. “So this is where it gets really good,” I whisper.

She begins rubbing her temples with her thumbs. “I don’t know if I can take any more of this.”

“I can admit that on the surface it might seem like I’m just some run-of-the-mill gold digger. But as you now know, nothing could be further from the truth. Because even though my motivations may be personal, they’re also political. And that’s where my book ties in…”

“Ah. Here it comes.”

“Okay, so this is the thing… I’m going to write a book detailing the entire process…”

“Ha!” she practically shouts. “The process of selling out and setting the women’s movement back about one hundred and fifty years?”

“Shhhhh! Keep your voice down, would you?”

“Why? If it’s such a great idea you should shout it from the rooftops!”

“That’s very funny, George. And you’re a fine one to talk about the women’s movement—you’re sleeping with the original Doctor of Misogyny! Professor Bales could write his own book on how to convince big-boobed undergrads that sleeping with him was their idea!”

“Don’t make this about me and Stuart. You’re the one planning to completely prostitute herself.”

“It’s not prostitution. Technically, it’s emancipation.”

“You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

“Cute. Don’t you want to hear about the book?”

“Go ahead,” she sighs. “Why stop now?”

“Okay, so on the surface, it’s going to be a step-by-step guide on how to marry a millionaire, complete with informational boxes, exercises, worksheets, all that stuff. A blueprint for my weary, downtrodden, working-for-the-man sisters around the world. That alone should make it sell a million copies.”

“Can’t argue with that. Go on.”

Her curiosity is getting the better of her. A good sign.

“But when you read between the lines,” I continue, “it’ll be an ironic commentary on male-female relationships, the history of the women’s movement, and the plight facing the modern woman/artist.” The idea is as close to brilliant as I can probably ever expect to come. “Tell me I’m wrong, G, but I think this book might have a little something in it for everyone!”

George twirls a curl around her finger. “I see what you’re saying, but what if the subtleties of sexual politics are lost on the average girl next door who buys your little manual or manifesto or whatever. It’ll just come off as an endorsement for gold digging.”

“It’ll be plainly obvious to anyone looking to debunk it. Trust me—How to Marry a Millionaire (And Still Love Yourself in the Morning!) will be immune from criticism. I do tongue-in-cheek very well, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“The irony, of course, is that I don’t know how to marry a millionaire, so I’ll have to find a rich guy in order to write this puppy. For realism’s sake.”

“I got that already, thanks. What a happy coincidence for you, by the way. And I don’t mean to nitpick, but if you ever read the New York Times or even Vanity Fair once in a while, you’d know that irony is dead. Been that way since 9/11…”

“Romance is what’s dead!” I slam my fist down on the table for emphasis. “This is not a quest for romantic love. It’s a quest for self-love, a pursuit of knowledge and insight and creativity which on the surface might seem like a grab for cash. But this is a search for something real. You’ve got to understand that.”

“Okay, now you’re just making me sad.”

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean that romance is dead dead. Just that it seems that way to me lately.” Losing one’s faith is contagious, and I certainly don’t want George suffering as I had. All I need to do is convince her there are plenty of other good reasons to come along for the ride. “Look, George. Maybe romance and love and chivalry are just hibernating for a while. Maybe in a few years, it’ll be trendy again to commit to an honest, monogamous relationship and all the men who’ve been holding out will come back from the dark side and flood the market. Who knows? But for now, my writerly persona will have to assume a detached skepticism when it comes to matters of the heart, or how else will I be able to push the pursuit of cold, hard cash over holding out for true love?”

“I guess it all sounds okay,” she says, scratching her head with a swizzle stick.

I lean in and hug her. “If you want, the real real irony could be that I actually do fall head over heels along the way. I mean, hey—I’m only flesh and blood! I’m definitely hoping to live happily every after when all’s said and done here.”

The more I explain it, the better it sounds. I would be free from a senseless job, perhaps even madly in love, artistically productive and obscenely wealthy—at first by association, but then, as the critically acclaimed author of a runaway bestseller, by my own merits.

Before I can prove to George why it’s in her best interest to be my partner every step of the way, a waitress interrupts. “Excuse me, ladies. Those gentlemen over there thought you might like these.” She plops two fruity-looking concoctions down on the table in front of us.

A couple of middle-aged suits a few booths over raise their martini glasses and smile. One of them has badly crooked teeth and neither has much hair to speak of.

“I… I… I don’t think so,” George stammers. I can’t tell if it’s the calorie count or our shiny-skulled suitors that has her spooked.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “It’s just one drink. They seem okay. Don’t they seem okay?” I ask the waitress.

She shrugs. “They’re in here an awful lot, so they’re either single, unhappily married or alcoholics.”

“Umm…yeah…well, thanks for clearing that up for us. Would you please just ask them if they’d like to join us?” She takes off for their table, shaking her head.

“Don’t say a word, G. This is just a trial run. And I think this place has just the right demographics, so let’s put our husband-catching hats on, just for fun, and—”

“Our whats? And did you just say we? So now it’s we? I don’t think—”

They slide in beside us before she has a chance to object any further.

“Hi guys! Thanks for the drinks,” I say to the better-looking one sitting next to George.

“Yeah, thanks,” she grumbles.

“You’re welcome,” he say. “I’m Trevor. And this is Ron.”

“Hi,” says Ron.

“I’m Holly, and this is George.”

George half smiles and looks down.

“George?” Trevor says. “Bit of a funny name for a pretty lady like you, isn’t it?”

“Maybe that’s, you know, like her work name or something,” Ron says to Trevor out of the side of his mouth.

“Her work name. I get it,” he nods.

George and I exchange glances. Who knows? Maybe they’re into names or something. “Well, even though I’m a Holly, I wasn’t born in December or named after Christmas or anything silly like that, though people often assume that I am. I guess my parents just thought it was a nice name, you know?”

But Ron and Trevor just stare at George as she proceeds to deskewer her sword of maraschino cherries with her teeth.

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” Ron says. “That’ll do it.”

Trevor apparently agrees. “Let’s get to it, then! I assume you ladies are working tonight?”

“Huh?” I am utterly confused.

For a change, George is not. “They think we’re hookers, Holly.”

The burgundy leather banquette squeaks as the offending parties shift uncomfortably.

“What?! Are you joking?” Three drinks have not dulled my capacity for righteous indignation.

“Wait! It’s okay if you’re not!” Ron suggests frantically.

“Yeah, that’s totally fine, too. We just thought—”

“You just thought what?!”

“Holly, let’s get out of here…”

“No, G! I want to know why they would think we’re hookers!”

“Maybe it’s her hair,” Ron points at George. “And her…her…wow. Those right there. And your lipstick! I don’t think bright red is the way to go at happy hour.”

Trevor shoots him a nervous look. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“My sister works for Avon,” he explains.

“Man, you’re so queer…”

“You can go now,” I tell them.

I whip my compact out of my purse while George slumps down as far as she can without completely disappearing under the table. True, I am a little more made-up than usual, but I figured the occasion called for a touch of sophistication. As for George’s hair, it is undeniably large.

Scanning the room, I suppose we’re a bit out of place. The only other women in Taylor’s are the waitresses and a few frumpy accountant types. I am definitely the only one with an attempt at an updo, while George’s cleavage apparently speaks a thousand words.

“Can we get out of here, Holly? Please?”

“Fine. But don’t look so glum. This is going to make a great ‘What Not to Do’ appendix for the book.”

George reluctantly agrees to give my tactics some more thought as we scarf down Chinese takeout in the cab on the way back to my place. If it were easy, I reason, then everyone would be doing it. Chapter One will just have to wait until we are a little further into the game.

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