understand…”
“Spit it out, Cannie,” Andy urged. The waiter returned, dumped my escargot in front of Andy, Andy’s pate 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 entrees, 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 crepe.
“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 pate. “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
