The Woman Who Stole My Life (33 page)

Starting with Thanksgiving at the end of November, New York turned into party season. Blisset Renown had their Happy Holidays shindig on 10 December. But they held it in their offices because, as everyone kept telling me, ‘publishing was dying on its feet’ and it would be unseemly to spend a fortune on a big blowout.

I was making awkward small talk with two copy-editors when something sharp was poked into my bum. I turned around. It was Phyllis Teerlinck, whom I literally had not clapped eyes on since the day she’d done my book deal, all that time ago in August. ‘Hey there,’ she said, wielding the pen that she’d stuck into me. ‘My God, what have they done? They’ve “New Yorked” you! Shiny and skinny!’

‘Lovely to see you, Phyllis.’

‘No touching!’ She repelled my proto-embrace by showing me the palm of her hand. ‘I hate these things. Everyone kissing everyone else’s asses. Hey there, girls.’ She addressed the two women I’d been talking to. ‘I’m just picking up some cupcakes for my cats. Yeah, I’m the crazy lady who lives alone with her cats. Give me that tray.’ She decanted a tray of pastel-iced mini-cupcakes into a large Tupperware container, which she then put into a small wheely bag. ‘So, Stella, where’s that sexy man of yours?’

‘Over there.’

Standing nearby, leaning against some shelves, Mannix was talking to Gilda. Gilda said something that made him laugh.

‘Great teeth,’ Phyllis said. ‘Very white. Who’s that little popsicle he’s talking to?’

‘Her name is Gilda Ashley.’

‘Oh yeah? Why’s she here?’

‘She asked if she could come. And … why not?’

‘You trust Mannix with her?’

To amuse Phyllis, I shook my head. ‘Nooooo.’

Phyllis laughed. ‘Wise, Stella.’

As if he felt our scrutiny, Mannix looked at me and mouthed, ‘Okay?’

I nodded. Yes, okay.

Then he noticed Phyllis and he came over, trailing Gilda with him.

‘I hear you did a deal,’ Phyllis said to Mannix. ‘With a teeny-tiny Irish publishing house. Good for you! Let’s hope I haven’t accidentally omitted any other territories from our contract, right? You’d make a good agent.’

Mannix inclined his head graciously. ‘Coming from you, that’s quite a compliment. So will we see you in the new year?’

‘What? You want me to take you two out for a fancy lunch on my dime? When Stella’s written her second book and the time is right, I’ll do a new deal and make you a lot of money. Until then, Happy holidays!’

She noodled her way through the guests, then lifted a tray of cupcakes from the hands of a surprised-looking intern and emptied it into one of her boxes.

‘She’s your agent?’ Gilda said. ‘My God, she’s … 
horrible
.’

On 21 December, Mannix, Betsy, Jeffrey and I flew to Ireland for Christmas. It was all a bit weird because we had nowhere
to live. My house had tenants in it and Mannix had no home at all. There wasn’t enough room in Mum and Dad’s for the four of us. Turbo-capable as Karen was, I didn’t think it was fair to land us all on top of her and her two young children. Rosa’s house was full because Mannix’s parents had come from France. Hero and her family had had to downsize to a two-bedroomed box when Harry had been made redundant from his banking job, so there was no space there either.

In the end, Betsy and Jeffrey stayed with Ryan, Mannix stayed in Roland’s little apartment and I shuttled between both places.

I was anxious about meeting Mannix’s parents, Norbit and Hebe and, as it transpired, I was right to be. Despite their reputation for being high-spirited and jolly, they clearly didn’t think I was good enough for Mannix. His mum eyed me coldly and treated me to a limp handshake. ‘So you’re the one,’ she said. Then she noticed Georgie, who had shown up at this Taylor family get-together, and she gasped, ‘Darling Georgie. Angel girl. Let me smother you in kisses.’

Mannix’s dad didn’t even bother shaking hands with me, just scampered around Georgie, like a dog wagging his tail, trying to get in to lick her. I swallowed down my hurt and decided to be adult about this. But it agitated the suspicion I always carried, that I was a gatecrasher in Mannix’s world.

Norbit and Hebe weren’t the only ones who took issue with me. Ryan, also, was quite horrible – nothing new there. One night he came home, totally scuttered, and said, ‘There she is. The woman who stole my life.’

‘Stop it, Ryan; you’re jarred.’

‘It should have been me,’ he said. ‘It was all over the papers here when you got your deal with Harp! And it’s only going to get worse when your shitty little book comes out. You’ll be on the telly and all. From now on I refuse to call you
Stella. You are known to me as The Woman Who Stole My Life.’

The following morning, he said, ‘I remember what I said last night. And I’m not sorry.’

‘Grand. I’m going out to see Zoe. She’s nice to me.’

But Zoe told me she was ‘on the turn’. ‘I’m moving from sad to bitter.’

‘Ah, don’t,’ I said.

‘But I want to. I even have a mantra:
Every day, in every way, I am becoming bitterer and bitterer
.’

Not everything in Ireland was unpleasant – Karen and I had a great night out with Georgie. And I was really pleased to catch up with Roland. He was still decked out in his gaudy threads but had lost a bit of weight.

‘I know!’ he said, wobbling his still-enormous tummy. ‘Skinny, right? You’re worried? You think I have a wasting condition?’

He made me laugh so much.

‘I’ve been doing the Nordic walking,’ he said, with pride. ‘Soon I’ll look like Kate Moss.’

Back in New York, Gilda scolded me for gaining six pounds in Ireland. ‘We’ll put you on a juice-fast. Ten days to start with and then we’ll review it.’

Ten days!

The juice-fast was horribly difficult. It wasn’t simply that I was always hungry, but I found myself crying a lot. Three feet of snow fell in New York that January, bitter winds blew in straight from the frozen north and I was always cold and always weepy. Except for now and again when I found myself white-hot with rage, usually over something ridiculously small.

Gilda was kind but immovable. ‘All those pieces of pie you ate in Ireland? Now it’s payback time.’

One particularly miserable morning, it all became too much. The snowflakes were blowing in vicious flurries outside the window and I felt shaky and weak. Then the phone rang and a posh woman’s voice said, ‘May I speak with Mannix?’

‘He’s out at the moment. He’s at the swimming pool. This is Stella. Is that Hebe … er … Mannix’s mum?’

‘This is she. Please inform my son that I called. I trust you can do that?’

Then she hung up. Dumbfounded, I stood staring at the handset. I didn’t want to let myself cry, but there was no one
in the apartment to see, so I gave in. However, when Gilda arrived, I was still sobbing.

‘Sweetie, what’s wrong?’ She was full of concern.

‘Nothing, it’s nothing.’ I wiped my face. ‘It’s just Mannix’s mum. She rang a little while ago and she talked to me like I was a … sneaky servant, a dishonest lowlife, and it scares me.’

‘But she lives in France, right?’ Gilda said. ‘You never have to see her.’

‘But what if Mannix thinks the same way? Like subconsciously?’

Gilda rolled her eyes.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand. You just think we’re all Irish, that we’re all the same, but Mannix and I come from different worlds. We don’t have much in common.’

‘Looks to me like you’ve got plenty in common.’

‘You mean … the sex?’ My red face went even redder. Okay, admittedly, that was lovely. ‘But what if that’s all we have? We’ll only get so far on that. Gilda, could we please not do our run today? I’m too upset. My legs feel like jelly.’

Sympathetically, she shook her head. ‘My job is to make you run. Your job depends on you doing it.’

I put on my running gear, and out in the street the wind hit my face like slaps from a cruel hand. As I ran, I cried, and the tears froze on my cheeks, and I thought: I’m not able for this life. I’m not tough enough. Only hard people survive in this city, people with abnormal self-belief and drive and inner strength.

‘Happy birthday,’ Mannix whispered in my ear.

I opened my eyes, blinking to wake myself up.

‘Champagne?’ I said. ‘In bed? For breakfast?’

‘It’s a special day.’

I sat up and sipped from the glass.

‘Are you ready for your gift?’ Mannix produced a miniature black carrier bag, which looked sheeny and expensive.

‘Is it a puppy?’ I asked.

He laughed.

‘Will I open it?’ I undid the bag’s ribbons and found a small black box within. That too had ribbons and I undid them slowly. Inside the box was a black velvet pouch and I emptied its contents into the palm of my hand. Out tumbled a pair of silver earrings, set with stones that glowed with a clear, intense fire.

‘Are they … diamonds?’ I was awestruck. ‘Oh my God, they are!’

I owned no proper jewellery. My engagement ring from Ryan had cost about a tenner.

‘This is awkward but, just so you know,’ Mannix said, ‘I paid for them, you know …’ Out of a different bank account, not from our joint account.

‘Is this how you thought your life would be at forty?’ Mannix asked.

I could hardly speak. I was living in New York, with this beautiful man, and in four days’ time I started my first book tour of the USA. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was.

This was the moment to tell Mannix that I loved him. The words rushed into my mouth, but I swallowed them back – they would sound as if they’d been prompted by the gift of expensive jewellery, which was a whole world of wrong.

Gilda’s birthday gift to me was two tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert, because I’d always had a thing for him. To make things extra-great, Gilda gave me a one-day-only free pass on chocolate, ice cream and wine because she said that I’d dance it off. We went together to the gig and I adored every second: I shrieked every time Justin thrust his hips and wept buckets during ‘Cry Me a River’ and danced so much in an over-adrenalized state that my hurty-hurty high heels caused me no pain whatsoever. As we made our way home, me in a state of almost ecstatic happiness, Gilda observed, ‘We need to do this sort of thing more often. You don’t have enough fun in your life. Have you ever been to the ballet? To
Swan Lake
?’

‘No, and to be honest, Gilda, it doesn’t sound like much fun to me.’

‘Oh, but you’re wrong, Stella, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s … transcendent. I’ll get tickets. I think you’d love it.’

‘… Okay.’

And, to my great surprise, I did.

And then it was time to start the book tour …

At
Good Morning Cleveland
, the make-up woman found me a challenge. ‘Your eyebrows, what am I supposed to do with them?’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘They’re just … 
awful
.’

How productive I was! Only 8.30 a.m. and I’d already been up for three hours, flown five hundred miles and had my eyebrows insulted.

‘I can colour them in,’ she said, ‘but you need to not pluck them.’

That was interesting, because one of yesterday’s make-up people in – where had it been? Des Moines? – had told me they were far too bushy. But I didn’t have the energy to go to bat on behalf of my eyebrows.

The feel of the soft make-up pencil on my forehead was lovely. I’d just close my eyes for a moment and …

‘… Stella?’

I jerked awake; I was looking into a young woman’s face. ‘Power nap!’ I said, thickly.

But there was nothing power-y about it – I could feel drool on my chin and I hadn’t a clue where I was.

‘I’m Chickie,’ the woman said. ‘You’re in Cleveland, Ohio, and you need to wake up; you’re on TV in seven minutes.’

‘How long was I out?’

‘Thirty seconds,’ Mannix said.

‘You’re Mannix,’ Chickie said. ‘And you’re going to need some base.’

‘Excuse me?’ Mannix said.

‘We need you on the show with Stella. We need to focus on, like, do you feel emasculated working for her?’

‘
With
me,’ I said, for what felt like the millionth time. ‘He works
with
me.’

This kept happening everywhere we went on this book tour. The media were obsessed with Mannix, and their questions always went one of two ways: how could I live with myself, having entirely emasculated a man? Or how did it feel, being a traitor to feminism by ceding management of my career to my fiendishly clever, controlling partner?

‘We need to talk to him,’ Chickie persisted.

‘No,’ Mannix said.

‘See!’ I said. ‘Not emasculated at all.’

But Chickie had her orders. ‘We need him in this slot.’

‘You don’t
need
my ugly mug on TV,’ Mannix said.

‘… You’re cute.’ Chickie seemed confused. ‘Like, for an old guy. I mean, old
er
guy. Hey, I didn’t mean … I need –’

‘Stella is the star. You need her.’

‘But –’

‘I
need
to not go on your show.’

Chickie glared at him for the longest time, then stomped away, speaking rapidly into her headset.

‘I need people to stop saying they “need” stuff.’ Mannix watched her disappear. Regretfully, he said to me, ‘Sorry, baby.’

It was okay. I guessed we’d got away with it.

But we hadn’t. As a punishment, the host didn’t give details of my mid-morning book-signing, so no one came.
But maybe no one would have come anyway. I was quickly learning that the whole book-signing business was impossible to predict. I’d assumed that it would be difficult to scare up a crowd in the bigger cities because they had so much more choice and that people would be more likely to come out in droves in the backwaters, but it didn’t always work that way.

Anyway, whatever the reason, Cleveland didn’t love me and I was too tired to care. It was nice to not have to talk to dozens of people, to not have to say the same thing again and again. Mind you, it was hard sitting upright, a smile fixed to my face. There was a very real danger that I was going to nod off and crash headlong onto the table.

For eleven days now, I’d been on the road promoting
One Blink at a Time
. There hadn’t been one day off. If you drew the route of the tour on a map of the USA and saw how often I was doubling back on myself, you’d laugh.

But I kept reminding myself of what Gilda had told me: I was lucky.
I’m lucky
, I told myself.
I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’m lucky.
I was so tired I could barely dress myself, but I was living the dream.

In fact, if it hadn’t been for the wardrobe plan Gilda had done for me, I really
wouldn’t
have been able to dress myself. However, it worked like clockwork.

Although you can’t factor in the entirely unexpected …

Later that same day, in Cleveland, Ohio, at a charity lunch, a drunken eejit slopped half a glass of red wine onto my light blue suede stilettos, the shoes that were in shot in nearly every TV appearance I did.

All credit to me, I managed to not bite him. Baring my teeth in a rictus smile, I poured white wine on the shoes, then doused them with salt and kept on smiling even though nothing lifted the stains. Smiling, smiling, smiling.
All fine, yes, thank you, only shoes, hahaha, no, no need for the dry-cleaning bill, anyway you can’t dry-clean shoes, you drunken old cretin, if you would just leave me alone now, please stop apologizing, please stop making me make you feel okay about it, I must go now, wonderful time, yes, thank you, yes, at least I have feet, true enough for you, but now I must go to a private place and scream.

Back in the hotel room, Mannix said cautiously, ‘You
do
have other shoes.’ No fool, he knew this was the wrong sort of thing to say to a woman.

‘I haven’t!’ Tearily, I held up a pair of black boots. ‘Can I wear these with skirts? No. Or these?’ I held up a pair of Uggs, then a pair of trainers. ‘No. No.’

‘What about these?’ Mannix produced some blingy sky-high platforms.

‘They’re for evening, for gala dinner events. These shoes …’ I held up the ruined pair. ‘They were perfect for daytime, for bare legs, for wearing with skirts. They were pretty, they were glamorous, they were even comfortable! And now they’re ruined. I know I’m overreacting but they were the
very linchpin
of this book tour!’

‘The very linchpin?’ Mannix repeated and looked at me.

‘The very linchpin and don’t make me laugh.’

He could always defuse a situation. For a few blissful moments, before we had to start work again, we lay side by side on the bed.

‘Can’t we get another pair?’ he asked.

‘They’re from Kate Spade. We’re in Hicksville, Ohio. They won’t have Kate Spade here.’

‘I thought Kate Spade was over,’ he said.

‘They’ve had a reboot. And you shouldn’t know about things like that. Be a man.’

He rolled over on top of me and looked into my face. ‘Be a man?’

I stared at him for a moment. The mood between us changed and thickened.

There wasn’t time. But I didn’t care. ‘Be quick,’ I said, tearing off my knickers.

He
was
quick. Just about. His moans were still dying off when the phone jangled.

‘Jesus,’ Mannix groaned.

It was the front desk, telling me that a journalist was waiting in the lobby. ‘Thanks,’ I gasped. ‘I’ll be right down.’

‘Stay a minute.’ Mannix tried holding onto my hips.

‘I can’t.’ I wrenched myself free of him. ‘While I’m out, will you see if you can do something about my shoes?’

‘What if I try spilling more red wine on them and pretend it’s a feature? A Jackson Pollock look.’

‘Okay …’ It was worth a try. I pulled on a pair of jeans and boots that were all wrong for Cleveland and all wrong for an interview, but I had no choice.

‘If that doesn’t work we’ll just cancel the rest of the tour,’ Mannix said.

‘Grand. I’ll be back in half an hour.’

Mannix’s Jackson Pollock spatters didn’t work; they just looked like red wine stains, more of them. Then he’d tried cleaning the stains off with make-up wipes, but they gave the shoes alopecia. While I clattered out my blog, Mannix tried to order a replacement pair of shoes from Kate Spade in New York.

‘You can overnight to Cleveland, Ohio? But we’re flying to Tucson at five p.m. today. We leave Tucson at seven a.m. tomorrow. You can’t guarantee they’ll get there by then …? Okay, tomorrow we’ll be in San Diego between nine thirty a.m. and four p.m. But we don’t have an address, we’ll be
moving around. Tomorrow night? Seattle. Great.’ After he’d given all his details, he hung up. ‘Okay, an identical pair of shoes will be waiting for you in Seattle.’

I couldn’t wear jeans and boots tomorrow in San Diego. I’d melt. I’d have to go out and try to find a temporary pair of shoes here in Cleveland but I had three back-to-back interviews to do.

‘I’ll go,’ Mannix said.

He returned with a pair of light blue shoes: they were patent not suede; they were round-toed, not pointy-toed; the heels were clumpy rather than curved and skinny. They looked plastic and cheap and horrible.

‘Nearly identical?’ Mannix sounded pleased with himself.

Rage – terrible, awful rage – rose up in me. Fucking
men.
They were so
stupid
. They hadn’t a fucking
clue.

Something somewhere told me that I was being irrational, so I swallowed down the fury and reminded myself that these crappy shoes were only for one day.

(As it happened, that wasn’t true. The Kate Spade shoes didn’t make it to Seattle until we’d left. They were then despatched to San Francisco to meet us there, but once again they arrived too late. They were probably still out there, to this day, in the great landmass of America, trailing in my wake, like a Grateful Dead fan.)

While I was trying to make peace with the cheap-looking shoes, my phone rang. It was Gilda – and I wavered about answering. All through the tour, Gilda had continued my personal training by phone. She knew my schedule, so she factored in a run every day and Pilates every other day.

‘Hey, Gilda,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my gear on, my earpiece in and I’m ready to go.’

‘Great!’

I lay on my back on the floor of the hotel room and
breathed a little heavily. ‘Okay, I’m outside in the street now. I’m running. I’m at twelve-minute pace.’

‘Pick it up,’ she said. ‘Ten-minute miles. Keep that pace for fifteen minutes.’

‘Okay.’ I huffed and puffed, while Mannix quietly looked at me and shook his head and smiled.

Gilda spoke encouraging words into my ear and I made myself gasp for breath.

‘Turn back now,’ she said. ‘But do the next mile in eight minutes.’

I panted into the mouthpiece until Gilda said, ‘Slow it down to ten. Now twelve. Stay steady at twelve until you get back to the hotel. How’s your food?’

‘Good,’ I wheezed. ‘I ate the chicken and the green beans at the charity lunch. No bread. No rice. No dessert.’

‘And now you’re flying to Tucson for a charity dinner. Same rules apply: no matter what they put on your plate, no carbs. Ever! Especially no sugar. I’ll call you in the morning at five thirty a.m. Tucson time. Four-mile run before you go to the airport. Do your stretches now. You did good.’

‘Thanks, Gilda.’ I hung up and remained lying on the floor.

‘You know,’ Mannix said. ‘This is crazy. Just tell her you’re too tired to do it.’

‘I can’t. She’d be … disappointed in me. Come on, we have to go to the airport.’

The flight to Tucson was delayed by three hours and Mannix and I made good progress on our his-and-hers ulcers.

‘It’s a charity dinner,’ I said, my face in my hands. ‘All those people have paid for their ticket. They’re expecting me to show up to talk to them.’

Once we’d landed in Tucson and run to catch a taxi, I tried to wriggle into my evening dress and accidentally kicked the
driver in the head. I was still apologizing when we drew up outside the hotel, where a deputation of hysterical committee members was watching out for me. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Sorry for –’

‘Come on. This way.’ They bundled me onto the stage without a chance to catch my breath.

Immediately I knew it was a tough crowd. Sometimes the energy is with you and sometimes it isn’t. I’d kept these people waiting and they were wounded, so as soon as I finished telling my story, the hostile questioning started.

‘My husband got Guillain-Barré Syndrome …’

I nodded sympathetically.

‘… and he died.’

‘Oh dear,’ I murmured. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘He was a good person, probably better than you. How come he died and you didn’t?’

‘… Well, I survived because I was given a tracheotomy and put on a respirator in time.’

‘He got a tracheotomy too. Did he get the wrong kind?’

‘Well, er …’

‘Why does God let people die? What’s up with God’s plan?’

She stared at me, waiting for an answer. I was even less of an expert on God’s plan than I was on effective tracheotomies.

‘… God’s ways are mysterious,’ I eventually managed. ‘Any other questions?’

A Tucson matron with astonishing hair took the roving mic and cleared her throat. ‘Do you think they’ll make a movie of your book? And if so, who would you like to play you?’

‘Kathy Bates,’ I said.

A confused murmuring broke out at this. ‘Kathy Bates?’
I heard them turn to each other and say. ‘But she’s a brunette.’

I’d forgotten the Americans didn’t do self-deprecation.

‘I mean Charlize Theron,’ I said quickly. ‘Or Cameron Diaz.’ I was racking my brain for blonde movie stars. ‘I see a lady over there has her hand up. What’s your question, please?’

‘How do I get to be famous?’

‘You could murder someone,’ I heard myself say.

A shocked
Oooooh
moved through the room. Aghast, I said, ‘I’m very sorry! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just the tiredness –’
And
I’d been unsympathetic to the woman whose husband had died. This exhausting process had sapped me of my compassion. ‘I’ve been on the road for eleven days and –’

The mic was grabbed from me by one of the committee ladies. ‘Thank you, Stella Sweeney.’ She paused to allow some desultory applause and a couple of boos. ‘Stella will be signing her book in the auditorium.’

The line was a short one. Nevertheless, I was on nutter alert. The nutters always hung around until the end. The nutters didn’t queue up with the rest of the people and let themselves get conveyor-belted along.

Tonight, as a special treat, there was a nutter-off with two alpha-nutters squaring up to each other. One, a
perky lady nutter; the other, a bloke, an anger-management-problem nutter.

‘You first,’ Perky Lady Nutter said, sweeping her hand in a gracious inviting manner to the man.