My boss? It was inconceivable that Betsy would do this, beyond inconceivable that she’d do this and not tell me.
“With Gabby Gardiner,” April concluded.
I was stunned. “Gabby’s not my boss!”
“I’m sorry,” April said, sounding not sorry at all, “but those are the arrangements we’ve made.”
I backed into the hospitality suite and plopped into a chair by the window. “Look,” I said. “I’m here, and I’m sure you’d agree that it would be better for all of us to do an in-person interview – even a quick one – with someone who’s seen all of Maxi’s movies, who took the time to prepare for this – than something over the phone. I’m happy to wait.”
April stood in the hall for a moment. “Do I have to call security?” she finally asked.
“I don’t see why,” I said. “I’ll just sit here until Ms. Ryder finishes up with whoever she’s in with, and if it happens that she’s got a minute or two to spare before she has to go rushing back to Australia, I will conduct the interview that I was promised.” I clenched my hands into fists so she wouldn’t see how I was shaking, and played my final card. “Of course, if it should turn out that Ms. Ryder doesn’t have a few minutes for me,” I said sweetly, “then I’ll be writing a thirty-inch story about what’s happened to me here. And by the way, what’s your last name?”
April glared at me. Roberto sidled closer to her, flicking his eyes back and forth between us, as if we were playing a very fast game of tennis. I stared right back at April.
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Interesting last name,” I said. “Is it one of those Ellis Island specials?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, for what would be the last time, “but Ms. Ryder’s not going to be speaking to you. You were sarcastic to me on the phone…”
“Ooh, a sarcastic reporter! Bet you’ve never seen one of those before!”
“… and Ms. Ryder doesn’t need your kind of attention…”
“Which is fine,” I exploded, “but couldn’t one of your lackeys or flunkies or interns have had the courtesy to call me before I came all the way up here?”
“Roberto was supposed to,” she said again.
“Well, he didn’t,” I told her, and crossed my arms. Standoff. She stood and glared at me for a minute. I glared right back. Roberto leaned against the wall, actually shaking. The larvae stood in a row, their eyes darting back and forth.
“Call security,” April finally said, and turned on her heel. She looked back over her shoulder at me. “You,” she said. “Write whatever you want. We don’t care.”
And with that, they were gone: Roberto, shooting me a final, desperately apologetic look over his shoulder, the larvae, all in black boots, and April, and whatever chance I had of meeting Maxi Ryder. I sat there, until they’d all piled into an elevator. Only then did I let myself cry.
Generally speaking, hotel lobby bathrooms are great places to have breakdowns. People registered at the hotel are mostly using the bathrooms in their rooms. People on the streets don’t always know that they can breeze right in to the lobby of even the fanciest hotel and almost always use the toilet unmolested. And the bathrooms tend to be spacious and fancy, with all the amenities from hairspray and tampons to actual towels for wiping your tears and drying your hands. Sometimes there’s even a couch to collapse on.
I staggered down the hall, into the elevator, and through the gold door reading “Ladies” in elaborate script, heading for the handicapped stall and peace, quiet, and solitude, grabbing two neatly rolled towels on my way in. “Fucking Maxi Ryder!” I hissed, and slammed the door, sat down, and pressed my fists against my eyes.
“Huh?” said a familiar voice from somewhere over my head. “Why?”
I looked up. A face was peeking over the top of the stall.
“Why?” Maxi Ryder said again. She was just as adorable in person as she was on the big screen, with her saucer-wide blue eyes, her lightly freckled, creamy skin, her cascade of auburn curls, seemingly brighter and more glossy than standard-issue human hair was meant to be. She was gripping a slim cigarette in one tiny blue-veined hand, and as I watched she took a generous drag and blew it out toward the ceiling.
“Don’t smoke in here,” I told her. It was the first thing I could think of. “You’ll set off the alarms.”
“You’re cursing me because I’m smoking?”
“No. I’m cursing you because you stood me up.”
“What?”
Two sneaker-clad feet plunked lightly onto the marble and came to rest outside my stall. “Open up,” she said, rapping at the door. “I want some explanation.”
I slumped down on the toilet seat. First April, now this! Reluctantly I leaned forward and unlocked the door. Maxi stood outside the stall, arms crossed on her chest, waiting for her answers. “I’m from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I began. “I was supposed to interview you. Your little Gestapo-ette told me, after I came all the way up here, that the interview had been canceled and rescheduled with this woman at my office who’s just…” I gulped. “Vomitous,” I arrived at. “So it kind of ruined my day. Not to mention our Sunday section.” I sighed. “But it’s not your fault, I guess. So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have cursed at you.”
“Bloody April,” said Maxi. “She never even told me.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I’m hiding,” said Maxi Ryder, and gave a nervous giggle. “From April, actually.”
In person her voice was soft, cultured. She was wearing bell-bottomed jeans and a scoop-necked pink T-shirt. Her hair was piled into the kind of artless updo that probably took a hairdresser half an hour to construct, ornamented with tiny, sparkling butterfly clips. Like most young female stars I’d met, she was thin to the point of unreality. I could make out the bones of her wrists and forearms, the pale blue tracery of veins along her neck.
Her pouty lips were painted scarlet. Her eyes were carefully lined and shadowed. And her cheeks were streaked with tears.
“Sorry about your interview,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said again. “So what brings you to these parts? Don’t you have your own bathroom somewhere else?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, and drew a long, shuddering breath. “You know.”
“Well, actually, not being a thin, rich, successful movie star, I probably don’t.”
One corner of her mouth quirked upward, then drew down again into a trembling crimson bow. “Ever had your heart broken?” she asked in a shaky voice.
“Actually, yes,” I said.
She closed her eyes. Impossibly long lashes rested against her pale freckled cheeks, and tears slid out from beneath them.
“It’s unbearable,” she said. “I know how that sounds…”
“No. No. I know what you mean. I know that it feels like that.”
I handed her one of the rolled-up towels I’d grabbed on the way in. She took it, then looked at me. It was, I thought, a test.
“My house is full of things he gave me,” I began, and she nodded vigorously, curls bouncing.
“That’s it,” she said, “that’s right.”
“And it hurts to look at them, and it hurts to put them away.”
Maxi slumped to the bathroom floor and leaned her cheek against the cool marble wall. After a moment’s hesitation, I joined her, struck by the absurdity of it all, and how it would make a great opening for an article: Maxi Ryder, one of the most acclaimed young actresses of her generation, is crying on the bathroom floor.
“My mother always says that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I said.
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
I only had to think about it for a minute. “No. I don’t even think she believes it. I wish I’d never loved him. I wish I’d never met him. Because I think that as good as the good times were, it isn’t worth feeling like this.”
We sat for a minute, side by side.
>
“What’s your name?”
“Candace Shapiro. Cannie.”
“What was his name?”
“Bruce. And you?”
“I’m Maxi Ryder.
“I know that. I meant, what was his name?”
She made a horrible face. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Everybody knows! Entertainment Weekly did a whole story. With a flow chart!”
“Well, I was very explicitly forbidden from even mentioning it.” Plus, there was more than one candidate, but it didn’t seem prudent to say so.
“Kevin,” she whispered. Which would be Kevin Britton, her costar from Trembling.
“Still Kevin?”
“Still Kevin, always Kevin,” she said sadly, fumbling for another cigarette. “Kevin who I can’t forget, even after I’ve tried everything. Drink… drugs… work… other men…”
Jeez. I suddenly felt very innocent.
“What do you do?”
I knew what she was asking me. “Oh, you know. Probably the same kinds of things as you.” I laid one hand across my forehead, affecting world-weary hauteur. “I started by running off to my private island with Brad Pitt, trying to forget the pain by buying up llama ranches in New England…”
She punched my arm. Her clenched fist felt like a puff of air. “Seriously! Maybe it’ll be something I haven’t thought of.”
“Probably just more stuff that doesn’t really work. Baths, showers, bike rides…”
“I can’t go for bike rides,” she said morosely.
“Because of the paparazzi?”
“No. I never learned how.”
“Really? Bruce, my ex-boyfriend, couldn’t ride a bike either…” My voice trailed off.
“God, don’t you hate that?” she asked.
“The way even completely unrelated things remind you of the person you’re trying to forget? Yes. I hate it.” I looked at her. With her face framed by the bathroom wall marble, she looked ready for her close-up. Whereas I was probably a blotchy-faced, runny-nosed wreck. No justice, I thought. “What do you do?” I asked.
“Invest,” Maxi said instantly. “Manage my money. And my parents’ money, too.” She sighed. “I used to manage Kevin’s money. I wish he’d given me a little notice that he was going to dump me. I’d have sunk him so deep into Planet Hollywood that he’d be taking guest-shots on the WB just to make his rent.”
I considered Maxi with newfound respect. “So you, like…” I racked my brains for the appropriate vocabulary. “Day-trade?’
She shook her head. “Nope. I don’t have time to be geeking around on computers all day. I pick stocks, and I look for investment opportunities.” She stood and stretched, her hands on her nonexistent hips. “I buy real estate.”
My respect was turning into awe. “Like houses?”
“Yup. Buy them, have a crew renovate them, sell them at a profit, or live in them a while, if I’m between movies.”
I felt my fingers reaching for my pen and notebook, creeping almost of their own accord. Maxi as real-estate mogul was something I hadn’t read in any of the innumerable profiles I’d plowed through. It would make great copy. “Hey,” I ventured. “Do you think… I mean, I know they said you were busy, but maybe… could we talk for a few minutes? So I can write my story?”
“Sure,” said Maxi, shrugging, and looked around as if realizing for the first time that we were in a bathroom. “Let’s get out of here. Want to?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be heading to Australia? That’s what April said.”
Maxi looked exasperated. “I’m not leaving till tomorrow. April’s a liar.”
“Imagine that,” I said.
“No, really… oh. Oh, I see. You’re kidding.” And she smiled at me. “I forget how people are.”
“Well, generally, they’re bigger than you.”
She sighed, gazed at herself, and dragged deeply on her cigarette. “When I turn forty,” she said, “I swear, I’m giving this all up, and I’m going to build a fortress on an island with a moat and electrified fences, and I’m going to let my hair go gray and eat custard until I have fourteen chins.”
“That was not,” I pointed out, “what you told Mirabella. You told them you wanted to appear in one quality movie a year, and raise your children in a country farmhouse.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You read that?”
“I’ve read everything about you,” I told her.
“Lies. All lies,” she said, almost cheerfully. “Today, for example. I’m to go to some place called Mooma…”
“Moomba,” I corrected.
“… and have drinks with Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck. Or maybe both. And we’re supposed to look very secretive and lovey, and somebody’s going to call Page 6, and we’re to be photographed, and then we’re going to go to some restaurant that probably paid April off to have dinner, except of course I can’t actually have dinner, because, God forbid, I ever get photographed with something actually in my mouth, or with my mouth open, or basically in any manner that could give any suggestion that I ever do anything with my mouth besides kiss men…”
“… and smoke.”
“Not that, either. The cancer lobby, you know. Which is how I got away from April. Told her I needed a cig.”
“So you really want to pass up drinks and dinner with Ben… or Matt”
“Oh, it doesn’t stop there. Then I’m supposed to be seen out dancing at some bar with pigs in its name…”
“Hogs and Heifers?”
“That’s it. Dancing there till some ungodly hour, and then, and only then, am I permitted some sleep. And that’s after I take off my brassiere and dance on the bar while I’m twirling it over my head.”
“Wow. They really, um, arrange all that for you?”
She pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. Sure enough: 4 P.M., Moomba; 7 P.M., Tandoor; 11 -?, Hogs and Heifers. She reached into another pocket and produced a very small black lace Wonderbra. She wrapped the Wonderbra around her hand and started swinging it around her head while pumping her hips in a parody of a party girl’s bump and grind. “See,” she said, “they even made me practice. If it was up to me I’d sleep all day…”
“Me, too. And watch Iron Chef.”
Maxi looked puzzled. “What’s that?”
“Spoken like someone who’s never been home alone on a Friday night. It’s this TV show where there’s this reclusive millionaire, and he’s got these three chefs…”
“The Iron Chefs,” Maxi guessed.
“Right. And every week they have cooking battles with some challenger chef who comes in, and the eccentric millionaire gives them a theme ingredient that they have to cook with, and half the time it’s something that starts off alive, like squid or giant eel…”
Maxi was smiling, and nodding, and looking like she couldn’t wait to see the first episode. Or maybe she was just acting, I reminded myself. That was, after all, her job. Maybe she acted this excited and friendly and, well, nice, every time she met someone new, and then forgot they’d ever existed as soon as she moved on to the next movie.
“It’s fun,” I concluded. “Also free. Cheaper than renting a movie. I taped it last night, and I’m going to watch it when I get home.”
“I’m never home on Fridays or Saturdays,” she said sadly.
“Well, I almost always am. Believe me, you’re not missing much.”
Maxi Ryder grinned at me. “Cannie,” she said, “know what I really want to do?”
And that was how I wound up in the Bliss day spa, naked on my belly, next to one of the most acclaimed young movie stars of my generation, talking about my failed love life while a man named Ricardo slathered Active Green Clay Mud all over my back.
Maxi and I had slipped out a back door of the hotel and caught a cab to the spa, where the receptionist very snippily informed us that they were booked all day, were booked for weeks, in fact, until Maxi slipped off her sunglasses and made about three seconds’ worth of significant
eye contact and the service improved by about 3,000 percent.
“This is so great,” I told her, for about the fifth time. And it really was. The bed was cushioned with about half a dozen towels, and each one of them was easily as thick as my comforter. Soothing music played so softly in the background I thought it was a CD, until I’d opened my eyes long enough to see that there was an actual woman with an actual harp in the corner, half-hidden behind a lacy billow of curtains.
Maxi nodded. “Wait until they start with the showers and the salt rub.” She closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she murmured. “All I want to do is sleep.”
“I can’t sleep,” I told her. “I mean, I start, but then I wake up…”
“… and the bed’s so empty.”
“Well, I actually have a little dog, so the bed isn’t empty.”
“Oh, I’d love a dog! But I can’t. Too much travel.”
“You can come hang out with Nifkin any time,” I said, knowing that it was highly unlikely that Maxi would be dropping by for an iced cappuccino and a frolic in the dog-crap-studded South Philadelphia dog park. Then again, I reasoned, as Ricardo gently rolled me over and started smearing my front, this was pretty unlikely, too.
“So what’s next?” I asked. “Are you blowing off your entire agenda?”
“I think I am,” she said. “I just want one day and one night to live like a normal person.”
This hardly seemed like to the time to point out that normal people did not get to drop a thousand dollars on a single trip to a spa.
“What else do you want to do?”
Maxi considered. “I don’t know. It’s been so long… what would you do if you had a day to kill in New York?”
“Am I me in this scenario, or am I you?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, do I have unlimited resources and recognition issues, or am I just plain old me?”
“Let’s do plain old you first.”
“Hmm. Well, I’d go to the ticket outlet in Times Square and try to get a half-price ticket for a Broadway show tonight. Then I’d go to the Steve Madden store in Chelsea and see what was on sale. And I’d look in all the galleries, and I’d buy six-for-a-dollar barrettes at the flea market on Columbus, and I’d have dinner at Virgil’s, and go to the show.”
Good in Bed Page 15