Mercury in Retrograde (5 page)

“Oh, that's cute,” Lipstick said. “Hold on to it—I'll try it on too.”

The girls moved through several departments, picking up dresses and tossing them back (“too slutty,” “too old lady,” “too
too
”), until Lipstick had five dresses she wanted to try on—two Pradas, one Alessandro Dell'Aqua, and two Chanels. She was about to go into a dressing room when she saw they'd come up right behind Bitsy Farmdale, Lipstick's social frenemy.

“You know, Ashley,” Lipstick said, nervously, eyeing Bitsy, “I don't need to try these on. Let's just go pay for them.”

“I'm not in a rush,” Ashley said, twirling her hair.

“Well, I can always return them, and it's for work. I'm sure Daddy will take it off on taxes,” Lipstick said, turning around just in time to come face-to-face with Bitsy.

“Lena,” Bitsy said. Dressed in a white tank, a pink Chanel
jacket, and tight pencil-cut dark jeans, Bitsy was a rail-thin blond whose shoulder-length hair was done up in bizarre corkscrew curls like an old Shirley Temple movie and pinned back with shiny gold barrettes that matched her jewelry. “So good to see you. You didn't show up to Margaret's bridal shower last week—we were worried about you.”

“Sorry, I meant to call,” Lipstick said, a little flustered.

“Well,” Bitsy said, “you should call her. She's
very
hurt. I think you should mention it in
Y
to make it up to her.”

“Of course! It's already in for the next issue,” Lipstick said.

“What do you have there?” Bitsy asked.

“What?” Lipstick said.

“Those dresses,” Bitsy said, pointing to the two Lipstick had in her arms and the three Ashley had in hers. Bitsy ignored Ashley, as she had ever since Ashley left her job at La Prairie and could therefore no longer send her free face cream worth thousands of dollars (“The second I became useless to her I became a nameless remora,” Ashley said to Lipstick one day. “So, what's the bad news?” Lipstick asked).

“I'm just stocking up for the May season.”

“Off the rack?” Bitsy sneered. “I'm surprised. Shocked, really.”

“Well, I have some lovely couture and vintage dresses at home,” Lipstick said.

“Of course you do. Just be careful. If you buy off the rack, someone could show up wearing the same dress as you. And
that
would be even more of a disaster than the time you wore that Lagerfeld dress to two events and then tripped and fell in front of everyone.” Bitsy smirked as her phone started ringing. “Oops! It's Thad, have to go.” Lipstick flinched at the sound of her ex-boyfriend's name. Enjoying the look of pain on Lipstick's face, Bitsy continued, “So nice seeing you, Lena, and”—waving
a hand in Ashley's direction—“you.”

“Okay, what was that about?” Ashley said, as Bitsy disappeared into the Chloé boutique at the other end of the floor. “You are way cooler than her and have an actual paying job with a magazine she kills herself to get into. You should be making her squirm, not the other way around. Not to mention she
stole
your ex-boyfriend!”

“Thanks for the reminder—I forgot about that,” Lipstick said, making her way toward a cash register. “Ever since that sleepover in the seventh grade when Bitsy and her friends locked me out on her mother's balcony on the sixty-fifth floor and said they ‘lost me' until the next morning, it was kind of game over. It was some sort of power play, and she won. It's been like that for years.”

“That's ridiculous! Who wasn't a bitch in middle school?” Ashley said.

“I know, but Bitsy acts like she needs to put me in my place on a regular basis. I know it sucks, but that's the way it is.”

“Why do you even put up with Bitsy and her friends? They're truly horrible. I mean, they all act like they're thirteen. Like
Mean Girls
is on repeat in their heads. I can't believe she ignores me. My mother's family used to rule Italy, for chrissake!”

“I've known her since I was two,” Lipstick said, piling her dresses on the counter. “Her parents are friends with my parents and we were debutantes together. I have to be careful. She pretty much rules our world. If I piss her off, she could make things very difficult for me.”

“
You
could make things difficult for
her,
” Ashley said as they waited for the salesgirl to tally up the five dresses Lipstick was buying. “What if you stopped writing about her? You'd cut off her oxygen supply. And see how long Thad stays with her if he thought she had no juice!”

“She'd still find a way to get in the magazine—through Jack or Muffie.” Lipstick sighed. “Either way, that's just how it is. There's a social pecking order, and she's the reigning queen of the under-thirty crowd. I don't really care, it's just part of my job. It's not like I actually hang out with her or the other Bitsies…much.”

“The total is $35,572, miss,” the saleslady cut in.

Lipstick rummaged in her tote and pulled out a black American Express card. “Here you go,” she said, handing it to the saleslady. “So anyway, do you want to go to Barneys? Maybe they've heard of that cream there.”

“Nah,” Ashley said. “I'll just call it a day. Arthur is getting home early, and I think he may want to have sex.” Arthur Winksdale was Ashley's husband of two years. Every other Friday he came home early from his job as an accountant to have sex, despite his wife's obvious lack of interest. “I mean, I know some people like it, but it's just so…messy,” Ashley said.

“Miss,” the saleslady cut in again.

“Yes?” Lipstick asked.

“The card's been declined. Do you have another one, perhaps?”

“That's impossible,” Lipstick said, “it's a
black
card. They don't get declined. Can you call, please? It's probably the strip. I always forget to put it back in my wallet, and it gets all scratched up.”

As the saleslady picked up the phone, Lipstick looked up and went pale.

“What's wrong?” Ashley said. “You look sick.”

“It's Bitsy,” Lipstick whispered through clenched teeth, making sure her mouth didn't move. “She's over there, behind that rack of Prada skirts. I think she heard my card get declined.”

“Don't be silly,” Ashley said. “She's on the phone and too
self-centered to notice anything but her own reflection.”

“Okay, maybe you're ri—”

“Miss,” the saleslady cut in again. “They say your card's been deactivated.”

“Shhhh!” Lipstick hissed. “Okay, okay, try this card.” She pulled out a Visa.

Two cards later, it was clear that for some reason all of Lipstick's credit cards had been canceled, and Bitsy, who was off the phone by now, was walking toward them.

“Oh my God,” Lipstick cried. “Put them on hold—I'll be back tomorrow to pick them up. Don't do anything with those dresses!”

“Everything okay, Lena?” Bitsy purred.

“Fine, Bitsy—I'm just not sure about the dresses,” Lipstick said. “I think you may be right after all. Buying off the rack may be too risky.”

“It always is,” Bitsy agreed, giving Lipstick a little smirk.

Lipstick grabbed Ashley and the two ran out of the store.

The garbage bin had finally been brought to her office, and Dana was slowly sifting through the remnants of her former life. During her divorce, she hadn't wanted to throw things like wedding albums, anniversary pictures, vacation snaps, and love notes out, but she'd also not wanted them in her new home, so her back office drawer had acted like a perverse storage bin. She didn't tell many people what she'd undergone, but most of her coworkers surmised something had happened when she sent around an office email saying, “Henceforth I would like to be
referred to, professionally and personally, as Dana Gluck.”

A Tiffany-framed picture of her and Noah smiling happily into the camera made her tear up. Outwardly their relationship seemed so much like a cheesy Disney fairy tale that she often ignored signs of trouble that popped up every now and then. Noah, who was very supportive of her job at first, had a sudden about-face and pressured her to quit to focus on getting pregnant. Dana was okay with the pregnant part—she'd always wanted children—but she'd never wanted to be a housewife.

“You're never around,” he told her. “I like to have my wife here when I come home.”

“I'm here four out of five weeknights,” Dana had countered. “I even got them to let me work from the apartment after five p.m., but Wednesdays are the big work nights and I have to stay until eight. I'm sorry.”

“It's not like we need the money,” Noah said sulkily. “I make enough to support a family of ten. Not that we even have kids yet. Maybe something's wrong with you. We had sex three times last week and you're not pregnant.”

“It's not about the money,” Dana had answered. “I love my job. And believe me, without it, I'd be a mess. You wouldn't want to come home to a bored mess every day, would you? And it's not my fault I'm not pregnant. I want a baby as much, if not more, than you!”

To make up for not being a housewife, Dana started getting up an hour earlier than usual, putting on a pot of coffee and making Noah breakfast (an egg-white omelet and seven-grain toast).

For their first anniversary Noah got Dana a mini-dachshund puppy—which she promptly named Karl Gluck-Glickman—and said, “Until you can get pregnant with a real baby, this will have to do.” The subtle dig was hurtful, but Dana loved Karl, not just because he had been a gift but because Karl developed an instant dislike to almost everyone but Dana. He didn't even like Noah.
She should have known.

Another source of tension was her weight. That first year of marriage she'd put on a few pounds, like so many other women do at that one-year mark, and started losing her permanent battle with the bulge. Not a lot, only twenty pounds, but enough to go up several pants sizes. “The lettuce diet was wearing thin, and besides, everyone gains weight the first year of marriage. It's normal! And Noah said he didn't care how I looked,” Dana told her yoga teacher and friend, Sally Brindle, one day after yoga class as she ate her second chocolate croissant during Sunday brunch at Le Pain Quotidien in Tribeca.

“Yeah, right. See how long that lasts,” Sally said. She had seen her fair share of clients deal with men and weight issues in the past.

“Getting plump,” Noah would comment, which always made Dana blush. She would laugh it off and comment on his growing gut, but she ran to Sally's yoga studio the next morning after she'd made him breakfast and before heading to the office. In addition to yoga, she started attending Weight Watchers every Tuesday evening to shed the pounds that offended Noah so much.

Six months before they split up, Noah started nudging Dana out of the house on weekends, claiming, “I need my alone time, and you need to go to Weight Watchers.”

“Weight Watchers is on Tuesdays, and you don't have to shove me out of my own house every night!” Dana shot back. “You say you want me home, so I'm home. Now you want me to leave?”

“You were so hot when we first met.”

“I was borderline anorexic.”

“Exactly.”

“I think I still look hot.”

“Suit yourself.”

In the cab downtown Ashley looked at Lipstick, who was sweating despite the freezing temperatures outside.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lipstick said, slumped in the seat of the cab. “Bitsy just freaks me out.”

“No, I mean, are you okay—what's with the credit cards being declined?”

“Oh, Mommy probably lost her purse again and canceled all the cards. She always forgets to tell them to only cancel
her
cards—and not mine as well. No big deal. I'll just call her when I get home. But what a time to cancel! This will be all over the Upper East Side by dinnertime. Bitsy has a bigger mouth than the East River. I'm mortified.”

“Forget her,” Ashley said as the cab passed under the shadow of the Empire State Building.

“Yeah, I guess you're right. Besides, she's still mad that Cavalli gave me first look at his line last year, before her. Even if it was skanky.”

But the unsettling feeling in Lipstick's stomach wouldn't go away.

Any run-in with Bitsy was a bad run-in. Not only was Bitsy pure spite, but it reminded Lipstick of Thad, whom her parents, she was convinced, had liked even more than their own flesh and blood daughter. Lana Lippencrass, who was as devoted to the website Socialstatus.com as Lipstick—if not more—was furious that Lipstick had dumped Thad and that he was now dating Bitsy. As if somehow, despite her breeding and pedigree, something was so wrong with her daughter—and therefore her—that
someone from the Newton family would choose a Farmdale over a Lippencrass.

Lipstick's father, Martin, was irked as well. Thad's parents had sponsored his membership to the ever-exclusive Southridge Golf Club in the Hamptons, and when Lipstick dumped Thad, his parents dumped Martin.

The whole encounter with Bitsy brought back bad feelings for Lipstick, which she normally didn't like to think about
at all,
thank you very much. A black cat had crossed her path and she felt uneasy, as if it were an omen of doom.

As she approached Martman's office, Penelope could see Thatcher inside, slumped over in a chair opposite Martman's desk, his flannel shirt lifted up. He was inspecting the contents of his belly button.

“Mercury, take a seat,” Martman said as he shut his office door, pointing to the free chair next to Thatcher. Martman sat in the Posturepedic chair he had special-ordered a year ago to remedy his sciatica. Behind his desk the walls were covered in front-page
Telegraph
exclusives that had all been meticulously framed and lovingly hung by Martman's loyal secretary, Rosario, who guarded the three-by-four-foot area outside Martman's office like a rabid pit bull. On top of Martman's oak desk, which wrapped around the entire back half of the office, was his collection of beer steins that he swore he'd collected from around the world, but which looked suspiciously like the Global Beer Stein
Collection in the Franklin Mint ads in the back of the
National Enquirer.

“Now,” Martman said, clearing his throat, “I brought you two in here because you've both asked me about Kershank's job.”

Both?
Penelope thought. T
hatcher wants Kershank's job? He never said anything, he doesn't do anything, and there is no deli by the courthouse that serves Philly beef and Swiss sandwiches.

“Mercury,” Martman said, leaning back in his chair, with his hands together as if in prayer and the tips of his fingers tapping against his mouth. “You're a great city reporter and are semidependable—which is more than I can say about ninety percent of the rest of the newsroom.”

“Semi? But—” Penelope stammered.

“Now hold on there, cowgirl. I'm not done,” Martman said, resting his hands palms down on the desk in front of him and staring closely at her. “I value your work. Thatcher, you too. You're great at rewrite. Your desk smells and you look like hell, but I'm a man of my word.”

Man of his word?
A warning bell rang through the layers of fuzziness in Penelope's head.
When did that happen? And word for what?

“I promised you this job when I hired you away from the
Daily News
last year,” Martman said, looking at Thatcher. “I also remember telling my mother, your aunt, something to that effect as well. Which is why, after long deliberations, I've decided to let you cover Manhattan courts. Mercury, the next opening is yours.”

“Whad?” Penelope cried, leaping out of her chair. “Thad's insane. You told be
I
was the front-rudder—”

“Sit down, Mercury,” Martman said, standing up.

“Doh! Doh way…Thatcher? He doesn't eben
do
eddythig!”

Thatcher looked up and said, “Dude—not cool. Did you drink like a gallon of Hatorade all day?”

“You habn't eben
seen
be all day,” Penelope yelled back, “because I'be been out freezing id the snow od a wild goose chase for doh dood reason!”

What came next happened in a kind of slow motion Penelope had previously assumed occurred only in Michael Bay movies or
The A-Team
reruns.

Martman kept talking. “…an important asset to the
Telegraph
…blah blah blah…a real star…blah blah blah…Thatcher…seniority…blah blah blah…he threatened to call my mother who's a real bitch if he didn't get the job…blah blah…You can be in the office more and do rewrite…” but Penelope couldn't follow what he was saying due to a strange buzzing in her ears.

The buzzing reached a crescendo as Martman was extolling the virtues of doorstepping, and Penelope became increasingly dizzy as her forehead started throbbing anew. “I deed to sit down,” she said—which, in the arduous trek from her brain to her mouth, was retranslated and somehow came out as, “Fug you, I quit.”

Martman cut off his speech midsentence.

Oops,
Penelope thought as her eyes crossed and she swayed with nausea.

Her boss's face turned an alarming shade of purple.

She tried to walk to a chair as Martman blocked her path. He started screaming incoherently, spittle flying everywhere. “Fuck you? Fuck me? No way, sister, fuck
you
!…Blah blah…Fuck that!…Blah blah…fucking fired…get the fuck out…blah blah blah…”

It was then that Thatcher sniffed the air and said, “Hey, you guys smell smoke?”

A fire alarm suddenly went off and someone yelled, “The photo studio's on fire!”

Smoke poured from the end of the office where the smoking studio was and the sprinkler system was triggered, spraying a light rain all over the office.

Martman, still berating Penelope, was screaming with renewed vigor as droves of editors and reporters got up and ran for the fire exits.

Penelope wiped Martman's spittle off her face and, trying to push past him out of his office, mumbled, “Martman, move,” as a tidal wave of her vomit erupted out of her mouth, covering him.

Martman froze as the remnants of the leftover lo mein Penelope had consumed the night before slid down his face and spackled his dark gray Men's Wearhouse suit. He uttered a high, girlish screech and, shoving her out of the way, ran for the men's room.

As he disappeared around the bend, Penelope had her last semicoherent thought of the day:
Get out now.

Lipstick dropped Ashley off at her Gramercy Park town house and made it home as the winter sun disappeared early and the sky turned jet black. She walked up the stairs to the front door of the brownstone and straight back into her parlor floor apartment.

“Home,” she said as she sighed and sank into the leather armchair in the front room. Lipstick loved this apartment—almost as much as she loved Lagerfeld. The two-bedroom, two-
bathroom apartment was meticulously decorated by her favorite designer and friend, Neal DuBoix, who also designed the garden and the terrace off the kitchen at the back of the parlor floor. The first floor had dark brown floors, light gray walls, and brown and khaki furnishings. The small entryway held a petite black lacquer table, on which she always threw her keys, bag, and mail, and was next to the dark leather nailhead armchair that had come from her mother's grandfather's study. Above it hung an oil painting of her in Valentino couture as the debutante of the year, 1997, at the Le Bal Crillon des Debutantes in Paris. The portrait of her, two years later, at the New York debutante gala, The New York Infirmary Ball at the Waldorf Astoria, hung above the fireplace in the living room. She had again worn Valentino but lost out on Deb of the Year to Bitsy Farmdale, whose mother was rumored to have rigged the jury.

Lipstick's eyes shot open when she heard voices coming from her garden.

Oh, God,
she thought.
What if somebody scaled the wall?
Her heart started racing, and she began to sweat. She could hear the banging of the garden doors downstairs. Someone was breaking into the apartment.

Lipstick grabbed her cell phone from her purse and keyed in 911. She tiptoed through the living room into the kitchen, took a large knife from the wooden knife block, and peered out of the glass doors leading down to the garden. She couldn't see anything, so she turned on the garden lights and stepped outside onto the terrace, her thumb hovering above the send button on her cell phone, which was set to call the police at a touch. She peered over the side of the railing and said, “Hellooooo…”

Looking back up at her were her parents.

“Lena, darling! You're home!” Lana cried, shivering in the cold in a thin baby-blue cashmere sweater set and tan wool
pants. “We came out to check on the garden and the door locked behind us. Our coats and my purse are inside and everything. Thank God you're home and not out on one of your gallivants. We'd have died if we'd spent another minute out here!”

As Dana continued cleaning “the drawer,” a photo fell out from a stack of papers. Dana picked it up and immediately the bile rose in her throat again. The photo of her, Noah, and his friend Bill—who was clinging onto the arm of a tall, gorgeous model—was almost too much for her.

Their marriage hadn't been going well, but nothing that Dana was too concerned about. Then one night, Noah didn't come home and didn't answer her many frenzied calls. All night. On her way to work the next day, Dana was getting on the southbound A train at Seventy-second Street and ran into Noah, getting off the train.

“It wasn't so much that Noah was getting
off
the train as I was getting
on
to go to work, it was that he was wearing the
same clothes from the night before,
” Dana slurred to Sally later, recalling her breakup in a drunken haze. “But
whatever
—I mean, it was
Noah
. He
said
he was helping his friend Bill move into a new apartment in Cobble Hill and then just crashed. I
swear,
it made sense! Bill is always asking for help with shit like that.”

A week after Noah spent the night at Bill's, Dana found herself with a raging case of pubic lice. Semitraumatized after finding a tiny living thing residing below her underwear line, Dana called her mother who snapped, “You've got crabs. Are you having an affair on my darling son-in-law?”

When Dana confronted Noah, who had been suspiciously
and discreetly scratching “down there” as well, about the invasion of the tiny bloodsucking pseudocrustaceans, he blamed Bill's most recent conquest: Evya, an Eastern European exchange student/model Bill met at Hunter College a month before in the psychology class for which he was a teacher's assistant.

“You know those Eastern European girls—they're all dirty and infect everything,” Noah explained. “And crabs get everywhere.”

It seemed logical enough and the tiny bloodsuckers were gone soon after, thanks to a bottle of RID and a fierce spring cleaning in late February, which Sally had helped with (Sally came dressed for nuclear winter, wearing a homemade hazmat suit and chanting, “Ooooom. Om. Ew. Oooom”).

After that, Noah became…distracted. He spent much of his time furiously typing on his BlackBerry and came home from work even later than usual.

His newfound Crackberry addiction was so bad that during a dinner to celebrate their two-year anniversary at Nobu in Tribeca, Dana, not usually one to throw tantrums, threw her napkin down on the table. “Dammit!” she said. “If you are going to spend all night on that fucking BlackBerry, I may as well go home. What on God's green Earth is so important that you can sit here for an hour and ignore me on our anniversary?”

“Sorry, babe,” Noah explained, looking sheepish. “It's Bill. He and Evya are having problems and I'm just trying to help them.”

“What?” Dana asked, incredulous. “Crab girl? Bill is still with her? She cost us five hundred dollars in cleaning bills—and you're trying to help them stay together? You should help him by sending her a ticket back to Belarus!”

“You're right, babe, I'm sorry,” Noah said and turned his BlackBerry off.

A week later, on a Thursday evening, Dana was putting on
her mascara in the hall mirror in preparation for meeting Sally and some other friends at the Soho House to celebrate Sally's birthday and asked Noah if he wanted to come.

“I have to take a client out to dinner,” he said. “See you at home later?” He kissed her on the cheek on her way out.

As she was walking to the corner of Seventy-fifth and Columbus to catch a cab downtown, Dana realized she'd forgotten the cupcakes she had bought Sally at the new Magnolia Bakery on Columbus and Seventieth. She was about a block away from her house nearing the corner of Seventy-fourth and Amsterdam, by the concrete playground, when she saw Noah, hunkered down against the wind in his shearling coat, a black scarf, and matching cashmere hat thirty feet in front of her.

I bet he's coming to meet me. God, he's great,
Dana thought.

She was about to run up behind him and playfully slap his butt when Noah walked up to a tall, striking, black-haired model type waiting by the bus stop, put his arms around her, and, whispering, “Evya…” he gave the woman a long, deep kiss.

It turned out Noah had not been helping Bill, but rather, Evya—right into bed.

Dana stood there, frozen, feeling the blood rush from her face. She couldn't move for a good two minutes, long enough to watch Noah and Evya walk off, hand in hand, disappearing down West Seventy-fourth. When they were out of sight, Dana finally regained her senses enough to move and ran home sobbing across the playground. She called Sally—who made some excuses to her other friends at the Soho House, leaving a three-quarters-full bottle of wine, and came right over.

Noah didn't pick up the phone the twenty times Dana, imbued with the courage and hysteria that only a half bottle of Jack Daniels can give, tried calling. So, in a rage, she packed up all of his clothes, and Sally helped her carry them down the
stairs to the vestibule by the trash on the first floor.

Sally was still there three hours later with a red, puffy-eyed and sniffling Dana when, from the window, they spied Noah coming back from his “business dinner.” The friends sat on plastic garbage bags on the sofa (just in case Evya's crabs were back now that Noah was officially having an affair with her), waiting to confront him.

But Noah never came up, nor did he call. In the morning Dana went downstairs and saw that his bags were gone.