Page 37 of The Perfect Rom-Com

And then directly beside me is Amelia, looking faintly confused as to why we have ended up in a place with entrée items below forty dollars. Her spine juts straighter than a fishing rod toward the ceiling. She looks like she is trying very hard to touch the faded red vinyl booth she’s sitting on as little as possible. A vibrant pink stretch of pearls matching a vibrant pink silk blouse rests on Amelia’s perfectly sculpted neck, all framed by perfectly bouncy bottle-blonde curls. Even her vibrantly pink and impossibly thin stiletto heels look like they are hovering just above the sticky floor. And really, would it surprise me? To discover Amelia is a witch?

“Ah, the dream team all together,” Jack says with a grin as exaggeratedly big as his voice. He raises a finger for the waiter beside him. “This calls for celebration. Two bottles of your finest champagne for the table, please.”

I clear my throat. Jack adds begrudgingly, “And a sweet tea.”

Amelia’s glossy lips do a little pucker my way, and I’m already beginning to ball my hands into fists in my lap, readying for whatever nonsense she brings. But a little ding rings out from her phone. And then she’s gone. Gone into the little words on her screen, scrolling and tapping like her life depends on it.

She does this, for the record, a lot.

I take a deep, already-exhausted-by-this-experience breath.

The rest of the restaurant is crowded, as all the restaurants lining Singapore Avenue are at this hour. The walls are covered in yellowing vintage posters of bottles of olive oil for twenty-five cents and bunches of tomatoes on the vine for five pennies. Little fingerprints smudge the glass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t had a spray bottle on them in years. But whatever the atmosphere lacks, it makes up for in the air.

The room is one big perfume bottle of basil and garlic and freshly baked bread and, of course, roasted tomatoes. And given the number of tomato pies I see around the room, all propped up on pizza racks on tables, I imagine they go through hundreds of tomatoes a week. Acres worth.

Music plays loudly over the speakers, something indiscernibly old-fashioned and Italian and cheery—the kind of music that puts people in the kind of mood to spend money and eat tomato pie. And the loudness and the smudges and the general stickiness of the floor and ceiling and menus are forgivable. It’s always forgivable because the food is that good. The environment of it all mixed together is that good. Everyone understands and accepts this, even cherishes it, because this is Gaeta’s way.

Much like a sun-dried tomato taken straight out of the jar is inedible but becomes indefinably delicious when used within the secret sauce, so the smudges and stickiness and loudness all combine to create an extremely memorable kind of place.

Magical, if you will.

When you go to Gaeta’s, you are guaranteed to leave like everyone else, arm in arm with your friends and a to-go bag in your hand as you sing “Que Será Será!” with a smile on your face.

“Can you turn it down?”

My head snaps to Amelia.

The waiter, standing beside me with the wine cork in his hand, snaps his head to Amelia.

Everyone in the room, it seems, has snapped their head to Amelia.

She looks at me, then Mona, the waiter, and finally Jack, who, to his credit, looks just as personally assaulted as everyone else within earshot.

“It’s just . . . a little loud.” Amelia shrugs as if to say, “This is absolutely no big deal.” As if walking into a perfectly imperfect place and immediately demanding change is no big deal.

After a few seconds with no response, she adds, “It’s just”—her eyes bounce around to each of us—“I have to speak in two hours for an event. And I am just trying to be careful not to lose my voice.”

“Then simply stop talking, Amelia.”

A pause ensues as everyone’s eyes swivel to the last person on earth to say this to Amelia. Jack.

If there’s one thing about Jack, it’s that Jack does not offend his clients. I believe, in fact, one of Jack’s main career responsibilities is to keep his clients puffed up at all times. This, he takes as his personal responsibility. Your books don’t sell (not that I’ve personally experienced this part, but I’ve heard him plenty of times on phone calls), Jack is there to tell you it’s simply the market’s fault. Shame on the market. Shame on the whole economy. Never fear, your next book will pick up and race along like a two-year-old stallion.

You’re struggling to write and voice that you are a failure? Jack is there to tell you that it’s the weather. It’s unseasonably cold, and with the cold front, nobody on earth has been able to get any work done and haven’t you even read the latest news? (Cue him conjuring up some obscure article with whatever he wants to prove.) Work ethic is down 18 percent with these rains, and the best thing you can do right now is book a cruise. Yes. A cruise. A cruise will solve all your writing problems.

Half of Jack’s job seems to be swiveling you, the author, around enough times that you’re dizzy and then halting and pointing the blame on anything and everything aside from yourself or him. It’s the economy. The weather. The ridiculous publisher and their ridiculous demands (though this one typically comes right before he decides to push you off the cliff toward another publisher).

Jack does not ever, now that I think of it, encourage personal responsibility. I believe he thinks of us authors more as show dogs. Lavish us with bubble baths and put bows on our ears so we can prance around performing our best.

It’s why I hardly ever take his words to heart.

And why precisely at this moment, his words are incredibly jolting.

“The team has a lot to say in the next hour regarding ideas and plans,” Jack continues, “and you have your voice to protect, so just relax and let everyone else do the speaking as much as possible, mmm?”

Amelia, ever the victim of flattery, releases the tension in her eyes and sits back.

Her pupils are actually undilating before our very eyes. Like Dracula. It’s downright creepy.