Fairy Tale Interrupted Read Online Free PDF Page A

remorse.

    My report card was waiting for me at school on Monday morning.

    Twenty years later, on the heels of my own holier-than-thou battle with John, I decided to follow my mom’s example andignore him. John may have won my office, and I may have had to put up with him at work, but that didn’t mean I had to like him or even acknowledge his existence.

    It took a while for the guy who got whatever he wanted to take a hint. Every day, he would walk or Rollerblade past my office, greeting me with a cheerful “Good morning.” And every day, I refused to respond or even make eye contact with him. I’d hear him coming, and just before he popped his head in to say hello, I would quickly pick up the receiver and pretend to be on the phone, thinking, Fuck you. Have fun in your new office, buddy.

    I know it seems immature to be that rude to any coworker, let alone to John Kennedy, but it was a matter of pride. When I feel slighted, I don’t back down. As it turned out, John was the same way—although his approach was very different. He said his chipper hellos each morning, seemingly oblivious to my ignoring him. John couldn’t relax his perfect manners: they had been instilled in him at a very early age, just as my tough exterior had been. So the standoff went on for weeks.

    During that time, John settled in to PR/NY, though none of us had any idea what he was doing there. He brought in an intern, a daughter of a family friend, to answer his phone and open his mail. She clearly had a crush on him and decided to bond with Sam, as if that unstable dog might be the way to John’s heart. One day she was lying on the floor with Sam—yes, rolling around the office floor with a scary dog that snapped from time to time—and he bit her face. She refused to go to the hospital. Blood, rabies, whatever, Sam was John’s dog, so it was all fine and good, just a scratch, nothing to worry about. . . . People were insane around John.

    He was making me insane, too, and not just because he stole my office. The fact that we still didn’t know what he was doing there began to worry me. After several months of his being there, it was obvious he couldn’t be working on a charity event. And he couldn’t just be renting office space—the place was nice but not that nice. Plus, Michael was distracted from the agency’s day-to-day work—he didn’t give my press releases the attention he once had or ask about the status of an account. Most worrisome was that no proposals were going out to potential new clients.

    About a month after John ousted me from my office, I heard him coming down the hallway toward my new digs. Every single morning, I thought. The guy just wouldn’t let up.

    “Good morning, Rose.”

    Hearing him say my name startled me. He’d never said it before, so I looked up. When I did, he was standing in the doorway giving me the finger. I couldn’t help it: I burst out laughing. He finally got me.

    The next day, I didn’t get a “Good morning” when he came into work.

    “What’s up, loser?” he said.

    “ You’re the loser,” I replied.

    “Well, you’re stupid.”

    “Not as stupid as you.”

    He’s kind of funny, I thought.

    By the summer of 1994, it wasn’t just our little group at PR/NY that wanted to know what John was up to. The press was also beginning to wonder. A year had passed since he leftthe DA’s office, and as far as they knew, he wasn’t up to much. The media looked for drama: Was he striking out on his own, or headed for a breakdown? People magazine pounced on the theme with the sensational cover line: “Is he a man with a plan, or a dreamboat adrift?”

    I grabbed the magazine, which I had seen on the newsstand on my way into work, and busted it out in our morning sparring session.

    “Morning, dreamboat,” I said when he walked into the office.

    “Why don’t you take that fright wig off? It’s not Halloween,” he retorted.

    “Sorry we can’t all be as handsome as