“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
