The Cinderella Pact (6 page)

“You've never met her?” I ask innocently.

“Never. I have to say I am a closet fan of her columns. Though don't tell my students that I read such trash.”

We both laugh conspiratorially about my trashy prose.

“Seriously. I think her message of encouraging women to relax and enjoy life is simply brilliant. I can't tell you how many uptight women I've met at Princeton who drive me up the wall with their insecurities, their ‘How come you didn't call me's' and ‘Will I get tenure's' and ‘Do I look . . .' Well, you get the idea. Really, most men are sick of it.”

I should be listening to his rant, but I stopped at the word brilliant. Brilliant! Nigel Barnes,
the
Nigel Barnes, said I was brilliant! I try to appear unflustered by this and reply with a classic non sequitur. “Yes, she's not bad.”

We have arrived at the closed conference room, but Nigel shows no signs of eagerness to make the meeting. Perhaps he is such a star here that his job is assured, whereas I, like any editor, can be replaced with a phone call.

“So what's she like in person?” he asks. “Belinda, I mean.”

“Well, she's very tall,” I begin, uncertain whether it's her physical beauty he's interested in.

“Oh?” He makes a curious face. “Freakish
Guinness Book of World Records
tall or model tall?”

“Model tall,” I say quickly. “Definitely not freakish. And she has long red hair . . .”

“Yes, yes,” he says, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I can tell all that from her photo. I mean, what's she
really
like? Is she as laid back as she claims? Or is she actually a witch? Does she sleep around? Or is she perhaps a lesbian?”

“Lesbian!” I scream as if I've just seen a centipede.

“You have something against lesbians?”

“No. No I'm perfectly fine with lesbians. It's just that I never thought of her in
that
way.”

“So she sleeps around, then? Lots of men, is it?”

“No!”

“You mean she's a virgin?”

“What?” I have to slap my hands to my ears. This is nuts. Belinda Apple doesn't even exist and now she's a lesbian whore with a Madonna complex.

“I'm sorry,” he says, smiling. “I suppose what I'm trying to find out is whether it would be acceptable for me to, you know, look her up. I do travel to London quite a bit.”

Look her up. My heart skips a few beats.

“I mean”—he hesitates, stumbling—“I'm asking if . . . if she's seeing anyone.”

And then the sweetness wears off and the truth hits me. This pompous Princeton half-professor is talking to me like I'm an automated gatekeeper to the fantasyland that is Belinda Apple. Oooh, I so hate that. This has been my role since high school when my close friend Constance Maxwell—the concert pianist, the blond-wavy-haired, could've-been-a-cheerleader-but-was-too-smart Constance Maxwell—drew boys to me like dogs to roadkill.

Was Connie seeing anyone? Did she like so and so? Did I think she'd go out with him? Could I put in a good word for him?

“We don't delve into her personal life much,” I snap, a mischievous scheme popping into my head. “Besides, she's quite preoccupied these days, what with Wills and all that. Royalty can be
sooo
demanding.”

“By Wills, you mean Prince William?” Nigel looks as though he's swallowed an egg.

“Whoops! I shouldn't have said that. Then again, I suppose it's obvious, with her living at Balmoral . . .”

“Balmoral!” This elicits an even more satisfactory reaction. Nigel is practically salivating. “I've always wanted to go to Balmoral. I have quite a bit of Scottish blood in me, you know. My father was a MacLeod.”

“Really?” What the hell is a MacLeod?

“I'd give anything for a chance to stay at Balmoral. I've already been to Deeside. Lovely area, absolutely lovely. Um”—the wheels in Nigel's brain are clicking—“I do wonder if there's a chance she might fancy a visit from the likes of me.”

“You?”

“Well, I am rather famous, aren't I? I mean dozens of women write to me every day. They even send me their knickers.”

“That's nasty.”

“And I am a professor at Princeton. There's some cachet in that. What do you think? Do you think I would pass? I mean, not to your American standards, rather to Belinda's higher—er, British ones.”

I grip my purse.
Not my standards, Belinda's higher British ones?
Listen, I'm tired of being the nun from
Romeo and Juliet,
I want to tell him. Look at my chin. Do you see hairs? Is there a cowl around my head and a cross dangling from my neck?

And then it hits me. OK, Princeton's Gift to Women, let's have some real fun.

“I'll tell you what.” I reach into my purse, pulling out the tiny black “food diary” I picked up at the bookstore along with
Who Moved My Fat?
I rip off a blank page. “I'll give you Belinda's e-mail, her personal e-mail, not the one her columns go to, and you can write her yourself.” I scribble it and hand it to him.

Nigel takes the paper with gleaming eyes. “You won't regret it.”

“Oh, I'm sure I won't.”

Boom!
The conference door flings open and there stands Lori DiGrigio looking nothing short of insane.

“I can hear you two all the way in there.” She waves to the conference room where I spy my friend Lisa from Books, her eyes wide. “Why weren't you at the meeting? You're so late, it's over.”

“There was a meeting? Fancy that.” Nigel, calm as crystal ice, checks inside where everyone is standing, pushing in their chairs and mumbling somberly. Joel, Lisa, and Dawn, Lori's former secretary who was replaced by a dimwitted Valley Girl from Swarthmore, file past us.

“Sorry, Lori,” I begin, feeling the familiar panic rise again, “I didn't know if . . .”

“You.” She points a finger straight at me. “I need to see
you
now. Alone.”

I flash Nigel a wave of my fingertips, wishing that I were as lucky as he to be spared a private conference with this rabid pit bull, and slide against the wall into the room. Lori slams the doors behind me. It is just the two of us, and her bloodred nails are digging into the flesh of her elbows.

“I have a question for you,” she says. “Just who in the hell is the real Belinda Apple?”

Chapter Five

Five Things You Couldn't Pay Me to Wear (Even If I Were Thin):

 
Thong
! is the first word that pops into my mind when Lori DiGrigio demands to know who the real Belinda Apple is. No matter what she is saying, all my attention has turned to the very faint straps of her red thong peeking above the waist of her Tahari black pants. Accident? I'll venture not.

After all, David Stanton is out of his deathbed.

It is common knowledge that Lori is plotting and planning to become the last Mrs. David Stanton so she can cash in à la Anna Nicole Smith. Seeing her thong, I realize she has taken a hint from Monica Lewinsky and decided that the first step in finding billion-dollar love is to reveal one's underwear the way baboons flash their crimson bums to show they are in heat.

Lisa heard a rumor from someone in Food that a few years back, when Lori was in Manhattan to meet with Corporate, she and Mr. Stanton stayed out past his bedtime of eight p.m. to take in a Big Band swingathon and that later she unzipped his pants in an alley and . . . Well, I'm sure it's not true. I can't imagine Lori doing that. Correction, I
don't want
to imagine Lori doing that, especially in an alleyway with an octogenarian.

“Don't you know?” Lori is saying.

“I . . .” I don't know what to say.

“That Belinda Apple doesn't exist?”

I freeze. Simply freeze when Lori says this. She is staring at me, but I am unable to stare back because my entire life is flashing before my eyes.

Somehow I find inner strength, possibly hidden in the criminal core of my id, to ask with an eerily calm voice, “What do you mean Belinda Apple doesn't exist?”

“I mean that everything about her is made up. She's a fraud. We,
Sass!
magazine, have as our ethics columnist a woman who is a total, complete, one-hundred-percent hoax.” Lori sighs deeply, and not even her regular Botox injections can prevent the wrinkles creasing her face. “Can you imagine what the flak's going to be when this gets out?
Star
is going to have a freaking orgy. Nola, this is the absolute worst. You have to help us find out who she is.”

Oh my God, Lori doesn't know,
I realize, trying to maintain a straight face. Relief is washing me like a cool breeze so that my body temperature drops and instead of feeling sweaty I feel clammy.
She doesn't know that I am the real Belinda Apple.

And then a new concern. “Is this what the meeting was about?”

“Of course. Though it's been hanging over my head for over a week. You don't know the stress this so-called Belinda Apple has caused. I've had to triple my Zoloft.” Lori is actually confiding in me as though we're buddies, and I don't know whether to play along or keep her at arm's length.

“How did you find out?” I ask boldly.

“Due diligence. After the Jayson Blair scandal at the
New
York Times
, Mr. Stanton demanded an internal investigation into our employees. We were doing fine until we discovered that there never was a British magazine called
Go Fab!
That's where Belinda allegedly worked before coming here.”

“I see. Well, maybe there was a
Go Fab!
once but it's now defunct,” I say optimistically. “You know how that happens.”

“No, no. We have ways of checking these things. Personally, I think these frauds are all over the publishing world thanks to laptops and cell phones. They should be abolished.”

“Good point,” I say, lying through my teeth. If it weren't for my cell phone and laptop, I would have no secret identity as Belinda Apple. Then again, that kind of proves Lori's point, doesn't it?

“So . . .” I venture delicately, “do you have any other evidence that Belinda doesn't exist?”

Lori begins pacing back and forth in front of a blackboard on which the word MISREPRESENTATION is scrawled with a line through it. “Not much, aside from the fact that there's no listing for a Belinda Apple anywhere in London. I just can't believe it. I just can't believe I was so . . . careless. I know I'm going to get fired over this, I just know it.” With this, Lori buries her head in her hands as though she is about to cry. I begin to feel sorry for her, which is ridiculous, as everyone knows Lori is a vampire.

It is my first experience seeing Lori in some other state besides cracking the whip, and I am conflicted. Here she is, vulnerable, weak, and scared, and it is all I can do to pat her on the shoulder. Anyone else I would throw my arms around and hug.

“Don't worry, Lori,” I say, trying my best. “Maybe Belinda is legit. Have you asked her?”

Lori lifts her head. As I expected, her eyes are dry. “No! Mr. Stanton and the lawyers don't want us to contact her until we've built our case. They want to handle this delicately. If she wasn't the biggest draw at this magazine, she would have been canned already, I can tell you that.”

Her hands work into tiny balls. “I don't care if she's our precious columnist. If I ever find who's behind this, I will have her head on a stick. Make a chump of Lori DiGrigio? I think not. She'll wish she never heard my name when I'm done with her.”

Did I mention that my knees were shaking?

Lori emerges from her seething rant and focuses her beady eyes on me. “You've got to spy on Belinda, Devlin. Find out if she's working for another publication. Or if she's in jail. Or that there's some other reason why she's not using her real name. I want to know everything.”

“Uh-huh,” I manage.

“After all, this scandal wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for you,” she says, craftily turning the blame onto me. “One might say you were the catalyst.”

I am not about to let her get away with that. I must stand up to her, or she will trample me with her size-five El Vaquero python boots. “In what way was I the catalyst?”

“Well, you were on her résumé as a recommendation, weren't you?”

Heat is rising up my neck remembering how Lori essentially threw my application in the trash, thereby leading me to this farce in the first place. “Was it? You never called me.”

“Don't be stupid. I certainly did call you and, as I recall, you raved about her. You even got me Belinda's new phone number when the one on her résumé turned out to be defective.”

“Lori,” I say firmly, “that is a total lie, and you know it.”

“You didn't get me her phone number?”

“I did that, yes . . .”

“Then let's not bicker over details. By the way, it doesn't matter what I think. Mr. Stanton already knows you were the one who recommended her. If I were you I'd think very seriously about how you're going to explain that. Mr. Stanton is not going to let this matter go by the wayside. He's outraged.”

Chapter Six

I spend the rest of the afternoon in a daze. Mostly my brain mulls over the cornucopia of punishments for my deception—whether I'll be sued and then fired or fired and then sued. Or criminally prosecuted. The possibilities are endless, though I resolve to take whatever punishment I have coming in brave, Martha Stewart style. I, too, will crochet a shawl in prison.