Excerpt of The Pink Ghetto by Liz Ireland

After all that’s happened, most of the people think it was
that book that changed everything for me. It’s not hard to
understand why. I blamed everything on the book at first,
too. I was bitter, I’ll admit that. In my shoes, anyone
would have been.

But recently, thanks to the support of my friends, my
family, and the personal growth section at Barnes and
Noble, I’ve adopted a more zenlike attitude toward the
whole episode. To put it in a string of clichés: I am
bowed but not broken. That which did not kill me has made
me stronger. I have washed that man right out of my hair.

Taking the longer view, I can see that it wasn’t
heartbreak or even that book that altered my life. Not
really. It was the job. The job changed everything, which
is weird, because at the time I was so desperate to earn
money that I didn’t even pay attention to what I was
applying for.

The ad didn’t name the company. Lodged as it was in the
middle of the employment section of the New York Times
without a box or even much bold lettering, it seemed
anonymous, non-threatening, almost forgettable. A little
brown bag of an ad. Well-known publishing house seeks
assistant editor, it said. Or something to that effect.

Well-known publishing house. Lurking behind those four
innocent words was a whole new world, amazing to the
uninitiated and fraught with unseen traps that a novice
was bound to step in, like those pits camouflaged by
leaves in an old Abbott and Costello jungle movie.

I didn’t realize it myself for months, until I was
sprawled on the ground, shaking the banana leaves out of
my hair.

Not that it would have mattered at the time when I spotted
the ad. Like I said, I was desperate. If Pol Pot had been
hiring, I probably would have fired off my resume. I was
sending out that document, so heavily padded that it could
have played tackle in the NFL, to any and every business
that sounded as though they required a semiliterate being
to park at a desk all day. In a blizzard of cover letters
blanketing the human resources departments of Manhattan
that month, I professed my profound desire to be a
proofreader, executive assistant, editorial assistant, or
any type of flunky imaginable sought by the worlds of
advertising, public relations, or broadcasting. I needed a
job, and the sooner the better.

For two and a half unbelievable years I had been living on
easy street. Actually, the address was a floor-through in
Williams- burg, Brooklyn, land of the trust fund bohemian.
I had no trust fund, but I had been incomparably lucky
since getting out of college, when, through a professor, I
had landed a position as a personal assistant to Sylvie
Arnaud.

Sylvie Arnaud was one of those people that the early
Twentieth Century popped out now and then—magic people who
were simply famous for being around all the right people.

How she had become famous, no one remembered. Perhaps
sometime circa 1935 she had written something, or painted
something, or slept with someone who had written or
painted something. Her name would occasionally pop up in
The New York Review of Books, during the course of a
discussion of a review of books about German Expressionist
painters, say. She knew everybody. Ernest Hemingway.
Salvador Dali. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Harpo
Marx. You can play a highbrow Where’s Waldo? with her in
pictures of intellectuals and rich folk gathered in salons
in Paris and London between the wars. Chances are she’ll
be there somewhere, maybe sitting next to Cole Porter and
looking impossibly elegant in her slinky bias cut dresses,
with a drink in one hand and a stretch limousine cigarette
holder in the other.

By the time I knew her, she was a beaky, wizened old
creature on toothpick legs, with jaundiced flesh as thin
as onion skin parchment. She lived in a dark, musty
brownstone on the Upper East Side, in Turtle Bay. When my
old college professor who helped get me the job told me
about the position, he said that I would probably be
helping her assemble her personal papers so she could
write her autobiography. But I was not taking down her
memoirs; instead, I spent most of my time chasing after
her favorite groceries, like these nasty chocolate covered
apricot filled cookies that she practically lived on.
Believe me, I am not picky when it comes to food. There’s
nothing I can’t deem binge-worthy if I stare at it long
enough, but even I would make an exception for those
cookies.

And her peculiarities didn’t end there. She also liked a
specific kind of hot pickled okra that could only be found
in Harlem; butter mints from the basement at Macy’s;
baguettes and croissants from a French bakery in Brooklyn
Heights. She preferred cloth hankies to Kleenex and Lava
soap to the expensive kind I bought her once on her
birthday, and woebetide the person who made the mistake of
serving her ice in her drinks.

She was one peculiar old lady.

She didn’t talk to me much about Picasso, or Earnest
Hemingway, or the Duchess of Windsor. I arrived too late
for that. Mostly I heard about her ingrown toenails and
her skin problems. I guess when you’re ninety-four and you
itch, dead painter friends become a second tier concern.

When I first started working for her I would bring up the
subject of her memoirs.

“What are these memoirs you are always pestering me about,
Rebecca?” She had a trace of her native accent, but it was
an off-and-on thing. She could lay it on thick if she
wanted, turning these to zeez.

I tried not to let on that I was disappointed not to be
doing important literary work. “I just thought . . . if
you needed any help going through your journals . . .”

She would laugh throatily at that idea. “Ah, you see me as
some sort of crazy old artifact, non?”

“No, no,” I would stutter. (A lie. I did.)

“Naturally! You want to know all my little secrets, like
whether Cary Grant was good in bed.”

“No, I . . .” I gulped. “Wait. Cary Grant?”

She would bark with glee at me, tell me to take her
laundry down to the basement, and then ignore me for the
rest of the afternoon. I began to suspect the diaries
didn’t exist anyway. Maybe she’d never been any closer to
Cary Grant than I had been.

Or maybe she had.

Occasionally an academic would make his way to the
brownstone, but he always left disappointed. He might sit
in a chair with a plate of those apricot cookies and
listen to Sylvie rave for a few minutes about John-Paul
Sartre’s bad breath; generally it didn’t take much longer
to realize that Sylvie wasn’t going to divulge much useful
information. Even though Sylvie had been living in New
York since the sixties, her principal visitors while I was
there were not glitterati or even academics, but a
physical therapist named Chuck and an old lady from the
Bronx named Bernadine.

Sylvie was a mystery to me, right down to the question of
what I was doing there. I couldn’t figure out why she
wanted to pay even my nominal salary to have me around. I
couldn’t even figure out why this old French lady was in
New York.

Then again, I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about
it. When I began working for her I was twenty-two and it
was the first time I’d ever lived in New York City, so I
wasn’t exactly consumed with curiosity about my
nonagenarian employer.

And I had nothing to complain about. On the first day of
every month a check arrived from the manager of Sylvie’s
estate, R.J. Langley, CPA, which made me the prime
breadwinner among my roommates in our apartment in
Williamsburg. At the time I was too young to appreciate
that getting paid a living wage for buying an old lady’s
baguettes was really nothing short of a miracle.

Then one morning as I was getting ready to hie myself off
to Manhattan, I received a call from R.J. Langley, the
first time I had ever spoken to the man personally. He
asked me—commanded me, actually—to go to his office in
midtown first thing.

“Why?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”

“Actually, yes. I have bad news. Miss Arnaud has
pneumonia.”

“Oh, no! What hospital?”

There was a pause. “I can give you more details in
person.”

During the subway ride over, I was filled with sadness.
Poor Sylvie, stuck in the hospital, eating Jell-O. She
hated being away from her apartment, away from all her
musty old crap. I made out a mental list of her favorite
things I could put into a hospital care package for her.

When I arrived at the accountant’s office, however, I was
hit by a real shocker. Mr. Langley pushed an envelope
across the vast oaken plateau that was his desk. “We would
like to thank you for your service to Miss Arnaud.”

I gawped at the check, which was for twice the amount I
usually received.

“That’s for your last weeks of work, plus two weeks
severance,” Langley said. “I’m afraid we have to let you
go.”

He kept saying we. “But what about Sylvie?”

“If she recovers—”

“If!” I bleated.

He winced at my outburst. “Miss Arnaud is at a very
advanced age, as you know, and her condition is serious.
If she survives, it is her wish and the wish of her
beneficiaries that she be moved to an assisted living
community. You must understand.”

I did not. And who were these beneficiaries? They had
certainly not visited her while I had been there.

“I’d like to see Sylvie.”

The wrinkles of studied concern that had creased his brow
disappeared. “I don’t think that will be necessary, or
even advisable considering her present condition.”

Growing miffed, I asked, “Will you at least tell me where
she is?”

“I will take that up with the beneficiaries.”

I stood up, filled with righteous anger. I had a feeling I
was talking to the primary beneficiary. Maybe the only
one. The weasel. “Fine. Please ask them, Mr. Langley.
Please assure the beneficiaries that all I want to do is
bring Miss Arnaud a box of her favorite cookies.”