Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  Cal snorted. “Well, you could use some of your reportorial skills and find that out, Addison. It’s sure to be in the paper. Or the Web,” he added.

  Does that mean something? Is he implying I spend too much time on the Web?

  “I don’t mean who won the race, Cal,” I said in a pointedly dramatic fashion. “I mean what people wore, how it felt—the sights, the smells, the sounds.”

  I was using all my most dramatic gestures to illustrate the senses, but that was all lost on Cal because, well, we were talking by phone.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” he said. “No one cares about the Kentucky Derby. I was just trying to get you off Hughes’s sofa for a few days.”

  I bristled at the reference to Hughes’s sofa. I was suddenly consumed by what has become the one lasting regret about my marriage to Hughes. Why did I not take advantage of our short period of intimacy to find out if Cal was paying him a lot more than me? I mean, really. Hughes’s sofa? The sofa certainly belonged to me as much as Hughes. I was the one who had to constantly worry about it clashing with my clothes.

  Cal could not see me bristle. He sighed. “What do I care? If you and Baxter want to cavort about the barns, be my guests. But listen to me, Addison, don’t get married and don’t knock anyone unconscious. And tell Baxter to keep up with the weather!”

  We hung up.

  Baxter had collapsed on the small couch in the living area of our suite. His tie was undone and he had a bemused smile on his face.

  “What?” I said. He could not have heard any of Cal’s advice or his reference to Hughes’s sofa, so I didn’t see what he could be smirking about.

  “The sights,” he said, in a Zsa Zsa Gabor voice, his hand over his eyes as if pantomiming a ship captain. “The smells?” He took a huge exaggerated sniff.

  He was mocking me!

  “The sounds!” He spoke in the same silly breathless voice, but now he was cupping a hand around each ear.

  I threw a pillow at him.

  “She’s resorting to violence again!” he yelled—a bit too loudly, I thought—but I laughed despite myself. He threw his hands up. “Just don’t call Al Sharpton on me!” he continued.

  I plopped in the armchair, gracelessly, and my skirt got pulled up a good two inches higher than I would have normally allowed. I’m actually fairly modest when I’m not on television or, you know, magazine covers. I started to jump up and straighten myself, but Baxter was continuing with his shtick and it was all so comfortable and familiar that jumping up for the sake of two inches of modesty didn’t seem worth the bother. Lots of women wear their skirts this short all the time. At least, a lot of models do.

  “You know, the first lady will be on my side about this,” he said. “She thinks you’re setting a very bad example, you know.”

  He was laughing, but it didn’t sound like he was just making that up. “The first lady?” I said. “She’s weighed in about this?”

  Baxter, who was acting so silly as to seem a little drunk, now took on a serious, political spin-master tone. “The junior senator from Ohio, Ms. McGhee, weighs in on everything, especially something as vitally important as the feminization of violence and the glamorization of a crime.”

  “Oh come on,” I said, kicking my feet up on the coffee table. My skirt rode up another half inch. “Be serious.”

  Baxter sighed, from honest tiredness, I think. Not boredom. Or exasperation. “I am serious. She’s all ‘out to get you’—that’s the way they put it in the Post.”

  He took off his tie, tossing it toward the dining room table. He missed, and it fell to the floor. He just sighed again.

  “Out to get me?” I felt the faintest stirrings of fear. I hadn’t read the Post lately. I wasn’t reading much of anything. Well, except for the Daily Racing Form. It had all sorts of valuable information. For example, one of the horses was from Asia and had always trained running uphill. I rather liked that. It seemed very Addison McGhee to me. Why run on flat land if you can run uphill? Why walk ten thousand steps if you can walk twenty?

  But honestly, I liked the Racing Form mostly because I wasn’t in it. Every time I picked up a regular paper, it seemed I saw something about Hughes and me. It was making me sick. I had stopped reading for my own mental health.

  Still, if the first lady was reportedly out to get me, I should know about it. I remembered the look in her eyes when she threatened me and my “skinny ass.” She couldn’t do that, could she? I’d have to commit a crime or something.

  “Bax,” I said. “She couldn’t get me deported, could she?”

  He had one leg on an ottoman and was popping breath mints like they were popcorn. “I’m starving,” he said, when he noticed me eyeing the breath mints. “And of course not. She can’t deport a US citizen. You know that.”

  “I’m not a US citizen.” The words came out fast. I was shocked he didn’t know this.

  Another breath mint.

  “You’re not?”

  “You know I’m not a citizen,” I said, in a voice more panicky than the situation called for. I tried to tone it down a bit. I feigned a light, breezy manner. “I’m a permanent resident. It’s a green card for me. You know that. I’m fresh off the boat.” I made sort of an airy motion with my hand. “Or, you know, the plane.”

  “Yeah, well, not that fresh,” Baxter said. “What’s it been, three decades?”

  I bristled a little. How old did he think I was? Did he think I was in my late thirties or something? I was in my early thirties. Or at least my late early thirties. It had not been three decades. Not quite.

  “I’d have thought you’d have become a citizen by now,” he said. He chewed the last mint slowly, as if to savor. “Hmm. Wow, Ada. Hmmm.”

  He finished chewing. Neither of us spoke.

  “You probably should do that,” he said. “You know, become a US citizen.”

  I nodded. I probably should. My parents and brother had. I thought I would get started on that when I got back to New York.

  I got up from the armchair and slid into a narrow spot on the sofa with Baxter. I put my hand on his arm. “Baxter,” I said. “Am I going to be okay?”

  He brushed my hair back from my face and pulled my head into his shoulder. “Sure you are,” he said. And he kissed me on the forehead.

  We sat there like that, unmoving, for a few minutes. “I should make some broth,” I said. He didn’t answer. I looked over and he was asleep. I laid my head back down on his shoulder and soon I was, too.

  When he woke me up, my head was lying on his chest. It was the deepest sleep I’d slept in a long time, and I was disoriented when he nudged me. “Ada,” he whispered. I looked up at his face. He had some serious stubble. How long had we slept? “Wake up, Ada,” he said. “It’s morning now.”

  I laughed.

  “Seriously?” I asked. “How long did we sleep?”

  “A long time,” he said. “It really is morning. Let’s go to the track.”

  Chapter 28

  I would like to say that the previous afternoon’s discussion had cast a pall over Derby Day, because that would suggest that I had the good sense to know when my world was being threatened. But in fact, Baxter and I were laughing and giddy as we got ready for the race. I wore a red striped suit with a matching hat, purse, and shoes. Baxter shaved, which sort of disappointed me actually, and put on a crisp four-button suit—strikingly similar to the one Hughes often wore that always drove me wild. Baxter set his off with a red polka-dot bow tie.

  I tugged on his bow tie, straightening it in a familiar way. “We look like Easter eggs,” I said.

  “Yummy,” he said.

  Among the other things I had enjoyed about being at the Derby was the ability to hobnob with other journalists and to hear their stories and theories. The previous morning, during a commercial break, I had chatted it up with a local newspaper reporter who had explained to me, somewhat suggestively I thought, that the wonderful thing about the Derby is its unbridled sexiness.
>
  “Sexy?” I said. I glanced down at the manure-y mud. He caught my glance.

  “Oh sure,” he said, “there is that problem. But on Derby Day, the place is teeming with people, overcrowded and understaffed. The drunken college boys in the infield are pleading with women to pull up their shirts and the millionaires on the Skye Terrace are leaning too far over the railing with their breasts leaning too far over their bras. The whole thing feels as if it’s about to teeter madly out of control,” he said. He kicked the mud and then looked up at me.

  “And everyone’s wearing their beautiful hats and talking about the studs and drinking their mint juleps and spending too much money on a horse they’ve got a gut feeling about.”

  “I never trust gut feelings,” I said.

  He quickly glanced up at me, and a kind look swept over his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I would think not anymore.”

  Then he had walked away.

  But when the cab dropped Baxter and me off at Churchill Downs, I saw immediately what the reporter meant. I had never seen a fashion display quite like it before. Women were dressed in wonderful pastel suits that looked positively Easter-pageant-esque, except for the sexy shoes and the low-cut tops. And the men? The men were dressed in a way that took male fashion seriously. Bright ties, hats, seersucker suits. You have never seen so much color in men’s clothes. Baxter’s colorful bow ties wouldn’t even be noticed here.

  When Baxter and I arrived at our box seats, we found that we shared the box with some other celebrities and their companions. The stars were legitimately familiar. Erik Estrada, Lynda Carter, and a guy who I think was on Celebrity Poker with me. He was a country singer and he had one of those geographic names. Denver? Dakota? Dallas? Des Moines? Yes, I thought that was it.

  Maybe.

  I wasn’t sure. I suddenly sympathized with George Clooney’s panicked face when he saw me coming at the post-Oscar party.

  “Hi, Addison,” said Des Moines, or whatever his name was. He glanced at Baxter, then back at me. “Good to see you on the prowl again.”

  Well.

  Baxter shifted uncomfortably. I bristled, but covered well. I gave Des Moines and the others my most engaging smile and said, “Let’s leave all that stuff behind for the day, shall we? We’re just folks watching the races.”

  Lynda Carter rolled her eyes and stuck her nose back in her racing program. I don’t know what she was rolling her eyes about. I wasn’t even talking to her! Not specifically. But I held my smile until I was sure she was back in her program, then I turned to Baxter and cocked an eyebrow.

  He cocked his as well. And I felt we shared a secret joke. He then put his hand on my back. It was tight quarters, there in the box. It would be anyway, with eight people. But Lynda was wearing a larger-than-average hat and Des Moines’s date was wearing some sort of hoop-skirted outfit that took up more than her allotted room. (Was this skirt the next big thing in country attire? I mean, it certainly qualified as big. No doubt about that.)

  Des Moines was yammering on, too loudly to be ignored, about his strategy for picking horses. It was all about the name and the trainer, he said. A horse with a good name suggested that there was something inspirational about the horse when it was being named. But you had to allow for the trainer, he said, because a bad trainer could suck the inspiration right out of an animal. Des Moines said that with great importance, as if we would all be very grateful for the insight.

  Instead, Baxter shrugged. “It’s a horse race,” he said.

  Des Moines looked at him suspiciously. “Yes,” he said, with a tone of sarcasm that smacked of insecurity. “I think we’re aware that it’s a race involving horses.”

  Baxter ignored him, turned to me. “You know the old saying—It’s a horse race—what we say if a political race is close. It means the outcome can’t be predicted. Handicappers realize it’s no trite cliché. Because the brutal truth is that even if your horse is the best to come along in thirty years, even then it can be beat. The only ones that are undefeated are the ones that retired early.”

  I was sort of impressed. I didn’t think Baxter knew anything about racing. Not that what he said really amounted to much, I guess. But he said it with an air of authority.

  “The secret,” Baxter continued, “is to find the value bet.”

  We all looked at him. Value is not a word that gets used a lot in celebrity circles.

  “What you’re looking for is a horse that has a better-than-average shot of winning but is for some reason being overlooked by the bettors.”

  Blank stares all around.

  “Say he’s got a bad trainer.” Baxter looked at Des Moines, then away. “Or an unknown jockey. Or he’s imported from some country where they don’t even time the races so no one is exactly sure how fast he is.

  “Bet for value,” Baxter continued, “and no doubt about it, most of the time you’ll lose. But that’s true no matter what. If you go for value, then at least when you win, you’ll win a lot.”

  Lynda Carter rolled her eyes again. What’s her deal? I found myself thinking. I myself thought Baxter’s little speech was quite impressive. And I became even more impressed over the next few races as he quietly whispered in my ear about speed numbers and track records and dosage indexes.

  “Where did you learn all this?” I asked at one point.

  “Oh, online,” Baxter said. “I’ve been reading up.”

  At one point, the other people in our box went off to make their bets at the same time, and Baxter and I were alone. I slipped off my sandals and stretched my legs out into the other seats for a moment, leaned back to look up at the warm sun, placing my hand on the top of my hat to keep it from falling back. I cocked my head and looked at Baxter sitting there. His face was soft and serious as he pored over the Racing Form. His bow tie was slightly crooked.

  “Baxter baby,” I said. “Tell me something. If you’re only wearing those silly ol’ ties because of your agent, why do you wear them when you’re not working?”

  There were nearly two hundred thousand people in the stands. I had never been in such a crowd, but Baxter and I were, somehow, alone. Once again, I was struck by how familiar Baxter was to me, by how much he felt like home.

  “I don’t,” he said casually. He looked up and caught me raising an eyebrow. “Except,” he continued, raising a finger like a professor explaining a technical point. “Except when accompanying a woman who is on record as saying they’re sexy.”

  I laughed, a bit too loudly, and looked up at the sun again. I just loved doing that, looking up at the sun and holding on to my hat. I decided then and there to wear hats more often. Though as it turned out, my days for selecting my own clothes were numbered.

  “You know I lied about bow ties that day on the air,” I said.

  Baxter feigned a crestfallen look.

  “Not about them being sexy,” I quickly clarified. “They’re definitely sexy. But that whole business about how they look easy to untie. That was a total lie.”

  I was still looking up at the sky. I’m not sure I could have talked about this to Baxter if I’d been looking at him. “I haven’t the faintest idea how to untie one of those things,” I said.

  Baxter’s nose was back in his Racing Form, but he peered over it. “I can show you sometime,” he said. He winked.

  I laughed too loudly again.

  I gestured toward the paper. “You’re really into this,” I said.

  “Yeah, sort of.” He looked a little sheepish. “I had no idea it was this fascinating. It’s all about odds and weighing different variables and making assumptions about future outcomes based on past outcomes. It’s like doing the weather,” he said. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Except,” I interrupted, “that horse racing is impossible to accurately predict.”

  He grinned and leaned toward me so that the people in the next box couldn’t hear. Not that they were listening. “So is the weather,” he whispered.

  We both laughed. And I looke
d up again at the warm sky while Baxter pored over the Racing Form some more. Finally, he glanced up at me. “So,” he said, softly. “Who do you like, Ada?”

  I looked over at him, warmly.

  “You,” I said. And then I realized with horror he had been asking me which horse I liked. Luckily, my experience with live television saved the day. “Decide,” I added quickly. Then I repeated myself. “You decide.”

  Chapter 29

  Baxter came up with some sort of exotic bet in which he grouped multiple horses in various first- and second-place combinations. We split the cost of the bet, each contributing twelve dollars.

  The energy at the track had been building all day, and when the crowd paused to sing “My Old Kentucky Home” before the race, I looked up at the stacks and stacks of people, leaning out of the track balcony above me, and felt dizzy. All the big hats. All the colorful men’s suits.

  A crowd like that alters your sense of personal space, so that Baxter and I stood quite close to each other during the entire day. When the big race finally started, he whispered “They’re off” in my ear, and it seemed so intimate. We screamed and yelled and stood on our chairs as the horses came thundering down the track. We each had twelve bucks at stake, after all.

  And we cheered some more when we saw that one of Baxter’s combinations had come in, to the tune of eight hundred dollars. I thought about buying myself a large supply of expensive monogrammed towels, with my own initials. AM.

  When the race was over, I picked up my bag, slipped my sandals back on, and stood up with Baxter. We stepped into the torrent of the crowd and were pushed along by it. I walked directly behind Baxter and put my hand on his back, so as not to lose him. We tried to head in the direction we had come from, but missed our trajectory somehow and ended up in line for the express buses, which would take us downtown for ten dollars each.

  “Too good for the bus?” Baxter said.

  I laughed and said I was not.