But Enough About Me (23 page)

“You know what, Dad? I'm staying single for a while.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Say, what are you doing today?” My father really did use the word
say.

I thought for a minute. “Well, I kind of have plans.”

“Well, break them.”

The two of them must have jumped right into the car, because a few hours later, there they were in my doorway, my father holding his tool kit to make any minor repairs in my apartment, my mother holding a small stuffed rabbit wearing a hat and glasses.

“I can't get away from you people,” I said.

“Nope,” said my father.

“Your father says you broke up with Trevor,” said my mother, grabbing my arm. “What happened?”

“Jesus, Ma,” I said. “Shouldn't you soften me up first with a little small talk?”

There comes a point in every interview when the awkward question must be posed—the one about your star's bitter divorce, or alarming weight gain, or extended hospital stay due to that old euphemism “exhaustion.” Alternately, there is the question that will never go away, the one that will be asked in perpetuity: Kate Winslet will always be made to discuss her nonexistent weight problem, Jennifer Lopez will forever be asked about her
tuchis,
George Clooney cannot elude questions about why he won't “settle down.” These tired perennials never fail to irritate your subject, and rightly so, but there is, for reasons that mystify, an insatiable demand for endless variations of the same answer.

There is no method to erase the dread of asking the awkward question, but there is one way to at least minimize the damage, should your star become incensed. Remember above all else that if you are in a restaurant with your subject (and as I have pointed out, 95 percent of the time, that is where you will be),
get the check and pay for your meal before the question is asked.
Otherwise, if you flame out, that wait for the check will be long. And tense.

Every interviewer goes about this process in the same way. After you have safely signed the bill (do not attempt to ask the question if the waiter
has just taken your credit card, because God only knows when he might return and it's just too risky), affect a sheepish, self-effacing demeanor. Then say, “I certainly don't want to pry into your personal affairs, which are absolutely none of my business (light chuckle), but my editors wanted me to ask about your eating disorder/felonious brother/lip augmentation, even though (bemused headshake, derisive, empathetic snort) I don't really understand when it became the public's right to know this stuff.”

It is useless to try to wriggle out of the awkward question, because prior to your interview most magazine editors will send you an e-mail in all capital letters saying ESSENTIAL TO THE PIECE, even though in many cases, they are questions that you wouldn't ask some of your closest friends. How'd the abortion go? Why, exactly, are you and your husband getting divorced? Was it the whole hooker thing?

In a different setting, many people would throw down their napkin in disgust and stalk off at this sort of prying, but not in this particular zone. If you have softened the person enough, or if they're still new to the game, they may offer up a personal anecdote. Or they may provide a general comment, which will at least result in your getting paid. You simply preface the parsimonious quote with a wordy, inflamed lead-in: “Of the shocking charge that she had her housekeeper act as her drug runner and subsequent grim stretch in rehab, she says simply, ‘I just want to move on with my life.'”

This sends a message to your editor:
Hey, I tried. Me, I'm not scared to ask the tough questions. It's not like I can physically force her to go into detail.

My check-grabbing lesson came courtesy of
Flashdance
and
The L Word
star Jennifer Beals. At that point, I was pursuing in earnest more work at women's magazines. Doing profiles for them was wonderfully pleasant. After years of dealing with hungover rock stars, I just wanted people to behave themselves, and to my profound relief, most of my subjects were affable female country music or sitcom stars, all of them roughly my age. I'd fly into Nashville or Los Angeles, have a just-girls chat on how they balance work and family and what bad habits they wish they could break. Then I'd fly home and write the piece. Easy. Painless.

My favorite was
Lifetime
magazine, a print extension of the network that lasted two years, during which time I had coffee or brunch with reliable sellers like Faith Hill or
CSI
's Marg Helgenberger. “Couldn't be nicer,” I would inevitably report back.

Then came Beals. She had a reputation for being a prickly interview, but surely, I thought, not for soft, friendly
Lifetime.
Beals, a well-traveled Yale graduate, just didn't play the anecdote game—which I would have completely respected if I hadn't had a job to do—and was known to be incredibly guarded about her personal life.

I met her at a restaurant in Santa Monica. Tall and serene, she glowed with yogic good health. She was wary but cordial—until, that is, I asked her about her husband.

“I just have to throw in one question about him,” I said apologetically. “Maybe something about how you met him.”

Her tight smile vanished, her eyes narrowed, and she snapped in a loud voice that she didn't
have
to do anything, and no, she was not going to answer. As she went on, her voice rising, a concerned waiter hovered nearby.

There was something surreally appalling about being dressed down by Alex Owens: Pittsburgh welder by day, exotic dancer by night. I tried to maintain my composure after she calmed down, but the rest of our lunch was terse and uncomfortable, made more so by the interminable wait for the goddamn check.

I was still rattled when I arrived back at my room at the ritzy hotel that I had wrangled. As I closed the door and slipped into a robe, I was horrified to burst into tears.

“I can't believe Jennifer Beals is making me cry,” I sobbed to Dinah on the phone.

“Who the hell is she?” Dinah said. “She was in a dance movie and she can't even dance. Is something else bothering you?”

Celebrities were bothering me, and while I loved my fancy hotels, a creeping lonesomeness always set in by the second day. Some of my friends with kids couldn't wait to travel for business to get away from the tumult at home. I didn't have any tumult at home.

After I hung up with Dinah, the phone rang again. It was the folks, whom Dinah had obviously alerted.

“Hi, kid,” said my father.

“We heard what happened,” chimed in my mother on the bedroom extension. “Stupid bitch.”

“Too bad,” said my father. “She was really good in that movie where she had cancer.”

I stopped snuffling. “What?”

“The one where Shirley MacLaine was her mother. Remember?”

“Jay,” said my mother, “Jay. That was
Terms of Endearment.
This was the one who was in
Flashdance.
”

“Oh,” said my father. “Well, she was good in that, too.”

Someone was knocking on my door. “Folks, I've got to go,” I said.

I opened the door to a maid. “Do you want turn-down service, miss?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, ushering her in. It was embarrassing to have her turn down the bed while I was perfectly capable of doing it myself, but I wanted the chocolate that she put on the pillow.

She looked critically at me as I blew my nose. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Me? Oh, sure,” I said, throwing the tissue away. “I interview people for a living and I just had a bad experience. I don't know why I'm upset. Some people get snapped at every day.”

She plumped the pillows with a neutral expression, but I saw her eyes flick toward me.

“It was Jennifer Beals,” I said.

“
Flashdance,
” said the maid, whose name was Ana.

“Right.”

She turned and looked at me. “Famous people,” she said. “Some are nice, some are so crazy.”

I stopped sniffling and suddenly felt ashamed. “I imagine you see a lot of strange behavior,” I said.

Ana pulled back the comforter on the bed and expertly folded the sheet.
“Oh, honey, you don't even know. And we can't say a thing. We just do our jobs. Mariah Carey was here a few weeks ago with bodyguards by the door. I was sent up there to clean the room, but they wouldn't let me in,” she said. “I didn't know what to do.” I pictured her hesitating in front of the door with her cart.

Ana reached over and patted my hand. “Don't you worry about it,” she said, turning to go. “She doesn't know you. That's what I tell myself: They don't know me.”

A half hour later there was another knock at the door. It was Ana again, accompanied by one of the bellhops, who carried a towering basket of fruit and chocolate.

“I told him what happened,” she said, “and we thought you might like this.” Somehow they had finagled it from Guest Relations.

Of course, I burst into tears again. I invited them in, and we spent fifteen minutes trading celebrity war stories—theirs far more gruesome because, as the bellhop pointed out, “they don't see us, so for some reason they think we don't see them.”

After we were through commiserating, Ana glanced at the clock by my bed. “We should go,” she said, making for the door. “Hope you feel better.”

When I got back to New York, I vowed to make a quick getaway in future interviews, after potentially explosive questions. I also sent Ana the biggest bouquet of flowers that I could find.

I had just walked into my apartment with my nightly serving of dinner from the gourmet place when I got a call from Julie to tell me about her first day at VH1. Relations between us were almost back to normal. Neither of us mentioned the rift again, and we had faked that it never happened so effectively that most of the awkwardness had dropped away.

“How did it go?” I said, throwing on my favorite pair of saggy-drawered sweatpants.

“Do you know how I have been e-mailing back and forth with Paul, my boss?”

“Right, right,” I said, feeling under my bed for my slippers.

“He's the head writer and producer, and I knew that there was some sort of attraction because our exchanges were very funny and flirty. Plus, I was so nervous because I had never had a job except at the insurance company and he was really comforting and promised he would help me.”

“Good,” I prompted.

“Well, the minute I met him today, I knew there was something. I can't explain it. He just looked very familiar to me.”

“How so?”

I heard her pouring kibble into a bowl for her dog. “I had the pang that Cher said she had when she met Sonny and Rob Camiletti. She says that the time that she met those two guys, the rest of the room went dark. That's what happened when I met Paul.” I had never heard her sound so excited. Julie was a chronic dater, while I was a chronic inappropriate-boyfriend collector.

“So listen, I need your advice,” she continued. “There is this party after work tonight to celebrate some special that Paul produced, but I went home first because I was exhausted. When I worked at that insurance company I was used to quitting time being at, like, three, and today we worked until six thirty. So I told him that a window had broken in my apartment and I had to take care of it but I'd try to go later. Okay. So. He just left me this message.”

“Play it.”

She held the phone up to the machine. I heard a slightly faltering male voice say, “Hi, this is Paul. I hope everything went okay with the broken window, and I hope you can make it to the party later, because I…well, because I was really looking forward to getting to know you.”

“That's not a ‘howdy, coworker' sort of message,” I diagnosed. “He's clearly into you. Be careful. You just started this job.”

“I know. But I should go to the party, right?”

“Absolutely.”

She snuck a call to me the next day at work. “I did go to the thing,” she said in a low voice. “I sat next to him, and the other producers were telling funny stories and Paul was telling me about the time in his life that he was the most depressed.”

“So then it didn't go well?”

“Actually, it did. When he wasn't telling me that story he made me laugh like I haven't done in years. Like almost wetting my pants.”

A few nights later, they went on their first date at a downtown tavern, and I waited anxiously for her morning report.

“Are you ready for this?” she said, calling me before I had even poured my cereal. “This morning I told my aunt Mattie and my aunt Phyllis that this was the guy I'm going to marry. He's so kind. He makes me laugh. He has the same name as my father and they have the exact same birthday, thirty years apart.”

I was floored. This sort of hyperbole was completely unlike Julie. “Do you really think you're going to marry him?” I asked.

“How the hell do I know?” she said. Then she laughed. “No, I really do think I will.”

“Oh, Jul,” I said. “This is the happiest news.”

“How about you?” she said. “Maybe it's time for you to get out there again.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “First of all, it's not like I've been besieged with offers. The only prospect is that setup that Casey wants me to do and I'm not going on a blind date.” My friend Casey, a publicist, kept trying to push a writer on me named Tom.

“He's handsome, and he writes for the
New York Times,
” Casey had wheedled. “Your favorite, the City section. He plays soccer. He's incredibly smart.”

I asked my time-honored question. “Would you sleep with him?” I demanded.

“She says that she would sleep with him,” I told Julie. “I mean, not that she would, but theoretically. For weeks, I've been putting her off, but she's wearing me down.”

“Oh, just go,” Julie said. “I always told myself that it's just one night. Who cares? If it's bad, you'll have a funny story to tell me afterward.”

I crawled into my bed. Maybe I would bring dinner in here on a tray, like some sort of old film star, and eat while I flipped through magazines. “True,” I said.

I called Casey a few days later. “Okay, I'll do it,” I said. “Only if you invite someone else so that it doesn't look like a complete setup.”

She told me to meet her at a soul food place in the twenties called Lola's. When I walked in, I realized that I had been there before, during a gospel brunch. I had a fleeting recollection of resolutely eating my peach cobbler as a group of singers pulled my mother onstage to sing background on the hymn “How I Got Over.”

Casey had brought along her boyfriend and another one of our friends to act as a fifth-wheel decoy. I greeted everyone, ordered a sparkling water and cranberry mocktail, and took a seat, fiddling with my silverware and trying not to stake out the doorway.

Ah. There he was. I could tell by the uncertain way he scanned the room. As he approached the table, I turned discreetly to Casey. “No,” I said.

She shook her head. “You are ridiculous.”

I leaned closer. “I can tell you right now that he's not my type,” I said quietly. For starters, he carried a battered leather satchel straight out of
Good-bye, Mr. Chips
that screamed “Hey, I'm a writer!” And he towered over me at six foot three while I had always seemed to end up with men who were more eye-level. He had the neat, crisp look of a man in a fifties-era shirt ad: cleft chin, blue eyes, slim, with short, sandy brown hair. He seemed so familiar. Why was that? Then it hit me: He looked exactly like the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, before the drugs.

We all started off with a little general conversation, and then I figured that I should humor Casey and talk to Tom a bit. The problem was that he sat across the table from me, so every time I addressed him, I had to raise my voice.

“So Casey tells me you're working on a book,” I said loudly. Immediately our three tablemates ceased talking and leaned forward. They obviously wanted to see if we were getting along. I felt like we were pandas at the zoo, and everyone was breathlessly monitoring us to see if we were going to mate or not.

Tom cleared his throat. “Well, ah, yes, it's sort of a…I don't know how to describe it.” He tried again. “It's a survey of Cold War landscapes.”

I rummaged my mental archives for some sort of question, or even a relevant comment. Hm. Nothing.

“That sounds dry.” He corrected himself. “I mean it's a travelogue of—well, you know, missile silos and relocation bunkers across the country. Atomic proving grounds. That kind of thing.”

“Ah,” I said.

Nobody uttered a word. Where was the waitress? I prayed that no one would order appetizers. If we all went straight for the entrées, a good twenty minutes could be shaved off the evening.

Tom leaned forward in a vain attempt not to shout. “And I understand you write for
Rolling Stone,
” he said. “Who have you interviewed lately?”

This, I could do. “Let's see,” I said. “Yesterday I talked to a guy from Saliva.”

“Saliva. Saliva,” he said. “I only like their earlier work. No, I don't know them. I was a deejay in college but I'm afraid my knowledge pretty much stopped at that period. I could talk about the Descendents, if you want.”

I smiled. “Believe me, I'm happy not to talk about music. I'm in the midst of a career change. I was old enough to be the Saliva guy's mother, let's put it that way. So you write for magazines as well?”

He nodded. “Mostly design magazines. I write about architecture, history, things of that nature. I just wrote a piece about the cultural history of the revolving restaurant.”

“Aren't they all history? They seem sort of stuck in the seventies to me.”

Tom sat up, invigorated. “Actually, there has only been one built in the U.S. in the last ten years, but there has been a spate of new ones built in the Gulf-Arab states…”

As he went on and on, I began to feel like I was in a revolving restaurant myself. Too bad. He was nice, which was, admittedly, a notch above Perfectly Nice and a few notches above Fine, but we weren't clicking. By
the time our food arrived, I noticed that our tablemates had stopped their eavesdropping and had resumed their conversation.

I snuck glances around the room as he moved onto another article he was working on about the unusual origins of everyday objects. “The Dixie cup was created as part of a public health campaign against mass viral outbreaks,” he was saying. “And oh! Here's something: Bubble wrap was the accidental invention of two scientists trying to create plastic wallpaper…”

Tucked away in a corner, I noticed, was a tall woman seated at a little table next to a sign that said
READINGS BY NEFERLYN.
On the table sat a burning candle and—I had to subtly crane my neck—a deck of cards.

Tom and I moved on to the “biography” section of our setup. “So why do you live in Brooklyn?” I asked.

He cycled through the reasons—it's cheaper, more space, no tourists, more trees—and then I offered a defense of my own neighborhood with my “Murray Hill isn't so bad” rap. Dessert arrived.

I stood up. “I'm going to visit the fortune-teller,” I announced to the table. “I feel badly that she's not getting any business.”

I drifted over to her table. Neferlyn was a tall, queenly woman with blond hair who wore an appropriately dramatic, sparkly purple dress. She had the perfectly penciled eyebrows of a thirties-era actress. She wasn't immediately identifiable as black, or white, or male, or female. She seemed to be a little of everything.

She gazed unblinkingly back at me. “I accept thirty dollars,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, fumbling in my purse. “Of course.” I put the bills on the table and in a smooth, discreet motion, she tucked them under the table somewhere.

“Let's do your cards,” she said, doing a few shuffling moves before methodically laying them down on the table. “Mmm,” she murmured.

“Mm?” I said. “Is it something bad?”

“No, no. It's interesting. There are children in your life…”

Nope. Oh, well. Good-bye, thirty dollars.

She frowned and studied the cards. “But they are not yours.”

“One of my sisters has a baby, and the other is due shortly,” I said. She pored over the cards, her lips moving slightly. “Listen,” I said hesitantly, “what if you did see something bad? Would you tell a person?”

She allowed a small smile and said that yes, she would find a way to warn them if it was serious, but no, she wouldn't scare a person to death.

As she considered the cards, I couldn't resist quizzing her. How long had she been at the restaurant? Did people ever come over when they were drunk? Do you have security in case they get out of hand? Oh, most people behave themselves? Huh. Interesting.

Neferlyn drew herself up to her full height. “We contain within us all of the answers to the situations that challenge us,” she announced. “I see that you are in a transitional period,” she continued, her eyes moving over the cards. “This year has been difficult for you,” she said. “Someone has left your life who was very dark. Very bad for you.”

I leaned forward. “True.”

“I see here that you are going to travel,” she said. This did not impress me. With airline prices at record lows, who doesn't travel?

“I see also that…” She turned over another card. “I see that you are going to meet a man from the Midwest who will give you his heart.”

“Well, everyone I meet is from New Jersey or Long Island,” I said. “Maybe you mean my dad. He's from Michigan.”

I finally got her to laugh.

“He will give you his heart. I can only tell you what I see.”

I stood. Time to return to my table and wrap the evening up quickly. “Thanks, Neferlyn,” I said.

“I'm available for private parties,” she called as I made my way back to the table.