LITMIR.BIZ

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That’s probably it.

      “Night, Tracey,” Ryan Cunningham, an assistant art director, says as I pass him in the hallway.

      “Night. Have a good weekend.”

      “I’ll be spending it here,” he says, striding on past. “Same as usual.”

      Having endured my own share of seven-day workweeks, I shake my head in empathy, glad it isn’t me this time.

      You know, lately I really miss the good old days in account management. Not that I knew that they were good old days at the time—or that I’d even want to go back there, because it’s not the same.

      There used to be four of us who shared a big cubicle space on the account floor—along with countless margarita happy hours, office dirt, diet tips, recipes, advice—you name it.

      But Brenda quit two years ago when her husband, Paulie, got promoted to sergeant on the NYPD. Now she’s a stay-at-home mom in Staten Island with two kids and a third on the way.

      Not long after that, Yvonne retired to Florida with her husband, Thor. I still can’t quite picture Yvonne, with her tall raspberry-colored hair and tall kick-ass kick-line body (she was a Radio City Rockette back in the fifties), and Thor (her much younger Scandinavian not-just-a-green-card-marriage-after-all husband) hanging around some retirement community.

      But Yvonne has reclaimed her showgirl past and is entertaining the “geri’s,” as she calls them, with a torch-song act at the residents’ club.

      Of our original foursome, only my friend Latisha still works at Blaire Barnett. She’s an executive secretary for one of the management reps. We try to get together as often as we can, but when we do manage, it’s kind of lonely with just the two of us.

      Anyway, I’m usually too busy with Client demands to go for drinks or lunch, and Latisha’s got her hands full with a husband, Derek, and two kids. Her son, Bernie, is in preschool—and wait-listed at every decent grammar school, so it’s nail-biting time. Her oldest, Keera, has a learning disability and Latisha’s trying to get her through junior year with stellar grades so she’ll have a prayer for an Ivy League college, which she has her heart set on.

      See what I mean?

      Back in my hometown, Brookside, New York, no one ever worried about getting into an Ivy League school. You were lucky if you got a higher education at all. I went to a state college. A lot of my classmates went to community college, joined the military or just started working.

      Now they all think I’m this huge success merely because I moved to Manhattan, have a business card and once rode an elevator with Donald Trump, who was at Blair Barnett for a meeting. Do I have to mention I wasn’t even at the meeting?

      That didn’t matter to anyone back home.

      Seriously, when my mother introduced me to the new church organist at midnight mass at Most Precious Mother, the organist exclaimed, “You’re the one who rode the elevator with Donald Trump! It’s so, so nice to meet you!”

      See what I mean?

      Here at Blaire Barnett, the eighth-floor reception area is dimly lit and buttoned up, as you would expect at this hour, and as I wait for the down elevator, there’s no sign of The Donald.

      I can see fellow Creatives bustling up and down the halls.

      A handful of others scurry out of an up elevator that, frustratingly, doesn’t change direction on my floor. They’re clutching cups of coffee and take-out bags, obviously here for the duration.

      They all work on the agency’s new spacetrippin.com account, which is just what it sounds like: a company that arranges dream vacations into outer space. Laugh if you want—we in the Creative Department have certainly gotten some good mileage out of it—but it’s a legitimate new business, started by a venture capitalist who has millions to spend on start-up advertising.

      “I really hope you’ve got an umbrella, Tracey,” one of the spacetrippin.com guys tells me as they head back to their offices. “It’s nasty out there.”

      Uh-oh. I really hope I’ve got an umbrella, too. On a good hair day, my straight brown hair doesn’t exactly incite photoshoot offers from the agency’s Lavish Locks Shampoo account group.

      This isn’t a good hair day. Douse me with rain and mist, and a bad hair day goes catastrophic.

      I dig through my bag and come across everything else one can possibly need in the course of daily urban travels: Band-Aids, gum, tampons, car-service vouchers, low-fat granola bars, a book, sunglasses and a Metrocard—which I shove into my coat pocket for easier access, along with my iPod.

      There are also plenty of things no one could possibly ever need, anywhere: a dried-out pink Sharpie, a limp Splenda packet spattered with coffee stains, an expired 20%-off Borders coupon and a couple of loose, bleached-out Tic Tacs.

      But no umbrella. The little fold-up one I usually carry is in the pocket of my jacket at home, I remember. I took it along when I ran out in the rain to get milk the other night, and I never put it back.

      Well, maybe the rain will let up by the time I get downstairs. It’s taking long enough.

      I wait impatiently, thinking about my father and brother who work at a steel plant back in Brookside, near Buffalo. When they’re done with work, they punch out, walk out the door, get into their cars and drive maybe three-tenths of a mile at most to their houses. I bet they could do their commute door to door in sixty seconds or less, no exaggeration. Who says there are no perks to being a steelworker in a fading, blue-collar, Great Lakes town?

      Come on, Tracey. You don’t want to be a steelworker. And you don’t want to move back to Brookside.

      No, but I wonder if I really want to be a junior copywriter at Blaire Barnett Advertising in Manhattan, either.

      Maybe I want…

      Maybe I don’t know what I want.

      Other than to get the hell out of this building before Crosby Courts reappears and summons me back to her lair.

      I stick my iPod earbuds into my ears and turn it on. Some good, loud music will be an appropriate way to kick off the weekend, right?

      Right—except the charge is depleted.

      And let me tell you, there is nothing worse than riding the subway without an iPod. It’s the only way to tune out the chaos of the city.

      I’m contemplating taking the stairs when at last a down elevator arrives. Naturally, it’s already filled to overflowing with office workers impatient to launch their own overdue weekends.

      I wedge myself in and ignore the grumbles from behind me as the doors slide shut two inches from the tip of my nose. Something—it had damn well better be someone’s umbrella—is poking into my butt.

      Outside, Lexington Avenue is still engulfed in an icy March downpour. Getting a cab would be akin to landing that Lavish Locks print ad: It ain’t gonna happen.

      Blaire Barnett offers a car service to employees who work past ten. Do I dare go back upstairs to wait it out?

      I check my watch. It would be about twenty minutes…

      But no, I do not dare. On any night at 10:00 p.m., there’s a car-service backup. Friday nights are worse. Plus, it’s raining. That’s at least another hour delay.

      Anyway, Crosby is still up there. If she sees me, she’ll need me to tweak a line on the copy I just rewrote for the hundredth time, and twenty minutes will turn into tomorrow morning.

      So off I splash to the number six subway a few blocks away. I duck under scaffolding and awnings at every opportunity, but there’s no way around it: I’m drenched.

      As I hover in the doorway of a bank on the corner waiting for the light to change, I call Jack from my cell.

      “Hey, where are you?” he asks, and has the nerve to sound boozy

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