“What is?”
“The book title.”
“So?”
“So—I just thought you’d want to get it right.”
She paused, breathed out loudly. I knew she was pissed.
“The Morning Before Love, The Morning During Love. The Day After Hate. You think I care what the title is? I’ve got more important things to worry about. This is serious business, Elise! These aren’t two-thousand-word pieces for twelve-year-olds about Britney Spears’s belly button that can be turned around in an hour! These are idiotic four-hundred-page tomes about relationships and exercise and self-actualization that are ‘documented’ and ‘backed up’ and ‘scientificized’ with indexes and footnotes and bibliographies—all of which has to be copyedited and fact-checked and proofread! It’s a pressure cooker here! I’m responsible for getting these piece-of-shit books published on time! I mean, God forbid the world should have to survive another two weeks without Love in the Morning.”
We both laughed; then Anne, calming down, sighed deeply.
“Oy. I gave up a highly prestigious and lucrative career in Scandinavian literature for this, you know,” she said, starting the rant that had become all too familiar in times of extreme stress at Sassy. I could just see her at her desk, with her head in her hands, dwarfed by piles and piles of paper.
“I know.”
“I double-majored in comp lit and history at Vassar for this? I could have been an untenured adjunct professor at some community college by now.”
“I know.”
She laughed again. “I know you know, Miss I-Graduated-from-Barnard-but-I-Edit-Idiotic-Self-Help-Books.”
I let out a long sigh.
“Don’t sound so defeated. At least you’re in school now. Or on a break from school anyway. You’re trying to better yourself.”
“Look, I’m sorry about asking for an extension,” I said, unwittingly acting the part of a student. “It’s just that it’s kind of an emergency.”
She stopped to think for a second or two. She may have had a stupid job, but she was no fool. “This has something to do with that ex-girlfriend situation, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t answer.
“You fixed what wasn’t broke. You scratched what didn’t itch.”
“Anne, she’s moving here. From New York. In two months.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to meet her for the first time on Saturday. And I only have”—I looked at my watch frantically—“a hundred and twenty hours to get ready.”
She gave me a month.
I scheduled two half-days of beauty (manicure; pedicure; eyebrow shaping and tweezing one day; haircut and color the next) at the Jacques Dessanges salon in Chevy Chase even though I was, especially now, the biggest Francophobe around. But the French know beauty. And for that measure of certainty—to ensure that the beautification techniques used on me were at least as sophisticated as those used on Adrienne (she had that French-sounding name, don’t forget, and got her treatments in Manhattan, which, as I’d once known personally, is the grooming capital of the world)—I was willing to—and did—suffer anything.
Once the basics were taken care of (two days used, two days left) it was on to clothing: What to wear. So important, so impossible to solve was this question (not only did I have to figure out the exact particulars of how I would dress and whether or not I’d have to buy anything, but I had to ask myself and answer far bigger existential questions: What look was I trying to achieve? What was I trying to prove? What did it all mean?) that I decided to put it temporarily on hold and move on.