Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

I winced. First of all, I don’t think Shaggy’s last name is Doo. He’s not Scooby’s brother, after all. And I don’t recall him ever wearing a black shirt. He always wore green, didn’t he? More importantly, why did Hughes always have to bring up the ties?

  Baxter ignored the whole thing. “Hello, Hewey,” he said. He nodded toward me then but didn’t meet my eyes. He simply said: “Addison.”

  I noticed that he said my whole name. He did not call me Ada, as he normally did. I wondered what that meant.

  “I had no idea you were here,” Hughes said. “Did you, Addison?”

  The question surprised me and made me feel guilty. I wondered about it days later. It was a strange question to ask. I would have expected Hughes to ask if I had known Baxter was coming. But asking me if I had known Baxter was there? It was a very specific question. Not as specific as Have you been staring into this man’s eyes for the past two hours? But specific nonetheless. Why did Hughes ask that, particularly?

  Still, live television prepares you for surprising moments, and I handled it. “I saw him just now coming across the room,” I said. (It was an absolutely true statement. I had seen him just then coming across the room. I did not say it was the first time I saw him that evening.)

  “And I saw you,” Baxter said, which made me blush, but by that point Hughes had started glancing around the room again to see if he was being recognized. He did not notice the blush.

  “I wasn’t aware that you liked theater,” Hughes said, without making eye contact.

  Baxter said, “I’m trying to branch out.”

  “Well, you picked an excellent one to start with,” Hughes said. He yammered on for a while about reflecting our stilted times. I looked at my feet again. I wished I had worn higher heels.

  Baxter eventually interrupted. “I guess I didn’t appreciate the significance of the stilted dialogue,” he said while looking directly at me for the first time since approaching us. “They were rolling around on the stage, talking about the ‘handcuffs of marriage’ and the ‘ethics of love.’ The whole play I was just thinking of lines like: ‘Dump the jerk, run away with me. Push me down on the futon and bite off my buttons.’?”

  I gasped. I was terrified and, well, thrilled. I was also slightly appalled to realize that the futon-pushing, button-biting fantasy was common enough to be some sort of catchphrase. When FargoMama had used it on the boards, I thought it was original. I took a moment to chide myself for not staying up on pop culture. Hughes didn’t bat an eye.

  “Ah, Baxter,” he said. “Charming as usual.” Then he excused himself to get another drink and Baxter and I stood there, uneasily shifting from one foot to the other.

  “You look nice,” I said. I meant this as idle chitchat. It’s one of the sorts of things co-workers say when they encounter each other in nonprofessional settings. But I immediately cringed. After having stared at him for so long, it seemed like a more meaningful comment than I had intended.

  But he accepted it gracefully. “The bow tie thing is an act, you know,” he said. “My agent came up with it. Bow ties are big with weathermen.”

  “Ah,” I said. Then: “Oh.”

  I don’t know why this surprised me so much. Other people have agents, too, don’t they?

  “The agent picked out the name Baxter, too—after Ted Baxter on Mary Tyler Moore,” he continued.

  “And the curmudgeonly thing?” I asked, a bit hesitant.

  “All an act,” he said. He winked, leaned toward me. “Most of the time, at least.”

  I smiled and, inexplicably, blushed.

  “You know,” Baxter said, “the little speech I gave Hewey about what I was thinking during the play? That wasn’t really what I was thinking.”

  “Oh?” I asked. I was now definitely tilting more toward terrified.

  “No, I was really thinking Dump the jerk, run away with me, let me love you. But I thought button biting sounded more avant garde.”

  He leaned over then and whispered in my ear. “Your move.” And he turned and walked out the door without looking back.

  And that was the night Hughes finally kissed me.

  Chapter 14

  Men.

  I suppose women are the same, really—loving the unattainable more often than not. But men seem particularly transparent about it. Not that I was ever unattainable to Hughes. But it did not escape my notice that he did not make a physical move in our relationship until the night that Baxter flirted with me.

  I learned this lesson about men early enough. My high school boyfriend and I had been taking what should have been a romantic stroll when I was fourteen. It was summer and dark out and we were walking around the block of his leafy, suburban neighborhood. We were holding hands, but he was telling me that he wasn’t really interested in a relationship just then and that he thought we shouldn’t spend so much time together. Our relationship was, he explained, getting in the way of his pro-wrestling viewing.

  I was about to drop his hand—understandably, I thought. Who holds hands while breaking up? Just then, in the distance, I saw a red Toyota pickup turn on the street, engines gunning in a typical teenage-guy fashion. For a moment, I thought it must be Kevin Ford, who sometimes borrowed his brother’s truck though he wasn’t old enough to drive. (Not a strongly enforced law in Slater County—at least not then.) I was, by this point, admitting to myself that I rather liked Kevin Ford so I dropped my boyfriend’s sweaty palm even more quickly than I’d originally intended, a move that did not go unnoticed.

  “What’s going on?” my boyfriend asked, glancing at the pickup and then back at me. By the time the truck got close enough for me to realize it was not Kevin, but his truck-owning brother, my boyfriend was looking at me with admiring new eyes. “You like him,” he said, incredulously. “One of those Ford boys.”

  I shrugged. There was a long silence, and then my boyfriend revealed an amazing bit of self-awareness and honesty.

  “I feel completely different about you,” my boyfriend said. “Now that I know you like someone else.”

  Yeah, well. Yeah.

  We dated for another three months and those three months were as satisfying as you would expect, given that little story.

  Anyway, I suspect that the same sort of thing happened with Hughes. I don’t think he saw Baxter and me staring at each other during the play, for Hughes was obviously enthralled with what was happening on stage. And he clearly did not hear Baxter telling me that it was now my move.

  But I suppose that night when Hughes returned with his drink, I was distracted and disinterested. I hung on his words less. My gaze was a little less admiring. I actually was, in some small way, less “available” to him. He picked up on that and, suddenly, he could not get enough of me.

  “You smell great,” he said at one point. And a few moments later, he added: “You look great.”

  As we were leaving, he placed his hand on the small of my back. And when I pulled my skirt up a little to get in the taxi, he whistled in a sweet, boyfriendish way.

  “Want to get a drink?” Hughes asked. I was surprised: It was awfully late for people who worked our kind of hours, and besides, even Hughes had to watch the alcohol. The camera adds ten pounds to men, too.

  There was a basement bar near my hotel, and we settled into a discreet corner. He got a gin and tonic. I got a glass of water. “For now,” I told the waiter. As if I was just a little thirsty and wanted to get my hydration levels up before blowing a day’s worth of calories on sugary mixed drinks.

  Hughes and I had fallen into a companionable routine by then. On camera we were often extraordinarily flirtatious, but in real life it was far more toned down. You can talk about swallowing goldfish all day on television and what’s the harm? But it feels dangerous and scary and, you know, real to say the same thing in the darkened corner of a bar. (Or even in an empty restaurant at 4:30 PM, which as I’ve said was our more typical date.)

  Our private conversations were normally—well—friendly, yes. Comforta
ble? Undoubtedly. Occasionally even flirtatious. But for people who were, by that point, celebrated for their public chemistry, our private conversations were rather inert.

  Usually.

  That night Hughes kept grinning in a boyish, impish, charming way, laughing at everything I said, and slinging his arm along the back of our shared bench in an intimate gesture. There was an awkward moment when we finally ran out of conversation and just grinned at each other for what seemed like a very long time. His dimple quivered. His smile wavered, and he finally looked away. A couple of times, he set his hand down on my thigh to emphasize a point.

  Yes, his eyes crinkled. Often.

  During my third glass of water, he started talking about how “refreshingly down-to-earth” I was and how “genuine” also. Looking back, I should have known then that something had changed in my relationship with Hughes. You would have to be delirious with infatuation, I think, to consider me “genuine.”

  And I was feeling pretty infatuated myself. When we left the theater, I had been distracted by my interactions with Baxter, but after a couple of hours with a flirtatious Hughes, I had forgotten all about that. And then we started yawning. It was 2 AM—we’d each been up about twenty-three hours. “I guess I should get home,” I said.

  And Hughes said he supposed he should as well. He offered to walk me to the hotel, just around the corner really. I followed him up the narrow stairs that took the bar patrons to the street level, and a blast of cool misty air hit us in the face. “Wow,” he said. “It’s gotten cold.”

  He popped open his James Smith & Sons umbrella. He always had that handy, being the sort that sweats the details. I murmured something and leaned into him. It was an instinctive reaction—seeking shelter from the drizzle and the chill. But I immediately realized that this spot—my head on his chest, just under his chin—was a nice place to be.

  His arm slid around me and for many months afterward I swore to myself that I could remember each individual step we took, hunkered together, until we reached my hotel. But time has erased some of that. Now I remember only the general feel of it.

  I do remember that as we got closer to the lobby, I felt an impending panic. I didn’t want the night to end yet, obviously enough. And I didn’t think he did, either. But this was one of the moments you realized how odd it was to be living in a hotel. If I’d been in a regular apartment, I would have asked him to come up for some herbal tea—something warm and noncaloric to sip while he called a cab. I do not know if any hot drinks would have been consumed or any cab called, but it would have been at least something to say.

  But there was a taxi in front of the hotel and there was a bank of phones in the lobby and there was a cafeteria, presumably with tea, next door. And there was nothing in my room except a television, a laptop, and a bed.

  What should I do? I asked myself. What can I say?

  As it turned out, though, I didn’t need to say anything. We stepped into the lobby, shook ourselves free from the wet air, laughed at some silly weather joke the bellman made, and then Hughes gave me his arm and walked me straight into the elevator as if he had no need to be invited, as if that was simply where we all knew he belonged. There were several other people on the elevator, a group of five or six conventioneers—all loud and laughing. Hughes and I stood side by side, our backs to the side wall of the mirror-lined elevator. We stood there looking straight ahead into the opposite mirror. Without turning toward each other, we could still make eye contact, and there was a long unbroken glance. Somehow our pinkie fingers became intertwined.

  On the eighth floor, the raucous group exited, apparently headed for a balcony bar. We stood there for a beat or two, waiting for the elevator doors to close. From the bar, we could hear the wailing sounds of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” We stood like that for a long time, the doors to the elevator still open. Finally, I realized with embarrassment that I had never pushed the button for my floor. So I giggled and reached across Hughes to do so. I swore I could hear his heart beat.

  The elevator doors closed and we were silent, looking at our feet, our pinkie fingers swinging a little. Then his hand was on my face and his lips were on mine and my arms were around his neck and his tongue was in my mouth and my heart was in my knees.

  After that, it is all a blur.

  Chapter 15

  It’s hard for me to remember how I felt those next few weeks. Obviously, everything that has happened since then has colored those days in my memory. At the time, I was exhilarated, ecstatic, and enthralled. But now I look back and am skeptical about every moment of it. I’m not sure, to this day, what I think of Hughes or of our courtship.

  The next morning was the blending of comfort and awkwardness that you’d expect. We’d been talking and sharing meals together like an old married couple for months and now we were ordering breakfast from room service and dividing up the morning paper like new lovers.

  “Is this awkward?” he said at one point, employing his boyish grin to full effect.

  “It’s like When Harry Met Sally,” I said, shrugging a little. “We already know each other’s stories.”

  He said he’d never seen When Harry Met Sally, which amazes me to this day. What had he been doing for the last fifteen years?

  I tried to explain Harry’s theory, expressed in the middle stages of the movie, that the reason his relationship with Sally fell apart was that they had been friends so long, they already knew each other’s stories and thus had nothing to talk about after sex.

  I challenged Hughes then to tell me something I didn’t already know about him.

  “I just did,” he said, with a wink. “I’ve never seen When Harry Met Sally.”

  “Something else,” I said, smiling into my breakfast fruit cup. It was mostly cantaloupe, thankfully. Strawberries are so terribly caloric.

  He looked out the window for a moment, as if he was thinking very seriously, and then he said, “My dad says that after all those years on the bench, he can immediately spot a lie. He says that everyone has a ‘tell’—a gesture or an expression or sound they make when they’re lying. Mine,” he continued, “is that I always blink three times after a lie.”

  “Blink?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Three times. My dad said it might be a second, or five seconds, or nine seconds after the lie, depending on how determined I am to keep my secret. But before I say the next thing, I always blink three times.”

  Well, Hughes Sinclair, I thought, don’t think I won’t remember that.

  And then he smiled and acknowledged the usefulness of the information. “My dad also told me that I should never share that information with a woman—at least not if I intended to lie to her.”

  He chuckled, looked at his hands. “So I guess,” he said, in what I took to be a meaningful way, “I’m never going to lie to you.”

  I nodded. “Or at least, you’ll get caught if you do.”

  He dipped his head and lifted his palms in an expression that seemed to say: Fair enough.

  “On the other hand,” he said, eyes still sparkling with playfulness, “everyone blinks.”

  Our eyes were locked. He smiled. I smiled. He pushed his chair back a little, propped his bare feet into my robed lap. And we went back to our papers.

  Hughes left my room at 2 PM that Saturday, all dimples and meaningful glances. He said he had family plans on Sunday, apologized for not being available. I made all the appropriate comments. “Don’t be silly. I understand. Of course, your family is important. I think I can live a day without you.”

  And so forth.

  But I was, as you might expect, mad with relief and delight when he called the next morning anyway, saying he couldn’t stand another of his cousin’s sing-alongs and asking if he could sneak away and meet me for a movie and a meal. And then he showed up at my door with a DVD of When Harry Met Sally and take-out Thai food in boxes. We never left the room, until he made a great show of peeling himself away from me at 10 PM, six shor
t hours before we would see each other again at work.

  Chapter 16

  I arrived at the studio at my usual time, although more giddy and gushy than usual. I had chatted with my driver all the way into the station and chirped “good morning” as I passed the doorman, the various overnight producers, and the administrative assistants who were already in the studio. (This may not sound particularly giddy to you, but compared with my usual 4 AM demeanor it was positively over-the-top.)

  “Well, you’re in a good mood,” one of the lighting guys said. “You and Baxter must be drinking the same coffee. He’s all bouncy, too.”

  I turned then and saw Baxter at his workstation across the newsroom. I suddenly realized with horror that he might interpret any appreciable change in my mood as being about him and the stare-down we shared in the theater on Friday evening. I had not, I am embarrassed to admit, given him another thought since Hughes kissed me in the elevator.

  It was a surreal moment, standing there—looking at Baxter whistling at his computer, expecting Hughes to appear at any moment and hoping that he would seem similarly happy. After months, years really, of loneliness, two very interesting things had happened that weekend. And for the first time, I focused on that coincidence and thought about how briefly thrilled I had been by Baxter’s attention and how quickly I’d forgotten it. It didn’t speak well of me, I was afraid.

  I would have been a little nervous about how Hughes and I would handle ourselves in the office and on the air anyway, but that morning as I watched Baxter, I felt the stakes being raised noticeably. I cleared my throat, smiled at the lighting guy, and said by way of explanation: “It’s a beautiful night out there. I suspect everyone will be in a good mood.”

  Sure enough, Hughes bounded in moments later—with doughnut boxes no less. He was handing out glazes—I had a quarter of a doughnut hole—and acting uncharacteristically chummy with even the lowliest of interns.

  I was flattered out of my mind at the thought that his weekend with me was apparently doing so much for his spirits, but also a little concerned. I finally gathered myself to enter his office, where I mustered all my professionalism and dignity to say that though we’d had a lovely weekend, I hoped he shared my belief that we should not speak about it with any of our co-workers. He came around his desk then. He was wearing a four-button suit, one that I always found impossibly sexy. He perched himself on the beveled edge of his Amish-crafted, hickory desk. (Every time I looked at that desk, I thought I really should talk to Cal about my own, which appeared to have been salvaged from a 1970s Dumpster. Little hints like this left me with the impression that Hughes was valued more and—dare I think it?—paid more also.) He folded one leg under him as he eased himself onto the desk. It was a smooth, strong, agile move—one that showed off his ballet mother’s influence.