And despite how low I felt when I checked into the hotel, despite not getting a moment of sleep, I felt surprisingly frisky that “morning.” I dressed in a snug suit that was particularly becoming and I delivered my signature sentence with more than my usual flirtatious charm. I had selected a Lenox teacup of the Solitaire pattern for the occasion. I thought the name was appropriate and, at about fifty bucks, it was a particularly frugal choice for a single woman.
Cal had a glint in his eye off screen. I could tell he was thinking: She’s back. She’s back.
Hughes had a glint, too. “Well, you’re in a good mood, Addison. Must have slept well, I guess. Hotel living suits you.”
My face froze. I turned toward him, slowly.
You think of a television studio as being a quiet place during a show, but it’s not really as quiet as you think—not for the anchors. There are the people talking in our ears and the cameramen’s grunts and shuffling. All of that is filtered out from the audience, but there are, at least on a low-rent show like ours, deliveries being made and production problems being solved in stage whispers all around you. Still, when Hughes made his comment about hotel living, the entire room went silent. Even the producer—who had been blathering some information about how we were going to replace the Pilates demonstration with some trained seals—stopped midsentence. Hughes had recently said publicly that we were still married, whether the state of Nevada knew it or not. But now he had just casually acknowledged to the whole world that his wife of a few weeks was no longer sharing his bed, that he had no idea how she had slept, that she had moved into a hotel.
Except I wasn’t legally his wife, but you know what I mean.
I glared at him. I tried to convince myself later that it wasn’t really a glare, but when I watched it back on tape, it most definitely was. I cleared my throat. I said: “Well.”
I turned away from him then and said: “And how about you, Baxter? What did you think of this new controversy with the gold standard?”
“I think,” said Baxter, dependable as always, “that the Gold Coast is in for a terrible storm.”
And we muddled through the rest of the show.
I suppose it is possible that Hughes just blurted out his comment without realizing how revealing it was. Or furthermore, that he just thought the truth needed to be broached and the sooner, the better. But it fell so obviously and painfully flat that I never could believe that. Surely someone of Hughes’s charms and grace would have attempted to apologize in either case. Instead, he merely acted for the rest of the day as if nothing had happened, including our marriage.
But the viewers could tell that something had happened. Icy asides and snippy exchanges were analyzed and debated, even at times when no icy or snippy intent was meant.
Much was made, for example, of Hughes using the word corny to describe the latest Ben Stiller movie. Some thought it was a putdown to the corn-producing state of Nebraska and everyone who once lived there. I think they were seriously overestimating how much thought Hughes had given to my ties to Nebraska. In his heart of hearts, I don’t think he truly believed that I ever lived there. I’m not sure he believes anyone does. He thinks it’s sort of a quaint pop-culture invention—like a Norman Rockwell painting or the city of Mayberry.
My own comments were also scrutinized. The most cited exchange involved a particularly harsh putdown of Hughes when he steered our conversation about a small fashion flare-up in an unexpected and unwelcome direction.
We were going to discuss the unfortunate movie premiere at which Ewan McGregor and Jude Law appeared wearing identical Union Jack bow ties. I thought we were going to talk about the identical part, which seemed to me to be the central embarrassment. But Hughes got hung up on the bow tie concept itself.
Baxter was, that day, wearing a blue-with-white-polka-dots tie, and he tugged it in what I took to be a self-conscious way when Hughes used the phrase finicky dandies about Ewan and Jude.
“Hey, Baxter,” Hughes said, turning toward the weather map, as if suddenly realizing there was someone else in the room. “You’re one of those bow tie guys. Maybe you can explain the appeal. I, myself, don’t get the look. It’s so positively George Will!”
Baxter looked mortified, and I was filled with dread. There was no good way this conversation could end.
“Oh, Hughes,” I said, nudging him with my elbow. “You’re just jealous. You know how bow ties drive women wild.” I looked over my shoulder then, glancing at Baxter. I gave him my “devilish” grin—the one I had perfected during a short stint playing a substitute teacher/demon in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Hughes looked at me, incredulous. “Bow ties drive women wild?” he said. “Really?”
“Heard of the Chippendales?” I said, turning back toward Hughes and giving him a meaningful look. “They’re not wearing bow ties because women think they’re frumpy.”
“I suppose,” Hughes said, seeming to give this serious consideration. “But those ties are solid colors. And they match their cummerbunds.”
I furrowed my eyebrows. “Do they?” I asked. “I don’t remember any cummerbunds.”
Hughes made a there-she-goes-again face, as if this was some sort of sexual remark. I rolled my eyes. But neither of us went down that conversational path.
“I don’t know what it is about bow ties,” I continued. I looked directly at the camera. “I guess we just want to untie them.” I made a gesture with my hands that looked something like pulling a tie apart. Then I clapped my hands together and laughed.
“Those ordinary things you wear.” I reached over and tugged at Hughes’s tie, which happened to have muted red stripes on a silver background that day. (The women on the discussion boards never had cared for it.)
“We don’t even understand how this sort works.” I was on a roll. “If we started tugging on one, we might just choke you.”
I smiled, then looked back at Baxter.
“Not that choking Hughes doesn’t have its own kind of appeal.” I winked.
Hughes pursed his lips in mock sheepishness. Baxter smirked and looked as if he was about to break into an honest-to-goodness grin.
By that point in our relationship, all friendly on-air banter was a show. I assume you know that now. But my comment about choking Hughes was nevertheless entirely innocent. I meant no harm to Hughes. It was all about the show. Hughes had made a mistake by broaching this subject with Baxter. He was not going to score points for himself by publicly picking on the unfashionable unfortunate. I never asked, but I think Hughes realized that. He did not seem angry at me, afterward. It was just the way we were on air. It didn’t faze him at all.
Still, that comment was cited often, including most famously in the special issue of People magazine titled: WHAT’S WRONG WITH ADDISON AND HUGHES? The Coalition Against Office Romances was quoted far and wide saying that we were an example of why interoffice flirtations should be banned by company policy and the law itself. The religious right said it demonstrated how gay marriage would destroy the very fabric of a nation and ruin the lives of God-fearing young couples like Addison and Hughes. The liberal left said look what happens when the government gets involved in people’s sex lives.
George Clooney was asked about it on his way into a movie premiere. “Ah, Madison and Hugh,” he said. “Wish them both the best.” He turned to his date. “We went to their wedding, didn’t we?” And she said, “No.”
Meanwhile, the gay rights movement in Nevada picketed with signs that said: SAVE OUR MARRIAGE—AND ADDISON’S TOO.
But it was obvious to everyone that it was too late for that. Nothing that happened in Nevada would change anything now. Our personal story had an all-too-predictable plot. Anyone could see how it was going to end. The state of Nevada was not going to restore all those marriages, and neither Hughes nor I was going to do anything about it.
I even allowed myself to think a little about my post-Hughes future, wondering wistfully if Derek Jeter was still single, if Cloo
ney had worked on his abs, if Baxter would still stare at me in a theater.
Over on the boards, the conversation, not surprisingly, had been followed with more than average interest. The people posting things on the boards all day wondered how often I’d been to Chippendales (never!), whether I was a good tipper or not (generous is more like it; I was, after all, a waitress once), and if, really, it was Hughes who frequented Chippendales. And Weatherjunkie said that perhaps the reason I mentioned Chippendales was that was what “really” happened to our marriage.
That was a theory that B-basher did not like at all. “Let’s not engage in spreading wild and unsubstantiated speculation,” he wrote. I thought his reaction was a bit odd. I mean, that’s all we ever did there on the boards. Why protest it now?
This launched a rather animated discussion about the pleasures and pitfalls of unsubstantiated speculation. It was the kind of conversation that would have normally gone on for weeks. But it was interrupted by the momentous and violent events that occurred the next day during a Cal-mandated segment on flexibility, which our guest, the author of a series of books on stretching, called the “fountain of youth.”
The author, a frighteningly agile man, said your true age can be determined in large part by how flexible you are. I was not thrilled about helping with the demonstration because flexibility had never been one of my strong suits. In high school, I could not have considered cheerleading, even if my parents would have allowed it, because there was no way I ever could have done the splits. And high school was a long time ago. And, perhaps proving the expert’s theory, things had not improved.
But Cal insisted the segment needed a demonstration and that Hughes, Baxter, and I must all participate.
The expert trotted Baxter and Hughes and me out to the middle of the stage and put us through a short workout of stretching, as he took measurements with an odd instrument featuring spikes and sharp points. He made notes and tsked and tutted at us. Hughes was whizzing through them all with a ballet dancer’s grace, while Baxter and I were grunting and so forth. I, more than Baxter, truth be told, even though the expert said women are usually better at this.
But it’s not all about gender. It’s also genetics and culture—my parents’ culture believed all your limbs should be kept close to your trunk, thank you very much. And besides, I was wearing control-top hose during the entire ordeal, an obstacle that Hughes and Baxter, as far as I know, did not face.
The expert did a few calculations during the commercial break and then gave us a live, on-air report. Baxter was first, and he was proclaimed to have the flexibility of a thirty-four-year-old woman. “Ah,” he said, looking very pleased. “I turned thirty-six last month. And, as you know, I’m a man.”
Hughes and I gave him high fives. Then the expert turned to Hughes. “You, sir, have the flexibility of a seven-year-old boy.” Hughes leaned back into a yoga bridge position to celebrate. There were gasps and cheers from the production staff. Baxter whistled, and I applauded with good-natured glee.
Then the expert turned to me.
“I’m sorry to say, Ms. McGhee, that you have the flexibility of a seventy-eight-year-old arthritic patient.”
I blinked. I had been prepared for mild embarrassment, which I planned to gamely shrug off in a charming and self-deprecating way. In my most paranoid moments, I could not have fathomed such humiliation was possible from this stupid segment. (I still think he got his calculations wrong.) I looked at Hughes and realized that since the happy day I got married barefoot, there had been nothing but humiliation and regret.
“I’ve never seen numbers like this,” the expert continued. “And I evaluated Pope John Paul the second.” The expert hesitated and then added, “Just before he died.”
My dimple started quivering.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Hughes said, patting me on the back.
I looked up at him, suddenly consumed again with the old fondness. We had just gone through a wrenching and mysterious marriage. He had broken my heart and forced me to waste money on monogrammed towels. But here, on this show, on our show, we were still a team. I could trust him again. He would help me out of this mess. He would save the day.
“I’m sure,” Hughes said, “it’s just a temporary condition. You’ve just been all brittle and crispy since that court ruling thing.”
My budding fondness shriveled instantly. Brittle? Crispy? Not to mention: Court. Ruling. Thing? I turned and looked at him incredulously and noticed that the production staff had fallen quiet again. “You mean, the ending of my marriage?” I said in a husky whisper as I placed my hand over my mike. (The people on the boards caught only the word marriage, and so were not quite sure what I said. They proposed several theories—all of which, I’m afraid, were more clever and striking than what I had actually said.)
But the question of what I said was overshadowed by what happened next. Without thinking it through, I grabbed the sharp, pointed flexibility measurer and heaved it at Hughes.
My high school neighbor, Kevin Ford, and Slater County’s glamorous PE coach said I had terrible aim. And for all those years I believed them. But if I have terrible aim, then angels (or devils) must have carried that flexibility device, for it hit Hughes square in the left temple and skidded down his face, leaving a deep gash and briefly knocking him unconscious.
Chapter 24
Al Sharpton was on the phone within the hour. “Addy, baby,” he said. He sighed in what I think was supposed to be a sympathetic way but rang with a note of excitement. “Girl,” he said, clucking his tongue a little. “You got to watch yourself with the white people.”
I confess that it took me a moment to make sense of that sentence. I did not immediately connect it to the on-air incident with Hughes. I didn’t really think of Hughes as being “white people.” I thought of him as my husband, or ex-husband, or, you know, something.
And secondly, I did not really perceive racial issues in the same way as Al Sharpton. I suppose that goes without saying. I’m not sure anyone sees racial issues exactly as Al Sharpton does.
But in a broader sense, being an African refugee in America is much different from being a traditional “African American.” And being an African refugee of Middle Eastern descent, with a rather undefined appearance and a career in television, is even more different.
It’s not that I cannot understand, intellectually, where the Al Sharptons of the world are coming from. Being forcibly brought to America and enslaved? It is quite obviously a horror that can be erased only after many, many generations, if at all. And every time Al Sharpton reminds the world of that, well, it’s time well spent, I say.
But it’s different for me. My family’s arrival in America was, you see, our salvation. To use a sports analogy, I watched the Al Sharptons of the world the way baseball fans might follow the labor problems in hockey. They can sympathize with the hockey fans. They can see the parallels to their own painful experiences. They can understand, in a deep intellectual way, that they’re the same exact issues and that this will play itself out in ways that will leave no team, in any sport, unchanged. But really, when it comes right down to it, they don’t care about hockey.
Al Sharpton was making a clicking sound with his tongue. “This is going to be huge, you know? Huge.”
I gulped. Was it?
I looked out the door of my office, saw everyone working. It seemed quieter than usual. Hughes was holding an ice pack to his head with more drama than was strictly necessary, I thought. But people were not exactly gathering around to commiserate or check on him. In fact, once Hughes was conscious and okayed by the paramedics, people had hardly spoken to him at all. Or to me, either, come to think of it.
I’ll never forget how I had felt as a schoolchild, sitting at my desk, in my Goodwill clothes, my body smelling of spices my classmates didn’t eat, my words—even after a year or two—awkward and slow compared with theirs. Utterly apart is how I felt. Completely different.
But for several years n
ow, that had not been my experience at all. I was on the cover of Vanity Fair. I was eating nightly with the son of a former chief justice, an American hero of sorts. I was going to barbecues at the White House. (Well, okay, one barbecue.) I had shamed my parents, wasted years looking at a computer screen, and starved myself because of a television-induced fear of food. I was married for the lesser part of three weeks and my marriage began and ended in Las Vegas. How much more American could you get?
But at that moment, as Al Sharpton was excitedly relaying to me the racial ramifications of what I’d done, I looked out through my office door and felt absolutely lost again—the way I had as a young child. More than two decades in America and I had still not mastered this basic tenet of American life. I still didn’t understand race.
“I don’t think it’s going to be huge, A . . .” I started to call him Al, instantly thought better of it. “Um, Reverend Sharpton. I’m not really black and Hughes . . .” I don’t know where I’d been going with that, because Hughes was certainly white. He was about the whitest white guy in television. I paused, then offered: “It’s different for celebrities.”
“Oh, you’re black all right,” Sharpton said. “Especially now that you nearly killed a white guy.”
I gasped. This was the first time the nearly killed line was used on me.
But Al didn’t hear or, at least, didn’t care about my gasping. “We’re going to have to get your story straight and get it out quick. I’m assuming you’ve been Hughes’s target a few times or you wouldn’t have had your technique down so well.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Hughes never . . .”
But Sharpton wasn’t listening, just continuing on his own beat. “I’d say you learned from the master.”
He half chuckled. “Heh, the master. Sometimes I amaze even myself.”
“This has nothing to do with any of that,” I finally said. I pulled out the drawer of my desk where I’d stashed our wedding photo. I looked at Hughes and me. I realized that in the entire time we had flirted and dated and married—the flirting time being the longest—I had never heard anyone mention that we were an interracial couple. I had never thought about that. Did I need to think about it now?
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