Authors: Jeffrey Robinson
“Is she qualified?”
“She has a background in hotels.”
“I'll rephrase that. Is she qualified to steal your job?”
The elevator door opened and Alicia Melendez stepped out with a towel draped around her neck.
The tall Cuban American brunette, statuesque with high cheekbones and café-au-lait skin, was wearing a dark green leotard that was cut very high at her hips. “Hi Belasco,” she said, then nodded at Riordan.
“Miss Melendez.”
She waved and walked down the hall, obviously on her way to the health club on the northeast corner of the floor.
Riordan watched her walk away. “I know how she got her job.”
Belasco disregarded the remark and stepped into the elevator. “Forty-two, please.”
Miguel, the elevator operator, looked at Belasco.
He shook his head.
And the doors closed before Riordan had a chance to turn around.
A
licia stepped onto the treadmill, Alejandro set the speed, she started running, and he walked away.
At this hour, the big room with row after row of machinesâand floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue and Central Parkâwas empty. She had no trouble getting the machine in the far corner, the one she liked best because it had such great views.
“Very early or very late,” she'd advised Carson, who also liked that machine.
“Very early to beat the before-the-market-opens crowd, or very late to beat the ladies who lunch.”
Carson, a six-foot-three, mahogany-skinned former tennis player, eventually found that he could get that machine at 5:15. But Alicia didn't have to be at NBC until 11, which meant that now, at 9:30 a.m., she usually had the place to herself.
Herself and Alejandro.
He was a good-looking, sleepy-eyed kid from Costa Rica who was always helpful and friendly but showed no interest in her. He was the same with Cyndi. So Alicia and Cyndi decided Alejandro must be gay.
When Carson said, “Impossible,” the two women set out to prove him wrong. Not that it mattered to them if Alejandro liked girls or boys. It was a game to play and they called it “Alejandro In or Out?”
One day, Alicia showed up in her coffee-with-cream-colored Lycra outfit, the one that Carson absolutely forbid her to wear in public because it made her look totally nude.
Cyndi was dying to know, “What happened?”
Alicia told her, “Nothing.”
The day after that, Cyndi wore a tiny two-piece training set that was so tight there was absolutely nothing left for Alejandro to imagine.
Alicia asked, “What happened?”
Cyndi answered, “Nothing.”
Finally, Carson decided it was up to him to make the winning move. “I'm going to ask.”
“You can't do that,” Cyndi said.
“Why not?” And he did. “My wife says you're gay. Are you gay?”
“Me?” Alejandro started laughing, not the nervous laugh of someone caught in a lie, but the real laugh of someone who is truly amused. “Me? I am right now currently having it with four different ladies in the Tower. Almost every day. Each one. Quatro. Four. I like
las mujeres
very much.”
He warned Alejandro, “Not Alicia. And not Cyndi.”
“Your señora? Your
mujer
? And her friend? No,” he said, “only
las pumas
.”
“
Las pumas
?”
Alejandro tried to find the word, “You know . . .
pumas, mujeres pumas
. . . cougars?”
“Old ladies?”
He nodded several times. “
Cincuenta
.
Cincuenta y cinco
.
Sesenta
.” Fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty.
“I win,” Carson reported back to Alicia and Cyndi. “You guys are much too young for him.”
Immediately, Alicia and Cyndi started making a list of the older women
they spotted training with Alejandro. And within days, they were up to twenty.
“He told me four,” Carson said.
“No way,” Alicia said. “At least fourteen.”
“Twenty-four,” Cyndi said.
Carson eventually gave up and let the women play a new game they called, “Alejandro In or Out,” but added the words, “of Who?”
Now, alone in the corner of the gym, running steadily on the machine with two clear views, Alicia stopped thinking about Alejandro and his
pumas
, and started thinking about Donald Trump, Fay Wray, Michael Jackson, Johnny Carson, Liberace, and Sophia Loren.
T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
, just as she'd come out of the afternoon story meeting, one of the college students who worked as a research assistant in the newsroom announced, “Some agent-man called and left a voice mail.”
“Some agent-man?”
“He said he was an agent and he was a man, hence . . .”
“Agent-man,” Alicia nodded. “Thanks,” and went to listen to the message.
It was from Mel Berger at William Morris Endeavor. “We've got a project that might interest you. Will you give me a call, please?”
She dialed the number he had left, and when a man answered, she announced, “It's Alicia Melendez calling for . . .”
Before she could say, “Mr. Berger,” he himself asked, “How would you like to write a book?”
“A book? Me? What about?”
“Let's meet.”
“Give me a hint.”
“No,” he said, “because I may have to talk you into it and I won't be able to do that over the phone.”
Intrigued, she agreed to stop by his office that evening after she got off the air.
“There's not a lot of money in it,” Berger explained, sitting her down at the big, round table he used as his desk in the middle of the book-lined room. “But you're the perfect person to write it.”
He had a friendly face, a big smile, and seemed pretty hip. She thought he looked a little like a blue-eyed, younger version of Al Pacino.
“Do I get to find out what I'm writing about before I write it?”
“Biggest tourist attraction in New York.”
She said, “The Empire State Building.”
“Good guess, no cigar.”
“The Statue of Liberty?”
“Bigger. You need a boat to get to the statue. Your place, you don't need a boat.”
“My place? NBC? Thirty Rock?”
He shook his head. “Trump Tower.”
She didn't understand. “Trump Tower is the biggest tourist attraction in New York?”
“More tourists . . . more foot traffic . . . go through Trump Tower than anywhere else in New York. Iconic building. Big name brand. Free admission. No boat needed. The thirtieth anniversary is coming up. You live there, right?”
She nodded.
“Coffee table book. Gorgeous photographs. Twenty-five thousand words max. History of the building and some stories of the famous people who've lived there.”
She was hesitant. “I don't think the people who live there necessarily want to find their names in a book . . .”
“Donald Trump?”
“Okay, yeah,” she nodded. “But the others . . .”
“Fay Wray?”
“She's dead, so she probably won't mind.”
“Michael Jackson?”
“That's three, but . . .”
“Johnny Carson?”
“Four.”
“Liberace?”
“He lived there?”
“Sophia Loren?”
“She lived there too?”
“But not with Liberace,” Berger smiled. “Steven Spielberg?”
“Ah . . . he will mind. At least, I think he will.”
“Mikey Glass?”
“You sure he lives there? I thought he lives in LA. I mean, he's still doing that sitcom, right?”
“When they can't get Charlie Sheen, they get him. Except when they anger Ashton Kutcher. Mikey's wife and kids live in the Tower . . . sometimes. And he stays there too when he's in New York.”
“Well . . . if he's stoned or drunk or both he won't mind. And, from what the papers say about him, if he isn't yet stoned or drunk or both, he's too busy working on it. So, okay, he won't mind.”
“Andrew Lloyd Webber?”
“Oh, I suspect that he will mind.”
“Cyndi Benson?”
“This one I know for sure,” Alicia grinned. “Nothing fazes Cyndi. Absolutely nothing at all. But the others . . .”
“Edmond Greenwich?”
She pondered that. “If Andrew Lloyd Webber is in and Edmond's not, he'll mind a lot. Composers are very competitive. If Andrew Lloyd Webber is not in and Edmond is, Edmond might buy a lot of extra copies. But then . . . Andrew will scream bloody murder.”
“Zeke Gimbel?”
She conceded, “He might actually sue if he's
not
in.”
“The Holy Ghost?”
She was surprised. “Somebody from the Bible lives in Trump Tower?”
“The Yankee's Holy Ghost.”
“Oh . . . him. Roberto Santos. Ah . . . I don't know. No one ever sees him. I mean, I've never seen him.”
“Ricky Lips?”
She started laughing. “You mean, Richard Lipschitz of Ealing Broadway, West London, England Fucking UK?”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Lyrics to one of their songs. I take it you're not a big Still Fools fan.”
“I prefer Jacques Brel. But he never lived in Trump Tower.”
“And I've never written a book before.”
“Most people haven't. But you may be the only person living in Trump Tower who can.”
She thought about that for a moment, then went back to what he'd said about money. “How much is not a lot?”
“You live in Trump Tower so you obviously don't need the money . . .”
She immediately corrected him. “You wouldn't say that if you lived there. Maybe no one who lives there actually needs the money, but everyone who lives there can always actually use the money.”
“Twenty-five thousand words . . . I can get you forty grand.”
She confessed, “That will buy a few pairs of shoes.”
“It works out to a dollar-sixty a word.”
She wondered, “A buck-sixty for âthe' and âand' and âof' and âholy ghost'?”
Now he corrected her. “Holy Ghost gets you three-twenty.”
“S
EÃORA
?”
She was going at a pretty good pace now.
“Señora?” It was Alejandro signaling to her. “Señora?” He slowed down the machine. “Enough for today.”
She stayed on the machine, at a walking pace, warming down before he stopped it completely and she stepped off.
“Wow,” she said, putting her hands on her knees and trying to catch her breath. “Did I do all five miles? It felt like more.” She looked at the number on the digital display. “Six and a half? No way. Really? Wow.”
“See you Monday, Señora,” Alejandro said.
She stood up and was about to wave goodbye when she noticed two older women coming into the gym.
One of them was the wrinkly old wife of some retired German businessman. The other, Alicia seemed to think, was married to a jeweler. She made a mental note to tell Cyndi there were two more candidates for the Alejandro list.
Back in her apartment, Alicia took a shower and got dressed. On the way out of the Tower, the concierge handed her an envelope that had been biked over. Inside were several dozen printed pages and a note from Mel Berger. “Sign all three copies and send them back to me. You are about to become a published author.”
Smiling, she read the contract as she walked.
Arriving in the newsroom, she went to her desk and signed the contracts.
“What's that?” her editor, Howie, wanted to know.
“I'm writing a book,” she said.
“Good for you,” he said. “I hope you have the time.”
“Why wouldn't I have the time?”
“You didn't hear this from me,” he whispered. “They may or may not want you to know yet. And if you are supposed to know, they'll want to tell you themselves upstairs. But . . . substitute anchor at
Nightly
? You made the short list.”
Z
eke Gimbel, a smallish forty-five-year-old with a three-day growth of beard, thinning hair and a craggy but smiling face, looked at his tiny, white-haired, seventy-seven-year-old mother, Hattie, shook his head, turned to his lawyer, silent partner and oldest friend from childhood, Bobby Lerner, and sighed, “You talk to her. She always liked you best, anyway.”