“It’s in New York,” I say, pathetically.
The little bitch shrugs. As if New York is over and the dining room at this four-star boutique hotel in Phoenix is where it’s at. She looks like someone who would watch the show, but she certainly doesn’t recognize me. I find myself wishing I told the camera crew to follow me to dinner (they went back to their hotel—a three-star chain—after my reading), so this haughty newborn would realize she should be clamoring to make nice with me. Not that I have any right to complain. I avoided the other two black kids in my class studiously. On my own, I was a refreshing breeze. Two would have been a twister, everyone in my town hiding in the basement.
I remember my Chanel bag as I follow the hostess’s unhelpful directions to the bar, adjusting it on the chain so that it rests flush against my pelvic bone. When in doubt, lead with Chanel.
The bar isn’t immediately visible at the foot of the stairs, and I walk around a second dining room space like an asshole, wondering if Brett would have gotten an escort, and if it would have been for her star or for her skin. When I finally locate the bar, it’s empty and unset.
“This okay?” I ask the bartender, hoisting myself onto a stool.
“You drinking or eating?”
“Eating.” I rethink my answer. “Both.”
He smiles in a way that makes me feel stupid for asking. His hair is slicked back and his beard is unkempt. His bow tie is baby shower pink. “Then this is okay.”
I’m set up with a placemat and menu and silverware, then ignored for several minutes until a red-faced man in a rumpled suit takes the stool two empty seats over from mine. He is immediately given the bartender’s full attention; to his cocktail order I manage to tack on a request for a glass of white wine. What kind? the bartender asks, and I shrug, because I have no idea, only that I am desperate to feel the way I felt that day in Jen’s apartment, like nothing could ever go wrong again. Surprise me, I tell him, kittenish. But, like, he says, all business, dry, fruity, what? I weigh my options before telling him fruity. Who wants to drink something dry?
The bartender tends to our drinks in the order that they are placed, though I know from Vince’s bartending days that you are almost always supposed to pour a glass of wine or beer before assembling a more complicated cocktail. The man gets his beverage and the bartender retreats to the other end of the bar. I’m forced to raise my hand to remind him I’m still waiting. He waves back with a patient smile that says, Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you. After drying a rack of wineglasses steaming from the dishwasher, he opens a bottle of fruity white for me. He fills a glass to the top and empties the bottle into a mini wine carafe that he presents to me on the side with a Don’t tell anyone wink.
“Sorry about that. I’m the only one back here tonight and we were out of clean glasses.” He flings a bar towel over his shoulder and folds his arms across his chest. His shirt cuffs are rolled to his elbows; his thick, veiny forearms say farmhand, his watch says Trust Fund Baby who dropped out of SMU sophomore year to start his own T-shirt line. He has warm, green-flecked eyes. People whose licenses list their eye color as hazel are usually reaching—they’re brown, just say brown—but in his case, I’d allow it. What are the genes needed to produce a child with eyes like that? I uncross my legs, thinking just how far Phoenix is from New York, how unlikely it is that this not-brown-eyed gentleman watches Saluté.
“What can I get you to eat, miss?” he asks.
Just as I’m no stranger to the vagaries of posh restaurants, I’m also no stranger to poor service with a smile, that ensuing whiplash of indignation and clemency. The moment you are sure this is it is always the moment you’re brought a free glass of wine, the moment that the handsome bartender offers his heartfelt apologies, miss. So you adjust your blinkers and you say, “The beet salad to start and the salmon.”
“Excellent,” the bartender says, forgetting to collect my menu before he walks away.
I find my phone and open my email. The glass is hot from the dishwasher and the wine tastes like a wedding bouquet, nothing like the crisp elixir poured for me in Jen’s apartment a few weeks ago. No matter, tomorrow I will be in L.A., where I’m all set for dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director at 8pm at Bestia. Exciting! my motion picture agent’s assistant added.
Next is an email from Gwen, my editor, Re: Stephanie Simmons’s AQ. Every writer fills out an Author Questionnaire pre-publication. It’s distributed to different departments to help develop publicity and marketing plans. Steph, I need you to pull the AQ on Stephanie Simmons’s memoir first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks. I have to read this several times before I remember that Gwen’s assistant is also named Stephanie, and that she must have sent this to me in error. Still, what does she want with my AQ?
I hear “Beet salad?” and half raise my hand to claim it, but the plate is set in front of the man to my right. I turn my attention back to my email. Vince has forwarded me the details of my flight to Marrakesh. 5:47 P.M. out of JFK, three days from now. We’ve arranged for him to meet me in the airport with a suitcase packed for Morocco; this way I didn’t have to pack for my book events, the Female Director dinner, and Brett’s trip. I wince. It’s going to be a brutal day of travel. But backing out of Morocco is not an option, not like backing out of Brett’s engagement party was, especially since I’ve recently come to the conclusion that now is the opportune time to extricate myself from the show. You may think such a shift in mind-set would give me carte blanche to bail on all the events I would never attend if the cameras weren’t there, but if anything, I’m under even greater obligation. I need to make it clear that I was an integral part of this season, that nobody phased me out. I want to quit while I’m on top, as they say. The top is like Mars, hostile to human life.
The gentleman to my right is now cutting into a small steak, grilled a diligent brown, just as he ordered it. That’s what the bartender called him, indicating to a busser where to place the plate, “The filet is for the gentleman.”
I move on to the mini carafe of wine. Also the temperature of soup, but nonetheless helping to fuel the bold fantasy I’ve nurtured since before my memoir came out; The Site of an Evacuation is a number one New York Times bestseller (done), I am both a massive commercial success and a critics’ darling (done), and a very famous and timely director or actress is committed to adapting my memoir for screen (almost done). I’m of course asked to return to the show, even though I will be a crusty thirty-five next season, but I demur, because I’ve got a better idea. Lauren Conrad crowing at Heidi—You know what you did!—may be the highest-rated reality TV episode of all time, but did you also know that Keeping Up with the Kardashians peaked in popularity when the sisters had babies? A motherhood storyline may sound heretical, but remember, our audience loves seeing unconventional women caving under the pressure to do the conventional thing.
With this in mind, I pitch a spinoff where I get pregnant and move to Los Angeles to oversee the film project. I’ll live in a house with a yard and have a meltdown trying to put together a crib. A storyline about the comic discordance between having a baby and having zero maternal instincts is a classic knee-slapper. Is this right? I can imagine myself saying in the trailer, holding up my baby with her diaper on inside out and backward. Stephanie Ever After, Jesse would probably want to call it, and I would tell her, laughing, absolutely not.
“Excuse me, you had the salmon?” A lonely filet is placed before me, but before the server can set down the accompanying plate of sautéed spinach, I stop him.
“I never got my appetizer.”