Reality Check Read online

  The puppy swung his legs to the floor and rose. He offered me his hand. “Hi. I’m Rob Dick. No jokes about my name or you’ll never get on the show. Thank you for coming in this afternoon, Liz.” He motioned for me to sit. “I’m just going to turn on this video camera,” he said, adjusting the lens. “I need to tape your interview (a) so I can remember it since I’ve got associate producers taping potential contestants in two other cities today; and (b) so we can see what you look like on camera.” Rob switched on the camera and returned to his chair. “So,” he continued, “what makes you want to be a contestant on Bad Date, Liz?”

  Before I could reply, Rob barreled ahead. “We were

  3/

  The Job from Hell

  Gwen, the in-house chef at Seraphim Swallow Avanti, the ad agency where I work in SoHo, decided she was going to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by whipping up a pre-holiday lunch comprised of foodstuffs that were the colors of the Irish flag. Forget those old standbys of corned beef and cabbage; Gwen was paid well to feed us bunny food. Hence, the plat du jour was a salad. With Gwen in the kitchen, the plat of every jour was a salad. Never before have I worked at a job where I spent half the day craving bacon cheeseburgers.

  I took another mouthful of my radicchio, pignoli nut, and mandarin orange salad. SSA lured its employees with the promise that there was indeed such a thing as a free lunch. I always thought it was really just a clever ruse to keep everyone from leaving the building for the obligatory—and lengthy—three-martini lunch, still popular in the canyons and caverns of the advertising world.

  “Okay, folks, chow down. We don’t want to spill raspberry vinaigrette all over the product,” chirped Jason Seraphim, one of my bosses.

  going to call the show Date from Hell but the religious right got on my ass and the network executives thought it was the better part of valor to go with something a bit less . . . site-specific, if you get my drift.”

  Why did I want to be on the show, whatever it was titled? Good question. Of all the smart mouth things I’d planned to say, I really didn’t have an answer for that one. I was afraid that telling Rob that I wanted to use the prize money to start up an ad agency focusing primarily on public service campaigns might not be a compelling enough reason for him to cast me. “Because I’m just your average twenty-first century media whore” didn’t sound like the right thing to say either. Besides, that wasn’t true.

  I crossed my legs. “Well, Rob.” I smiled as warmly as I could. “I have led a rich and varied life as a single woman in New York and Lord knows I’ve had my share of experiences with men. And when I saw your ad, I thought here’s my opportunity to share my nightmares with America in the hope that if I can reach just one kindred sister spirit out there, my bad date stories will prevent her from making the same mistakes I did. I suppose they’d have some entertainment value to anyone who wasn’t on those dates.”

  Rob stopped chewing his pencil. “Good answer!” he exclaimed.

  I felt like I was trying out for the old Family Feud show instead. He looked down at my questionnaire. “So, you’re a copywriter for Seraphim Swallow Avanti. My sister works for J. Walter Thompson. She’s an art director over there.”

  “They’re a worthy competitor,” I acknowledged gracefully.

  “Nina always complains about them being too ‘old school,’ though,” Rob said. “You guys are supposed to be real cutting edge, according to her. Hey, did you have anything to do with the ‘site bytes’ campaign for that Intelligencer gizmo? We’ve got their screens in our elevators here. I love that I can see how the Dow and the Knicks are doing before I even get to the tenth floor!”

  “That was me. My baby. Thanks, by the way. All the ad copy including the ‘site bytes’ nickname sprung from my ever-fertile mind.” Unfortunately.

  “Damn!” Rob pointed his pencil at me. “You’re the kind of quick thinker Bad Date needs to keep the energy of the show flowing. Smart, snappy comebacks to our host’s scripted ad libs. Now, this isn’t a guarantee, mind you. We’re conducting interviews across the country—a three-city marathon. And we’re looking to cast a good mix of people from all backgrounds, all colors . . .”

  “A veritable rainbow of disappointed singles.”

  “Exactly! So, have you got any questions for me, Liz?”

  I thought about asking him something like “How do you spell the name of the president of Indonesia?” but I decided to play it straight. I wasn’t yet sure what kind—or even how much—of a sense of humor he had.

  Rob noticed the pause, so he added, “Questions about the show, I mean.”

  “Well, what’s the format?” I asked. I figured I’d give him an easy one to start with.

  “The show has been picked up by the network for a thirteen-week season. Half-hour episodes. We’re going to cast fourteen singles—seven men and seven women—who each week tell our live studio audience and our TV viewers across the country a sob story— hopefully, one that’s tastefully titillating—about a bad date they’ve been on, past or present. The contestants are hooked up to a monitor when it’s their turn to talk about their date.”

  “A monitor?”

  “Finger electrodes. They look like little metal cones that you stick your forefingers into.”

  “And what’s that supposed to do?”

  Rob grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “You can’t lie! Isn’t that cool? The electrodes work like a polygraph, and the graph itself, with all the little lines that go up and down, you know, zitz-zitz—” he illustrated by waving his arm up and down as though it were a huge stylus, “—that’s going to be displayed on a big screen behind the contestant. See, the show would have no integrity if the cast members were just making up bad dates or our staff writers were feeding them copy. We’re going to be the most honest show on television! Except maybe for 60 Minutes. Bad Date has to be real. That’s what’s so exciting. Real people with real horror stories.”

  “Competing for real money,” I added. “So how does someone get the million dollars?”

  “At the end of each week’s episode, the studio audience votes someone off the show. The person with the least objectionable bad date gets canned. The surviving contestants go on to compete against one another the following week when they give a completely new date-from-hell story.”

  It was sinking in. “So the person with the thirteen worst dates of anyone, the most pathetic one of all of us—”

  “Wins a million dollars! Of course you do get compensated each week you stay on the show. A thousand dollars per week. Which you get in a lump sum cashier’s check given to you the night you get voted off the show, in the amount commensurate with the number of episodes you’ve survived. In other words, if the audience votes you off the show after the seventh episode, you walk away that night with a cashier’s check for seven thousand dollars.”

  Somehow a grand an episode didn’t sound like very much mollification for the amount of humiliation involved.

  “Did I tell you who our guest host is?” Rob asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Guess.”

  “Colin Powell,” I sassed.

  “Nope. But we asked him. Gotcha!” Rob said when my eyes widened. “Our guest host is gonna be—if we can nail down the details of his contract, which I expect the network brass will do this week— Rick Byron!”

  “The movie star?” I shifted in my chair and crossed my legs, angling my body to one side so that I would appear thinner and, hence, more potentially castable.

  “Yup. It’s a perfect tie-in with the movie he’s got out now, What’s Your Sign?”

  “That’s the one where he signs up with this matchmaking agency and ends up going on a whole slew of bad dates, right? I loved that movie,” I gushed. Actually, it was a total piece of fluff that was less challenging than the box of Dots I munched during the picture. At least the Dots got stuck in my fillings and stayed with me long after the movie plot did. I asked Rob what would happen when it was down to just a few contestants. How w
ould they fill the half-hour program?

  “Early on in the game, the contestants only have a couple of minutes each to share their tale of woe. Just a slam, get-in-get-out kind of thing. As we reduce the number of cast members, they’ll have more air time to elaborate on their sob story for that week and we’ll get to learn more about who they are, their backgrounds, their jobs, whatever they want to talk about. It’ll be more like an interview on Letterman.”

  Rob’s enthusiasm was contagious. I was getting the idea and forming a strategy of my own—a game plan for surviving Bad Date all the way to the jackpot. But I wasn’t about to share it with the show’s producer. I smoothed out my mini and smiled at Rob. “I see.”

  “Well, then,” he said, rising from his desk, “just one more thing before you go. Tell me about a bad date you’ve been on. Don’t worry, if we cast you, you still can use it on an episode.”

  I had had a feeling it would come to this. “No lying, right? Not even an embellishment for dramatic effect?”

  Rob shook his head. “The practice will be good for you.”

  I took a deep breath, debating whether to hit him with one of my absolute worst or just give him a taste of the misery of some of my matchups. “Do you want to hear about the guy who dumped me for my kid sister?”

  Rob jumped up from his chair before I could get any further. “That’s a great one-liner,” he exclaimed. “In fact, that’s all I need to see for now. Well! It’s been terrific meeting you. And we’ll be in touch.” He turned off the camera and shook my hand. Tara materialized out of nowhere to escort me back out to the waiting area.

  Jem had her head bent over a stack of papers. In a careful hand she was writing a comment on the final page of one of them. I watched her lips move as she turned back to the first page, slid the tip of her violet Pilot marker along the left margin of each sheet, subtracted from one hundred in a muttering tone I knew well, then returned to the first page and wrote a big seventy-nine below the student’s name.

  “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?” I asked her.

  “With all this time to kill, I figured what better opportunity to grade midterms?” Jem flipped the exam she’d just finished grading to the back of the stack, then tackled the next one, shaking her head and muttering to herself. “About a half dozen kids make the same error every semester,” she griped.

  “Which course is that one?” I asked her.

  “ ‘The Pen or the Sword: Communication Through Violent and Nonviolent Means.’ Whenever we cover the segment on frontier justice and vigilantism, a handful of students always refer to Shane as the hero of High Noon.” She sighed, exasperated.

  “Well,” I said brightly, “I’m glad to see you’re taking this million dollar contest so seriously.”

  Jem grinned up at me, rolled her eyes, and resumed her grading. “At least I’m doing something useful,” she added, still fixated on the midterm. When I didn’t ask to whom she was comparing herself, she explained. “Nell,” she said.

  I looked across the corridor and saw Nell, her hand caught in mid–hair toss, her head tilting back, her smile a bus ad for Pepsodent. The British call it “chatting up.” We Yankees tell it like it is. Nell appeared to be in full-throttle flirt with the dark-haired man who had been so intently looking at me. For some reason, I felt one of those icky jealousy pangs. And I didn’t know the guy from Adam.

  Tara reviewed her list. “Number forty-eight. Anella Avignon,” she said, looking down the corridor.

  “Oops! ’Scuse me.” Nell treated her new friend to another dazzling glimmer—the effects of several thousand dollars’ worth of adolescent orthodonture. She skittered over to Jem and me and grabbed her clipboard. “Almost forgot it,” she said, as she straightened her skirt with her free hand, then gave her hair another once over.

  “It’s a piece of cake,” I whispered to her.

  “Oh, please. I’m just sorry they called my name already. That Jack guy is really cute. . . . I was just getting to know him. And he can cook! This is such a lark, you two.” Halfway down the hall to Rob Dick’s office, she was still laughing at the sheer goofiness of our mutual adventure.

  4/

  The Hunk

  I sat down to talk with Jem, but Professor Lawrence wasn’t interested in anything but getting her midterms graded. She frowned when a shadow crossed our paths, obscuring the light she needed to decipher her students’ sloppy scrawls masquerading as penmanship.

  “Hey, hey! I can’t read,” Jem said, looking up at the obstruction.

  An extremely nice-looking obstruction, if I do say so myself. The tall, dark, and drop-dead gorgeous obstruction Nell had referred to as Jack.

  “Excuse me. Are you Liz?” he asked me, pocketing his red yo-yo. “I hear you’re in advertising.”

  “And you’ve got all your hair!” I blurted like an idiot, thinking about how many guys I knew who needed Rogaine after they turned thirty-five. I consider myself a very verbal person, but his looks robbed me of words. Intelligent ones, anyway.

  “Yes, I do, but it’s not as nice as yours.” He smiled—the kind of smile that radiated kindness as well as humor, a smile with the eyes as well as the lips. “It’s so shiny, you could be on one of those shampoo commercials.”

  I threw caution to the winds. We weren’t even properly introduced, but I wanted Jack to touch me; I wanted to know how it would feel to have him run his fingers through my hair. My scalp is one of my most erogenous zones, so if the guy was courageous enough to comply, the worst that would happen was that I would get a cheap thrill. I don’t know how else to explain it. It was something new for me, something primal. Maybe it was pheromones. “You can . . . touch it . . . if you want to,” I offered, in a fit of lust and chutzpah.

  The man didn’t reach out and tentatively run his palm along the length of my hair. He grasped a handful of it. In one bold gesture. It didn’t remotely hurt; in fact, it felt quite wonderful, gave me a little shiver at the nape of my neck. Jack ran his fingers through my hair as though he wanted to memorize its texture, color, weight. Instinctively, I found myself leaning backward, toward him. Before I could even consider editing my reaction to his touch, I realized I’d just let out a tiny moan.

  “Guys, can you take that elsewhere?” Jem asked, a slight edge to her voice.

  “Not a problem. Can I offer you something to eat? Either of you.” He steered me over to a vending machine. The machine was a good six inches taller than I was. Jack was taller than the vending machine. “Sugar or salt?” he asked. “Or you can cover more than one of the four basic food groups with such combinations as Reeses or those cheese-stuffed pretzel nuggets. My treat.”

  “Jem, they’ve got Sugar Babies,” I called out to her, then turned back to face my handsome co-conversationalist. “That’s my friend, Jem. Mine and Nell’s. Whom you just met a few minutes ago.”

  Jem waved her hand at us.

  “Does that mean she wants the Sugar Babies or she passes?” Jack asked. I was beginning to fall for that warm smile of his. And the best way to my heart is by being nice to my friends. I shook my head.

  “Was that a yes or a no? God, I hate women who can’t make decisions.”

  His grin indicated that he was just having fun with us. The high-wattage smile could have lit up the room. It drew attention to his dark eyes, and briefly sounding their depths, I decided to add intelligence to the cocktail of Jack’s qualities.

  Our new benefactor deposited three quarters into the machine and punched the alpha-numeric code for Sugar Babies. The yellow and red packet thunked to the well inside the glass case at the bottom of the machine.

  “I’ll get it. I’m built closer to the ground than you are,” I offered. I retrieved the bag of caramels and turned to Jem. “Jem! Catch!” She looked up and I underhanded her the pack.

  “Nice toss. Ever play softball?”

  “Nah. Just a lucky throw. And yes, I am Liz, by the way. Liz Pemberley.”

  “Jack. Jack Rafferty.” Instea
d of shaking my hand, he rested his on my shoulder. It felt warm. “So, what would you like?”

  Oh, mister, you don’t want to know, I thought. I peered at the range of selections. “Oh, yes, my favorite petroleum product. Gummi Bears.”

  “What a coincidence. Mine too.” Jack fed seventyfive cents into the vending machine.

  “Do you rob parking meters or something?” I said.

  “Why do you ask?”

  I wondered if his thick dark hair curled naturally or if he used some sort of gel. “You’ve got so many quarters.”

  “I usually save them up for the laundromat, but when damsels are in need of midafternoon sugar-craving satiation, I feel I must leap to the rescue.”

  When he leaned past me to retrieve my cello-wrapped packet with the pseudo–Brothers Grimm graphics, I found myself breathing a bit more deeply to catch the scent of his aftershave or whatever it was he was wearing. He smelled like those blue water colognes that are supposed to remind you of the sea . . . make you wish you were drifting off to sleep on the deck of a catamaran with an umbrella drink in your hand.

  “So, how did you know I was in advertising?”

  “Your friend Nell told me you were one of the top copywriters in New York. ‘Fastest brain in the business,’ she said, as a matter of fact. So I had to meet a woman whose mind goes from zero to sixty in a millisecond.”

  Well, well, good for Nell. “I pay her to say those things,” I kidded. I felt my pupils dilating by the centimeter.

  “I asked her what kind of stuff you work on that really rings your bell and she told me your favorites are public service campaigns.”

  Good grief, he’d practically interviewed Nell about me. “All true.”

  “Any one in particular that you’re proudest of?”