Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  “Science!” said Hughes, all goofy and enthusiastic. And then we went to commercial.

  I leaned back in the sofa, ready for the makeup person to come touch me up as usual. But Hughes took my arm and said: “Addison, Cal doesn’t want you to finish the show.”

  And then he told me that the first lady had announced that “removal proceedings” had been launched against me. I looked at him blankly. “She’s trying to deport you,” he said. “She says you’re a ‘convicted felon from a suspicious country.’”

  It took me a moment to process that.

  “Cal wants me to quit?” I asked finally. “He agrees with her?”

  Hughes shrugged. “I don’t know that this is a political statement, really. I was told that he said it was the ‘last straw.’ I think he just wants his show back.”

  My lip quivered.

  Hughes looked at his feet. “You’d really have to ask Cal, I guess.” We both glanced at Cal’s office. He was still weeping. Hughes sighed. “But I don’t know that you’d get a satisfying answer.”

  I nodded, stood up, smoothed my skirt with as much dignity as I could, and left the set.

  There were no cakes or farewell gatherings, no office good-luck cards. I was leaving with no notice, for one thing. And in shame, for another. I packed up my personal belongings in a large box, nodded to Hughes and a producer across the room. I helped myself awkwardly through the door, nearly dropping everything until I was saved by a passing janitor who held the door for me. (A new immigrant to the country, he did not speak English and did not appear to recognize me.) I pulled myself up with dignity and thanked him. “When the time is right,” I said, “become a citizen.” He nodded at me in a friendly way, but I don’t think he understood what I said.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Baxter watching me. He was standing by his radar tracking equipment holding a bunch of sloppy-looking files. He hesitated and then offered his hand up in a perfunctory wave. I raised my fingers as best I could without dropping my box and waved back.

  When I got to the lobby, I saw Hughes looking somber on the bank of televisions, which were always on and always tuned to GUP.

  “This is tough,” he said. He sat up a bit and straightened his tie. “But Addison has decided to leave. There’s been some news from the first lady’s office and . . .”

  I didn’t really hear the rest. I just studied his face the whole time, wondering what had gone wrong. Obviously, we were not meant to marry. We had been wrong, silly at best. But how had we gone from those companionable dinners to this? Me in the lobby carrying the dustings of my career, him worrying about his tie being straight as he delivers the news that my career is over and, oh by the way, I might be deported to a war-torn, famine-ridden desert nation where the language of business is a language I don’t speak, where the dominant culture is one I don’t understand, where my ethnicity is not considered glamorous or exotic but a huge liability, and where my gender makes all the other points basically insignificant, because the only hope for a woman is that she will marry well and I am far too old and far too strange and, in the eyes of my new countrymen if not the eyes of Nevada, far too already married for that.

  I pushed my way through the revolving door, walked two blocks, and then realized that the terms of my work release forbade me from doing anything other than proceeding directly to my cell. Not that I had anywhere else to go anyway. I looked at the contents of my box—several of my favorite teacups, framed journalism awards, the wedding photo, and a camera with the undeveloped film from the Derby.

  The prison officials would never let me bring this box in. I stopped at a corner and looked down at the box, then up at the street signs, and then at my watch. Even if I were bold enough to try to sneak off for a few minutes, where would I take these things? To my old hotel room? To Hughes’s apartment? To a bus-station locker? Do they have those in this day and age? I remembered what Hughes told me the first lady had said about a “suspicious country” and almost laughed. Why not make this worse, I thought, by violating the terms of my work release to go stash something in a bus-station locker?

  I got to a corner, stood there among strangers waiting for the light to change. None of them looked at me. I thought, How can this be? I’m as famous at this moment as I can possibly be and I’m crying on the corner and no one notices me.

  Suddenly there was a loud blast of thunder. I jumped and the sky opened up the way I thought it did only in movies, where the weather goes from sunshine to a downpour in one clap of the clouds. I looked down and the wedding photo was already bubbling with moisture.

  I heaved the box into a trash bin, wiped my eyes, and headed toward my cell.

  The strangers standing around me? The ones who did not seem to notice my despair? Apparently they were more observant than I realized. I learned later that every single item in that box, including the rain-pocked wedding photo, was listed on eBay within the week. They all made a killing. The award from the East Coast Association of Irish American Television Personalities sold for two thousand dollars. It was described as an “ironic keepsake of a ruined career.”

  Chapter 33

  That was almost six months ago. I guess I’ve written everything that Cassie needs. She should be here any minute. And she’ll no doubt be pleased.

  While I wait for her, I suppose I might as well continue the story, tell you about my time here in prison. In the past six months, I have been on a typical inmate journey. I did sit-ups for hours a day. I read all the great holy books and most of the Harry Potter series. I finished in last place in the fourth floor’s wastepaper basketball championship for four straight months. I doodled Baxter’s initials in the dust on my window over and over again. I taught myself Mandarin, thinking with pride that if I ever reprised my Alias role I would do so much better this time. (I had played a triple agent with a badly executed Chinese accent for three particularly incomprehensible episodes.)

  Cassie had smirked when I told her about the Mandarin and suggested that learning Arabic would have been more prudent. I had glared at her.

  I also slept a fair amount, which did amazing things for my mood, I must confess. I did not realize how sleep-deprived I had been, but after a few months of sleeping eight and a half hours a day, I started to feel like my old self again. My skin kind of shimmers now. I guess that’s why they call it beauty rest.

  My mother sends me a box of snack foods each week: jerky, dried figs, a flat, salty corn bread. My fellow inmates were excited the first few times I got a box, thinking a celebrity like me would have great things to trade, but one slice of the flat, salty corn bread and they pretty much gave up on that idea. They weren’t trading their Snickers for that. And that was a good thing.

  My parents, in fact, stopped by early this morning. Visiting hours had not yet officially started, but the guards were kind enough to let my family come in and speak privately to me before my trip to the courthouse.

  There in the visiting room, my mother and father cried with me. My mother said simply that she had failed me, but my father had more specific regrets. He regretted, for example, sending me to school and allowing me to dress in Western clothing. He said that none of this would have happened if I had remained illiterate and married my cousin when I turned thirteen as he had wanted me to do. Or if I had worn a veil.

  I nodded solemnly at that. The truth is, after all, the truth. None of this would have happened.

  I said, “It’s okay, Dad.” I said, “Perhaps this is my destiny.” I said, “I will go to our homeland and maybe I will do something great there.”

  My father was staring at me. He finally said, “You do not know that place. There is nothing good to do there.”

  And it struck me at that moment that my father was looking at his homeland from the beaten-down perspective of someone who has lived with disappointment and adversity his whole life. But I was, despite the place of my birth, a child of America. And I thought, with equal measures of naïveté and arrogance, that a little
Yankee ingenuity would surely set that country right.

  Looking at my father, I realized something else about him. Something that should have been obvious long ago. He is not the son of a Supreme Court justice. He is not a product of our nation’s best schools. When he hears the word football, he still imagines the game I know as soccer. He loves the opportunities that America has given him, but he doesn’t think an American can do anything to solve the problems of his homeland. In all these ways, he is less than the American I have aspired to be.

  But in one important way, he is more American than I am, than it appears I will ever be. When I was watching Mary Tyler Moore and Hollywood Squares, while I was cruising with my Nebraska friends and talking about Star Wars, he was doing something else. Sitting at the kitchen table, late at night, he was doing something that I never thought necessary, somehow. He was studying to take the test that allows you to become a US citizen. Sometimes, when I was feeling tender toward him, I would sit down and grill him. Educated in Nebraska’s best rural schools, I knew all the answers—or most of them, at least—the three branches of government, the mechanics of the electoral college. I still know these things, but it doesn’t matter. Unlike my father, I never took the test.

  He took it twice, passing the second time. I had just turned eighteen. At the time, I thought nothing of that. But Cassie explained to me recently that if my father had passed the test the first time, when I was still a minor, I would have, as the child of an American citizen, been automatically naturalized. In the eyes of the law, however, I was an adult when he passed. So my citizenship problems were my own.

  Cassie challenged me when she gave me this writing assignment to explain why I had “never bothered” to become a US citizen, never did what my father did when I was eighteen and what my mother did a few years later. Anything I say now, obviously, is going to look stupid. Because it was stupid. It was the stupidest thing I ever didn’t do. Why didn’t I take the test? I think, for me, going through the naturalization process would have, if only for those few months, involved admitting that I was not already a US citizen. It was a form of denial, I guess. Or maybe, it was just a form of “screwed-up priorities.” Looking back, I had a lot of those.

  So often my parents embarrassed me with their Old Country ways, their ridiculous ideas about dating, their funny foods, and their lack of concern about “appearing American.” They would not follow Miss Liberty’s advice at all. I always hated that.

  But I can hate it all I want and that does not change the basic truth that as a point of fact and as a technicality of law, they are American. I am not.

  Now they are on their way to the courthouse and I am waiting for Cassie, who will ride with me in the prison van and walk with me into the courtroom.

  Wait—I think I hear her now. She’s laughing with the guards, talking about their Thanksgiving plans. They’re exchanging cranberry sauce recipes. (There’s a lot of sugar involved in that stuff. I had no idea.)

  I guess they’ll be finished soon, so I’m going to stop writing. Cassie says that even if I’m deported, they’ll probably make me serve out my sentence first. So I’ll “probably” be back here tonight, and I can finish this document by explaining what happened in the courtroom today.

  Chapter 34

  Yesterday did not go exactly like expected. Even Jeffrey Toobin was shocked. I watched his account this morning on Cassie’s home television. The judge allowed me to stay with her last night and have Thanksgiving dinner with her today. It was an unexpected kindness. Jeffrey Toobin said that was sort of shocking, too.

  I had thought that Cassie seemed uncharacteristically chipper Wednesday morning as she breezed in chatting up the guard about cranberry sauces and creamed corn recipes. The guard—the Celebrity Gourmet reader—said she was going to have fish for Thanksgiving dinner, supposedly a tradition in the family of one of the Charmed stars.

  (Like they even eat.)

  Cassie was talking about how tempting that was, because fish cooks so quickly and everything. And they were giggling about how to “sell” the idea to their families.

  I thought it was a bit obnoxious, really. I mean, fine, eat whatever you want for Thanksgiving. It’s no business of mine. But there I was in my somber suit and they were yukking it up about twisting and perverting American traditions, when I very likely wasn’t going to have any American traditions to pervert once the day was over. Certainly not any American traditions involving food.

  It made me steaming mad. Cassie took one look at me and could tell I was not my usual upbeat self.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” she said.

  There was a long awkward silence, which I finally broke by asking if were true that Peter Jennings was Canadian. I thought being an immigration attorney, maybe she would know.

  “Of course,” she said. “He didn’t become a citizen until he was in his sixties.”

  I nodded. Neither of us spoke again until we arrived at the courthouse.

  We settled into the courtroom. I was surprised that there were other people sitting in the desks up front. Cassie whispered that there were a couple of short hearings before me. They were sobering. Three people were deported in an hour. A Cambodian woman, whose mother had carried her as an infant out of the killing fields, was sent back for some shoplifting convictions when she was nineteen. She had, by all accounts, lived as a law-abiding, tax paying legal resident for ten years after that. She married an American doctor and thought all was well. But when she applied for US citizenship, her record was discovered. Shoplifting, while neither violent nor a felony, counts as a crime of moral turpitude. Her hearing lasted less than thirty minutes. Her husband and her children wept when the judge gave his order.

  A Sudanese refugee with a DUI was next. Then there was a Mexican girl, just eighteen, who had not known, until stopped by immigration authorities while trying to reenter the country on a high school trip to Niagara Falls, Canada, that her parents were illegal immigrants. The entire family had entered the country illegally seventeen years ago. “I don’t even speak Spanish,” she kept saying. “I don’t eat Mexican food.”

  I nodded throughout her testimony, which seemed moving and compelling to me. But I glanced at the judge and he just looked bored. He banged his gavel and it was over.

  “Next up,” the bailiff called, “Addison McGhee.”

  The ICE attorney got right down to business. He called a variety of unlikely experts who testified, quickly and efficiently, that I displayed all the characteristics of a “troubled immigrant,” that I was a “loose cannon,” and that the famine in my father’s homeland isn’t nearly as bad as people think. “Usually,” the expert said, glibly, “it’s only the very young or the very old who die from malnutrition. Not middle-aged women in the prime of life like Addison McGhee.”

  A murmur went through the crowd. “Middle-aged?”

  When it was Cassie’s turn, though, she surprised the media and, most importantly, me by telling the judge she was adding someone to the witness list and calling him right away. “Who?” I whispered, but she waved me off dismissively.

  “The defense calls Hughes Sinclair,” she said. And Hughes seemed to float into the room on the crowd’s gasps.

  “I object,” said the ICE attorney. “The events of the crime against Mr. Sinclair have already been decided. Ms. McGhee has pled guilty. He has no stake in these proceedings.”

  “Oh please,” Cassie said. “You just called a famine expert!”

  All this commotion was swirling, but I sat riveted in my chair, staring at Hughes, who had settled into the witness stand with his usual grace and good carriage. He looked somber and more tired than usual.

  My attorney said that “Mr. Sinclair” had arrived in her office the previous evening and revealed to her previously unknown details about our marriage and our life together that she thought were pertinent to the court.

  “Isn’t that right, Mr. Sinclair?” she asked.

  And he said it was.

  Ther
e was some stage-setting nonsense in which Hughes was asked about his honorable parents and his long-standing reputation for integrity and honesty and so forth. And there was some mumbo jumbo about how we met and how long we had known each other and all of that.

  And then my attorney said: “Why did you marry Addison McGhee, Mr. Sinclair?”

  I leaned forward across the table and I found myself thinking, for just a moment, that even if I got deported, it would be worth it if I heard the true answer to this question.

  Hughes looked down at his hands. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, looked at the ceiling, then the floor, then at the attorney, then me.

  “Mr. Sinclair?” the judge prompted.

  “Yes,” Hughes said. “This is just a little embarrassing to admit. Our marriage was a sham,” he went on. The ICE attorney put his hand over his mouth in mock astonishment, but put his hand back down when the judge glared at him.

  “Addison didn’t know it, though,” Hughes continued. “I think she honestly loved me.”

  I nearly fell on the floor with astonishment. And then I was mortified. And then relieved to know the truth. And then horrified that my naive yearnings were being exposed and then relieved that maybe this would, somehow, make a difference.

  “I was always fond of her, I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t,” Hughes said. “She’s a lot of fun, Addison is.”

  He looked at me then, smiled shyly. It was the boyish kind of maneuver that had always warmed my heart—my easily fooled, embarrassingly naive, stupid little heart. “She’s good-looking,” Hughes continued. “Anyone can see that. And she’s . . .” His voice trailed off and he whistled. “Let’s just say we had some good times.”

  I blushed and did not look at my parents.

  “But?” my attorney said.

  “I love Addison,” Hughes said. “But I didn’t love her that way. Never did. I just thought it would be good for our careers.” He paused and then emphasized that. “Both of our careers,” he said.