What Nora Knew (12 page)

EyeSpy
is in an office building built over a hundred years ago, back when news reporters sat around playing cards while waiting for the ticker tape, versus now when we sit around playing Angry Birds while waiting for coffee break. The building’s tenants are doctors, shrinks, lawyers, and CPAs. If you see someone walk into the lobby wearing blue jeans, you know they’re going to our office; we’re the only creative occupants. Unless there’s some creative accounting going on with those CPAs. The lobby boasts marble walls, a soaring ceiling, gold chandeliers; but it all adds up to dingy because of the gloomy lighting. The small newsstand across from the elevators provides the one bastion of decent light. It’s also where I buy my weekly box of Tic Tacs.

“Must be Monday!” Mr. Pupko greeted me. He’s my pal. Grumbly, with a beer-barrel chest. When he’s not ringing up
chewing gum and magazine sales, he sits behind the counter doing the crossword puzzle in the
New York Post
and making inappropriate comments like “What’s a four-letter word for
great ass
?”

“How was your Father’s Day?” I asked.

“Good.”

“How’s your wife?”

“Good.”

“How’s your bad knee?”

“Bad.”

I was about to pay for my Tic Tacs when I looked over and noticed Cameron Duncan exiting an elevator, squinting at his phone and hurrying toward the newsstand. I wanted to duck behind a—Well, there was nothing to duck behind unless I wanted to hide under Mr. Pupko, and I sure wasn’t about to do that.
Damn,
I thought. Maybe Cameron had a therapist in the building; running into me could be totally embarrassing for him.

“Molly!” he said, looking up from his phone. “I was hoping I’d run into you.”

“Really?” Maybe he was with a lawyer. “At a candy stand?”

He picked up a
Daily News,
opened it to the back, and flipped through the sports pages. “Missed the game last night.”

“Busy?”

“You can’t imagine.”

I imagined something blond, brunette, or redhead.

He folded back the paper, skimmed a page, then happily pumped his fist. “
Yes!
Thank you, Miguel Cairo.”

“Reds fan?” Mr. Pupko asked, looking up from his puzzle.

“You bet,” Cameron said.

Mr. Pupko grunted.

“Is Miguel Cairo your favorite baseball player?” I asked Cameron.

“He is today. He hit a two-run homer.”

“But what about the days he doesn’t hit a homer?” I glanced down. Cameron was wearing loafers without socks. I like loafers without socks. Loafers without socks are sexy.

“I like him those days, too,” he said.

Mr. Pupko was making change for a man buying a
Forbes
and Juicy Fruit. The man took four pennies from the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny dish. Mr. Pupko grunted again.

“I read your restaurant review,” Cameron said.

“What did you think?”

“Rather scathing on the brisket.”

“Well, don’t use my name if you call for a reservation.”

Brady the cloud administrator dashed in and bought a pack of Marlboros. “Hey, Molly,” he said.

“Hey, Brady,” I said. “Those’ll stunt your growth, y’know.”

Brady is six feet four.

He paid for his cigarettes and dashed out, calling over his shoulder, “See you upstairs.”

Cameron checked his watch. “I’ve gotta go, too,” he said. “I guess I should pay for this newspaper now that I’ve mangled it. What are you buying? My treat.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“No, really. I insist. What were you getting?”

“Tic Tacs.” The only thing worse would’ve been if I were buying a pack of condoms. “I buy them for the flavor,” I said.

“Really? I buy them for my breath. Make it two!” he said to Mr. Pupko. He handed me my Tic Tacs. “Now we’ll both be kissable.”

“Bye, Cameron.”

“Bye, Molly.”

After he left, Mr. Pupko said, “What’s a four-letter word for
horny
?”

*  *  *

Deirdre walked into my cubicle and, despite her perfume, caught me off guard. I was wearing my headphones, waiting for my computer to boot, and leaning over to stuff my purse into my file drawer when I saw her from the feet up in a pair of high-heeled wedgie platforms.

“Deirdre! Hi! Sorry.” I sat up straight, tugging off my headphones. She wasn’t smiling. She was gripping a handful of paper. Whatever she wanted, it didn’t involve a raise, a promotion, or a column. “Nice weekend?”

Okay. That was inane. She didn’t come into my cubicle to chat. She’d have sat down if she wanted to chat and she was still standing. I felt uncomfortably aware of her eye level above my eye level. Her breasts at my face level. Deirdre looking down at me like a disappointed parent.

“Molly, what can I say?”

“About what?” But I knew what.

“I believed you could pull this off. That you could handle
a bigger opportunity, bring a different dimension to
EyeSpy.
”

“But I didn’t?” I honestly thought I’d done a good job.

“This lacks sparkle,” Deirdre said, holding up the sheets of paper.

“Sparkle?”

“And edge.”

“Edge?”

“And any sense of magic or hope.”

“Hopeless?”

She read aloud from my article. “ ‘Men who easily say I love you may not love you at all.
Darling
is a euphemism for “I forgot your name.” Is there a
one
? Don’t ask that question when it’s closing time in a bar.’ Molly, this is the first piece you’ve written that I have to reassign.” She continued reading. “ ‘Some people never find the one. No, they prefer one option after another.’ ” Deirdre let out a long, rueful breath.

“I can still work on it, maybe the structure’s off,” I said. “I can interview more couples.”

“Structure’s fine. Information’s all here,” she said. “You just don’t have a grasp for romance. You’re too detached.”

Emily’s head rose up like a big ol’ smiling man in the moon. “Oh, Deirdre!” she said as if surprised to see her. “Anything you need?”

Braless, in a cotton sundress, wearing fishnet stockings and high heels, my hair clipped with barrettes, I was trying to look like Eva Mendes as a prostitute. I’d hauled out the good china, lit a couple of candles, and downloaded the entire sound track from
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans.
And Russell still hadn’t guessed I was creating a romantic dinner the way I figured Eva and Nicolas Cage would’ve had a romantic dinner if a cop and a whore had bothered to have such a dinner in
Bad Lieutenant.
I didn’t know how to make a
National Treasure
dinner, short of decorating the room with cash, but I’d gone to all this trouble to give my boyfriend a romantic fantasy. And to prove to myself that Deirdre was wrong. I wasn’t detached. I did have a grasp on romance.

We’d finished the gumbo and were eating the crab cakes and the Cajun chicken I’d brought home from Citarella’s. “Do you like the music?” I asked Russell.

“Sure, it’s great.”

“Like the chicken?”

“Sure,” he said.

“It’s Cajun. Like they serve in New Orleans.”

“Great chicken,” he said. He had his tie tucked into his shirt.

I was about to polish off my crab cake but set my fork down and asked, “Russell, do you consider me romantic?”

He paused midchicken. “In what way?”

“In a romantic way.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, for starters, I’m dressed like a prostitute and you haven’t noticed.”

He leaned closer. “I thought your hair was different.”

“How do you like eating by candlelight?”

“It’s fine if it makes you happy.”

“It’s supposed to make
us
happy.”

“Candles are for women.”

“Women?”

“Sure. A woman will light candles in her bedroom. A woman will take a bath and light candles. No guy would do that.”

“You’ve had girlfriends who take baths with candles?”

“No comment.”

“Did you take baths with them?”

“We’re talking about candles.”

“We’re talking about romance. I lack sparkle! Magic! I’m trying to fix that.”

“Nobody asked you to fix anything. Except maybe you can relax a bit and have a nice, pleasant dinner.”

We ate in nice, pleasant silence. For about two minutes.

“Do you like taking baths with candles?” I asked.

Russell took a bite of his crab cake, chewing it slowly before saying, “Every relationship’s different. There are women you take baths with and women you don’t.”

“And with me, you don’t?”

“Molly, that’s not who you are. If I said, ‘Let’s take a bath together,’ what would you do?”

I didn’t answer.

“See? Not you.” He looked down at his plate. “This needs tartar sauce.”

“So you’re saying with other women you might be a man who likes candlelight baths?”

“I’m saying couples bring out different aspects in each other. You might not realize you’re romantic until you’re with someone who makes you feel romantic.”

I blew out the candles. Stood up and turned on the overhead light before sitting again.

“Oh, hello,” Russell said. “Nice to see you.”

“I worked hard planning this dinner. Lighting these candles. Buying crab cakes and gumbo. I was going to memorize Eva Mendes’s cocaine monologue but ran out of time.”

“Bad Lieutenant?”

“Bad idea.”

“It was a lovely effort, Molly.”

“It’s a terrible movie, Russell.”

“Would you feel better if we took a bath together?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t feel like cleaning the tub.”

He pushed aside the chicken and kissed me.

I must pause now to confess that I can’t write a sex scene. Some writers are great at describing huffing and puffing and panting and pounding, and if ever there’s a sentence that proves I can’t write about sex, this is it. How do you come up with new adjectives and surprising adverbs for the same sweaty procedures a couple of pet hamsters can do? If you’d never heard of sex and were reading about it for the first time in a manual, you’d say, “Who? What?
Where?
”
The thing is, why are sex scenes necessary? To help the reader visualize the sex? Did we ever want to see Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman going at it? Would that have made
Casablanca
any hotter? Wasn’t
Titanic
still perfect without seeing Kate and Leo jump in the sack? Raise your hand if you’d have voted to view Clint Eastwood’s ass on top of a naked Meryl Streep in
The Bridges of Madison County
or to see Tramp humping Lady.

And I guarantee you nobody, absolutely nobody, was watching
You’ve Got Mail
and thinking,
Gee, how about some hot, sleazy sex?
We didn’t want to see Tom crawling over Meg. I’m embarrassed to have even brought the image up. But Russell and I had sex. Nice, satisfying sex. And that’s all I plan to say about it.

*  *  *

Thursday morning, when I arrived at work, Keith Kretchmer was leaning on the doorway to my cubicle. “Hey, Molly,” he said.

“Hey, Keith.”

He was wearing a cardigan; Keith’s not at all flashy for a flash developer. “Sorry you bombed out on your story,” he said.

“Who told you that?” I stepped around him, walked into my cubicle, and sat down.

Keith cracked his knuckles. “I was just talking with Emily.” Her hand flew up and waved from her side of the divider, then disappeared just as quickly. “Do you think you’ll get fired? Emily thinks you might.”

“Emily’s a moron!” I said, raising my voice.

“I think you’re a good writer,” Keith said. “I hope you don’t get axed.”

“Thanks, Keith. Thanks for your concern.”

He ambled off.

“Good morning, Emily!” I called out again.

“Morning,” she said from behind the wall.

I was worried. More than a little worried. I hadn’t received a new assignment since
bombing out
on Monday. That happens sometimes. A slow day or two. But I didn’t know if the days were slow or I was toast.
No, wait,
I told myself.
Keith’s right. I am a good writer.
With a good attitude. Who else would be willing to kayak in the Hudson or walk eight dogs at once or spend an afternoon at a vegan barbecue? Keith? Emily? Okay. A hundred people whose résumés showed up in Deirdre’s mailbox every day. But I’ve been here four years, never missed a deadline except that one time with the sweatproof pantyhose assignment, and everyone agreed those were unavoidable circumstances.

I checked my e-mails. Straightened my desk. Checked my
e-mails again. Called Russell. He was with a patient. Called my mother. Got the machine. I started reading
Rebecca
; Daphne du Maurier seemed like a juicy target for one of my essays, but I stopped after a few pages. I didn’t want to be seen reading a book at my desk looking useless. Only Emily had that luxury.

“Hey, Emily,” I called over our wall.

“What?”

I walked around to her cubicle. She blinked up at me as if she were stunned I’d walk within a ten-mile radius of her doorway. Stacks of books covered the floor. Three photos of Rory the imaginary ski instructor boyfriend were taped above her file drawers. She shifted in her seat, blocking her computer.

“Emily, you seem to know everything.” We gave each other the stink eye. “I was just curious if you happened to hear who’s rewriting the romance piece.”

She glanced over her shoulder, making sure her computer screen wasn’t visible. “Oh, Deirdre probably assigned it to some freelancer.”

“You think? Or you know?”

“I think I know.”

I looked at her Rory display. “So what does a ski instructor do in June?”

“He’s not just an instructor. He’s also in management.”

“Okay. What does a ski manager manage in June?”

“Hikers. People come to the resort to hike.”

“So you’re dating a hike instructor?”

“Why don’t you take a hike, Molly?”

“Why don’t you go call your make-believe boyfriend?”
I turned and walked out of her cubicle. And tripped into Gavin, who told me Deirdre wanted to speak with me pronto.