by Laura Zigman
“How are you feeling now?” he asked once she’d stopped talking.
She closed her eyes, pressed the damp facecloth to her cheeks, and saw the morning’s events flash on the black screen behind her eyes.
She wished she were dead. “A little better.”
“Do you think you can handle the rest of the day?”
She turned to the night table and moved the bottle of ginger ale and the glass of ice. Then she picked up the schedule and read through it.
There was the three o’clock Washington Post Style section interview in Mary’s suite across the hall, the Live at Five in-studio news segment, and, of course, there was the main event: the six o’clock Legend signing just over the bridge in Virginia. Julia couldn’t imagine how she was going to get through it—not only how she was going to handle the first full day of press interviews and another hellacious public appearance, but how she was going to face Mary after the disastrous flight.
“You’ll get through it. You always do.”
She groaned.
“Just pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Peter. I threw up on her.”
“You didn’t throw up on her. You threw up near her. Into a newspaper. There’s a difference. And whatever you do, don’t apologize. I mean, fuck it. She deserved it. There’s no excuse for her to give you such tsuris.”
Julia laughed finally, and then she heard Leo’s soft voice on the other end of the phone. Her heart constricted: it was the first time they’d ever talked on the phone.
“Mommy?”
“How are you, my Scoob?”
“Good.”
“How was school?”
“Good.”
“Are you having fun with Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do after school?”
“We went to the store.”
“The big store with the big snacks?”
“No. The store with the red cars.”
Food Emporium. Leo loved the carts with the red plastic cars attached to the front that he could climb into and pretend to drive.
“Daddy bought me dinosaur chicken. And mac and cheese. And a present.”
“What kind of present?”
“A train.”
“Which one?”
“Mavis. It’s black and white.”
“I can’t wait to see it.”
“Hey, Mommy?”
“Yes, my sweet?”
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon. I’ll be home soon.”
“But I want you to be home now.”
“I will be home.”
“Will you be home tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow. The day after tomorrow.”
She could hear Leo breathing through the phone but he wasn’t saying anything.
“Hey, Scooby?” She closed her eyes and felt tears slide out from under her lashes while she waited for him to answer.
“Say yes to Mommy, she can’t see you,” she heard Peter say in the background.
“Yes?” Leo said.
“I miss you.”
“Mommy?”
“What, my sweet?”
“Are you still working on the railroad?”
“Yes, I’m still working on the railroad.” She wiped her eyes with her palm and then her nose with the back of her hand. She couldn’t believe how ridiculous this was. Four hours and already she was falling apart. And before she could tell Leo she loved him, Peter was back on the phone.
“So I saw the gang at pick-up,” he said.
“Did anyone ask about me?” Julia said lightly, hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell she’d gotten all sloppy. “Or have they forgotten about me?”
“Yes, they asked about you. I told them that you’d left this morning and they seemed very impressed.”
“And now you can impress them tomorrow, too—‘Oooooo! Julia’s in Washington, D.C., with a has-been, recovering from a stress-induced vomiting episode!’” She shook her head. “So what are you going to do for dinner?”
“Your mother came by this morning with more chicken.”
Julia closed her eyes and reached for her glass of ginger ale. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. She means well. I’ll throw it out and take Leo to Stanz instead.”
She nodded and looked out the window through the thin white sheers beneath the heavy chintz drapery. The room she was in had an amazing view of Lafayette Park and the White House, and if she hadn’t been so miserable she would have been struck by the view; by the trees which were still green and full here in the South in mid-October; and cheered by the idea of ordering room service—something like a B.L.T., or a cheeseburger and fries—and watching cable while having complete control of the remote. But she was lonely. And sad. Letting the sheers fall from her fingers, she turned away from the window and back to the phone.
Julia sighed. “I hate this. I want to go home.”
“I know. It sucks.”
Her eyes started to fill again with tears and she indulged in a fleeting fantasy of Peter picking Leo up early from school and racing over to the Westchester airport to catch a flight to Washington to be with her—there was plenty of time before the interviews and the Nordstrom event were to begin, and the ju-nior suite she’d been upgraded to because she was with someone famous who was complaining loudly was certainly big enough for the three of them.
Then she blew her nose and wiped her eyes for the last time. The sound of Peter’s and Leo’s voices had lifted her spirits and she could feel herself finally start to rally.
Getting up and showering; changing her clothes and staring at the files she had brought with her—the files Mary had found so pathetic and incomplete—Julia steeled herself for the rest of the day. Walking across the hall to Mary’s suite at three o’clock and sitting through the interview with Barbara Starr and the brief shoot with the Post photographer she’d brought along; calling for the limousine at four-thirty and walking Mary through the hotel and getting her into the car in time for her five o’clock news segment; getting back into the car and racing across the Potomac to the east entrance of the Pentagon City Mall, where two uniformed security guards met them and escorted them to the Nordstrom cosmetics department, where a respectable though not unmanageable crowd of almost three hundred people were waiting along with an extremely excited store manager and three extremely excited sales professionals—Julia felt like she was getting her sea legs back again.
Sitting next to Mary at the table and handing her box after box of Legend, she felt herself play her part of this staple of public relations performance art—The Celebrity Product Signing—with absolute perfection: performing the exquisitely precise choreography of movements (the readying of the pen, the removal of the Post-it note, the simultaneous sliding of the box and leaning over to stage-whisper and repeat the spelling of the customer’s name, the simultaneous handing of the signed box back to the customer and removing of the next Post-it note, etc. etc) without error and all while knowing precisely when to replace the Sharpies and the cans of Fresca. Keeping the flow of this ballet, this pas de deux, during a signing at a pace that was neither too hurried nor too slow was as much an art as it was a science, and after Mary had put her signature on every box in the store and after they were back in the limousine and riding up in the elevator of the hotel, Julia felt an enormous wave of relief: the event had been free of disaster. At nine-thirty p.m., the day, finally, was over.
At least, she thought it was.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mary said as Julia put the key in her hotel room door—the door that was directly across from Mary’s which was now open and through which she had just walked expecting Julia to follow.
“We haven’t had dinner yet and I’m starving,” Mary said, over her shoulder. “You call room service while I change out of these clothes.”
Mary peeled off her jacket, her silk blouse, and her scarf and walked through the suite from the bedroom to the bathroo
m and back again wearing nothing on top but a giant white bra while Julia, exhausted and crestfallen and more than a little mortified by Mary’s partial nudity, trailed slowly after her.
“Order me a Cobb salad and two vodka martinis extra dry. And get yourself something substantial—you need to get your strength back after this morning,” she said, unzipping her pants with one hand and reaching into the closet for a giant white terry-cloth robe with the other. “I want to go over tomorrow’s schedule and see what guest that idiot Charlie Rose who never shuts up has on tonight.”
16
It was well after midnight when Mary Ford finally finished with Julia for the day: finished eating her room service dinner next to her on the chintz sofa while watching Donald Trump (“A vulgarian who I’m actually quite fond of”) being interviewed by Charlie Rose (“Again with the interrupting and the talking over the guest. Why does he invite them on if he’s not going to let them talk?”); finished unzipping her Claus Von Bülow bag and poking and sucking at her gums with the various implements contained therein; finished going over the next day’s schedule, which left Julia with more questions both logistical (“Will there be an airline escort person—someone wearing a red blazer, holding a walkie-talkie, and with access to a golf-cart vehicle—waiting for me at National Airport and another waiting on the ground in Atlanta to escort me on and off the planes?”) and practical (“How is my Fresca supply holding up?”).
Placing the breakfast room-service order form on the outside doorknob (a basket of croissants, tea with milk and lemon, and a “medium ripe medium size” banana) as she left Mary’s room and stepping across the hall, Julia could hardly believe when she slipped the plastic key into the slot of her door and heard it click that she was finally alone. But her relief was short-lived when she realized that after only a few short hours of sleep—assuming she’d even be able to sleep—she was going to have to wake up and start all over again.
After changing into her big white pajamas and brushing her teeth, she sat down on the bed, stared at the clock, and then at the phone. It was now almost twelve-thirty—far too late to call home and talk to Peter and find out what the rest of his and Scooby’s day had been like: what specific ideas he’d come up with to reconfigure the flow of the preschool; what else he’d done around the house to make it practically buzz with efficiency; what he and Leo had eaten at Stanz after disposing of her mother’s chicken; whether or not he’d started on the gingerbread house project.
She glanced across the room and saw her laptop, still in its case on the desk where she’d left it when she’d checked in hours before, and though she was dying to see if Peter or her mother had e-mailed her any digital pictures of Leo, caught in various moments throughout his busy little day—at the kitchen table eating a mixture of Life cereal and Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast; heading out the door with his Thomas the Tank Engine backpack that was almost as big as he was and his Scooby-Doo “Mystery Van” lunchbox that took up the equivalent parking space in his cubby of a giant SUV; napping on their bed in the afternoon with his blanket and surrounded by his favorite stuffed animals—two kittens she and Peter had bought for him when he was still a baby from FAO Schwarz before the unthinkable happened and it had closed down briefly and an elephant with ears the size of Dumbo’s—she could barely move.
Neither did she have the energy to e-mail Jack—to tell him how many people had shown up at Nordstrom (fifty fewer than had shown up at the Long Island event) and how many units of Legend were sold (314)—disappointing numbers all around. But bad news could always wait, and it wasn’t even like Jack was expecting to hear anything different.
She lay back on the bed and then reached into her suit pocket for her cell phone. At several points during the event she’d felt it vibrate and now she flipped it open until the little polka song played. Scanning the Caller ID list, she saw that Peter had called twice and Jonathan had called once from home in Brooklyn.
She listened to their voicemails—Peter’s two drowsily affectionate messages and Jonathan’s concerned and apologetic one, delivering the bad news that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had canceled its interview with Mary for the next day—then folded up the phone and closed her eyes. She knew she would take the brunt of Mary’s annoyance about the newspaper’s cancellation the next day, but Julia couldn’t think about that now. All she could think about was how good it felt to finally be alone in her hotel room in her big white pajamas, with nothing else to do but remain prone on the 400-thread-count sheets and the down feather bed.
As her mind drifted on its way to what she assumed would be a deep and instant sleep, she remembered back to all the times when she was younger that she had traveled for days on end like this with clients—lying beached on huge hotel beds after twenty-hour days, ordering room service, wishing there had been enough time to use the deep bathtub and the miniature bath products before checkout, and watching too many reruns of Dallas or Mary Tyler Moore in the dark before her mind finally switched off and she was able to fall asleep.
Sometimes, right before she fell asleep in those hotel rooms, with their plush carpeting and their heavy drapes and the Chinese vase bedside lamps with the soft light coming through their pleated silk shades, she used to get a strange and vaguely pleasant sensation that she was floating, half awake and half asleep, through days and hours and cities and airports. She loved hotels—good hotels—loved their hushed anonymity, their amenities, their creature comforts; loved how they provided her with a brief otherworldly interlude from her cramped, comparatively Spartan Manhattan apartment, from the bills that were waiting to be paid, the dry-cleaning that was waiting to be dropped off, the pile of work she always brought home with her from the office to finish at night or over the weekend. She’d loved the clear-cut challenges of those client-escorting trips—the military precision required to set up and complete each mission, the challenge of solving or coping with unexpected problems (traffic tie-ups, severe weather, canceled interviews, underattended events), the pride she took at her ability to keep her cool (or, at least, to make it look like she was keeping her cool) in even the most tense and pressure-filled situations.
And even though she knew there was more to life than feeling a deep sense of satisfaction at knowing the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of fifty newspapers and magazines without ever having to look them up or knowing the beverage preferences and food restrictions of every single one of her clients without having to write them down on the inside of her hand in tiny letters, and even though she often felt disillusioned by the spectacular rudeness of her clients and by their shocking lack of gratitude during those long trips, she had always enjoyed the challenge.
Until she met Peter. That’s when the trips got harder and harder to make: because suddenly there was someone to miss, someone who missed her, someone she couldn’t wait to come home to.
Falling into a deep sleep now, on top of the covers, cell phone still in hand and all the lights on, Julia had no idea how long she’d been asleep before the relentless, ear-piercing buzzing woke her. Sitting up in the bed, looking at the unfamiliar furnishings and surroundings—nightstands and lamps and floral drapes and bedspreads—she had, for an instant or two, no idea where she was or what was going on. And then she remembered:
I’m in a hotel.
In Washington, D.C.
With Mary Ford.
And the noise I’m hearing is the hotel fire alarm going off.
She jumped off the bed and raced to the door. Opening it the way she knew she shouldn’t (in case of fire, she’d once read in Reader’s Digest during an excruciatingly long layover in Denver, one should not only drop to the ground since smoke rises, but also feel the door for heat), she peeked out into the hallway.
It was empty.
No frantic panicked guests, no firemen with big boots and rubber coats, no axes and hoses.
Julia closed the door behind her and ran to the phone next to her bed and called the front desk. But the line was busy, probably
because everybody else in the hotel was doing exactly the same thing.
She ran back to the door and peeked out again. This time she saw a small group of middle-aged men gathered in the hallway, milling around in robes and slippers and trying to smooth down their messy hair. As Julia watched them a few took the fire stairs down to the lobby, while the rest—clearly well-heeled businessmen who were used to having enough information to make informed decisions—were still waiting to hear whether this was actually a fire in the building or whether it was a false alarm.
Standing in the hallway, she stared across the carpeting to Mary’s door, trying to will herself to act:
Knock on it!
Pound on it!
Alert her to the fact that there’s a possibility the hotel might soon go up in smoke!
But she couldn’t.
Not just because she knew that knocking or pounding wouldn’t do much good since Mary obviously hadn’t heard the incredibly loud fire alarm (in addition to her two martinis, she’d had an after-dinner brandy from the minibar), but because she knew that more drastic action would have to be taken: she would have to let herself into Mary’s suite with the extra key Mary made everyone who traveled with her keep in case she lost hers and walk into her room and physically shake her, wake her in her bed.
I’d rather have all my finger- and toenails pulled from my body than go back into that room and touch her.
She closed her eyes and tried to think what Jack would do here—he’d probably be halfway to the lobby right now with his cell phone in one hand and his Palm Pilot in the other in case there really was a fire and he had to switch hotels in the middle of the night—but because she’d spent seventeen straight hours with Mary and had been awoken so suddenly out of a dreamless, druglike sleep, all she could see was this: Jack dressed in pleated knickers and a vest, jumping nimbly and quickly over a candlestick on his desk.