Lipstick Jungle

“I’m so glad to see you,” Victory exclaimed. In the daylight, the loft was bright and casually bohemian, seeming to suggest the possibility of different ways to live. The reality that she’d been fired began to enter into Nico’s consciousness, but instead of feeling despair, she experienced an odd, floaty sensation, as if she’d stepped into a parallel universe where everything she’d once thought was important no longer mattered.

She had hidden out in Victory’s loft until the end of the day, waiting for the time at which Seymour might reasonably be home. When she walked in, Seymour was in a panic. He’d heard the news—it was all over town, and the newspapers and gossip columns were calling. Getting fired from Ratz Neste, it seemed, was more interesting and newsworthy than when she’d been hired two years before. For weeks afterward, she’d had to endure reading lies and half-truths speculating on the reasons she’d been fired, and the possible flaws in her personality and management style. She was shocked to discover that there were people she’d hired who’d hated her—enough, anyway, to complain about her “coldness” to the press. She was more surprised that the press was even interested. She hadn’t realized she was so “important.”

She wanted to disappear, but Seymour insisted that she had to be seen out in public. It was important to send a message that she was still around, that she wouldn’t be beaten. Seymour said the bad press was only a test. And so, three nights a week, she would dress up and drag her expanding belly out of the apartment, and she and Seymour would attend the rounds of cocktail parties, openings, and dinners that made up the social fabric of New York publishing.

Well, she thought, pulling on her pajamas. Seymour had been right. It was a test. There were people with whom she’d thought she’d had a relationship who brushed her off. And there were others, like Victory and Wendy, who were there, who didn’t care if she’d been fired from Ratz Neste or not. At the end of these evenings, she and Seymour would analyze what had happened, who they had seen, what they’d said, and what their possible agendas might be. It was crucial, Seymour said, to know what people wanted, what they needed, and how far they’d go to get it. It was a question of personal morality . . .

At first, these discussions made her head throb. She was never that interested in getting inside other people’s heads, as she imagined they weren’t interested in getting inside hers. All she had ever wanted to do with Glimmer was to make it a great magazine. That she understood. It seemed to her that hard work and good work should lead directly to its own reward, and if other people had any sense, they would just get on with it. But Seymour explained again and again that the world—the big business world, anyway—didn’t work that way. There were millions of talented people out there who got squashed every day because they didn’t understand that it wasn’t really about talent. It was about perception and positioning. You had to be able to walk into a situation and read it immediately.

One night they were at a cocktail party for the launch of a new Mont Blanc pen when a man in his late forties sidled up next to her. Two things struck Nico: his skin was stained a deep mahogany with self-tanner, and he was wearing a silver-and-black-striped tie. “I just wanted to say that you were doing a great job with Glimmer. Ratz Neste made a big mistake,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” Nico said. Who was he? She had a feeling she ought to know him.

“What are you working on now? Besides the obvious,” he said, glancing down at her belly.

“I have some interesting offers I’m pursuing,” Nico said. It was what Seymour told her to say when someone asked.

“Do you think you might be interested in talking to us at some point?” the man said.

“Of course,” Nico nodded.

It wasn’t until the man walked away that Nico realized who he was—Mike Harness, who had just been promoted to CEO of publishing at Splatch-Verner.

“You see?” Seymour crowed in the taxi going home. “That’s the point of going out in New York. Now all we have to do is wait.”

“Maybe he won’t call,” Nico countered.

“Oh, he will,” Seymour said confidently. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to hire you to replace Rebecca DeSoto at Bonfire magazine. Rebecca isn’t his hire, you see? He’s going to want to put his own person into place. To solidify his position.”

Nico knew Rebecca DeSoto a little bit and liked her. “Poor Rebecca,” Nico said.

“Poor Rebecca nothing,” Seymour scoffed. “You’ve got to develop a tougher hide. It’s not like you’ve got anything personal against her. You don’t even know her. It’s just business.”

Three months after Katrina was born, Splatch-Verner announced that Nico O’Neilly was replacing Rebecca DeSoto as the new editor in chief of Bonfire. And Nico imagined that Rebecca hadn’t seen it coming either.

And then, once she was back on top, people came out of the woodwork, sending flowers and cards and messages of congratulations. Seymour insisted that she answer each one, even the messages from people who had shunned her when she’d been fired. But the first note she sent was to Rebecca DeSoto, telling her that she’d done a great job and wishing her luck in the future. There was no point, Nico thought, in creating enemies where you didn’t have to.

Especially when you had real rivals to defeat.

Two weeks into the job, Nico realized that her first deadly foe was someone who should have been her ally—Bruce Chikalis, the publisher of Bonfire. Bruce was an arrogant young man in his mid-thirties who was considered Mike Harness’s golden boy, something he never let anyone forget.

He and Nico hated each other on sight.

Bruce’s understanding of women was limited to his narrow definition of what women should be in relationship to him. There were only two kinds of women in the world: women who were “fuckable,” and women who were not. And if you were not, he’d just as soon you didn’t exist. To him, women should be beautiful, large-breasted, skinny, and compliant, meaning they were willing to suck his cock whenever he so desired. He never came out and said this, of course, but he didn’t need to. Nico could sense his disdain for women under the surface of everything he said. The first time Nico met him, he had walked into her office, pointed to a model on the cover of the last issue of Bonfire, and said, “All I want to know is, can you get me a date with this?”

“Excuse me?” Nico said.

“If you can get me a date with her,” he said, with a grin that indicated he was used to women falling all over him, “you can keep your job.”

“With that attitude, I think you’re the one who needs to be worried,” Nico replied.

“We’ll see about that. The last editor didn’t last long,” Bruce said, taking a seat and giving her a deceptively boyish smile.

Nico stood up. “I’m not the last editor, Bruce. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with Victor Matrick.” And she walked out of her office, leaving him sitting there to ponder his fate.

She didn’t have a meeting with Victor Matrick, of course, but Bruce couldn’t prove she didn’t. Instead, she went to the ladies’ room and hid out in one of the stalls for ten minutes, thinking. She was going to have to take out Bruce Chikalis. She didn’t doubt his implication that Rebecca DeSoto had failed because of him. But mostly, she guessed that Bruce didn’t really care about Bonfire at all. To him it was merely a stepping-stone on his way up to a bigger position, which meant, consequently, more money and better chicks. If she failed too, it would reinforce the fact that he wasn’t to blame, and he would only end up looking good in the process. But he’d taken on the wrong opponent. She wasn’t going to risk being fired twice in a row. Once was a fluke; two times a loser. Her career would be over, and what would Seymour say? And what would her little daughter think of her?

The answer was simple: She was going to have to destroy Bruce Chikalis.