The Best Laid Plans (6 page)

I
ZIGZAG ACROSS
Fifty-fourth Street and walk up Madison Avenue at a glacial pace, even an eighty-year-old woman with a walker races past me. If I knew how to play Tetris on my cellphone I could probably delay the inevitable a little longer, but finally, I find myself standing in front of the Addison Gallery, the site of my one—gulp—and only job.

“Suze said get a job,” I plead with my feet, imploring them to move just another five steps to the left so I can open the gallery door. But no luck, my Tod-shod tootsies refuse to budge. “Fine, we’ll just wait till you’re ready,” I say in the same reassuring tone I used with the girls when they needed a few minutes before jumping into the pool. I press my nose to the gallery’s glass-fronted window and look inside.

When I first started working at the gallery after college I was passionate about being in the art world. It seemed exciting and glamorous and I looked forward to the same sorts of heady debates I’d had as an art history major—one time we stayed up half the night just arguing about whether it had been a disservice to clean the windows at the cathedral in Chartres. (Without eight hundred years of grime, now they’re as brightly colored as a handful of Skittles.) But at the Addison all we ever talked about were auction prices and stealing other gallery’s artists. My title was “gallery assistant.” Ha! “Underpaid Kreskin” was more like it. I was expected to magically Windex fingerprints off the glass before they even appeared, beat the
meter maid to a client’s car even though the clients never remembered exactly where or at what time they’d parked, and deal with artists’ egos, which are as delicate—and inflated—as soufflés. When I wanted to quit after only eighteen months, Peter was all for it. By then he’d landed a promising position in one of the city’s largest investment banks and we agreed that we’d both be happier if I took charge of making a comfortable home.

“It was a lousy fit. They’d never give me a job again anyway. The director of the gallery always graded my Windexing abilities as ‘below par.’ You were right, feet,” I concede, deciding that what I really need is to go home and start looking through the want ads. I’m just turning around to find a subway when I see Georgina Wright, (the very same director of the gallery who gave me that C-minus in window cleaning all those many years ago), bounding out the door in my direction.

“I thought that was you!” Georgina says, throwing her arms around me and practically pulling my shoulder out of the socket to haul me inside. Georgina’s hair is gathered in a chic knot at the nape of her neck and her tiny body is overwhelmed by a crinkly black dress that looks two sizes too big, but actually fits as its Japanese designer meant it to be worn. When I was her employee, the best I ever got from Georgina was a vague nod in my direction. But today she’s practically giddy.

“It’s really you!” she gushes.

“And it’s really you!” I echo, having learned from the Discovery Channel that if you don’t want to be eaten by a wild animal, you should model its behavior.

After the usual opening pleasantries about how I haven’t aged a day, she loves my Chanel, and what a clever girl I am to actually
use
the suit pockets (“So few people do,” Georgina coos, although we both know that Coco must be rolling over in her grave), the reason for Georgina’s thaw becomes transparent.
“Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve come back to us! I hear that you’re married to a very rich investment banker.”

“I was, I am, well yes.” Now that Georgina’s got me here, I guess I might as well try to ask about that job. Still the one thing I know about human nature is that people only want to give you something if they think you don’t need it. Why else did Converse airlift crystal-studded sneakers to both Brangelina twins? With the fourteen million dollars
People
paid for their baby pictures those kids could have bought shoes for the entire planet Earth—with some money left over for the Republic of Pluto. So no, I can’t possibly say something simple, like
I need work
. “I’ve been
missing
you,” I say sweetly. “The art world, the gallery, all of it. Now that my girls are getting a little older, I was thinking I might like to dip my toe back in the water, maybe …”

“Start buying art! We have just what you need!” says Georgina, taking my elbow and leading me through the exhibition: slick Technicolor pictures of pole dancers. Different from the pole dancers you see in
Playboy
, of course, because the artist, according to the foot-high letters after his name, is a Rhodes Scholar. Georgina stops in front of the brashest, most lurid picture in the group.

“This one’s a little large,” I say, diverting my eyes from the young lady’s fifteen-foot-high triple-D breasts and her X-rated pose. “I still have teenagers in the house. And what I really was thinking …”

“… was that you wanted something a little more subtle, right? You always were a sly girl!” Georgina says, buttering me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “You know we keep the best work in the back room for our very favorite people. Come with me right now!”

Just as in the old days, when Georgina speaks, I listen. I have no choice but to trail behind her, past those arty-farty
photos of pole dancers. And past a half dozen weary-bleary-eyed gallery assistants—all doing the job I used to do, and not one of them over the age of twenty-five.

This was stupid. What on earth gave me the harebrained idea that Georgina—or anyone else in the art world—would be interested in hiring me?
Get a job
! But doing what? I make terrible coffee and I can’t even wear a miniskirt anymore. (According to Naomi, I never could.) I spent sixty thousand dollars on a college education to major in medieval art with a minor in women’s studies. About the only thing I’m qualified for is writing a Wikipedia entry. It’s a miracle that the Addison Gallery hired me in the first place.

All I want in the whole wide world right now is to get out of here—but no such luck. Georgina’s got me secluded in the insiders-only back office.

“Sit down and take off your shoes,” she commands. She snaps her fingers and yet another in the seemingly endless supply of gallery assistant appears with a basin of water. “Now sit back, relax, and soak those pretty feet.”

“That’s okay, I don’t really want to …”

“Soak them!” Georgina orders. The gallery assistant shrugs helplessly and clamps her hands on my heels. The water is pleasantly warm and soothing, but within moments I feel a tickling sensation.

“What the heck!” I exclaim, hastily retreating from the basin—and at least a hundred tiny fish that are nipping at my feet. “This isn’t what I meant by dipping my toes back into the water.”

“Don’t tell me this is your first fish pedicure?” Georgina chuckles, motioning for the gallery assistant to force my feet back into the tub. “Asian carp, natural exfoliators. They just love dead skin! A little something extra for Addison Gallery clients that I think you won’t find anywhere else.”

A little something extra for Addison Gallery clients that keeps them forcibly glued to their chair while Georgina makes her pitch, is more like it. Having a hundred marine animals snack on your toes takes some getting used to. Still, it’s nothing compared to a ferocious assault by one hungry-to-make-a-sale piranha. Georgina walks over to a custom-designed chrome file cabinet and rifles through a stack of candy-colored photos.

“I simply won’t take no for an answer,” she says, wagging her finger, a bony metronome of determination. “If we have to stay here all night, I’m going to get you to take one of these fabulous pictures. Steve Martin collects them. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“That he’s into soft porn?” I dip my fingers in the water to try to swat the fish away. But to the cuticle-eating carp my hand is just another meal.

“Silly girl, it means that you simply have to have one!”

“Georgina,” I say, pulling my wrinkly toes out of the tub. “Can I please get something to wipe my feet?”

Georgina ignores me. She’s focused her laserlike concentration on flipping through the photos, and like Jack the Ripper, she won’t be sated until she’s nabbed her next victim. Finally, she settles on a close-up of a dancer’s leg wrapped around a pole with just a hint of red satin G-string. “This is it! Forty-eight hundred dollars, that’s as low as I’ll go. All right, for old time’s sake, forty-five. You always did drive a hard bargain.” Georgina turns to another one of the overtaxed, overtired gallery assistants. “Wrap it up!” she says with a grin. “And bring Tru a towel.”

“Y
OU BOUGHT A PICTURE?”
Sienna hoots, when I tell her about my unimpressive attempt at job hunting.

“Georgina thinks I did. But I ditched the photo by the gallery doorway and then I made a quick getaway.”

“And the fish pedicure?”

“Not bad. But until they train the carp to apply polish, I’m sticking with the nail salon.”

I’ve come over to Sienna’s studio straight from the gallery. I couldn’t face Peter and the girls without any good news. Sienna points to a canvas-back chair and tells me to take a seat. “I just have a quick rehearsal, then we’ll get a bite to eat,” she says.

In person, the high-ceilinged set—littered with booms, tangled wires, and all shapes and sizes of monitors—always looks a little cheesy. The lighting is way too bright, the backdrop of towering skyscrapers is the same view of midtown Manhattan you can buy on any fifty-five-cent souvenir postcard, and the curved “wood” desk is actually particle board covered with a
veneer of plastic laminate. But somehow on camera it all comes together. The assistant director cues up the show’s theme song and the TelePrompTer operator rolls the script for Sienna and her cohost to run through their lines. Sienna’s new cohost is the very blond, early-thirtysomething Tom Sandler, a golden boy replacement for the veteran newscaster who, until he was unceremoniously fired last week, had been Sienna’s partner for fifteen years.

Tom straightens his tie and smoothes a palm along the mountain of moussed hair that rises onto his forehead in a gentle slope. “Good evening, I’m Tom Sandler,” Tom Sandler reads off the screen, as if he might not get it right without a prompt.

“And I’m Sienna Post,” she purrs. Simultaneously, Sienna reads her lines, sorts through some mail and fiddles with a nail file, until the show’s executive producer, Jerry Gerard, comes storming over to the anchor desk. He’s wearing a brown shirt and brown pants tucked into shiny black boots and looks just like the fascist Sienna’s described him to be. Jerry Gerard yanks the nail file from Sienna’s grip, and for good measure, he throws it on the floor and stomps on it, hard, with the heel of his boot.

“This is a fucking newsroom, people, get a grip! We’ve got fucking serious work to do. The U.S. Open scores will be coming in any minute … and fighting just broke out in Tajikistan … or Turkmenistan … or some fucking ‘T’ country. Find out which fucking ‘T’ country is at war!” Jerry Gerard growls to an assistant. “And get me two Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffees. Fucking
now
!” Within minutes the assistant is back with the coffees and Jerry Gerard tells him to place them on the anchor desk. “With the logos on the container facing out, toward the camera, you moron!”

Tom Sandler smiles amiably and takes a sip. “Thanks for the freebie, boss!”

Sienna spins around in her chair.

“We are not, I repeat not, having this argument again, Jerry,” Sienna says, snagging the cup from Tom and handing it, along with her own, to a passing assistant.

“That’s right, we’re not,” Jerry Gerard says, snatching the cups back. “Orders from the head of the news division. Product placement is a go, honey.”

Honey
? He called her honey? I can’t wait to see what happens next! But instead of duking it out with Jerry Gerard, Sienna puts on the kid gloves.

“Listen, Jerry,” Sienna says sweetly, as her face muscles relax into her practiced newscaster smile. “I know Randy Jackson holds a big red Coke glass on
American Idol
and I’m sure the only reason they give out Doritos to those poor hungry bastards on
Survivor
is that Pringles wouldn’t pay as much for the privilege. But we’re newspeople. What happens if there’s an outbreak of donut poisoning? Or the company president is indicted for, I don’t know, stealing the donut holes? Are we going to report it while we’re sitting here like idiots with their coffee cups in front of us? Are we going to
not
report it because they pay us to sit here like idiots with their coffee cups in front of us?”

“Why don’t you just worry about those bags under your eyes and leave the morality issues to me?” Jerry Gerard smirks. He chucks Sienna under the chin and turns her face from side to side. “Stop by to see me on the way out. I have a name of a plastic surgeon. Could extend this little career of yours by a good four or five months.”

“Fuck you,” Sienna says, speaking to Jerry in the only language he understands. She unhooks the wireless microphone from the lapel of her Armani jacket, throws it on the floor, and stomps away from the desk.

“Walk away from this set and you’re fired!” Jerry Gerard
says gleefully, sounding not the least bit scared. In fact, he sounds like Sienna’s permanent departure would make his day.