I'll Eat When I'm Dead

by Barbara Bourland

  She scanned the restaurant, looking for Hutton, but he was, of course, nowhere to be found. Leicester was a dozen miles from his apartment. They’d been here once. It wasn’t exactly the top of the Empire State Building or anything, just a nice bar with a nice patio with good service and small-batch liquor, one of hundreds in this part of Brooklyn, here to serve you, to meet your needs, to provide a bistro-lit backdrop to your romance, any time after noon and before 4:00 a.m.

  There could be hundreds of me, she realized suddenly, sitting in hundreds of bars, just like this, alone in a crowded place, famous and not, trading one thing for another, winding up with nothing.

  Talking to Hutton over the past week had kept her spirits up, but at this moment, she started to think the whole thing was a bad idea. He’d admitted over the phone that his professional ambitions were priority A1; he’d already proved to her that the only thing he was interested in was getting ahead, and, worst of all, he’d used her to do it. It didn’t matter how many times he apologized.

  I’ve tried so goddamn hard, she thought, her mouth suddenly dry. She’d spent her whole summer getting dressed, being viewed, taking criticism about her body and her choices and her background, about her facial expressions. She’d powered her way through hundreds of conversations with strangers, forcing them to listen to her ideas about labor when really all she was doing was encouraging them with her very presence to worship at the altar of consumerism. She’d sacrificed her very personhood in the last two months, becoming nothing but a show pony in the process of trying to save her reputation from that train wreck of a week in July.

  And the worst part was that all of it had happened because of how she felt the first time she met him, that she needed to prove to him she had more substance than he thought she did. To force him to pay attention to her, she’d playacted being a detective and wound up staining her own life with indelible ink. It had all been so stupid, and it was all her own fault, and she probably wouldn’t even get the guy in the end.

  Cat checked her phone one more time.

  Nothing.

  She absentmindedly circled her left wrist with her thumb and forefinger, measuring the size of her rapidly reducing arms. Cat hadn’t intended to get so thin, but each pound washed away in a cascade she couldn’t stop, a tide beyond her control. She took a fat book out of her handbag—The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil—and sank into it gratefully, letting the words wash over her while the alcohol washed through her.

  The waitress reappeared and asked if she wanted anything to eat. Without looking up, Cat shook her head and raised her now-empty glass for a refill, but instead of taking it from her, someone reached out and grabbed Cat’s wrist with a set of huge, bony fingers.

  “What the—?” Cat muttered as she looked up—and found Grant Bonner grinning down at her. She couldn’t help but smile back. The Bonners were the closest thing Cat had to family in this country, and she hadn’t seen Grant since he’d bailed them out of jail eight weeks earlier. He was a real, honest-to-goodness friend—even if he was nine years her junior and basically her opposite. Tall and lanky, with close-cropped hair, a clean-shaven face, and dark green eyes, his clothing was boyish and boring; he wore a nondescript gray suit and a striped banker’s tie, the knot loosened and the jacket thrown over his arm. It was refreshing as hell.

  “Hi,” she said happily. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  She scooted over on her bench and made room for him next to her, while he thanked the waitress and ordered two more beers. “What are you doing here?”

  He held up his cellphone. “I think you’ve forgotten that there’s a map devoted to your every move.”

  “You’re stalking me?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Not really,” he said. “I was around the corner watching the baseball game at my buddy’s house.”

  “And then you stalked me.”

  “To be fair, it was a very convenient stalk, but I’ve been meaning to call you. I got an offer to work out of the Brussels office.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a back-and-forth job between here and there. Technically it’s a promotion.”

  “Do you have a choice?” she asked. Their beers arrived.

  He laughed. “Probably not.”

  “Then I think you should take it. Brussels is fun. It’s not very big, but the two million people who live there come from all over the world…it’s sophisticated, really, in its own way. Cheers.”

  They toasted glasses a little harder than she’d intended, and foam spilled over the cold glass onto the wooden table.

  “Do you get to choose where you live?”

  “I don’t think so. It’ll probably be a charmless corporate apartment.”

  “You have to go to my parents’ house for dinner. And my mother will take you riding in the bois.”

  “The bois?”

  “It’s a bluebell forest. You’ll like it.”

  “You want me to ride a horse through a bluebell forest? Cat, I was in a fraternity at Emory.”

  “Then it’ll be the brony fantasy you’ve been longing for.”

  He laughed. “How are you?”

  “I’m…honestly, I’m tired. We’ve been doing a lot. Fashion Week is almost over, then I get two weeks off. I’m just trying to make it through until then.”

  “If you ever need a chaperone, just say the word. I’m a very good date. Your life looks pretty fun from the outside these days.”

  Cat snorted. “From the inside, it sucks. Ugh, I’m so sick of myself. Actually can we talk about something else?” She scanned the room. “Want to play Scrabble?” she asked, pointing to a stack of board games on a bookshelf near the small outdoor bar.

  “Sure,” he said, walking over to grab the game. “But you’re going to be sorry you asked that.”

  They spent the next hour playing Scrabble, and joking, and laughing, big, real laughs, and it was the most fun Cat had in ages. She built a real humdinger on the triple-word square, but wordsmith Grant won with 455 points. While they played, she forgot about work, forgot about Hutton, forgot about how she looked. Grant ordered fries and burgers for them both; she wolfed the food down without even thinking.

  She forgot about Mania, too.

  The next morning, the first thoughts to run through Margot Villiers’s mind were wholly negative.

  The October issue was a mess.

  They’d be lucky to sell a global million on newsstands next week, nothing compared to the seventeen million issues they’d moved last month. October’s biggest problem was that its photo shoots had been totally reimagined by Lou, who had fashioned Judy and the Technicolor Housecoat into a fun-looking but rather soulless story; just another dumb spread of models jumping up and down, pretending to look happy. Nothing to write home about. And Dotty for It, the shoot set at the Scoria Vale sanatorium, wound up making a mockery of mental illness. Lou followed Cat’s notes to the letter, but in the end, it lacked the gravity that it had originally been pitched with; the photographer hadn’t used the right lenses, and the prism effect looked badly photoshopped.

  Irritation built up with every moment Margot spent thinking about it. The record-setting sales of their September issue hadn’t been enough; they still needed to sell another fifteen million issues before the end of the year, or RAGE would change according to whatever George Cooper Jr. had in mind. RAGE stood on the precipice of real and total failure, and Margot with it. George Jr. had laughed at her pivot toward sustainability, actually, physically laughed in her face.

  “That’s the most expensive thing you’ve ever said,” he’d scoffed.

  “It’ll make us money,” she’d replied.

  “We’ll see,” he’d responded coldly. “You have through the December issue. Publish pornography for all I care. But make some goddamn money.”

  Margot increased the speed and incline on her treadmill, picking up the pace on her morning workout. Twenty minut
es and three miles later, her pink leotard soaked front and back in sweat, she jumped off the treadmill and started the forty-five-minute barre routine she punished herself with several days a week.

  “You can choose either the cardiologist or the orthopedic surgeon,” she always told her children, none of whom had ever joined her in her exercise studio except for the two months before their weddings, panicking about the state of their upper arms. But her hard work paid off. At seventy-two, Margot looked fifty, the same age as her oldest daughter.

  She hopped into the shower and donned an oilcloth shower cap. After a quick rinse, covering her body in a tangerine-scented bodywash from an unlabeled bottle, she combed her hair back out and twisted it into a neat bun. In her carved mahogany walk-in closet, dozens of racks were hung with freshly pressed couture dresses arranged by color and by season; a wall-length set of narrow drawers held her underclothes and accessories. A huge upholstered bench dominated the center of the room. Virgin-white cashmere carpet, the wool harvested from goats perched atop the highest mountains in Mongolia, cushioned her knotty athletic feet as she wandered the room.

  After opening a velvet-lined drawer, she wiggled into a silk crepe camisole and underpants before selecting a pale gray glen plaid suit from Vivienne Westwood. The oversized legs of the suit’s trousers had been ironed and starched to a knife-edge drape. She ran her fingers down them with satisfaction, choosing a set of heavy brass neck rings from Kenya that she’d purchased at an estate auction from a minor Rockefeller.

  Next she wandered into her gray marble bathroom, plastered a thick coat of moisturizer over her face from a small amber-colored apothecary jar, and tamped down the shine with a light dusting of translucent powder. Finally she applied a single swipe of Chanel lipstick and two of mascara, slipped a monogrammed kidskin wallet into her pocket, and walked out the front door of her Park Avenue penthouse into her private elevator.

  Grinding her teeth, Margot read and replied to a crop of early-morning emails on her way down. The most interesting one was from Paula; it seemed that the remaining RAGE staffers were expressing outright resentment toward Cat and Bess.

  She wrote back and authorized Paula to spend whatever she had to on Margot’s personal credit card. Get them tickets to Paris like I said. The staff need to be motivated, she typed. And we can’t let them think anything’s wrong. Let’s give them something to look forward to. It’ll be great publicity. Ask Lou if you can get a discount at that hotel her ex-husband owns.

  Fifteen million copies.

  RAGE’s future rested in the hands of the November and December issues.

  Margot tried not to think about it.

  Callie Court yawned and stretched out in her bed, tossing the dove-gray linen duvet aside. She kicked her legs up into a bicycle pose and stared over her soft, round belly at the lumpy plaster ceiling. The last eight weeks had been a whirlwind. Her agent had dropped the fact of her RAGE contract in all the right ears, omitting the name of the magazine but implying that it was one of the top three women’s titles—either RAGE; Frenzy, the pornographic German monthly; or Cinq a Sept, the chic French quarterly—and she’d managed to pick up two runway shows for next week along with an “inner beauty” campaign from Raven, a cosmetics conglomerate trying to bounce back from allegations made in the RAGE article. Raven alone had kept her busy for the last three weeks. Callie had to give away all her bar shifts, too: the Raven contract didn’t allow her to drink, lest she finally ruin the peaches-and-cream complexion she’d been born with and steadily abusing for the last decade.

  She let her legs fall back down on the bed and breathed out in a long, slow whistle. Today was the day that Jonathan’s camp would release her Rhythm Nation video online. In it, she wore only a sequined bikini bottom from his spring collection as she took tiny bites of an oversized ice-cream sandwich that melted and dripped down onto her body while performing the military-style dance routine from the 1989 Janet Jackson music video, something she’d spent countless hours rehearsing as a teenager.

  The background was a crudely spray-painted scene of palm trees. Glitter exploded halfway through the video out of a cannon and stuck to the melted ice cream. She completed the dance by doing the splits, laughing hysterically, a banshee. FIN, it said, fading to white, STARRING CALLIE COURT / COSTUMES BY JONATHAN SPRAIN.

  Tomorrow was Callie’s RAGE shoot, and she was supposed to spend today relaxing, doing yoga, and staying out of the sun, so she finally rolled out of bed and walked the five steps to her kitchen to put the kettle on for tea, then walked over to the antique armoire where she kept her clothes and took down an old Vans shoebox.

  It was full of photographs. The oldest ones had been taken with cheap disposable cameras: an out-of-focus Mark laughing on the quad in front of Dakin House, shaggy-haired Mark playing a guitar while she sat next to him in a ratty papasan chair, naked Mark lying in the bed of her freshman dorm, trying to hide his face.

  Around 2005 the photos became mostly Polaroids. Mark in a tuxedo at the Central Park Boathouse, at the wedding of a couple now divorced. Mark wearing an aviation suit before they jumped out of a plane together in New Jersey. Mark holding a puppy in Prospect Park. Mark looking hung over in her apartment. Twenty-six-year-old Mark drinking a beer in Park Slope. Mark captured midair in the pit at a punk show downtown somewhere. Mark covered in body paint for a Bushwick party.

  Around 2012 the photos turned into square printouts from Photogram; there were only a half-dozen of these, their time together less frequent during his relationships with the condescending horse-faced lawyer and the pointy-headed ballerina. Still, she had a photo of Mark standing in front of CBS in Midtown, clowning around during a lunch break; Mark drinking coffee out of a paper cup at Grand Army Plaza; Mark holding up a bowling ball at the derelict alley she loved near the Lincoln Tunnel; Mark doing a shot in his first NYPD uniform. Mark and Callie together on the Coney Island Cyclone before it was torn down.

  They hadn’t spoken since he’d dismissed her in his office, blowing her off for his “big important case,” and his feeble late-night texts the following week had dropped off after just four or five days of no reply. After that he hadn’t called—so she hadn’t called. It wasn’t exactly a breakup as far as Callie had been concerned: she’d thought of it as more of a détente.

  Everyone who’d seen it assured Callie that the Rhythm Nation video was the sexiest, funniest thing they’d ever seen. That even if Janet Jackson forbade the use of the music—which she would never do, Jonathan claimed, because they’d gotten wasted together in Nashville once and she was sure to love it—they could put anything over it, even just a drumbeat. It’ll kill, they said. It’s guaranteed viral. It’ll get a hundred million views in a day.

  But all she cared about was whether or not Mark would see it. “You’re my best friend, Cal,” he’d said to her a thousand and one times. “You’re the sexiest girl I’ve ever known,” a thousand and two. They’d had momentum this summer—she knew they had—yet somehow it had disappeared in a single afternoon. She kept trying to remind herself of how he’d looked when he’d blown her off that day in his office: apologetic, but not in love. He hadn’t looked at her with love. And somehow knowing that didn’t seem to help her to let go permanently; it only gave her the strength not to call.

  She had tried so hard over the years to forget him, to get over him, to love somebody else. It never happened. His big laugh and easy smile, his puffy hair that always looked so silly; the way he ate a sandwich, drank a beer; moved his big arms and legs around; all of it felt to Callie like he was designed just for her and her alone, like God had molded someone from her rib, her only complement in the universe, a soul mate.

  An email sat in her drafts folder that she’d edited and rewritten a hundred times. She pulled it up on her phone just to look at it. Just to think about saying it was enough—that was how much she loved him.

  I love you. I want us to be together.

  I’ll get my shit together and be your per
fect wife.

  I’ll have a million of your babies.

  I have forgiven so many things: The time we screamed in the street on my birthday. The time you made me hide under the bed. The time you came over to my apartment on Carroll Street and ignored me for three hours, then told me you never wanted to see me again. I will never run out of room to forgive you or out of room to love you more. I belong to you.

  I want you to belong to me.

  Yet—just like every other time she’d read the email—she hit Cancel and put down her phone.

  Another day, she thought. Maybe tomorrow or next week. He’ll see the video, and read about the shoot, and he’ll call, and we’ll get back into it, and then maybe I’ll finally send it, once we get our momentum back. That’s the play. Don’t plead for commitment out of the gate, she told herself. Get him back in your arms first.

  But Mark Hutton would never get to read it, because Callie Court died the next day.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lou Lucas woke up at 4:00 a.m. without an alarm, springing out of bed to make the first cup of coffee. As the kettle heated up she changed into a pair of spandex underpants and matching sports bra—the type worn by elite marathoners—and searched for her favorite padded socks. She grabbed her headphones and stuffed them into her ears, her caramel-colored locks set in place the night before with a series of pins and foam rollers. She wrapped an Hermès scarf around her head to keep it all perfect, then coated her dry hands with cream.

  The kettle whistled, and she poured the steaming water over a porcelain Hario set atop a thermos, then laced up her sneakers and tucked her house key into her bra. When the coffee finished brewing, she screwed on the thermos top, then sprinted out the door and darted across the street into Central Park for a quick five-miler to and around the reservoir before her day really began.