Mercury in Retrograde (10 page)

“Yes, but that was years ago,” Lipstick moaned.

“Did you not make me the most beautiful slipcover, in under an hour, I might add, for the Ryans' sofa when their schnauzer shat on it right before the
Elle Decor
magazine shoot? And did you not say you secretly enjoyed sewing it?”

“Okay, sure, but what does this have to do with what I can wear to the gala season?” Lipstick asked.

“Oh my, it's going to be one of those spell-it-out-for-you days, isn't it?” Neal sighed. “Make. Your. Own. Dresses.”

“Really? Me? From what?”

“Yes, silly, you. You always have to alter your clothes anyway and are constantly complaining about how boring everything looks off the racks—”

“Not Balenciaga or Dior!” Lipstick gasped as if she'd heard something libelous.

“Please. No one from
Y
can hear you—don't mock-shock me, Lips,” Neal quipped. “Do it yourself. Isn't that your motto these days?”

“Yeeees,” Lipstick said, rubbing her forehead again.

“So, use your old clothes. We may have edited, but there are still way too many in that closet-slash-bedroom, and it's not like you can wear the same thing twice after Jack sees it anyway. To borrow a line from Tim Gunn: ‘Make it work.' And to help, I brought you some old
Vogue
s from the 1950s and '60s. Don't ruin them—they're classics from my personal library.”

Lipstick, feeling overwhelmed, put her head down on the kitchen table and let out a sigh.

“It's okay,” Neal said, “Let's look on the bright side—you have a fabulous new apartment in Soho, which is way cooler than the Village, darling. Think of it as grungetastic! You are the Marc Jacobs of
Y
right now, dear—young, hip, urban, and downtown—and a designer.”

“Yeah,” Lipstick said, sitting up straight in her chair, “Marc Jacobs.” She instantly felt better.

“Now, let's order Chinese. Penelope told me about this fantastic delivery called Mama Buddha. She said to order her the spare ribs.”

“Penelope?”

“Penelope, your new next-door neighbor who got you the apartment and whom I invited over. She should be here any minute now, probably dressed in something that used to be yours.”

As if on cue, there was a knock on the door and Penelope's voice came floating through the cracks, “Neal? You there? It's me….”

Neal opened Lipstick's door to reveal a slightly harried Penelope, dressed, sure enough, in one of Lipstick's hand-me-downs—a black Dolce & Gabbana sleeveless dress that clearly hadn't been tailored yet and hung on her in a baglike way, topped off with a yellow cashmere cardigan with pearl buttons. She'd tried to straighten her hair for her first day of work, but it was still slightly frizzy and a few loose strands had escaped her ponytail, giving Penelope a fried halo.

Neal enveloped Penelope in a hug, introduced her to Lipstick, and ordered Chinese food for the three of them while Lipstick, recognizing her dress and sweater, stifled a giggle. Penelope looked like a little girl playing dress up in her mother's clothes. Lipstick liked her immediately.

Penelope, exhausted, was more than keen to meet her new neighbor, the socialite who'd fallen on hard times that she'd heard so much about in the past year. But when she saw her, Penelope
couldn't help but be irked by the fact that Lipstick had spent all day moving and still looked gorgeous. She was a tiny bit jealous of the other woman in Neal's life, especially one who seemed to have had so much handed to her. But then Penelope saw her eyes, which were still red from crying, and she felt a pang of guilt.

“Hey,” Penelope mumbled, offering her hand, “nice to meet you. Thanks for all the clothes and stuff.”

“Oh no,” Lipstick said, grabbing her hand, “thank you for the apartment. You saved my life! And my dress looks better on you than it ever did on me.”

“Ha!” Penelope said. “Now I know you're a liar—but I'll take what I can get!”

Just then the food arrived, and they all crowded around Lipstick's makeshift kitchen table.

“So, how's the new job?” Neal asked Penelope. “How's my David treating you?”

“Oh, man.” Penelope sighed, tossing a masticated rib into the garbage bag. “I love David—he saved my butt like ten times today, but everybody else at New York Access is nuts. They're all sniffing some powerful glue.”

“Oh, sounds fun!” Lipstick said, slurping her sesame noodles.

“Well. Not exactly,” Penelope said, giving Lipstick and Neal an odd look.

Penelope's job as an “assistant producer” was slightly more demeaning than she'd anticipated.

Penelope arrived for work at the NY Access newsroom on East Twenty-eighth Street a full fifteen minutes early. Once again, Gladys made her wait in the dingy reception area until David okayed her entry, and once again, Gladys called her Pamela.

“Penelope,” David said when he saw her walk into the newsroom, “I'm so glad you actually showed up. Let me take you around and introduce you to people.”

David guided her first to the “studio” area, which was divided into three sections: a sofa (“for interviews”), an anchor desk, and a green-screen area where the weather segment was done. It was all shiny and two dimensional in a way that television studios are, and while it may have looked authentic and homey through the distance of a TV screen, in person it looked cheap. Behind the IKEA sofa was a mock-up of Fifth Avenue so that when the cameras were on, it would look as if the studio were on the busy thoroughfare, in the heart of the city, rather than in the dingy warehouse district. The anchor “desk” was a shell of painted-over plywood, and there were signs that read
NY Access: #1 for News!
that could be rolled in or out of sight to add a three-dimensional aspect to any part of the set while reminding the viewers that they were, in fact, watching a high quality telecast.

Stepping over wires and dodging cameras, David took Penelope's arm and walked her over to the makeup room just as Marge's voice was heard ringing through the walls, “Coffee! David, where's my coffee?”

“Oh, blast that bitch.” David sighed. “Penelope, wait right here; I'll be back in a second.”

“Okay,” Penelope said, taking a seat in the director's chair farthest from the door. “Take your time. I'm good.”

Five minutes later, in walked the station's news anchor, Trace Howard. Penelope recognized him from his photo on the promotional poster by the front door where he stood with the sta
tion's other anchor, Kandace Karllsen, linking arms and smiling. Trace was a preternaturally tan sixty-two-year-old man with dyed, thinning hair on his head but a full
Magnum P.I.
mustache on his face and a new, young girlfriend every month or two.

He strutted into the makeup room, dropped his briefcase by the door, took one look at Penelope, and announced, “I am a powerful and attractive man!” before taking the seat next to hers and demanding, “Teeth whitening paste, please.”

“Huh?” Penelope asked, jumping out of her chair.

“Teeth whitening paste, please,” Trace said, staring straight ahead at himself in the mirror. “It's in the drawer. Hand it to me. Now.”

“Oh, right. Gotcha,” Penelope said and started sifting through several drawers until she found the required paste in the drawer by Trace's left knee.

As she was getting the paste out of the drawer, she felt his knee brush her ass.

“Hey!” Penelope exclaimed.

“Yes?” Trace asked, still staring at himself in the mirror. “My paste?”

She rolled her eyes but handed him the paste. Trace applied it to his teeth and, pulling his lips back into a skeletal grimace so the paste wouldn't be wiped off, barked, “Apply the tanning cream to my scalp!”

“Tanning cream?” Penelope asked, looking around the spare makeup room. A small, nervous-looking middle-aged woman with mousy brown hair dressed in an absurdly bright orange sherbet–colored suit outside the makeup room averted her eyes and pretended to be
very busy
as Trace, settling into his director's chair, leaned his head back and, still baring his cream-coated teeth, again demanded, “Tanning cream. Scalp. Now!” Turning toward the sherbet-colored suit, he ordered, “Berry! Get in here and show this girl how it's done!”

Berry, who turned out to be Trace's well-seasoned assistant, rushed over, grabbed a can of spray-on hair and some small rectangular sponges out of the drawer by Trace's right knee, and placed them in front of Trace. Berry whispered into Penelope's ear, “Spray it on him.”

“What?” Penelope said. “Spray
hair
on him?” This was too much. Surely, she couldn't be serious? She was a fucking reporter, not a stylist—

“Shhh!” Berry, a nervous woman, said, not wanting to disturb Trace's concentration. “Yes. Spot spray, pat down, and repeat until he has a full head of hair. And hurry up!”

“Oh,” Penelope said as the canister was thrust into one hand and a sponge in another. Apparently, Berry was serious. “Ew. Okay…”

Penelope picked up the “Can-O-Hair,” walked around to face Trace's bald spots, which from a certain angle appeared to form a shape like Africa, picked one obvious expanse of hair-free scalp in the area that would have been Sudan or Egypt, and gingerly pressed the spray. A glob of dark brown, viscous fiber-like substance, the same color as Trace's dyed hair, shot out and sat on the spot like a small hair pyramid.

Penelope choked as some of the loose fiber in the air shot up her nose.

“Mmmph, bleargh,” she said, gagging.

Trace's eyes popped open. “Well, pat it down, woman! I don't have all day.”

“Okay,” Penelope said, turning her face away and trying to breathe actual air. “Got it!” It was demeaning, but not as demeaning as going back to Cincinnati and living with her parents, so…

She grabbed a sponge and patted the “hair” down, fully covering the bald spots. “Not bad,” she said, surveying her follicular artwork, “not bad.”

After several applications of tanning cream, David finally came back from coffee duty and, ignoring Trace, loudly announced, “Penelope, scalp-covering duties are
not
in your job description—we have a makeup girl who comes in two times a week who takes care of that—and Trace is not supposed to wash it off every day unless it's summertime. He has shower caps.” Turning toward Trace, David snapped, “Trace, that's enough. Marge wants you on set. Now,” he said, turning back toward Penelope, “come with me and meet everyone else.”

Guiding her by the elbow, David steered Penelope into the newsroom and toward the other main news anchor, Kandace Karllsen, a pie-faced, plump, bottle blond of Swedish descent who described herself as a “real, expressive” newswoman “with heart.” This meant that when she talked she swished her hands in and out—using them as props to “drive her point home” while she fixated on “proper a-NUN-see-ay-SHUN”—and teared up during stories about puppies, babies, and firemen. In an attempt to make herself seem smarter than she actually was, she often made up words that sounded “bookschooled.”

“Oh, Hel-LO,” Kandace said looking Penelope up and down several times, taking in her Lipstick-donated outfit and black patent leather pumps from Candie's that Penelope had picked up at Macy's for thirty-five dollars on sale.

“A-DOR-able! Stick close to me (hand swish in) and you (hand swish out) will learn
irreduceible
amounts (hand swish in).”

Kandace came from CNN and was therefore, at least according to her, NY Access's “number one star,” which didn't go over well with the station's other self-professed star, Trace Howard (he of the spray-painted bald spot). So Kandace and Trace ignored each other. Their egos were too big to acknowledge each other unless they absolutely had to. As Trace walked past Kandace, Penelope, and David, leaving the unmistakable smell of
Drakkar Noir wafting in the air, Kandace, who had celebrated her “annual thirty-fifth birthday” for the past nine years, said rather loudly to his back, “That man is just irretrievably jealous that I used to be the sole anchor for the two a.m. newscast on CNN for over five years.”

Trace glowered, not breaking his stride. “That fat old meatball screwed the CNN bureau chief to get that job. And who watches at two a.m.? A mime outside of Yankee Stadium during the playoffs would get more viewers! Whereas,
I
am a powerful and attractive man!”

“And on with our tour!” David said, grabbing Penelope's arm and rushing her away from a boiling Kandace to introduce her to the rest of the newsroom. First up was Laura Lopez—nee Spincer—the tall, athletic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed “entertainment girl” who was actually thirty-six.

“She plays up the Hispanic last name,” David whispered to Penelope as they approached Laura's desk, “despite not having any actual Hispanic lineage. She acquired her Latino last name through her ex-husband, a Puerto Rican tax inspector. They were only married for six months when Laura discovered his penchant for young African-American men. Ouch! I know, right? So, she kicked him out, but kept his last name as she feels it gives her ‘a leg up in this cutthroat TV business.'”

Penelope and David, not noticing Laura listening to them, started to giggle.

“Fine, you go ahead and laugh now,” Laura snapped while David rolled his eyes, “but by 2011, Hispanics will be the largest demographic in the U.S. and they are going to want to watch one of their own, Laura Lo-PEZ!”

Penelope eyed Laura's desk where she kept pictures of her idols—Natalie Morales, Geraldo Rivera, and Charo—framed in silver on her desk. She also had a “fame wall” to the left of her desk decorated with photos of her and the celebrities she had
interviewed on junkets. There was a picture of Laura and Beth Blow—an unfortunate but appropriate last name as the twenty-one-year-old starlet of such movies as
Moodracer, 23 Ways to Die,
and
Muff
had been arrested with her mother last year in a Times Square hotel room doing lines of cocaine.