Queen of Babble in the Big City (Queen of Babble #2) Read online

  But young girls, they do get weary…

  Okay, I totally have to stop thinking of that song all the time.

  “I am proud of her,” Chaz says. “I just wish she could help make a difference fewer hours of the day, is all.”

  “Aw.” I smile at him. “You’re sweet. You wuv your girlfriend.”

  He shoots a sarcastic look at me. “Maybe you do have a personality disorder,” he says.

  I laugh and take a swing at him, but he ducks.

  “What about you and Luke?” he wants to know. “I mean, aside from the shameful secret you’re keeping from him—about your abject poverty—how are you two getting along?”

  “Great,” I say. I think about asking him what I should do about Luke’s mom. The guy who’d called—the one with the accent—had left another message, sounding wounded that Bibi hadn’t shown up to their meeting. Again, he didn’t leave a name, but again, he’d mentioned their standing appointment, and that he’d be waiting.

  I’d erased the message before Luke got home from class. It just didn’t seem to me like the kind of thing a guy would want to listen to. About his mother, that is.

  Of course, I was considering the fact that I hadn’t blabbed the whole thing out to Luke anyway the minute he walked through the door a sign of my newfound maturity and ability to keep my mouth shut.

  The fact that I’m not blabbing it to Chaz now is even further proof of my incredible New York sangfroid.

  Instead I say to Chaz conversationally, “I’m still doing the tiny woodland creature thing, and it seems to be working.”

  Chaz blinks at me. “The what?”

  And I realize, belatedly, that I’ve been lulled into a false sense of comfort by his easygoing nature…so much so that I’ve started talking to him about stuff I normally reserve for Shari’s ears only! What am I doing, talking about my woodland creature theory with another GUY? Worse than just another guy—my boyfriend’s best friend?

  “Uh, nothing,” I say quickly. “Things are fine with Luke.”

  “What’s the tiny woodland creature thing?” he wants to know.

  “Nothing,” I say again. “Just—nothing. It’s a girl thing. It’s not important.”

  But Chaz totally won’t let it go. “Is it a sex thing?”

  “Oh my God!” I cry. “No! It’s not a sex thing! God!”

  “Well, what is it then? Come on, you can tell me. I won’t tell Luke.”

  “Oh, right,” I say with a laugh. “I’ve heard that before—”

  Chaz looks wounded. “What? Have I ever ratted you out to any of your boyfriends before?”

  I glare at him. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before. At least, not one who wasn’t gay or using me for my money. Back when I had some money, I mean.”

  “Come on, just tell me,” Chaz says. “What’s it mean to do the tiny woodland creature thing? I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Just…” I can see I have no choice but to tell him. Otherwise, he’s never going to let it go. And with my luck, he’ll bring it up in front of Luke. “It’s just this theory I have, all right? That guys are like tiny woodland creatures. And to lure them in, you can’t make any sudden moves. You have to be subtle. You have to be cool.”

  “Lure them in to do what?” Chaz asks, seeming genuinely not to know. “You’ve already got Luke. I mean, you’re living together. Although I still don’t understand why you can’t tell your parents that’s what you’re doing. They’re going to find out it isn’t Shari you’re sharing your place with eventually. Don’t you think the fact that you have an address on Fifth Avenue is going to make them a little suspicious?”

  I roll my eyes. “Chaz. My parents don’t know from Fifth Avenue. They’ve never been to New York. And you know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I really don’t. Enlighten me?”

  “You know,” I say. Because he’s clearly never going to let it go. “Get them to commit.”

  “Get them to…” Comprehension dawns across Chaz’s face. Comprehension combined with what appears to be a healthy dose of horror. “You want to marry Luke?”

  I have no choice but to lift up one of the gold cushions and hurl it at him in fury. “Don’t say it like that!” I yell. “What’s wrong with it? I love him!”

  This time Chaz is too stunned to duck. The cushion bounces off him, nearly overturning his empty gin and tonic glass, already teetering precariously on the uneven floor.

  “You’ve only known the guy like three months,” he cries. “And you’re already thinking about marriage?”

  “Oh, what?” I can’t believe this is happening. Again. Why did I open my big mouth? Why can’t I ever keep anything to myself? “Like there’s some kind of correct time frame in which you’re supposed to decide these kinds of things? Sometimes you just know, Chaz.”

  “Yeah, but…Luke?” Chaz is shaking his head in disbelief. This is not a good sign. Considering Luke is his best friend. And he probably has insider information.

  “What about Luke?” I demand. But I’ll admit it, even though I sounded cool about it—to my own ears, anyway—my heart was beginning to race. What was he talking about? Why did he have that expression on his face? Like he’d just smelled something bad?

  “Look, don’t get me wrong,” Chaz says. “I think Luke’s a great guy to hang out with and all. But I wouldn’t marry him.”

  “No one is asking you to,” I point out. “In fact, in most states, that would be illegal.”

  “Ha, ha,” Chaz says. Then he clams up. “Listen. Never mind. Forget I said anything. You go on forest-creaturing him, or whatever it is. Have fun.”

  “Woodland,” I say. Now my heart isn’t just racing. It feels like it’s about to explode out of my chest. “Woodland creature. And tell me what you mean. Why wouldn’t you want to marry Luke? I mean, aside from the fact that you’re not gay.” And that he hasn’t asked. Me, I mean.

  “I don’t know.” Chaz looks uncomfortable. “I mean, marriage is pretty final. You have to spend the rest of your life with the person.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “I think your father’s built himself a pretty lucrative career proving that this isn’t always the case.”

  “That’s what I mean, though,” Chaz says. “If you pick the wrong person, it can end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. If my dad’s firm represents you, I mean.”

  “But I don’t think Luke is the wrong person,” I explain to him patiently. “For me. And I’m not saying I want to get married to him tomorrow. I’m not an idiot. I want to be established in my career before I start having kids and all of that. And I told him the whole moving-in-together thing was on a trial basis and all of that. I’m just saying that, if things work out, when I’m thirty or so, marrying Luke would be very nice.”

  “Well,” Chaz says. “That’s fine, I guess. But I’m just saying, a lot of stuff can happen in the six years before you turn thirty—”

  “Seven,” I correct him.

  “—and that if you guys were horses, and I were a betting man, Luke’s not the horse I would bet on to come in first. Or at all, for that matter.”

  I shake my head. My heart has slowed down. It’s clear Chaz doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. Not bet on Luke? What is he talking about? Luke is the most fantastic person I’ve ever met. What other guy does Chaz know who’s memorized every song on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album by heart—and frequently sings them in the shower—on key? What other guy does Chaz know who can take oil, vinegar, some mustard, and an egg, and make the most delicious salad dressing I’ve ever tasted? What other guy does Chaz know who was willing to give up his lucrative salary as an investment banker to go back to school to become a doctor, and help heal sick children?

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friend,” I point out.

  Chaz looks defensive. “I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m just saying that I’ve known him a lot longer than you have, Lizzie, and he’s always had a problem with—well, let’s just say when the going gets tough, Luke has a habit of getting going. As in quitting.”

  I’m appalled. “Because he put off medical school to become an investment banker, then realized he made a mistake? People do that, you know, Chaz. People make mistakes.”

  “You don’t,” Chaz says. “I mean, you make mistakes. But not that kind. You’ve known what you’ve wanted to do since the day I met you. You’ve also known it was going to be hard, and that it would take a lot of sacrifice, and that you probably wouldn’t make a lot of money at it right away. But that never stopped you. You never gave up on your dream when the going got tough.”

  I gape at him. “Chaz, have you even been in the same room with me for this entire conversation? I just got through telling you how I’m about to give up on my dream.”

  “You just got through telling me how you were going to move home and figure out some other way to pursue it that doesn’t include New York City,” Chaz corrects me. “That’s different. Listen, Liz, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Luke’s a bad guy. I’m just saying I wouldn’t—”

  “Bet on him to finish first if he were a horse and you were a betting man,” I finish for him impatiently. “Yes, I know, I heard you the first time. And I get what you’re saying, I guess. But you’re talking about the OLD Luke. Not the Luke he’s turned into, now that he has me to support him. People change, Chaz.”

  “Not that much,” Chaz says.

  “Yes,” I say. “They do. That much.”

  “Can you give me empirical data to support that statement?” Chaz asks.

  “No,” I say. Now I’m really getting impatient. I don’t know how Shari puts up with Chaz sometimes. Oh, sure, he’s cute, in a jockish kind of way. An
d he totally adores her, and is supposedly fantastic in bed (sometimes I think Shari shares a little too much). But what’s with the turned-around baseball caps? And the Can you give me the empirical data to support that statement?

  “Then that,” Chaz goes on, “is a specious argument—”

  What’s that Shakespeare saying? The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers? It should be, The first thing we do, let’s kill all the graduate students getting a Ph.D. in philosophy.

  “Chaz!” I cut him off. “Do you want to help me measure your windows so I can go home and start on your curtains, or what?”

  He glances at the windows. They are covered with hideous folding metal gates, in order to keep out the few remaining crackheads in the city, all of whom seem to live in his neighborhood, for some reason.

  They are terrifically ugly. Even a guy should be able to see that.

  “I guess,” he says, looking deflated. “It’s more fun arguing with you, though.”

  “Well, I’m not having any fun,” I inform him.

  He grins. “Okay. Curtains it is. And Lizzie.”

  I’ve scooped up the measuring tape and am slipping off my shoes so I can climb up onto the radiator to measure. “What?”

  “About the job. In my dad’s office. There’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have to keep your mouth shut. I mean, about who you see and what you overhear in there. You’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s a law office. And they promise their clients total discretion—”

  “God, Chaz,” I say, irritated all over again. “I can keep my mouth shut, you know.”

  He just looks at me.

  “If it’s important, I can,” I insist. “Like, if my paycheck depends on it.”

  “Maybe,” Chaz says, almost as if to himself, “recommending you for the job isn’t the best idea…”

  I throw the measuring tape at him.

  Lizzie Nichols’s Wedding Gown Guide

  Yes, I know. Everybody’s doing it. Well, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?

  So stop letting your bra straps show!

  I don’t care how much you paid for your over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder, it’s uncouth to force us to look at it (especially if the straps are graying or frayed—and ESPECIALLY on your wedding day)!

  Keep your girls where they should be by having your wedding-gown specialist attach about an inch and a half of seam binding or a thread chain under the shoulder seam of your sleeve or strap. Then have her sew a ball snap to the free end of the guard, and a socket snap toward the neck edge.

  Then snap your strap. It will be out of sight…and so will you!

  LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS™

  Chapter 8

  If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French politician and historian

  N ew York is a strange place. Things here can change in the blink of the eye. I guess that’s what they mean when they say a New York minute. Everything just seems to go faster here.

  Like, you can be walking down a street that seems perfectly tree-lined and pleasant, and not even one block later, you suddenly find yourself in a trash-filled, graffitied seedy underbelly of a neighborhood, resembling something out of a crime scene on one of the Law and Orders. And all you’ve done is crossed a street.

  So I guess, considering all this, I shouldn’t have been so amazed that in a forty-eight-hour period, I went from having no job in New York City to being the proud owner of two of them.

  The interview with the human resources division of Chaz’s dad’s office is going well. Really well. It’s like a joke, actually. The harried-looking woman whose office I’m escorted into after waiting for nearly half an hour in the fancy lobby (they’d upgraded from gold-trimmed couches to deep-brown leather ones, which blended nicely with the dark wood paneling on the walls and rich green carpeting) asks me one or two pleasant questions about how I know Chaz—“From the dorm we all lived in in college,” I say, not mentioning that Shari and I had met him at an outdoor movie night sponsored by the student government of McCracken Hall, at which Chaz had been the one who’d started passing around a joint, causing us to refer to him for days afterward as the Joint Man…until Shari spied him eating breakfast in the dining hall by himself one morning, plunked herself down beside him, asked him his name, and by that evening had slept with him in his single in McCracken’s tower suites. Three times.

  “Great,” Roberta, my interviewer, says, apparently not realizing she’s getting a less than complete relationship history from me. “We all love Charles. The summer he worked here in the mailroom, he had us all in stitches the whole time. He’s so funny.”

  Yeah. Chaz is hilarious.

  “It’s just too bad,” Roberta goes on wistfully, “that Charles didn’t choose the law. He has his dad’s same brilliant academic mind. When either of them starts arguing a point—well, get out of the way!”

  Yeah. Chaz likes to argue a point, all right.

  “So, Lizzie,” Roberta says pleasantly. “When can you start?”

  I gape at her. “You mean I got the job?”

  “Of course.” Roberta looks at me strangely, as if any other turn of events would be unthinkable. “Could you start tomorrow?”

  Can I start tomorrow? Is there a grand total of three hundred and twenty-one dollars in my checking account? Are my credit cards maxed out to their limits? Am I fifteen hundred dollars in debt to MasterCard?

  “I can definitely start tomorrow!”

  Oh, Chaz, I take it all back. I love you. You can say whatever you want about Luke. You can be as pessimistic as you choose about the wisdom of my wanting to marry him. For this, Chaz, I owe you. Big time.

  “I love your boyfriend.” I call Shari on my cell to tell her as I come out of the skyscraper on Madison Avenue in which the offices of Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn take up the entire thirty-seventh floor.

  “Really.” Shari sounds, as always when I call her at her office these days, a little frantic. “You can have him.”

  “Taken,” I say. I’m on Fifty-seventh Street between Madison and Fifth. It’s such a nice fall day—just warm enough that you don’t need a coat, and just cool enough that you don’t feel sweaty—I decide to walk to Monsieur Henri’s, just thirty blocks north, instead of taking the subway, saving myself a whopping two bucks. Hey, every little bit counts. “Chaz got me a job in his dad’s office.”

  “A job?” I hear computer keys clacking. Shari is talking and e-mailing at the same time. But that’s okay. I’ll take whatever I can get, it’s so hard to reach her these days. “I thought you already had a job. At that wedding-gown place.”

  “Yeah,” I say, realizing I hadn’t been quite as upfront with my friends about my deal with Monsieur Henri as I ought to have been. “That’s not really a paying gig—”

  “WHAT?” I realize by her tone—and the cessation of clacking keys—that I now have Shari’s undivided attention. “You took a nonpaying job?”

  “Right,” I say. It’s kind of hard to walk down a busy sidewalk like the one I’m currently hurrying along and talk on your cell at the same time. There are so many businesspeople rushing back to their offices, street vendors hawking Prada knockoffs, tourists stopping to gawk at the tall buildings, and homeless people asking for spare change that it’s as hard to navigate as the Indy 500 Speedway during the race. “Well, it’s not easy to find a paying fashion gig in this city when you’re just starting out.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Shari says, sounding incredulous. “What about Project Runway?”

  “Shari,” I say. “I’m not going on a reality show—”

  “No, I just mean…they make it seem like it’s all so easy—”

  “Well,” I say. “It’s not. Anyway, I want us to get together to celebrate—you and me and Chaz and Luke. So what are you doing tonight?”

  “Oh,” Shari says. I hear the clacking start up again. Which isn’t easy, considering the fact that there are cars honking and people talking loudly all around me. And yet, I can still hear the fact that my best friend is only half paying attention to me. “I can’t. Not tonight. We’re getting slammed here today—”