What Nora Knew Read Free Page A

chair or if it was dropped off by her assistant, Gavin. Deirdre’s assistants are always male. I’ve workedhere four years now, since the year after my divorce, and in that time she’s been through half a dozen assistants, all male.
    I got to the office around eleven, having written at home that morning. One of the perks of my job is you’re allowed to go off and be creative in other locales. Deirdre sees our main competitor as either Gawker or Jezebel ; it’s hard to tell, but someone once told her that Gawker writers get to work at home, so now we get to do it, too.
    When I walked in, ass-kissing, backstabbing Emily Lawler was sitting in her adjacent cubicle with her nose in a book. Usually, she’s poking her nose into my business. Emily has this really white skin and really dark hair and round, dark eyes. She looks like Snow White minus the dwarfs. After I stowed my purse in my file drawer, next to my backup heels and box of Lipton chicken-soup packets, Emily popped up, looming over me with that cutsie, sneery face of hers, and said, “Good thing you showed up before two,” which proves she didn’t have the decency to even pretend she didn’t read my note. “Gavin was asking where you were.”
    “Oh, really?” I turned on my computer.
    “I told him if there’s something Deirdre needed, that I’d be happy to help.” She smiled her fake sweet smile that’s not meant to be sweet, just fake.
    “You’re a true pal, Emily.” I feigned intense typing to make my pal go away. “Must be nice to sit around reading all day.”
    Emily’s got the all-time cushiest of cushy jobs. She writes book reviews for EyeSpy . She held up a novel, Larceny among Lovers . The cover had a cornball illustration of a man, in atrench coat and fedora, standing in a doorway and casting a shadow across a dead woman’s legs.
    “This guy had to grow up with a lot of sisters,” she said, pointing to the author’s name. “He really understands women.”
    “Isn’t that a crime book?”
    “Criminals have sisters.”
    “Emily, can I pay you to go away?”
    “You wish,” she said and disappeared behind our mutual wall.
    When I first started at EyeSpy, we all had actual offices. Now only Deirdre and the CFO have offices. About a year ago they knocked down walls, squeezed us together, and knocked off a full floor’s rent. The official party line was that an open plan would foster communication and encourage rapport, but all that really happened was now everyone sits at their desk listening to iPods, blocking out any distractions and each other.
    Maybe Deirdre wanted to meet to tell me what a commendable job I was doing. We’d discuss moving my office; she’d say I deserved any cubicle of my choice. Maybe she was so thrilled with me that I could request my own column again. I do that a lot. Request a column. And maybe this time she’d say yes!
    Well, maybe.
    Before EyeSpy, I was writing for Hipp magazine, which was anything but. Hipp ’s readership was decent until the magazine industry went into the toilet, and even after that it was still semidecent, but their readers are aging—moreinterested in hip replacements than hip nightclubs, a side effect of Hipp not converting to an online format. The good news was, the magazine was floundering enough that they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, which is how I got to write a piece about a powerful, well-known, unnamed New York divorce attorney who cheated on his expense account and did unflattering impersonations of his clients.
    Oh, and who’d recently dumped his journalist wife.
    I still don’t know how Deirdre ended up reading the story—she must have been at her beauty salon or something—but she called me at Hipp and introduced herself. Like I wouldn’t know who she was!
    “Loved your piece on Evan Naboshek,” she said. “You did to him what Nora Ephron did to Carl Bernstein.”
    “Technically that piece wasn’t about my ex-husband; it was about—”
    “Your