Fat Chance

by Deborah Blumenthal

  He smiles. “I don’t know of too many girls who make me laugh,” he says, running his hand along my chin. “I’m going to miss that.”

  “It’s a survival tool of the overweight…anyway a good friend of mine is getting married. I have to be there.”

  “So send her a solid gold fondue pot—on me.”

  “It’s a him….”

  “Him.” He nods, exaggeratedly. “He’s not marrying you, is he?”

  “No, smart-ass. But I’ve known him for a long time….”

  “You really like the guy.”

  “He’s just a friend at work…. I’m crazy about you, Taylor, but—”

  “It’ll pass—”

  “Don’t say that. It’s just that I can’t run away forever. I have to go back to my column, my life…. Does that make any sense?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, tapping the wheel nervously. “I’m no expert. I skipped out on one bad marriage, and I’ve slept with an awful lot of women that I haven’t loved—”

  “Slut.”

  “You got it. Aside from my three-month marriage, I’ve only been crazy in love once maybe. She was nineteen, and I was twenty-two. But then she moved a thousand miles away and I lost her. And now I meet Maggie O’Leary from New York who broke the mold, and got to my heart through my stomach. And what do I get?”

  “Indigestion?”

  “No, dumped for some—”

  “Stop—”

  “Anyway, I got you a going-away present.” He pulls a small red velvet box out of his hip pocket and places it in my lap. Cartier. I look at him warily and slowly open it. I lift up a shimmering gold chain with a charm hanging from it in the shape of an open book. There are emerald-cut diamonds running along the spine. Dangerous Lies is engraved on the cover. I flip it over and see the engraved words: With love, Mike.

  “You’re making going home very hard, you know?” I don’t want him to see my eyes, but he does. I open the chain and he lifts my hair and closes it behind my neck. I get a shiver as I feel the teasing touch of his fingertips on my neck. He looks at the necklace, then turns and stares out the driver’s window.

  “Well, there is a positive side to everything,” he says, rhythmically tapping the heel of his hand on the steering wheel for the second time. “At least you won’t be stripping the damn gears of my car anymore.”

  “I’ll miss this car,” I say, closing my hand over his on the wheel. “I really will.”

  eighteen

  In atmospheric colic, the 747 from Los Angeles to New York swoops, dips and ricochets through the atmosphere. From a world of sunshine, I’m hurled into a raging nor’easter.

  I stare out the window, taking deep relaxing breaths to overcome my nausea and chills. Are we even going to make it? On top of everything, I feel like I’m coming down with the flu. Is this Mother Nature’s way of punishing me for flying off to L.A.? Adding to my malaise is the haunting vision of Taylor’s face growing fainter and fainter as I walked from the gate. “It was a sweet time, Maggie.” No, it was more. I was leaving wonderland.

  But there was no time to nurse my misery—I had a column to write. Offer the hug, the Band-Aid, another shot in the arm. I needed a shot all right—curare maybe—to stop my own heart. I glare at the screen of the laptop.

  Three false starts, and after two hours in the air, all of the words I’ve written have been dragged into the electronic trash bin. Have my writing skills evaporated? Where was that warm, caring, intimate voice with readers? Maybe now that I had become thin—or thinner—I had grown cold, angry, strident and unfeeling. I could see the letters. When you lost the weight, you lost your heart.

  No, my heart was still there, but I had changed. Things hadn’t turned out the way I figured. I never imagined my boy-toy fantasy would warm to me. Actually, I hadn’t thought about his feelings at all—how liberating!

  I finger the necklace. Dangerous Lies. Loaded words. I had been given the rare chance to walk into the cotton-candy clouds of imagination and explore blind longing. Maybe blind was the operative word. It reminded me of a cartoon that a friend had on her refrigerator: A princess is sitting, eyes closed, dreaming of her Prince Charming and just at that moment, he passes by her on horseback.

  The flight smooths out and we begin to descend. I recognize the lights of Queens, the gray waters off Long Island. I look over Manhattan, spotting the Empire State Building, and the glittering 59th Street Bridge, and am haunted, like every New Yorker, by the absence of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

  I look for glimmering swimming pools and mosaics of twinkling turquoise, but there are none. Just tall buildings, and traffic-snaked roads. Tie-ups on the Cross Island Parkway, the glamorous Gowanus. The plane gets closer and closer to land, and finally, the reassuring BUMP as it hits the ground. I’m thrust back in my seat, feeling the rush of speed as it approaches the terminal. Tear-size rain pellets pound the glass. The northern half of the sky is a swath of charcoal gray. Home.

  I zip the laptop case and reach for my handbag, then sit while others file out first. They move like cattle, lugging heavy bags that pound the sides of the seats as they amble down the narrow aisle. The plane is nearly empty when I get up. I slip on my jacket and head for the terminal with my swollen suitcase. It feels as though I’m dragging home a corpse.

  I’m looking toward the taxi line when I spot him. Six foot five, always high above the crowd. But this Tex…has a look. Not newsroom anymore. Downtown. Sleek haircut, faint outline of a sandy beard along the jaw, steel-framed sunglasses, weathered-leather bomber jacket. He has that “just back from St. Bart’s” glow that blends with the clothes, and I’m wondering if he went so far as to visit a tanning parlor. I look him over, head to toe. Was he even trimmer? Whose hands had remodeled him, some Fashion Institute ingenue? Couldn’t have been Sharon—she could use some updating herself. He waves.

  I hesitate, then wave back, walking closer. He’s leaning up against a railing, smiling expectantly.

  “What did you do with Tex?”

  He points to the ground. “Down there with the old Maggie.”

  I run my hand over the sleeve of his jacket. “Sample sale?”

  “You underestimate me.”

  Under the jacket he’s wearing a tan cashmere turtleneck instead of his usual standard-issue blue pinpoint oxford shirt and poly tie. I feel the sweater. “Nice, but what’s going on around here? I go away for a lousy two weeks and you become Richard Gere?”

  “Not ‘You look good, Tex, I like the clothes. You lost weight.’ Just ‘What’s going on here?’”

  I catch myself. “Okay. You look good, Tex. I’m impressed. Stunned actually. Mr. GQ.”

  “Jesus, you’re something.”

  “Sorry, I was in California, remember? I guess I lost some of my brain cells. They’re airheads out there, you know? The state flower is the golden poppy, a natural source of opiates, you believe that?”

  He looks at me without saying anything for a minute, then shakes his head disapprovingly. “Well, the endearing personality is intact.”

  “Thank you.” Bastard.

  I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself. “Next, you’re going to tell me you have a part in a TV series.”

  “No, I’m still Metro editor, very happy with my job. I know who I am.”

  I open my mouth to reply but before I do, I see his eye on the necklace. He reaches out for the charm, lifts it, then turns it over. For a split second a look of incredulity passes over his face, and he snorts and shakes his head.

  I want to kill.

  “Don’t tell me you had a love affair with that clown.”

  “First of all,” I say, cocking my head to the side. “He’s not a clown, as you so articulately phrased it. He’s a world-famous actor. And second of all, it’s really none of your goddamn business what I did.”

  “No, you’re right,” he says, shaking his head in agreement, talking loud enough for people around us to halt their own conversations and st
art staring. “You are free to mess up your own lousy life. But if your sweet, private life is nobody’s business, then don’t hang a sign around your neck advertising it, okay?”

  Everyone around us seems to turn into an audience, watching to see how the play will end.

  “Actually, it’s not a sign at all,” I say as haughtily as possible. “It’s an eighteen-karat gold charm with diamonds made-to-order by Cartier. And you can just go screw yourself.” I viciously pull my bag from his hand, nearly toppling him. “You know what? I’d really rather take a cab with a kamikaze driver than have to endure spending another second with you.”

  “Well, that’s just fahn with me.” He’s yelling now, and thanks to the high ceilings, the sound waves are echoing throughout the terminal. “I don’t know wha I wasted mah whole afternoon coming out he-ah anyway.” The accent again. Stupid hick. Why didn’t he just go back to the armpit of Texas where he came from? Maybe because where he came from they probably didn’t have newspapers, just notices of cattle auctions. The nerve of him to humiliate me.

  I run out into the pouring rain, throw my bag into the back seat of the first cab that stops and bark, “Manhattan.”

  I slam the door and am a victim to an air supply that’s been beamed by the cloying vapors of bottled air freshener suctioned to the driver’s dashboard. Imagine jasmine, bathroom deodorant, B.O. and decay, all together inside a dark bottle. I know the fetid molecules are invading the fibers of my clothes like cigarette smoke in a crowded bar. I start to gag, and lower the window as far as it will go, welcoming the rain that lashes my face. I sit back and listen to the driver whispering into a cell phone for the entire fifty-minute ride, convinced that I’m being driven by someone who has now plotted a new terrorist attack against my city.

  In my elevator lobby, I stab the button for my floor and ride up to my apartment. I turn the key and enter an apartment that looks strange and unfamiliar as though I’m reentering somebody else’s old life. I throw open the living room windows and stare out blankly at the view. Concrete and steel. Bad enough that I left the sun-soaked world of California, I’ve come back to a city that now seems like it was shoehorned inside a dark, drafty elevator shaft. I strip off my clothes and toss them into a pile on the floor. As I walk into the bedroom, I glance at the row of plants along the window sill that my elderly neighbor promised to take care of. The edges of the leaves are black and drooping. Even the poor resilient cactus looks as though it’s succumbed to dehydration. My tiny teardrop of a New York garden has perished in my absence, starved of the few pathetic droplets of water, all it needed just to simply stay alive.

  The next morning, just as I’m about to enter my office, I hear the click of a camera.

  “Got ya,” Tamara says, grinning. I give her a small smile. The gossipmongers quickly congregate around me. “How was your pupil?” a secretary from Foreign giggles. “An A-plus?”

  “So is he really like the character he plays in The High Life?” Well, he gets high. I look at Tamara. She knows something’s amiss, but we don’t have time to talk. There are candidates waiting to be interviewed for her job. I want to cut through the stereotypes and hire a male, but few apply. One of the most promising is a gorgeous acting student, grounds for immediate rejection.

  Meanwhile, I dismantle the gallery of hunk posters with the solemnity afforded a series of shining presidential hopefuls who, through no shortcomings of their own, drop by the wayside. I stare at a blank wall, studying the hairline cracks as if they are seismic fissures in a planet that is about to implode.

  “Redecorating?” Tamara says.

  “Huh?”

  “How about a poster of some really wanted dudes.” She holds up the FBI’s “Most Wanted.”

  I wave it away. “Unwanted.” I look back down at the desk as if I’m lobotomized, skimming letter after letter. Readers are keenly aware of my weight loss, image change and the trip. I don’t have secrets. Now I know what it’s like to be running from the bulls at Pamplona. I try to concentrate on the column, but everything I write is garbage. Finally I bat something out.

  Dangerous Lies

  In my own life I’ve been living some dangerous lies. [I had to get that in somewhere, the phrase was now etched in my brain.] I thought that I would never again attempt to lose weight, never even put myself on an exercise program. Then, challenged by an assignment that would take me to the center of celebrity, I decided to tackle some major lifestyle changes. [No, admitting my infatuation with Taylor is going just a wee bit too far. Anyway, none of their damn business.]

  I began eating three small meals a day and two smaller, healthy snacks. I drank water instead of soda, juice or alcohol, and worked out regularly. So far, I have kept off all but five of the thirty-five lost pounds. Can I maintain the rest of what I lost? Who knows? Biology is destiny and the deck is stacked against me.

  But more important, I now have a new sensibility about that predisposition that will affect my food choices. Be assured, however, that I will never cut myself off from the joys of eating—there’s a reason why food tastes good. These days I think of food as a spiritual offering. I will never again use it as a weapon against myself, because that would demean the preciousness of life, of survival.

  As for exercise, who can afford not to, now that a new study shows that mice who exercised grew twice as many brain cells as those who didn’t. We’re running out of excuses.

  Before I press Send, it goes to Wharton with a note: “I hope this addresses all of the questions and concerns. Glad to be back, Maggie.”

  He messages back: “Liked the column. Happy you’re back. Just one thought: Should we change the name of the column now to ‘Slim Chance’?”

  “Bill. I’ve changed enough. Let’s leave something the same.”

  No party in Santa Monica tonight, and no lobster spring rolls and black bass. Instead the choice is a carton of take-out stir-fry shrimp and broccoli from the Tang Dynasty Palace or a tin-foil pan filled with tomatoes, black olives, iceberg lettuce and chunks of feta—the Parthenon salad—from Niko’s Diner.

  I stop at Blockbuster Video first and eyeball the Mike Taylor section, pulling out a copy of Super Sleuth, then look for his first movie, The Trainer.

  “He’s so hot,” a girl standing behind me says when she sees the cover of the video. I turn around. She has long, straight hair and is wearing tight jeans and high-heeled boots. A college freshman, maybe.

  “I heard he’s gay,” I say, shoving the box back into the shelf.

  “Really?”

  “Hard to believe, huh?”

  I take out Leaving Las Vegas. Halfway into it, I press Stop. What a downer. Home for two days, and nothing more from Tex. What exactly was eating him?

  As well as I thought I knew him, he remained something of an enigma. Here was a guy who took comfort in editing—cleaning up other people’s messes, making life neater, cleaner, more comprehensible, more to the point. And he was good at it. When parts of a story didn’t read smoothly or make sense, bells went off in his head. He was familiar with the language, its clarity, its subtlety, the various shades of mood and meaning each word had the exquisite power to convey. It served his needs, really. It made sense out of the jumble of life. But aside from the way he performed at work, how finely honed was his own life? Was his smug, self-satisfaction really a cover-up?

  I’m feeling frustrated, out of control, but instead of going into the kitchen and seeking fulfillment in a pint of Rocky Road, I head to a corner of the bedroom closet where I keep the free weights. Biceps curls. I lift the weights up angrily, pumping, heaving hard. Whatever his motivation, he could have opened up, told me how he felt, not just show up at the airport, think he had it all figured out because he glanced at the charm, then put Taylor and me down at the same time.

  While he was getting his doctorate in sartorial splendor, maybe someone gave him a tutorial on being a prick. I flew back from L.A., back to the job, ready to pick up my old life, and his reaction to a few harmles
s, cynical comments on my part was the Antarctica freeze.

  I put the weights down and think of food again. One expert suggested that if you got the urge to binge, you should force yourself to wait five minutes before doing anything. The next time you should wait ten minutes, finally working your way up to waiting half an hour before you touched food. Eventually, the theory went, if you were able to delay eating by half an hour, you would be able to think rationally about how destructive the behavior was, and substitute something else. Of course, you could always try this home remedy for reducing hunger pangs that I picked up from a Harvard University newsletter, although I can’t say that I tried it, or plan to: Dissolve a gelatin packet in water, stirring it well and quaffing it 2 to 3 hours after a meal to reduce appetite for the next meal. This can be done two to three times a day.

  But what I do is grab a handful of air-popped popcorn, sprinkle it with salt substitute and force myself to go for a walk, vowing that I’ll walk until I drop. Park Avenue is ideal—building after boring building, none of them home to delis or pizza parlors where the scent of toasted garlic knots might lure me in. I go home too exhausted to eat anyway, my body too tired to trouble my mind with stress.

  But at sunrise that ends. Now it’s time to work the body and ease the mind. Not bothering to dress, I step aboard Mr. Ed in my spinster pink flannel nightgown and begin the rhythmic slide. It’s calming, like cradle rocking. After a shower and a cup of French roast, I leave for the office.

  I work until lunch, then walk out to Tamara’s desk, grab a Milky Way sitting there and devour it. Tamara takes this in, silently. Then I turn to her.

  “Can I borrow your shoes?”

  “My shoes.” She repeats it as more of a statement than a question.

  “My Manolos are at the shoemaker. I need to be taller.”

  She looks at me strangely as she slips them off. “Going out?”

  “Just to the newsroom.”

  I ignore her look and with head held high, shoulders back, pupils dilated, I take long strides down the wide center aisle, past a maze of computers. With adrenal hormones flooding my veins, I feel my blood electrified, roiled by a surging power that turns me into a walking Vesuvius, my eyes focused on the Metro desk. I march purposefully, stopping just inches from Tex’s shoulder, and wait. Seconds pass. Nothing.