Fat Chance (16 page)

He pushes open the white lacquered door, and there it is, shadowed by night. Opposite the bed is a glass wall and beyond it only blackness and twinkling lights and the bleached
yellow of a three-quarter moon. In the daylight, the view will sharpen into focus, like a developing photo, to show an endless panorama of sunlight and blue ocean. He turns on a small steel wall lamp, and then kneels and lights three thick white candles on a red lacquer tray on the bedside table. I watch his lips come together to blow out the match.

“C'mere, sex symbol.”

He stretches out next to me, pushing back hair from my face and blowing off stray strands with a puff of breath. “Nobody can live up to that.”

“Try.”

He runs his fingers lightly over the outside of my dress, easing each button open, and then slowly sliding the silky fabric down until it reaches my waist. His lips brush my bare shoulders, and a hand slips behind me. With just a touch, my bra loosens. Does everything go easily for this man? His lips run along the hollow of my shoulders and down toward my breasts. I lean into him, and moan.

“Who taught you how to do…that?”

“This?”

“Umm…yes…”

“Or this?”

“Yes…God…”

“What if I stop?”

“I'll…oh…kill you…”

The mouth stops. So does the slow stroking finger playing on the outside of my panties. “No, you won't,” he whispers.

My arms tighten around his neck, but he eases back. Payback. I try again to pull him toward me, but he resists. A slow grin spreads over his face.

“What?” I whisper, pleading.

“Want to throw your fuck-me pumps out the window again?”

I bite his lip suddenly. “Only if you crawl around with me to look for them.”

“Mmmm, sounds like fun.” He lifts my shoes from the floor and arches his arm back as if to hurl them out of the window.

“Taylor…please…” He wrestles me down to the bed, dangling them high above my head with one hand, while the other pins my wrists together over my head. I push against him, fighting to reach them.

But with a learned cool, he leans over, caresses my ear with his lips, taunting me. Then, pressing himself against me, he whispers, “Put them on…”

 

“The dinner went perfectly, by eleven we were in bed, and then, in the middle of the night, I heard the moan.”

“The what?” I'm sitting up in Taylor's bed now and checking my watch. Fortunately, he isn't awakened by the ring of my cell from the room down the hall from his. It's 4:00 a.m., and Tamara is calling me from the hospital. It doesn't help that she's whispering from the opposite end of the country, and I'm half-dead.

“The moan. I ran to the bathroom door and called him, Maggie, and there was no answer. Finally, there was this terrible croak. ‘I'm dying,' he said. ‘It must have been something I ate.'”

I know what's coming.

“So he stumbles out of the bathroom looking like he's dying. Says he lost half the fluid in him, so we dash down and jump into a cab to the emergency room. Ty's lying back in his chair in the E.R., looking pale and faint. Finally they call us and ask him what he ate.”

“The oysters,” I say, so low that I think she can't hear me.

“Uh-huh,” she says, “uh-huh. A bad oyster. ‘Happens every year on Valentine's Day,' the doctors says, glaring at me. ‘Why don't people ever realize what a dumb idea it is to eat raw shellfish?' he says. Do you know how guilty I felt, Maggie?”

“How's he doing now?”

“He's going to be okay,” Tamara says, glumly, “no thanks to—”

“Don't blame yourself. Millions of people eat oysters, and it just happens that some of them are bad.” I turn and look at Taylor, who's slept through this, so far. Thank God I didn't make him oysters.

I hear her breathing. She's sitting in the No Smoking lounge now, she says, watching a gray-haired woman in a hospital gown with spongy slippers who's attached to an IV pole. “Sitting right under the No Smoking sign,” Tamara whispers. “The red tip of her cigarette is glowing like she's radioactive.”

I've never felt so glad to be so far away.

It's Valentine's Day, and Tamara is now in the least romantic spot in the universe. For some reason, that makes both of us laugh.

“If you weren't sick enough when you came in,” she says, “the sight of people moaning, being wheeled from ambulances with heart attacks, strokes, gunshot wounds—and one bum oyster—could make you keel over.”

“Sick,” I say, starting to laugh.

“You know, Maggie, there have been a few men in my life who I could imagine myself killing—shooting them, or maybe strangling them. But in my wildest dreams, it never occurred to me to use an oyster!”

How refined a murder, how deft. “One swallow of the soft, gray, slimy little bivalve, and the deed is done.”

“Oh God,” Tamara says, hysterical now. “If he pulls through, I'll do all I can to make it up to him.”

“Everything,” I say, “except cook.”

“S
till 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.

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 management 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.”

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.