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Gina Landretti came into work early, too. “Oh, good,” she said, her eyes lighting when she saw Jaine at her desk. “I need to talk to you, and I hoped you would be in early so we wouldn’t have an audience.”
Jaine gave an internal groan. She could see what was coming from a mile away.
“Pam called me last night,” she began. “You know, my sister. Anyway, she’s been trying to get in touch with you, and guess what? She wants to book you on the show! Good Morning America! Isn’t that exciting? Well, all four of you, of course, but I told her you were probably the spokesperson.”
“Ah … I don’t think we have a spokesperson,” Jaine said, a little nonplused by Gina’s assumption.
“Oh. Well, if you did, you would be it. The spokesperson.”
Gina seemed so proud that Jaine cast about for a diplomatic way of saying, “No way.”
“I didn’t know your sister was a program booker.”
“Oh, she isn’t, but she spoke to the booker and she’s very interested, too. This would be a feather in Pam’s cap,” Gina confided. “The word is out the other networks will probably contact you today, so Pam wanted to get the jump on them. This could really help her career.”
Meaning that if she, Jaine, didn’t cooperate, any setbacks in Gina’s sister’s career would be laid directly on her doorstep.
“There might be a problem,” Jaine said, looking as contrite as possible. “T.J.’s husband isn’t happy with all this publicity—”
Gina shrugged. “So only three of you go on the show. Actually, it would probably be just fine if you were the only one—”
“Luna’s much prettier—”
“Well, yeah, but she’s so young. She doesn’t have your authority.”
Great. Now Jaine had “authority.”
She tried to use some of that authority and infuse her tone with firmness. “I don’t know. I don’t like all this publicity, either. I’d rather the whole thing just faded away.”
Gina looked at her in horror. “You can’t mean that! Don’t you want to be rich and famous?”
“Rich, I wouldn’t mind. Famous, no. And I don’t see how going on Good Morning America would make me rich.”
“You could get a book deal out of this! One of those multimillion-dollar advances, you know, like those women who wrote the book about rules.”
“Gina!” Jaine half-shouted. “Reality check here! How could the List be a book, unless the preferred size of a man’s penis is discussed for three hundred pages?”
“Three hundred?” Gina looked dubious. “I think a hundred and fifty would be plenty.”
Jaine looked around for something against which to bang her head.
“Please, please say you’ll say yes to Pam,” Gina pleaded, folding her hands together in the classic supplicant pose.
In a flash of inspiration, Jaine said, “I’ll have to talk to the other three. It’ll be a group deal, or nothing at all.”
“But you said T.J.—”
“I’ll talk to the other three,” she repeated.
Gina looked unhappy, but evidently recognized some of that mysterious authority she thought Jaine possessed. “I thought you’d be thrilled,” she mumbled.
“I’m not. I like my privacy.”
“Then why did you put the List in the newsletter?”
“I didn’t. Marci got drunk and let it slip to Dawna what’s-her-name.”
“Oh.” Gina looked even more unhappy, as if she realized Jaine was even less thrilled about the whole situation than she had previously thought.
