Mercury in Retrograde Read online

  “Has it been rented yet?” Neal asked as he wiped the last plate and put it in the cupboard.

  “No, why? You redoing your apartment again and wanna slum it for a while? Come on, it’ll be fun, I think they’re installing an actual bathroom in there so it won’t be too bad.”

  “No thank you,” Neal said, uncorking a bottle of red wine and pouring Penelope a glass. “My Sutton Place apartment is just fine…but I do have this friend who needs a place. When will they be done?”

  “My landlord said mid March. I better get a job soon, though, or he’ll be renovating mine too.”

  “Not good, huh?” Neal asked gingerly, sipping his wine.

  “The worst,” Penelope said, plopping into the armchair and tearing up with self-pity. “I’m not exaggerating. In the past month I have been on nine job interviews. I have called in every contact I know, every news editor of every paper, and every managing editor of every magazine. No one is hiring. They either say they’ll keep my résumé on file and they’ll call if something comes up, or the honest ones just flat out tell me they’re not interested. I got so desperate that today I went on an interview for something called Modern Faucets & Toilets. A plumbing journal! I fucking hate toilets! I still have nightmares about that bad drain clog last year. Believe me, it wasn’t pretty…”

  “What about one of those blogs?” Neal asked, deftly avoiding the details of Penelope’s fecal clogging.

  “Oh, please, don’t even get me started on those things.” Penelope sighed, taking another swig of wine for dramatic effect.

  After Penelope had run through her contacts in traditional media, she’d tried websites and blogs. But she’d managed to quit/get herself fired at a particularly bad time of year. Most of the sites were fully staffed, and while some were hiring, they paid next to nothing.

  “Let me get this straight,” Penelope had said to one media website owner during an interview. “You want me to blog for twelve hours a day, five days a week, and you’ll only pay me ten dollars per post?”

  “Minimum of ten posts a day—that’s not bad,” the owner, wearing a brand new gold Audemars Piguet watch and a perfectly tailored Armani suit, had said. “That’s ten dollars an hour.”

  “Starbucks pays more,” Penelope shot back, adding, “and they give lunch breaks and benefits.”

  The owner had blogged about her indignation after she’d left, noting “So-called ‘mainstream media’ reporters, like Penelope Mercury, have not a clue as to what life is like on the internet. Just because you used to get benefits, honey, doesn’t mean you should expect them now. Your sense of entitlement and lack of work ethics are jaw-dropping. Especially since you burned down your last place of employment.” That was pretty much it for Penelope’s online interviews.

  “A job is a job, babe,” Neal said, topping off Penelope’s wine glass.

  “I know,” Penelope said, taking a sip. “That’s why I went to the interview. You’d think that seven years at the Telegraph, five as an actual reporter, would count for something.”

  “It’s the time of year,” Neal said.

  “I mean, what the fuck? What kind of an asshole was I in a previous life that I deserve this?” Penelope half-laughed and lit a cigarette.

  “Oh, please. You’re not some rabid dog on the street or Britney Spears. Mercury is in retrograde, darling; everything is a little haywire.”

  “Ha! So I was in retrograde. What does that mean anyway, and do you really believe that stuff?” Penelope said, puffing on her Marlboro Light and laying her head down on the couch.

  “Of course I do!” Neal said. “And why are you smoking? Haven’t you learned your lesson? You almost burned down the Telegraph, wasn’t that a big enough sign for you to stop?”

  “Please,” Penelope said, taking a long drag, “I’ve got other battles to fight right now. And frankly, it’s the only thing that’s keeping me even a little bit sane these days. When I get a job, I’ll stop.”

  This was a mantra she’d told herself for years: “When I (fill in the blank) I’ll stop.” Penelope had been smoking since she was thirteen years old (“Um, hello? I was raised in Ohio—what else was I supposed to do? Tip cows?”), and while she realized it made her clothes and breath smell, atrophied her lungs, and—thanks to stringent New York smoking laws—basically ostracized her from the community at large, Penelope still loved cigarettes. She would quit, one day, when she was locked in an asylum where she couldn’t hurt anyone. But she was still young enough not have the smoker’s face (crisscrossed wrinkles) and until then, “Forget it. I actually think that because no one does it anymore, it makes me a little punk rock,” she rationalized.

  “Have you thought about TV?” Neal asked, ignoring Penelope’s smoking dissertation. “You’d make a great producer.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going into TV,” Penelope said. “At least it’s still considered journalism—however loosely—and it’d be a paycheck. I’ll do anything right now. Why?”

  “Maybe I can help,” Neal said. “You remember David?”

  Neal had met David two months ago at the Tool Box, a gay bar off the still yet to be gentrified part of the Upper East Side. They’d both been ogling the same go-go dancer—whose G-stringed bottom was obscuring their view of each other—and when the dancer left the stage for a break, their eyes met. David, a thirty-year-old transplant from Venice Beach, California, was a short guy—only around five-feet-two-inches tall—with jet black hair, a chiseled face, blindingly white teeth, and bright green eyes. Neal was smitten.

  They had been casually seeing each other ever since. Two nights before, David, the assistant to the station manager at NY Access, New York’s other local cable channel, mentioned that there was a job opening.

  “David said they were looking for an assistant producer at New York Access,” Neal said. “I could get you an interview if you want. But I don’t think they pay much.”

  “And the Telegraph did?” Penelope snorted. “I got my annual one-to-three percent ‘cost of living’ increase every year—if I was lucky—and that was it. For seven years! I don’t care. I just need a job. Who do I call?”

  “I’ll sort it out tomorrow,” Neal said, “but on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You let me do something about…this,” he said, waving his hands in her general direction.

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Everything.”

  “Oh, not that again.”

  “No, really,” Neal said, “you can not be walking into job interviews with the pink Michelin coat looking like a nineteen-year-old homeless wonder and expect them to hire you. I have a plan.”

  “What is the plan and how much money does it involve?” Penelope asked as she took a final drag of her cigarette before stubbing it out.

  “Nothing, it’s free. You just have to call your landlord tomorrow and get my friend Lipstick that damn apartment across the hall for two thousand dollars a month or less.”

  “That socialite friend of yours? She’d want to live here?”

  “It’s a long story. How much do you pay for this…palace?”

  “It started out at a thousand dollars a month. It’s now twelve-hundred dollars, which isn’t bad considering I’ve lived here seven years. But the new renovated apartments are going for fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred dollars. That’s because they have real bathrooms built in, with a tub and everything.”

  “Doesn’t matter, that’s perfect,” Neal said. “Lips needed to find an apartment yesterday. Anyway, she doesn’t have room to move all of her stuff. I told her I would help store the majority of her furniture and clothes, but frankly, there’s a lot of editing in that closet that needs to be done. She already has like five trash bags full of Dolce, Dior, and Gucci going to Housing Works, but I think that you, my dear, are a much better charitable cause. We’ll call it an apartment finder’s fee.”

  “Nice.” Penelope sniffed, rolling her eyes, “I’m a charity case now.”

&
nbsp; “Never let pride get in the way of a good wardrobe,” Neal shot back.

  “If this girl has so much money and good stuff, why does she want to move in here? The only really nice place in the building is the penthouse upstairs, and that chubby chick with the dachshund that just tried to bite me already lives there. And I heard she signed like a gazillion-year lease.”

  “That would be too expensive for her anyway,” Neal said. “The one-bedroom next door will be fine. It’s a long story, P, and I told her I wouldn’t get into it, but just do it for me, okay? I’ll bring the clothes over tomorrow after you call David about that job and your landlord about the apartment. She’s a bit bigger than you, but alterations are cheaper than a wardrobe.”

  “Sure,” Penelope said. “Let’s toast to my first Gucci, Pucci, and Toochi!” They clinked glasses.

  “Now, darling,” Neal said, “you look like you haven’t had a decent meal in a week. Let’s go to Raoul’s for steak, my treat!”

  The next day, after Penelope called Mr. Brillman and got him to promise her he wouldn’t show the apartment to anyone until he’d talked to Neal and his friend Lipstick, Penelope dialed David about the job at NY Access.

  “The opening is for an assistant producer,” David told Penelope over the phone. “It’s basically a fancy title for the get coffee/carry extraneous camera and lighting equipment, union rules be damned, fix the teleprompter, and all-round general errand girl. You’re totally qualified—in fact, you’re overqualified. My boss Marge usually likes to hire ’em fresh out of college because they’re pretty dispensable. But on the bright side, there are always opportunities to advance because of the turnover.”

  “Whatever,” Penelope said. “What’s it pay?”

  “Only forty thousand dollars.”

  “Same as the Telegraph. Fine.”

  “Okay, Marge said you can come in Monday at two p.m., but I have to warn you…”

  “What?”

  “She’s…a little difficult.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like fucking crazy.”

  “Please. My boss at the Telegraph could’ve used an enema in 1992.”

  The following Monday, Penelope, who spent an hour that morning fighting with her blow dryer to get her hair straight-ish for the interview, walked into the NY Access offices in the warehouse section of East Twenty-eighth Street at 1:55 p.m.—exactly five minutes before her meeting with Marge Green was to begin. The reception area of the station was a dull gray room—the kind of color that looked like it had once been white but over the decades turned permanently dusty—with a heavy, peeling, rust-colored door that presumably led to the inner sanctums of the TV station. The only decoration on the walls was a shabby banner that read: NY Access—New York’s OTHER local cable station! below a picture of the evening news anchors: TRACE AND KANDACE, SERVING UP THE NEWS HOT, JUST THE WAY YOU LIKE IT! The room itself was empty except for a moth-eaten multicolored wool sofa, a rickety coffee table, and a desk that hid the receptionist—a tiny, ancient woman with short gray hair, thick black Coke-bottle glasses, and a large hearing aid in her left ear. She was sitting on a small swivel chair and wearing a fuchsia muumuu with a name tag that read GLADYS, and barked “Yes?” after Penelope peered over the top of the desk to see if anyone was actually there.

  “I’m here to see Marge Green.” Penelope said. She was dressed in a tailored hand-me-down dark wool Armani suit and a gray cashmere overcoat from Neal’s friend. Neal had come over several days before—“with just enough time for you to get alterations done before your big interview!”—armed with three huge bags stuffed full of designer clothes and at least two usable interview suits. “You look like you mugged Nan Thrice,” Penelope said. The two had sorted out which clothes were best for Penelope, which pieces should be altered first, and which didn’t have to be altered at all, and in the process cleaned out the majority of her old closet. The pink puffer was the first item to be tossed.

  “What?!” the geriatric receptionist snapped.

  “Marge Green—”

  “Yes, she works here!”

  “I know. I have an appointment to see her.”

  “Name!”

  “Penelope Mercury.”

  “What?”

  “Penelope—”

  “Speak up!”

  “PENELOPE MERCURY!”

  “Sit!”

  Two seconds later, Gladys barked into the phone, “Pamela Minklestein to see Marge!”

  Penelope sat on the edge of the “vintage” wool sofa. She didn’t want to stain the new-ish suit, and the couch looked like it had the recent remains of someone’s lunch on it.

  Twenty-five minutes later, as Penelope’s eyes started to glaze over, Gladys called, “Through the green door, down the hall to the left.”

  Penelope collected her purse (a black Coach bag—also donated from Neal’s friend) and, clutching her résumé, walked through the rust-colored door and down a long hallway that opened up into a large room with cubicles on the left (Newsrooms are always the same, Penelope thought) and a studio on the right. At the end of the cubicles was a stand-alone area where David was dressed smartly in what looked like a very expensive suit (How can he afford that? Penelope wondered. It must be a knock-off). He was seated behind a desk that guarded an office with a black door that was open. To the left of the door was a placard that read: “Marge Green. Station Manager.”

  Penelope rushed over to David, gushing, “Hiii!” before she looked around and said, “What happened here?” There were pockmarked holes in the wall behind David’s head—as if someone had been hammering at the walls haphazardly as David sat there, leaving only his body outline intact.

  “Don’t ask,” David said and sighed before calling into the office, “Marge, Penelope Mercury is here to see you.”

  Penelope could hear a woman talking loudly into a phone.

  “Marge! Penelope Mercury is here to see you!” David yelled when his first interruption received no response. Penelope could hear the woman tell the other person on the line, “One minute, I have a two o’clock appointment,” before a voice boomed, “Bring her in!”

  David pointed to the door and said, “Entrez, my dear. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Penelope slunk into Marge’s office as Marge resumed her conversation with an underling on the other end of the line.

  “We gotta sex up the show! Sex sells!” Marge, a petite blonde of a certain age who looked like she’d had her fair share of plastic surgery, yelled into the phone while banging her fist against her desk. “Sit down,” she instructed Penelope, pointing at the hard wooden chair opposite her desk before talking back into the phone, “No, not you! Anyway, where was I…”

  As Marge debated the merits of sexing up the afternoon broadcast, Penelope placed her résumé on Marge’s desk, which was cluttered with papers, pens, several staplers, a rickety old computer, and various stress balls. Behind Marge the wall was plastered with framed awards, marking her various achievements over the years: “1999: Best Local Newscast Producer: ABC’s Marge Green—New York magazine,” “Time Out: 2001 Special Achievement Award to CBS’s Marge Green,” “1997: CNN Innovator of the Year,” “NBC Salutes Marge Green for her Emmy-Winning Year, 1989,” and so on.

  There were awards from almost every station imaginable. Marge was like the garden weed of local news—she had popped up everywhere—but some of the older awards, which had been typed out on a typewriter instead of a computer, had their dates rubbed off.

  “Marge doesn’t want anyone knowing how old she really is,” David later explained. “She thinks that if she rubs out the dates, no one will be able to prove she isn’t—ahem—‘fifty.’”

  There were some filing cabinets behind Marge’s desk, on top of which was an industrial-sized coffee machine, with a coffee pot that looked like it had a half cup of coffee left in it, several empty coffee mugs, and a jar of Coffee-Mate.

  Marge, hyped up on more than five pots of Colombia’s finest gro
und beans, slammed down the phone, picked up Penelope’s résumé, and said, “So! Pamela!”

  “Penelope.”

  “You want to work at New York Access?”

  “Yes, I think it’s a—”

  “David!” Marge cut Penelope off.

  “Yes,” David answered.

  “My coffee’s low. Get in here and make me some more!”

  “I will in a second—”

  “Now!”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Marge pursed her lips into a thin, white line, and a vein on her forehead bulged dangerously.

  “You went to the bathroom yesterday!” Marge said before picking up one of the staplers on her desk, leaning to her right, and flinging it out the door in David’s general direction. There was a thud and Penelope heard David scream, “Aaahhh! You bitch—you got me!” before Marge got up and slammed her office door shut. “You just can’t find good help around here,” she said to no one in particular.

  “So, Polly,” Marge said, sitting back down behind her desk and turning her full attention to Penelope, “as you can see, I am extremely competitive and dedicated to my work.” She smoothed down the lapels of her hot pink suit (“She thinks pastels and bright colors make her look younger,” David had warned Penelope). “I need someone who can match that dedication. Is that you?”

  “Sure…” Penelope said, aware that Marge was glaring at her. A bead of sweat rolled down her back and, feeling her one and only job opportunity slip away, Penelope sat up very straight and said, “I mean, yes! Yes, it is me! I am dedicated—I’m dedication incarnate!”

  “Great,” Marge said, sitting back in her chair, dropping Penelope’s résumé back on her desk and staring at the ceiling. “You start Monday.” She picked up the phone and barked, “David!” and Penelope was escorted from the room.