Good In Bed (9 page)

Terrific, I thought. Hot gossip about Walter Cronkite. Can’t wait.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Every morning, Monday through Friday, I could look forward to my daily call from Gabby.

“Ben Affleck?” she’d rasp. “What’s a Ben Affleck?”

Or, “Comedy Central? Nobody watches it.”

Or, pointedly, “Saw something on Elizabeth on ET last night. Why didn’t we have it?”

I tried to ignore her— to be pleasant on the phone and every once in a while, when she got particularly crabby, to toss in a line about “Gabby Gardiner will return at the end of September” at the end of the column.

But then one morning she called and I wasn’t there to pick up my phone, so Gabby got my voice mail, which was basically me saying, “Hello, you’ve reached Candace Shapiro, entertainment columnist at the Philadelphia Examiner.” I didn’t realize my misstep until the paper’s executive editor stopped by my desk.

“Have you been telling people you’re the entertainment columnist?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m just filling in.”

“I got a very irate call from Gabby last night. Late last night,” he emphasized, with the expression of a man who did not appreciate having his sleep interrupted. “She thinks you’re giving people the impression that she’s gone for good and you’ve taken over.”

Now I was confused. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

He sighed again. “Your voice mail,” he said. “I don’t know what it says, and, frankly, I don’t want to know what it says. Just fix it so Gabby isn’t waking up my wife and kids anymore.”

I went home and wept to Samantha (“She’s completely insecure,” she observed, and passed me a pint of half-melted sorbet as I moped on her couch). I raged on the phone to Bruce (“Just change the damn thing, Cannie!”). So I took his advice, altering my voice mail to say, “You’ve reached Candace Shapiro, temporary, transient, impermanent, just-filling-in, in-no-way-here-for-good entertainment columnist.” Gabby called the next morning. “Love the message, kid,” she said.

But the damage was done. When Gabby returned from her break she took to calling me “Eve”— as in All About— when she spoke to me at all. I just tried to ignore her, and focus on my extracurricular activities: short stories, scraps of a novel, and Star Struck, the screenplay I’d been laboring over for months. Star Struck was a romantic comedy about a big-city reporter who falls for one of the stars she interviews. They meet cute (after she falls off a bar stool ogling him at the hotel bar), get off on the wrong foot (after he assumes she’s just another plus-size groupie), fall for each other, and, after the appropriate Act Three complications, end up in each other’s arms as the credits roll.

The star was based on Adrian Stadt, a cute comedian on Saturday Night! whose sense of humor seemed in sync with my own— even when he was doing his memorable three-month stint as the Projectile Vomiting Pilot. He was the guy I’d watched all through college and beyond and thought, if he were here, or if I were there, we’d probably get along. The reporter, of course, was me, only I named her Josie, made her a redhead, and gave her stable, straight, still-married parents.

The screenplay was what I’d pinned my dreams on. It was my answer to all of my good grades, to every teacher who’d ever told me I was talented, to every professor who’d ever said I had potential. Best of all, it was a hundred-page response to a world (and to my own secret fears) that told me that plus-size women couldn’t have adventures, or fall in love. And today I was going to do something gutsy. Today, over lunch at the Four Seasons, I was interviewing actor Nicholas Kaye, star of the forthcoming Belch Brothers, a teen-pleasing comedy featuring twin brothers whose gas gives them magical powers. More importantly, I was also interviewing Jane Sloan, who’d executive-produced the movie (with one hand holding her nose, I figured). Jane Sloan was a hero of mine, who, before her slide toward the crassly commercial, had written and directed some of the sharpest, funniest films Hollywood had ever seen. Better yet, they were films with sharp, funny women in them. For weeks I’d been distracting myself from the missing-Bruce blues by constructing an elaborate daydream of how we’d meet and she’d immediately recognize me as a kindred spirit and potential collaborator, slipping me her business card and insisting that I contact her the moment I turned my attention from journalism to screenwriting. I even smiled a little, imagining the look of delight on her face when I modestly confessed that I had indeed penned a screenplay, and that I’d send it to her if she liked.

She was a writer, I was a writer. She was funny, I figured, and I’m funny, too. True, Jane Sloan was also rich and famous, successful beyond my wildest dreams, and about the size of one of my thighs, but sisterhood, I reminded myself, is powerful.

Almost an hour after I arrived, forty-five minutes after we were scheduled to meet, Jane Sloan seated herself across from me and laid a large mirror and a larger bottle of Evian next to her plate. “Hello,” she said, her throaty voice emerging through her clenched teeth, and proceeded to give her face a few healthy squirts. I squinted at her, waiting for the punch line, waiting for her to crack up and say she was kidding. She didn’t. Nicholas Kaye sat down beside her and shot me an apologetic grin. Jane Sloan finally put the mirror and bottle down.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” said Nicholas Kaye, who looked much like he did on TV— cute as a button.

Jane Sloan shoved the butter dish aggressively across the table. She picked up her napkin, which had been folded into the shape of a swan, opened it with one dismissive flick of her wrist, and carefully wiped her face with it. Only after she’d set the napkin, now stained ecru and crimson and mascara-black, onto the table, did she deign to speak.

“This city,” she pronounced, “is wreaking havoc on my pores.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid as soon as the apology had left my mouth. What was I sorry for? I wasn’t doing anything to her pores.

Jane waved one pale hand languorously, as if my apology for Philadelphia was of no more consequence then a mold spore, then picked up her silver butter knife and started poking at the flower-shaped butter pat in the dish she’d just banished to my side of the table. “What do you need to know?” she asked, without looking up.

“Umm,” I said, fumbling for my pen and my notebook. I had a whole list of questions ready, questions about everything from how she’d cast the movie to who her influences were, and what she liked on TV, but all I could think of was, “Where’d you get the idea?”

Without lifting her eyes from the butter, she said, “Saw it on TV.”

“That late-night sketch comedy show on HBO?” Nicholas Kaye said helpfully.

“I called the director. Said I thought it should be a movie. He agreed.”

Great. So that was how movies got made. Strange little butter-averse pint-size Elvira with squirt bottle makes phone call, and voilà, instant film!

“So… you wrote the script?”

Another wave of that ghostlike hand. “I just oversaw.”

“We hired a few guys from Saturday Night!,” said Nicholas Kaye.

Double great. Not only did I not work for Saturday Night!, I wasn’t even a guy. I quietly abandoned my plan of telling her that I’d written a screenplay. They’d probably laugh me all the way to Pittsburgh.

The waiter approached. Both Jane and Nicholas scowled at their menus in silence. The waiter shot me a desperate look.

“I’ll have the osso bucco,” I said.

“Excellent choice,” he said, beaming.

“I’ll have…” said Nicholas. Long, long pause. The waiter waited, pen poised. Jane poked at the butter. I felt a drop of sweat descend from the nape of my neck, down my back, and into my underwear. “This salad,” he finally said, pointing. The waiter leaned in for a look. “Very good, sir,” he said, relieved.

“And for the lady?”

“Lettuce,” Jane Sloan mumbled.

“A salad?” the waiter ventured.

“Lettuce,” she repeated. “Red leaf, if you have it. Washed. With vinegar on the side. And I don’t want the leaves cut in any way,” she continued. “I want them torn. By hand.”

The waiter scribbled and fled. Jane Sloan slowly lifted her eyes. I fumbled my notebook open again.

“Umm…”

Lettuce, I was thinking. Jane Sloan is eating lettuce for lunch, and I’m going to sit here and suck down veal in front of her. And, worse yet, I couldn’t think of a thing to ask.

“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 pantyhose 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 bucco, 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 of 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 lettuce-eating 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 bucco 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 Celine 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 Celine’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.”