Oof. I leaned back in the plush, double-wide leather-clad reclining seat and closed my eyes, feeling the most potent and horrible mixture of sadness and fury – and sudden, overwhelming hope – that for a minute I thought I’d throw up. He’d written this three months ago. That was how long magazines took to print things. Had he seen my letter? Did he know I was pregnant? And what was he feeling now?
“He still misses me,” I murmured, with my hand on my belly. So did that mean there was hope? I thought for a minute that maybe I’d mail him his Cheesasaurus Rex T-shirt, as a sign… as a peace offering. Then I remembered that the last thing I’d mailed him was news that I was having his baby, and he hadn’t even bothered to pick up the phone and ask me how I was.
“He doesn’t love me anymore,” I reminded myself. And I wondered how E. felt, reading this… E. the kindergarten teacher with her sweet talk of baggage and her small, soft hands. Did she wonder why he wrote about me, after all this time? Did she wonder why he still cared? Did he care, or was that just my wishful thinking? And if I called, what would he say?
I turned restlessly in my seat, flipping the pillow, then scrunching it against the window and leaning against it. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the captain was announcing our descent into beautiful Los Angeles, where the sun was shining and the winds were from the southwest and where it was a perfect 80 degrees.
I got off the plane with my pockets full of little gifts the flight girls had pressed upon me, packets of Mint Milanos and foil-wrapped chocolates and complimentary eye masks and washcloths and socks. I had Nifkin’s carrier in one hand, my bag in the other. In the bag was a week’s worth of underwear, my Pregnancy Packable kit, minus the long skirt and tunic, which I was wearing, and a few fistfuls of assorted hygiene products that I’d thrust in at the last minute. A nightgown, some sneakers, my telephone book, my journal, and a dog-eared copy of Your Healthy Baby.
“How long will you be?” my mother had asked the night before I’d left. The boxes and bags of what I’d bought at the mall were still strewn in the hallway and kitchen, like fallen bodies. But the crib, I’d noticed, was put together perfectly. Dr. K. must have done it while I was on the phone with Maxi.
“Just a weekend. Maybe a few days longer.” I told her.
“You told this Maxi person about the baby, right?” she’d fretted.
“Yes, Mom, I told her.”
“And you’ll call, right?”
I rolled my eyes, told her yes, and walked Nifkin over to Sa-mantha’s, to give her the good news.
“Details!” she demanded, handing me a cup of tea and settling on her couch.
I told her what I knew: that I’d be selling my screenplay to the studio, that I’d need to find an agent, and that I’d be meeting some of the producers. I didn’t mention that Maxi had urged me to find a place to stay for a while, in case I wanted to be in California for the inevitable revisions and rewrites.
“That is completely unbelievable!” Samantha said, and hugged me. “Cannie, it’s just great!”
And it was great, I mused, as I trudged down the jetway with Nifkin’s case banging against my leg. “Airport,” I murmured to the baby. And there, at the gate, was April. I recognized her instantly from New York. Same knee-high black leather boots, only now her hair was drawn up into a ponytail at the top center of her head, and there was something strange happening between her nose and her chin. It took me a minute to figure out that she was smiling.
“Cannie!” she said, and waved and took my hand. “It’s such a pleasure to finally meet you!” She raked her eyes over me in the way that I’d remembered, lingering just a beat or two too long on my stomach, but her smile was firmly in place by the time her eyes met mine. “A towering talent,” she pronounced. “Loved the screenplay. Loved it, loved it. As soon as Maxi showed it to me, I told her two things. I said, Maxi, you are Josie Weiss, and I said, I cannot wait to meet the genius who created her.”
I thought briefly about telling her that we had, in fact, already met, and it had been the single worst reporting experience of that month, possibly the entire year. I wondered if she’d hear me if I whispered “hypocrite” to the baby. But then I decided, why rock the boat? Maybe she genuinely didn’t recognize me. I hadn’t looked pregnant the last time she’d seen me, any more than she’d been smiling.
April bent to peer into the carrying case. “And you must be little Nifty!” she cooed. Nifkin started growling. April appeared not to notice. “What a beautiful dog,” she said. I snorted back laughter, and Nifkin continued to growl so hard that his cage was vibrating. Nifkin has many fine qualities, but beauty is not among them.
“How was your flight?” April asked me, blinking rapidly and smiling still. I wondered if this was how she treated her famous clients. I wondered if I was a client already, if Maxi had gone ahead and signed a pact in blood, or whatever one did to acquire the services of someone like April.
“Fine. Very nice, really. I’ve never been in first class before.”
April linked her arm through mine like we were grade-school chums. Her forearm fit neatly below my right breast. I tried to ignore it. “Get used to it,” she advised me. “Your whole life’s about to change. Just sit back and enjoy the ride!”
April deposited me in a suite in the Beverly Wilshire, explaining that the studio was putting me up there for the night. Even if it was for one night only, I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, if they’d gone with the indie-alterna ending, where the prostitute winds up pregnant and alone, with only her little dog for comfort.
The suite might very well be the one where they filmed Pretty Woman. It was big, and bright, and deluxe in every way. The walls were covered in gold and cream striped wallpaper, the floors were lined with ultra-plush beige carpeting, and the bathroom was a study in marble shot through with veins of gold. The bathroom was also, I noted, the size of my living room back home, with a bathtub big enough to accommodate a vigorous game of water polo, if I’d been so inclined.
“Fancy schmancy,” I noted for the baby, and opened a pair of French doors to find a bed that looked big as a tennis court, all done in crisp white sheets, topped with a fluffy pink and gold comforter. Everything was clean and new-smelling and so gorgeous I was almost afraid to touch it. There was also an elaborate bouquet waiting for me beside the bed. “Welcome!” read the card, from Maxi.
“Bouquet,” I informed the baby. “Very expensive, probably.” Nifkin had bounded out of his carrier and was busily making a sniffing tour of the suite. He glanced at me briefly, then rose up on his hind legs to dip his nose toward the toilet. Once that had passed muster, he scampered into the bedroom.
I got him settled on a pillow on the bed, and took a bath, and wrapped myself in the Wilshire robe. I called room service and ordered hot tea and strawberries and fresh pineapple, and liberated some Evian and a box of Choco Leibniz, king of all cookies, from the minibar, without even blanching at the $8 price tag, which was at least triple what the cookies would have cost in Philadelphia. Then I lay back on two of the six pillows that came with the bed and clapped my hands together, laughing. “I’m here!” I crowed, as Nifkin barked to keep me company. “I did it!”
Then I called every single person I could think of.
“If you eat at any of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurants, get the duck pizza,” counseled Andy, in full food-critic mode.
“Fax me anything before you sign it,” urged Samantha, and proceeded to spout five minutes’ worth of lawyer-ese before I calmed her down.
“Take notes!” said Betsy.
“Take pictures!” said my mother.
“You brought my head shots, right?” demanded Lucy.
I promised that I’d lobby for Lucy, take notes for future columns for Betsy and pictures for Mom, fax anything legal-looking to Samantha and eat duck pizza for Andy. Then I noticed the business card propped on one of the pillows, engraved with the words Maxi Ryder. Under her name was the single word Garth, a telephone number, and an address on V
entura Boulevard. “Be there at 7 o’clock. Drinks and amusements to follow,” it said.
“Drinks and amusements,” I murmured, and stretched out on the bed. I could smell the fresh flowers, and could hear the faint sound of cars buzzing from thirty-two floors below. Then I closed my eyes and didn’t wake up until it was 6:30. I splashed water on my face, scrambled into my shoes, and hurried out the door.
Garth turned out to be the Garth, hairdresser to the stars, although at first I thought the cab had dropped me off at an art gallery. It was an easy mistake to make. Garth’s salon lacked the typical trappings: the row of sinks, the stacks of thumbed-through magazines, the receptionist’s desk. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anyone at all inside the high-ceilinged room, decorated with a single chair, a single sink, and a single floor-to-ceiling antique mirror except… Garth.
I sat in the chair while the man who’d put the buttery chunks into Britney Spears’s tresses, who’d given Hillary her highlights and Jennifer Lopez henna, lifted and replaced sections of my hair, touching and scrutinizing it with the cool detachment of a scientist, and tried to explain myself.
“See, you’re not supposed to color your hair when you’re pregnant,” I began. “And I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant, so I’d just had my highlights done, and they’ve been growing out for six months and I know it looks terrible…”
“Who did this to you?” Garth asked mildly.
“Um, the pregnancy or the highlights?”
He smiled at me in the mirror and picked up another piece of my hair. “These weren’t done… here?” he asked delicately.
“Oh, no. In Philadelphia.” Blank look from Garth. “In Pennsylvania.” Truth was, I’d gotten it done at the beauty school on Bainbridge Street, and I thought they’d done a pretty good job, but from the look on his face I could tell that Garth would not agree.
“Oh, dear,” he breathed quietly. He took a comb, a little spritz-bottle of water. “Do you have any strong feelings about, um…” I could tell he was groping for the kindest word to describe what was happening on top of my head.
“I have lots of strong feelings, but none about my hair,” I told him. “Do with me what you will.”
It took him close to two hours: first cutting, then combing, then snipping the ends, then rinsing my head in a garnet-red solution he swore was completely natural, chemical free, derived from only the purest organic vegetables and absolutely guaranteed not to harm my unborn child.
“You’re a screenwriter?” Garth said once I’d been rinsed. He was holding my chin, tilting my head this way and that.
“Unproduced, so far.”
“Things are going to happen for you. You’ve got that aura.”
“Oh, that’s probably just the soap from the hotel.”
He leaned in close and started tweezing my eyebrows. “Don’t tear yourself down,” he told me. He smelled of some wonderful cologne, and, even inches from my face, his skin was flawless.
Once he’d shaped my brows to his satisfaction, he rinsed out my hair, blew it dry, and spent about half an hour applying different creams and powders to my face. “I don’t wear much makeup,” I protested. “Chap Stick and mascara. That’s pretty much it.”
“Don’t worry. This is going to be subtle.”
I had my doubts. He’d already brushed three different shades of shadow around my eyes, including one that looked practically violet. But when he whipped the cape off me and twirled me to face the mirror, I felt sorry for even thinking about doubting him. My skin was glowing. My cheeks were the color of a perfect, ripe apricot. My lips were full, a warm wine color, curling with a faint hint of amusement even though I wasn’t aware that I was smiling. And I didn’t notice the eyeshadow, just my eyes, which seemed much bigger, much more compelling. I looked like myself, only more so… like the best, most happy version of myself.
And my hair…
“This is the best haircut I’ve ever had,” I told him. I ran my fingers through it slowly. It had gone from a raggedy mouse-brown bob with a few haphazard highlights to a rich, shimmering tortoiseshell color, shot through with strands of gold and bronze and copper. He’d cut it short, the tendrils just brushing my cheeks, and let its natural wave remain in place, and he’d tucked it behind my ear on one side, giving me the look of a gamine. Sure, a pregnant gamine, but who was I to complain? “This may be the best haircut anyone’s ever had.”
The sound of applause came from the doorway. And there was Maxi, wearing a black slip dress with spaghetti straps and black sandals. She had diamond studs in her ears and a single diamond on a thin silver chain around her neck. The dress tied around her neck and left her back bare almost enough to display butt cleavage. I could see the tender buds of her shoulderblades, each marble-sized vertebra, the perfectly symmetrical sprinkling of freckles on her shoulders.
“Cannie! My God,” she said, studying first my hair, and then my belly. “You’re… wow.”
“Did you think I was kidding?” I said, and laughed at her awed expression.
She knelt down in front of me. “Can I…”
“Sure,” I said. She laid one hand flat on my belly, and, after a moment, the baby obligingly kicked.
“Ooh!” said Maxi, yanking her hand back as if she’d been burned.
“Don’t worry. You won’t hurt her. Or me.”
“So it’s a girl?” asked Garth.
“Nothing official. I just have a feeling,” I said.
Maxi, meanwhile, was circling me as if I were a piece of property she was thinking about buying. “What does Bruce have to say about this?” she inquired.
I shook my head. “Nothing, as far as I know. I haven’t heard from him.”
Maxi stopped circling and stared at me, her eyes wide. “Nothing? Still?”
“Not kidding,” I said.
“I could have him killed,” Maxi offered. “Or even just beaten up. I could send, say, half a dozen angry rugby players with baseball bats to break his legs…”
“Or his bong,” I suggested. “It’d probably hurt him worse.”
Maxi grinned. “Do you feel okay? Are you hungry? Or sleepy? Do you feel like going out, because if you don’t, that’s no problem at all”
I grinned at her, and tossed my fabulous hair. “Of course I want to go out! I’m in Hollywood! I’ve got makeup on! Let’s go!”
I offered Garth a credit card, but he shooed me away, telling me not to worry, it was all taken care of, and if I’d only promise to come back in six weeks to have my ends trimmed he’d consider that payment enough. I thanked him and thanked him until Maxi dragged me out the door. Her small silver car was pulled up to the curb. I got in carefully, aware of my shifting center of gravity… and aware that, next to Maxi, even with my fabulous new hair and gorgeous Garth-enhanced complexion, even in my semichic black matte tunic and skirt and not unhip black slides, I still felt like a dowdy dirigible. A gamine dirigible, at least, I thought, as Maxi zoomed across three lanes of honking cars and accelerated through a yellow light.
“I arranged for the doormen at the hotel to look in on Nifkin, in case we’re out late,” she shouted, as the warm night wind blew in our faces. “Also, I rented him a cabana.”
“Wow. Lucky Nifkin.”
It wasn’t until two traffic lights later that I thought to ask where we were going. Maxi perked up instantly. “The Star Bar! It’s one of my favorite places.”
“Is it a party?”
“Oh, it’s always a party there. Great sushi, too.”
I sighed. I couldn’t eat raw fish or drink alcohol. And even though I was excited to celebrate and see the stars, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the thing I wanted most was the bed in that big gorgeous hotel suite. I never liked late nights or loud parties much before I was pregnant, and I found myself liking them even less since. I’d stay for a little while, I told myself, and then plead pregnant lady exhaustion and make a break for home.
Maxi gave me the rundown on who might be there, as well as an
y pertinent back-story of which a newcomer such as myself should be aware. The famous actor and actress, married for seven years, I learned, were faking it. “He’s gay,” Maxi murmured, “and she’s been getting it on with her personal trainer for years.”
“How cliché!” I whispered back. Maxi laughed and leaned in closer. The ingenue, star of last summer’s second-biggest action picture, might offer me Ecstasy in the ladies’ room (“at least, she offered it to me,” said Maxi). The hip-hop princess who reportedly didn’t make a move without her Baptist, Bible-carrying mother was “a real wild one,” said Maxi. “Sleeps with boys, and girls, and both at the same time, while Maman’s off leading revivals in Virginia.” The fifty-ish director just got out of the Betty Ford Clinic; the fortysomething leading man had been diagnosed as a sex addict during his last stint at Hazelden; and the much-gossiped-about art-house director wasn’t actually a lesbian, although she was perfectly happy to feed the rumor mill. “Straight as an arrow,” said Maxi, sounding disgusted. “I think she’s even got a husband stashed in Michigan.”
“The horror!” I said. Maxi giggled, grabbing my arm. The elevator doors slid open, and two gorgeous guys wearing white shorts and white dress shirts swung open ten-foot-high glass doors, revealing a bar that looked like it was suspended in the night sky. Windows wrapped around the length of the room. There were dozens of small white-cloth-covered tables for two and for four, covered with dozens of flickering votive candles. The walls were hung with gossamer ivory curtains that billowed gently in the night breeze. The bar was backlit with blue neon, and the bartender was a six-foot-tall woman in a midnight-blue cat-suit, dispensing martinis with her face as gorgeous and still as a carved African mask. Maxi gave my arm a final squeeze, whispered, “I’ll be back in a jiff,” and darted off to air-kiss people I’d only seen in movies. I leaned against one of the pillars and tried not to stare.
There was the hip-hop princess, with tiny braids cascading from the crown of her head almost to her waist. There were the long-married superstars, looking for all the world like a devoted couple, and the non-lesbian art-house director, in a starched tuxedo shirt and a red bow tie. Dozens of waiters and waitresses zipped around. They all wore white – white pants, white shorts, white tank tops, and absolutely pristine white sneakers. It made the place look like the world’s most chic hospital, except the staff carried oversized martinis instead of bedpans, and everyone was beautiful. My hands itched for a pen and a notebook. I had no business being at a place like this, surrounded by people like these, unless I was taking notes for a future newspaper article in which I’d quite possibly be sarcastic. I didn’t belong here just as myself.
Good in Bed Page 27