Cosmo's Deli (3 page)

“The person whose campaign they choose gets a promotion to account manager, my job. I in turn get bumped up to partner. Win-win.” Val pauses. “Oh, I almost forgot the last detail. The loser gets terminated.”

The room is silent.

Renny tries to keep her voice from faltering, “But what if neither of us wins the account?”

“Then you can keep each other company on the unemployment line. This may seem harsh, but I believe that the best work comes under pressure. Besides, there's no room here for dead weight. If either of you have a problem with this, the door hasn't moved since you came in, you're free to use it. You have autonomy in that, too. Security will be happy to escort you out.”

Renny holds her face steady under Val's scrutinizing stare.

“Good.” Val picks up her phone, letting them know they are dismissed. “Doris has files for each of you on the project.”

Renny follows Lance toward the door.

Val calls after her. “And Renny.”

She turns, “Yes?”

Val's voice is caustic. “Next time, save the tennis shoes for the weekend. We dress for work here.”

Chapter Two

“Renny, open the door. It's Jeff.”

“Shit, not now,” Renny whispers, hopping as she pulls on black knee-high boots. Jeff is her friend and neighbor across the hall. She ignores him, hoping he'll go away.

He taps at the door like a woodpecker. “Come on, open up, I want to show you something. I know you're home. I heard you come in.”

She wonders if she can telepathically send him a message to leave.

“That's it! I'm going to sing until you open the door.” He bursts into a hearty rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

So much for telepathy, Renny thinks, opening the door. “What?”

Jeff walks in, holding out a cupcake with a burning candle as if it were a twelve-tier confectionary masterpiece.

Renny breezes past him toward the bathroom and extinguishes the flame. “I'm meeting Sara and Gaby in less than twenty minutes for dinner across town. I don't have time right now.”

“What restaurant?” Jeff asks.

“Volume,” Renny calls back, fluffing the brown hair curling at her shoulders, which despite a drizzly commute home has remained frizz free—a birthday token from the hair gods. To refurbish for her evening, she has washed away the day's grime, applied fresh make-up and donned her favorite black pants with a new white shirt that ties at the waist.

“I love that place. How about I drive you?”

Heading to the kitchen, she shoots him an irritated look. “I don't think so.”

“Come on, it'll save you time.”

“No way.” Even though he is one of the few people she knows with a car in the city, Renny also knows that letting him drive her is not a good idea.

“You hate when I hang out with you and your friends. You're ashamed of me.”

“That's ridiculous.” Renny searches the counter for her keys.

“I know that's it.”

“Jeff, I am not ashamed of you. You're a great guy and a great friend. And that's it!”

“Not because I haven't tried.”

“I don't have time for this.” Renny ignores the sad puppy eyes he casts at her. “There you are.” Her hand closes around the keys, which somehow wound up between the answering machine and microwave.

Jeff moved in across the hall a year ago. They met in the laundry room and he was immediately smitten. Renny wishes that she felt the same way because what could be better than falling in love with your best friend? On paper he adds up. He's cute and has a great sense of humor. Two years ago he left his job as a web page designer for a technology company, cashed in his stock options and started his own Web design company, NewApproach. A few months ago they added two search engines to their client roster. And though he's balding, Jeff is one of the few men who carry it off with aplomb. He's actually a cool bald guy, which—much like a rainbow—you can't believe until it's really there in front of you. Unfortunately for Jeff, what looks good on paper doesn't translate chemically. After they'd known each other for a few months, Jeff got up the nerve to kiss her. He may as well have been a dentist darting a probe around her mouth. Instead of being filled with desire, Renny felt an urgent need to spit.

The phone rings and Renny dives for it. “Hello,” she says, relieved to have a diversion from their conversation.

“Are you sure you can't come for dinner tonight?” Renny's mother asks in lieu of hello.

“Ma, I'm meeting Sara and Gaby in…” she checks her watch, “…sixteen minutes.”

“Tell Shirley hello,” Jeff says.

“Who's there?” her mother asks.

“Jeff, he says hello.” Renny wedges the phone between her head and shoulder while wiggling into her jacket.

“He's a nice boy,” her mother says, which Renny knows that innocent statement is actually code for, “Why can't you marry him?”

Call waiting beeps in. “Hang on, the other phone.” Renny clicks off with her mother. “Hello.”

“Finally, Cosmo's Deli! Vhat's vit the machine?”

“Mendelbaum,” she sighs. “When are you going to realize this is not Cosmo's Deli?”

He ignores the question. “I'll have a tuna on rye mit a side of cole slaw. And a tea, hot tea, not cold. The name is Mendelbaum. With a capital…”

“M,” she cuts in mimicking his ritual spelling of his name, “e-n-d, like dog, e-l-b, as in boy, a-u-m, like Myrna.” Renny has been fielding calls from Mendelbaum for four months. “It'll be right over. That is over to wherever it is you call me from. Who are you Mendelbaum?”

As always, he hangs up when she questions his identity. Renny clicks the phone back to her mother. “Ma, I really have to go.”

“Fine. Don't forget to bring your laundry when you come.”

Renny smiles. She loves that her mother is still willing to do laundry for her. “You're the best, Ma.” She hangs up and finds Jeff's face set with a smug glow of satisfaction. “What's with you?” she asks.

“You're mother said I was a nice boy, didn't she?”

“Actually she said you're an asshole and I should never talk to you again.”

“Very funny.” Jeff straightens the collar on Renny's jacket. “I don't know why you talk to him.”

“Who?”

“Mendelbaum. He's obviously a nut.”

“But he's my nut.” She checks herself in the hallway mirror.

“You should change your number.”

“I can't do that. What if some old boyfriend has a change of heart and tries to call? He won't be able to, and I'll end up alone forever.”

“For all you know Mendelbaum's a stalker,” Jeff warns.

“For all I know you're a stalker.”

“Thanks.”

“He's harmless. I can tell.” At least she hopes. Renny has tried to track him down but always hits a dead end. Two trips to the Social Security office on 48th Street, a zillion Internet searches and countless sessions plowing through the phone books at the Public Library haven't turned up anything. There are just too many Mendelbaums in the New York area and Renny doesn't even know his first name. The only thing she uncovered is that her phone number once belonged to a restaurant called Cosmo's Deli off Delancey Street, three months before she moved into her apartment five years ago. She wrote to the city's health department to find out more about the place, but that was a month ago and she hasn't heard back.

She heads out the door and Jeff follows after her. “So am I driving you?”

With a quick wave, Renny dashes down the hall and into the waiting elevator.

“I guess that means no,” he calls, watching the doors close.

***

Renny runs into Volume and scans the packed bar. She spots Gaby, drink in hand, and hustles over, trying to make up a few seconds out of the fifteen minutes she's late. “I'm so sorry. Jeff stopped by and then I couldn't get a cab. God, it took forever, and Third was like a parking lot.”

“It's okay,” Gaby says, sipping her purple-tinted martini.

Ceasing the avalanche of apologies, Renny waits expectantly.

“Oh, Happy Birthday!” Gaby says, giving Renny a limp one-armed hug.

She's even more distracted than last week, Renny discerns, noticing the heaviness surrounding Gaby's vacant eyes.

“Do you want a drink?” Gaby waves toward the bar, only her hand motion and words are out of sync, like the dialog in an old black and white Godzilla film.

A year ago, Renny would have walked into the restaurant and found her friend holding court with a collection of new acquaintances—men, women, it didn't matter, people gravitated to her. Gaby Bowers, originally from North Carolina, is a Southern belle with an adopted New York attitude. From the start, she took to the city like a new skyscraper—everyone who met her looked up to her. With her sandy hair attractively rumpled and her wide mouth often curled in a playful smile as if someone had whispered the most delicious secret to her, Gaby's beauty is unconventional, but unmistakable. However, the past months have been unkind to her. It began with the demise of her business, which was followed immediately by the sudden death of her mother and a painful break-up. This left Gaby's emotions lying there like shards of glass.

“Are you okay?” Renny asks.

“Yeah, sure,” Gaby says, turning her head away. “We should get a table.”

“Shouldn't we wait for Sara?”

“Here I am.” Sara comes up from behind. “I was in the bathroom. I think this baby is sitting right on my bladder. I pee every three seconds.” They exchange air kisses and Sara adds, “It's your birthday, so we'll forgive you for keeping us waiting.”

Renny detects the annoyance in her tone. Sara is very punctual and Renny knows her own tardiness has always irritated her. Sara is the only one in their trio to have taken the marriage plunge. She is breathtakingly beautiful, looking as though she's been lifted off the pages of a Ralph Lauren ad and set in the real world like a human Colorform. Renny has always envied the ease with which Sara could get ready to go out, everything looking fabulous on her and without any size twelves lurking in the shadows of her closet. With an unintentional air of “look but don't touch,” most people assume her to be an ice princess, aloof and distant, her features carefully sculpted on her face.

But Renny knows different.

She knows the Sara who makes a riotous squeaking when she laughs hard. She knows the Sara who despite her perfect figure has an insatiable hankering for junk food, including a heavy addiction to Butterfingers.

Renny's mother frequently points out that Sara is the luckiest of their threesome.

Her exact words: “Sara has it all.”

By “all” Renny's mother is of course referring to Sara's handsome, wealthy husband Bart Matthews, their two-year-old daughter Megan, her current pregnancy and the recently acquired four-bedroom house in Greenwich. Only her mother doesn't know that three weeks ago Bart walked out.

Settling at a table in the middle of the restaurant, Gaby shoves a small Modine's shopping bag under her chair, which strikes Renny as odd. “Are you doing a story on Modine's?” Renny asks. Modine's is an exclusive handbag boutique where the prices start at $1,000. Most of their clientele lunch at restaurants that begin with Le and whose Maitre D's are as French as the food.

Gaby stammers, “No, I, uh, needed something to put my sneakers in. Toni, the style editor, she loaned it to me. The shopping bag, that is. It's so silly, right? Modine's is as Ultra as they come. I'm embarrassed to even have my sneakers in this thing.”

For the last few months Gaby has been the shopping columnist for
It's New York
, a hip New York City ‘zine. In one of her columns, she coined the phrase “Ultra” in reference to the chi-chi boutiques where Ms. Average would have to line up angel investors before buying anything. Readers ate it up, already sympathizing with Gaby's own rise and fall tale. Three years earlier, while sleeping with an inventor named Victor, Gaby hatched an idea involving fabric reactions to body temperature. When the sex waned, she walked away with custody of their tinkering—mood fabric—and the wild idea of creating underwear for women so that at the point of arousal a phrase appears on the crotch.

“Crazy? Sure,” Gaby said as part of her sales pitch. “But Pet Rocks and Chia Pets were crazy all the way to the bank.”

She showed a prototype to a few garmento friends; they went nuts over it. Six months later, Unmentionables underwear debuted with the tagline “I Dare You To Find My Password.” At first orders were scarce, trickling in from out-of-the-way shops. Then Nina, the hot new R&B singer, accepted her Magic Music Award for Best New Artist wearing just a pair of Unmentionables and a sliced up tee shirt. Everyone assumed that it was the excitement of winning that made Nina's custom password, “I WON,” show up during her acceptance speech.

Store orders flooded in from department stores and tabloids reported that even the First Lady had a pair tucked in her bureau at the White House. Gaby raked in a small fortune and became a minor celebrity appearing on all the morning talk shows.

Then Gaby decided to add rhinestones to the new line. This made it harder to keep up with the demand so she brought in some new suppliers, who unbeknownst to Gaby, cut corners. It wasn't long before some guy in Olive Hill, Kentucky was giving his fiance an oral gift, password flaming, when he swallowed a rogue rhinestone and choked to death.

The newspaper headline blared, “The Cat Got His Tongue.” The grieving fiance filed a lawsuit and though it eventually was settled out of court, the damage had been done and Unmentionables folded.

Renny opens her mouth to ask more about the Modine's bag when Gaby tosses her head back and exclaims, “Lord, I need another drink,” her honeyed drawl making “I” sound like a long sigh that makes the listener want to snuggle next to her on a porch swing, sipping sweet tea.

Renny takes a cue from Gaby's jittery expression and sweat-beaded face not to press the issue of the shopping bag. The last time she pressed her on anything, Gaby cried for hours.

Gaby signals the waiter, who immediately comes over. He takes their drink and dinner orders and is off. She volleys the conversation to Renny. “I got your message. What happened at work?”

Renny dives into her story of the ultimatum she received from Val. As she talks, the waiter brings a breadbasket and their drinks.

Gaby gulps the purple liquid set in front of her as if it held medicinal powers. “Just keep them coming,” she tells the waiter.

“What do you think I should do?” Renny asks.

“Huh?” Gaby answers.

“I asked what should I do?”

“About?” Gaby's face is blank.

“About work?” Renny knew Gaby was spacing out during her story, clearly visiting an alcohol-infused planet.

“I don't know.” Polishing off her drink, Gaby motions to the waiter to bring another. “Sara, what do you think?”