Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  The only reason I was thinking about him, I realized, was because I’d never known him well enough to know his flaws. That’s my problem, I thought. I am totally enamored with guys unless and until I actually get to know them. Then I find out their stomach is soft or they bring up pro wrestling too often or they hog up the sofa they’re renting out or, well, something.

  My fixation on men from long ago was a sad manifestation of my loneliness. So were my long discussions with strangers on the Internet. But I didn’t realize exactly how sad it all was until the day some of us at the office were going to lunch together, celebrating three pregnancies on the staff. We were supposed to meet outside Hughes’s office at 11 AM—a late lunch for us—and walk together to a nearby salad bar. I was thinking of doing something wild like loading up on croutons.

  As we were about to leave, I said I needed to dart into my office and check my e-mail. And Hughes acted surprised. “You do?”

  I looked at him, a tad defensively. “Well, yeah. Don’t you?”

  “Unless I’m expecting something important, I just check mine once a day,” he said.

  “Once a day?” I asked incredulously.

  Baxter rolled his eyes. “Good grief, Hewey,” he said. “Once a day?”

  One of the administrative assistants snickered. A producer nodded his head solemnly. “It’s no wonder Hughes is so productive,” he said.

  I just gulped. The sad truth was, I wasn’t even really going to check my e-mail. I was using my private shorthand for checking the boards, only I was now using my private shorthand publicly. (Which is worse? Lying to yourself or to others?)

  I was stunned by Hughes’s reaction. I knew that going to check the boards again would be an embarrassing thing to own up to, but I had thought checking my e-mail sounded perfectly legitimate. But Hughes’s comment was a wake-up call. I realized, suddenly, how twisted my view of the online world had become. I was no longer capable of distinguishing between obsessive and normal.

  At least that is how I felt, standing there. Hughes was looking at me in his amused way while the other lunchgoers glanced at their watches. I suddenly saw myself through their eyes, and from that vantage point I realized that I spent a lot of time on the Internet. Just the other day, in fact, one of the pregnant staffers had told me an exhausting story about her previous evening, in which she had attended a Lamaze class, childproofed her home for the coming baby, cooked seven casseroles to freeze for harried postbirth meals, cleaned out her hall closet, and had a dinner date with her husband. “One last hurrah,” she said. And then she smiled at me and asked what I had done. I pretended to have a coughing fit to avoid telling her that I had surfed the Web all night, chatting about my own show and reading up on ways to increase your pedometer count.

  I had told myself she was just engaged in some crazed hormonal behavior, but now . . . I wondered. I looked at her and the rest of them, waiting for me to answer Hughes and explain why I needed to check my e-mail.

  “Well,” I said, with feigned breeziness. “I suppose if you only check once a day, I can wait until after lunch.”

  I acted as if everything was fine. But it wasn’t. All during the chatty, happy lunch, I felt distant from the crowd as I picked at my salad of butterhead lettuce. As I ate, I looked around the room and I suddenly realized with absolute conviction that none of these people were spending hours a day reading about themselves online. I felt, for the first time, like someone with a shameful secret. I was, arguably, sick. It was as if I was addicted to reading about the show. Wait a second, I thought. I’ve heard of that. Internet addiction. I’m quite sure I read something about that once.

  I couldn’t wait to get back to the office to get online and read about it again. And that impulse alone, the impulse to turn to the Internet for more information, proved that I had an Internet addiction. I felt a surge of panic, and then something very much like excitement. Cal will let me have a whole month off for treatment, even during sweeps! I could sleep, possibly, for days.

  This Internet obsession, I found myself thinking, is quite possibly the best thing that has ever happened to me.

  When we got back to the studio, I closed the door to my office so that no one could see what I was doing and found a Web site devoted to Internet addiction. I scrolled through the questions. “How often do you spend more time than you intend to online?” Well, always! Didn’t everybody? I thought everybody did! Apparently not! I’d only done one question and I’d already gotten five points!

  “How often does surfing interfere with your work?” Well, there you go. See? Right at that very moment it was interfering with work. If I didn’t have Internet access, I would have had to wait until I left the office to read up on this. But here I was, in the middle of the workday, taking this test rather than doing something productive. Score another five points!

  A couple of the questions were a bit difficult because they didn’t really apply in my case. “Does surfing get in the way of doing housework?” The hotel maids did all the housework, but I figured that if I had housework to do, I would surely do less of it because of the Internet. So I gave myself the highest score. Then it asked if loved ones ever complained about my online usage. I don’t have any loved ones who know about it, I thought sadly. I live alone. In a hotel. Still, I’m quite sure that my mother would complain if she knew. “You can’t write a decent letter, but you spent two hours yesterday looking for baby shower gifts on RedEnvelope?” I could just imagine her saying that! I gave myself another maximum score.

  The next question was about whether I ever comforted myself with “soothing thoughts of the Internet.” I giggled a little. Well, that’s just silly, I thought. “Soothing thoughts of the Internet.” The Internet isn’t soothing.

  But then I remembered that rough day just last week when Cal made us leave straight from work for an embarrassing team-building exercise in Central Park. (The real objective was not to build our team, but to look picturesque for Business Week, which was doing a story about the GUP network’s superb morale and its employees’ “intense loyalty” to Cal. They needed photos.) So Hughes, Baxter, and the rest of us ran around the park, doing ridiculous stunts while wearing, in my case, a really uncomfortable pair of Fendi pumps.

  Cal suggested I take them off, but I was embarrassed by a slipshod pedicure I had received the day before. (Add that to my rules of life: Just because a pedicurist “once” did John Cusack’s nails does not mean you should let her do yours. Note the word once. Never consider a pedicurist who can’t boast of repeat customers. Also, in retrospect: John Cusack?)

  At any rate, I remember quite clearly climbing a portable rock wall in those stupid shoes and thinking: I cannot wait to go home, kick these shoes off, and mess around on the Internet.

  There it was! A “soothing thought” about the Internet!

  I am sick, I thought.

  And when I made my announcement and there was the press conferences and everything, I would give credit to Hughes. If he hadn’t expressed his surprise that I was going back to check my e-mail, well . . . I never would have known. (Of course, if he hadn’t been rumored to be gay, I may not have gotten addicted in the first place. But I didn’t plan to go into that.)

  I hoped giving this public credit to Hughes would deepen our relationship. Little did I realize how much it was about to deepen anyway.

  Chapter 13

  The eye-opening Internet quiz had been on a Thursday. But I decided to take the weekend to read up on Internet addiction before making my announcement. Good thing I had decided not to do anything rash.

  During a story-idea brainstorming session, I casually suggested a story on Internet addiction and Cal said it was quite a good idea. “Maybe we can interview some of these loonies who are talking about our show online for hours every day,” he said. Hughes and Baxter and I each cringed. I assumed that they were cringing for the implication that our fans were unhinged. I was cringing at the suggestion that I was unhinged.

  The Web master u
sed this as an excuse to launch into his favorite topic, the lack of publicity for our discussion boards. There was some tedious back and forth and Cal finally said, “Fine. Publicize them, redesign them. What do I care?”

  The meeting ended and I told Cal I was feeling ill, though I didn’t explain it was from hearing him talk about “loonies.”

  I raced back to the hotel and went straight to bed without logging on—not even for a moment. I considered it something of a test and was very impressed with myself for doing it. I wasn’t sure I could. But I was lucky I did because the extra sleep came in handy on Friday.

  That morning I headed into the office as usual, getting there a little early to check the boards once before going over the scripts. (I thought since I had gone without the night before, I was entitled.) I was pleased to realize that my absence on the boards had not gone unnoticed. Baxterbasher posted several times, saying, “Are you out there, ObjectiveObserver?” And when he finally gave up, he said: “I suppose if my online friends are going to disappear like this, I’m going to have to do something to get an actual life.”

  And Weatherjunkie had posted: “LOL, B-basher. Me too.”

  I smiled with satisfaction at that. Weatherjunkie and Baxterbasher were my best friends on the boards. The only ones whose comments on the show seemed insightful and on point. But I liked Weatherjunkie better. B-basher had a mean streak. (Hence the name.)

  Anyway, I was sitting there, grinning a little and wondering how on earth Weatherjunkie and B-basher would get by when I had to give up the boards to treat my addiction, when Hughes startled me by popping into my office, flashing some theater tickets, and asking if I wanted to join him for what he called a “wickedly avant garde” theater production. It was, he said, a postmodern, edgy take on love and marriage by an up-and-coming playwright who was all the rage in the circles that rage about such things.

  “Really?” I said. (It was hardly Miss Liberty’s approved response to an invitation, but I was frankly stunned. Hughes had never, ever asked me to an event other than dinner.)

  “Oh yes,” Hughes continued, apparently misunderstanding my question. “They say it’s simply shocking.”

  He went on to describe the play, which was about a woman’s decision to leave her emotionally abusive husband for her lover. I confess I was skeptical. I supposed leaving an emotionally abusive husband would have been considered edgy at some point in history or in some places in the world. Miss Liberty was, for example, not a big worrier about emotional abuse. (I specifically remember a passage where she said that domestic servants should not be so silly as to get their backs up about employers mispronouncing their names or using “so-called derogatory slang.”) But Miss Liberty lived in 1910. Now? In Manhattan? Leaving an emotionally abusive husband struck me as an edgeless concept.

  But who cared about that? Hughes was asking me to join him for a play. This meant that unlike our dinners, which were always conducted in empty restaurants, there would be witnesses. People might actually think we were a couple! On a date!

  I’m not ashamed to admit that this thrilled me. I was atwitter all the way to the theater. On the cab ride over, Hughes even asked me why I was drumming my fingers in such an agitated way, but I passed it off as a weight-maintenance thing. “People who fidget are slimmer than those who don’t,” I said.

  He nodded solemnly. “I’ve read that, too,” he said, and began tapping his toes to the beat of the cabdriver’s music.

  When we arrived at the theater, I felt self-conscious and alive. I looked around and wondered how many people recognized us and, if they did, what they thought. Just co-workers out for a social night?

  And was that all we were? Co-workers who often ate together or shared play tickets or gave each other career or fashion advice?

  As we settled into our seats in the left balcony, the big lights dimmed and a woman took the stage, a spotlight illuminating her as she gave us the usual reminders about turning off phones and not expecting an intermission. Then she walked off and the regular stage lights came up. I looked across the theater, and directly opposite me in the right balcony, a tall, agile man was slipping into his seat, the only one taken in a couple of rows near the back. He was wearing crisp-looking chinos and a black T-shirt. His hair was tussled in a Kurt Cobain sort of way. He laughed at something the usher said as he lowered himself into his seat. He was still chuckling as the light from the stage illuminated his face and I realized, with a start, that it was Baxter. Where was the bow tie? And he looked so, well, happy.

  He adjusted his long limbs awkwardly, looked up at the stage, and then, almost magically, looked right at me. An entire theater of people and when he looked up, he looked up right at me.

  He was clearly surprised. He jumped a little. His face broke into a smile and he waved.

  And then I did something that still puzzles me. I put my hand down at my side, so that it was blocked from Hughes’s view by my own body and by the program I was holding in my lap. And I waved back.

  Why did I do it that way? Why did I hide from Hughes that I was waving to our mutual co-worker? Why didn’t I nudge Hughes and indicate for him to wave, too? What was my impulse toward secrecy?

  Baxter apparently noticed the discreet move I’d made. He looked at me, then at Hughes, then back at me with an amused, questioning look. Cocked his head a little, turned the corners of his lips up, but most importantly he locked his eyes on mine. I took this as a challenge. He was daring me to look away.

  I didn’t.

  The first scene of the play was filled with tortured dialogue, inexpertly delivered. The review the next day tore it apart—tore the whole play apart—but was especially hard on the first scene, which the reviewer noted was so stilted as to be painful to listen to.

  And listen to it was all that I could do because I was still staring into Baxter’s eyes across the crowded theater. I could see the actors moving in my peripheral vision. I could hear the words. That was all.

  One of the actors on stage moved over to the side to deliver a tortured monologue about the anguish of being involved with a man who treats you badly. The lights shifted and for a moment—no, for longer than that—I could barely see Baxter and I assumed that he could barely see me. But even then, neither of us looked away.

  Soon the actors on the stage were rolling around, thumping about on the floor in a love scene that the review called pathetic and icky. But Baxter and I just kept looking at each other.

  As the minutes passed, I began to feel giddy and reckless. I was tempted to up the ante in some way. Blow a kiss? Unbutton the top of my blouse? I felt like I should do something wild and outrageous. But then, as this little stare-down continued, I came to feel that this was the most wild and outrageous thing I could do with this man whom I talked to every day. I would simply allow him to stare into my soul for as long as he would.

  Toward the end of the play, there was a gloomy scene in which most of the characters in the play got drunk in the dark and some of them killed themselves. The scene was, in the words of the reviewer, “as long as hell and a good deal more painful.” The stage was dimly lit; no light at all escaped into the crowd. For the entire ordeal, twenty minutes at least, I could not see Baxter at all. But I continued looking into the dark space where I had been able to see him before, aware of the play in only the most vague and incidental way.

  And then, finally, it was over. Light once again flooded the theater seats, and it seemed to me that time moved so slowly that I could see the glow spread row by row into the audience. It seemed to take an hour to reach the place where Baxter had been sitting and when it did, it was as if not a second had passed.

  He was still looking toward me. He cocked his head toward the stage and rolled his eyes. I smiled and then, finally, looked at my shoes. And when I looked up again, he was gone.

  Hughes leapt to his feet then, calling out “Bravo!” and whispering in my ear about how marvelously risqué the whole thing was. It was a subject he was able to go on a
bout throughout the curtain call and during the slow walk to the lobby. He used the word brilliant several times. I think he said it was a “tour de force.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. I didn’t normally argue with Hughes, but this play had not been, at all, my kind of thing. “Didn’t you think the dialogue was a little stilted?” I asked.

  Hughes sighed in an exasperated way. “Intentionally, honey,” he said. “It reflects the stilted age we live in.”

  “I suppose,” I said. I had, after all, given the play less than half my attention, so I didn’t want to be too dogmatic. I must confess that I wasn’t absolutely certain it was terrible until I read the review the next day.

  Hughes was going on some more about our stilted era as I looked around the room. I gathered that Baxter had left. He had disappeared so quickly, he surely must have been dashing off to meet someone. Probably a woman, I found myself thinking sadly. And this surprised me, for I had never found myself wondering about whom Baxter spent time with before.

  But then I saw him. A clump of people standing nearby broke up and suddenly there he was, walking toward us from the elevators. His coat was casually draped over his shoulder. He looked more relaxed than he ever did on the set. He looked more relaxed than anyone I had encountered in my adult life, I guessed. He looked like a relaxed Midwesterner. He reminded me of home.

  “Well, well, well,” Hughes said, when he saw Baxter approaching. “The whole gang is here.” He looked Baxter up and down and added, “And you’re dressed like Shaggy Doo! No bow tie.”