Fat Chance (20 page)

“I'm okay, really. I can't come home now…. I just can't.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn't make sense. I just got here, I…we…have to give it time…. I can't just go flying from one city to another like an unguided missile…”

“Yes, you can, Maggie. What are you saying? You have a life here…you'll find another job….”

“What? I'll find another what? WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

“Maggie, you missed the column. There was nothing in the paper where your column was supposed to be.”

“You didn't get the column I filed?”

“You heard me.”

“But I sent it, it went through…. I never got anything back from you.”

“Maggie, your head is somewhere else. There was a black hole where your column should have been. You haven't returned Wharton's thousand phone calls, and now the column's kaput. Finito.”

“But I SENT IT, Tamara, I swear.”

“Wharton is thinking of having Justine write it and renaming it ‘Thin Chance'—”

“Did you hear me? I SENT—”

“Maggie, any day now, he's going to put the announcement in the paper.”

“WHAT? WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

“He gave up on you, babe. Maybe you filed, but he never got it, and that did it. He was fed up. You're out of touch, nowhere to be found and….” The line filled with static and went dead.

“You're breakin' up again,” Tamara said. “Maggie? Maggie, you there?”

 

I don't remember starting the car, but I find myself driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, staring out at the ocean. Like an automaton, I turn off the ignition and walk down to the beach where Taylor and I had spent the afternoon. It's familiar turf, like a tiny safe haven, only, now it's just me. The weather is perfect, as if in ironic direct defiance of my state of being. As usual, I'm out of sync, living in some parallel universe. But I'm grateful that very few people are around. I don't want to pretend to act normal.

Whenever I have to sort out my feelings, I write them down. It forces me to concretize the angst, gives it form, sub
stance. I'm carrying a pen and paper and now it seems like a luxury to see my words on real paper instead of an electronic screen. There's more comfort in the deliberation of the effort. It's like sweeping a floor with a broom rather than using an electronic vacuum. More soothing, less mechanical. And if you didn't get the words down on paper right, there was a certain satisfaction in crumpling up the sheet rather than deleting words as if there never was a paper trail of false starts at all.

I tear off the piece of paper, fold it up and wedge it into my pocket. It's calming to just stroll along the beach, watching the water glittering in the sunlight. There's an old discarded beer bottle sticking out of the wet sand and I pick it up. The glass is smooth as beach glass from the gritty wash of being pelted over and over and over by the wet sand. Beaten up by life. I hold it by the neck, then reach into my pocket and take out the paper. I wedge it down into the neck of the bottle, and then lift my arm into an arc and pitch it out to sea with as much power as a Roger Clemens fastball. It soars through the sky before dropping down into the water, disappearing below the surface.

I
head up to his office without stopping at my desk—if it's still mine—and barge in. The shocked expression on his face makes it painfully clear I'm the last person on earth he expected to see.

“THIN CHANCE?” I blurt out in disbelief as I'm dropping into the Christmas-plaid chair directly facing Wharton. “You were going to give away MY column—or should I say OUR column—and call it ‘Thin Chance'?” I'm hyperventilating, pressing my hand at the base of my neck. What have I got to lose, either he'll hire me back or call security and have me handcuffed. Wharton stares for a moment, a mixture of amazement giving way to relief. Finally his stern expression softens.

“Are you staying here now or have you become, in the jargon of the day, ‘bicoastal'?”

“I love this city, for God's sake, you know me better than that, I would never ever leave.”

“Well, you could have fooled me. I tried to reach you over and over again but—”

“I'm back, Bill, back. I was exhausted. Back and forth over the time zones was just…the lines got crossed.” I wave my hand as if to clear the air.

“Lines got crossed? Maggie, we were waiting for a column—”

“Anyway that was then and this is now,” I say, not letting him finish because I couldn't own up to the realization that I was so distracted that for the first time in my career I forgot to file. “And I'm so anxious to—”

“I don't know, Maggie, I've started to set things in motion now to replace the column. I don't know if I can just reverse—”

“Bill, you've been like a father to me, a mentor. If
you
hadn't originally conceived of this column and shaped it—practically laid it out from
A
to
Z
—we wouldn't be leading the papers in this city, and probably the country, in health coverage.”

His color is rising—what man didn't succumb to shameless flattery? “So why sabotage that success by changing the whole gestalt of our column? America doesn't need to kill more trees to read about the thin perspective. The news is fat. It's spreading worldwide—Christ, obesity is rearing its ugly head in New Guinea, even the Cook Islands. Nobody was fat there twenty years ago. It's a global issue! How could you possibly turn the clock back and change the entire focus of your brilliantly conceived column that could well set us up for a Pulitzer—”

“Well, I haven't put anything into the paper yet…” He looks off as if he's trying to come up with some face-saving proposal. “If you're truly through traveling, and ready to put in the time again—even more time now to right things—I
suppose I could reinstate the column.” His round face slowly wrinkles into a smile.

“Great, great, done.” I jump to my feet. “Why don't we have lunch. I feel like celebrating. God, I'm so starved already. What time is it?”

Wharton looks at his watch. “It's only ten-thirty. Why don't we say twelve?”

“Great,” I say nine more times before walking out. “We'll celebrate the rebirth of the column and the rest of my life.” I turn and see him cocking his head to the side, not sure of what he just heard.

I sign off and call out to Tamara. I haven't seen her since I came back.

“Tamara? T A M A R A? Hey—anyone around here know what happened to my sidekick?”

Justine is passing my door and sticks her head in, staring at me incredulously. “You're here?” she says.

“Obviously.”

“You should have told your secretary,” she says snootily.

“What do you mean?” I'm getting nervous now.

“She's on her way to L.A.,” Connors says coolly.

“What? What for?”

“To rescue you, my dear. She said you needed help, and she left here with fifty dollars she borrowed from
me,
and a bran muffin from the coffee cart.” I stare back at her, not knowing what the hell to do now. Then it hits me and I start dialing Taylor's private line.

He answers the phone, but he doesn't sound like himself. Is he coming down with a cold? Did I just wake him out of a dead sleep?

“You gotta friend named Tamara?” He's pissed.

“Mmm,” I say.
“Pourquoi?”

“The
pourquoi
is that she just punched me out, and I can't stop my goddamn nose from bleeding.”

“What?”

“I answered the door in the middle of the night and this
girl with a camera is standing there. She says she's looking for you.”

“Oh no.” My eyes are closed.

“Oh yes. She seemed to think I wronged you in some awful way.”

“There were all these crossed signals, Taylor. I am sooo sorry.” I'm afraid to ask my next question, but do anyway. “It's not broken, is it?”

“No,” he says. “I guess I should be thankful.”

“You should be thankful that I'm gone.”

“Well, you've got devoted friends,” he says. “She called you the sweetest lady on the face of the earth, and then called me a miserable son of a bitch for making you so upset.”

“She didn't quite get the full story,” I say, pushing out my cheek with my tongue.

“Listen, I gotta get more ice,” Taylor says. “I'll talk to you later, Maggie.”

I hang up and get into a cab.

 

Tamara looks as if she hasn't slept for days as she stumbles through the front door of her building, barely nodding hello to the doorman. She approaches the elevator, then she stops in her tracks and does a double take. I'm sitting on the lobby couch, where I've been parked for the past three hours.

“Maggie.
Maggie?
”

“Welcome home.” I'm up on my feet and we're looking at each other eye to eye.

“I figured out how to get thin,” she says, letting her bag drop.

“Oh?”

“You live on plane food.”

“That so?”

“Yes, ma'am. The economy-class diet—limp vegetables,
soggy pasta, tough meat. You take a bite of each then leave the rest over. It couldn't add up to more than a hundred calories, according to my calculations.”

“I'll use that.” My toe starts tapping then, the culmination of a three-hour anxiety fit. Tamara and I just look at each other. “So, ah, been anywhere interesting?” I say, cocking my head to the side.

“Yes, I've been chasing down movie stars…. Wait till you see the pictures. Bloody great. Living color.”

“And why is that?”

“Money, fame…no,” she says, stamping her feet. “For you, Maggie. I…you're my best friend, Maggie. And I couldn't stand the idea of losing you, and you losing yourself. I went out there to help…to bring you back.”

“Oh God. To what?”

“To…your senses?”

“You're the only one left who thinks I have any.” I'm smoothing the lapels of Tamara's jacket, nodding my head, and then I throw my arms around her neck and hug her. We're both crying, and I'm not sure why, but then it hits me that there isn't anyone else in the world that I know who would do what she did—not counting the punch in the nose.

“So which one of us is crazier?”

I'm carrying Tamara's bag and we ride up to her apartment. It's almost lunchtime and we're both starving. I go through her refrigerator, opening up the fruit and vegetable bins and looking behind the cartons to the back of the shelves.

“In the old days we would have eaten now, right?”

“And how,” she says.

“We probably would have boiled up a pot of spaghetti, thrown together a tomato-and-pepper sauce with some pep
peroni, made an arugula and radicchio salad, cut open some Italian bread and slathered it with butter and tons of garlic and toasted it to perfection. And for dessert, we would have had some coffee Häagen-Dazs, with crumbled chocolate chip cookies on top.”

“That's right,” Tamara said. “In the old days.”

“What the hell, you want to eat?”

She starts to laugh. “You don't have to ask me twice.”

“I mean after all we've gone through, at least we deserve a decent meal, right?”

“Nobody ever got fat on just one meal,” Tamara says.

“Who said that?”

“You did.”

“Don't quote me to me.” I take a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, pour it into two glasses and offer a toast: “To what happens to the best-laid plans.”

 

If readers were interested in my personal life before California, afterward, it reached a new high. The majority of letters applauded my honesty and openness. (They should only know.) I showed myself to be as vulnerable to the desire to be thin as they were, they said. (A good share of readers said they only wished that they had the same gorgeous motivation as I did to change.) Many were eager to follow my lead and said that they would consider exercising. But now I also had a little hate cabal out there, and those letters were mean-spirited, vitriolic and bitter. One was cc'd to the Catholic Archdiocese. So much for sainthood.

I filed the hate mail away. Maybe Tex was behind it. Probably had a voodoo doll made in my image with a charm around its neck. I hadn't seen him since I was back. It would be interesting to see how he would react to me if we ran into each other in the elevator. I thought about calling him, and
then decided against it. Did I dare go to see him? Repeat the mortifying walk I had made up to his desk? Why not? No one at the paper would ever say, “Maggie? Maggie who? No, I don't recall ever meeting her.” Whatever else they would engrave on my tombstone, they'd never put the word
anonymous
.

I pad softly to the back of the newsroom and crane my neck. This time I wish I'd worn a chador. I couldn't bear the thought of getting the same reception again. Well, whatever. I walk closer, only to come up behind an empty chair. There's a small needlepoint pillow on it: “Out align.”
Meant for me?

“Where's Tex?” I ask offhandedly.

“Tex-as,” Larry says. “His mother died.”

“Oh.” I can't help biting my bottom lip. “I didn't know.”

“Yeah,” Larry says. “Out of the blue.”

“Do you have a number for him?”

“Yeah, except I don't think you'll be able to reach him. After the funeral he's traveling around for a week or so.”

“Where?”

He shrugs. “He doesn't always make a point of explaining his whereabouts.”

“Sharon with him?”

“Legs? I guess.”

Legs? Why do they all have to act like such jerks?
“Good to see you, Lar.”

“Hey, Maggie,” he yells after I start to walk off. “How was California?”

“Out of this world.” I get back to my office, grab my coat and decide to take myself out to lunch. Nobody else was offering.