With those last romantic words, it was over.
In her mind, she mocked him relentlessly. But what he said about mourning she knew to be true, because she was alone and thinking about Diane, and about Hilary’s baby being born without her even knowing where or when. Eat your protein. Didn’t he know she’d been trying? She wanted to eat protein, eat muscles and blood, even her own heart, until nothing, not a single ounce, was left.
The night the pilot aired, she watched it with fifty people at the director’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Anne stood outside until the last possible moment, bumming cigarettes from one of her costars, then someone opened the plate-glass doors, said it was starting, and dragged her inside.
To her the pilot looked embarrassing and lame, like a high-school talent show. The pulsing techno music of the theme, the way her mouth pursed in puzzlement as she stared into the distance. Watching this, she ran her tongue over her lips, lush and protuberant from chemical injections, and turned away. It felt like she was masturbating in front of the whole room.
She went back outside, ignoring everyone’s encouraging shouts. For the first time she started wondering about the future. They had filmed three episodes and had a contract for ten more, though she’d been cautioned that the network could pull the plug at any moment. By now she had heard this so often that she assumed that’s what would happen. The idea that it wouldn’t — that this was her life now — felt even more frightening than failure.
Julia was calling all the time these days, but Anne had a new L.A. agent, Molly Senak, who kept sending her scripts for movies she could shoot once the season was over. The parts were always the hooker who dies, the girlfriend who walks away in the early scenes, the cheating temptation for the flawed hero. “Places to shine in small ways,” Molly called them, the building blocks of a certain kind of career.
She missed New York — not the life itself so much as its familiar sense of difficulty and want. And more often than she would have imagined, she also found herself thinking about even more distant times in Montreal. Her father she refused to think about, but her mother sometimes wafted into her thoughts, along with memories of their house, her old room, even her therapist, who she realized now was the closest thing she’d had to a friend back then. Trying to boost her confidence, Grace had once told her to pretend she was a star, that she was all grown up with the life of her dreams. She wondered if any of them would see the show. If they’d be proud.
She left the party fifteen minutes after the director turned off his enormous TV and broke out the champagne. Back at the cottage, she listened to the message Diane had left, stiffly congratulating her. She felt an agonizing twist of pity and longing at the sound of her voice, but set it aside. She set it aside every day, and each time it was easier, more automatic, less twisting.
Reviews were bad; ratings were good. She filmed the new episodes, working sixteen-hour days, and perfected the art of the sudden nap; at any moment she’d lie down on the couch in her dressing room and drop off. She was sleeping one day when a PA knocked on the door and came in. She was a twenty-year-old UCLA dropout, timid and lithe. Anne couldn’t remember her name.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.
Anne yawned. “What is it?”
“There’s a call for you,” she said, “that got forwarded from the production office.” She held out a phone. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but this woman’s been calling, first the network and then the producers. She’s very resourceful, and really pushy. On the one hand it’s probably a crazy person but I just thought, what if it’s not? What if she’s telling the truth and I didn’t tell you? I hope you aren’t mad.”
Anne stared at her blankly and took the phone without giving it much thought.
“I’m really sorry,” the PA said. “It’s just, you know, I wasn’t sure what to do. She says she’s your sister.”
“I don’t have a sister,” Anne said. She weighed the phone in her hand, then hung up.
A week later the girl came by Anne’s trailer again and stood in front of her so long that she had to say something, if only out of impatience.
“I haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Everything okay?”
The PA’s face wrinkled. “I’ve been here. I think you just didn’t see me.”
Anne rolled her eyes. “I’m self-involved, but I’m not blind.”
The PA nodded, apparently taking this as a statement of fact instead of the joke Anne had intended. Then someone swooped in to reapply her makeup, blocking the girl from view, but Anne heard her say, “Anyway, I’m really, really sorry.”
“For what?”
“I brought you this,” the PA said, producing a manila envelope from her messenger bag and handing it to her.
Anne stared at it, having no idea what it was.
“It’s your fan mail,” the girl said. Her walkie-talkie crackled and she turned to leave.
As the stylist kept working, Anne glanced at the letters. It was her first fan mail ever: young girls, middle-aged women, boys asking her to their proms, convicts, men promising they’d leave their wives in a heartbeat if she’d meet them for a drink, they really felt like there was some kind of special connection there, two hearts that could beat as one. If you wanted to feel optimistic about the human race, fan letters to a TV star were not the place to start. She flipped through the stack, not thinking she was looking for anything in particular, until she saw it. A letter postmarked Utica, New York, with Anne’s name written in the bubbly, curly penmanship of a teenage girl.
She thought that waiting to read it would make the letter seem too important. Better to read it as quickly as possible, then throw it away.
She saw the words Annie, we need money before she panicked and crumpled it up. Even though she had stopped reading, words kept throwing themselves at her: television and please and need and baby, each one giving her a strong, unpleasant, sickening sensation. How could she have taken in so much of the letter when all she wanted to do was get rid of it?
“Sweetie, do you want a Xanax?” the stylist said. “Please try not to cry, it’ll be hell on your makeup.”
Two more weeks of twenty-hour days, all workouts and hunger, tanning and fittings. She was stretched into a new shape, her skin and muscles reconfigured, cut from new cloth. At night she dreamt of cheeseburgers and banana splits. She had never had trouble keeping her weight down, but this was a whole new discipline, and she embraced it. She didn’t even have to try to forget the phone call and letter; her body was too busy forgetting everything for her.
She made friends with the PA, who sometimes came over after work with some Zone meals for dinner. They’d watch movies, and several times the PA slept over on the couch in the living room. Her name was Lauren, but Anne still thought of her as the PA. It comforted her to wake up and see her there; Anne would make coffee and bring her a cup, happy to do at least one thing in her day for somebody else.
So she was surprised and a little annoyed one afternoon when the girl brought her a phone and said her sister was on hold.
“Please,” Anne said. She was wearing a leather bustier and five-inch stiletto heels and could barely move. “I thought I told you.”
“She keeps calling,” the PA said. “I know you said you don’t have a sister, but this woman … To be honest, Anne, the producers kind of want to know what’s up. They’re wondering if something’s, like, weird. That the media might get a hold of? No judgment or pressure or anything. They totally understand that everybody has, you know, some family strangeness. But here they’d just like to know the particulars.”