The Whitney Chronicles

“Here you are.” Mr. Van Horne pulled around the spouting volcano to drop me off at the front door of my hotel.

“I’ll call you and we’ll set a time for dinner.” Eric patted the piece of paper in his pocket containing my phone number.

Then they left me to the perils of Sin City. How dangerous could it be, surrounded as I was with what looked like the entire population of the Midwest? Grandpas, grandmas, mothers pushing strollers and fathers carrying toddlers swarmed around me like locusts as I made my way to the reception desk. I tried to count how many fanny packs I saw and finally decided it would be easier to count the people who didn’t have them on.

I tipped the bellhop double for hauling my weighty bags to my room, a cavernous arena with a great tub and blackout curtains. With room service, I wouldn’t have to leave for a month—if the trade show weren’t such an interruption, of course. I flung myself onto the bed to make sure the mattress was up to my standards and debated the question of showering and changing before or after I checked on how the booth setup was progressing. Occasionally the people I hire to help me with logistics don’t show up on time and I’m stuck doing it alone. Not showering and changing clothes first was, of course, the totally wrong decision.

I put the final touches on the trade-show booth—the laptop that would give my PowerPoint presentation, a bouquet of flowers just for color and a dish of imported chocolates in case some of the participants needed an extra incentive to hang around my booth. If I’d been thinking about my diet, I would have given away toothbrushes.

Hot, I’d mopped my forehead on my arm—makeup and all—tied my hair back with a piece of string I’d found in one of the shipping boxes and removed my shoes when Matt Lambert found me.

“So you are here! Harry told me you would be.”

I spilled a bottle of water on my lap and tried to dissolve into the floor, but unlike the Wicked Witch of the West, I discovered liquid did nothing for me. “Oh, hi, Matt. What a surprise to see you!” I’ll bet he was surprised to see me, too, especially looking like something drooping off the end of a fishing line.

But he never flinched. What a great guy. What élan, what sophistication, what finesse, what…was he blind?

He must have selective vision, because he asked me out for dinner. Since the show was only open for a couple hours that evening and the big event really started the next day, I jumped at the chance. If I could pull myself together and show him that I didn’t always look like a bag lady, I could trade in my rumpled image for something more…dare I say it?…glamorous.

“It’s three in the afternoon. I have to be here from seven to nine, but I’m free after that.”

“I’ll be here at nine. I know just the place we can eat. There’s a little French hideaway within walking distance.” He gave me a look that was half James Bond and half Indiana Jones and that made my fingertips tingle…then he was gone. Okay, so maybe my imagination was on overdrive and my hand had fallen asleep, but what’s the fun in that?

The hotel spa was full, so I settled for a shower, an hour ironing the crumpled clothes in my suitcase and a bag of pretzels from the hotel minifridge for which I would pay a minifortune when my bill arrived.

The first time Kim stayed at a hotel that provided stocked refrigerators, she assumed everything was free and decided to eat it all. She’s almost got the loan paid off on the hotel bill.

My hair still wrapped in a towel, I sat down to leave messages for clients with whom I needed to touch base. I’d just hung up from the last call when my phone rang. It was the salon. A masseuse had had a cancellation. If I still wanted to have a massage, she could bring a table to me. The luxury was irresistible. My mouth said “yes, yes” as my checkbook screamed “no, no.” As usual with me, the mouth won.

A tiny woman arrived toting a portable massage table and a gym bag full of towels, oils and a tiny CD player. Practically before I could say “Come in,” she had everything set up and music playing. Discreetly she turned her back as I slid under the sheets and lay back with a deep sigh.

“Do you like a light massage or deep?”

I gave her the once-over. She was smaller than my mother and looked less robust. “Deep,” I said, wanting my money’s worth.

And, oh boy, did I get it. Looks are deceiving. I was a loaf of bread being kneaded, a meat loaf being pounded into shape, a potato being squeezed through a ricer. While my masseuse had looked a little like David with his unobtrusive slingshot when she’d walked into the room, she massaged like Goliath.

When she left me lying on the table while she went into the bathroom to wash her hands, I took my thumb and index finger and pried open one eye. My muscles refused to go back to work. Eventually I slithered to a chair and sprawled there until the masseuse returned.

“Feeling better?” she asked. “Be sure to drink lots of water tonight.”

I nodded and handed her a check with a large tip, my “mad” money for the rest of the month. But I rationalized that I’d be too limp to go shopping for a couple weeks anyway.

The show was typical of such events, with somber businessmen and computer geeks roaming the aisles. As closing time neared, I saw Matt strolling down the aisle toward me. I recalled the old commercials where a man and a woman run toward each other across a vast field in slow motion, arms out, faces blissful, eyes locked in a gaze of love. But Matt wasn’t running in slow motion or in a field or looking blissful. He did, however, have me in an eye-lock that made my heart pound. The man was gorgeous.

“You look lovely,” he complimented me.

Anything was an improvement over this afternoon.

“I hope you like French food,” he said as we entered a darkened cavern lit with flickering candles. I nodded, but he probably couldn’t see me in the shadows. He led me, stumbling, to our table. I’ve never been good about entering a movie theater after the feature’s begun, and this was no different. Blind as a bat was not how I’d wanted to start the evening.

My eyes finally grew accustomed to the dimness, and I began to appreciate the opulence of my surroundings. Even more, I prized the play of light and dark on Matt’s features that made him appear craggy, manly and very French. I pinched my thigh as my hand rested on my lap. Was this for real, or had the masseuse sent too much blood to my brain?

Matt and the waiter had a spirited conversation in French. I knew he was ordering our meal, because I heard the only two French words I know—escargots and pâté. Snails and liver, the two things I was most terrified of as a child. When he took my hand, however, and looked into my eyes, I decided that eating bottom feeders and giblets was a small price to pay to spend an evening with this man.

I was pretty pulled together for the encounter, if I do say so myself. My hair went the direction I’d aimed it, my dress still fit after dinner and even though I hadn’t anticipated a show of affection, I didn’t burst out laughing when he kissed me. It was just a gentle peck on my forehead, but I hadn’t expected it (fantasized, maybe—expected it, no). If I didn’t get a single client nibble this trip, it still would be a roaring success.

Clients. Falling under Matt’s influence almost made me forget why I was here. I retrieved voice messages and wrote notes to every potential or current client in the hotel to confirm our appointments, took a steamy bath that used up all the bath bubbles in my little complementary basket and oiled my cuticles.

Lord, thank You for safe travel, my job, my family and my friends. I pray for our country’s leaders and for those people I read about in the headlines of the newspaper. Sometimes the haunted eyes of those hurting people stay with me for days. I may be flippant at times, but I know for sure that believing in You is a life-and-death issue. I ask that You touch the heart of every unbeliever so that they may know You as I do.

And, although it seems a pretty shallow request compared to the last, I pray for wisdom. I’m thirty years old and falling under my mother’s questionable influence. She wants me happy but she also wants me married. Is there a fabulous, Christian man out there for me, Lord? And when You send him, will You put a big label on him, please, so I don’t miss him?

With thankfulness that I have You to talk to,

Whitney

October 7

Today was a blur. I had breakfast, morning coffee, late-morning coffee, lunch, early afternoon coffee and late-afternoon coffee with clients while intermittently checking on the booth. The rest of the time I spent in the bathroom relieving myself of all that coffee. I drummed up enough business, however, to keep Harry happy into the next century. I feel a bonus coming on.

I found time to buy souvenirs for everyone, including the most spangled, outrageous T-shirt I could find—studded with rhinestones and in electric blue. Kim will love it, especially since I got a baby-size one for Wesley in the same color. I looked for a long time before I found something for Mom and Dad and finally settled on matching T-shirts that said His and Hers. Each has an arrow pointing across the shirt, supposedly to the person standing alongside you. It will give them something to do, trying to figure out if they have their arrows pointed in the right direction. I didn’t recall until later that there have been a number of recent examples of Dad’s trying not to claim Mom at all. Hopefully she’ll start leaving that little battery-operated fan at home when they wear the shirts.

Unfortunately, the evening did not go as smoothly as the rest of the day. I’d forgotten how territorial men could be, mostly because it never happens to me—until Eric and Matt faced off in the lobby outside the show.

While waiting for Eric near the exit, I was surprised to see Matt also approaching.

“Whitney, I know this is spur of the moment, but I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner at Spago? Sorry I didn’t ask you sooner, but my schedule…” Matt held his hands out helplessly. “I’m sure it’s been equally busy for you today.”

“Hiya, Whit. Ready for dinner?” Eric gave Matt the once-over, and his eyes narrowed.

“Eric, I’d like you to meet Matthew Lambert. Matt, this is Eric….”

I explained as best I could that Eric and I had made plans on the plane. Matt said, “I understand. It was nice to meet you, Eric,” and if he’d just stopped there, we’d have been okay. Unfortunately he added, “At least we had last night together” in a breathy voice that made Eric’s eyebrows go straight up into the thatch of sandy-brown hair tumbling over his forehead.

I didn’t know Eric had a jealous bone in his body. Apparently he has quite a few, and Matt managed to bruise them all. For the rest of the night, he studied me like a bug under a microscope, as if amazed that I had enough pheromones to attract anyone but him.

There were a dozen roses in my room when I returned and a note from Matt saying “Sorry we couldn’t talk business tonight—catch you later.” Later, room service arrived with a large pepperoni pizza. “From somebody named Eric,” the waiter said. “He told me he wanted you to have this in the morning because he knows cold pizza is your favorite breakfast.”

How could I ever choose between two men who know me as well as that?

October 9

Not one moment to myself today. My bladder is feeling flabby from being stretched to the max. Had most of a pot of coffee for breakfast and didn’t get to the ladies’ room until noon. Oh, the pain.

I leave the hotel tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. No time to see either Matt or Eric again. It’s probably for the best. I can’t face either one quite yet, since I have no idea what’s going on in their minds—or in my own.

October 10

Up at 3:30 a.m., in the air at seven, into the office by eleven, manic by lunchtime. No one could accuse me of not jumping right into an office frame-of-mind upon my return.

Mitzi gave me a dirty look as I entered, as if I’d been on vacation instead of working 24/7. Betty peered at me through those half-glasses middle-aged people who insist they don’t really need glasses use and told me in an accusing tone that I’d let mail stack up on my desk. And the cruelest cut of all, Bryan, sadist that he is, produced a large, heavy bond envelope addressed to me in calligraphy scrolls and embellished with a wax seal and one of those “Love” stamps that sell by the millions around Valentine’s Day and during the bridal season.

“Wipe that smirk off your face, Bryan,” I ordered, immediately out-of-sorts, “or I’m going to ask you to be my escort to this wedding. Then you’ll be the one having to dance with Whitney dressed as a human omelette in egg-yolk yellow satin and dyable shoes straight from the Marquis de Sade collection.”

Fear flickered on his face and he tried to retrieve the wedding invitation, but it was too late. He’d already made my shortlist of potential escorts.

Why couldn’t my friend Leah Carlson, who’d worked with the rest of us in this office until she’d earned parole, have had her bridesmaids wear something black and slinky? Wasn’t that the fashion now? Of course, Leah had an insecure streak, and in order to make sure that, as the bride, she was not outshone by anyone else, she’d made sure the rest of us looked utterly ridiculous, with puffy sleeves and large straw hats laden with silk flowers, ribbons and probably a resident parakeet. The only thing that cheered me about this designer fiasco was that Kim was also in the wedding, and she insisted that she looked even worse in yellow than I did. Misery does love company. So do women who are forced to look like chubs of butter rolling down an aisle.

“Need to get out for lunch?” Kim smiled knowingly at the invitation in my hand and tipped her head toward the door. “I’ll buy.”

“One lettuce leaf, one stalk of celery, one cherry tomato and water with a slice of lemon so thin as to be transparent, please.”

“I thought you were going to cut back. Doesn’t a cherry tomato have a calorie or two? Have you considered what it will do to your thighs?”

“Har, har, so not funny.” We went into the little luncheonette two doors down from our office building and I ordered “the usual” without opening my menu. Sad, isn’t it, when every waitress on every shift knows my “usual.” Of course, it’s not that hard to remember a house salad and a slice of dry toast.

“Other than the dress, are you excited about the wedding?” Kim, ever the optimist, assumed such a thing was possible.

“My mother has offered to make me a queen-size quilt of all the bridesmaids’ dresses I’ve ever worn. I’m sad to say she already has enough fabric to do the quilt and shams. This wedding will provide enough ugly fabric for the bed skirt.”

Kim leaned down to sip her Coke from the straw and looked up at me through her long, dark eyelashes. “This is not totally about the dress, you know.”

“I do know. It’s those torture implements they call shoes. They’ll dye them yellow, I’ll wear them until my eyes water and my feet blister and turn color. Then I’ll kick them off, destroy my nylons and have my toe broken by Leah’s four-hundred-pound uncle at the reception. And she wants us to put our hair up. Kim, I’ll look like Marie Antoinette!”

“It really bugs you that she’s getting married and you haven’t got a glimmer, doesn’t it?”

I hate it when she does that. Am I that transparent?

“I didn’t think so, but between this wedding and my mother’s fixation on marrying me off, I guess I’m a little sensitive right now.” The waitress came by with my house salad with a side of dry toast. “It’s crazy, too, because I’ve had more male attention in the past week than in the past four months.”

Kim listened with rapt attention as I told her my Eric/Matthew experiences in Las Vegas.

“What do you make of it?” she probed.

“Absolutely nothing. I can’t figure out what’s going on.”

“Because one man likes you, you’ve become more interesting to all the others—at least until you commit to one and take yourself out of the market.”

I really do believe that someday God will send a man into my life. I just hope that when he arrives, I won’t be too old to recognize him.

October 15

Mitzi must go. Away. Far, far away. Soon.

Annoying, maddening, irritating, infuriating, exasperating, trying, aggravating, frustrating, irksome, grating, galling, vexing. It’s so hard to decide which word describes her best. She is the burr under the saddle of my life, the twist in my undies, the mosquito trapped in my bedroom that won’t let me sleep.

She’s always most exasperating the week she receives her women’s-magazine subscriptions. That’s when she brushes up on what’s new, cool and trendy in the world and distills it into a Cliff’s Notes kind of report meant to either a) shame us into getting with the program or b) just shame us. She’s a pop-psychology junkie and living breathing proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She has very little knowledge, all of it dangerous.

This morning she greeted me with the words, “You can’t have it all, you know.”

“I don’t want it all. I just want my coffee, black.”

“You know what I mean. You’ll have to give up something in life in order to devote time and energy to what is most important to you. Obviously you’ve given up meaningful, loving relationships with the opposite sex and the chance at a family in order to stay at this midlevel schlepping job.”

Now try that one on before you’ve had coffee!

“You’ve said ‘yes’ to being a lonely, pathetic single woman with a job that cannot fulfill you completely and ‘no’ to having the love of a man and the joy of children in your life.”

Really? I had no idea. I thought it was “yes” to earning a living and “no” to jumping into bad relationships just so I could have a man on my arm.

“Which magazines came yesterday, Mitzi? Depression Digest? Deadbook? Failures Illustrated and Family Triangle?”

“Don’t mock me, Whitney. You could learn a great deal from keeping up on the latest trends and polls. Why, do you even know that carbohydrates are out again?” She gave me the once-over. “Obviously not.”

“What’s this leading up to, Mitzi? You’ve got something on your mind.” I could see Bryan making his way to the rest room and Betty Nobel sitting a little straighter, her nose twitching with interest.

Mitzi pushed a photocopied page from a magazine across the desk toward me. The headline blared at me like a demented trumpet: Are You Doomed To Be A Spinster? Under it was a quiz, dolled up in graphics of cartwheeling brides and one forlorn damsel sitting on an upturned briefcase. That, no doubt, was me.

“Thanks, Mitzi, but no thanks. I’m not even sure why you’re more upset about my being single than I am.”

She shook her head at me as if to say, “Poor, deluded darling,” and pushed on the quiz until I picked it up.

Mission accomplished, Mitzi turned back to her computer and brought up the diet program on the Web into which she fed her list of foods consumed yesterday. With a few clicks, she had the calorie count, fat grams, fiber content and a tally of which vitamins and minerals she was low on that day. Come to think of it, I can’t really remember the last time I’ve seen Mitzi do anything that resembled work. But apparently she types a million words a minute, because Harry keeps her around.

I stuffed the quiz in my pocket, poured myself a cup of coffee, watered my plants, checked my e-mail and then went to knock on the men’s bathroom door. Bryan must have fallen asleep in there, or he would have heard that Mitzi and I had avoided a confrontation. I was right. When he stumbled out, there was a flat pink spot on his cheek where he’d laid his head against the side of the stall. I gave him a list of things I needed done and turned my attention to touching base with potential customers I’d collected at the trade show.

For a long time, I ignored the hole being burned in my pocket before I furtively took out the ridiculous survey on single women. By spreading it out on my desk with a half-dozen other magazine articles on Innova software, it seemed to blend right in. One by one, I read the questions:

WILL YOU MARRY OR ARE YOU SINGLE FOR LIFE?

Which is more important to you?

 an IRA

 PMS

 MSG

(Depends on whether I’m in a Chinese restaurant or not.)

What is your most important undergarment?

 A push-up bra

 A body shaper

 Full cut panties large enough to cover those supreme pizzas you eat alone on weekends

(No contest there.)

What is your favorite store?

 Victoria’s Secret

 Ann Taylor

 GAP

 Banana Republic

 Relax the Back

 The Hemorrhoid Shop

(I have to choose just one when all six are so appealing?)

What is your favorite dog?

 A neurotic dog that weighs less than five pounds, wears bows in its fur, eats only off your plate and can pierce eardrums with its bark

 A black Lab, the son of the son of the son of your beloved childhood pet

 A glistening Doberman that salivates at the sight of cats, rabbits and short men

(Hmmmm…)

What is your favorite food?

 Yogurt pops

 Sugar-free breath mints

 Endive

 A favorite? How can anyone pick just one?

(What, no éclairs?)

What is your favorite novel?

 The latest Chick Lit on the racks

 Teach Yourself Pilates

 The History of Elizabeth I: Look Ma, No Man!

(I see they forgot “How to Cook Nutritiously for One.”)

What is your favorite flower?

 Roses—by the dozen

 Bird-of-Paradise

 Violets—in those cute little plastic-lined baskets like Grandma used to have

(Violets. Definitely violets. Ha!)

What do you think about cats?

 Sneaky snakes with feet and fur

 Actually tiny women in little fur coats

 You simply can’t have too many

(I like the little-women theory. It explains a lot.)

What’s your most useful kitchen tip?

 Too many ice cubes make a smoothie watery

 Don’t use regular dish soap in lieu of dishwasher detergent

 Alphabetizing spices makes cooking so much more pleasant

(I’ve experienced the first two. Hope never to know the truth about the third.)

What is your attitude toward computers?

 How did my parents and grandparents live without them?

 I buy everything from groceries to clothing online

 Highly overrated

(Finally, a question I could answer with complete honesty! I love my computer.)

What is your favorite pastime?

 Spending a day at the beach

 Cooking gourmet meals

 Shopping

 Reviewing those articles I cut out of magazines and put into plastic sleeves for future reference

(Definitely not tanning. I’m a fake-bake girl myself.)

What do you consider your personal fashion statement?

 Black. I only wear black

 Those catchy little designer purses that cost an arm and a leg but are definitely worth it

 I’m still using my 1999 fashion statement. The clothing hasn’t worn out yet.

I threw the paper down on my desk and snarled. So what if I haven’t had a new wardrobe for a while? I love the clothes I bought in ’99. What’s so bad about that? Still, for some reason the dumb thing was a little unsettling.

CHAPTER 4

October 16

“Whitney, Whit!” Kim’s voice was low and urgent. She looked into my office with eyes the size of saucers. “Can we have lunch?”