Mercury in Retrograde (3 page)

Round about that time, at approximately 8:30 a.m., Penelope popped out of the subway onto the Bronx streets like a large, layered, pink jack-in-the-box. Sweating from the heat of the subway and the effort of dragging her bag up three flights of stairs, the second she hit the fresh, subzero air above ground, she felt a chill as her perspiration began to freeze. For a quick, hot second, she wished she had taken her father's advice to become a certified public accountant.

Her morning soundtrack was still playing in her head, tunes now courtesy of Foreigner. “
You're as cold as ice, you're willing to sacrifice our loooove…”

By the time she reached the building—a particularly rundown high-rise in a sea of structures that had all seen better days—the weather improbably managed to get worse (“
You want paradise, but someday you'll pay the price, I knoooow…”
). And no one seemed to be home in apartment 14B, much to her dismay.

This is not a good sign. But I'll be in courts soon. In a nice, dry courtroom, miles away from Martman and paragraphs away from the front page…I'll wait out that cat woman if it takes me all day. I'll even interview the dead cat if I have to…

The wind whipped up the clouds and, as Penelope shivered under the minuscule concrete canopy of the high-rise waiting for the dead cat lady to emerge from her apartment or even answer her buzzer, sleet continued to blow sideways, straight into her face.

Across the street, in the cozy confines of his once silvery blue but now fully rusted 1989 Honda Civic, was Bert Salvino, the staff photographer who'd been sent to meet her and get pictures of the former cat owner or any neighbors who would talk about how wonderful the dead cat was or how horrible the now ex-boyfriend was. Bert, a forty-two-year-old with a greasily sparse comb-over who smelled like he hadn't bathed since 1996, was sitting in his aesthetically crappy but warm and dry hatchback. The car only had one seat—the driver's seat. Bert hated everyone—especially “dickhead reporters”—so much that he'd ripped out all of the other seats so that he, legally, wouldn't be able to chauffeur anyone else, anywhere, ever.

Bert was always sent as a last resort. His refusal to get out of his car meant that he almost always missed the shot—and when he did get it, it was inevitably blurry. He should have been fired, but he was on disability. After 9/11, which Bert and every other photographer and reporter at the paper had been sent to cover, Bert had claimed that he'd tripped over a part of the fallen towers, busting his knee. Six years later he was still complaining and filing for disability every few months, despite perfect X-rays and several newsroom eyewitness accounts that he had never actually gotten closer to Ground Zero than Canal Street, about fifteen blocks north of where the twin towers had once stood.

When she saw Bert's car parked in front of the high-rise, Penelope called Martman to question the paper's choice of photographer for the day, enraging him even further. “Listen, I can't stand the guy either, but you try and fire a disabled guy—I'd
have a lawsuit on my ass in a second,” Martman screamed. “And besides, he's all we got—there was a triple homicide in Midtown, so stop bitching and get me that fucking cat lady!”

Two hours and three inches of snow later, there was still no sign of life from the building and no one in 14B was answering the buzzer, which Penelope had been dutifully pressing with one frozen finger every five minutes, conserving body heat and warmth by only moving her arm from the elbow, like a garden gnome with one working finger.

At 10:35 a.m., just as a thin layer of ice was forming on the outside of Penelope's coat and she was morphing from small Michelin man to large strawberry Sno-Cone, Martman called again.

Penelope couldn't feel her frostbitten fingers but somehow fished her phone out of her coat pocket and pushed talk.

“Mercury!” said Martman. “Cat lady is in Queens! Get there now!”

“B-b-but,” Penelope protested, “I h-h-have b-b-been here f-f-for two hours already—”

“Mercury, stop complaining! It was a cock-up on our end. Just get me the cat lady! Now!” And after rattling off the new address in rapid-fire, Martman hung up on her.

A near-frozen Penelope waddled over to Bert's Honda and knocked on the windshield.

Bert, reclining in the Civic in a summery outfit of T-shirt and jeans, topped only by a thin, zip-up fleece jacket, leaned over and grudgingly rolled the street-side window down an inch. He was on the phone and ignored her. Penelope was mesmerized by the heat emanating from the inch of open window. It was smelly heat, but it was still heat. She stuck her fingers on the rim of the pane to try and get any part of her body warm as she leaned in to shout through the open slot.

“B-b-bert,” Penelope stammered, “w-w-e have t-t-to go to Queens—”

“Yeah, I know,” Bert said as he hung up his phone, “just got the call. See you there.” And with that, he rolled up the window, put the Honda in drive, and peeled off.

“I hope you b-b-break down on the T-t-triboro Bridge!” Penelope screamed after the disappearing car, before picking up her bag and trudging back to the subway.

Penelope's cough had worsened, and she began to wonder if she might have pneumonia.
I should have just taken a sick day,
Penelope thought.
I'm going to end up on a stretcher in Saint Vincent's.
She popped her last two Advil in the train station, got on the A train going downtown, and at Forty-second Street switched to the 7, the local to Queens.

As Penelope made her way to Queens, Dana Gluck, who, up until that very moment, was well on her way to making her monthly quota in billable hours as a junior partner at Struck, Struck & Kornberg, was forced to unbutton the skirt of her favorite Armani suit, thanks to the twenty pounds she'd put on virtually overnight. To make matters worse, an hour into her fifteen-hour workday, Merck & Co., Inc., her biggest client—worth more than ten million dollars in annual revenues to her firm—informed her that it had been poached by the wily rival law firm, Krath & McGowan. And then, just as Dana was contemplating what diet plan she would utilize for lunch, the phone rang.

“Dana, are you sitting down?” said Ruth Gluck.

“Yeah, Mom.” Dana sighed. “What's up?”

“I just ran into Noah's mother at Kroger.”

“Oh, great. How is she?”

“She's pregnant.”

“Huh? She's like seventy!”

“No.
She
is.”

Dana's face went numb and her hand fell from her ear, dropping the phone onto the desk with a clatter. Something started buzzing loudly in her ears, and she could feel the bile rise from her stomach. Evya. That bitch. The mere suggestion of her ex-husband's new wife knocked the wind out of Dana.

“Dana? Dana? Hello? Dana?” her mom's voice squawked through the other end of the line.

Dana ran out of her office so fast she knocked her assistant down and barely made it into a stall in the Struck, Struck & Kornberg bathroom, where she sat on the toilet seat with her head in her hands, tears silently splashing onto her two-inch black patent leather Manolo Blahnik pumps.

An hour later Penelope exited the subway in Long Island City. The second she hit fresh air—and cell service—her phone beeped, full of messages. The first was from her mother. “Penelope, it's your mother…you haven't called me or your father back in a
week
. We are concerned. I mean, we could be
dead,
or
dying
and how would you know? You wouldn't! We'd just be here, in Ohio, decomposing…” Penelope sighed and pressed delete.

The next message was also from her mother. “And another thing. Are you dating anyone? You're not getting any younger you know—you're twenty-eight! Did you get the article I sent you on harvesting your eggs? You should think about freezing…”

Again, Penelope pressed delete. She was freezing enough out in the street, and dating had never been easy for her. Since she'd been in New York, she hadn't had much free time and the few men she'd dated had hardly been memorable. Last year she'd even tried Match.com, which had introduced her to Tony, a balding energy trader who had an annoying penchant for high-fiving everyone within earshot every time he made what he thought was an interesting comment (“Yo, that dude looks like a lady—high five!” or “Duke guys do it best—high five!”). After high-fiving a guy, he would usually follow it up with a belly bump, a move Penelope referred to as the “sumo.”

Their first date had been woeful, but Penelope had decided to give Tony another chance as he'd promised he'd take her to Da Silvano, a trendy and pricey restaurant by her house that she couldn't afford. He'd lied. Instead, Tony had taken her to a sports bar in Midtown to watch the Yankees beat the Red Sox, where he'd gotten so excited, he'd not only high-fived her (“Yeah! Yankees rule! High five!”) he'd sumoed her and Penelope flew halfway across the room and landed on her ass (“It's not even post-season!” Penelope said as nearby bar patrons helped her to her feet). She'd called it quits after that, fearing permanent sumo-inflicted damage.

The last three calls were from Martman: “Mercury! Abort cat lady mission, she already talked to the
Daily News
and the
Post.
We need you down on Wall Street—some asshole's been selling World Trade Center rubble for five dollars a pop, like it's the Berlin Wall or something.”

Next message: “Mercury? Mercury? Helloooo…”

Final message: “Mercury! Where the fuck are you? I've been trying to call you for an hour now. This is not funny! Get over to Wall Street
now
!”

Penelope sighed. If she'd felt any better she might have called Martman back and possibly demanded to use one of her three
personal or ten vacation days. But two things held her back. First, a minor case of Stockholm syndrome, whereby she had grown accustomed to the abuse flung at her and instead of loathing her tormentor, was willing to jump through flaming hoops of fire to try to please him. And second, she really needed to impress him right now in order to secure Kershank's job. Otherwise, she was doomed.

 

Still huddling away from the driving snow in a doorway in Queens, Penelope spied Ahmad Musharif's corner bodega shining like a friendly beacon in the blizzard and ran for it. Ahmad's bodega was right by the main subway line in Long Island City, a hub to the rest of Queens, and she visited every couple of months. She entered the store and waved to Ahmad before searching for tissues, a bottle of water, and some Tylenol for the fever. As Penelope dialed Martman back, an overwhelming sense of Sisyphean dread enveloped her.
What's next?
Penelope thought.
Staten Island?

“Mercury! Jesus Christ! Where the fuck have you been?” Martman bellowed when he answered. “The Daily Snooze and the
Post
got the cat lady in Brooklyn, the World Trade Center asshole has already been processed at central booking, and half the city is being shut down due to this storm and you go missing for hours. What the hell is going on? Where are you—Bert's been back in the office for half an hour!”

“I'b id Queens.” Penelope sniffed. “Where you told be to go.”

“Over an hour ago!” Martman shrieked.

“I was on the subway,” Penelope said while digging through her tote bag to pay Ahmad for her stash of medicinal relief. “I couldn't get here eddy faster. Bert wouldn't let be id his car.”

“What the fuck are you saying? I can't even understand you!” Martman said.

“Sorry. I'b sick again,” Penelope said, sneezing.

“Well, just get back here! We need you in the office now!”

“Okay,” Penelope said, wiping her nose on her jacket sleeve. “But I bay habe to leabe early cuz I don't feel so well.”

“I had five people call out sick. You want Kershank's job, then you'll leave when your shift is over; now get in here!” Martman hung up.

Penelope sighed and dropped the phone from her ear, hanging her head like a sad, sick pink snowman.

“Madame Penelope,” Ahmad said from behind the counter, “you do not look so good. You should not be out in this weather. Perhaps you should go home. How is your mother?”

“Thangs.” Penelope sniffled before opening the water bottle and downing the two Tylenol from the paper pocket. “She's ogay…I'll fill you in lader, but I hab to go bag to the office now. By boss is a liddle crazy.”

“Yes, yes,” Ahmad said, nodding his head. “I could hear him from here. He does not sound like a stable man. You should not listen to him. Every time you come in here he is yelling at you over the phone.”

“That's what eberybody says,” Penelope said, forcing a laugh. She picked up her bag and, swinging it back onto her shoulder, took a deep breath and said somewhat cheerily, “But I'm gedding a promotion to Manhattan court reporter, so it's ogay!”

“Oh, congratulations!” Ahmad said, handing her a small Pakistani flag from the register. “Take this for good luck!”

“Thangs, Ahmad!” Penelope said, shoving the flag in her pocket, “hab a good day. I'll still come visit you when I'm working in courts!” She opened the door which, when she let go too soon, swung back and hit her with gale force smack in the forehead, but thankfully she was just numb enough not to feel it.

By noon, as Penelope was desperately trying to get back to the
Telegraph
on West Fifty-seventh Street and Dana was trying not to dissolve into a hysterical mess at work, Lipstick was safely ensconced in
Y
's weekly editorial meeting in the gleaming white lacquer conference room on the thirty-sixth floor of 535 Madison Avenue. Jack Marshall, the revered editor of
Y,
wearing his new Prada chaps paired with a frilly pirate shirt (“So Galliano,” Muffie whispered admiringly), and ankle boots, clapped his hands together and announced: “Everyone. I have succeeded in getting
Y
pulled from the shelves of Walmart, Kroger, and all those other nasty Midwestern places and thus, I think we are finally going to be able to keep our rate base down to forty-five thousand. Which is our
target
as an
elite
fashion magazine. Not any less, not any more. Do you
understand
? We at
Y
are about
quality
not quantity—never forget that! So stop using Gap shirts in our fashion spreads, Muffie. I don't care who they have guest-designing at that hellhole. It is still a Gap shirt!”

Lipstick giggled to Muffie: “Forty-five thousand rate base!
Y
's subtitle should just be, ‘Keep your grubby little hands off our gorgeous magazine!'”

“I don't see anything wrong with that, Lena,” Muffie snapped back in a whisper. “Jack is a genius. He knows everything about fashion and our world. You should pay more attention to what he says.”

Jack had moved on by then to critique Ashley Winksdale, the beauty editor, whose mother was an Italian princess and father ran the collateralized loan option business for Goldman Sachs. “Darling, you are behind the times!” Jack told her. “Gwyneth has been using snake venom on her face for a
year
now—an entire year! Do you
want
us to look foolish? Everyone knows the big thing now is pig embryo cream—it clears up those horrible lines within days. Not to be harsh, my dear, but you should look into it…and not just for the magazine. You're not the pedophile's dream you used to be, you know.” Ashley, who swayed and nervously sat on her hands during the tirade, looked like a small child being berated. The fact that Ashley, who wore her straight, dark brown hair in a neat bob with bobby pins holding back her bangs, was only five foot one and insisted on dressing in wool jumpers with white shirts that had rounded collars and puffed sleeves only added to the effect.

After dissecting Ashley, Jack moved his implacable eye counterclockwise around the table to Dean McDonal, the dapper British lord/health editor (“Seriously, another spread on the abs diet thing? I know you're dating that author, but this is ridiculous!”), Sarah VanDart, the wife of an internet entrepreneur/articles editor (“We need to beef up coverage of the San Francisco scene. Can't your husband do anything? Isn't he in charge of the Google or something like that?”), Pansy Bainbridge, whose family had come over on the Mayflower and who was currently
Y
's managing editor (“The expenses here are out of control. Daily
trips to Swifty's are not considered source meetings”), Summer Holstein, Jack's goddaughter/photo editor (“Genius job, darling. But perhaps next time you could pick a cover photo that didn't look like a Sears ad?”), and so on down the line. With each critique, the target's face would freeze in a mask of terror, relaxing only when Jack would move on to focus his laserlike disappointment on the next victim.

“The net worth of this room alone could pay off the debt of not only Africa but Southeast Asia,” Lipstick whispered to Muffie, who flipped back her long, pin-straight black hair, sniffed, and said, “Well, that is only
two
small countries, dear. It's not like we work at
Vogue
where they actually pay people.”
Y
was not for the under-trust-funded. It was more like a glamorous hobby with benefits: parties, power, and a minor paycheck. At least, that was how Martin Lippencrass, whose patience with his daughter seemed to be waning by the day, viewed it. Upset that he had raised what he liked to call “a trifle” (on a good day) or a “succubus on my wallet” (on a bad), he'd been repeatedly trying to get Lipstick on the phone for over a month, “to discuss your cash flow”—calls she'd been artfully dodging.

As for her actual income, Lipstick wasn't sure how much she actually made. Seven years ago, when she started as a junior society correspondent right out of Princeton at the age of twenty-one, she thought she recalled something like the figure of twenty thousand dollars being bandied about. Now that she was the senior society editor, in charge of all the coverage of any social event anywhere in New York City, she assumed she must have gotten a raise or three, but she had never really paid attention during the meetings about money. As a good aristocrat, money talk always made her uncomfortable. It was gauche. And because her paychecks went straight to her father's accountant, she wasn't quite sure what her actual earned monthly income was. Either way, it was a small drop in the large bucket. Martin
Lippencrass's net worth, according to the annual
Forbes
billionaires issue, hovered around $3.5 billion. Although he'd always sniff and say, upon reading the issue, “That is incorrect.”

“Lena!” Jack, whose tirade had finally come full circle around the table, barked.

Lipstick jumped. “Yes?”

“Your coverage of the Whitney Gala and the fall season was superb. But May is going to be tough. It will be war. It seems Nan Thrice's botched face-lift has finally healed and she has come out of hiding. She is chairing the American Ballet Ball
and
the Burkhas for Bahrain gala.”

“Bahrain?” Lipstick said. “Why does Bahrain need a charity ball?”

“Do you know how many inappropriately dressed indentured servants there are in Bahrain that need our help?” Jack said. “That, and Nan's niece is dating the prince of Bahrain. Either way. Nan is out and about and back leading the circuit, and Elsie Courter is
pissed
. Elsie has now announced she will chair
three
galas to Nan's two, making the total number of events on the society calendar leading up to and including the ultimate society and fashion event, the Met Gala, in May—which, as you know, is
the
month of black-tie balls—well, that and November, but who's there yet?—a whopping twenty-five black-tie galas. And that's not even counting the smaller functions, which seem to have multiplied like herpes in a Mexican brothel. I hope you are prepared. This is our biggest season yet, and we can't have what happened last year, can we?”

The year before, Lipstick had fallen in love with a beautiful Karl Lagerfeld frock and made the mistake of wearing it to—gasp!—two events, and posing for pictures—horrors!—at both events. The pictures were posted on society websites like Social status.com, and printed in
Y,
to her supreme embarrassment. And then there was that horrid picture of Lipstick lying flat on
her stomach in the Lagerfeld dress at the Cancer Society Benefit after she'd tripped on the hem—or Bitsy Farmdale's carefully placed foot, depending on whom you asked. The photo appeared in the
Telegraph
under the headline: “Recycled Social Carpet.” Jack was mortified when he found out one of his employees had made such a “plebian” gaffe and had fumed, “Never—
never
—be caught dead in the same dress twice.
Especially
if you've been photographed. Sometimes I feel as if I'm teaching society standards to a pimply faced teen in Junior Cotillion!”

Back at the meeting, Jack continued, “So, get a good night's sleep for the next few months because come May, you belong to charity!”

Jack took the business very seriously. He lived, breathed, and slept
Y
and considered the social pages, which covered every move and every dress that the women of the world's upper crust made and wore, second only to the fashion. His commitment to fashion and the figures that ruled that world was legendary, and his schedule was regimented to fit that universe. Labor Day was referred to as “that three-day weekend before New York Fashion Week,” the Fourth of July was “Parisian couture week,” and Christmas and New Year's Eve were simply called “Saint Barth's.” If world politicians were outside of the fashion circle, they didn't count. When President Ford—whose wife was “no Jackie Kennedy”—died, Jack sniffed and said, “Bad suits.” But fashion figures were an entirely different matter. When Gianni Versace was murdered, Jack's hysteria—and insistence that he heard about it even as Andrew Cunanan's gun was still smoking on the Miami street—earned him the title the Gianni Death Caller.

The title had stuck, not that Jack minded. He was the first person at
Y,
and thus New York, to learn that Gianni Versace had been shot—despite claims to the contrary that
Vogue
editrix Anna Wintour was the first call on the tipster's phone list (“Fuck
Vogue,
” Jack had sneered to Lipstick, “cow pies in Arkansas
relate to
Vogue
! Only the true fashion believers get, and I mean really
get,
us”).

Several years ago, on Black Tuesday, as it was now known in the office, everyone immediately knew something was wrong. From outside his centrally located Jeffrey Bilhuber–decorated glass office, everyone could see and hear when Jack had suddenly stood up, knocking his Philippe Starck chair over, and shrieked into the phone: “GIANNI! GIAAAAANI!” before collapsing on his desk in a faint.

Jack's two assistants, the Hoover twins, tall blond former Abercrombie & Fitch models, ran in to help him. Several minutes later, after Jack, through ashen lips and rolled-back eyes, had managed to eke out: “Gianni…shot…. dead…” they ran out of the office hysterically crying, pulling at their hair and screaming the news to everyone in 535 Madison like fey Gucci-clad town barkers.

“It was amazing,” Lipstick had told Neal once over dinner, eating a forbidden breadstick—“Carbs equal cellulite,” was Jack's favorite mantra—“They all fell to pieces. Muffie was hyperventilating for days, Jack had fainting spells for almost a year, and the Hoover twins had to take a week at Calvin Klein's castle in Southampton to get over it. I can't believe we put out a magazine that month. They still mention it in hushed tones and every year wear all black on that day. Well, Muffie wears vintage Versace—but only the stuff designed by Gianni, not that trashy sister.”

“Darling,” Neal cooed, “for our crowd you can forget September eleventh, Gianni Versace's death—Armageddon!”

After the meeting ended, an hour and a half later, and all of the editors were filing out of the conference room, Lipstick grabbed Ashley and whispered, “I'm taking the afternoon off to do a little B&B—Bergdorf and Barneys. I like to call it ‘working in the field.' You wanna come?”

“Sure,” Ashley said, “I have to see if Bergdorf is stocking that pig product anyway. Or if they even know about it. Sometimes I think Jack makes stuff up just to screw with me.”

“That,” Lipstick said with a laugh, “would be
shocking
!”

It took Dana a little more than half an hour of yogic breathing to calm herself down to the point she could leave the bathroom stall. It took another ten minutes to wash her face, straighten her hair, and finally return to her office.

Once safely inside her glass walls, she pressed her intercom and instructed her secretary, “Hold my calls for the rest of the day, and if you wouldn't mind, could you have the janitors bring up a large garbage bin, please? I have some cleaning to do.”

Dana sat back in her ergonomic swivel chair and sighed. She would have to face the drawers.

Her office was sparse, containing only her chair, a dark appropriately legal desk, and two other reception chairs for clients or underlings who needed to be grilled. Other than that, there was nothing but a corporate-approved print on the far wall above the oak-paneled, legal-sized drawers that held all sorts of items, including the one thing she'd been dreading most: her past.

Dana took a deep breath and opened the bottom drawer that had been closed under lock and key for some time and stared at the pictures and mementos that had once lined her desk and decorated her walls. It was time to let them go.

Just a little over a year ago Dana's full name was Dana Gluck Glickman, and she was happily married—or so she thought—to Noah Glickman, a nice Jewish boy she had met five years earlier while waiting in line to see the Klimt exhibit at the Neue Galerie.

Dana, who'd graduated from Columbia Law School at twenty-four, had just been made a permanent associate at Struck, Struck & Kornberg after toiling for two years as a first-and then second-year associate at the firm and was working 80-hour weeks. The hours were so rough that one colleague of Dana's had come home early one morning after putting in an ungodly 100-hour, seven-day workweek to a note from his wife of three years that read, “Dear Chris: Since we've been married I have seen you a cumulative total of four months, and that includes the few hours you spent sleeping and, incidentally, not fucking me. I've had it. Good-bye. Love, Trish.”

But Dana didn't mind. She didn't miss having a social life, and was happy going to work every day. She loved being a corporate litigator, loved trying to get her clients out of trouble and arguing that while, yes, it was reprehensible that perhaps they had dumped millions of pounds of toxins into the Hudson River in the 1970s, there was no actual proof that said toxins were directly responsible for the high rate of breast cancer around the Catskill Region.