“Still afraid of me?” Taylor asks, leaning on one elbow on his Hollywood bed. When I first heard about Hollywood-size beds, I assumed it was a joke. Then I found out that there really was such a size. Inches longer, naturally.
No, I’m not afraid of you, Taylor, I’m afraid of every woman you’re going to meet who’s sexier, thinner, younger, prettier…
“Afraid of you? You should be afraid of me now,” I say, pulling the sheet around me. “You sleep with a journalist and you run the risk of reading about it in the gossip rags the next day.” I trace my finger along the swell of his shoulder. Just those arms…
Taylor exhales hard. “It’s been done. Don’t remind me.”
“I trust you didn’t get a high score. Well, not to worry. My account will do wonders for your image. You’ll need to install one of those infrared sensors right down here.” I reach down and tease him with my fingers, tracing an X.
“To change the subject, what happens when Jolie comes back? Does she get the guest room? Do we play musical beds? Am I relegated to the tool shed? How are you going to mastermind this, Taylor?”
“Actually, I thought I’d invite a new girl over that I just met and put you both in the guest room,” he says, running his fingers through my hair. “She’s different than anyone I know—very hot, a little overweight, a great cook, and all she thinks about is sex. Heavy chicks like to get it more—betcha didn’t know that.”
“Mmmm…. Dangerous lies.”
Taylor smiles, then his face turns serious. “I’m going to talk to Jolie today, and tell her—”
“Shhh. Don’t tell me…” What did he want from a woman? Maybe Jolie wasn’t the one, but was he capable of commitment to someone else? Him monogamous? And if he was, how could anyone handle the tidal wave of fans?
Hard to imagine spending your life clinging to a movie star’s coattails as his success soared upward or spiraled down, forever anxious about what his next project would be, where it would take him, or if his female costar would take him.
No, I’m totally cool about you spending three months in the Amazon with Kim Basinger, in Adam and Eve, shooting and reshooting the procreation scenes. Verisimilitude.
“You’re off in space.” He turns my face toward his. “Talk to me.”
“I was just writing the article for the Star in my head,” I say, slipping my hand around the back of his neck and pulling him down on me. “I have to check some more details though.”
After a perfunctory kiss, he pulls away. “You’re thinking about going home, right?’
“Not right now, I’m not.”
“Stay. Let’s see what happens with us.”
“I’m not from here, it’s so—”
“What? It’s so what?” he says, shaking his head. “And what is so fucking great about New York?”
“All I can tell you is that when I hear Frank Sinatra sing ‘New York, New York’—and I’ve heard it a hundred and fifty times—it still brings tears to my eyes. When I see someone wearing a T-shirt that says New York Fucking City, it always makes me laugh. And the longer I stay there, and the worse it gets—and it does—the more I know that I can’t leave for more than a few weeks at a time because it’s a part of me. So that’s my nonanswer. New Yorkers are like an extended dysfunctional family—everybody’s screwed up, so we’re in good company. You’re where you belong.”
“You’re not normal.”
“Normal people are the ones that you don’t know very well.”
He laughs and I trace my finger along his ribs. “You’re not real to me, movie-star man. I keep thinking of you on the billboard.”
“I can’t live up to that, Maggie. Reality doesn’t cut it the way fantasies do.”
“It’s pretty close.” Then I stop smiling. “Maybe it’s the challenge of seeing if you can get me to move here to start my life over for you…of course, if you threw in the caaaaar…”
Every day, Tamara says, she sits bedside and watches the IV dripping into Ty’s limp arm, praying that he will suddenly rise up, as if reborn, throw down the covers and go home. But three days have gone by already, and the insidious little bivalve still hasn’t released its virulent grip.
By day four, he starts showing signs of life again. Would he turn into a vegan, or maybe a fruitarian and live on trail mix or granola from now on? Would the poor man, ever in this lifetime, be willing to look at a morsel of shellfish again?
She makes the mistake of asking him how he feels.
“Like a truck ran over me. I have a new respect for the power of nature.”
“I can’t tell you how awful that made me feel, Maggie. I told him that I wished it was me, instead of him.”
“What did he say?”
“When he gets out he’ll cook for me and even the score.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“He’ll forgive, but not forget, he said. But in the meantime,” Tamara says, brightening, “I did get a great shot of a Broadway actress leaving here after a face-lift, thanks to my night-vision glasses.”
“Your what?”
“I bought them in a spy shop.” I let that register. Is she just a trifle too committed to the new column?
“In a million years you won’t guess who picked her up?”
“Picked who up?”
“The actress with the face-lift.”
“Don’t tell me. I do not want to know. And if you don’t watch who you take pictures of, somebody’s gonna put a bad oyster in your lunch….”
Bill is looking forward to your return, the e-mail from his secretary says. Shots of you and Mike Taylor in papers here—readers fascinated by your exploits yet confused about appearance changes—tout le monde asking, “What’s going on with Maggie? Losing weight purposely? Hunk related? Is Maggie abandoning readers now that she’s thinner?” Questions abound. Advise.
Readers’ questions would have to be addressed, but what would I tell them? But more important, spies in financial told me, the whole mess was boosting readership. That explained Wharton’s note with a forwarded invitation to a food-tasting dedicated to everything chocolate.
Maybe You’re Not To Blame
If you follow the news as closely as I do, you get to the point where you feel it’s only a matter of time until science confirms what you already know. Today, for instance, there was a front page story in the New York Times about how they’ve discovered a hormone that’s apparently to blame for why the overweight can’t stay slim after they diet and lose weight. The name of the chemical villain is ghrelin. Before meals, levels of ghrelin shoot up. After eating, they drop. And when you give someone a shot of ghrelin, they basically pig out, eating about thirty percent more than normal.
And here’s the worst part: People who diet and lose weight produce more ghrelin than they did before they dieted. What does that tell you? That after you diet, your body is working against you, trying to get you to go back to your old chubby weight. The explanation being that the body was designed to protect you from starvation in times of famine, and one way was to slow metabolism and perk up appetite.
The new studies, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, also describe how after grossly obese people have gastric bypass surgery, they end up with very little of the hormone which explains why they report a decrease in their appetites.
So where does that leave us? Well, maybe since ghrelin is the first appetite-stimulating hormone found to be produced not by the brain—although it acts on it—but by cells in the stomach and the upper small intestine, maybe clever scientists can come up with a drug that will block the hormone, cutting appetite. The other side of the picture is that for those with cancer, suffering from extreme weight loss, the hormone may help stimulate appetite. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, research is concentrating on chubby rats.
In my absence, Tamara’s book has been rejected. It’s about a photographer and a newspaper columnist who both give up on trying to lose weight on their own and decide to go to an in-patient weight manag
ement program together. They struggle together, bond, and emerge convinced that they will forever be in control of their lives and content with who they are. She’d apparently also told Ty. It hits him as off. He tells her to revise it and then send it out again.
“He thinks it’s ‘too easy,’” Tamara tells me.
“Why?”
“After they leave, they team up to do stories about the American way of losing weight, and start their own antidieting magazine, they both find guys and fall in love.”
“So?”
“He thinks that they like themselves too fast. Thinks they don’t suffer enough.”
“In the real world, yes, most people do, but this is made up,” I say. You can tell that my career as a novelist is going nowhere. Why should she make her poor heroines suffer, didn’t women suffer enough in real life?
“He thinks I’m taking women back in time, offering them an unreal image.”
“These women lost the weight by not dieting, that’s the point.”
“Exactly,” Tamara says. “It’s a lifestyle…and the book’s a romance…reality doesn’t sell. And then I said, ‘Anyway, you’ll find out that when they set up their own antidieting magazine, they’re so friggin’ overworked they don’t have time to eat. And if you can forget to eat, you’re cured. You’re not obsessed with food anymore. You find something else to fill you up.’”
“I’ll publish the book,” I say. “I can’t wait to read it.”
“Men don’t get it,” Tamara says. “Anyway, two publishers called to see if you want to write a tell-all book.”
Thunk. I drop the phone, laughing out loud.
“Why is that so funny? There’s a forty-billion-dollar diet industry out there, Maggie. Maybe instead of just shooting holes in it, you should consider using it to build up your retirement fund.”
But I can’t stop laughing. “If Taylor’s fans alone bought it, it would be a bestseller.”
Dear Ms. Brown:
Thank you for giving us a chance to read New Beginnings. We’ve looked it over and also gave it to another editor who read the entire book. In the end, while we found it lively, we also felt it would be a midlist book for us and difficult to publish as well as we’d like to. With regrets, I’m returning the manuscript, but grateful that you gave us the opportunity to review it.
And she thought she was tough. I look at the fax and shake my head. Poor Tamara. She was so convinced that the book was good. I call her to commiserate.
“You can’t get too cocky in this world, because life has a way of smacking you in the head and tamping you down,” Tamara says.
I hear Ty in the background. “Everyone gets rejected,” he says. “It means nothing. It’s a rite of passage.”
“He’s right,” I say.
“You gotta stick with it,” Ty yells. “You know what a publisher once said about Kon-Tiki? ‘Who in hell wants to read about a bunch of crazy Scandinavians floating around the ocean on a raft?’”
Now I know I like Ty.
“I put my heart and soul into that book, Maggie. And you know, every time I reread it, I can’t stop. I mean, it is a page-turner, isn’t it?”
“That’s not it, Tamara. Maybe it’s just not what that particular publisher was looking for at the time.”
“That particular publisher is behind half the bestsellers on the list.”
“Onward,” I say for lack of something better.
“So what do I do? Keep sending it out?”
“Absolutely. By the time they get around to answering you there’s a new crop of editors anyway.”
“Won’t the word spread that there’s this bum manuscript going around and around?”
“It’s not a bum manuscript,” I say. “You may have to do some rewriting, but you’ve got a good story.”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding dejected. “Maybe I deluded myself into thinking that when I got the column I’d be living a different kind of life from then on, that rejection was behind me.”
“Sometimes it looks like one step forward, two steps back,” I say, “but you got to keep at it.”
“Maybe writing’s like weight loss,” Tamara says. “You succeed for a while, but then you inevitably slide back. Success is just a bump now and then in a long continuum of failure.”
“That’s not the Tamara that I know talking. I know you don’t believe that.”
“Maybe I just can’t do it,” Tamara says. “Maybe it’s just too hard. I don’t have the talent. I’m a fraud.”
“If you start to think that way you become paralyzed,” Ty says. “Right, Maggie?” he says, yelling into the phone.
I hate three-way conversations, but he’s right. “Yeah,” I yell. “Everything’s hard, especially taking the first step.”
“But I don’t want to keep failing, goddammit.”
“Look at me,” Ty says. I hear him come and sit next to her. “Have you ever failed before?” he says.
“Of course I’ve failed before, Jesus!”
“You still alive?”
She doesn’t answer for a minute. Then I hear her laugh.
“Okay then,” he says.
“Maggie, I gotta go,” Tamara says. “I got a pile of letters to tear up.”
I hang up. I don’t think she notices.
“Your last day,” Taylor says, slipping his arm around my waist as we walk to the car.
I glance at him, then look away. I woke up this morning with no appetite. Don’t remember the last time that happened. At my worst, I breakfasted on Coke and potato chips. But now there was only this hollow feeling.
He dangles the keys in front of me. “Want to drive?”
I shake my head. We drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. He left the studio early so we could spend the afternoon together. I turn and stare out the window at the ocean as the waves break against the rocky coastline, glittering like faceted stones—the second perfect thing my eyes feasted on when I woke up in his bed. I open the window to breathe in the cool, salty air.
I hate goodbyes—that gnawing fear that the harsh winds of fate might change your life from that moment on, separating you forever. The air charged with the unspoken. Airports were the worst, particularly after September 11th.
To relieve the discomfort I’m feeling, I start blathering on endlessly about weight loss. “…the absurdity of looking at a weight chart and finding your ideal weight. I mean there are fifty different tables, some take into account frame size, sex and age, others don’t. They don’t distinguish between excess fat and muscle. You can look fat but have a high percentage of…” I’m boring myself to death, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking. He seems to be caught up in driving. I catch my breath and stop in midsentence. I don’t think he notices.
“So now you’re an expert. Maybe you should take over the column for me.”
“What would you do, act?”
“I can’t act, I can’t even lie—well, not for long. And my problem now is that my readers want to know how the hell I lost weight and what’s happening to me. A lot of them are going to hate me now. My message is going to get a lot more complicated.” I shake my head. “I just have to sort out what to tell them.”
“Tell them you had a crush on a movie star and wanted to test out the fantasy, but it passed and you realized that in real life fantasies burst like soap bubbles, but you decided to stay thin anyway, and you ran back to your New York life to pick up the pieces.”
“That’s not my story.”
“So what is?”
I shrug.
Taylor’s watching me stare ahead. “So what is?” he says, reaching over and holding my arm. “You’ve got to figure out your moves pretty soon, you know.”
His face is so close to mine that I don’t move. I can almost feel the warmth of his skin. I want to touch it, but I don’t. I shift in my seat, uncomfortable.
“Maybe the New York columnist goes home, and before her plane lands, the movie star starts living with another leggy blond
e who weighs ninety-five pounds and wears a size four, and they live happily—and then unhappily—ever after until he meets a sexier one with a different accent who wears a size two. The actress du jour, or maybe a Scandinavian cover girl this time—”
“You don’t give me much credit do you? Or yourself for that matter.”
Why am I doing this? Do I have to test out his allegiance to me? And why am I putting myself down like that?
“Maybe you’re right,” I say in a whisper. “Guess it comes with the territory.” Neither of us knows what to say, but I’m getting edgy as he starts racing around the turns as though he wants to permanently imprint his tire tracks on the road.
“Are you trying to smash us both up? Would that solve things?”
“No, but some coke might help. Want some?”
“I prefer Pepsi.”
“You’re always on, right? I can’t get through to you.” He drives faster, turning up the radio.
“I’d prefer not to be cremated in your car just now,” I shout above Aerosmith, “so would you mind slowing down—no, pulling over?” He doesn’t seem to hear, then suddenly swerves off the road. I pitch forward in my seat—glad that I didn’t have lunch—and feel the seat belt stretch and snap back on me. I reach for the radio and turn it down. It seems like such a long time ago that we were heading to his house for the first time. I’ll never forget how he stopped—more slowly then—to teach me how to drive a stick.
“Okay, let’s run off to Vegas. How many times have you been proposed to before, anyway?”
He shrugs. No one could accuse him of being a braggart.
“Is that what you want—to tie yourself down to one guy for the rest of your life?”
“I’ve never thought about it in those terms, but at some point…I guess you meet someone and…you can’t imagine life without them. You don’t feel like you’re giving anything up or losing anything…just the opposite.”
“But that’s not what’s going on here.”
“It’s so different here for me,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m facing the wrong ocean. And the prices on Rodeo Drive are starting to look normal to me….”
Fat Chance Page 17
