Good in Bed

FIVE

Thinking back, there was probably some way I could have felt worse at Berna rd Guberman’s funeral. Like if I’d killed him myself.

The service started at two o’clock. I got there early, but the parking lot was already full, with cars backed down the driveway, spilling onto the highway. I finally parked across the street, dashed across four lanes of traffic and straight into a cluster of Bruce’s friends. They were standing in the vestibule, in what were surely their interview suits, hands in their pockets, talking quietly and looking at their feet. It was a brilliantly sunny fall afternoon – a day to look at leaves, to buy apple cider and build the first fire of the year. Not a day for this.

“Hey, Cannie,” George said softly.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

George shrugged. “He’s inside,” he said.

Bruce was sitting in a little vestibule, holding a bottle of Evian water and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was wearing the same blue suit he’d worn on Yom Kippur, when we’d sat side by side in temple. It was still too tight, the tie still too short, and he was wearing canvas sneakers that he’d decorated with drawings of stars and swirls during some particularly boring lecture. The second I saw him it was as if our recent history fell away – my decision to ask for a break, his decision to describe my body in print. It was as if nothing was left but our connection – and his pain. His mother stood above him with one hand on his shoulder. There were people everywhere. Everyone was crying.

I went over to Bruce, knelt down, and hugged him.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, coolly. Formally. I kissed his cheek, scratchy with what looked like three days’ growth of beard. He didn’t appear to notice. The hug his mother gave me was warmer, her words a marked contrast to his. “Cannie,” she whispered. “I’m glad you’re here.”

I knew it was going to be bad. I knew I’d feel terrible, being there, even after our parking-lot breakup, even though, of course, there was no earthly way I could have known that this would happen.

But it wasn’t just bad. It was agony. Agony when the rabbi, whom I’d seen at Bruce’s house at dinner a few times, talked about how Bernard Leonard Guberman had lived for his wife and his son. About how he’d take Audrey to toy stores, even though they didn’t have grandchildren. “Just to be ready,” he’d say. Which was when I lost it, knowing that I was the one who was supposed to produce those grandchildren, and how much the kids would have loved him, and how lucky I would have been to have that kind of love in my life.

And I sat there on the hard wooden bench in that funeral parlor, eight rows back from Bruce, who was supposed to have been my husband, thinking how all I wanted was to be beside him, and how I’d never felt farther away.

“He really loved you,” Bruce’s Aunt Barbara whispered to me as we stood washing our hands outside the house. There were cars double-parked in the cul-de-sac, cars circling the block, so many cars that they’d had to station a policeman outside the cemetery for the burial service. Bruce’s father had been active in the temple, and had had a thriving practice as a dermatologist. Judging from the throngs, it looked like every Jew or teenager with a skin condition had shown up to pay their respects.

“He was a wonderful man,” I said.

She looked at me curiously. “Was?”

Which was when I realized that she was talking about Bruce, who was still alive.

Barbara wrapped her maroon fingernails around my forearm and dragged me into the immaculate, Downy-scented laundry room.

“I know you and Bruce broke up,” she said. “Was it because he didn’t propose?”

“No,” I said. “I guess… I just felt more and more that maybe we weren’t a good fit.”

It was as if she hadn’t heard.

“Audrey always told me that Bernie said how happy he’d be to have you in the family,” she said. “He always said, ‘If Cannie wants a ring, she’ll have a ring in a minute.’ ”

Oh, God. I felt tears starting to build behind my eyes. Again. I’d wept during the service, when Bruce stood on the bimah and talked about how his father taught him to catch a ball and drive, and I’d cried at the cemetery when Audrey sobbed over the open grave and said, over and over, “It isn’t fair, isn’t fair.”

Aunt Barbara handed me a handkerchief.

“Bruce needs you,” she whispered, and I nodded, knowing that I couldn’t trust my voice. “Go,” she said, pushing me into the kitchen. I wiped my eyes and went.

Bruce was sitting on the porch with his friends around him in a forbidding-looking circle. When I approached, he squinted at me, observing me like a specimen on a slide.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

He shook his head and looked away. There was someone in every chair on the porch, and nobody looked like they were moving. As gracefully as I could, I squatted down on the step behind them, just outside of the circle, and sat there, holding my knees. I was cold, and hungry, but I hadn’t brought a jacket, and there wasn’t anywhere to balance a plate. I listened to them talk about nothing – about sports, and concerts, and their jobs, such as they were. I watched as Bruce’s mother’s friends’ daughters, a trio of interchangeable twentysome-things, made their way onto the porch with paper plates full of petit fours, and gave Bruce their condolences, and their smooth cheeks to kiss. It felt like swallowing sand, watching him go out of his way to smile at them and show how he’d remembered all their names, when he could barely spare me a glance. Sure, I knew when – if – we decided to break up, he’d most likely find somebody else. I just never thought I’d have to suffer through a preview. I sat on my hands feeling wretched.

When Bruce finally stood up, I got up to follow him, but my leg had fallen asleep, and I stumbled and went sprawling, wincing as a splinter dug its way into my palm.

Bruce helped me up. Reluctantly, I thought.

“Do you want to take a walk?” I asked him. He shrugged. We walked. Down the driveway, down the street, where more cars were massing.

“I’m so sorry,” I told him. Bruce said nothing. I reached for his hand, my fingertips brushing the back of his palm. He didn’t reach back. “Look,” I said, feeling desperate, “I know things have been… I know that we…” My voice trailed off. Bruce looked at me coldly.

“You aren’t my girlfriend anymore,” he said. “You were the one who wanted a break, remember? And I’m small,” he practically spat.

“I want to be your friend,” I said.

“I’ve got friends.”

“I noticed,” I told him. “Mannerly bunch.”

He shrugged.

“Look,” I told him. “Could we… could we just…” I put my fist against my lips. Words were failing me. All I had left were sobs. I swallowed hard. Get through this, I told myself. “Whatever happened between us, however you’re feeling about me, I want you to know that your father was a wonderful man. I loved him. He was the best father I ever saw, and I’m sorry he’s gone, and I just feel so terrible about all of this…” Bruce just stared at me. “And if you want to call me…” I finally managed.

“Thanks,” he finally said. He turned to walk toward the house, and after a moment I turned to follow him, like a chastened dog, walking numbly behind him with my head hanging down.

I should have just left, but I didn’t. I stayed on through the evening prayers, when men with tallits over their shoulders crowded Audrey’s living room, bumping their knees on the hard wooden mourning benches, pressing their shoulders against the covered mirrors. I stayed when Bruce and his friends gathered in the white-and-chrome kitchen to pick over deli trays and make small talk. I hung on the edge of the group, so full of sadness I thought I would burst, right there on Audrey’s Spanish-tiled floor. Bruce never looked at me. Not even once.

The sun set. The house slowly emptied. Bruce collected his friends and took us up to his bedroom, where he sat down on his bed. Eric and Neil and Neil’s hugely pregnant wife took the couch. George took the chair at Bruce’s desk. I folded myself up on the floor, outside of the circle, thinking with some small and primitive part of my brain that he’d have to talk to me again, he’d have to let me comfort him, if our years together were to have meant anything.

Bruce unfastened his ponytail, shook out his hair, and tied it back again. “I’ve been a child my whole life,” he announced. Nobody seemed to know quite how to respond to that, so they did what I supposed they normally did, up in Bruce’s room. Eric filled the bong, and George fished a lighter out of his suit jacket pocket, and Neil shoved a towel under the door. Unbelievable, I thought, biting back a burst of hysterical laughter. They cope with death the exact same way they cope with a Saturday night when there’s nothing good on cable.

Eric passed the bong to Neil without even asking me if I wanted it. I didn’t, and he probably knew it. The only thing pot ever did for me was make me want to sleep and eat even more than I already did. Not exactly the kind of drug I needed. Still, it would have been nice if he’d offered.

“Your father was really cool,” George mumbled, and everyone else mumbled his assent, except for Neil’s pregnant wife, who made a big production of heaving herself to her feet and walking out the door. Or maybe it’s always a production to get up and go when you’re that pregnant. Who knows? Neil gazed at his sneakers. Eric and George said again how sorry they were. Then everybody started talking about the playoffs.

Always a child, I thought, looking at Bruce through the haze. For a minute, I caught his eye, and we looked right at each other. He tilted the bong toward me: Want some? I shook my head no, and took a deep breath into the silence.

“Remember when the swimming pool was finished?” I asked.

Bruce gave me a small but encouraging nod.

“Your father was so happy,” I said. I looked at his friends. “You guys should have seen it. Dr. Guberman couldn’t swim…”

“… he never learned how,” Bruce added.

“But he insisted – absolutely insisted – that this house have a swimming pool. ‘My kids aren’t going to sweat for another summer!’ ”

Bruce laughed a little bit.

“So the day the pool was finished, he threw this gigantic party.” Now George was nodding. He’d been there. “He had it catered. He ordered, like, a dozen watermelon baskets…”

“… and a keg,” said Bruce, laughing.

“And he walked around all afternoon in this monogrammed bathrobe that he’d bought just for the occasion, smoking this gigantic cigar, and looking like a king,” I concluded. “There must have been a hundred people here…” My voice trailed off. I was remembering Bruce’s father in the hot tub, a steaming cigar clenched between his teeth, a Dixie cup full of beer sweating on the ledge beside him, and the full moon hanging like a circle of gold in the sky.

And finally I felt that I was on more stable ground. I couldn’t smoke pot, and he wouldn’t let me kiss him, but I could tell stories all night long. “He looked so happy,” I said to Bruce, “because you were happy.”

Bruce started to cry quietly, and when I got up and crossed the room and sat beside him, he didn’t say anything. Not even when I reached for him. When I put my arm around his shoulders he leaned into me, holding me and crying. I closed my eyes so I only heard his friends getting up and filing out the door.

“Ah, Cannie,” he said.

“Shh,” I said, and rocked him, moving him back and forth with my whole body, easing him back onto the bed, beneath a shelf lined with his Little League trophies and perfect attendance plaques from Hebrew school. His friends were gone. We were finally alone. “Sshh now, shh now.” I kissed his wet cheek. He didn’t resist. His lips were cool underneath mine. He wasn’t kissing me back, but he wasn’t pushing me away, either. It was a start.

“What do you want?” he whispered to me.

“I would do whatever you wanted,” I said. “Even… if you wanted that… I’d do it for you. I love you…” I said.

“Don’t say anything,” he whispered, sliding his hands up under my shirt.

“Oh, Bruce,” I breathed, unwilling to believe that this was happening, that he wanted me, too.

“Shh,” he said, shushing me the way I’d quieted him moments before. His hands were fumbling with the many clasps of my bra.

“Lock the door,” I whispered.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I told him, tucking my face into his neck, breathing in the smell of him, sweet smoke and shaving cream and shampoo, glorying in the feel of his arms around me, thinking that this was what I wanted, was what I’d always wanted – the love of a man who was wonderful and sweet and who, best of all, understood me. “You don’t have to ever again.” I tried to make it good for him, to touch him in his favorite places, to move the way that I remembered he liked. It felt wonderful to me, to be with him again, and I thought, holding his shoulders as he thrust himself into me and moaned, that we could start over; that we were starting over. The Moxie article I was willing to write off as water under the bridge, provided he’d swear a solemn oath to never again mention my body in print. And the rest of it, his father’s death, we’d get through as a couple. Together. “I love you so much,” I whispered, kissing the side of his face, holding him close, trying to quiet the small voice inside of me that noticed, even in the throes of passion, that he wasn’t saying anything back.

Afterward, with my head on his shoulder and my fingertips tracing circles on his chest, I thought that nothing had ever felt so right. I thought that maybe I’d been a child, a girl, but now I was ready to step up to the plate, to do the right thing, to be a woman, and to stand beside him, holding him up, starting tonight.

Bruce, evidently, had other thoughts. “You should get going,” he said, removing himself from my arms and walking into the bathroom without looking back at the bed.

This was unexpected. “I can stay,” I called.

Bruce came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’ve got to go to temple with my mom in the morning, and I think it would, um, complicate things if…” His voice trailed off.

“Okay,” I said, remembering my vow, to be an adult, to think of what he needed instead of what I wanted, even though what I wanted was more along the lines of a long, slow, sweet snuggle, followed by both of us drifting gently off to sleep – not this hasty retreat. “No problem,” I said, and pulled my clothes back on. No sooner had I straightened my panties then Bruce was grabbing my elbow and walking me toward the door, hustling me past the kitchen and the living room, where, presumably, his mother was waiting and his friends had regrouped.

“Give me a call,” I said, hearing my voice trembling, “whenever you want.”

He looked away. “I’m going to be kind of busy,” he said.

I took a deep breath, willing the panic to subside. “Okay,” I said. “Just know that I’m there for you.”

He nodded gravely. “I appreciate that, Cannie,” he said, as if I’d just offered him financial planning advice instead of my heart on a platter. I went to kiss him. He offered me his cheek. Fine, I thought, getting into the car, gripping the steering wheel tightly so he wouldn’t see my hands shake. I can be patient. I can be mature. I can wait for him. He loved me so much, I thought, speeding home through the dark. He’ll love me again.

SIX

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforceme nt. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while.

The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they’ll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father’s rat.

He’d loved me once. I remembered it. I had a handful of mental pictures, postcards that had gotten soft around the edges from being handled so often. Scene one: Cannie, age three, snug in her father’s lap, her head against his chest, feeling his voice rumble through her as he read Where the Wild Things Are. Scene two: Cannie, age six, holding hands with her daddy as he led her through the doors of the elementary school on a warm summer Saturday to take her first grade readiness test. “Don’t be shy,” he tells her, kissing both her cheeks. “You’ll do great.”

I remember being ten years old spending whole days with my father, running errands, meeting his secretary, and Mrs. Yee at the dry cleaners who did his shirts, the salesman at the clothing store who looked at my father with respect as he paid for his suits. We’d pick up brie at the fancy cheese shop that smelled wonderfully of freshly roasted coffee beans, and jazz records at Old Vinyl. Everyone knew my father’s name. “Dr. Shapiro,” they’d greet him, smiling at him, at us, lined up in a row, from oldest to youngest, with me at the head of the line. He’d put one big warm hand on my head, stroking my ponytail. “This is Cannie, my oldest,” he’d say. And all of them, from the clerks at the cheese store to the security guards in his building, seemed to know not just who he was, but who I was, too. “Your father says you’re very smart,” they’d say, and I’d stand there, smiling, trying to look smart.

But days like that became rare as I got older. The truth was, my father mostly ignored me. He ignored all of us – Lucy, and Josh, and even my mother. He came home late, he left home early, he spent his weekends in the office or on long drives “to clear my head.” Whatever affection we got, whatever notice he paid us, was parceled out in small doses, administered infrequently. But oh, when he loved me, when he put his hand on my head, when I leaned my own head against him… there was no feeling in the world that could beat it. I felt important. I felt cherished. And I would do whatever it took, press the bar until my hands bled, to get that feeling again.

He left us for the first time when I turned twelve. I came home from school and there he was, unexpectedly, in the bedroom, piling undershirts and sock balls into a suitcase. “Dad?” I asked him, startled to see him in the daytime. “Are you… are we…” I wanted to ask if we were going somewhere – a trip, maybe? His eyes were heavy and hooded. “Ask your mother,” he said. “She’ll explain.” And my mother did explain it – that both she and my father loved us very much, but they couldn’t work things out between the two of them. I was still numb from the shock of that when I found out the truth of what was going on from Hallie Cinti, one of the popular girls. Hallie was on my soccer team, but in a completely different league socially. On the field she frequently looked as though she’d prefer that I not pass to her, as if my foot on the ball could transmit my own personal taint and send nerd-germs creeping through her cleats. Three years later she’d be infamous for administering restorative blow-jobs to three of the five starters on the boys’ basketball team during half-time of the state play-offs, and we’d all be calling her Hallie Cunti, but I didn’t know that yet.

“Heard about your father,” she said, plunking herself down at my table, which was in a corner of the lunchroom where Hallie Cinti and her ilk rarely ventured. The chess club kids and my friends from Junior Debaters stared, open-mouthed, as Hallie and her friend Jenna Lind slung their purses over the backs of two plastic chairs and stared at me.

“Heard what?” I asked warily. I didn’t trust Hallie, who’d ignored me through six years of school, or Jenna, whose hair was always perfectly feathered.

Hallie, as it turned out, couldn’t wait to tell me. “I heard my Mom talking about it last night. He moved in with some dental technician on Copper Hill Road.”

I toyed with my peanut butter sandwich, buying time. Was this true? How could Hallie’s mother know? And why was she talking about it? My mind was fluttering with questions, plus the half-remembered faces of all the women who’d ever scraped my teeth.

Jenna leaned in to deliver the coup de grace. “We heard,” she said, “that she’s only twenty-seven.”

Well. So that would explain the gossip. Hallie and Jenna stared at me, and my debate-team friends stared at them staring. I felt like I’d been suddenly thrust onstage, and I didn’t know my lines, or even what I was supposed to be performing.

“So is it true?” Hallie asked impatiently.

“It’s no big deal,” said Jenna, evidently hoping to get me to spill via sympathy. “My parents are divorced.”

Divorced, I thought, tasting the word. Was this really what was happening? Would my Dad do this to us?

I lifted my eyes to the popular girls. “Go away,” I told them. I heard one of my debate friends gasp. Nobody talked to Jenna and Hallie that way. “Leave me alone. Go away!”

Jenna rolled her eyes. Hallie shoved her seat back. “You’re a big fat loser,” she opined, before scurrying back to the popular kids’ tables, where everyone’s shirts had little alligators, and all the girls ever had for lunch was Diet Coke.

I walked home slowly and found my mother in the kitchen, with about ten half-unpacked bags of groceries arrayed on the counters and dining room table. “Is Dad living with someone else?” I blurted. She shoved three packages of chicken breasts into the freezer and sighed, her hands on her hips.

“I didn’t want you to find out like this,” she murmured. “Hallie Cinti told me,” I said.

My mother sighed again.

“But she doesn’t know anything,” I said, hoping my mother would agree.

Instead she sat at the kitchen table and motioned for me to join her. “Mrs. Cinti works at the same hospital as your Dad,” she said.

So it was true.

“You can tell me things. I’m not a little kid.” But at that moment, I wished that I was a little kid – the kind whose parents still read to her in bed and held her hands when she crossed the streets.

My mother sighed. “I think this might be for your father to tell you.”

But that conversation never happened, and two nights later, my father had moved back. Josh and Lucy and I stood in the backyard and watched him pull the suitcase out of the trunk of his little red sports car. Lucy was crying, and Josh was trying not to. My father never even looked at us as he crossed the gravel driveway, the heels of his boots crunching with each step.

“Cannie?” Lucy sniffled. “If he’s back now, that’s good, isn’t it? He won’t leave anymore, right?”

I stared at the door, watching it slowly close behind him. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed answers. My father was unapproachable, my mother was no help. “Don’t worry,” she scolded me. Her own face was etched with lines of sleeplessness. “Everything’s going to be fine, honey.” This from my mother, who never called me honey. As much as I dreaded it, I would have to go right to the source.

I found Hallie Cinti in the girls’ room the next Monday afternoon. She was standing at the mirror, squinted as she reapplied Bonnie Belle lip gloss. I cleared my throat. She ignored me. I tapped her on her shoulder and she turned to face me, her lips pursed in distaste.

“What?” she spat.

I cleared my throat as she glared at me. “Um… that thing… about my father,” I began.

Hallie rolled her eyes and pulled a pink plastic comb out of her purse.

“He moved back,” I said.

“How swell for you,” said Hallie, now combing her bangs.

“I thought maybe you might have heard why. From your mom.”

“Why should I tell you anything?” she sneered.

I’d spent the whole weekend planning for this contingency. What could I, plump and unpopular Cannie Shapiro, offer sleek, beautiful Hallie? I pulled two items out of my backpack. The first was a five-page paper on light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet. The other was a fifth of vodka that I’d swiped from my parents’ liquor cabinet that morning. Hallie and her crew might not have been as academically advanced as I was, but they made up for it in other fields of endeavor.

Hallie snatched the bottle out of my hands, checked to see that the seal was unbroken, then reached for the paper. I yanked it back.

“First, tell me.”

She gave a little shrug, slipped the bottle into her purse, and turned back toward the mirror. “I heard my mother talking on the phone. She said that his dental friend told him that she wanted children,” she said. “And I guess your father doesn’t want any more. And looking at you,” she continued, “I can understand why.” She turned to me, smirking, extending her hand for the paper.

I threw it at her. “Just copy it over in your own handwriting. I put in some spelling mistakes, so they’ll know it’s you, not me.”

Hallie took the paper and I went back to class. No more children. Well, the way he treated us, that made sense.

He stayed with us for almost six years after that, but he wasn’t the same. The little moments of kindness and love, the nights he’d read to us in bed, the Saturday afternoon ice-cream cones and the Sunday afternoon drives, were gone. It was as if my father had fallen asleep, alone, on a bus or a train, and woken up twenty years later, surrounded by strangers: my mother, my sister, my brother, and me, all wanting things – help with the dishes, a ride to band practice, $10 for the movies, his approval, his attention, his love. He looked out at us, mild brown eyes swimming with confusion, then hardening with anger. Who are these people? he seemed to be wondering. How long will I have to travel beside them? And why do they think I owe them anything?

He went from being loving, in an absent-minded, occasional way, to being mean. Was it because I knew his secret – that he didn’t want more children, that he’d probably never wanted us? Was it that he missed the other woman, that she was his one true love, forever denied to him? I thought that was some of it. But there were other things, too.

My father was – is, I suppose – a plastic surgeon. He started off in the Army, working with burn victims, wounded soldiers, men who’d come back from the war with their skin pink and puckery from chemicals, or lumpy and disfigured from shrapnel.

But he discovered his true genius after we moved to Pennsylvania. There, the bulk of his practice involved not soldiers but society ladies, women whose only wounds were invisible and who were willing to drop thousands of dollars on a discreet, skilled surgeon who’d make their bellies tight, their eyelids less droopy, who’d eliminate saddlebags and double chins with a few deft strokes of the scalpel.

He was successful. By the time he left us for the first time Larry Shapiro was known as the man to see in the greater Philadelphia area for tummy tucks, chin lifts, nose jobs, boob jobs. We had the requisite big house, the curved driveway, the in-ground swimming pool with hot tub in the back. My father drove a Porsche (although, thankfully, my mother was able to talk him out of the NOSEDOC vanity plates). My mom drove an Audi. We had a maid clean twice a week; my parents threw catered dinner parties every other month, and we went on vacations to Colorado (for skiing) and Florida (for sun).

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor. He didn’t want this life. That much was clear. He was miserable tethered to this suburb, to the never-ending schedule of soccer games and spelling bees and Hebrew schools, tied down by mortgage payments and car payments, habit and obligation. And he took his misery out on all of us – and, for some reason, on me especially.

Suddenly, it was as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. And nothing I could do was right, or even close.

“Look at this!” he’d thunder, of my B+ in algebra. He was sitting at the dining room table, a familiar glass of scotch at his elbow. I was skulking in the doorway, trying to hide myself in the shadows. “What is your excuse for this?”

“I don’t like math,” I’d tell him. In truth, I was just as ashamed of the grade as he was angry about it. I’d never gotten anything less than an A in my life. But no matter how hard I tried, or how much extra help I got, algebra confounded me.

“Do you think I liked medical school?” he snarled. “Do you have any idea how much potential you have? Do you have any inkling what a waste it is to squander your gifts?”

“I don’t care what my gifts are. I don’t like math.”

“Fine,” he’d say with a shrug, flinging the report card across the table like it had suddenly acquired an offensive smell. “Be a secretary. See if I care.”

He was like that with all of us – snarly, surly, dismissive, and rude. He’d come home from work, drop his briefcase in the hall, pour himself the first in a series of scotch on the rocks, and storm by us, upstairs into the bedroom, locking the door behind him. He’d either stay up there, or retreat to the living room, with the lights turned low, listening to Mahler’s symphonies. Even at thirteen, even without the benefit of a basic music appreciation class, I knew that nonstop Mahler, backed by the rattle of ice cubes in his glass, could portend nothing good.

And when he did bother to speak to us, it was only to complain: how tired he was, how little appreciated; how hard he worked to provide things for us, “you little snobs,” he’d slur, “with your skis and your swimming pool.”

“I hate to ski,” said Josh, who did. One run and he’d head back to the lodge to drink hot chocolate and fret, and if we forced him back out he’d convince the Ski Patrol that he was suffering from imminent frostbite, and we’d have to collect him at the first aid cabin, stripped down to his long underwear and basting under the heat lamps.

“I’d rather swim with the other kids at the Rec Center,” said Lucy, which was true. She had more friends than the rest of us put together. The phone was always ringing. Another sore spot with my father. “That goddamn phone!” he’d yell when it rang during dinner. But we weren’t allowed to take it off the hook. It could be his office, after all.

“If you hate us so much, why did you even have kids?” I’d scream at him, taunting him with what I knew was the truth. He never had an answer – just more insults, more anger, more scalding, punishing rage. Josh, just six, was “a baby.” Lucy, who was twelve, he either ignored or berated. “Stupid,” he’d say, shaking his head at her grades, “Clumsy,” when she’d drop a glass. And, at thirteen, I became “the dog.”

It’s true, thirteen was not the year when I was looking my best. In addition to the breasts and hips I’d sprouted, seemingly overnight, I had acquired a mouthful of complicated-looking metal and rubber bands to correct my overbite. I had a de rigeur Dorothy Hamill haircut, which wasn’t doing my full face any favors. I bought clothes in two sizes – baggy and baggier – and spent the whole year in a perpetual stoop, trying to hide my chest. I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, only with zits and braces. I felt like a walking affront, like a collection of the things my father spent his days waging war against. He was all about beauty – its creation, its maintenance, its perfection. Having a wife who’d fallen short of the mark and hadn’t stayed thin was one thing, I supposed… but a daughter who’d failed so flagrantly was, evidently, unforgivable. And I had failed. There was nothing beautiful about me at thirteen, nothing at all, and I could feel that fact confirmed in the hard, hateful way he looked at me, and in all the things he said.

“Cannie’s very bright,” I heard him tell one of his golf buddies. “She’ll be able to take care of herself. Not a beauty,” he said, “but smart.”

I stood there, hardly believing what I’d heard, and when I finally believed it, I crumpled inside, like a tin can under a car’s wheels. I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t blind, and I knew that there were many ways in which I differed from Farrah Fawcett, from girls in movies and on posters in boys’ bedrooms. But I’d remembered his hand on my head, his beard tickling my cheek as he kissed me. I was his daughter, his little girl. He was supposed to love me. Now he thought I was ugly. Not a beauty… but what father doesn’t think his little girl is beautiful? Except I wasn’t little. And, I guessed, I wasn’t his girl anymore.

When I look at pictures of myself from that time – and, understandably, there are only about four – there’s this horrible desperate look in my eyes. Please like me, I’m pleading, even as I’m trying to hide myself behind a row of cousins at a bar mitzvah, beneath the hot tub bubbles during a pool party, with my lips drawn in a pained smile, stretched tight over my braces, ducking my head into my neck, hunching my shoulders, slouching to make myself shorter, smaller. Trying to disappear.

Years later, in college, when a friend was recounting some bit of suburban childhood horror, I tried to explain how it was with my father. “He was a monster,” I blurted. I was an English major, versed in Chaucer and Shakespeare, Joyce and Proust by then. I still hadn’t found a better word than that.

My friend’s face got very serious. “Did he molest you?” she asked. I almost laughed. Given how much of my father’s conversation with me revolved around how ugly, how fat, how hideous I was, molestation was the last thing I would have expected.

“Did he abuse you?” she asked.

“He drank too much,” I said. “He left us.” But he never hit me. He never hit any of us. It would have been easier if he had. Then there would have been a name we could give it, a box to put it in, a label for the box. There would have been laws, authorities, shelters, TV talk shows where reporters gravely discussed what we were enduring, a built-in recognition of what we’d experienced, to help us through.

But he never raised a finger. And, at thirteen, at fourteen, I had no words for what he was doing to us. I didn’t even know how to start that conversation. What would I have said? “He’s mean?” Mean meant being grounded, meant no television after dinner, not the kind of daily verbal assault my father would routinely deliver over the dinner table, a scathing recitation of all the ways I’d failed to live up to my potential, the walking tour of the places that I had failed.

And who would have believed me? My father was always charm personified to my friends. He remembered their names, and their boyfriend’s names, he would inquire courteously about summer plans and college visits. They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mother took Josh and Lucy to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend. A friend had a rental house, she was itching to get out of Avondale. I had my first summer job, as a lifeguard at a local country club. I told my Mom that I’d stay home, watch the dogs, hold down the fort. I figured it would be fine: I could have the house to myself, entertain my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend away from her watchful eye, come and go as I pleased.

For the first three days it was fine. Then I came home in the predawn hours of the fourth morning, and it was as if I were twelve again. There was my father in the bedroom, the suitcase on the bed, the stacks of white T-shirts and the piles of black socks – maybe the same ones, I thought wildly, that he’d taken the last time.

I stared at them, and then at him. My father looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.

“I’ll call,” he said, “when I have my new number.”

I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said.

“Don’t talk to me like that!” he said. He hated when we were flip. He demanded respect, even – especially – when he didn’t deserve it.

“What’s her name?” I asked. He narrowed his eyes.

“Why do you want to know?”

I looked at him and couldn’t think of an answer. Did I imagine that it made any difference? Could a name even matter?

“Tell your mother,” he began. I shook my head.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t make me do your dirty work. If you’ve got something to say, tell her yourself.”

He shrugged, like it didn’t matter. He added a few more shirts, a fistful of ties.

“I’m glad you’re leaving. Do you know that?” I said. My voice was too loud in the early-morning quiet of the house. “We’ll be better off without you,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I think maybe you will.”

He went back to his packing. I went back to my bedroom. I lay on the bed – the bed where my father had read to me, a million years ago – and closed my eyes. I’d been waiting for this, after all. I’d known it was coming. I thought it would feel the way it does when a scab over an old wound finally falls off – a momentary pang, a little bit of pain, a sense of absence. Then nothing. Just nothing at all. That was what I was supposed to feel, that was all I wanted to feel, I thought fiercely, tossing and turning on my bed, trying to find comfort. It didn’t matter, I told myself, over and over again. I just couldn’t figure out why I was crying.

I went to Princeton because he told me to, in one of his last acts of hands-on parenting. I’d wanted to go to Smith. I liked the campus, liked the crew coach, liked the idea of an all-girls’ school, where the focus would be on learning, where I could be free to be who I was: your basic late-eighties model nerd with her nose in a book.

“Forget it,” my father pronounced over the table. He’d been gone for six months by then: relocated to a new suburb, living in a brand-new, shiny condo with a brand-new shiny girlfriend. He’d agreed to meet us for dinner, then cancelled and rescheduled twice. “I’m not sending you to some dyke school.”

“Larry,” said my mother, her voice quiet and hopeless. All of her good humor and cheer had been leeched from her by then. It would be years – and Tayna – before she laughed and smiled easily.

My father ignored her, glaring at me suspiciously, a forkful of steak raised halfway to his mouth. “You aren’t a dyke, are you?”

“No, Dad,” I said, “I actually prefer threesomes.”

He chewed. Swallowed. Patted his lips with his napkin. “That’s two more people than I’d have thought would be interested in seeing you naked,” he said.

As much as I’d liked Smith, I hadn’t liked Princeton. The campus looked like the staging ground for a very successful eugenics experiment: everyone was blond, preppy, and perfect, except for the dark-haired girls who were sleek, exotic, and perfect. During the weekend I’d spent there I hadn’t seen a single fat person, or anyone with bad skin. Just acres of shiny hair, straight white teeth, and perfect bodies in perfect clothes arrayed beneath the perfect willow trees that grew beneath perfectly Gothic stone halls.

I said I’d be miserable. My father said he didn’t care. I dug my heels in. He told me it was Princeton or nothing. And by the time I’d been packed off to Campbell Hall and stayed long enough to start classes and have my graduation-present mountain bike stolen from the library bicycle rack, the divorce was final, and he was gone for good, sticking us with a tuition bill of which he’d paid just enough to make it impractical for me to start over anywhere else. So I quit the crew team – no big loss to me, or the team, I suspect, since I’d gained the requisite Freshman Fifteen, plus the fifteen pounds my roommate should have gained but didn’t, thanks to her diligent bulimia – and got a job with the Department of Food Services, affectionately known as Doofus to its employees.

If college is supposed to be the best years of your life, then it’s safe to say that I spent the best years of my life in a hairnet, dishing out reconstituted scrambled eggs and limp bacon, loading dirty dishes on the conveyor belt, mopping the floors, looking at my classmates out of the corner of my eyes and thinking that they were all so much more beautiful, graceful, comfortable in their own skins than I could ever be. They all had better haircuts. And all of them were thin. True, many of them were thin because they were sticking their fingers down their throats after every meal, but at times that seemed like a small price to pay for having basically everything a woman could want – brains, beauty, and a way to eat ice cream and cherry Danishes and still stay skinny.

“Good Hair” was the first article I wrote for the campus alternative newspaper. I was a freshman, and the editor-in-chief, a junior named Gretel whose own hair was kept in a paramilitary blond brush cut, asked me to write more. By sophomore year I was a columnist. By junior year I was a senior writer, spending every hour I wasn’t slinging hash or pushing a mop in the Nassau Weekly’s cramped, dusty offices in Aaron Burr Hall, and I’d decided that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

Writing let me escape. It let me escape Princeton, where everyone was chic and stylish and, in the case of the guy down the hall, the future ruler of some minor Middle Eastern principality. It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Writing was like slipping into the ocean, a place where I could move easily, where I could be graceful, and playful, and invisible and visible all at once – a byline, not a body. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew.

And there was plenty to escape from. In the four years I was at Princeton, my father remarried and had two more children. Daniel and Rebecca. He had the nerve to send me pictures, and birth announcements. Did he think I’d be happy, seeing their squinched-up baby faces and tiny baby footprints? It felt like being kicked. It wasn’t that he didn’t want children, I realized sadly. It was that he hadn’t wanted us.

My mother went back to work, and her weekly telephone calls were full of complaints about how schools, and kids, had changed since she got her teaching certificate. The subtext was clear: This wasn’t the life she signed up for. This wasn’t where she expected to be, at fifty, making ends meet on alimony and what the local school board paid permanent substitutes.

Meanwhile, Lucy had flunked out of her first year at school in Boston, and was living at home, attending community college haphazardly, and majoring in unsuitable men. Josh was spending three hours a day in the gym, lifting weights so frequently that his upper body looked inflated, and had pretty much stopped talking except for a series of tonal grunts and the occasional “Whatever.” “Just get your education,” my mother would say wearily, after the latest recitation of how my father’s checks were late again, of how her car had broken down, of how my sister hadn’t come home for two nights in a row. “Just finish up. We’ll be fine.”

Then – finally – it was the June of my graduation.

Except for a handful of strained lunches during the summer and Christmas breaks, I hadn’t seen my father. He sent birthday cards (usually on time), and tuition checks (almost always late) and usually for about half of what they were supposed to be. I felt like I’d become just one more unremarkable item on his to-do list. I hadn’t expected him to come to my graduation. I never thought he’d care. But he called me a week in advance of the much-longed-for date, saying that he was looking forward to it. Him, and his new wife, whom I’d never met.

“I’m not sure… I don’t think…,” I stammered.

“Cannie,” he said. “I’m your father. And Christine’s never seen Princeton!”

“So tell Christine you’ll send her a postcard,” my mother said sourly. I had dreaded telling my mother that he’d be there, but I couldn’t figure out how to tell him no. He’d said the magic words, the pellet words. I’m your father. After everything – his distance, his desertion, the new wife and new kids – I was, it seems, still starving for his love.

My father, with new wife and kids in tow, arrived during the English Department’s reception. I’d won some small award for creative writing, but they came too late to hear my name called. Christine was a petite little thing, with an aerobicized hard body and a blond perm. The children were adorable. My floral Laura Ashley dress had looked just fine in the dorm. Now it looked like a slipcover, I thought dismally. And I looked like a sofa.

“Cannie,” said my father, looking me up and down. “I see college cuisine’s agreed with you.”

I clutched my stupid plaque tightly against me. “Thanks so much,” I said. My father rolled his eyes at his new wife as if to say, Can you believe how touchy she is?

“I was just teasing you,” he said, as his new adorable children stared at me, as if I were an animal in a zoo for the oversized.

“I, um, got you tickets for the ceremony.” I didn’t mention that I’d had to beg, borrow, and finally pay $100 I couldn’t spare to score the tickets. Each senior was issued a total of four. The administration at Princeton hadn’t yet made accomodations for those of us struggling with reconstructed families that included stepmothers, stepfathers, new half-siblings, and the like.

My father shook his head. “Won’t be necessary. We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Leaving?” I repeated. “But you’ll miss graduation!”

“We’ve got tickets to Sesame Place,” chirped his little wife, Christine.

“ Sesame Place!” repeated the little girl for emphasis.

“So Princeton was sort of on our way.”

“That’s… um… well.” And suddenly I was blinking back tears. I bit my lip as hard as I could, and squeezed the plaque against me so tightly that I had an eight-by-twelve bruise on my midsection for the next week and a half. “Thanks for stopping by.”

My father nodded, and moved as if he was going to hug me, but wound up merely grasping my shoulders and giving me the kind of shake that coaches routinely administer to underperforming athletes – a “buck up, camper” kind of shake. “Congratulations,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.” But when he kissed me his lips never even touched my skin, and I knew the whole time that his eyes were on the door.

Somehow I made it through the ceremony, the dismantling of my dorm room, the long ride home. I hung my diploma on my bedroom wall and tried to figure out what I’d do next. Graduate school was out of the question. Even after all those breakfasts I’d worked, all those drooly pieces of bacon and curdled scrambled eggs, I was still $20,000 or so in debt. I couldn’t see borrowing more money. So I lined up job interviews with the handful of small papers who were willing to even consider a college graduate with no real-world experience, in the middle of a recession, and spent the summer driving up and down the Northeast in the thirdhand van I’d bought with some of my food-service dollars. When I loaded up the car to head out for my job interviews, I made myself a promise – I wasn’t going to be my father’s rat anymore. I was going to walk away from the pellet bar. He could bring me nothing but unhappiness, and I didn’t need more unhappiness in my life.

I heard from my brother that our father had moved out West, but I didn’t ask for specifics, and nobody offered them. Ten years after the divorce he no longer had to pay child support or alimony. The checks stopped coming. So did the birthday cards, or any acknowledgment that we even existed. Lucy’s graduation came and went, and when Josh sent a card announcing his, it came back returned to sender. Our father had moved on, it seemed, without telling us where.

“We could find him on the Internet or something,” I offered. Josh glared at me.

“Why?”

And I couldn’t think of an answer. If we found him, would he come? Would he care? Probably not. We agreed, the three of us, to let it be. If our father wanted to stay gone, we would let him.

And we struggled into our twenties without him. Josh overcame his fear of the slopes and spent a year and a half drifting from one ski-resort town to another, and Lucy ran off briefly to Arizona with a guy she claimed was a former professional hockey player. As evidence, she’d had him remove his bridge in the middle of dinner and show that he was missing all his teeth.

And that was that, pretty much.

I know that what had happened with my father – his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed – had hurt me. I’d encountered enough of those self-help articles in women’s magazines to know that you don’t go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met I’d watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I’d wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I’d ask myself, or do I just think he’d never leave me, the way my father did?

And where had all the care I’d taken gotten me, I wondered? I was alone. A man who’d liked me enough to want me in his family was dead, and I couldn’t even say how sorry I was properly. And now that it was possible – now that it was likely, even – that Bruce had finally gotten to the point in his life where he could understand me, where he could sympathize with what I’d been through because of what he’d gone through – he wouldn’t even talk to me. It felt like the cruelest joke, like a rug being yanked out from under me – in other words, like the way my father made me feel, all over again.

SEVEN

The scales at the University of Philadelphia ’s Weight and Eating Disorders Center looked like meat carts. The platforms were about four times the size of normal scales, with railings all around them. It was hard not to feel like livestock when you climbed aboard, as I had every other week since September.

“That’s very unusual,” said Dr. K, gazing down at the red digital printout on the scale. “You lost eight pounds.”

“I can’t eat,” I said numbly.

“You mean you’re eating less,” he said.

“No, I mean every time I put something in my mouth I puke.”

He looked at me sharply, then back at the scale. The numbers were the same. “Let’s step into my office,” he suggested.

And there we were again: me in the chair, him at his desk, my ever-thickening folder spread in front of him. He was tanner than when I’d seen him last, and possibly even thinner, floating in his white laboratory coat. It had been six weeks since I’d last seen Bruce, and things were not proceeding as I’d hoped.

“Most patients gain weight before we start them on the sibu-tramine,” he said. “They have a kind of last hurrah. So, as I said, this is unusual.”

“Something happened,” I said.

He looked at me sharply. “Another article?”

“Bruce’s father died,” I said. “Bruce, my boyfriend… ex-boyfriend. His dad died last month.”

He looked down at his hands, at his folder, then, finally, up at me.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“And he called me… and told me… and asked me to go to the funeral… but he wouldn’t let me stay. Wouldn’t let me stay with him. He was so awful… and it was so sad… and the rabbi said how he used to go to toy stores, and I feel so terrible…”

I blinked hard against the tears. Wordlessly, Dr. K. handed me a box of Kleenex. He took off his glasses and pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.

“I’m a bad person,” I blubbered. He looked at me kindly.

“Why? Because you broke up with him? That’s silly. How could you know this was going to happen?”

“No,” I said. “I know I couldn’t. But now, it’s like… all I want is to be there for him, and love him, and he won’t let me, and I feel so… alone”

He sighed. “It’s hard when things end. Even if nobody dies, even if you part on the best possible terms, and there’s nobody else involved. Even if you’re the one who lets go first. It’s never easy. It always hurts.”

“I just feel like I made this huge mistake. Like I didn’t think things through. I thought I knew… how it would feel to be apart from him. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I never imagined anything like this. And all I do is miss him” I swallowed hard, choking on another sob. I couldn’t explain it – that I’d been waiting my whole life for a guy who would get me, who would understand my pain. I thought I’d known what pain was, but I knew now I’d never hurt this way.

He focused his eyes on a spot on the wall over my head as I wept. Then he opened a drawer, pulled a pad out of his desk, and started writing.

“Am I out of the study?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Of course, you’re going to have to start eating again soon. But I think it might be a good idea for you to have someone to talk to.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not therapy.”

He gave me a crooked smile. “Am I sensing a little antipathy here?”

“No, I don’t have anything against it, but I just know it won’t help,” I told him. “I’m looking at the situation realistically. I made a huge mistake. I wasn’t sure that I loved him enough, and now I know that I do, and his father’s dead and he doesn’t love me anymore.” I straightened my back and wiped my face. “But I still want to do this. I really want to do this. I want to have one thing in my life I can feel good about. I want to feel like I’m doing something right.”

He sat me on the examination table again, his hands gentle on my back and my arms as he tied a piece of rubber tubing around my bicep and told me to make a fist. I looked away when he slid the needle in, but he’d done it so skillfully I could barely feel it. Both of us watched the glass vial filling up with my blood. I wondered what he was thinking. “Almost done,” he said quietly, before deftly removing the needle and pressing a piece of gauze over the wound.

“Do I get a lollipop?” I joked. He handed me a Band-Aid instead, and the piece of paper where he’d written two names, two phone numbers. “Take it,” he said. “And, Cannie, you’ve got to eat, and if you find that you can’t, you have to call us, and then I’d really suggest calling one of these counselors.”

“I’m so huge, do you really think a few more days is going to kill me?”

“It’s really not healthy,” he said seriously. “It can have an adverse impact on your metabolism. My suggestion is to start off with easy stuff… toast, bananas, flat ginger ale.”

Out in the lobby, he gave me a sheaf of papers easily three inches thick. “Keep exercising, too,” he said. “It’ll help you feel better.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said, tucking everything into my purse.

“And Cannie?” He put his hand on my forearm. “Try not to take it so hard.”

“I know,” I said. “I just wish things were different.”

“You’ll be fine,” he told me firmly. “And…”

His voice trailed off. He looked uncomfortable.

“You know how you said you were a bad person?”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry. I just have this tendency to get a little melodramatic”

“No, no. That’s okay. I just meant… I wanted to tell you…”

The elevator doors slid open, and the people on it looked at me. I looked at the doctor and stepped backward.

“You aren’t,” he told me. “I’ll see you in class.”

I went home and lunged for the telephone. My one message was from Samantha.

“Hi, Cannie, it’s Sam… no, not Bruce, so get that pathetic look off your puss and call me if you feel like going for a walk. I’ll buy you an iced coffee. It’ll be great. Better than a boyfriend. ’Bye.”

I set down the phone, and picked it up again when it started ringing. Maybe it was Bruce this time, I thought.

Instead, it was my mother.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

“You didn’t leave a message,” I pointed out.

“I knew I’d get you eventually,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know…,” I said, my voice trailing off. My mother had really been making an effort since Bruce’s father had died. She’d sent a card to the family and made a donation to the temple. She’d been calling me every night, and insisted that I come to her softball league’s play-off series and watch the Switch Hitters take on Nine Women Out. It was all attention I could have done without, but I knew she meant well.

“Are you walking?” she asked me. “Are you riding your bike?”

“A little bit,” I sighed, remembering how Bruce used to complain that spending time at my house was more like triathlon training sessions than a vacation, because my mother was always trying to organize a walk, a bike ride, two-on-two basketball at the Jewish Center, where she’d gleefully body-check my brother under the boards while I sweated on a StairMaster and Bruce read the sports section in the Seniors’ Lounge.

“I’m walking,” I said. “I take Nifkin out every day.”

“Cannie, that’s not enough! You should come home,” she said. “You’ll be in for Thanksgiving, right? Are you going to come Wednesday, or the day of?”

Ugh. Thanksgiving. Last year Tanya had invited another couple – both women, of course. One of them wouldn’t touch meat, and referred to heterosexual people as “breeders,” while her girlfriend, whose buzz cut and broad shoulders gave her a disconcerting resemblance to my senior prom date, sat beside her looking embarrassed, then vanished into the family room, where we found her, hours later, watching a football game. Tanya, whose Marlboro habit had rendered her tastebuds defunct, spent the entire meal hustling from the kitchen to the table, bearing one bowl of overcooked, overmashed, oversalted side dishes after another, plus something called Tofurkey for the vegetarian. Josh had cut out early on Thursday night, muttering something about finals, and Lucy spent the entire time on the phone with a mysterious boyfriend, who, we would later learn, was both married and twenty years her senior.

“Never again,” I’d whispered to Bruce that night as I tried to find a comfortable position on the lumpy couch while Nifkin trembled behind a stereo speaker. Tanya’s loom occupied the space that had formerly housed my bed, and whenever we came home I had to camp out in the living room. Plus, her two evil cats, Gertrude and Alice, took turns stalking the Nif.

“Why don’t you come home for the weekend?” my mother asked.

“I’m busy,” I said.

“You’re obsessed,” she corrected. “I’ll bet you’re sitting there, reading old love letters Bruce sent you and hoping I’ll get off the phone in case he calls you.”

Damn. How does she do that?

“I am not,” I told her. “I’ve got call waiting.”

“Waste of money,” said my mother. “Look, Cannie. He’s obviously angry with you. He’s not going to come running back just yet”

“I’m aware of that,” I said frostily.

“So what’s the problem?”

“I miss him,” I said.

“Why? What do you miss so much?”

I didn’t say anything for a minute.

“Let me ask you something,” my mother had said gently. “Have you talked to him?”

“Yeah. We talk.” In truth, I’d broken down and called him twice. Both calls had lasted less than five minutes, both had ended when he told me, politely, that there were things he needed to do.

My mother persisted. “Is he calling you?”

“Not so much. Not exactly.”

“And who’s ending the calls? You or him?”

This was getting touchy. “I see you’ve returned to the heterosexual advice-giving arena.”

“I’m allowed,” my mother said cheerfully. “Now: Who’s hanging up?”

“Depends,” I lied. In truth, it was Bruce. Always Bruce. It was like Sam had said. I was pathetic, and I knew it, and I couldn’t stop myself, which was even worse.

“Cannie,” she said. “Why don’t you give him a break? Give yourself a break, too. Come home.”

“I’m busy,” I demurred, but I could feel myself weakening.

“We’ll bake cookies,” she wheedled. “We’ll go for long walks. We’ll go for a bike ride. Maybe we’ll go to New York for the day…”

“With Tanya, of course.”

My mother sighed. “Cannie,” she said, “I know you don’t like her, but she is my partner… Can’t you at least try to be nice?”

I thought about it. “No. Sorry.”

“We can have some mother/daughter time, if you really want it.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It’s busy here. And I’ve got to go to New York next weekend. Did I tell you? I’m interviewing Maxi Ryder.”

“Really? Ooh, she was great in that Scottish movie.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

“And listen, Cannie. Don’t call him anymore. Just give him some time.”

I knew she was right, of course. A), I wasn’t stupid, and b), I’d been hearing it from Samantha, and from every single one of my friends and acquaintances who had an even passing familiarity with the situation, and I’d probably be hearing it from Nifkin, too, if only he could talk. But somehow I couldn’t stop. I had turned into someone that I would have pitied in another life; someone who searched for signs, who analyzed patterns, who went over every word in a conversation looking for hidden meanings, secret signals, the subtext that said, Yes, I still love you, of course I still love you.

“I’d like to see you,” I’d told him shyly, during Five Minute Phone Conversation #2. Bruce had sighed.

“I think we should wait,” he said. “I don’t just want to jump right back in again.”

“But we’ll see each other sometime?” I said, in a tiny little voice that was utterly unlike anything I’d normally use for conversation, and he’d sighed again.

“I don’t know, Cannie,” he said, “I just don’t know.”

But “I don’t know” wasn’t a “no,” I’d reasoned, and once I had a chance to be with him, to tell him how sorry I was, to show him how much I had to give, how much I wanted to be back with him… well, then he’d take me back. Of course he would. Wasn’t he the one who’d said “I love you” first, three years ago, as we’d held each other in my bed? And hadn’t he been the one who was always bringing up marriage, always stopping on our walks to admire babies, always steering me toward jewelry shop windows when we walked on Sansom Street, and kissing my ring finger and telling me how we’d always be together?

It was inevitable, I tried to tell myself. Just a matter of time.

“Let me ask you something,” I began.

Andy the food critic shoved his glasses up his nose and murmured into his sleeve. “The walls are painted pale green, with gilt on the moldings,” he said softly. “It’s very French.”

“It’s like being inside a Fabergé egg,” I volunteered, looking around.

“Like being inside a Fabergé egg,” Andy repeated. I heard a muted click as he turned off the tape recorder he had concealed in his pocket.

“Explain men,” I said.

“Can we do the menu first?” Andy cajoled. This was our standard deal: first, the food, then, my questions about men and married life. Today we were casing the latest crêperie for a possible review.

Andy perused the menu. “I’m interested in the paté, the escargot, the greens with pear and warm Gorgonzola, and the mushroom in puff pastry to start with,” he instructed. “You can get any kind of crêpe you want for a main course, except not the plain cheese.”

“Ellen?” I guessed. Andy nodded. In one of life’s supreme ironies, Andy’s wife, Ellen, was possessed of the least adventurous palate of all time. She eschewed sauces, spices, most ethnic cuisines, and was constantly frowning over the menus, desperately scanning them for things like plain baked chicken breasts and mashed potatoes that weren’t truffled, garlicked, or otherwise gussied up. Her ideal evening, she’d once told me, consisted of rented movies and frozen waffles “with the kind of syrup that has absolutely nothing maple about it.” Andy adored her… even when she was screwing up his review meals by ordering yet another Caesar salad or plain piece of fish.

Our waiter ambled over to refill our water glasses. “Any questions?” he drawled. From his offhand manner, plus the blue paint caked under his fingernails, I had him pegged as a waiter by day, artiste by night. He seemed hugely, supremely, unassailably indifferent. Pay attention, I tried to tell him telepathically. It didn’t seem to work.

I ordered the escargot and a crêpe with shrimp, tomatoes, and creamed spinach. Andy took the paté and the salad, and a crêpe with wild mushrooms, goat cheese, and toasted almonds. We each had a glass of white wine.

“Now,” he said, as the waiter loped back to the kitchen. “How can I help you?”

“How can they…” I began. Andy raised his hand.

“Are we speaking in the abstract or the specific here?”

“It’s Bruce,” I acknowledged. Andy rolled his eyes. Andy was not a fan of Bruce… not since the first and last review dinner he’d come out for. Bruce was even worse than Ellen. “A picky vegetarian,” Andy had messaged me at work the next day, “is basically a food critic’s worst nightmare.” In addition to not finding a single thing he wanted to eat, Bruce also managed to tip his menu far enough toward the candle that lit our table to actually set the menu on fire, bringing three waiters plus the sommelier running and sending Andy, a stickler for anonymity, dashing into the men’s room lest he risk discovery. “It’s hard to keep a low profile,” he carefully pointed out the next day, “when you’re being sprayed with a fire extinguisher.”

“I just want to know,” I said. “I mean, the thing that I don’t understand…”

“Spit it out, Cannie,” Andy urged. The waiter returned, dumped my escargot in front of Andy, Andy’s paté in front of me, and hastily departed. “Excuse me,” I called toward his back. “Could I have some more water? When you get a minute? Please?” The waiter’s whole body seemed to sigh as he reached for the pitcher.

Once our glasses were filled, Andy and I traded plates, and I waited for him to describe, and taste, before continuing.

“Well, it’s like, okay, I know that I was the one who wanted to take a break, and now I miss him, and it’s like, this pain…”

“Is it a sharp stabbing pain, or more of a constant throbbing ache?”

“Are you making fun of me?”

Andy stared into my eyes, his own brown eyes wide and innocent behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “Well, maybe a little bit,” he finally said.

“He’s completely forgotten me,” I grumbled, spearing a snail. “It’s as if I never even mattered… like I never meant anything to him.”

“I’m confused,” said Andy. “Do you want him back, or are you just concerned about your legacy?”

“Both,” I said. “I just want to know…” I gulped a mouthful of wine to stave off tears. “I just want to know that I meant something, somehow.”

“Just because he’s acting like you didn’t mean anything doesn’t mean that you really didn’t,” said Andy. “It’s probably just an act.”

“You think?”

“The guy adored you,” Andy said. “That wasn’t an act.”

“But how can he not even want to talk to me now? How can it just be so completely…” I sliced one hand through the air to indicate a violent and absolute ending.

Andy sighed. “For some guys, it’s just like that.”

“For you?” I asked.

He paused, then nodded. “For me, when it was over, it was always over.”

Over his shoulder, I could see our waiter approaching… our waiter, plus two other waiters, trailed by an anxious-looking dark-haired man with an apron tied over his suit. The manager, I presumed. Which could only mean the one thing that Andy dreaded most – namely, someone had figured out who he was.

“Monsieur!” the man in the suit began, as our waiter set down our entrées, another one poured us fresh water, and a third waiter carefully decrumbed our not-very-crumby table. “Is everything to your liking?”

“Just fine,” said Andy weakly, as Waiter One set fresh silverware beside our plates, Waiter Two whisked fresh bread and butter to the center of the table, and Waiter Three hustled over with a lit candle.

“Please let us know if there’s anything else we can bring you. Anything!” the manager fervently concluded.

“I will,” Andy said, as the three waiters lined up and stared at us, looking anxious and vaguely resentful, before finally retreating to the corners of the restaurant where they watched our every mouthful.

I didn’t even care. “I just think that I made a mistake,” I said. “Did you ever break up with someone and think you made a mistake?”

Andy shook his head, wordlessly offering me a bite of his crêpe.

“What should I do?”

He munched, looking thoughtful. “I don’t know if these are actual wild mushrooms. They taste kind of domestic to me.”

“You’re changing the subject,” I grumbled. “You’re… oh, God. I’m boring, aren’t I?”

“Never,” said Andy loyally.

“No, I am. I’ve turned into one of those horrible people that just talks about their ex-boyfriend all the time, until nobody can stand to be around them and they don’t have any friends…”

“Cannie…”

“… and they start drinking alone, and talking to their pets, which I do anyway… oh, God,” I said, only half-faking a collapse into the bread dish. “This is a disaster.”

The manager hurried over. “Madame!” he cried. “Is everything all right?”

I straightened myself up, flicking bits of bread from my sweater. “Just fine,” I said. He bustled off, and I turned back to Andy.

“When did I become a madame?” I asked mournfully. “I swear, the last time I was at a French restaurant they called me Mademoiselle.”

“Cheer up,” said Andy, handing me the last of the paté. “You’re going to find someone much better than Bruce, and he won’t be a vegetarian, and you’ll be happy, and I’ll be happy, and everything’s going to be fine.”

EIGHT

I tried. Really, I did. But I found myself so preoccupied with Bruce miser y that it was hard to get anything done at work. This is what I considered as I sat on an Amtrak Metroliner bound for New York and Maxi Ryder, famously ringletted and frequently dumped costar of last year’s Oscar-nominated romantic drama, Trembling, in which she’d played a brilliant brain surgeon who eventually succumbs to Parkinson’s disease.

Maxi Ryder was British, twenty-seven or twenty-nine, depending on which magazines you believed, and had been known, early in her career, as something of an ugly duckling until, through the miracle of rigorous diet, Pilates, and the Zone (plus, it was whispered, some discreet plastic surgery), she’d managed to transform herself into a size-two swan. In fact, she’d been a size two to start off with, and a beauty to boot, but had gained twenty pounds for her breakthrough role in a foreign film called Advanced Placement, playing a shy Scottish schoolgirl who has a torrid affair with her headmistress. By the time that film had reached the States, she’d shed the twenty pounds, dyed her hair auburn, ditched her British manager, hooked up with the hottest agency in Hollywood, founded the inevitable production company (Maxi’d Out, she’d called it), and been featured in a Vanity Fair spread of homes of the stars, wearing only a black feather boa, curled seductively beneath the headline “Maxi’s Pad.” Maxi, in other words, had arrived.

But for all her talent and her beauty, Maxi Ryder kept getting dumped, in the most public ways you could think of.

She’d done the typical starlet-in-her-twenties thing, popularized by Julia Roberts and practiced by the generation that followed, which was to fall in love with her costars. But while Julia would have them yanking her toward the altar, poor Maxi just got her heart broken, again and again and again. And it didn’t happen quietly, either. The assistant director she’d fallen for on Advanced Placement showed up at the Golden Globes sucking face with one of the girls from Baywatch. Her costar on Trembling – the one with whom she’d played a half-dozen torrid love scenes, where the chemistry between them was so palpable it practically soaked your popcorn – had broken the news to her, and the rest of the world at the same time, during a Barbara Walters’ “Ten Most Fascinating People” interview. And the nineteen-year-old rock star she’d picked up on the rebound had gotten married in Vegas two weeks after they met to a woman who was not Maxi.

“It’s a wonder she’s doing any press at all,” Roberto, the publicist at Midnight Oil, had told me the week before. Midnight Oil was a very small, somewhat obscure New York PR firm – leagues below the big agencies that Maxi’d typically deal with. But between Advanced Placement and Trembling, she’d spent six weeks in Israel making a tiny little movie, a period piece about a kibbutz during the Seven Day War… and tiny little movies generally had small-time publicity agencies, which was where Roberto came in.

Seven Day Soldier would probably never even have made it to American art houses, had it not been for the Oscar nomination Maxi had gotten for Trembling. And Maxi would probably never have done any publicity for the movie, except she’d signed on to it before she’d made it big, which meant she’d agreed to be paid bupkes, and to publicize the film “in any way the producers deem appropriate.”

So, needless to say, the producers saw a chance to at least have an enormous opening weekend based on the strength of Maxi buzz. They’d flown her in from a shoot in Australia, set her up in the penthouse of the Regency on the Upper East Side, and invited in what Roberto referred to as “a select group of reporters” to enjoy twenty-minute audiences with her. And Roberto, bless his loyal heart, had called me first.

“Are you interested?” he’d asked.

Of course I was, and Betsy was thrilled in the way that editors usually are when plummy scoops fall into their laps, even though Gabby grumbled about one-hit wonders and flashes in the pan.

I was happy. Roberto was happy. Then Maxi’s personal publicist got in on the act.

There I was, moping at my desk, counting the days since Bruce and I had spoken (ten), the length in minutes of the conversation (four), and contemplating making an appointment with a numerologist to figure out if the future held anything good for us, when the phone rang.

“This is April from NGH,” rapped the voice on the other end. “We understand you’re interested in speaking with Maxi Ryder?”

Interested? “I’m interviewing her Saturday at ten in the morning,” I told April. “Roberto from Midnight Oil set it up.”

“Yes. Well. We have a few questions before we sign off.”

“Who are you again?” I asked.

“April. From NGH.” NGH was one of the hugest and most notorious public relations firms in Hollywood. They were the people you called if you were famous, under forty, found yourself in the midst of some kind of unsavory and/or illegal mess and wanted to keep all but the most fawning and tractable press far, far away. Robert Downey hired NGH after he passed out in someone else’s bedroom in a heroin haze. Courtney Love had NGH redo her image after she’d redone her nose, her breasts, and her fashion, and they smoothed her transition from foul-mouthed grunge goddess to couture-clad sylph. At the Examiner, we called them Not Gonna Happen… as in, that interview you were hoping for, that profile you wanted to write? Not Gonna Happen. Now, evidently, Maxi Ryder had enlisted their assistance as well.

“We would like your assurance,” April from NGH began, “that this interview will focus exclusively on Maxi’s work.”

“Her work?”

“Her roles,” said April. “Her acting. Not her personal life.”

“She’s a celebrity,” I said mildly. Or at least I thought it came out that way. “I consider that her work. Being a famous person.”

April’s voice could have frozen hot fudge. “Her work is acting,” she said. “Any attention that she gets is only because of that work.”

Normally I would have let it drop – just gritted my teeth and grinned and agreed to whatever ridiculous conditions they wanted to impose. But I hadn’t slept the night before, and this April was pushing all the wrong buttons. “Oh, come on!” I said. “Every time I open People magazine I see her in a slit skirt and big, dark, don’t-look-at-me glasses. And you’re telling me she just wants to be known as an actor?”

I’d hope that April would take my remarks in the half-joking manner I’d intended them. But I wasn’t sensing a thaw.

“You cannot ask her about her love life,” April said sternly.

I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “Terrific. Whatever. We’ll talk about the movie.”

“So you’re agreeing to the conditions?”

“Yes. I’m agreeing. No love life. No skirts. No nothing.”

“Then I’ll see what I can do.”

“I told you, Roberto already set up the interview!”

But I was talking to a dead line.

Two weeks later, when I finally left for the interview, it was a gray, drizzly Saturday morning in late November, the kind of day where it looks like everyone with means and money has fled the city and gone to the Bahamas, or their country cottage in the Poconos, and the streets are populated with the people they’d left behind: pockmarked delivery boys, black girls with braids, scruffy-looking dreadlocked white kids on bikes. Secretaries. Japanese tourists. A guy with a wart on his chin with two hairs sprouting from it, long, curly hairs that reached almost to his chest. He smiled and stroked them as I walked by. My lucky day.

I spent the twenty-block walk uptown trying not to think of Bruce and trying not to let my hair get too wet. The lobby of the Regency was huge, marble, blessedly quiet and mirror-lined, which let me appreciate, from three different angles, the zit that had sprouted on my forehead.

I was early, so I decided to loiter. The hotel gift shop boasted the typical assortment of overpriced bathrobes, $5 toothbrushes, and magazines in many languages, one of which happened to be the November Moxie. I grabbed it and flipped to Bruce’s column. “Going Down,” I read. “One Man’s Oral Adventures.” Hah! “Oral adventures” had not been Bruce’s forte. He had a little problem with excessive saliva. In a moment of margarita-soaked weakness I’d once referred to him as “the human bidet.” It had been that bad at the beginning. Of course, there was no way he’d mention that, I thought smugly, any more than he’d mention that I’d been the only girl he’d ever attempted that particular maneuver upon. And I flipped back to his column. “I once overheard my girlfriend refer to me as the human bidet,” read the pull-quote. He’d heard that? My face flamed.

“Miss? Are you planning to purchase that?” asked the woman behind the counter. So I did, with a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and a $4 bottle of water. Then I parked myself on one of the plush couches in the icy-cool lobby and began:

Going Down

When I was fifteen and a virgin, when I wore braces and the tighty whities my mother bought me, my friends and I used to laugh ourselves sick over a Sam Kinison routine.

“Women!” he’d rant, tossing his hair over his shoulder, stalking the stage like a small, rotund, beret-wearing trapped animal. “Tell us what you want! Why,” he’d say, and drop to one knee, beseeching, “why is it so HARD to say YES, right THERE, that’s GOOD, or NO, not THAT. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT!” he’d shriek, as the audience erupted, “WE’LL DO IT!”

We laughed without knowing precisely what made this so hysterical. What could be so hard? we wondered. Sex, insofar as we’d experienced it, did not involve much mystery. Lather, rinse, repeat. That was our repertoire. No fuss, no muss, and certainly no confusion.

When C. parted her legs and then parted herself with her fingertips…

Oh… my… God, I thought. It was as if he’d shoved a mirror between my legs and broadcasted the image to the whole world. I swallowed hard and kept reading.

… I felt a sudden and complete sympathy with every man who’d ever pumped his fist to Kinison’s lament. It was like looking at a face with no features, was the best thing I could think. Hair and belly and hands above, creamy thighs to the left and the right, but in front of me, a mystery, curves and tucks and protrusions that bore, it seemed, little resemblance to the air-brushed pornography I’d seen since I was fifteen. Or maybe it was just the proximity. Or maybe it was just my nerves. Being confronted with a mystery is a scary thing.

“Tell me what you want,” I whispered to her, and I remember how far away her head seemed at that moment. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” But then I realized that by telling me what she wanted, she’d be as much as admitting that… well, that she knew what she wanted. That someone else had stared into this strange, unknowable heart, had learned the geography, had unfurled her secrets. And even though I knew she’d had other lovers, that seemed somehow different, more intimate. She’d let someone else see her here, like this. And I, being male and a former Sam Kinison listener to boot, resolved to bring her to paradise, to make her mewl like a sated kitty, to obliterate every trace of memory of the He Who’d Gone Before.

Strange unknowable heart, I snorted. He Who’d Gone Before. Somebody get me a shovel!

And she tried, and I tried, too. She demonstrated with her fingertips, with words, with gentle pressure and gasps and sighs. And I tried, too. But a tongue isn’t like a finger. My goatee drove her crazy, in precisely the opposite of the way she wanted to be driven crazy. And when I heard her on the phone once refer to me as the Human Bidet, well, it seemed easier to rely on the things I knew I could do better.

Do any of us know what we’re doing? Does any man? I ask my friends, and at first they all guffaw and swear they have to scrape their women off the ceiling. I buy them beer and keep their glasses full, and in a few hours I have my more perfect truth: We’re all clueless. Every single one of us.

“She says she’s coming,” says Eric mournfully. “But I dunno, man…”

“It isn’t obvious,” says George. “How are we supposed to know?”

How, indeed? We’re men. We need reliability, we need hard (or even liquid) evidence, we need diagrams and how-to guides, we need the mystery explicated.

And when I close my eyes I can see her, still, as she lay that first time, furled tight like the wings of a tiny bird, seashell pink, tasting like the rich ocean water, full of tiny lives, things I’ll never see, let alone understand. I wish I could. I wish I had.

“Okay, Jacques Cousteau,” I muttered, and struggled to my feet. When he closed his eyes he could still see me, he’d written. Well, what did that mean? And when had he written it? And if he still missed me, then why wasn’t he calling? Maybe, I thought, there was hope after all. Maybe I’d call him later. Maybe we still had a chance.

I took the elevator up to the hospitality suite on the twentieth floor, where a variety of young, larva-pale publicists in variations on black stretch pants, black bodysuits, and black boots sat on couches and smoked.

“I’m Cannie Shapiro from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I said, to the one sitting beneath a life-size cardboard cutout of Maxi Ryder in battle fatigues, brandishing an Uzi.

Larva Girl paged languidly through some pages full of names.

“I don’t see you,” she said.

Great. “Is Roberto here?”

“He stepped out for a minute,” she said, flip-flopping one hand toward the door.

“Did he say when he’d be back?”

She shrugged, apparently having exhausted her vocabulary.

I peered at the pages, trying to read upside-down. There was my name: Candace Shapiro. And there was a thick black line through it. “NGH” read the note in the margin.

Just then Roberto hustled in.

“Cannie,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

“You tell me,” I said, trying for a smile. “Last I heard I was interviewing Maxi Ryder.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Nobody called you?”

“About what?”

“Maxi decided to, um, scale way back on the print interviews. She’s only doing the Times. And USA Today.”

“Well, nobody told me.” I shrugged. “I’m here. Betsy’s expecting a story.”

“Cannie, I’m so sorry…”

Don’t be sorry, you idiot, I was thinking. Do something!

“… but there’s nothing I can do.”

I gave him my best smile. My most charming smile, which I hoped was underscored with my I-work-for-a-large-important-‌newspaper steel. “Roberto,” I said, “I was planning to talk to her. We saved the space. We’re counting on the story. Nobody called me… and I schlepped all the way up here on a Saturday, which is my day off…”

Roberto started wringing his hands.

“… and I would really, really appreciate it if we could maybe just get even fifteen minutes with her.”

Now Roberto was wringing his hands and biting his lip at the same time, plus shifting from foot to foot. Bad signs all.

“Listen,” I said softly, leaning toward him, “I watched every single one of her movies, even the direct-to-video ones. I’m, like, the complete Maxi expert. Isn’t there anything we can do?” I saw him start to waver, when the cell phone on his belt shrilled.

“April?” he said. April, he mouthed to me. Roberto was a sweetheart, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Can I talk to her?” I whispered, but Roberto was already rehol-stering his phone.

“She said they weren’t comfortable with your, um, compliance.”

“What? Roberto, I agreed to every single one of her conditions”

My voice was rising. The larval creatures on the couch were starting to look vaguely alarmed. As was Roberto, who was edging out into the hallway.

“Let me talk to April,” I pleaded, holding out my hand for his cell phone. Roberto shook his head. “Roberto,” I said, hearing my voice breaking, imagining Gabby’s gloating grin when I came back to the office empty-handed. “I can’t go back without a story!”

“Look, Cannie, I am so, so sorry…”

He was wavering. I saw he was. And that’s when a tiny woman in high-heeled calf-length black leather boots came trip-trapping down the long marble hall. There was a cell phone in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other, and a no-nonsense look on her unlined, carefully made-up face. She could have been a very mature twenty-eight or forty-five with a great plastic surgeon. This, undoubtedly, was April.

She took me in – my zit, my anger, my black dress and sandals from last summer, far less fashionable than anything any one of the couch larvae were wearing, in one cool, dismissive glance. Then she turned to Roberto.

“Is there a problem?” she said.

“This is Candace,” he said, pointing weakly at me. “From the

Examiner.”

She stared at me. I felt – actually felt – my zit expanding beneath her gaze.

“Is there a problem?” she repeated.

“There wasn’t until a few minutes ago,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “I had an interview scheduled for two o’clock. Roberto tells me it’s been cancelled.”

“That’s right,” she said pleasantly. “We decided to limit our print interviews to major newspapers.”

“The Examiner has a circulation of 700,000 on Sundays, which is when we’d planned the story for,” I said. “We’re the fourth-largest city on the East Coast. And nobody bothered to tell me the interview was off.”

“That was Roberto’s responsibility,” she said, raking him with her gaze.

This was clearly news to Roberto, but he wasn’t going to contradict Miss Kitten with a Whip. “Sorry,” he muttered to me.

“I appreciate the apologies,” I said, “but as I told Roberto, we’ve now got a hole in our Sunday newspaper, and I’ve wasted my day off.” Which wasn’t technically true. Stories fell through all the time, as April probably knew, and we’d just pop something else in the hole. And as for wasting my day off, any time I got a free ticket to New York, I always found something to do there.

But I was furious. The nerve of these people, to treat me so rudely, and to be so patently, completely not sorry about it!

“Isn’t there any way she can see me for a few minutes? Since I’m here?”

April’s tone was becoming decidedly less pleasant. “She’s running late as it is, and she’s flying right back to location this afternoon. To Australia,” she emphasized, as if this was a place a country mouse such as myself had most likely never heard of. “And,” she continued, snapping a small notebook open, “we’ve already scheduled a telephone interview with your boss.”

My boss? It was inconceivable that Betsy would do this, beyond inconceivable that she’d do this and not tell me.

“With Gabby Gardiner,” April concluded.

I was stunned. “Gabby’s not my boss!”

“I’m sorry,” April said, sounding not sorry at all, “but those are the arrangements we’ve made.”

I backed into the hospitality suite and plopped into a chair by the window. “Look,” I said. “I’m here, and I’m sure you’d agree that it would be better for all of us to do an in-person interview – even a quick one – with someone who’s seen all of Maxi’s movies, who took the time to prepare for this – than something over the phone. I’m happy to wait.”

April stood in the hall for a moment. “Do I have to call security?” she finally asked.

“I don’t see why,” I said. “I’ll just sit here until Ms. Ryder finishes up with whoever she’s in with, and if it happens that she’s got a minute or two to spare before she has to go rushing back to Australia, I will conduct the interview that I was promised.” I clenched my hands into fists so she wouldn’t see how I was shaking, and played my final card. “Of course, if it should turn out that Ms. Ryder doesn’t have a few minutes for me,” I said sweetly, “then I’ll be writing a thirty-inch story about what’s happened to me here. And by the way, what’s your last name?”

April glared at me. Roberto sidled closer to her, flicking his eyes back and forth between us, as if we were playing a very fast game of tennis. I stared right back at April.

“It’s impossible,” she said.

“Interesting last name,” I said. “Is it one of those Ellis Island specials?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for what would be the last time, “but Ms. Ryder’s not going to be speaking to you. You were sarcastic to me on the phone…”

“Ooh, a sarcastic reporter! Bet you’ve never seen one of those before!”

“… and Ms. Ryder doesn’t need your kind of attention…”

“Which is fine,” I exploded, “but couldn’t one of your lackeys or flunkies or interns have had the courtesy to call me before I came all the way up here?”

“Roberto was supposed to,” she said again.

“Well, he didn’t,” I told her, and crossed my arms. Standoff. She stood and glared at me for a minute. I glared right back. Roberto leaned against the wall, actually shaking. The larvae stood in a row, their eyes darting back and forth.

“Call security,” April finally said, and turned on her heel. She looked back over her shoulder at me. “You,” she said. “Write whatever you want. We don’t care.”

And with that, they were gone: Roberto, shooting me a final, desperately apologetic look over his shoulder, the larvae, all in black boots, and April, and whatever chance I had of meeting Maxi Ryder. I sat there, until they’d all piled into an elevator. Only then did I let myself cry.

Generally speaking, hotel lobby bathrooms are great places to have breakdowns. People registered at the hotel are mostly using the bathrooms in their rooms. People on the streets don’t always know that they can breeze right in to the lobby of even the fanciest hotel and almost always use the toilet unmolested. And the bathrooms tend to be spacious and fancy, with all the amenities from hairspray and tampons to actual towels for wiping your tears and drying your hands. Sometimes there’s even a couch to collapse on.

I staggered down the hall, into the elevator, and through the gold door reading “Ladies” in elaborate script, heading for the handicapped stall and peace, quiet, and solitude, grabbing two neatly rolled towels on my way in. “Fucking Maxi Ryder!” I hissed, and slammed the door, sat down, and pressed my fists against my eyes.

“Huh?” said a familiar voice from somewhere over my head. “Why?”

I looked up. A face was peeking over the top of the stall.

“Why?” Maxi Ryder said again. She was just as adorable in person as she was on the big screen, with her saucer-wide blue eyes, her lightly freckled, creamy skin, her cascade of auburn curls, seemingly brighter and more glossy than standard-issue human hair was meant to be. She was gripping a slim cigarette in one tiny blue-veined hand, and as I watched she took a generous drag and blew it out toward the ceiling.

“Don’t smoke in here,” I told her. It was the first thing I could think of. “You’ll set off the alarms.”

“You’re cursing me because I’m smoking?”

“No. I’m cursing you because you stood me up.”

“What?”

Two sneaker-clad feet plunked lightly onto the marble and came to rest outside my stall. “Open up,” she said, rapping at the door. “I want some explanation.”

I slumped down on the toilet seat. First April, now this! Reluctantly I leaned forward and unlocked the door. Maxi stood outside the stall, arms crossed on her chest, waiting for her answers. “I’m from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I began. “I was supposed to interview you. Your little Gestapo-ette told me, after I came all the way up here, that the interview had been canceled and rescheduled with this woman at my office who’s just…” I gulped. “Vomitous,” I arrived at. “So it kind of ruined my day. Not to mention our Sunday section.” I sighed. “But it’s not your fault, I guess. So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have cursed at you.”

“Bloody April,” said Maxi. “She never even told me.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I’m hiding,” said Maxi Ryder, and gave a nervous giggle. “From April, actually.”

In person her voice was soft, cultured. She was wearing bell-bottomed jeans and a scoop-necked pink T-shirt. Her hair was piled into the kind of artless updo that probably took a hairdresser half an hour to construct, ornamented with tiny, sparkling butterfly clips. Like most young female stars I’d met, she was thin to the point of unreality. I could make out the bones of her wrists and forearms, the pale blue tracery of veins along her neck.

Her pouty lips were painted scarlet. Her eyes were carefully lined and shadowed. And her cheeks were streaked with tears.

“Sorry about your interview,” she said.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said again. “So what brings you to these parts? Don’t you have your own bathroom somewhere else?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, and drew a long, shuddering breath. “You know.”

“Well, actually, not being a thin, rich, successful movie star, I probably don’t.”

One corner of her mouth quirked upward, then drew down again into a trembling crimson bow. “Ever had your heart broken?” she asked in a shaky voice.

“Actually, yes,” I said.

She closed her eyes. Impossibly long lashes rested against her pale freckled cheeks, and tears slid out from beneath them.

“It’s unbearable,” she said. “I know how that sounds…”

“No. No. I know what you mean. I know that it feels like that.”

I handed her one of the rolled-up towels I’d grabbed on the way in. She took it, then looked at me. It was, I thought, a test.

“My house is full of things he gave me,” I began, and she nodded vigorously, curls bouncing.

“That’s it,” she said, “that’s right.”

“And it hurts to look at them, and it hurts to put them away.”

Maxi slumped to the bathroom floor and leaned her cheek against the cool marble wall. After a moment’s hesitation, I joined her, struck by the absurdity of it all, and how it would make a great opening for an article: Maxi Ryder, one of the most acclaimed young actresses of her generation, is crying on the bathroom floor.

“My mother always says that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I said.

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

I only had to think about it for a minute. “No. I don’t even think she believes it. I wish I’d never loved him. I wish I’d never met him. Because I think that as good as the good times were, it isn’t worth feeling like this.”

We sat for a minute, side by side.

“What’s your name?”

“Candace Shapiro. Cannie.”

“What was his name?”

“Bruce. And you?”

“I’m Maxi Ryder.

“I know that. I meant, what was his name?”

She made a horrible face. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Everybody knows! Entertainment Weekly did a whole story. With a flow chart!”

“Well, I was very explicitly forbidden from even mentioning it.” Plus, there was more than one candidate, but it didn’t seem prudent to say so.

“Kevin,” she whispered. Which would be Kevin Britton, her costar from Trembling.

“Still Kevin?”

“Still Kevin, always Kevin,” she said sadly, fumbling for another cigarette. “Kevin who I can’t forget, even after I’ve tried everything. Drink… drugs… work… other men…”

Jeez. I suddenly felt very innocent.

“What do you do?”

I knew what she was asking me. “Oh, you know. Probably the same kinds of things as you.” I laid one hand across my forehead, affecting world-weary hauteur. “I started by running off to my private island with Brad Pitt, trying to forget the pain by buying up llama ranches in New England…”

She punched my arm. Her clenched fist felt like a puff of air. “Seriously! Maybe it’ll be something I haven’t thought of.”

“Probably just more stuff that doesn’t really work. Baths, showers, bike rides…”

“I can’t go for bike rides,” she said morosely.

“Because of the paparazzi?”

“No. I never learned how.”

“Really? Bruce, my ex-boyfriend, couldn’t ride a bike either…” My voice trailed off.

“God, don’t you hate that?” she asked.

“The way even completely unrelated things remind you of the person you’re trying to forget? Yes. I hate it.” I looked at her. With her face framed by the bathroom wall marble, she looked ready for her close-up. Whereas I was probably a blotchy-faced, runny-nosed wreck. No justice, I thought. “What do you do?” I asked.

“Invest,” Maxi said instantly. “Manage my money. And my parents’ money, too.” She sighed. “I used to manage Kevin’s money. I wish he’d given me a little notice that he was going to dump me. I’d have sunk him so deep into Planet Hollywood that he’d be taking guest-shots on the WB just to make his rent.”

I considered Maxi with newfound respect. “So you, like…” I racked my brains for the appropriate vocabulary. “Day-trade?’

She shook her head. “Nope. I don’t have time to be geeking around on computers all day. I pick stocks, and I look for investment opportunities.” She stood and stretched, her hands on her nonexistent hips. “I buy real estate.”

My respect was turning into awe. “Like houses?”

“Yup. Buy them, have a crew renovate them, sell them at a profit, or live in them a while, if I’m between movies.”

I felt my fingers reaching for my pen and notebook, creeping almost of their own accord. Maxi as real-estate mogul was something I hadn’t read in any of the innumerable profiles I’d plowed through. It would make great copy. “Hey,” I ventured. “Do you think… I mean, I know they said you were busy, but maybe… could we talk for a few minutes? So I can write my story?”

“Sure,” said Maxi, shrugging, and looked around as if realizing for the first time that we were in a bathroom. “Let’s get out of here. Want to?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be heading to Australia? That’s what April said.”

Maxi looked exasperated. “I’m not leaving till tomorrow. April’s a liar.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“No, really… oh. Oh, I see. You’re kidding.” And she smiled at me. “I forget how people are.”

“Well, generally, they’re bigger than you.”

She sighed, gazed at herself, and dragged deeply on her cigarette. “When I turn forty,” she said, “I swear, I’m giving this all up, and I’m going to build a fortress on an island with a moat and electrified fences, and I’m going to let my hair go gray and eat custard until I have fourteen chins.”

“That was not,” I pointed out, “what you told Mirabella. You told them you wanted to appear in one quality movie a year, and raise your children in a country farmhouse.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You read that?”

“I’ve read everything about you,” I told her.

“Lies. All lies,” she said, almost cheerfully. “Today, for example. I’m to go to some place called Mooma…”

“Moomba,” I corrected.

“… and have drinks with Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck. Or maybe both. And we’re supposed to look very secretive and lovey, and somebody’s going to call Page 6, and we’re to be photographed, and then we’re going to go to some restaurant that probably paid April off to have dinner, except of course I can’t actually have dinner, because, God forbid, I ever get photographed with something actually in my mouth, or with my mouth open, or basically in any manner that could give any suggestion that I ever do anything with my mouth besides kiss men…”

“… and smoke.”

“Not that, either. The cancer lobby, you know. Which is how I got away from April. Told her I needed a cig.”

“So you really want to pass up drinks and dinner with Ben… or Matt”

“Oh, it doesn’t stop there. Then I’m supposed to be seen out dancing at some bar with pigs in its name…”

“Hogs and Heifers?”

“That’s it. Dancing there till some ungodly hour, and then, and only then, am I permitted some sleep. And that’s after I take off my brassiere and dance on the bar while I’m twirling it over my head.”

“Wow. They really, um, arrange all that for you?”

She pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. Sure enough: 4 P.M., Moomba; 7 P.M., Tandoor; 11 -?, Hogs and Heifers. She reached into another pocket and produced a very small black lace Wonderbra. She wrapped the Wonderbra around her hand and started swinging it around her head while pumping her hips in a parody of a party girl’s bump and grind. “See,” she said, “they even made me practice. If it was up to me I’d sleep all day…”

“Me, too. And watch Iron Chef.”

Maxi looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never been home alone on a Friday night. It’s this TV show where there’s this reclusive millionaire, and he’s got these three chefs…”

“The Iron Chefs,” Maxi guessed.

“Right. And every week they have cooking battles with some challenger chef who comes in, and the eccentric millionaire gives them a theme ingredient that they have to cook with, and half the time it’s something that starts off alive, like squid or giant eel…”

Maxi was smiling, and nodding, and looking like she couldn’t wait to see the first episode. Or maybe she was just acting, I reminded myself. That was, after all, her job. Maybe she acted this excited and friendly and, well, nice, every time she met someone new, and then forgot they’d ever existed as soon as she moved on to the next movie.

“It’s fun,” I concluded. “Also free. Cheaper than renting a movie. I taped it last night, and I’m going to watch it when I get home.”

“I’m never home on Fridays or Saturdays,” she said sadly.

“Well, I almost always am. Believe me, you’re not missing much.”

Maxi Ryder grinned at me. “Cannie,” she said, “know what I really want to do?”

And that was how I wound up in the Bliss day spa, naked on my belly, next to one of the most acclaimed young movie stars of my generation, talking about my failed love life while a man named Ricardo slathered Active Green Clay Mud all over my back.

Maxi and I had slipped out a back door of the hotel and caught a cab to the spa, where the receptionist very snippily informed us that they were booked all day, were booked for weeks, in fact, until Maxi slipped off her sunglasses and made about three seconds’ worth of significant eye contact and the service improved by about 3,000 percent.

“This is so great,” I told her, for about the fifth time. And it really was. The bed was cushioned with about half a dozen towels, and each one of them was easily as thick as my comforter. Soothing music played so softly in the background I thought it was a CD, until I’d opened my eyes long enough to see that there was an actual woman with an actual harp in the corner, half-hidden behind a lacy billow of curtains.

Maxi nodded. “Wait until they start with the showers and the salt rub.” She closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she murmured. “All I want to do is sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” I told her. “I mean, I start, but then I wake up…”

“… and the bed’s so empty.”

“Well, I actually have a little dog, so the bed isn’t empty.”

“Oh, I’d love a dog! But I can’t. Too much travel.”

“You can come hang out with Nifkin any time,” I said, knowing that it was highly unlikely that Maxi would be dropping by for an iced cappuccino and a frolic in the dog-crap-studded South Philadelphia dog park. Then again, I reasoned, as Ricardo gently rolled me over and started smearing my front, this was pretty unlikely, too.

“So what’s next?” I asked. “Are you blowing off your entire agenda?”

“I think I am,” she said. “I just want one day and one night to live like a normal person.”

This hardly seemed like to the time to point out that normal people did not get to drop a thousand dollars on a single trip to a spa.

“What else do you want to do?”

Maxi considered. “I don’t know. It’s been so long… what would you do if you had a day to kill in New York?”

“Am I me in this scenario, or am I you?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, do I have unlimited resources and recognition issues, or am I just plain old me?”

“Let’s do plain old you first.”

“Hmm. Well, I’d go to the ticket outlet in Times Square and try to get a half-price ticket for a Broadway show tonight. Then I’d go to the Steve Madden store in Chelsea and see what was on sale. And I’d look in all the galleries, and I’d buy six-for-a-dollar barrettes at the flea market on Columbus, and I’d have dinner at Virgil’s, and go to the show.”

“That sounds fantastic! Let’s do it!” Maxi sat straight up, naked, covered in mud, with something thick slicking back her hair, and pulled the cucumber slices off her eyes. “Where are my shoes?” She looked down at herself. “Where are my clothes?”

“Lie down,” I said with a laugh. Maxi lay down again.

“What’s Steve Madden?”

“It’s a great shoe store. One time I wandered in there, and it was the No Big Feet sale. All the size tens were half-price. I think it was the happiest day of my life, footwear-wise.”

“That sounds so great,” Maxi said dreamily. “Now, then. What’s Virgil’s?”

“Barbecue,” I said. “They do these great ribs and fried chicken, and biscuits with maple butter… but you’re a vegetarian, right?”

“Only on the record,” said Maxi. “I love ribs.”

“Do you think we can do it? I mean, won’t people recognize you? And what about April?” I looked at her shyly. “And… I mean, not to pressure you or anything, but if we could talk about your movie for a little while… so I can write my story, and my editor doesn’t kill me.”

“But of course,” said Maxi grandly. “Ask me anything at all.”

“Later,” I said. “I don’t want to take advantage.”

“Oh, go ’head!” She giggled merrily, and started writing my article: “Maxi Ryder is naked in a downtown spa, doused in aromatic extracts, musing on her lost love.”

I heaved myself onto one elbow so that I could look at her.

“Do you really want to get into the lost love thing? I mean, that was the one thing that April was a demon about. She only wanted reporters to ask you about your work.”

“But the thing about being an actor is that you get to take your life – your pain – and make it work for you.” She took what sounded like a deep cleansing breath. “All things serve a purpose,” she said. “I know that if I’m ever called upon to play a woman scorned… say, dumped publicly on a talk show… I’ll be ready.”

“You think that’s bad? My ex-boyfriend writes the men’s sex column for Moxie.”

“Really?” she asked. “I was in Moxie last fall. ‘Maxi on Moxie.’ It was pretty stupid. Does your ex ever write about you?”

I sighed miserably. “I’m his favorite topic. It’s not a lot of fun.”

“What?” asked Maxi. “Did he talk about something personal?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My weight, for starters.”

Maxi sat straight up again. “ ‘Loving a Larger Woman?’ That was you?”

Damn. Had everyone in the world read that stupid thing?

“That was me.”

“Wow.” Maxi looked at me – not, I hope, to try to figure out how much I weighed, and whether it could genuinely have been more than Bruce. “I read it on the plane,” she said apologetically. “I don’t read Moxie, normally, but it was a really long flight, and I got bored, so I read, like, three months’ worth”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “I’m sure a lot of people read it.”

She lay down again. “Were you the one who called him the human bidet?” she asked.

Even under the mud, I was blushing again. “Never to his face,” I said.

“Well, it could be worse. I got dumped on a Barbara Walters special,” said Maxi.

“I know,” I said. “I saw.”

We lay in silence as the attendants sprayed the mud off of us with a half-dozen hoses. I felt like a very pampered, very exotic pet… that, or a particularly expensive cut of meat. Then we were covered with coarse salt, scrubbed down, showered off again, then wrapped in warm robes and sent off for facials.

“I think you had it worse than I did,” I reasoned, as we let our clay masks dry. “I mean, when Kevin talked about ending a long relationship, everyone who watched knew that he meant you. But with the article, the only people who knew that C. was me were…”

“Everyone who knew you,” said Maxi.

“Yeah. Pretty much.” I sighed. Between the seaweed and the salt and the New Age music and the warm and gentle almond-oiled hands of Charles the masseur, I felt like I was wrapped in some delicious cloud, miles above the world, away from telephones that didn’t ring and resentful coworkers and snooty publicists. Away from my weight… so much so that I wasn’t even worried what Charles amp; Company were thinking as they rubbed and oiled and rolled me around. There was just me and the sadness, but even that didn’t feel very heavy just then. It just felt there, like my nose, like the scar over my belly button I got from picking at a chicken pox scab when I was six. Just another part of me.

Maxi grabbed my hand. “We’re friends, right?” she said. And I thought, for a moment, that she probably didn’t mean it – that this was a version of her quickie, six-week, movie-set friendships. But I didn’t care.

I squeezed back. “Yes,” I said. “We’re friends.”

“You know what I think?” Maxi asked me. She raised a single finger-tip. Instantly, there were four more shots of tequila in front of us, each one paid for, no doubt, by a different adoring guy. She picked up a glass and looked at me. I did the same, and we gulped tequila. I set the glass down, wincing at the burn. We’d wound up at Hogs and Heifers after all. We’d had a late lunch at Virgil’s, where we’d sampled ribs, barbecued chicken, banana pudding, and cheese grits. Then we’d each bought about six pairs of Steve Madden shoes, reasoning that although we might feel fat, our feet didn’t. Then it was on to the Beauty Bar, where we’d bought all manner of cosmetics (I stuck mostly to sand-colored eyeshadow and concealing cream. Maxi splurged on everything with glitter). It all added up to much more than I’d planned on spending on either shoes or makeup in the next year, and possibly even the next several years, but I figured, when’s the next time I’ll be shopping with a movie star?

“You know what I think?” Maxi repeated.

“What’s that?”

“I think that we actually have a lot in common. It’s the body thing,” she said.

I squinted at her. “Huh?”

“We’re ruled by our bodies,” she pronounced, and sipped at a beer that someone had sent over. To me, this sounded very profound. This, perhaps, was because I was profoundly drunk. “You’re stuck with a body that you think men don’t want…”

“It’s a little more than a theory at this point,” I said, but Maxi wasn’t about to have her monologue interrupted.

“And I’m afraid that if I start eating things I like, I’ll stop looking the way I look, and nobody will want me. Worse than that,” she said, glaring through the cigarette haze, “nobody will pay me. So I’m stuck, too. But what we’re really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need,” she said, pounding the bar for emphasis, “is to just stop thinking of ourselves as bodies and start thinking of ourselves as people.”

I stared at her admiringly. “Thass very deep.”

Maxi took a deep swallow of beer. “Heard it on Oprah.”

I did another shot. “Oprah’s deep. But I have to say that all things considered, I’d rather be trapped in your body than mine. At least I could wear bikinis.”

“But don’t you see? We’re both in prison. Prisons of Flesh.”

I giggled. Maxi looked offended. “What, you don’t agree?”

“No,” I said, snorting, “I just think that Prisons of Flesh sounds like the name of a porno movie.”

“Fine,” Maxi said when she’d stopped laughing. “But I have a valid point.”

“Of course you do,” I told her. “I know that I shouldn’t feel the way I do about how I look. I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.” I sighed. “But you know what I want even more than that?” Maxi looked at me expectantly. I hesitated, then took another tequila. “I want to forget about Bruce.”

“I have a theory about that, too,” Maxi announced triumphantly. “My theory,” she said, “is that hate works.” She clinked her glass against mine. We did the shot, and upended the glasses on the sticky bar top, beneath the gently swaying clothesline of brassieres that had once cupped the breasts of the famous.

“I can’t hate him,” I said sadly. Suddenly my lips felt as though they were forming words a good foot or two away from my face, like they’d decided to just detach themselves and head for greener pastures. It was a common side effect when I’d been enjoying too many libations. That, and a liquid sensation in my knees and wrists and elbows, like my joints were coming unhinged. When I got drunk I started remembering things. And right now, because there was Grateful Dead on the jukebox (“Cassidy,” I thought), what I was remembering was how we’d gone to pick up Bruce’s friend George to go to a Dead show, and while we were waiting we’d slipped into the study and I’d given him a very quick, extremely hot blow job underneath the stuffed deer’s head mounted on the wall. Physically I was sitting at Hogs and Heifers, but in my head I was on my knees in front of him, my hands cupping his ass, his knees pressing my chest as he trembled and gasped that he loved me, thinking that I was made for this, made for nothing but this.

“Sure you can,” Maxi urged, yanking me out of the basement and into the tequila-soaked present. “Tell me the worst thing about him.”

“He was really sloppy.”

She crinkled her nose adorably. “That’s not that bad.”

“Oh, you have no idea! He had all this hair, see, and it would get in the shower drain, and he’d never clean his shower, but every once in a while he’d just, like, scoop up a clump of this disgusting, awful, soap-scummy hair and, like, park it in a corner of the tub. The first time I saw it I screamed.”

We did another shot. Maxi’s cheeks were flushed bright, her eyes were gleaming.

“Also,” I continued, “also he had disgusting toenails.” I burped, as delicately as I could, against the back of my hand. “They were all yellow and thick and raggedy…”

“Fungus,” said Maxi knowledgeably.

“And then there was his minibar,” I said, warming to the task. “Every time his parents went on a plane, they’d bring him those mini-bottles of vodka and scotch. He’d keep them in a shoebox, and whenever anyone would come over for a drink, he’d say, ‘Have something from the minibar.’ ” I paused, considering. “Actually, that was kind of cute.”

“I was going to say,” agreed Maxi.

“But it got annoying after a while. I mean, I’d come over, I’d have a terrible headache, I’d just want a vodka and tonic, and off he’d go to the minibar. I think he was just too cheap to shell out for an actual bottle of his own.”

“Tell me,” asked Maxi. “Was he really good in bed?”

I tried to prop my head in my hand, but my elbow wasn’t doing its job, and I wound up almost bouncing my forehead off the bar. Maxi laughed at me. The bartender scowled. I asked for a glass of water. “You wanna know the truth?”

“No, I want you to lie to me. I’m a movie star. Everyone else does.”

“The truth,” I said, “the truth is that…”

Maxi was laughing, leaning in close. “C’mon, Cannie, let me have it.”

“Well, he was very willing to try new things, which I appreciated…”

“Come on. No editori… editorial…” She closed her eyes, and her mouth. “No spin. I asked a simple question. Was he any good?”

“The truth” I tried again. “The truth is that he was very… small.”

Her eyes widened. “Small, you mean… down there?”

“Small,” I repeated. “Tiny. Microscopic. Infinitesimal!” There. If I could say that word, I couldn’t be as wasted as I thought I was. “I mean, not when it was hard. When it was hard it was pretty normal-sized. But when it was soft, it was like it telescoped back into his body, and it just looked like this little…” I tried to say it, but I was laughing too hard.

“What? C’mon, Cannie. Stop laughing. Sit up straight. Tell me!”

“Hairy acorn,” I finally managed. Maxi whooped. Tears came to her eyes, and somehow I was sideways, my head in her lap. “Hairy acorn!” she repeated.

“Shh!” I shushed her, trying to maneuver myself upright.

“Hairy acorn!”

“Maxi!”

“What? Do you think he’s going to hear me?”

“He lives in New Jersey,” I said very seriously.

Maxi climbed onto the bar and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Attention, bar patrons,” she called. “Hairy Acorn resides in New Jersey.”

“If you’re not gonna show us your tits, then get off the bar!” shouted a drunk guy in a cowboy hat. Maxi very elegantly gave him the finger, then climbed down.

“It could almost be a proper name,” she said. “Harry Acorn. Harry A. Corn.”

“You can’t tell anynone. Anyone,” I slurred.

“Don’t worry. I won’t. And I seriously doubt that me and Mr. Corn travel in the same circles.”

“He lives in New Jersey,” I said again, and Maxi laughed until tequila came out of her nose.

“So basically,” she said, once she’d stopped spluttering, “you’re pining for a guy with a small willy who treated you badly?”

“He didn’t treat me badly,” I said. “He was very sweet… and attentive… and…”

But she wasn’t listening. “Sweet and attentive are a dime a dozen. And so, I’m sorry to inform you, are small willies. You can do better.”

“I have to get over him.”

“So get over him! I insist!”

“What’s the secret?”

“Hate!” said Maxi. “Like I said before.”

But I couldn’t hate him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Against my will, I remembered something tremendously tender. How once, around Christmas, I’d told him to pretend he was Santa Claus, and I pretended I had come to the mall to have my picture taken. How I’d perched on his lap, taking care to plant my feet firmly on the floor so I wouldn’t rest all my weight on him, and whispered in his ear, “Is it true that Santa comes just once a year?” How he’d laughed, and how he’d gasped when I put one hand against his chest and shoved him flat back on the bed and snuggled against him while he performed an impromptu and doubtlessly off-key rendition of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

“Here,” said Maxi, shoving a shot of tequila into my hand. “Medicine.”

I gulped it down. She grabbed my chin and stared into my eyes. It looked like there were two of her – saucer-blue eyes, cascading hair, the geometrically perfect sprinkling of freckles, the chin just a shade too pointed, so that she wouldn’t be perfect, but overwhelmingly endearing instead. I blinked, and she turned into one person again. Maxi studied me carefully. “You still love him,” she said. I bowed my head. “Yes,” I whispered.

She let go of my chin. My head hit the bar. Maxi pulled me back upright by my barrettes. The bartender was looking concerned. “I think maybe she’s had enough,” he said. Maxi ignored him.

“Maybe you should call him,” she said.

“I can’t,” I told her, suddenly acutely aware that I was very, very drunk. “I’ll make a fool of myself.”

“There are worse things than just looking foolish,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Losing someone you love, because you’re too proud to call and lay it on the line,” she said. “That’s worse. Now: What’s his number?”

“Maxi…”

“Give me the number.”

“This is a really bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because…” I sighed, suddenly feeling all the tequila pressing against my skull. “Because what if he doesn’t want me?”

“Then it’s better that you know that, once and for all. We can go in like surgeons and cauterize the wound. And I’ll teach you the restorative powers of hating his guts.” She held out the phone. “Now. The number.”

I took the phone. It was a tiny thing, a toy of a telephone, no longer than my thumb. I unfolded it clumsily, and squinted, poking at the digits with my pinkie.

He picked up on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hey, Bruce. It’s Cannie.”

“Hi-ii,” he said slowly, sounding surprised.

“I know this is kinda weird, but I’m in New York, in this bar, and you’ll never guess who I’m here with…”

I paused for a breath. He didn’t say anything.

“I have to tell you something…”

“Um, Cannie…”

“No, I just want, I just need… you just have to lishen. Listen,” I finally managed. The words came in a rush. “Breaking up with you was a mistake. I know that now. And Bruce, I’m so sorry… and I miss you so much, and it’s just getting worse and worse every day, and I know I don’t deserve it, but if you could gimme ’nother chance I’d be so good to you…”

I could hear the springs creak as he shifted his weight on the bed. And someone else’s voice in the background. A female voice.

I squinted at the clock on the wall, behind the dangling bras. It was one in the morning.

“But I’m innerupting,” I said dumbly.

“Hey, Cannie, this actually isn’t such a good time…”

“I thought you needed space,” I said, “because of your father dying. But that’s not it, is it? It’s me. You don’t want me.”

I heard a bumping sound, then a far-off, murmured conversation. He’d probably put his hand over the receiver.

“Who is she?” I yelled.

“Look, is there a good time when I can call you back?” Bruce asked.

“Are you gonna write about her?” I cried. “Does she get to be an initial in your wonderful, fabulous column? Is she good in bed?”

“Cannie,” Bruce said slowly, “let me call you back.”

“Don’t. Don’t worry. You don’t have to,” I said, and started stabbing at buttons on the telephone until I found the one that switched it off.

I handed the phone back to Maxi, who was staring at me gravely.

“That didn’t sound good,” she said.

I felt the room spinning. I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt like I’d never be able to smile again in my life, that, somewhere in my heart it was always going to be one o’clock in the morning, and I’d be calling the man I loved, and there’d be another woman in his bed.

“Cannie? Can you hear me? Cannie, what should I do?”

I lifted my head from the bar. I rubbed my eyes with my fist. I drew a deep shuddering breath. “Get me more tequila,” I said, “and teach me how to hate.”

Later – much later – in the cab back to the hotel, I leaned my head on Maxi’s shoulder, mostly because I couldn’t hold it up. I knew that this was it: the point where I had nothing left to lose, nothing left at all. Or maybe it was that I’d lost the most important thing already. And what did it matter? I thought. I reached into my purse, fumbling for the somewhat tequila-sticky copy of my screenplay that I’d tucked inside a million years ago, thinking that I’d revise the final scenes on the train ride home.

“Here,” I slurred, shoving the screenplay into Maxi’s hands.

“Oh, really, for me?” Maxi cooed, going into what sounded like her standard accepting-a-gift-from-‌a-stranger spiel. “Really, Cannie, you shouldn’t have.”

“No,” I said, as a brief ray of sense poked through the alcohol fog. “No, I probably shouldn’t have, but I’m gonna.”

Maxi, meanwhile, was leafing drunkenly through the pages. “Whazzis?”

I hiccuped and figured, since I’ve come this far, why lie? “It’s a screenplay that I wrote. I thought maybe you would like to read it, like maybe on the plane if you get bored again.” I hiccuped some more. “I don’t wanna impose…”

Maxi’s eyelids had drooped to half-mast. She shoved the screenplay into her little black backpack, mangling the first thirty pages in the process. “Don’ worry about it.”

“You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to,” I said. “And if you read it and you don’t like it, you can tell me. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings.” I sighed. “Nobody else does.”

Maxi leaned over and enfolded me in a clumsy hug. I could feel the bones of her elbows jabbing me as she gripped me tightly. “Poor Cannie,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I’m gonna take care of you.”

I stared at her, as dubious as I was drunk. “You are?”

She nodded violently, with her ringlets bouncing around her face. “I’ll take care of you,” she said, “if you’ll take care of me. If you’ll be my friend, then we’ll take care of each other.”

NINE

I woke up in a hotel suite, in a very large bed, in my unfashionable black dress. Someone had taken off my sandals and set them neatly on the floor.

Sun was slanting through the windows, making bright stripes on the ivory-colored carpet and the pink down comforter that felt light as a kiss on my body. I lifted my head. Youch. Big mistake. I gingerly set my head back down on the pillows and closed my eyes again. It felt like someone had welded an iron band around my scalp and was tightening it slowly. It felt like my face was shrinking. It felt like there was something taped to my forehead.

I lifted my hands, removed a piece of paper that had, indeed, been taped to my forehead, and began to read.

Dear Cannie,

Sorry I had to leave you in such a state, but my plane left very early this morning (and April is livid with me… but that’s okay. It was worth it!).

I feel very badly about what happened last night. I know that I pushed you into calling him, and that it was terrible news to receive. I can imagine how you’re feeling now. I have been there myself (in terms of the tequila and the heartbreak both!).

Why don’t you call me tomorrow, when you’re back home and, I hope, feeling better? My number’s below. I do hope you’ll forgive me, and that we are still friends.

There will be a car waiting for you out front all day long, to take you home – my treat. (Actually, April’s!) Please call soon.

Sincerely,

Maxi Ryder

And then there were a string of telephone numbers: Australia. Office. England. Pager. Cell phone. Fax. Alternate Fax. E-mail.

I made my way gingerly to the bathroom, where I was noisily and thoroughly sick. Maxi had left aspirin on the sink, along with what looked like several hundred dollars of unopened Kiehl’s grooming products, and two large bottles of Evian water, still chilled. I swallowed three aspirin, sipped carefully at the water, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Ugh. Not good. Pale, pasty, blotchy skin, greasy hair, black-circled eyes, and all the makeup I’d tried at the Beauty Bar had smeared everywhere. I was weighing the pain-to-benefit ratio of a long hot shower when there was a gentle knock at the door.

“Room service,” said the waiter, and wheeled in a cart. Hot coffee, hot tea, four kinds of juice, and dry toast. “Feel better,” he said sympathetically. “And Ms. Ryder made arrangements for late checkout.”

“How late?” I asked. My voice sounded creaky.

“Late as you like,” he said. “Take your time. Enjoy.”

He opened the curtains, displaying a panoramic view of the city.

“Wow,” I said. The sunlight felt like it was stabbing my eyes, but the power of that view was undeniable. I could see Central Park spread out below me, dotted with people and trees, with their leaves turning orange and gold. The the stretch of high-rises in the distance. Then the river. Then New Jersey. “He lives in New Jersey,” I heard myself saying.

“It’s the penthouse suite,” he said, and left me there.

I poured myself a cup of tea, added sugar, attempted a few bites of toast. The bathtub, I observed sadly, was big enough for two – in fact, it was probably big enough for three, if the occupants were so inclined. The rich are different, I reasoned, and ran the water as hot as I could stand it, dumped in some frothing lotion guaranteed to possess so many restorative powers that I should rise from the tub reborn, or at least much better looking, and pulled my sundress off over my head.

My second mistake of the morning. There were mirrors all over the bathroom, mirrors offering views you couldn’t usually find outside of a department store. And the terrain was not looking good. I closed my eyes to blot out the vision of stretch marks and cellulite. “I have strong tanned legs,” I recited to myself. We’d practiced positive self-talk the week before in Fat Class. “I have beautiful shoulders.” Then I slipped into the tub.

So, I thought bitterly. So he had someone else. So what did I think would happen? He’s Jewish, he’s got an education, he’s tall and he’s straight and he’s easy on the eyes, and somebody was bound to snatch him up.

I rolled over, sending a cascade of water to the bathroom floor.

But he loved me, I thought. And was always telling me so. He thought I was perfect… that we were perfect together. And ten minutes later he’s got someone else in his bed? Doing the things he swore he only ever wanted me to do?

The voice returned, implacable. But you were the one who wanted a break. And, What did you expect?

“Philadelphia, right, miss?” The driver was Russian, and was actually wearing a chauffeur’s cap. The car, as it turned out, was a limousine, with a backseat bigger than my bed, and probably bigger than my bedroom, too. I peeked inside. There was the requisite television set, a VCR, a fancy-looking stereo… and, of course, a bar. Different liquors glittering in cut-crystal decanters, and a row of empty glasses. My stomach rolled over lazily.

“Could you excuse me?” I asked, and hurried back into the lobby. Hotel lobby bathrooms are also great places to get sick.

The chauffeur looked amused when I made it back to the car. “You want to take the Turnpike?”

“Whatever’s easiest,” I said, slipping into the seat, while he held the door open and loaded my backpack, shoe boxes, and shopping bags from the Beauty Bar into the trunk. There was a telephone in the backseat, next to the stereo and the television set, and I grabbed it, suddenly, sweatily desperate to know whether Bruce had tried to get in touch with me last night. There was a single message on my machine. “Hey, Cannie, it’s Bruce, returning your call. I’m going home for a few days, so maybe I’ll try you later this week.” No I’m sorry. No It was all a bad dream. The call had come at eleven in the morning, probably after he’d had time for a morning go-round and a Belgian waffle with Miss Squeaky Springs, who would, thanks to my training, never refer to him as the Human Bidet, and who probably did not weigh more than he did.

I closed my eyes. It hurt so much.

I set the phone back as we barreled down the New Jersey Turnpike at eighty miles an hour, right past the exit that would take me to his door. I tapped two of my fingers against the window as we sped past. Hello and good-bye.

Sunday passed in a blur of tears and vomit at Samantha’s house, where Nifkin and I had decamped, the better not to hear the telephone not ringing. Samantha, I could tell, was doing her damndest not to say she’d told me so. She lasted longer than I would have – all the way until Sunday night, when she finally ran out of questions to ask about Maxi and turned to the topic of Bruce, and the disastrous telephone call.

“You wanted to take a break for a reason,” she told me. We were sitting at the Pink Rose Pastry Shop. She was nibbling a macaroon. I was forking my way through a baseball-shaped and baseball-sized éclair, the best legal antidote for human misery I’d found, figuring that it didn’t matter, because I hadn’t eaten anything since the afternoon before, in New York, with Maxi.

“I know,” I said, “I just can’t remember what it was anymore.”

“And you did think things through before you did it, right?”

I nodded.

“So you had to at least consider the possibility that he’d find somebody else?”

It felt like an impossibly long time ago, but I had considered it. At one point I’d even hoped for it, hoped for him to find some cute little Deadhead girl with ankle bracelets and armpit hair who’d stay up late and get high with him while I worked hard, sold my screenplays, and made Time magazine’s “Thirty Under Thirty” list. Once upon a time, I’d been able to contemplate that scenario without tears, nausea, and/or feelings that I wanted to die, wanted to kill him, or wanted to kill him and then die.

“There were reasons things weren’t working out,” Samantha said.

“Tell me again what they were.”

“He didn’t like to go to movies,” said Samantha.

“I go to movies with you.”

“He didn’t like to go anywhere!”

“So it’d kill me to stay home?” I poked the éclair so hard it toppled over, oozing custard. “He was a really good guy. A good, sweet guy. And I was a fool.”

“Cannie, he compared you to Monica Lewinsky in a national magazine!”

“Well, that’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s not like he cheated on me.”

“I know what this is about,” said Samantha.

“What?”

“It’s about wanting what you can’t have. It’s the law of the universe: He loved you, you felt bored and suffocated. Now he’s moved on, and you’re desperate to have him back. But think about it, Cannie… has anything really changed?”

I wanted to tell her that I had – that I’d gotten an up-close look at what else was out there in my personal dating universe, and that its name was Steve, it wore Tevas, and it didn’t even consider a night out with me to be a date.

“You’d just wind up dumping him again, and that’s really not fair.”

“Why do I have to be fair?” I moaned. “Why can’t I just be selfish and lousy and rotten, like everybody else?”

“Because you’re a good person,” she said. “Unfortunate as it may seem.”

“How do you know?” I challenged her.

“Okay. You’re walking Nifkin and you go past your car and you notice that if you pulled it up a few feet there’d be another parking space, instead of just one of those annoying gaps that looks like a parking space but isn’t. Do you move the car?”

“Well, yeah… wouldn’t you?”

“That’s not the point. That’s the evidence. You’re a good person.”

“I don’t want to be a good person. I want to drive to New Jersey and kick that bitch out of his bed…”

“I know,” she said. “But you can’t.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Because you’ll wind up in jail, and I’m not going to take care of your weird little dog forever.”

“Fine.” I sighed.

The waiter came by, glancing at our plates. “Finished?”

I nodded. “All done. No more,” I said.

Sam told me I could stay over if I wanted to, but I decided that I couldn’t hide forever, so I hitched up Nifkin and went back home. I hauled myself up the stairs, with my hands full of Saturday’s mail, and there he was, right in front of my door. I saw him in stages – his scuffed-up, second-best sneakers… then mismatched athletic socks… then tanned, hairy legs came into view as I ascended. Sweatpants, an old college T-shirt, his goatee, his dirty-blond ponytail, his face. Ladies and gentlemen, fresh from his engagement with the Spring Squeaker, Bruce Guberman.

“Cannie?”

I felt so strange, as if my heart were trying to sink and rise at the same time. Or maybe it was just more nausea.

“Look,” he said, “I, um, I’m sorry about last night.”

“Nothing to apologize for,” I said breezily, shouldering past him and unlocking the door. “What brings you here?”

He walked inside, keeping his eyes on his shoelaces and his hands in his pockets. “I’m on my way down to Baltimore, actually.”

“How nice for you,” I said, giving Nifkin a stern look in hopes that it would stop him from jumping up toward Bruce, his tail wagging triple-time. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said.

“How nice for me,” I replied.

“I was going to tell you. I wanted to tell you before you read about it,” he said.

Oh, terrific. I was going to have to live it and read about it, too? “Read about it where?” I asked.

“In Moxie,” he said.

“Actually, Moxie’s not high on my reading list,” I told him. “I already know how to give a good blow job. As you may remember.”

He took a deep breath, and I knew what it was, knew what was coming, the way you can feel the air pressure change and know that a storm’s on the way. “I wanted to tell you that I’m kind of seeing somebody.”

“Oh, really? You mean you didn’t have your eyes shut the whole time last night?”

He didn’t laugh.

“What’s her name?”

“Cannie,” he said gently.

“I refuse to believe that you found another girl named Cannie. Now tell me. C’mon. Age? Rank? Serial number?” I asked jokingly, hearing my voice as if from a million miles away.

“She’s thirty-one… she’s a kindergarten teacher. She’s got a dog, too.”

“That’s great,” I said sarcastically. “I bet we have lots and lots of other things in common. Let me guess… I’ll bet she’s got breasts! And hair!”

“Cannie…”

And then, because it was the only thing I could think of, “Where’d she go to school?”

“Um… Montclair State.”

Great. Older, poorer, more dependent, less intelligent. I was dying to ask if she was blond, too, just to make the run of clichés complete.

“Do you love her?” I blurted instead.

“Cannie…”

“Never mind. I’m sorry. I had no right to ask you that. I’m sorry.” And then, before I could stop myself, I asked, “Did you tell her about me?”

He nodded. “Of course I did.”

“Well, what did you say?” A horrible thought struck me. “Did you tell her about my mom?”

Bruce nodded again, looking puzzled. “Why? What’s the big deal?”

I shut my eyes, assaulted by a sudden vision of Bruce and his new girl in his wide, warm bed, his arm wrapped companionably around her, telling my family secrets. “Her mother’s gay, you know,” he’d say, and the new girl would give a wise, professionally compassionate kindergarten-teacher nod, all the while thinking what a freak I must be.

From the bedroom, I heard choking noises. “Excuse me,” I murmured, and ran into the bedroom, where Nifkin was busily regurgitating a Baggie. I cleaned up the mess and walked back to the living room. Bruce was standing in front of my couch. He hadn’t sat down, hadn’t so much as touched anything. I could tell just from looking at him how desperately he wanted to be back in his car with the windows rolled down and the Springsteen cranked up… to be away from me.

“Are you okay?”

I took a deep breath. I wish you were back with me, I thought. I wish I didn’t have to hear this. I wish we’d never broken up. I wish we’d never met.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m glad for you.”

We were both quiet then.

“I hope we can be friends,” said Bruce.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well,” he said, and paused, and I knew that he had nothing left to say to me, and that there was really only one thing he wanted to hear.

And so I said it. “Good-bye, Bruce,” I said, and opened the door, and stood there, waiting, until he walked out.

Then it was Monday, and I was back at work, feeling both queasy and abidingly dumb. I was shuffling things around on my desk, half-heartedly going through my mail, which featured the usual spate of complaints from Old People, Angry, plus a collection of bitter missives from Howard Stern fans who were most displeased with the review I’d given his latest on-air venture. I was wondering whether I could simply come up with a form letter to the seventeen guys who’d accused me of being ugly, old, and jealous of Howard Stern, and signed themselves “Baba Booey,” when Gabby sauntered over.

“How’d it go with Maxi Whosit?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, giving her my best bland smile.

Gabby raised her eyebrows. “ ’Cause I heard through the grapevine that she wasn’t doing any interviews with print reporters. Just TV.”

“Not to worry.”

But Gabby was looking worried. Extremely worried. She’d probably scheduled Maxi as the main item for tomorrow’s column – just for the sheer joy of undercutting me – and now she was going to wind up scrambling to fill the space. Scrambling was not something Gabby did well.

“So… you talked to her?”

“For about an hour,” I said. “Great stuff. Really great. We really hit it off. I think,” I said, drawing the words out to prolong the torture, “I think we might even be friends.”

Gabby’s mouth fell open. I could tell she was trying to figure out whether to ask if anyone had mentioned her planned chat with Maxi, or to just hope I hadn’t learned about it.

“Thanks for asking, though,” I said sweetly. “It’s so nice of you to look out for me like this. It’s almost like… gee!… like you’re my boss.” I pushed back my chair, got to my feet, and walked by her regally, my back straight, my head held high. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up. Again.

Back at my desk, I was groping through my drawers, searching desperately for a mint or some gum, when the phone rang.

“Features, Candace Shapiro,” I said distractedly. Thumbtacks, business cards, three sizes of paperclips, and not an Altoid to be found. Story of my life, I thought.

“Candace, this is Dr. Krushelevansky from the University of Philadelphia,” said a deep, familiar voice.

“Oh. Oh, hi,” I said. “What’s up?” I gave up on the desk drawer and started going through my purse, even though I’d already looked through there.

“There’s something I need to discuss with you,” he said.

That got my attention. “Yes?”

“Well, you know that last blood draw we did…” I remembered it well. “Something came up that I’m afraid makes you ineligible for the study.”

I felt my palms go icy. “What? What is it?”

“I’d prefer to discuss this with you in person,” he said.

I quickly ran through everything else that a blood test could reveal, each possibility more awful than the one before. “Do I have cancer?” I asked. “Do I have AIDS?”

“You don’t have anything life-threatening,” he said sternly. “And I’d prefer not playing Twenty Questions.”

“Then just tell me what’s wrong,” I begged. “High cholesterol? Hypoglycemia? Scurvy? Gout?”

“Cannie…”

“Do I have rickets? Oh, God, please not rickets. I don’t think I can stand being fat and bowlegged.”

He started laughing. “No rickets, but I’m starting to think you might have Tourette’s. How do you know all of these diseases anyhow? Do you have a physician’s desk reference in front of you?”

“I’m glad you think this is amusing,” I said plaintively. “I’m glad this is your idea of fun, calling up innocent reporters in the middle of the day and telling them there’s something wrong with their blood.”

“Your blood is fine,” he said seriously. “And I’ll be happy to tell you what we found, but I would prefer to do it in person.”

He was sitting behind his desk when I came in, and he got to his feet to greet me. I noticed, once again, how very tall he was.

“Have a seat,” he said. I dropped my purse and backpack on one chair and parked myself on another.

He fanned my folder out on his desk. “As I told you, we do a standard series of tests when we draw blood, looking for conditions that could possibly disqualify study participants. Hepatitis is one of them. AIDS, of course, is another.”

I nodded, wondering if he’d ever get to the point.

“We also test for pregnancy,” he said. I nodded again, thinking, okay, already, but what’s wrong with me? And then I realized. Pregnancy.

“But I’m not…” I stammered. “I mean, I can’t be.”

He flipped the folder around and pointed to where something was circled in red. “I’d be happy to arrange for another test,” he said, “but generally, we’re very accurate.”

“I… I don’t…” I stood up. How had this happened? My mind was whirling. I sank back into the chair to think. I’d gone off the Pill after Bruce and I had broken up, figuring it would be a long, long time before I had the need to contracept again, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that I was at risk during the shiva call. It had to have happened then.

“Oh, God,” I said, jumping to my feet again. Bruce. I had to find Bruce, I had to tell Bruce, surely he’d take me back now… except, my mind whispered, what if he didn’t? What if he told me that it was my concern, my problem, that he was with somebody else and I was on my own?

“Oh,” I said, slumping once more into the seat and burying my face in my hands. It was too horrible to even think about. I hadn’t even noticed that Dr. K. had left the room until the door opened and he was standing there. There were three Styrofoam cups in one of his hands, a fistful of creamers and sugar packets in the other. He set the cups down on the desk in front of me: tea, coffee, water. “I wasn’t sure what you like,” he said apologetically. I picked up the tea. He opened his desk drawer and produced a half-empty bear-shaped squeeze bottle of honey. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked kindly. I shook my head.

“Would you like to be alone for a bit?” he asked, and I remembered that this was the middle of a work day, that there was a world going on around me, and that he probably had other things to do, other fat ladies to see.

“You probably don’t do this a lot, do you?” I asked. “Tell people that they’re pregnant, I mean.”

The doctor looked taken aback. “No,” he finally said. “No, I guess I don’t do it a lot.” He frowned. “Did I do it wrong?”

I laughed weakly. “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever told me that I’m pregnant before, so I don’t have much to compare it to.”

“I’m sorry,” he said tentatively. “I take it this is… unexpected news.”

“You could say that,” I said. Suddenly, I was gripped with a vivid memory of the Cannie and Maxi Tequila Tour. “Oh, my God,” I said, imagining that the putative kid was probably pickled by this point. “Do you know anything about fetal alcohol syndrome?”

“Hang on,” he said. I heard him moving quickly down the hall. He came back with a book in his hands. What To Expect When You’re Expecting. “One of the nurses had it,” he explained. He flipped to the index. “Page 52,” he said, and handed me the book. I skimmed the salient paragraphs and learned that basically, provided I quit drinking to the point of incoherence for the duration, things would be okay. Assuming, of course, that I wanted things to be okay. And, at that moment, I had no idea what I wanted. Except, of course, not to be in this situation at all.

I put the book on his desk and gathered my purse and backpack. “I guess I should be going,” I said.

“Would you like another test?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I’ll do one at home, I guess, and then I’ll figure out…” I closed my mouth. Truthfully, I didn’t know what I’d figure out.

He pushed the book back toward me. “Would you like to hang onto it? In case you have other questions?”

He was being so nice to me, I thought. Why was he being so nice to me? He was probably some crazy right-to-lifer, I thought meanly, trying to trick me into staying pregnant with the beverage sampler and the free guidebooks.

“Won’t the nurse want it back?” I asked.

“She’s had her babies,” he said lightly. “I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. You’re welcome to have it.” He cleared his throat. “With regard to the study,” he began. “If you choose to continue the pregnancy, you won’t be eligible, of course.”

“No thin pills?” I joked.

“They haven’t been approved for use by pregnant women.”

“Then I could be your guinea pig,” I offered, feeling myself teetering on the edge of hysteria. “Maybe I’d have a really skinny baby. That’d be good, right?”

“Whatever you do, just let me know,” he said, tucking a business card inside of the book. “I’ll make sure you get a full refund if you decide not to continue.”

I remembered, very clearly, somewhere in the sheaf of forms I’d filled out the first day, something stating that there would be no refunds allowed. Crazy right-to-lifer, for sure, I thought, and stood up, strapping my backpack over my shoulders.

He looked at me kindly. “Listen, if you want to talk about it… or if you have any other medical questions, I’d be happy to try to help.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. My hand was already on the doorknob.

“Take care of yourself, Cannie,” he said. “And give us a call, either way.”

I nodded again, turned the handle, and hustled out the door.

I made bargains with God the whole way home, the same way I’d invented letters to the Celine Dion fan, poor Mr. Deiffinger, the least of my concerns now. Dear God, if you make me not pregnant I’ll volunteer at the pet shelter and the AIDS hospice and I’ll never write anything nasty about anyone again. I’ll be a better person. I’ll do everything right, I’ll go to synagogue and not just on high holy days, I won’t be so mean and critical, I’ll be nice to Gabby, only please, please, please, don’t let this be happening to me.

I bought two tests at the drugstore on South Street, white cardboard boxes with beaming mothers-to-be on the front, and peed all over my hand doing the first one, I was shaking so hard. By then I was so convinced of the worst that I didn’t need the plus sign on the EPT wand to tell me what Dr. Krushelevansky already had.

“I’m pregnant,” I said to the mirror, and mimed a smile, like the woman on the box.

“Pregnant,” I informed Nifkin later that night, as he bounded all over me and licked my face at Samantha’s house, where I’d stashed him while I was at work. Samantha had two dogs of her own, plus a big, fenced-in yard and a pet door, so the dogs could go in and out as they pleased. Nifkin wasn’t crazy about her dogs, Daisy and Mandy – I suspected that he much preferred the company of people to other pets – but he was a big fan of the premium lamb and rice kibble that Samantha served, and so, on balance, seemed happy to hang out at Sam’s house.

“What did you say?” Samantha called from the kitchen.

“I’m pregnant,” I called back.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I yelled. Nifkin sat on my lap, looking gravely into my eyes.

“You heard me, right?” I whispered. Nifkin licked my nose and curled into my lap.

Samantha came into the living room, wiping her hands. “You were saying?”

“I said, I’m going home for Thanksgiving.”

“Lesbian turkey again?” Samantha wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you tell me that I was under strict instructions to slap you if you ever mentioned spending another holiday with Tanya again?”

“I’m tired,” I told her. “I’m tired and I want to go home.”

She sat down beside me. “What’s going on, really?”

And I wanted so badly to tell her then, to just turn to her and spill it all out, to tell her, help me, and tell me what to do. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I needed time to think, to know my own mind before the chorus started. I knew the advice she’d give me. It would be the same thing I’d tell her if she were in the same situation: young, single with a great career, knocked up by a guy who wasn’t returning her phone calls. It was a no-brainer, a $500 afternoon in the doctor’s office, a few days of cramps and crying, end of story.

But before I went for the obvious, I wanted some time, even just a few days. I wanted to go home, even if home had long since gone from a happy refuge to something closer to a Sapphic commune.

It wasn’t hard. I called Betsy, who told me to take as much time as I needed. “You’ve got three weeks of vacation, five days you never took from last year, and comp time from New York,” she said, in a message on my machine at home. “Have a happy Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you next week.”

I e-mailed Maxi. “Something has come up… unfortunately, not the thing I might have hoped for,” I wrote. “Bruce is dating a kindergarten teacher. I am brokenhearted and going home to eat dried turkey and let my mother feel sorry for me.”

“Good luck, then,” she’d written back immediately, even though it had to be three in the morning there. “And never mind the teacher. She’s his transition object. They never last. Call or write when you’re home… I’ll be in the States again in the spring.”

I cancelled my haircut, postponed a few telephone interviews, arranged for my neighbors to pick up my papers and my mail. I didn’t call Bruce. If I decided not to stay pregnant, there’d be no reason for him to know. At this stage in our non-relationship, I couldn’t very well imagine him sitting beside me in a clinic tenderly holding my hand. If I did stay pregnant… well, I’d burn that bridge when I came to it, I thought.

I hitched my bicycle rack and mountain bike to the back of my little blue Honda, put Nifkin in his traveling case, and tossed my bag in the trunk. Ready or not, I was going home.