CHAPTER 13
Stephanie
When Vince hazards on the bedroom door, I am awake with my eyes closed. We go through seasons of sleeping together and sleeping apart. A lot of it is allergy related. In the spring, when the pollen count is higher, Vince tends to snore and it keeps me awake and—oh, I don’t care enough to lie anymore. We only sleep in the same bed when we’re filming. It’s easier to slip into the skin of wedded bliss when we’re dueling over the same linen top sheet. The closer you can get to believing your own lies, the more palatable they become for mass consumption. Brett doesn’t even know it, but she taught me this.
Sometimes I wonder if Vince and I would still be having sex if I hadn’t made another cent. I think about all the chaste space my money has created in our marriage. A bi-level home that allows us to spend the better part of the day on unobstructed planes, if we prefer. (Turns out, we prefer.) A living room large enough for two couches, one for each of us should we ever agree on a show to watch. A master bedroom that fits a California king in which we can sleep diagonally, upside down, and inside out without ever so much as grazing a limb. We never touch anymore because we never have to touch anymore. In the first apartment, we were on top of each other. We spooned on the single couch out of necessity and if we got into a fight right before bed, Vince didn’t have the option to hermetically seal himself into the guest bedroom. We didn’t have a guest bedroom. So I wonder, if my success had plateaued, if we had never been able to upgrade to our current conditions, would this coerced contact have saved us? Or was it only ever a palliative treatment for something that was ailing from the start?
“How was it?” I ask him without opening my eyes.
“Oh.” He stumbles, probably over my suitcase, which is packed for the next book tour and the dinner in L.A. “You’re awake.”
I open my eyes to find Vince shirtless, his lower belly more pronounced than usual after too much free champagne, drunkenly grappling with the buckle on his belt. Not exactly a view to get the motor running. Vince has never tried very hard to have a great body, and there is something so arrogant about all those times he’s blown off the trainer he begged me to hire, as though he has decided someone with his face doesn’t need a six-pack too.
He spreads onto the bed in his boxers, the stench of him spilling over onto my side, despite what feels like a full Manhattan avenue between us. If he were an air freshener, what would we call him? Partially Metabolized Champagne Breeze. Radiant Herpes. “It was fun, babe,” he says. “You should have come.”
I told Brett and Lisa that I left for my book tour today, but I actually leave tomorrow. I’m stopping in three cities, making my way across the country to L.A., the trip culminating in the all-important dinner with the Female Director. I always make my own travel reservations (production won’t fly us business—the show features women so successful they should already fly business), so no one has any idea that I was actually in New York on the night of Brett’s surprise engagement party.
When I received Arch’s Evite with the bossy, bubble-lettered Shhhhhhh!, I RSVP’d Will attend! for two. But as the date approached, a special cocktail of venom seemed to pool in my glands. I could not bear the thought of raising a glass of champagne to the happy couple, one half of which is a nasty cold-blooded animal, the same temperature of whatever her environment happens to be that day.
I mash a fist into my pillow, carving out a view of Vince’s profile in the bright city dark. “Did everyone think it was weird that you were there without me? I just thought one of us should represent. I don’t want them to think I’m, you know, holding a grudge.”
Vince shuts his eyes, and not because he’s tired. “No, babe. No one thinks that. They all believe you made up.”
This is the perfect opening to address something that has been eating away at me for months but that I haven’t had the pluck to ask. Does Vince know? “Do you believe we made up?” I ask, my voice going hoarse. It’s a chickenshit way around it, but it’s better than the willful ignorance I’ve been affecting since Brett moved out.
Vince takes his time, choosing his words wisely. “I don’t think you should have to make up with her if you don’t want to,” he says, which is an answer not nearly as ambiguous as it sounds. It’s the closest we have gotten to the truth in a long while. My breath feels like acid in my nostrils and there are tears in my eyes, but I hide it from my voice.
“I appreciate that. I’m relieved no one said anything. I thought for sure Lisa might.”
“Lisa didn’t say anything. Brett didn’t say anything. Jesse didn’t say anything. You’re good. I promise.”
I hurl myself upright, my weepiness expunged, my heart like a jumping fish in my throat. “Jesse was there?”
Vince flings a forearm over his eyes with a groan, regretting the admission instantly. He knows Jesse only makes an appearance on set if the scene is of paramount importance. Jesse will be meeting up with me in L.A.—a first for me, and something I was immensely proud of. Now an engagement party—to celebrate the most banal of life achievements—is on par with a dinner with an Oscar-Nominated Female Director? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Yvette Greenberg was right. The show has lost its way.
“She stopped by for, like, five minutes,” Vince says, trying to make it sound as if it’s not as big a deal as it is.
“Did she say anything about doing a spinoff with Brett for her wedding?”
“Oh my God, babe.” Vince flops onto his side, punishing me with his back. “She was there, like, two seconds. I don’t know. Maybe. But I doubt it. That wedding’s never going to happen.”
I am still sitting up in bed, chewing on a thumb, but my panic tapers ever so slightly. “You think so?”
Vince answers with a short, confident laugh. “It’s all for a storyline. You know that.”
I remove my thumb from my mouth before I ruin my L.A. manicure, suddenly flush with appreciation for Vince, that he looks at Brett and sees what I see: an overhyped, overfed grandstander who’s cozened women’s empowerment into a brand for money and fame. Appreciation and something more: determination to make this charade less of a charade, to embark on the next venture designed to maintain my relevancy. I curl into my husband’s pale, hairless back, slinging an arm over his narrow hip. “Well. Thanks for representing us tonight. I just worried what it looked like to back out at the last minute. But I couldn’t bring myself to go either.”
“It’s fine,” Vince says, voice as taut as his body when he feels my roving hand. It takes some effort to weasel it between his thighs.
“Jesus,” he gasps, “your hands are cold.”
Seven years ago, even three years ago, Vince’s rejection would have flattened me. But I have developed a tolerance for my husband’s apathy. I rise on all fours, grit overpowering dignity, and stake a hand on either side of Vince’s face, a knee on either side of his hips. He does nothing for a few agonizing moments, before releasing his knees and straightening out to face me on his back.
“You have to get up early,” he tries.
I kiss him. His breath is putrid.
I worm a hand beneath the elastic band of his boxer shorts and capture him in my thumb and index finger. His penis is baby soft and pliable, spineless in its faithful state. Is it just in my mind or has he gotten smaller? Like the opposite of Pinocchio—every time he lies, it shrinks.
Vince wraps his fingers around my wrist, removing my hand from his boxers and setting it on the mattress with a consolatory pat. For a few long moments, that is that. I’m about to retreat to my side of the bed when Vince changes his mind, flipping me onto my back, then waiting, unhelping, while I wiggle out of my pajama bottoms. He does lean down to kiss me—there’s that—but it’s a wet, cold kiss, too many front teeth, and we abandon pretense to focus on getting his dick inside of me, which hasn’t happened since I went off birth control three months ago.
Vince is humping the seam of my inner thigh, wheezing, working dutifully for an ember. This outlives my capacity for dirty talk, and there are only so many times one can say, I want you to fuck me, before its rehearsed timbre incurs the opposite of its intended effect.
Vince slams onto his back with a sharp cry of frustration. He pounds his temple, a caveman’s show of self-flagellation. His angry breathing moderates into soothing neighs. “It’s not you,” he assures me. “I just drank too much tonight.” He drags me onto his pale, wimpy chest, nuzzling the top of my head and rubbing my back, like I’m the one who should be upset, even though there is nothing wrong with me. I should be the one consoling him Yes, dear, it’s perfectly normal that I have cashmere sweaters harder than your dick. “You’re so beautiful,” he continues, moronically. “I want you so much.”
“Thank you, babe,” I say. I prop my chin in my hand, my elbow sharp above my husband’s fickle heart. “You tell all the girls that when it doesn’t work?”
Vince doesn’t even call me crazy as I roll onto my side, my turn to punish him with my back. My intelligence isn’t worth insulting anymore, apparently. I can say anything, I realize. I can really be crazy now.
“No reservation, you said?” The hostess consults her seating plan. She’s the only other black person in the lobby besides me.
“Right,” I tell her for the second time. “But I just want to eat at the bar.”
“We take reservations for the bar.”
“There’s nowhere that’s first come, first serve?”
The hostess looks up at me. She is wearing no makeup except for goth lipstick, no jewelry except for a jade bangle. “You can see if there’s anything open.”
I tip my head at her. “So the bar is first come, first serve?”
“Only if it doesn’t have a place setting. If it has a place setting it’s being held for a reservation.”
“Eleven Madison isn’t even as tough as this.” I smile easily, letting her know I’m no stranger to the vagaries of posh restaurants.
The hostess is unbelievably annoyed. “Huh?”
“It’s in New York,” I say, pathetically.
The little bitch shrugs. As if New York is over and the dining room at this four-star boutique hotel in Phoenix is where it’s at. She looks like someone who would watch the show, but she certainly doesn’t recognize me. I find myself wishing I told the camera crew to follow me to dinner (they went back to their hotel—a three-star chain—after my reading), so this haughty newborn would realize she should be clamoring to make nice with me. Not that I have any right to complain. I avoided the other two black kids in my class studiously. On my own, I was a refreshing breeze. Two would have been a twister, everyone in my town hiding in the basement.
I remember my Chanel bag as I follow the hostess’s unhelpful directions to the bar, adjusting it on the chain so that it rests flush against my pelvic bone. When in doubt, lead with Chanel.
The bar isn’t immediately visible at the foot of the stairs, and I walk around a second dining room space like an asshole, wondering if Brett would have gotten an escort, and if it would have been for her star or for her skin. When I finally locate the bar, it’s empty and unset.
“This okay?” I ask the bartender, hoisting myself onto a stool.
“You drinking or eating?”
“Eating.” I rethink my answer. “Both.”
He smiles in a way that makes me feel stupid for asking. His hair is slicked back and his beard is unkempt. His bow tie is baby shower pink. “Then this is okay.”
I’m set up with a placemat and menu and silverware, then ignored for several minutes until a red-faced man in a rumpled suit takes the stool two empty seats over from mine. He is immediately given the bartender’s full attention; to his cocktail order I manage to tack on a request for a glass of white wine. What kind? the bartender asks, and I shrug, because I have no idea, only that I am desperate to feel the way I felt that day in Jen’s apartment, like nothing could ever go wrong again. Surprise me, I tell him, kittenish. But, like, he says, all business, dry, fruity, what? I weigh my options before telling him fruity. Who wants to drink something dry?
The bartender tends to our drinks in the order that they are placed, though I know from Vince’s bartending days that you are almost always supposed to pour a glass of wine or beer before assembling a more complicated cocktail. The man gets his beverage and the bartender retreats to the other end of the bar. I’m forced to raise my hand to remind him I’m still waiting. He waves back with a patient smile that says, Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you. After drying a rack of wineglasses steaming from the dishwasher, he opens a bottle of fruity white for me. He fills a glass to the top and empties the bottle into a mini wine carafe that he presents to me on the side with a Don’t tell anyone wink.
“Sorry about that. I’m the only one back here tonight and we were out of clean glasses.” He flings a bar towel over his shoulder and folds his arms across his chest. His shirt cuffs are rolled to his elbows; his thick, veiny forearms say farmhand, his watch says Trust Fund Baby who dropped out of SMU sophomore year to start his own T-shirt line. He has warm, green-flecked eyes. People whose licenses list their eye color as hazel are usually reaching—they’re brown, just say brown—but in his case, I’d allow it. What are the genes needed to produce a child with eyes like that? I uncross my legs, thinking just how far Phoenix is from New York, how unlikely it is that this not-brown-eyed gentleman watches Saluté.
“What can I get you to eat, miss?” he asks.
Just as I’m no stranger to the vagaries of posh restaurants, I’m also no stranger to poor service with a smile, that ensuing whiplash of indignation and clemency. The moment you are sure this is it is always the moment you’re brought a free glass of wine, the moment that the handsome bartender offers his heartfelt apologies, miss. So you adjust your blinkers and you say, “The beet salad to start and the salmon.”
“Excellent,” the bartender says, forgetting to collect my menu before he walks away.
I find my phone and open my email. The glass is hot from the dishwasher and the wine tastes like a wedding bouquet, nothing like the crisp elixir poured for me in Jen’s apartment a few weeks ago. No matter, tomorrow I will be in L.A., where I’m all set for dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director at 8pm at Bestia. Exciting! my motion picture agent’s assistant added.
Next is an email from Gwen, my editor, Re: Stephanie Simmons’s AQ. Every writer fills out an Author Questionnaire pre-publication. It’s distributed to different departments to help develop publicity and marketing plans. Steph, I need you to pull the AQ on Stephanie Simmons’s memoir first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks. I have to read this several times before I remember that Gwen’s assistant is also named Stephanie, and that she must have sent this to me in error. Still, what does she want with my AQ?
I hear “Beet salad?” and half raise my hand to claim it, but the plate is set in front of the man to my right. I turn my attention back to my email. Vince has forwarded me the details of my flight to Marrakesh. 5:47 P.M. out of JFK, three days from now. We’ve arranged for him to meet me in the airport with a suitcase packed for Morocco; this way I didn’t have to pack for my book events, the Female Director dinner, and Brett’s trip. I wince. It’s going to be a brutal day of travel. But backing out of Morocco is not an option, not like backing out of Brett’s engagement party was, especially since I’ve recently come to the conclusion that now is the opportune time to extricate myself from the show. You may think such a shift in mind-set would give me carte blanche to bail on all the events I would never attend if the cameras weren’t there, but if anything, I’m under even greater obligation. I need to make it clear that I was an integral part of this season, that nobody phased me out. I want to quit while I’m on top, as they say. The top is like Mars, hostile to human life.
The gentleman to my right is now cutting into a small steak, grilled a diligent brown, just as he ordered it. That’s what the bartender called him, indicating to a busser where to place the plate, “The filet is for the gentleman.”
I move on to the mini carafe of wine. Also the temperature of soup, but nonetheless helping to fuel the bold fantasy I’ve nurtured since before my memoir came out; The Site of an Evacuation is a number one New York Times bestseller (done), I am both a massive commercial success and a critics’ darling (done), and a very famous and timely director or actress is committed to adapting my memoir for screen (almost done). I’m of course asked to return to the show, even though I will be a crusty thirty-five next season, but I demur, because I’ve got a better idea. Lauren Conrad crowing at Heidi—You know what you did!—may be the highest-rated reality TV episode of all time, but did you also know that Keeping Up with the Kardashians peaked in popularity when the sisters had babies? A motherhood storyline may sound heretical, but remember, our audience loves seeing unconventional women caving under the pressure to do the conventional thing.
With this in mind, I pitch a spinoff where I get pregnant and move to Los Angeles to oversee the film project. I’ll live in a house with a yard and have a meltdown trying to put together a crib. A storyline about the comic discordance between having a baby and having zero maternal instincts is a classic knee-slapper. Is this right? I can imagine myself saying in the trailer, holding up my baby with her diaper on inside out and backward. Stephanie Ever After, Jesse would probably want to call it, and I would tell her, laughing, absolutely not.
“Excuse me, you had the salmon?” A lonely filet is placed before me, but before the server can set down the accompanying plate of sautéed spinach, I stop him.
“I never got my appetizer.”
The server extends an unsympathetic “Oh.”
“Excuse me.” I wave down the bartender, and this time he doesn’t dare give me a cute smile back. “I never got my appetizer.”
“Oh no. Really?”
“Really.”
The bartender flags down a passing waiter. “Nathan,” he says. “This young lady had ordered a beet salad. Can you go back in the kitchen and check on that for her?”
Everyone seems appeased by this, and the server attempts to set the side plate of spinach down again. “I would like my appetizer first,” I say, firmly, “then I would like my fish.”
The gentleman to my right sets his steak knife down. A few people in the dining area break off their conversation, eavesdropping, but I have no problem standing up for myself when it’s clear I’ve been wronged. It’s the nebulous, middle-of-the-road disrespect where I can’t find my footing.
“Of course. Of course,” the bartender says, removing the plate before me and dumping it into the trash so I can be sure they won’t try to reheat and reserve. “We are so sorry about this.” He disappears under the bar for a moment and reappears with the bottle of fruity wine, topping me off.
“And can I get a glass of ice?” I ask, fearlessly. “The glass was a little warm.”
The bartender does me one better and switches out my wineglass. “Again,” he says, “so sorry about this.”
When the bill arrives, all I have been charged for is a single glass of wine. I leave a fifty-dollar tip and something else, holding tight to the merchant’s copy as I place my dinner napkin on the bar and reach down for my purse, hanging on a hook by my knee. It’s only when the gold chain strap is over my shoulder and I’m on my feet that I slip the signed receipt, upside down, into the check holder. I hurry out of the restaurant like I’ve just hidden a bomb in a trashcan, like I will be blown to smithereens if the bartender makes the discovery before I board the elevator to my room.
I wake to a noise in the dark, like the sound of someone shaking open a new garbage bag, the way the plastic gasps for air. I am very still, waiting to find out if my broken brain has produced this track or if a maid is simply emptying the hallway trashcan. The last time I was in Phoenix, five months ago on my first book tour, a man chased me down after I passed through security.
“Ma’am? Ma’am?”
I refused to respond to “ma’am,” and so he had to say it twice.
“I think this fell out of your bag,” he told me, giving the pill bottle three shakes, the world’s glummest tambourine. I about fell over thanking him, explaining that I need to be better about latching my purse, my husband is always on my case about latching my purse. And God, wouldn’t my husband die to hear me tell a stranger that he is right?
The man laughed, his face shiny, like his smile had stretched his skin to its tearing point, the way men’s faces get when you let them believe that they are of any use to you anymore. “I know my wife can’t step foot on an airplane without her Xanax.” He gave me a neighborly wave good-bye. “Safe flight.”
“Thank you,” I said, watching him go the other way, thinking how nice it was to be mistaken for a silly woman with a silly fear of flying.
The next stop on the first book tour, five months ago, was Nashville, and there I decided I would again “forget” to latch my purse before sending it through the CT scanner, and I did the same thing in Milwaukee and Chicago too. I could have just tossed the prescription for Cymbalta into the trash, but that felt too intentional. I’d been using a pill cutter for the last few weeks anyway, under doctor’s supervision, and, well, my book tours are the ten days out of my year when I’d really rather not feel so . . . dampened.
It took me ten years to admit to a doctor that occasionally, I hear things. Not voices, well, I suppose it is a voice, but it isn’t speech I hear. It is a word, sometimes a first name, sometimes a familiar sound—shaking open a garbage bag, or revving the engine of a lawn mower.
Before I told my doctor about the voice, my blood pressure was one-forty over ninety. After my doctor told me that hearing things is not synonymous with schizophrenia or manic depression, that some 13 percent of adults will hear voices at some point in their lives, and that the cause can be anything from bereavement to stress, I clocked in at one hundred over eighty. I was predisposed to depression, that much was likely true, but my symptoms were dull and textbook, easily managed through sixty milligrams of Cymbalta daily. I have weaned myself off the drug once before, when the second book in my fiction series sold one million copies and the show was in its newlywed phase with fans, long enough to remember that oh, I do like sex as enthusiastically as I appear to in my books.
The noise does not repeat itself, and I remind myself of what my doctor told me, that success is a stressor too. Although it’s a stressor I might enjoy, it’s a spotlight nonetheless, shining on things I thought I’d jettisoned on the therapist’s couch when—surprise!—all I did was stuff them into a coat closet before the company arrives. The reassurance fails to soothe, and I turn over in bed and locate my phone, charging on the nightstand. It’s 4:40 A.M., and Gwen has responded to my email. I read the exchange in its entirety, twice.
Me: Gwen! I think you meant to send this to your assistant, Steph! Not me, Steph. But why do you need my AQ? All okay?
Gwen: So sorry, honey! Yes, meant to send this to Stephanie my assistant. How is wherever you are?
I compose a response.
Phoenix, but Los Angeles in a few hours!! For the Female Director dinner. Will let you know how it goes. Then I go from there to JFK to Heathrow to Marrakesh for the trip. Crazy few days! It’s so confusing that I have the same name as your assistant! Just curious, though, why do you need my author questionnaire for the memoir? You know me—I worry! Everything okay?
I hit send and swallow, dislodging the sweet film of that bad wine. I hear the noise again and I realize it is not the maid, emptying the trash in the hallway, and that it is not in my head, a result of going cold turkey on my medication somewhere over the Rocky Mountains five months ago.
“What time is it?” the bartender groans, kicking off more of the covers. His rough skin scraping the cheap sateen sheets—that was what woke me up.
“Almost five.”
“Jesus. Go back to bed.” The bartender raises his forearm and shields his eyes against nothing. The room is practically invisible, though my eyes have adjusted enough that I can make out his empty wrist. Last night, after he read the note I left him on my check (Room 19. Only here tonight.), he had shown up and removed his nice watch, leaving it on the nightstand before we got into bed, something Vince used to do when we used to have sex.
Boston, 2014, was the first time, though I thought about how easy I could get away with it at a hotel bar in Atlanta, considered it with a yoga instructor in L.A., and nearly called the number my black car driver slipped me after he picked me up from the airport in Tulsa. Looking back, I realize that after traveling all over the country for the second book tour, Boston felt familiar, and therefore like the last in my series of attempts to prove that I was too good to fit in anyway. I finally felt prepared for this particular challenge: The blooms hadn’t fallen off the show yet and the book was selling so well I had just gone on an antique Persian rug spending spree with money to spare for an Alhambra earring and necklace set from Van Cleef. I was thirty but I looked twenty-six. I was on TV. If I failed, there were plenty of affirmatives to cushion the blow to my self-esteem.
The men in Boston did not feel like the hipster men of New York—rather, they felt like the WASPy guys who told me I was hot in high school and college but were too afraid to actually sleep with me. What were they afraid of? That they might like it? That they might like me? That they might have to take me home and explain me to their mothers? I could relate to that, at least—not knowing how to explain a black partner to a white mother. I dated a few black guys in college, and while I met some of their families, I never introduced them to mine. I had grown up reassuring my adoptive mother that although I was one of a handful of black members of our community, I didn’t feel like an outlier. I dressed like the popular girls and I played the sports the popular girls played and I spoke like the popular girls and I ultimately became a popular girl to prove to her that I felt welcomed and included, to soothe her lingering concerns over my adoption. People warned her that despite the privilege she could afford me, she could inadvertently make my life worse by raising me in a place where I would always feel out of place. On some level, I worried that if I brought home a black guy, she would interpret this to mean that she had failed at creating a home where I felt like I belonged. Like what she had to offer me in terms of connection and love and empathy had never been enough. Like I might have been better off without her—always her greatest fear.
I knew Boston guys, the ones whose families had summer places on the Cape and degrees from small liberal arts colleges. But I had only ever known them through the lens of wingwoman or platonic friend. When I was younger, I had been quick to take my sexuality off the table before they could do it for me. It’s true that I didn’t neuter myself for Vince, but Vince had no pedigree. He may have been better-looking than the guys who rejected me growing up but as a struggling actor from a second-generation Italian family on Long Island, he was always a cut below. His degree didn’t say Colgate or Hamilton, and he didn’t have a long line of blond ex-girlfriends with pearls the size of jawbreakers in their ears. Who was I beating, really? Gia from Holbrook, studying for her nursing degree? It’s not an accomplishment to take men from the Gias, it’s an accomplishment to take them from the Lauren Bunns of the world, who would have slept with a guy like Vince, but married him? Not even blacked out in Vegas, something she did once, with a guy she met at the craps table.
Jamie was the name of the first. Sort of fat. Really tall. He was funny, bearded, and jobless, drinking a Bud Light at the bar at Mistral. Vince hadn’t had sex with me in two months. That is a different thing than saying Vince and I hadn’t had sex in two months. Do you understand that? My husband couldn’t get hard for me but he could for everyone else, and I was still so young. Thirty. A baby. This couldn’t be it for me. Yes, both Vince and I have had sex with other people in our marriage, but I am not a cheater. I am an outsourcer.
Jamie and I ended up back in my hotel because I was staying at the Taj and I wanted him to understand that he knew me too. A guy who occasionally serves Bloody Marys at his parents’ country club probably thinks he doesn’t have much in common with a woman who looks like the sassy sidekick to the hot girl on his favorite TV show, but money catches that trust fall. The sex was sloppy, neither of us finished, and when I woke up in the morning all that was left of Jamie was a few congealed specks of his urine on the toilet seat. But I had succeeded—or so I thought at the time. Because looking back, I’m now able to ask—but at what? Fucking an unambitious slob with decent breeding? He was my prize, and one I only felt worthy of collecting once I had amassed the advantages of fame? What happens when that goes away? And it would go away. That, or turn on me and last forever. I knew this from the start, but only in the most abstract of terms. The way anti-tobacco campaigns that attempt to deter kids from smoking with lung cancer horror stories don’t really work. It’s too far in the future to worry about having to talk through a hole in your neck now. That’s what I thought when I signed on to The Show. Yes, this will end, and maybe even badly, but not for many, many years. I always thought I had more time before someone punched a hole in my neck.
I pay for the half hour of in-flight Internet on the way to L.A., but after the first thirty minutes I still haven’t heard back from Gwen, and still nothing after an hour. I film a few clips of myself on the GoPro camera production gave me to use on the plane.
“On my way to meet the Oscar-Nominated Female Director,” I whisper, so as not to disrupt the other Mint passengers, and the line works like an affirmation. I’m on my way to meet the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. Gwen isn’t avoiding me. It means nothing that she has requested my AQ.
It’s not until I’ve shelled out $7.95 for the fourth time that Gwen gets back to me.
The director dinner!!! You must tell me how it goes!! Don’t worry about the AQ—just wanted to check on something! Did you see your piece in the Times?! That picture—you look like you’re twelve! I think Gwen has hit her yearly exclamation-point quota in a single email to me.
Of course I’ve seen the Times piece. I’ve seen the Times piece and the People piece and the HuffPo piece and the piece on The Cut and in a few months there will be the Vogue piece and an interview with Vanity Fair. There are so many pieces coming out that when I land and listen to the voicemail from a reporter fact-checking a story, I don’t even pay attention to what publication he says he is from. I call him back and when he tells me he’s with The Smoking Gun, I apologize, telling him I didn’t put this interview date into my calendar.
“We didn’t have one,” he says, as I pass under a sign that reads “Yoga Room This Way.” Definitely in L.A. “I was hoping to confirm that your birth date is 10/17/82 and that the date you graduated high school was May 2000.”
I stop walking. “Why?”
“Are those the correct dates?”
“They are correct, yes,” I say, and they are, so why do I immediately regret my answer?
“Thank you,” he says, and hangs up.
I dial Gwen, who is in a meeting. “Can you please tell her it’s urgent, Stephanie?”
“I will,” Stephanie promises, dutifully.
“Stephanie, do you know why The Smoking Gun would be calling me?”
“They called you?”
The alarm in her voice turns my stomach. I am right there with her, but I can’t bear to hear it echoed in my own. I make it sound like it wasn’t a big deal. “They just wanted to confirm my birthday and the year I graduated high school.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I confirmed it.” Silence. “They had their dates right.”
“I’ll let Gwen know they’re calling you now,” Stephanie says.
“Calling me now? What . . . have they been calling you? Does this have something to do with Gwen asking for my AQ?”
“I really don’t know all the details, Stephanie,” Stephanie says, softly. But of course she does. She’s the receptionist at the oncology unit, telling you not to worry while looking at your lab results that say stage four. “I’ll have Gwen call as soon as she’s back at her desk, okay?”
I’m in my tiny corner room at the Sunset Tower Hotel, House Hunters failing to attenuate my anxiety, when my phone seizures on the nightstand. It’s my motion picture agent, not Gwen.
“Hi,” she says, then, “so.”
The Oscar-Nominated Female Director has to head to Chicago unexpectedly. She sends her deepest regrets. It means nothing, my agent assures me, and we will find a time for us to get together sometime soon. The good news is that I still have the reservation at Bestia if I’m up for going, just her and me. Or maybe Jesse and I want to go? Jesse. I glance up at the ceiling. She texted me earlier to let me know she had arrived, and we’d worked out that she is in the room directly above mine. I’ll refrain from doing my step aerobics then, she’d joked. The thought of harpooning her good mood with this news plunges me deeper into the mattress.
I thank my agent for the update and we hang up. I don’t risk asking if the cancellation is in any way connected to my conversation with the reporter from The Smoking Gun. Asking would be akin to flaunting symptoms of a flesh-eating plague, like if anyone were to hear me cough, I’d be brutally exiled from mankind’s last surviving community.
I hold the ceiling in contempt, knowing I need to get up and go upstairs and tell Jesse not to bother breaking out the good Dr. Martens, but upstairs feels far enough away to require a passport. I bargain with my eyelids—five minutes—as the sunset pinkens the smog on the 405.
I wake to a gaveling on the door. My room is dim and cool, perfect sleeping conditions really, and when I eventually creak to my feet, walking feels like a new skill. Jesse is on the other side of the door, looking like the model-dating member of a boy band in a blaze orange beanie, tight black jeans and a black leather jacket, black Converse sneakers and black socks. “Steph!” She laughs, admonishingly. “We’re going to be late.”
“Oh my God, Jesse.” I grope the wall for the light switch and flip it on. The bright burst feels like a million hot needles in my eyes. “I fell asleep. I’m so sorry.”
“Well . . . let’s go! Splash some water on your face and throw on those Jimmy Choos.” She claps her little hands: Chop-chop! “I’ll meet you downstairs.” She starts for the elevator.
“No, Jesse, no. Wait. The dinner is rescheduled.” I cannot bring myself to say canceled, although that’s what it is.
Jesse stops and turns, looking forty-whatever again when she furrows her brow. “To when?”
“I’m not sure. She had to go to Chicago unexpectedly.”
Jesse exhales through her nose, a single hot puff, like a bull. She lolls her head in a slow arc, the physical embodiment of the words “of course.” Of course she canceled on you. Of course this was going to be a waste of my time. You’re Stephanie Simmons, not Brett Courtney. “Were you going to tell me?”
“I just found out.”
“But you were sleeping.”
“I mean, I found out an hour or so ago. I was going to tell you. I don’t remember falling asleep. I guess I’m more jet-lagged than—”
Jesse raises a hand, silencing me. “Is this your way of trying to stretch this storyline into another season?”
It’s not. “It’s not.”
“Because frankly, Steph, the abuse stuff is too depressing to warrant a two-story arc.”
I know. “I know.”
Jesse smashes the elevator button with the heel of her hand.
“We still have the reservation at Bestia if you want to go,” I try. “I actually do have something to talk to you about. Something not depressing.” It hurts to smile.
Jesse tugs off her beanie, spiking her short hair with her fingers. “No, well, I actually have work to do.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” I call out into the hall. The words feel like the bell lap of a race, like emptying the tank; they wind me.
Jesse checks the panel above the elevator, watching its protracted climb. “But you’re not sure.”
“I mean, I’m so tired.” I gesture at my disheveled appearance for proof. Sometimes, I think I’m too quick on my feet. I’ve gotten too good at this game.
Jesse regards me as though I am the last cupcake in the box, left on the counter in the office kitchen overnight. I’m sort of dried out, my buttercream swirl smooshed. But she has a sweet tooth and I’m still a cupcake. “Let me know when you’re sure.”
She takes the stairs.
I pass out in my clothes during a Seinfeld episode and when I wake, Kathie Lee and Hoda are drinking wine and my cell is buzzing. I slide my thumb right to answer. “Gwen,” I croak.
“Did I wake you? I forgot it’s early out there.” There is a raised-eyebrows pause. “Well. Not that early. Want me to call back?”
“Don’t call me back,” I say, struggling to sit up in bed. “I’m freaking out.” My stomach is screaming and I remember I couldn’t stand the thought of dinner last night.
“Don’t freak out. This happens all the time with nonfiction.”
“The Smoking Gun calls up authors to validate their birthdays and the year they graduated high school?”
“Normally they go through the publisher. That’s why I was pulling your AQ. I wanted to be the one to give them those answers so that they wouldn’t call you and make you worry.”
“But what are they even planning to do with that information?”
“You know, cross-reference to make sure it all checks out.”
I need water as a matter of life or death. I clomp a hand around the nightstand, finding the Dasani I took from the airplane yesterday. “What if it doesn’t check out?”
“You wrote a memoir, Steph, not an autobiography. If some of the dates or details are screwy, it’s really not a story, and they’ll let it go. Like I said, this happens all the time with nonfiction. I doubt it will come to a head.”
The Dasani bottle is empty. I throw it across the room in despair. I don’t want anyone to make me feel better. I want my misery shared; I want responsibility shared. “I said in the AQ that the book was fiction, Gwen.”
Gwen is silent so long I pull the phone away from my ear to make sure the call didn’t drop. “I know,” she says, at last.
“You were the one who said it would have so much more impact if we could package it as a true story. And then when I wouldn’t agree to that—because I’d have to be a real fucking Judas to womankind to lie about being raped!—you said”—and here I do my best impression of a dumbass white girl—“well, like, how about we call it creative nonfiction, not a memoir? So that, like, I could explain to people that the abuse never happened but was a metaphor for, like, how the subtle racism I dealt with growing up was as painful as a physical assault?” I drop my voice. “And I am the fucking weakling who agreed to that, to assuage my guilt just a teensy bit knowing neither of us would correct anyone who assumed it was real, and I am the monster who also agreed to make him black because you said a white kid in a black neighborhood could be more easily traced. So, Gwen, don’t you ever leave me hanging for over twenty-four hours like that again. If I go down, I will do everything in my power to make sure you are right there with me.” I hang up, feeling like I shouldn’t have done that and also like I could have chewed her out for another hour and it wouldn’t have been enough.
I labor into the bathroom and stick a glass under the tap, examining myself in the mirror while I gulp down aluminum-flavored water. God, it is so much work to be a human being. Eight glasses of water a day—no wonder I look like shit, life is utterly demanding even on the best of days. I turn away from the mess in the mirror and limp back into the room, timbering into bed. I don’t have to leave for the airport for a few hours; I should probably get up and do something. Take advantage of the fact that I am in L.A. Go on a hike. Meditate on a mountaintop. Eat an egg-white frittata. I think about closing the curtains, but the bed is quicksand. I sink into sleep with the sexy SoCal sunshine aging my face.
Vince is waiting for me in the Air France departures gate at JFK, sitting on my extra-large rose gold Rimowa suitcase in line to check in. When he sees me, he climbs to his feet, guiltily, knowing that I hate it when he treats my nice luggage like a beanbag chair in a dorm room. He threads his fingers through his hair and gives me a busted! smile.
“I tried to check in for you,” he says. “But apparently that’s a security issue.” He laughs and tosses a flap of hair that is not in his eyes.
“No shit it’s a security issue.” I send the carry-on I’ve been living out of for the last few days wheeling his way.
Vince stops it with his foot, his pink pouty lips ajar. He’s been using my Fresh sugar lip scrub while I’ve been away, I see. “Babe?”
“You can’t check in for somebody else, Vince. Not even someone as devastatingly handsome as you.” I balance my foot on my overturned suitcase and rest my Fendi power bag on my knee, pushing aside old plane ticket stubs and Quest Bar wrappers in search of my wallet. The inside of my purse has never looked like this before in my life. I am not one to take my nice things for granted. I have lived the good life since I was six months old and yet I somehow always knew it would be temporary.
Vince crouches at the knees so that his face is below mine and he’s gazing up at me. His hair flops forward, skimming his searching, soulful eyes. How he imagined he would look on the movie posters outside Regal Cinema one day. “Steph. Babe. You okay?”
I have shuffled all of my credit cards and medical ID cards and Sweetgreen rewards cards and I still can’t locate my passport. I tip my head back and tears spill into my ears.
“Babe,” Vince says, gently, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out my passport. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
I forgot my passport and Vince suspected I forgot my passport. He looked in the drawer where I keep it before he left for the airport just in case I had. I feel suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful for him, and suddenly, overwhelmingly certain that it is a bad idea I go to Morocco.
“Come here.” Vince straps his arms around me. “I know you’re disappointed about the dinner with the Female Director. And it’s a lot of travel. You’re tired.”
I hook my chin over his shoulder, remembering the bartender, and the regret is as express and dangerous as a flash flood, waterlogging my heart. Not regret because I love Vince and I broke our vows—I am so far past that kind of regret—but regret for doing something so careless when there are already so many cracks in the façade and I am running out of caulk. “I am tired.” I sigh, tearfully. “But I’m also scared.” Admitting this turns my tears into physical, silent sobs.
“But Gwen said not to worry, right?” Vince rubs circles into my back. “This sort of thing happens all the time with nonfiction?”
“It’s not nonfiction, Vince.”
Vince’s hand dies between my shoulder blades. He pulls away from me. He takes a step back. The look in his eyes—like he has turned over his meal ticket and realized Oh, shit, she has an expiration date. I shouldn’t be surprised, but still it twists. We loved each other once. I think.
“Steph,” Vince groans, bringing his hand to his cheek, his revulsion exemplary in case anyone is eavesdropping. Someone is always eavesdropping on this termite mound of a life I’ve built out of my own saliva and dung. “Jesus. You made that up?”
I look into my husband’s guileless eyes, showing off the acting chops he honed playing cute guy in a bar/elevator/towel in so many CW pilots that never got picked up I’ve lost count. My contempt for him is superhuman. I could pick him up and throw him through the plate glass revolving doors, send him all the way back to the Joey Bag o’ Donuts town where he came from. “Aw,” I say, with pitying scorn, “poor, innocent Vince. Just another victim of his fame-hungry wife’s desperate grab for her sixteenth minute. You must be shocked. Appalled! I’m sure that’s how you’ll try to sell me out to TMZ once the divorce is finalized and you’re searching between the couch cushions for quarters.” I shake my steepled hands at the heavens. “Thank you, Mom, for talking me into signing that prenup before you died.”
Vince checks over his shoulder. Yes, the couple ahead of us in line is listening. In a stage whisper, he says, “Steph, I actually am appalled. You lied about being assaulted? That’s a new low. Even for you.”
I snort. “You knew none of it was true after chapter five.”
The memoir is a memoir for the first seventy pages. I did hear things. I did have what felt like an unquenchable thirst for sleep. I did immediately jump to the worst-case scenario, as most teenagers do, that I was showing early signs of a debilitating case of schizophrenia. I did become convinced that if I could get in touch with my biological mother and understand my mental health history, I could somehow outsmart my genes.
A few months after I heard my first voice, I did pay to run a background check on her. At seventeen, I did gather the courage to drive my baby blue BMW to my biological mother’s residence in a banal middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. As I parked my car across the street from the townhome where my mother lived with my grandmother, on a circle preposterously named Kensington Court, a boy about my age happened to be walking by my window. He looked like he had just come from some sort of sports practice, the smell of grass and dirt and sweat clinging to him, alluringly. I was quick to call out to him.
The boy stopped. He looked at my car, eyebrows cocked in appreciation, before registering me and doubling back in surprise. I don’t think he expected to find someone like me behind the wheel.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said. I read my mother’s name, written in blue pen at the top of the MapQuest webpage printout. I’m prehistoric, remember.
The boy made an indeterminable face. He had pretty, curled eyelashes and a strong jaw; the combination of hard and soft was extremely appealing. There were no boys like him in the magazines my friends and I read, but if there were, I would have cut out his picture and taped it to the wall, over the tear of Leonardo DiCaprio dragging down his lower lip with his thumb. I never got the Leo lust, but as a matter of survival, I performed it.
“I have her address as fifty-four Kensington Court. But this is Kensington Court and there is no fifty-four.”
“This is Kensington Square,” the boy explained. “Kensington Court is over there.” He pointed.
“That’s confusing!” I laughed. He was so cute. “Thanks.” I started to roll up my window, but he took a step forward, motioning for me to lower it again.
“Wait,” he said. “That woman you’re looking for? Sheila Lott?”
I nodded.
“You know she killed herself, right?”
My vision went spotty. I gripped the steering wheel tighter, like the stress balls they give you when you donate blood. “When?” I managed, thunderstruck.
“Few months ago.” He shrugged, like the specifics weren’t important. “Something like that.”
“Do you, um . . . do you know why?”
He actually laughed a little. “Who knows. She was a little, you know . . .” He wound his finger next to his ear. Like Vince would later do whenever I asked him why he took his phone into the bathroom with him to shower. Stop being crazy, he’d laugh.
“Got it,” I said, weakly. “Thank you.” I pressed the gas pedal and the engine blustered. I’d forgotten that I was still in park. I yanked the gear stick into get the fuck out of here and lowered my foot.
And so that perfectly average and helpful boy, who was admittedly a little insensitive in his language around suicide, became A.J., even though he never laid a hand on me. Even though I never saw him again.
Vince snatches my wrist and draws me close. “I can destroy you if I want,” he says, not very loudly, but the cavernous Air France departures terminal amplifies the threat. His eyes dart over my shoulder, bulging, and he releases me at once. I turn to see Brett, Kelly, and a girl with Didi braids rolling some truly disgraceful nylon luggage our way. Lisa and Marc trail a few steps behind, Marc gripping the little handheld camera by the stabilizer like a pitchfork.
“Bonjour!” Brett does a little skip. “Bonjour, amis et—” She stops with a gasp when she gets close enough to see my splotchy face. “Steph. Are you okay?”
I wipe my wet chin on my shoulder. “I’m fine.”
“You look fine,” she laughs, because she can never be fucking serious, not even when it is serious.
“Stay the fuck out of it, Brett,” Vince snarls. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Lisa gasps, positively delighted.
Brett lowers her head and presses her lips together, which is smart. Cowardly, but smart. Kelly steps in front of Layla like a soundproof shield, as though Brett Courtney’s niece has never heard anyone say “fuck” before.
“Well,” Vince says, with demented cheer, “have a magical trip, everyone!” He takes off, my suitcase clattering smoothly behind him, his knuckles white on the handle.
“Nice guy,” Brett quips, but there is a wobble in her voice. I feel queasy when I look at Lisa and find her studying Brett with ruthless curiosity. Does she suspect?
Brett turns to Layla and forces a smile. “We should get in line to check in, Layls.”
I gesture to the sign before us that says “Air France First-Class Check-In.” “We are in line to check in.”
“Layla and I are flying coach,” Brett says, chest puffed. She directs a quick, sanctimonious glance Kelly’s way.
“We’re donating the difference in a first-class ticket to the Imazighen women,” Layla says. The little do-gooding bitch extends her hand. “We’ve met before but I’m not sure if you remember me. I’m Layla. I’m a big fan of your work.”
Oh! How adorably creepy. How scientifically miraculous! I did not know that doctors had succeeded in transplanting the brains of thirty-year-old women into the skulls of twelve-year-old children. I take this Girl Boss Borg’s hand with unease, finding some comfort in the fact that next to her leggy niece, Brett looks like Shrek with nicer hair. Layla is tall and thin, yes, but this—this?—is the “runway model” I’ve been hearing about for the last few months? She has a fresh whitehead on her chin and an old angry one on her cheek and not a stitch of makeup to soften the blow. And for this, she gets to hear she is beautiful. Get me a cane to shake grouchily into the air, because in my day, not even actually being beautiful was enough.
I squeeze Layla’s hand until she grimaces, thinking, You have no idea about pain, girly. You have no idea what I’ve been through to get here You don’t want to know what I’ll do to stay.