Diary of a Working Girl (37 page)

And so we walk, hands on asses to grab a taxi to the Traveler’s Building. In a dreamed-up version, Tom would probably forsake his responsibilities to be with me for the day. But in the real world, whose merits I am becoming increasingly keen to (I only whined for about ten minutes in the taxi), today is the day that Tom seals the deal on the telecommunications merger. And as I’m the only assistant he has at the moment, he needs my help.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re crouched on your couch or at a table in a deli eating an overpriced custom-built salad, or attempting to pick up sushi with chopsticks and hold a book and read it at the same time, without dripping soy sauce God knows where, and you’re thinking—I knew it! Tom actually does say the perfect things and do the perfect things. Lane gets to go back to her old ways and they live happily ever after.

But most of all, you’re thinking, don’t I get to see them together doing all of that wonderful romantic stuff? Don’t I get to see how Lane’s romantic sensibilities play into the picture? Does she ever stay down on planet Earth? Or is she unable to separate herself from her fanciful ways? And does she get to see that ass without the confines of clothing? How the hell did Tom find out about her feelings on said ass anyway? And what about that article?

Well, sister, put down those chopsticks and turn the page. After we’ve come so far, you don’t think I’d leave you hanging like that, do you? Especially when you know how I am about happy endings. . . .

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T w e n t y

Happily Ever After

Well, I do wind up with one standard-issue fairy tale-ism in the end. We do live extremely happily ever after. But I’ll tell you, Tom is Tom and there’s no leading man quite like him. I’ve thought and thought, and I can’t find one male character to compare him to.

But that’s actually the best part of all. I could have never dreamed him up, and those little quirks are precisely the things I love about him more and more every day. My checklist is now officially four pages and growing.

For instance, I’d always thought a couple should sleep in each other’s arms all night long, my leg slung about his thigh, his arm resting under my neck and the other about my back. And, yes, we’ll start off like that most nights. But right before I fall asleep, when he thinks I already have, he’ll do this thing where he’ll whisper my name to check I’m in dreamland.

“Lane? Lane?” he’ll venture.

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And when I don’t answer he’ll slide his hand out from behind my neck, peel my leg off of him and spend about five minutes shaking his arm out, whispering, “I have no feeling in my arm.”

It is with all of my might I pretend to not hear any of this and maintain a straight face. When he has finally got feeling back in his arm, he’ll turn over the other way and go to sleep with his butt directly in my face. It’s a very cute butt, as I’ve said before, so I really don’t mind.

He knows I like to fall asleep cuddling, so he does his best to maintain this little convention for me. I don’t have the heart to tell him I know the truth. And you know what? It doesn’t matter at all to me, really. In fact, I prefer it, because he makes up for it in the early mornings, when I catch him turning back over, sneaking his arm back under my neck, dragging my leg back around him and kissing me on the cheek, or stroking my hair. It really is adorable.

And while Tom so clearly has the most sentimental and admirable intentions at heart with every gesture, every word, they don’t always turn out perfectly. There was the time when he was planning a vacation for us. For weeks, I asked and asked about what he referred to as “the big surprise.” All he said was that I should have my passport ready and to pack lots of skimpy swimsuits, especially the one with “all of those stringy things.” Of course, I had to pack a lot more than just skimpy swimsuits.

When you have no idea where you may be off to, and your mind is taking you to all of the majestic destinations you may be dashing towards, it is very difficult to know what you should pack.

So, basically, I packed everything for a Caribbean fantasy vacation.

I had years of
InStyle
magazine celebrity vacations to fuel the fire.

The full-length evening gown would be for our black-tie eight-course dinner, where we would dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (although neither of us knows how to do any of 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:06 AM Page 294

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those ballroom dances) on a dance floor that juts out over the Caribbean sea, lit with elegant torches and twinkling white lights, the sounds of birds chirping and the air redolent of bougainvillea.

And then there are the practical items—the sneakers for exploring deserted islands that the concierge would arrange for us to be dropped off at, the proper woven hat for a lazy day of fishing, a driving outfit with gloves and Tod’s moccasins (so what if I’ve never driven before?). I needed a sunset-watching velour Juicy zip-up hoodie for the crisp night breezes, which I would pull up around me and Tom would say, “Come here, let me keep you warm, my darling.”

There’s the pareo I would need to wrap about my waist when we emerge from our private infinity pool to sip champagne and strawberries on our terrace. I couldn’t forget the array of white garments to accent the rich teakwood and bamboo furnishings with white upholstery, lush greenery, and Italian tile floors when we come inside, after a midnight stroll on the shore to create the perfect seduction scene before we step into our open-roofed bathtub, glancing up at the twinkling stars while I scrub his back with a loofah, drinking white wine and munching on caviar.

From the number of imaginings I’d indulged in before I even finished packing my suitcases, vanity cases, and suitor, you might be throwing around the idea that I have fully reverted to my fantastical ways. And in many respects, you would be correct. As it turns out, some of us are just woven from an imaginative cloth. And when we attempt to bury that part of ourselves, we are really burying the part of ourselves that makes us who we are.

That’s what Joanne tells me, anyway. And with that outlook I get to stay the way I am, so it works out rather nicely.

The trick is, for us Over-the-Rainbow sorts, to remember that the fantasies are wonderful in and of themselves. They weave 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:06 AM Page 295

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together this whole other world where all sorts of fantastical things happen all the time. There, frogs turn into princes, sunny days never run out, and whims are always satiated exactly as you would have them be. And this world is one that I am not willing to let go of—ever.

It was only a matter of days until I dragged those boxes back out of my basement, tore off all of the tape I thought would hinder me from unearthing the paraphernalia inside and, once again, reunited myself with my beloved books and movies. Now I have my own love, I don’t get sad at the endings. But after we watched
Pretty
Woman
and I got all quiet at the end, Tom said, “Ab Fab, don’t tell me you want me to charter a private plane just to go to the opera, which I’m sure you’ve never attended before in your life.”

Boy, what kind of a spoiled girl does he think I am?

“It doesn’t have to be a
private
plane,” I said.

He smiled curiously and then just held me in his arms, whispering in my ear, “Don’t ever change, Lane. Please don’t ever change.”

I hope he doesn’t think I’ve forgotten about the opera.

So you might think that when we got to the “big surprise” and found ourselves right smack in the middle of a Caribbean hurricane, which did not enable us to enjoy outdoor dinner/dancing escapades, driving trips, or open-roofed bathtub evenings, that I would have been devastated, having built it up so much in my mind.

But, my darlings, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The reality of our trip, as awful as my hair looked (I spent many unfruit-ful hours looking for a converter for my flatiron), as wet as our clothing remained (I spent many hours attempting to dry them out with a hair dryer), was a wonder in itself.

We spent the whole time in the room, which I guess we could have done anywhere in the world, even at home. But Tom was so 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:06 AM Page 296

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sweet, making up all sorts of games and declaring holidays like

“Crazy Saturday” where we had margarita-drinking contests and wore snorkeling apparatuses in the bathtub (Tom had to coax me into that one—I tell you, those goggles are pretty unflattering), and he even brought some sand, as wet as it was, and a couple of lounge chairs into our room to create our own little beach. It’s amazing how much fun you can have when you live life as it comes.

The pretrip fantasies, though, did not go to waste. After Tom had read my
Diary of a Working Girl
, he took the liberty of calling a publisher friend to take a look at it. It turns out that while I have had a world of trouble in the past coming up with ideas for articles, I have no trouble at all coming up with ideas for novels without even trying. (Did I not say this before?)
Diary of a Working Girl
is due out in a few months time and I have a three-book contract to keep the romantic books coming. So now, every single wonderful scenario I play out as I do such simple things as pack a filmy pink dress has a very definite, very fulfilling use. I instructed Tom that he would have to do some romantic research himself, as it helps when you have a strong leading man to draw from. But after he came to bed in a Fabio wig with a shaved chest, I could see he wasn’t taking his research very seriously. Although I have to admit that the shaved chest was actually rather nice.

And I guess, if you fill your time with enough fantasies, one of them is bound to be true once in a while. Remember Swen? The voice mail guy I’d kept on hand for a fantasy whenever the need for one arose? Well, soon after all of the amazing things began to happen to me, I once again reached his number in error.

“I couldn’t be happier for you, my little sugar plum. I insist you come up to my brownstone for a splendidly decadent meal, caviar, oysters, and all. Bring your dashing Tom, too.”

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Dashing—only Swen could use that word and get away with it.

When Swen’s butler, Harris, brought us into the sitting room to meet Monsieur Swen, he was (I swear this is true!) in a smoking jacket, running his fingers through his shoulder-length blond hair, sitting by a crackling fire.

After the kisses and the “Oh my God!” exclamations of our premier meeting were through, he said (and I quote), “You’ll have to excuse my appearance, I’ve just come in from a rather long day on the slopes.”

Can you believe it? Tom still can’t get over that one.

“I knew you were a witch, Ab Fab,” he said.

But despite the fact that this one musing did in fact turn out to be true, the important thing to remember, should you read any of my books in the future (remember that is Silverman, S-I-L-V-E-R-M-A-N) is that the stories I conjure up are just fantasies—they have a place in your mind and in your heart. Of course, I would never fully be able to follow that line of thinking myself, but since you are my people, I feel a certain duty to say that, even if you choose not to listen.

And while some of you might prefer the magical stuff of fluffy, frilly love, others, apparently, like the tough stuff—the stuff where people struggle and endure pain. And under that category would fall
Cosmopolitan
. When Lisa called Karen and began to plead my case to renegotiate my article assignment, Karen almost fell off of her seat laughing.

She literally said to Lisa, “Hold on, I have to unbutton the top button of my Paul & Joe pants. I’m laughing so hard I’m about to burst.”

Lisa, even sweeter than I’d first thought, was more than ready to defend me to the death, since she assumed Karen was laughing about the fact that she knew I couldn’t finish the article after all.

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But when she finally caught her breath she said, “Lisa, how many years have you known me? I am one of the toughest editors in the business. Now do you really think that I didn’t
know
this assignment would cause Lane to have a meltdown and reconsider her notions of how to find love? That setup she came up with was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life! Two months to find The One! God, I’ve been trying to do that for thirty-five years!”

“So you wanted her to have a breakdown just so that she could write the article about what she learned?”

“Of course! I could tell from those articles she sent me—you know the ones from the magazines nobody’s ever heard of—she was great, but a little green on instinct,” Karen exclaimed.

“But what about when she asked to switch the topic and you denied her? And what about asking for Liam’s number? That was pretty low, even for you.”

“That was all part of the game, darling. I couldn’t let her give up that early, she would have never gotten a story out of giving up so quickly. And as for Liam, that was pretty funny, huh? We hung that e-mail up by the watercooler. It’s a classic!”

“Well, I’ll tell you this, you did get yourself one damn good article, but Lane wins in the end, since after she finished her article denouncing every single thing she’d ever held to be true, she found the most fantastic man ever.”

Lisa says Karen got silent here and after a moment, she said, in a tone pregnant with thought, “Tell her to e-mail me the manuscript right away. I’ve got an idea.”

Obviously, I was completely overcome with rage when Lisa recounted this exchange to me.

All of that time! All of that stress! Unbelievable! It’s no wonder I could never get anywhere with those editors before—they are 21430_ch01.qxd 1/26/04 10:06 AM Page 299