LITMIR.BIZ

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Story: Stylist Marries His Creation. Cabot could see the headline in his mind’s eye, and wished he could see it on the cover of Variety. And People. And Vanity Fair. If Tippy were marrying Joey, he, Cabot, could spend this weekend profitably, which in his addled state meant kissing Faith numerous additional times. And doing more than kissing, if she wanted to.

      He wondered if Faith’s mental processes felt like his did right this minute—electrical impulses leaping from right brain to left, from front to back and skittering off on the diagonal. If so, he felt sorry for her.

      “…and I’m finally figuring out what my sister Charity has been going through as a model,” Faith was saying, “except that her shoes never fit. Maybe that’s why she’s so determined to be a scientist instead. Comfortable shoes.”

      Since she’d come to his rescue, effortlessly supplying the small talk he couldn’t seem to dredge up, Cabot thought he’d better help. “Let me guess,” he said. “You have another sister and her name is Hope.”

      “Yes. How about you?”

      He gave her a sidelong glance to find that she wasn’t even smiling, when that lovely, surprisingly wide mouth seemed to smile so easily. She seemed nervous. Fear of flying? I don’t think so. Fear of me is more like it.

      “One sister, which I thought was one too many when I was a kid. She’s married, now, with two kids. She’s an artist, he’s a stockbroker. I don’t know what they talk about.”

      “I told you about Charity,” Faith rattled on after her brief interest in Cabot’s family. “Hope’s a big businesswoman in New York. We’re all so different. Hope and Charity got all the brains, though.”

      She sounded so glum that Cabot found himself wanting to make her feel better. “Being brainy doesn’t necessarily make you successful,” he suggested, “and being successful doesn’t mean you’re brainy.” It sounded good, but he wasn’t sure he’d said anything meaningful. “You’re a good travel agent, and that’s not easy.”

      She suddenly whipped an earnest gaze around to him and he felt himself melting under it, or at least some of him was melting and some of him was impersonating a stalagmite.

      “Do you really think I could be a good travel agent?” she asked him.

      He shifted uneasily in the upholstered seat that would magically become his life jacket if he needed one.

      “Because it’s practically my last chance to succeed,” she said mournfully. Her mouth tilted down at the corners. Cabot wanted to settle his fingers right there and tilt it back up. “I’m thirty years old and my résumé reads like a terrorist’s dossier.”

      “Now I can’t believe you ever…”

      “I haven’t caused any actual explosions—well, a fire or two—but disaster strikes on every job I’ve ever held. First there was the Marrakesh caper.”

      “That sounds…”

      “Yes. Very exciting, doesn’t it? And I thought it would be. A very famous author—you’d recognize his name if I dared to say it aloud even now—hired me right out of college to be his research assistant. He was writing a thriller set in Marrakesh.”

      Cabot settled in. It seemed he was going to hear the story of her life, which was better than discussing the fact that he hadn’t acted very professional when he kissed her. “He sent you to Marrakesh?”

      “He sent me to the library. He wasn’t about to let go of enough money to send me to Marrakesh. Unlike you. You’ve spent a fortune already researching your own wedding! And I think that’s wonderful. Tippy deserves that kind of thoughtfulness.”

      She was gazing earnestly at him again, but there at the end he thought her gaze slid off to the right a little. “It’s tax deductible,” he said without thinking, because what he was thinking about was Faith’s full pink mouth. Forget the mouth! “I’m charging the dry run to my firm,” he added, improvising rapidly, “because I can apply the kind of information we’ll be gathering to my other clients.”

      “Would have been for him, too,” Faith said. “Tax deductible, I mean. Anyway, I was slaving away in the M stacks and files, and then—” she paused, and a dreamy look came over her face “—one day when I was doing an online search for ‘Moroccan Meteorological Trends’, I noticed a book called Explore Madagascar, and then another one, The Romance of Mozambique, and Don’t Miss Macao. So of course I had to find out what those places were like.”

      “You forgot about Marrakesh.” How could she forget about Marrakesh when she could remember the names of three books she’d read maybe eight years ago that weren’t even about Marrakesh, the topic she was supposed to research. The flight attendant hovered over them, and although Cabot didn’t drink martinis, the word just fell out of his mouth, probably because it was alliterative.

      “Oh,” Faith was saying to the woman, “I’d love some white wine, but I’d better not. I’ll have—”

      “What about a Mai Tai?” Cabot said. “Or a Manhattan.”

      “I was about to say tomato juice,” Faith said, giving him an odd look. “I’m barely competent stone-cold sober. And this may be vacation time for you, but I’m working.”

      While the attendant got the drinks, it occurred to Cabot that Faith was spilling out the story of her work history to make a point, and that the point might come as unpleasant news for him and his current enterprise.

      “So how did the job end?” he asked as soon as he’d taken a restorative gulp of vodka.

      Her mouth turned down again. “I woke up one morning and realized he was expecting me to hand him his Marrakesh background the very next day and I had almost nothing for him but basic geography and a printout of a Web site for tourists. So I checked out every old movie that had been set in Marrakesh and filled in the details from those.”

      “Uh-oh,” Cabot said, “most of those were probably made on an MGM lot.”

      “But still,” she argued, “I figured that somebody at MGM would have done better research than I had. Unfortunately, they’d done that research in 1938 or ’39 or ’40.” She sighed deeply. “He had to set the book in 1941 and make it a World War II espionage story.”

      “And it bombed.” He was getting bombed, too.

      “No, the publisher promoted it as his first historical novel and it stayed on the bestseller list for sixty-three weeks.”

      “But he’d already fired you.”

      “And I’d already taken a job as interpreter for an aide to the ambassador to Argentina. Want to hear about that?”

      “Well, I…”

      “That was going well—I’m quite fluent in Spanish,” she murmured modestly, “until one day I got distracted during one of his conversations with a lobby group—something about beef. I hadn’t listened to what he was saying, so when it came time to translate I had to make something up.” She halted, then turned to him, looking quizzical. “Do you remember that little civil uprising in Argentina about seven years ago? When the beef producers marched on Buenos Aires?”

      The last drops of vodka dribbled down the front of his shirt, but Cabot didn’t care. “You did that?” he said. He felt as if he were strangling.

      It was suddenly crystal clear what the point of Faith’s story was. Every job she took ended in disaster. And what she was now was a travel agent, his travel agent, Tippy’s double.

      And she was warning him that she was all too likely to blow it.

      The question was how? He could think of many, many ways. That was a big part of his job as a publicist, thinking of all the ways something could backfire. So he would spend the next four days creeping warily through a dark forest, waiting for the ogre to pop out and eat him alive.

      And little did

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