Really, life would make a great deal more sense if she could spend a great deal more of it unconscious.
3
SARAH MEYER WAS ASLEEP when Prescott Holloway called, but she wasn’t surprised to be wakened in the middle of the night, and she was even less surprised to be wakened by the company driver instead of her own boss. Sarah Meyer was only twenty-six years old, but she already had the world figured out, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like much of anything. Sitting up front with Prescott on the way into the office, feeling cinched and strangled by her seat belt, it occurred to her that she had a right to complain. She’d had a right to complain months ago, when the job she’d wanted—the one she’d slaved for, in fact, the one she deserved—had gone instead to the outsider Maria Gonzalez. Sarah had known what all that was about, and she still did, and nobody was going to talk her out of it. The least Lotte could have done was to give Sarah the job as Maria’s assistant—but that hadn’t happened either. Nothing ever happened the way Sarah wanted it to. Nothing ever had, not even when Sarah was in high school in Scarsdale, not even when she went away to college at Barnard, never. Written down on paper, Sarah’s life looked perfect. Witnessed in living color, it was a mess. Sarah didn’t even have a roommate any more. Her last one, a snippy little bitch from Baton Rouge, had packed up and moved out back in August. Sarah was not in the least bit interested in finding someone else. Whoever she did find was sure to be a first-class pain in the ass. Whoever she did find was sure to be pretty.
Sarah rode all the way into the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building without saying more than “hello” to Prescott. She marched through the lobby to the elevators without saying more than “hello” to Jack. Since Prescott and Jack both knew her well, neither one of them tried to start a conversation. Sarah was in a bad mood, and when she was in a bad mood she was nasty. When she was in a bad mood she was ugly, even uglier than usual, and she knew it. That was Sarah’s stock in trade. She was ugly.
When the elevator doors closed, Sarah looked up at the car ceiling and sighed. She was tired and she was cranky and she felt even fatter than she really was. Her face felt like pudding. For years, she had told herself she would win out in the end, that the process was simple, that if she followed all the rules it would work out just like all those Beverly Cleary young adult novels she borrowed from the library. There would be her sister, Linda, pretty and brainless, knocked up at nineteen and sentenced to a life of diapers and drudgery. There would be Sarah, with an Ivy League diploma under her arm, marching off to the glamorous world of television. Or art. Or something. The problem was, Linda had indeed gotten married at nineteen, but she hadn’t been sentenced to drudgery, because she’d married a student at the Harvard Medical School. Now the student was the most successful plastic surgeon in Westchester County, and Linda had maids. Sarah had one room on the Upper West Side and a closet full of mark-downs from Lerner’s. She had also stopped going out to Westchester to visit Linda, because Linda always did the same thing. She played matchmaker. And it didn’t work.
The elevator doors opened to the twentieth floor, and Sarah stepped out to find DeAnna Kroll pacing back and forth in front of the receptionist’s desk, reading off a piece of crumpled paper and swearing to herself. Sarah could just imagine what the paper was. She could just imagine what the mess was like. She’d never trusted Maria Gonzalez herself. She’d never liked Maria’s assistant, either. Maria’s assistant was an olive-faced girl from Guatemala named Carmencita Boaz. Carmencita spoke perfect English in a lilting accent that sounded like wind chimes, and Sarah hated her.
Sarah trundled across the lobby, the thick mounds of her hip bulges straining against the spandex of her leggings, the heavy swelling globes of her breasts bouncing and shaking under the sheer rayon of her tunic. Sometimes she wished that she were black. Black women were allowed to be fatter than white women. It was true. You only had to look at DeAnna Kroll to tell.
DeAnna must have sensed movement in the foyer. She put down the piece of paper and looked up. When she saw Sarah, she nodded and folded her arms across her chest. Sarah was ready to spit. With anybody else, Ms. Kroll would at least have smiled and made a welcome.
“Sarah,” DeAnna Kroll said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m having the devil’s own time finding anybody.”
“I was home,” Sarah said.
“Yes. Well. Do you know what this is all about?”
“The Siamese twins never got here from London and now we don’t have a guest for the show and you can’t find Maria Gonzalez anywhere,” Sarah said, as if she were reciting it, which she was, in a way. This was what Prescott Holloway had told her when he called to wake her up, and what she had worked so hard not to talk about in the ride down in the car. It was hard to talk about it even now. Maria Gonzalez was nowhere to be found. Oh, it figured. It really figured.