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  Taylor completed her morning routine with more vim than usual. So what if J.D. never called back? She actually had an interview! There was reason to hope! She fixed herself French toast. Enjoyed a long, hot shower. Posed naked in the cheval glass I’d found for her in a thrift store on the Bowery. After restocking her cigarette case and packing her hardcover copy of The Firm—a review copy bought for her at the Strand by moi—she stepped into a beautiful summer day.

  Sometimes I wonder, clichéd as it sounds, whether she would have bothered leaving the apartment that morning if she’d known then what the future held in store for her. Whether she would’ve even gotten out of bed, for that matter. What-If is a fun game to play when you have time to kill, like I do, but the bottom line is, things happen for a reason. All things: good, bad, and indifferent. So no, I don’t think foreknowledge would have saved her. I think that if she had it to do again, she would have played it exactly the same way. Then again, what choice did she have? It’s not like Taylor inhabited the world of Terminator 2: Judgment Day—the highest-grossing film of 1991—and could go back in time to alter the future.

  Say what you want about free will; we are all Destiny’s slaves.

  Quid Pro Quo was headquartered in a dazzling high-rise on 520 Madison Avenue, a few blocks from Central Park—as distinct and separate from its rival employment agencies as Tiffany’s is from the cut-rate jewelers on 47th Street. The lobby was breathtaking: all gilt and marble, with potted palms and plush carpets and a grand piano. Walking in, Taylor was awed, her eyes drawn to the gold, to the gaud, to the sinfully high ceiling. In Manhattan, nothing is as decadent as wasted space.

  She was a few minutes early, so Taylor waited by the piano, listening to an arthritic old crone stumble through, appropriately enough, the Pathétique sonata. It was the biggest waste of a Baldwin since Alec did The Marrying Man. Then she stepped into the elevator, which boasted in addition to gilt and marble a cushioned bench and a live operator.

  “Floor, please?” He looked just the way she expected an elevator operator to look—stately, respect-commanding, Anthony Hopkins-esque.

  “Fifty-four.”

  “Yes, miss.” A white-gloved finger depressed the requisite button, and the contraption made its upward climb. How different, this lift from the one at Fraulein! Taylor watched her reflection in the gold-plated doors until they opened to a foyer. The foyer terminated in a mammoth oak door. On the mammoth oak door was a bronze plaque that read THE QUID PRO QUO EMPLOYMENT AGENCY.

  Taylor stepped into the foyer. She wondered if maybe she should tip the operator, but before she could open her handbag, he was gone, swallowed by the elevator’s gilded jaws.

  The Quid Pro Quo lobby looked like a Victorian aristocrat’s study. Bookcases lined the far wall. Sconces peeked from mahogany paneling. Hand-carved end tables were crowned with vases of flowers. The most eye-catching objet d’art in a room full of them was a rough-hewn statue of a creepy-looking owl, twenty some-odd feet tall, that looked like it had been carved from a single giant stone.

  “Who,” Taylor whispered as she walked past.

  On catty-cornered leather divans, faces buried in hardbound novels, four slackers lounged. A fifth was rotating an enormous globe. Behind an ornate rolltop desk sat a pale Asian girl, who rose as Taylor entered. She looked about fifteen, and was thin as a parenthesis.

  “Good morning. You must be Taylor,” she said, gliding across the Persian carpet and extending a dainty hand. “Welcome to Quid Pro Quo. I’m Mae-Yuan. ”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Taylor, gesturing to the statue. “And nice owl.”

  “Yeah, it’s quite the conversation piece.” Mae-Yuan’s black gown seemed more formal than the job required. “All I need from you is your résumé and a list of references.”

  Taylor handed her the two sheets of paper.

  “References are personal rather than professional, yes? With addresses listed as well as telephone numbers?”

  “It was tough,” Taylor quipped, “but I managed to dig up three friends.”

  Mae-Yuan giggled.

  The other occupants of the room checked out Taylor, and vice versa. The four men wore T-shirts and Levi’s—the same clothes that are in style now, but in 1991, the jeans were tighter and bluer, the shirts baggier and boxier, and the high waist of the former and the long cut of the latter ensured the concealment of the ass-crack (it was not until our current decade that the peekaboo ass-crack became chic, for reasons I will never understand). All of them had longish, messy hair, and one had scraggly whiskers above his lip and below his chin that didn’t quite connect. The lone woman was wearing Buddy Holly spectacles, a shiny labret, and an orange sundress that matched her Annie Lennox-circa-1983 hair.

  To look cutting edge in 2009, all you have to do is shop at Urban Outfitters and stop combing your hair. In 1991, it took work. Back then, there was no such thing as “vintage inspired.” You had to scour the thrift shops—Manic Panic, Screaming Mimi’s, Andy’s Chee-Pees, and the good ol’ Salvation Army store—for hip threads. That way, if you found something cool, you knew damn well it was unique. And how, you might ask, did you know what was cool? If you spent enough time on St. Mark’s Place, you figured it out through osmosis, just like you figured out how to walk with purpose, how to glare at cabbies, how to not say hello to anyone. Taylor was green, too new for all of that. She dressed fashionably for Warrensburg, Missouri, but so what? With her predilection for pink and her heart-shaped lockets and charm bracelets, she might as well be on a different planet. The hipsters in the Quid Pro Quo lobby, they knew.

  Taylor sat down on one of the divans, as far away from the others as possible, took out her cigarette case, and, because she couldn’t light up, tapped her fingers on the silver. The hipster at the globe—who was both the closest to her and the most attractive of the bunch, probably because of the facial hair—plopped down on the divan across from her. His bedroom eyes locked in on hers, which she liked; nothing worse than a shy suitor who broke off eye contact like she was Medusa.

  “Dig that cigarette case,” he said. “Flapper chic.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “It sucks I have to keep it closed.”

  “We were born at the wrong time,” he said. “In the fifties you could smoke in an elevator if you wanted to. I’m Bryan, by the way.”

  “I’m Taylor.”

  “Taylor. I like that.” He nodded at the cigarette case. “You’ll have to let me bum one off you when we’re done.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, do you like Soundgarden, by any chance?”

  “Is that, like, a club?”

  “It’s a grunge band. From Seattle. They’re playing Irving Plaza this weekend. Maybe we could…”

  Before Bryan could follow through on the invitation, Mae-Yuan announced that the presentation was about to begin and that everyone should follow her to the conference room. The hipsters followed their hostess down the hall, with Bryan and Taylor bringing up the rear.

  The conference room contained what appeared to be the same table on which Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger dined in the first Batman movie, which is to say, it was big. The six job-seekers took their seats—there were plenty of chairs, but Bryan sat right next to Taylor—and Mae-Yuan passed around tall glasses of iced tea.

  “Some room,” Bryan whispered.

  Taylor took a sip of tea and found herself a minute later unconsciously chewing on a piece of ice. This was an old habit of hers, which Kim Winter was forever telling her indicated sexual frustration. As if she needed pop psychology to explain something so painfully obvious. It had been almost two weeks since her last sexual encounter—which was, for the frisky Taylor Schmidt, a dry spell of Saharan proportions. But she was hopeful, because Bryan seemed interested, and while he wasn’t exactly her type, he would do.

  “Twice the size of my apartment,” she said. “Literally.”

  The refreshments served, Mae-Yuan moved to the back of the room and dimmed the lights. When she
turned them back on, Asher Krug entered. And when Asher Krug entered, he entered.

  “Good morning. Welcome to Quid Pro Quo.”

  Asher was the sort of tall-dark-and-handsome, All-American hunk who crops up in aftershave commercials wearing only a towel, though this morning he was packaged in a dark suit of European cut that looked very expensive.

  Taylor was expecting him to be good-looking. She was not expecting him to be this good-looking. Her heart was “Stairway to Heaven” when the drums kick in. The bustle in her hedgerow was alarming.

  Asher Krug glanced at his Rolex, prompting Taylor to glance at her Swatch. It was exactly eleven o’clock. “What I’m hearing is, you guys are disillusioned with the job search right now. When you leave here, I promise you, you won’t be any longer. Mae-Yuan, can I get some water?”

  Mae-Yuan poured him a tall glass from a tray in the back of the room and brought it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said to her, and then continued: “This past May, you received a rolled-up piece of sheepskin that cost you about eighty thousand dollars. A week later, two solicitation letters turned up in your mailbox. One from the development office of your alma mater, the other from a glorified collection agency. The first note you could ignore, and did—but not the second. In December, you have to start repaying your student loans. Merry Christmas, and ho-ho-ho. They give you a six-month grace period, Sallie Mae, in the same way they give you fifty bucks and a new suit when you get out of jail.”

  Everyone reacted to the joke—even Mae-Yuan. Taylor caught herself laughing a bit too loud, and silenced herself before Asher could meet her glance.

  “I know how you feel,” Asher said. “It was just four years ago, I was right where you are now. Confused. Bitter. Frustrated. Desperate. I know exactly what you’re going through.”

  Asher Krug’s brooding eyes locked on Taylor’s. She plopped a fresh piece of ice into her mouth and champed.

  “You probably feel a little down on life right now,” he continued. “Maybe even a bit suicidal, am I right? Before you put your head in the oven, remember: life is temporary, but Sallie Mae is forever. If you kill yourself—I’m not making this up—if you kill yourself, your student loans don’t die with you; they just transfer to your parents, who cosigned your loan. Think about that: if you were to jump off the Empire State Building, the government would hit up your parents for the balance of your student loans. Mob tactics, if you ask me. Uncle Sam is just Don Corleone with a goatee and a red-white-and-blue hat.”

  Taylor had heard all about Kim Winter’s brushes with hot celebrities in Miami: River Phoenix, Peter Horton, Rob Lowe, Ian Ziering, Johnny Depp. None of them, Taylor was sure, could compare with Asher Krug. Taylor was never one to drool, but her breathing was actually getting heavier just watching this guy. She’d only felt this way once before, at age fourteen, in the sixth row at a Duran Duran concert, when John Taylor’s eyes met her own. She champed on the ice, which hurt her hypersensitive teeth—and didn’t stem the sexual frustration, either.

  “So Sallie Mae is going to send Rocco and Vito to your house, and your parents don’t understand why you don’t have a job yet, and you’ve been to every employment agency in town, and no one will hire you. That’s because—and it’s very simple—you don’t have any experience. It’s a catch-22: to get hired, you need experience, but to gain experience, you need to get hired. All you have going for you right now is your college degree. And if an employer doesn’t see Ivy or the Seven Sisters on your CV, in this job market, it goes right in the circular file.”

  Taylor glanced at the orange-haired chick across the table, who seemed more interested in the speech than the speaker. At any rate, her ice was still in the glass.

  “I know, I know, you went to some private liberal arts college that Peterson’s and Barron’s and U.S. News and World Report claim is ‘most competitive.’ You know how many liberal arts majors graduated from ‘most competitive’ colleges? All of them. They get people from Bucknell, Haverford, Middlebury, Amherst, Wesleyan, Oberlin, Williams, Swarthmore, Wycliffe, Kenyon…Kenyon has a terrific English department. Think most people know that? Think most people have even heard of Kenyon? Please. You’d be better off going to Kent State—at least the baby boomers who do the hiring have all heard of Kent State.

  “The employers, see, they don’t give a damn if you know your Shakespeare, or if you can play the piano, or if you copyedited your campus weekly. The first thing they do, when you go to an interview at a publishing house, is give you a typing test. A typing test! Four years of hard work, intensive study, and massive debt, all so you can take the same typing test they give some ex-con with a GED. It’s insulting. It’s an insult to your intelligence.”

  Asher Krug paused dramatically, and dramatically took a sip of water. Everything he did was dramatic. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the guy. He was in the wrong line of work, Taylor thought. The guy was a movie star, pure and simple.

  “Now,” he continued, “let’s give you a hypothetical situation. Let’s say that you wangle an interview at a publishing house, and they really like you. They narrow it down to two candidates: you and some freak from Harvard—everybody at Harvard is either a freak, a legacy, or both—and they choose you because you didn’t pick your nose during the interview. You know how much they pay entry-level hires, starting salary? Eighteen grand a year. Eighteen grand! Try living in New York on eighteen grand. Let me break it down for you. After taxes, you’re taking home a thousand bucks a month. Your rent is eight hundred, your loans are a buck-fifty, your transportation is another fifty—those tokens add up. That’s already your entire salary and you haven’t even eaten yet, let alone developed a social life. I think—and this is my own philosophy—that your starting salary coming out of a top-drawer university should be more than what it costs to attend that university for one year. Eighteen grand! A year at Bennington costs almost twice that.”

  Asher began to wander around the room, Jesus among the lepers. As he drew near, Taylor felt flushed, short of breath. Her teeth actually chattered. And it wasn’t because of the ice.

  “I’m not saying it’s impossible to find a job,” he said. “It’s not. But it requires a hell of a lot of energy, a hell of a lot of patience, and more than a hell of a lot of luck. And it can be a humbling experience. An ego can only be trampled on so many times.”

  “You can say that again,” the orange-haired chick exclaimed. The others gave empathic laughs. Remembering the losers in the Fraulein lobby, Taylor nodded in agreement.

  “Quid Pro Quo,” Asher resumed his post at the head of the table, “is not like the other agencies. We operate differently. You pick from our list of jobs, and you interview them. If you like what you see, the job is yours. Sound too good to be true?” Again his eyes found Taylor’s. He winked in such a way that no one else in the room was aware that his eyelid had moved. She just about swooned.

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it is. If you’re interested, give me a call this week. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.” This last sentiment he delivered right to Taylor. Who almost choked on the piece of ice sliding down her throat.

  “I hope to hear from you soon.” And Asher Krug’s exit was just as imperial as his entrance.

  Taylor stared at the door for a good thirty seconds, as if he’d left trails of smoke in his wake. Yes, she’d been predisposed to liking him, as he’d been so kind on the phone, but this was something she’d never experienced before. This was Love at First Sight. She was so fixated on Asher that she actually started when she heard a voice say, “Hey, we can go have that smoke now.”

  She had completely forgotten Bryan was there.

  CHAPTER 3

  P

  ower corrupts, but power also attracts. Wealth, celebrity, and talent all enhance a man’s sex appeal—in 1991, for example, fifty-five-year-old Woody Allen was shooting nude photographs of Soon-Yi Previn, who was just old enough to legally drink; it’s a safe bet that the latter was not attracted to the former’
s matinee-idol looks—but nothing sets a woman’s heart aflutter like power. JFK was wealthy, famous, talented, and handsome besides, but the primary reason he got laid so much was because he was the Leader of the Free World. Asher Krug was as good-looking as straight men get, he dressed like he had money, and he had a way with words. None of this is what titillated Taylor. She was drawn to the sense of command that he radiated. The dude oozed power, and she soaked it up. I said before that her tastes ran to bad boys; that was because bad boys seemed powerful. That’s why she liked J.D. Although his job as a bartender at a heavy metal club was not that important in the scheme of the universe, it required him to exercise power. In the realm of the Continental, J.D. was Master and Commander. But his kingdom was one small club that Taylor didn’t even like because it was so fucking loud. Asher, by contrast, was real-world powerful. He took power to a whole new dimension. And she had never met anyone like that before. Of course she was attracted to the guy. How could she not be?

  Taylor leaned against the side of the building, enjoying the cigarette—she had blown off Bryan—and the image of Asher Krug that was still fresh in her mind. Kim Winter’s Adam Curry sighting didn’t seem so impressive all of the sudden. She checked her watch—it was quarter to twelve, so she had plenty of time to kill before her Braithwaite Ross interview.

  Quarter to twelve, she discovered, is when the City That Never Sleeps sleeps. The bars and restaurants are deserted, the cinemas are still closed, the TKTS line is only ten or twelve deep. Even Herald Square is dead. So how to while away the afternoon? There was no way to stretch lunch for more than an hour and a half, even if she read all three daily papers and a gratis copy of the Voice. She wasn’t in the mood to shop and didn’t have any money to spend even if she were. And her Coliseum Books threshold was ninety minutes, tops. Where to go with no money? How you gonna make some time, when all you got is one thin dime?