No One Could Have Guessed the Weather by Anne-Marie Casey

Author:Anne-Marie Casey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2013-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

an englishwoman in new york

The dream took place in Central Park Zoo but did not feature many animals. One moment Lucy was standing with Max and Robbie, watching the sea lions being fed. The next she was alone, up a tree in the red panda exhibit, peering through the foliage at the throngs of visitors walking past and thinking, “Who’s in the cage?” She juddered awake at six a.m., curious. Normally her dreams required no interpretation (having sex with Brad, and once with Angelina), but this one must mean something. Am I in the cage? she wondered.

It was a perfect early-summer, crisp-cotton New York morning as she walked down West Broadway, although, as she was English, she did have a jacket tied round her waist and a small umbrella in her bag “just in case.” She was heading toward TriBeCa and the offices of a film company where Julia had organized a job interview for her. Julia had used the adjective “little” (which seemed to cover both job and interview) and emphasized that what was on offer was the opportunity to read unsolicited scripts and write brief reports on them.

Carmen Ross, a film producer who had been Julia’s first employer, and whose curiosity and capacity for reinvention had kept her at the top of her profession for many, many years, had just fired a twenty-three-year-old graduate of the film school at NYU for ambition, and had asked Julia to suggest someone “mature.” This mature person must love stories, be content with $75 a day for one day a week paid out of the petty cash, and never seek promotion. What Carmen, who shared her spectacular apartment on Greene Street with two Siamese cats and a lot of tribal art, had actually said was that “it would suit a woman with children,” and, when Julia raised one eyebrow, Carmen continued, “You know what I mean,” and Julia nodded, because Julia did. Julia had immediately thought of her, and she had immediately said yes. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

But when she paused outside the SoHo Grand to check out her reflection in the glass doors, the black iron gates reminded her of a cage, and she knew her dream was about anxiety. Her last—in fact, only—serious job interview had been eighteen years ago, when she had followed the traditional route into a publishing house for female graduates by applying to be someone’s secretary. Despite the first-class degree in English language and literature, she found herself word-processing in the gardening books department, and spent two years stroking the egos of muddy men with spades and getting drunk at the Chelsea Flower Show. She then moved into editorial and Mind, Body, and Spirit, and quickly knew more about growing medicinal drugs in a window box than anyone ever needs to. After six years of lunches with druids and one-way phone conversations with psychics, she was about to apply for an opening in New Fiction when she got pregnant, and the rest was history.

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