An excruciatingly uninspired senior editor.
A whole year had gone by. Wendy hid in her office, reading The Brookliner and shopping online, pretending to be extremely busy and acting overly curt and officious toward the assistants. Lucy Fleur hadn’t introduced herself to Wendy even once. Their communications had been reduced to Lucy Fleur’s cryptic, condescending emails: Cutoffs, cutouts, cowgirls. Take me to Texas. Or, Perfume. Grasse. Chanel. Roses. You know the drill. Make me smell it.
What kind of person sawed up another person? Was the woman dead when he started, or did he just knock her unconscious and turn on the chain saw? Did she wake up when he was sawing at her waist? Did she look down and see her bottom half fall away? Wendy exhaled noisily, well aware that there was no one to hear her. She didn’t know why she was so fascinated, but she felt connected to the drifting dead woman somehow.
Perfume. Grasse. Chanel.
Wendy pumped more hand serum into her palms and rubbed the excess on her neck, which could use all the help it could get. Why couldn’t she concentrate? Why had she been so fixated on getting this job and moving to New York when it was clear to her now that it was not what she wanted at all?
It made sense at the time. Roy was floundering. He hadn’t published a book in years. The older girls were almost finished at Oxford and Shy was only one year into high school. Wendy had been hosting the same dinner parties and game nights for the parents from her girls’ schools, cooking the same meals, complaining about the English winters, writing the same tiredly trendy copy for the same tiredly trendy magazine supplements for newspapers that no one cared about anymore. Roy’s longtime agent had died. Two of the couples they were friendliest with had moved away from their London suburb to South Africa and Australia. They needed a fresh start, she’d decided, in New York, where she’d grown up. And once she’d decided, she became fixated, spending all her time searching online for real estate, magazine jobs, and schools. She was going home, where she belonged. Where no one said “prawns and avos” when they meant shrimp and avocados, where virtually no one drank instant coffee, and where she wouldn’t have to take a bus to get a fresh bagel. The move had taken up all her time and planning and organizational skills. The new house had five bathrooms! But now that they’d actually moved and had lived in the city for a whole year, Wendy felt more restless and exasperated than ever. Roy still hadn’t written anything. Shy was struggling at school and hadn’t made any friends. There were no dinner parties or game nights to plan and host. And Wendy’s job, despite its title and salary and shiny trimmings, was painfully dull. Over the course of a year, all three of them seemed to have retreated into their discomfort and were more lonely and isolated than they had ever been before. Wendy had always maintained a certain bravado. She was Wendy Clarke. Editor of her Upper East Side girls’ school newspaper and NYU’s Washington Square News. Editor of Brexit Suppers. Mrs. Roy Clarke. Her bravado was what had gotten them here. But now that she was here, she didn’t know who she was anymore.
There was a light knock and Manfred poked their head into Wendy’s office.
“How’s it going?”
Manfred was new, one of several gender-fluid editorial assistants at the magazine, but by far the most gorgeous. Incredible legs, perfectly shaped shaved head, beige skin, and wonderful greenish-gold eyes. They were also extremely efficient. The perfume story was due today.
“I’m all right, thank you.”
“I’m getting coffee. You know you want some,” Manfred offered. “Lucy’s not back from Italy until tomorrow.”
Not that anyone ever actually saw Lucy when Lucy was “in,” but the office got very quiet. The rest of the time, when the assistants ran the place, it smelled like pad thai and squealing was rampant.
“Sure,” Wendy agreed. “Coffee would be nice, thank you.”
“Milky and sweet, just the way you like it.” Manfred glanced at Wendy’s gigantic computer screen, which was split between the dead-woman story on The Brookliner, complete with photos, and her perfume story, which was one long, boring paragraph. “Oh my God, have you been reading about the torso?”
Wendy nodded, embarrassed to be caught not working.
“It’s so sick.”
“There were a lot of pieces,” Wendy agreed and then frowned, remembering that she was supposed to be Manfred’s superior.
“Creepy boyfriend. He probably thought he was being all sneaky and careful. The dum-dum.”
Wendy was still not used to working in an office. There seemed to be a strange combination of the familiar and the formal. Was she supposed to delegate to Manfred or invite them to lunch? She turned back to her computer screen, reached for her mouse, and closed The Brookliner window. Sensing that Manfred was about to leave, she whipped around again.
“It’s a good story. I still want to know if they find the head.”
Manfred’s glossy black eyebrows shot up.
“We live quite close to where they found it,” Wendy continued. “How could she be living with that man for so many years and not know what he was capable of?”
“You don’t seem like the Red Hook type,” Manfred observed. “Not that I’d know. I go to work and then I go back to Williamsburg. I love Williamsburg.”
All of the assistants lived in Williamsburg. They were always meeting up for tacos and tequila or going to spinning classes or buying aromatherapy diffusers for their desks at the Williamsburg outpost of Muji.
“I live in Cobble Hill,” Wendy clarified. “It’s very safe.”
“I hope so.” Manfred bit their top lip. “Everyone said you were scary. You’re not scary.”
They looked at each other in silence for a moment.
“Sometimes I give people the wrong impression,” Wendy admitted. When anxious she resorted to snobbery, just like at Shy’s school. But she couldn’t possibly be snobbish to Manfred. Manfred was perfection.
“There’s a rumor that you took a pair of size eight Gucci sneakers from the fashion closet,” Manfred went on teasingly. “Only the assistants get to do that, and only if it’s not an in-demand size, like a five or an eleven.”
Wendy was horrified. The sneakers had been there for almost a month, collecting dust, before she rescued them and gave them to Shy.
“I didn’t know.”
Manfred laughed. “You’re supposed to be able to buy them on your salary, but don’t worry about it.”
Wendy had the feeling Manfred wanted to say something nice about her outfit now, and was struggling. When she’d started at Fleurt she’d decided on a chic and easy uniform—black trousers and a black top. Today’s ensemble was particularly unremarkable.
“You have the most beautiful hands,” Manfred said finally.
Wendy looked down at her hands. They were her thinnest feature. “Thank you.” She looked up. “I like your earrings.” Manfred wore tiny, classic pearl studs.
“Back in a few with coffee,” Manfred promised.
Wendy watched the door close and reached for her phone. At her most lonely and vulnerable moments she texted Roy or Shy, presumably to help organize them in some way, but really just to garner a response. Should she confront Shy about the meeting she’d had with her teachers? She’d come off a bit more demanding and terse and scary than she’d meant to. But what about that smug, unclean, burrito-eating, overly tattooed Latin teacher? All she wanted was for Shy to succeed. Not as a student per se, but as a person. She began a long, urgent, motherly text.