He had talked about her in interviews. “Margot is a chaotic and gorgeous creature. And besides that, she’s a great help,” he’d told New York magazine once. “I’ll show her cuts I’m working on, watch to see where she laughs and where she’s confused so I can see how a general audience might respond.” And he’d made a movie toward the end of their relationship in which a complicated, interesting man had an obsessive love affair with a young rich girl who was clearly modeled on Margot (though she was played by someone else, a former child star seeking a legitimate acting career, whose hair was styled exactly like Margot’s at the time). Apparently that character spent a lot of time lounging around half-naked. There was a scene in which her underwear rode up, exposing a hint of pubic hair, that had gotten a lot of play online. I’d heard about this before, but hadn’t realized it was based on an actual woman, a woman whom I now knew. What a strange and violating thing that must be, to have a doppelgänger of you turned into a sex object.
When a reporter asked Gus three years ago about rumors that he and Margot had broken up, he’d answered, “I’d rather not talk about it except to say that she broke my fucking heart.” He’d made a couple movies since then, although they had both done poorly at the box office and had received mixed reviews.
Now, even though Gus Wright was on the verge of becoming a has-been, he’d still found another wealthy, wispy woman to date. Maybe “woman” was the wrong term for her. She was twenty-two. Perfectly legal, and perfectly icky. She also looked small beside him in photos.
I studied the pictures on my computer screen as I ate a turkey burger at a Park Slope café. I’d been doing my research at BitterSweet all morning—making sure that my computer screen faced the wall, just in case anyone was watching me—but I’d relocated for lunch. As I took my final bite, my phone buzzed with a message from Miles. How’s it going, Beckley? Should we get a drink and discuss progress?
A smile automatically spread over my face. Lots of updates, I wrote back. When and where is good for you?
He didn’t respond immediately, so after staring unblinking at the screen for a full minute like a moron, I went to the bathroom. The women’s room had three stalls, and a mirror in a shabby-chic frame over the sink. When I came out to wash my hands, a woman was reapplying her lipstick in the mirror. We smiled at each other. She seemed familiar.
Then, she leaned forward and breathed onto the glass until it fogged up. Slowly she reached out a finger and began to write in the condensation, like I’d done on car windows when I was young. Friday, she wrote, in a looping script. She breathed on the mirror again. Same time. A normal woman might have passed out from the effort to fog up so much glass, but this woman had the lung capacity of a deep-sea whale. I watched, fascinated by her breath support, as she traced more letters: If you’re ready to join. Then she walked out without even glancing at me, the words already fading into the mirror behind her.
I waited there a moment, trembling. This seemed almost too easy. Also, had this woman been watching me all morning, from BitterSweet to this restaurant, waiting for her chance to catch me alone? Shit, I should have closed my screen when I went to the bathroom. I power walked back into the main part of the café. She was gone.
When I picked up my phone again, Miles had responded. Tonight? he’d written, and then named one of the bars where we used to drink after work at Quill.
I hesitated, then wrote, I actually don’t think we should talk about this in public.
Gotcha. You want to come by my office at the Standard sometime this week?
Um, YEAH OKAY!! I started to type. What I wouldn’t give to be escorted around those offices, to stare at journalists I’d admired for years as they cracked their knuckles and wrote their stories. But then I paused, thinking of the woman watching me all morning, standing up to slip into the bathroom after me. I started the message over. This sounds crazy, I wrote, but I think they’ve been sending someone to follow me around. So I probably shouldn’t go into that building right now.
The three little dots that meant he was typing appeared, then disappeared. I got ready to suggest that we rent one of those by-the-hour meeting rooms. Then, his three dots reappeared again and blossomed into a message: Okay, how about I come to your place?
THIRTEEN
Miles came over after work. “Damn, Beckley, this is inconvenient,” he said when I opened the door. “I thought you said you lived in Brooklyn.”
“You snob. Bay Ridge is Brooklyn.”
“Is it?”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t all afford to live on the Lower East Side.”
“Offer me a beer or something and I’ll forgive you.” He grinned, but there was something shaky in his bonhomie. Nerves in his eyes at being in my living room, even for professional reasons. Maybe especially for professional reasons. He joked with me like he was acting the part of a friendly coworker who had nothing at stake, but he wasn’t going to be nominated for an Oscar anytime soon.
I ducked into the kitchen and grabbed us each an IPA. That would help. When I came back and handed one to him, he took a long sip, then looked around the room, at the flowered curtains and the well-worn armchair. “This is where you grew up, huh? It’s nice. Comfortable, in that lived-in, loving-family way.”
“Thanks,” I said. My mom’s design skills were never going to win any kind of award, but she’d done
