Chapter 8
If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French politician and historian
New York is a strange place. Things here can change in the blink of the eye. I guess that’s what they mean when they say a New York minute. Everything just seems to go faster here.
Like, you can be walking down a street that seems perfectly tree-lined and pleasant, and not even one block later, you suddenly find yourself in a trash-filled, graffitied seedy underbelly of a neighborhood, resembling something out of a crime scene on one of the Law and Order s. And all you’ve done is crossed a street.
So I guess, considering all this, I shouldn’t have been so amazed that in a forty-eight-hour period, I went from having no job in New York City to being the proud owner of two of them.
The interview with the human resources division of Chaz’s dad’s office is going well.Really well. It’s like a joke, actually. The harried-looking woman whose office I’m escorted into after waiting for nearly half an hour in the fancy lobby (they’d upgraded from gold-trimmed couches to deep-brown leather ones, which blended nicely with the dark wood paneling on the walls and rich green carpeting) asks me one or two pleasant questions about how I know Chaz—“From the dorm we all lived in in college,” I say, not mentioning that Shari and I had met him at an outdoor movie night sponsored by the student government of McCracken Hall, at which Chaz had been the one who’d started passing around a joint, causing us to refer to him for days afterward as the Joint Man… until Shari spied him eating breakfast in the dining hall by himself one morning, plunked herself down beside him, asked him his name, and by that evening had slept with him in his single in McCracken’s tower suites. Three times.
“Great,” Roberta, my interviewer, says, apparently not realizing she’s getting a less than complete relationship history from me. “We all love Charles. The summer he worked here in the mailroom, he had us all in stitches the whole time. He’s so funny.”
Yeah. Chaz is hilarious.
“It’s just too bad,” Roberta goes on wistfully, “that Charles didn’t choose the law. He has his dad’s same brilliant academic mind. When either of them starts arguing a point—well, get out of the way!”
Yeah. Chaz likes to argue a point, all right.
“So, Lizzie,” Roberta says pleasantly. “When can you start?”
I gape at her. “You mean I got the job?”
“Of course.” Roberta looks at me strangely, as if any other turn of events would be unthinkable. “Could you start tomorrow?”
Can I start tomorrow? Is there a grand total of three hundred and twenty-one dollars in my checking account? Are my credit cards maxed out to their limits? Am I fifteen hundred dollars in debt to MasterCard?
“I can definitely start tomorrow!”
Oh, Chaz, I take it all back. I love you. You can say whatever you want about Luke. You can be as pessimistic as you choose about the wisdom of my wanting to marry him. For this, Chaz, I owe you. Big time.
“I love your boyfriend.” I call Shari on my cell to tell her as I come out of the skyscraper on Madison Avenue in which the offices of Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn take up the entire thirty-seventh floor.
“Really.” Shari sounds, as always when I call her at her office these days, a little frantic. “You can have him.”
“Taken,” I say. I’m on Fifty-seventh Street between Madison and Fifth. It’s such a nice fall day—just warm enough that you don’t need a coat, and just cool enough that you don’t feel sweaty—I decide to walk to Monsieur Henri’s, just thirty blocks north, instead of taking the subway, saving myself a whopping two bucks. Hey, every little bit counts. “Chaz got me a job in his dad’s office.”
“A job?” I hear computer keys clacking. Shari is talking and e-mailing at the same time. But that’s okay. I’ll take whatever I can get, it’s so hard to reach her these days. “I thought you already had a job. At that wedding- gown place.”
“Yeah,” I say, realizing I hadn’t been quite as upfront with my friends about my deal with Monsieur Henri as I ought to have been. “That’s not really a paying gig—”
“WHAT?” I realize by her tone—and the cessation of clacking keys—that I now have Shari’s undivided attention. “You took a nonpaying job?”
“Right,” I say. It’s kind of hard to walk down a busy sidewalk like the one I’m currently hurrying along and talk on your cell at the same time. There are so many businesspeople rushing back to their offices, street vendors hawking Prada knockoffs, tourists stopping to gawk at the tall buildings, and homeless people asking for spare change that it’s as hard to navigate as the Indy 500 Speedway during the race. “Well, it’s not easy to find a paying fashion gig in this city when you’re just starting out.”
“I can’t believe that,” Shari says, sounding incredulous. “What about Project Runway ?”
“Shari,” I say. “I’m not going on a reality show —”
“No, I just mean… they make it seem like it’s all so easy—”
“Well,” I say. “It’s not. Anyway, I want us to get together to celebrate—you and me and Chaz and Luke. So what are you doing tonight?”
“Oh,” Shari says. I hear the clacking start up again. Which isn’t easy, considering the fact that there are cars honking and people talking loudly all around me. And yet, I can still hear the fact that my best friend is only half paying attention to me. “I can’t. Not tonight. We’re getting slammed here today—”
“Fine,” I say. I understand that Shari’s new job is the most important thing in the world to her right now. Which is as it should be. I mean, she is, after all, saving women’s lives. “How about tomorrow night, then?”
“This week is really bad for me, Lizzie,” Shari says. “I’m going to be working late just about every night.”
“What about Saturday?” I inquire patiently. “You aren’t working on Saturday night, are you?”
There’s a pause. For a second or two, I think Shari’s going to say that she does, indeed, plan on working through Saturday night.
But then she says, “No, of course not. Saturday it is.”
“Great,” I say. “We’ll hit Chinatown. And then Honey’s. On Saturday night the serious karaoke players come out. And, Shari?”
“What, Lizzie? I really have to go, Pat’s waiting—”
“I know.” There’s always someone waiting for Shari these days. “But I wanted to ask you—are things okay between you and Chaz? Because he asked me about you.”
I have her full attention again. “He asked you what about me?” Shari demands, somewhat sharply.
“Just if I thought you were all right,” I say. “I said I thought you were. I guess he misses you as much as I do.” I think about this as I wait for the light to change before crossing the street. “Actually, he probably misses you more… ”
“I can’t help it,” Shari snaps, “if I’m too busy helping victims of domestic violence find safe places to live to worry about my boyfriend. This is part of the problem, you know. I mean, men think the entire world revolves around them. And so when the woman in his life finds herself thriving—excelling, even—in the workplace, a man naturally feels threatened, and eventually leaves her for someone who has more time to give to him.”
I am, to put it bluntly, stunned by this speech. So stunned I actually stop walking for a second, and am bumped from behind by an irritated-looking businessman. “Excuse you,” the businessman mutters before hurrying along.
“Shari,” I say into the phone. “Chaz does not feel threatened by your new career. He loves that you love your job. He just wants to know when he’s ever going to see you again. He isn’t leaving you.”
“I know,” Shari says, after a pause. “I just—sorry. I didn’t mean to lay all that on you. I’m just having a bad day. Forget I said anything.”
“Shari.” I shake my head. “This sounds like something more serious than just a bad day. Are you and
