What Nora Knew Read Free Page B

ex?”
    “My ex.”
    “Did you hear from him?”
    “A cease-and-desist order, although it was too late to cease or desist because the piece was already published.”
    “You’d think he’d be a smarter lawyer than that.”
    “You’d think.”
    She asked me to send her my résumé. To say I hung up the phone and wanted to knock out a few cartwheels would be an understatement.
    For years, my résumé was a testament to hyperbole, exaggeration, and creative fiction. Two days after graduatingcollege I moved to the city to be a famous writer, vowing to never end up in my family’s Long Island upholstery business. (Four generations of upholsterers—if you count my sister—a solid, successful business, and my worst nightmare.) Appalled to discover my journalism degree did not lead to offers to run the New York Times or write cover stories for Time magazine, I re-aimed my career goal to paying the rent .
    I started with a job at Starbucks that came with a cute title but lousy pay. To compensate for the gaping hole in my budget, Barista Molly spent the next two years posing nude three nights a week at a SoHo art studio. I developed a talent for holding still without shifting or wobbling or needing to pee. During breaks I’d slip on my robe and walk from easel to easel to see how I’d turned out. Despite my lifelong desire to look mysterious and exotic, I am incorrigibly fresh-faced and all-American. Like somebody whose face belongs on a box of laundry detergent. Pretty enough to be pretty, but maybe not so pretty as to stand out in a crowd. Unless, of course, I’m the only naked person in the room. Then you might notice me.
    Along the way I sold ballet shoes, house-sat, cat-sat, and worked behind a Hertz rent-a-car counter, a job I left the nanosecond I got hired as an advertising writer for kids’ cereals. That job lasted until the client meeting where I made an unfortunate comment involving the word crap, followed by a job as a technical writer for a mountain-biking company, until it was discovered I knew everything about lying my way through an interview, and nothing about technical writing or mountain biking. Next came a few years writing for a WeightWatchers–type website, and one Christmas season selling Mixmasters and can openers in the appliance department at Bloomingdale’s. I stumbled onto my job at Hipp because of someone I slept with whom I had no business sleeping with right after my divorce, but my self-esteem at the time wasn’t exactly helping me make sound decisions.
    Other people might have read a résumé like mine and thought, No focus.
    Not Deirdre. She got it in her head that I was some sort of fearless daredevil who’d do anything. For my interview we met in her office “before hours,” which for her meant before her 8:00 a.m. meeting, and for me meant before I was actually awake. When she offered me a cup of coffee, I didn’t tell her I’d already had two.
    Deirdre’s office at the time was all-white laminate and chrome and glass with a white carpet. Now it’s all-white laminate and chrome and glass with a gray carpet. She sat on one side of her glass-top desk; I sat on the other on a white Mies van der Rohe pavilion chair. A side benefit of a family in the upholstery business—you know your furniture styles.
    “So tell me about this nude-modeling job,” she said, running her gel-tipped fingernails through her spiked, blond hair. Deirdre dresses young for her age—her age at the time being forty-eight, but her wardrobe more like eighteen, with her low-cut dresses and ankle-high boots and enough bracelets to open a jewelry stand. “What did you get from the experience?”
    “Fourteen dollars an hour plus tip jar,” I said. “It helped pay expenses.”
    “Were you self-conscious?”
    “It’s not a good job for self-conscious people.”
    “It must have required a certain amount of bravado.” Deirdre held out a bowl and offered me a cashew. I shook my head no; I didn’t want