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 eclair, 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 eclair 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
