When the Messenger Is Hot by Elizabeth Crane Read Free Book Online Page A

to watch her, and she doesn’t much like putting on a show. She figures that she doesn’t need anyone else in the room who isn’t going to participate. She doesn’t really care about watching him.
    Josie has a friend in New York named Nadine. Josie and Nadine went to high school together. Nadine is an actress. Josie doesn’t want to be an actress, but she wouldn’t mind being Nadine. Nadine has excellent posture. Nadine’s posture, Josie thinks, explains everything you need to know about Nadine. Her grammar is good and her diction is better. She does not leave syllables unpronounced. She does not use slang. Nadine has all kinds of men making her all kinds of offers at all times. On a New York weekend, Josie meets Nadine for a $6.98 all-you-can-drink champagne brunch at an East Side restaurant called the Racing Club. Nadine brings a pair of excess suitors with her, Hyman and Hayes. Those are their real names.
    Hayes works for a bank, a Wall Street bank. Hayes knows something about banking. Hayes thinks he has something in common with Josie because of the bank thing, but he really doesn’t. Hyman is a composer. Hyman lives in Boston and New York . Hyman and Josie probably do have a few things in common, but Hyman could kind of care less. Hyman thinks Josie is beautiful . It is apparent that Hayes thinks Josie is beautiful too, but Hayes has nice guy written all over his seersucker jacket. Hyman is interesting . Hyman wears horn-rimmed glasses.
    Nadine’s posture aside, the attention of Hyman and Hayes is mostly fixed on Josie. Hyman dominates the conversation some, asks Josie a lot of questions. Josie doesn’t ask a lot of questions of anyone, but Hyman finds a way to mention that he went to Yale and got near-perfect SAT scores. It seems that in spite of an 800 on math, Hyman scored only a 780 on verbal, something he prides himself on, his verbal skills, and has, approximately nine years after having taken the SATs, never really gotten over it. Josie has been called an underachiever. Josie has never stopped to break down that word, or to look it up. She doesn’t understand that it means she can do better. She accepts that it means she can’t.
    Hyman tells a story involving a menorah and begins to explain to Josie what a menorah is. Josie is not Jewish but takes this kind of personally. For god’s sake, Hyman , Nadine says, she’s been to my house for Hanukkah. She’s from New York . Hayes, also from New York, says, I’d like to know what a menorah is , and everyone laughs except for Hayes. Hyman says, Maybe you’d like to explain, Josie , in a playfully challenging tone and Josie says to Hayes, It’s sort of a candelabra with nine candles that represent the creation. Sometimes seven , Hyman says. Nadine says, Oh Hyman stop it already . Later in the conversation Hyman tries to explain a few more things Josie already knows. Hyman touches her arm and tries to feed her cake and makes double entendres about having a three-way with Nadine and Josie and throws a couple of blatant insults over to Hayes, mostly regarding his seersucker jacket and his full-size umbrella that keeps falling off the side of the table onto the floor. The umbrella insults have to do with it being sunny. Josie has six mimosas and hardly catches a buzz and Hayes politely asks for her number after lunch. Hyman pulls Josie over and whispers loudly, Give him the wrong number .
    Nadine calls Josie to report that the gentlemen were enraptured , and that she gave Hayes her address and Hyman her numbers in New York and Philly. Hyman calls at the crack of dawn the next morning, before her train back to school, asking her out for a date the next time she comes to New York. Josie picks up a copy of People magazine at Penn Station and discovers an article about Hyman’s mother, an actress who had been famous in the sixties and then kind of disappeared and later wrote a tell-all book about her