“Hey. I’m Ivy,” she said, maybe a little too loudly.
Ivy tried to look as though she wasn’t looking around the classic old townhouse. She knew from a Google search that Vogue had done a massive makeover of the space a few years back for a photo shoot. They’d painted everything lilac, even the banisters, stairs, and floors. From the entryway, Ivy could see into the sitting room. It was a crowded space with massive sapphire velvet sofas and a rather magnificent white piano. It felt more like the waiting room at Tracie Martyn than an actual home.
“Come in. Come in. The place is a mess. I just got the kids off to school. We launched the new vagina skin-care line this month so I’ve been working nonstop. This new line of products will be a hurdle. People don’t think about skin when they think about their vaginas. There are pores down there just like the rest of your body, and it’s important to keep everything tight and healthy.”
She looked over her shoulder at Ivy. “Summer told me a little about you. Instructor at SoarBarre? Former ballerina? How cool is that? I haven’t been to the ballet in ages, but I was obsessed when I was a little girl. We went to the Nutcracker every single year and I just enrolled Dusty in a class.”
“I’ve been at SoarBarre for a couple years, but I’m thinking of starting my own thing.” Ivy wasn’t sure why she said that. “I do some training on the side, though. I miss ballet,” she added. “Let me know if Dusty likes it. I’m happy to come over and show her a few things.” She was sure people offered to come help Kate Wells with things all the time.
“She’d love that. It’s the sixth new thing she’s tried this year after archery, horseback riding, synchronized swimming, the harp, and Frisbee golf. I’m hoping this one sticks. What can I get you ladies to drink? Sparkling water? Juice? Wine? Is it too early for wine? Probably. But we have some if you’d like. I’ll have a tea. Does that sound good? I make this yummy hibiscus tea with lemon. Apparently it’s the perfect thing to drink when you have your period. I call it my uterus tea.” Ivy and Summer nodded together and laughed at the concept of uterus tea from a woman who had just developed a skin-care line for vaginas. “Let’s go sit in the library. Mariana will bring it in for us.”
Kate Wells’s library was an actual library, two stories tall with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, arranged by color and size, making the shelves appear to undulate like sine curves. Large teak ladders climbed all the way to the ceiling. The furniture was comfy and cozy, two overstuffed white couches with tight square leopard-print pillows and dark leather Moroccan ottomans. The fireplace had clearly been blocked years ago, and Kate had placed her one and only Oscar on a brick inside of it. Well-curated art hung on the walls. Ivy thought she spied a Bacon and maybe a Rothko. She allowed herself to sink into one of the couches.
“You’re looking at me funny…like I’m a unicorn,” Kate said pleasantly from the chair opposite Ivy.
“It’s just that…” She didn’t know how to put it into words exactly.
Kate raised an eyebrow. “I’m more normal than you thought I’d be?”
Ivy exhaled. “Normal” wasn’t the right word.
“You’re so much nicer than I thought you’d be.”
Kate let out a laugh that was deep and low. It was a movie star laugh, the kind you read about in the openings of lady magazine profiles, the ones where the stars always rush in to meet the journalist fashionably late with an intimate kiss on the cheek before ordering French fries. It was the kind of laugh the person could replicate on command. “Thank you! The press spins everything I do out of proportion. I swear, I’m not the freak they make me out to be. Take, for example, all those stories that I work out six hours every day. You know how that happened?”
Ivy and Summer both shook their heads. An incredibly small Filipino woman walked in with a large tray of their teas, a bowl full of a thick yellow oil, and a small glass cube with agitated specks fluttering inside it.
“I was giving an interview to Vogue to promote a movie, a bad movie I might add, that one where I was the telepathic superhero who could control the weather, and they asked me how much I exercised that day,” Kate went on. “Just that one day. And I stopped to think about it for a minute. I’d just given birth to Dusty, so I was up all night because she had terrible colic. The only way she’d go back to bed would be to put her in the stroller and walk around the block. So that was three hours a night of power walking and jogging. I rode my bike to the set in Brooklyn every day, which was another hour each way, and then I’d do an hour of Pilates or yoga. So six hours.” Kate paused and took a long sip of her tea. She knew how to play an audience. “And the journalist wrote, ‘Kate Wells keeps fit by training for six hours every single day.’ Well that was true and it wasn’t true. And every article about me since has talked about me working out six hours a day. I don’t bother to correct anyone anymore. No one wants their movie stars to be normal.”
Kate picked up the glass cube from where Mariana had left it and opened the lid, extracting what looked like a small fuzzy bumblebee. She calmly placed the bee on her willowy arm and winced.
Did it just sting her?
“You do write a blog where you talk about how much you love two hundred and fifty–dollar cashmere T-shirts and activated cashews. And you include things like spirit dust in your recipes. It’s not like you can buy spirit dust at Trader Joe’s. I’ve tried,” Ivy replied practically. Shit. Maybe she shouldn’t have said that.
“Who doesn’t love cashmere T-shirts?” Kate made a fake offended face as she grabbed a pair of tweezers and plucked the bee off her skin, putting it back into its box. “And spirit dust is just crushed turmeric. You can buy that at Trader Joe’s. I’m just willing to try all of it, even the weird stuff. No one would read the blog if I just wrote, ‘Eat less sugar and get off your ass and you’ll lose weight.’?”
“Yes!” Ivy exclaimed, wanting to fist-bump the pretty actress. “Move more, eat less!”
Kate calmly pulled a second bee from the box, pulled up her T-shirt, and placed it on her taut belly.
“Are those bees stinging you?”
“Of course,” Kate said. “It hurts less than getting a tattoo and more than acupuncture. But it’s so worth it. Reduces inflammation and injects you with natural collagen and biotin. Mother Earth’s Botox!” Kate plucked the second bee off her body by the wing, brought it close to her lips, and mouthed “Namaste.”
Ivy changed the subject. “Summer said you’re looking for a new trainer, or someone to work out with? I can do six hours a day.”