Good in Bed (13 page)

“Tell me your favorite scene in the movie,” I finally managed. A horrible question, a freshman-at-the-school-paper question, but better than nothing, I thought.

She smiled finally—faintly, fleetingly, but still, it was undeniably a smile. Then she shook her head.

“Can't,” she said. “Too personal.”

Oh, God, help me. Rescue me. Send a tornado shrieking through the Four Seasons, uprooting businessmen, sending fine china flying. I'm dying here. “So what's up next?”

Jane just shrugged and looked mysterious. I felt the waistband of my control-top panty hose give up the fight and slide down my midsection, coming to rest at the top of my thighs.

“We're working on something new together,” Nicholas Kaye volunteered. “I'm going to write … with a couple of my friends from college … and Jane's going to show it to the studios. Would you like to hear about that?”

He launched into an enthusiastic description of what sounded like the world's dumbest movie—something about a guy who inherits his father's whoopie cushion factory, and how his father's partner double-crosses him, and how he and the spunky cleaning lady triumph in the end. I took notes without hearing, my right hand moving mechanically over the page as my left hand ferried food to my mouth. Meanwhile, Jane was dividing her lettuce into two piles—one of mostly leaf pieces, the other of mostly stem pieces. Once this division was complete, she proceeded to dip the top third of the tines of her fork into the vinegar pot, then carefully spear a single piece of lettuce from the mostly leaf side and place it precisely in her mouth. After exactly six bites—during which time Nicholas polished off his salad and two pieces of bread and I downed half my osso buco, which was, all things considered, delicious—she patted her lips dry with her napkin, picked up her butter knife, and started poking the butter again.

I reached over and pulled the butter dish away, thinking that I couldn't stand to see this, and also that I had to try something, because the interview was going down the crapper. “Cut it out,” I said sternly. “That butter hasn't done anything to you.”

There was a pause. A pregnant pause. An icy, yawning crevasse of a pause. Jane Sloan stared at me with her dead black eyes.

“Dairy,” she said, as if it were a curse.

“Third-largest industry in Pennsylvania,” I countered, without any idea whether it was true. It sounded about right, though. Whenever I went for a bike ride that took me more than a few miles out of the city, I saw cows.

“Jane's allergic,” Nicholas said quickly. He smiled at his director, and took her hand, and then it hit me: They're a couple. Even though he is twenty-seven and she is … well, God, at least fifteen years older than that. Even though he is recognizably human and she … isn't. “What else?”

“Tell me …” I stammered, my mind stuck on blank at the sight of their interlaced fingers. “Tell me something about the movie that not everybody knows.”

“Part of it was shot where they shot
Showgirls
,” offered Nicholas.

“That's in the press packet,” Jane said suddenly. I knew that, but I'd decided to be polite, take the quote, and get the hell out of Dodge before I found out what a woman who ate six lettuce leaves for lunch did when they asked if she wanted dessert.

“I'll tell you something,” she said. “The girl in the flower shop? She's my daughter.”

“Really?”

“Her first role,” Jane said, sounding almost proud, almost shy. Almost real. “I've been discouraging her … she's already obsessing over the way she looks. …”

Wonder where she gets that, I thought, but said nothing.

“I haven't told anyone else that,” Jane said. The corners of her lips twitched. “But I like you.”

Heaven help the reporters you don't like, I thought, and was trying to construct a reasonable response when she suddenly stood up, taking Nicholas along with her. “Good luck,” she murmured, and they swept out the door. Just as the dessert cart arrived.

“Something for mademoiselle?” said the waiter sympathetically.

Can you blame me if I said yes?

* * *

“So?” asked Samantha, on the phone that afternoon.

“She ate lettuce for lunch,” I moaned. “A salad?”

“Lettuce. Plain lettuce. With vinegar on the side. I almost died.”

“Just lettuce?”

“Lettuce,” I repeated. “Red leaf lettuce. She specified a variety. And she kept squirting her face with Evian.”

“Cannie, you're making this up.”

“I'm not! I swear! My Hollywood idol, and she's this lettuceeating freak, this, this miniature Elvira with tattooed eyeliner. …”

Samantha listened dispassionately. “You're crying.”

“I am not,” I lied. “I'm just disappointed. I thought … you know … I had this idea that we'd hit it off. And I'd send her the screenplay, but I'm never going to get to give anyone the screenplay, because I didn't go to college with a single cast member of
Saturday Night!
, and those are the guys who get their scripts read.” I glanced down at myself. More bad news. “Also I got osso buco on my jacket.”

Samantha sighed. “I think you need an agent.”

“I can't get an agent! Believe me, I've tried! They won't even look at your stuff unless you've had something produced, and you can't get producers to look at something unless it comes from an agent.” I wiped my eyes viciously. “This week sucks.”

“Mail call!” said Gabby gleefully. She dropped a stack of papers on my desk and waddled off. I said good-bye to Sam and turned to my correspondence. Press release. Press release. Fax, fax, fax. Envelope with my name carefully lettered in the handwriting I had long since learned to identify as Old Person, Angry. I ripped the envelope open.

“Dear Miss Shapiro,” read the shaky letters. “Your article on Céline Dion's special was the filthiest, nastiest smear piece of garbage I have seen in my fifty-seven years as a loyal
Examiner
reader. Bad enough that you mocked Céline's music as ‘bombastic, overblown ballads,' but then you had to go and make fun of her looks! I'll bet you're no Cindy Crawford yourself. Sincerely, Mr. E. P. Deiffinger.”

“Hey, Cannie.”

Jesus Christ. Gabby was forever sneaking up behind me. For being massive, and old, and deaf, she could be quiet as a cat when it suited her. I turned around and there she was, squinting over my shoulder at the letter in my lap.

“Did you get something wrong?” she asked, her voice full of sympathy as thick, and fake, as Cheez Whiz. “Do we need to run a correction?”

“No, Gabby,” I said, trying not to scream. “Just a little opposing viewpoint.”

I tossed the letter in the trash can and shoved my chair back so fast I almost ran over Gabby's toes.

“Jeez!” she hissed and retreated.

“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I composed in my head. “I may not be a supermodel, but at least I've got enough working brain cells to know what sucks when I hear it.”

“Dear Mr. Deiffinger,” I thought, walking the mile and a half from work to the Weight and Eating Disorders office where my first Fat Class was meeting. “Sorry you took offense at my description of Céline Dion's work, but I actually thought I was being charitable.”

I stomped into the conference room, seated myself at the table, and looked around. There was Lily, from the waiting room, and an older black woman, about my size, with a bulging briefcase beside her, poking away at one of those hand-held e-mail readers. There was a blond teenager, her long hair swept off her face in a hairband, her body hidden beneath a bulky oversize sweatshirt and gigantic droopy jeans. And there was a woman of perhaps sixty who had to weigh at least four hundred pounds. She followed me into the room, walking with the aid of a cane, and surveyed the seats carefully, measuring her bulk against their parameters, before easing herself down.

“Hey, Cannie,” said Lily.

“Hey,” I grumbled. The words
Portion Control
were written on a white wipable message board, and there was a poster of the food pyramid on one wall. This shit again, I thought, wondering if I could place out of the class. I'd been to Weight Watchers, after all. I knew all about portion control.

The skinny nurse I remembered from the waiting room walked through the door, her hands full of bowls, measuring cups, a small plastic replica of a four-ounce pork chop.

“Good evening, everyone,” she said, and wrote her name—Sarah Pritchard, R.N.—on the board. We went around the table, introducing ourselves. The blond girl was Bonnie, the black woman was Anita, and the very large woman was Esther from West Oak Lane.

“I'm having a flashback of college,” whispered Lily, as Nurse Sarah distributed booklets full of calorie counts, and packets of printouts on behavior modification.

“I'm having a flashback of Weight Watchers,” I whispered back.

“Did you try that?” asked Bonnie the blond girl, edging closer to us.

“Last year,” I said.

“Was that the One Two Three Success program?”

“Fat and Fiber,” I whispered back.

“Isn't that a cereal?” asked Esther, who had a surprisingly lovely voice—very low, and warm, and free of the dread Philadelphia accent that causes natives to swallow their consonants like they're made of warm taffy.

“That's Fruit and Fiber,” the blond girl said.

“Fat and Fiber was where you had to count the grams of fat and the grams of fiber in every food, and you were supposed to eat a certain number of grams of fiber, and not go over a certain number of grams of fat,” I explained.

“Did it work?” asked Anita, setting down her Palm Pilot.

“Nah,” I said. “But that was probably my fault. I kept mixing up which number I was supposed to stay below and which one I was supposed to go above … and then I found, like, these really high-fiber brownies that were made with iron filings or something. …”

Lily cracked up.

“They had a zillion calories apiece but I figured it didn't matter because they were very low in fat and very high in fiber. …”

“A common mistake,” said Nurse Sarah cheerfully. “Fat and fiber are both important, but so is the total number of calories you take in.
It's very simple, really,” she said, turning back to the board and scribbling the kind of equation that had confounded me in eleventh grade. “Calories taken in versus calories expended. If you take in more calories than you burn, you'll gain weight.”

“Really?” I asked, my eyes wide.

The nurse looked at me suspiciously.

“Are you serious? It's that simple?”

“Um,” she began. I suspected that she was probably used to fat ladies sitting meekly in the chairs, like overfed sheep, smiling and nodding and being grateful for the wisdom she was imparting, staring at her with abashed, admiring eyes, all because she'd had the good fortune of being born thin. The thought infuriated me.

“So if I eat fewer calories than I burn …” I slapped my forehead. “My God! I finally get it! I understand! I'm cured!” I stood up and pumped my hands in the air as Lily snickered. “Healed! Saved! Thank you, Jesus, and the Weight and Eating Disorders Center, for taking the blinders from my eyes!”

“Okay,” said the nurse. “You've made your point.”

“Damn,” I said, resuming my seat. “I was going to ask if I could be excused.”

The nurse sighed. “Look,” she said. “The truth of it is, there're a lot of complicating factors … and science doesn't even understand all of them. We know about metabolic rates, and how some people's bodies just seem to want to hang on to excess weight more than other people's do. We know this isn't easy. I would never tell you that it was.”

She stared at us, breathing rapidly. We stared right back.

“I'm sorry,” I finally said into the silence. “I was being fresh. It's just that … well, I don't want to speak for anybody else, but I've had this explained to me before.”

“Uh-huh,” said Anita.

“Me, too,” said Bonnie.

“Fat people aren't stupid,” I continued. “But every single weight-loss program I've ever been to treats us like we are—as if as soon as they explain that broiled chicken is better than fried, and frozen
yogurt's better than ice cream, and that if you take a hot bath instead of eating pizza, we're going to all turn into Courteney Cox.”

“That's right,” said Lily.

The nurse looked frustrated. “I'd certainly never mean to suggest that any of you are stupid,” she said. “Diet is part of it,” she added. “Exercise is part of it, too, although probably not as big a part as we used to believe.”

I frowned. That was just my luck. With all of the biking and walking I did, plus regular workouts at the gym with Samantha, exercise was the one part of a healthy lifestyle that I had down pat.

“Now today,” she continued, “we're going to be talking about portion size. Did you know that most restaurants serve portions that are well over the recommended USDA guidelines of what most women require over an entire day?”

I groaned softly to myself as the nurse arrayed the plates and cups and little plastic pork chop on the table. “The correct portion of protein,” she said, speaking in the slow, loud, careful voice commonly employed by kindergarten teachers, “is four ounces. Now, can anyone tell me about how much that is?”

“Size of your palm,” muttered Anita. “Jenny Craig,” she said to the nurse's surprised look.

Nurse Sarah took a deep breath. “Very good!” she said, making a visible effort to sound happy and upbeat. “Now, how about a portion of fat?”

“Tip of your thumb,” I muttered. Her eyes widened. “Look,” I said,“I think we all know this stuff … am I right?”

I looked around the table. Everyone nodded. “The only thing we're here for, the only thing that this program has to offer us, is the drugs. Now, are we going to get them today, or do we have to sit here and act like you're telling us things we don't already know?”