Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (24 page)

“Yeah,” I tell her. “After I asked the
question, I could see that change come over him and I tried to walk it back,
tell him that I’d call back and see if I could get in on an earlier day or just
skip the callback altogether so we could go on our trip, but I’d already
committed the chief sin in his eyes. I questioned what he’d already decided.
Those pictures,” I sigh, “those, I think he just took so he’d have something to
remind me what happens when I…”

I trail off.

“When you go against him?” Ida asks.

He used to say the words to me all the
time, but now that I go to repeat them, they catch in my throat.

“It’s time for a commercial break,” Ida
says, “I’m here talking with Emma Roxy. When we come back, we’ll be talking to
Emma more about her ordeal and what kind of things she sees in her future. Stay
tuned.”

Someone off-screen calls, “We’re out!”

Ida leans toward me. “I know this is hard
for you,” she says, “but we’ve got to keep things moving if you’re going to be
able to say everything you want to say.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better,” I tell
her, and with that tiny act of me humbling myself before her, she’s no longer
trying to hide that smile.

Right now, I hate Ida and I hate the
studio audience and I hate the home audience and I hate everyone who has
anything to do with this show. Right now, they are all just projections of Ben,
every single one of them.

I know intellectually that I’m feeling
this way because I’ve kept this toxic memory inside of me long enough to hate
anyone I talk to about it, but sitting here, I feel like I’m back in that
relationship and every person in this room is just another aspect of him.

“We’re back in five, four,
three
…”

Ida pats my knee for reasons alien to my
understanding and she turns toward the camera, saying, “We’re back with Emma
Roxy, talking about the relationship that almost ended her career before it
began.”

I don’t know where she got that. The only
time Ben ever got in the way of my career was before that trip to the lake.
Most of the time, my success in the movies was his own wet dream because that
would only increase the value of his thrall.

“Emma,” Ida says, “we’ve talked a little
about your history with this man, but let’s fast-forward to when he comes back
into contact with you. Did you know from the start that he was trying to
blackmail you, or—”

“I wouldn’t say that I knew he was going
to blackmail me, specifically,” I tell her. “Once I knew who I was talking to,
though, I knew the conversation wasn’t going to mean anything good.”

“How much did he ask for?” Ida asks.

“While Ben’s still in pretrial, my
attorney advised me not to go into specifics on that, but I can tell you that
it was a substantial amount,” I tell her.

“Okay,” Ida says. “What
can
you tell us about that arrangement?”

The way she speaks the words makes them
come across less accusatory than she actually means it.

“He informed me that he had those
photographs of me and that, if I didn’t want them to become public, I’d do what
he wanted me to do,” I answer.

“And you went along with this?” Ida asks.

“I didn’t know what else to do at the
time,” I tell her. “Maybe that sounds stupid, but—”

“No, sweetie,” she says in a saccharin
voice that only proves my point that nobody’s going to be able to replace
Oprah, “it’s not stupid at all.”

“This all happened, the blackmail, after
we started working on this movie and it’s my first major feature, so I was
trying to keep my name out of the tabloids if at all possible,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says, and I’m done pretending.

“You know what?” I ask. “That’s actually
not true. The truth is that I remembered what I looked like the weekend those
pictures were taken—at least that I had bruises all over me. I didn’t want that
to be what people saw when they came to my movies or when they met me in
person. I don’t want those bruises to be what my life is all about. Maybe
that’s what’s happened now, maybe not. It’s too soon to tell, but I just didn’t
want people to see the bruises.”

“So it wasn’t the nudity that bothered you
so much; it was the bruises?” Ida asks and she jerks back a little when she
sees the look on my face. It’s not a happy one.

“I like my privacy,” I tell her, “but the
bruises are the bigger deal to me, as they were at the time.”

“What do you see when you look at those
bruises?” Ida asks.

“I really haven’t looked at the pictures,”
I tell her. “I glanced at them briefly a while ago to make sure that I was
being blackmailed with something he actually had, but as soon as I saw what
they were, I closed the file. I haven’t really looked since.”

“You couldn’t bear to look at those
bruises,” Ida says.

“It’s not that,” I tell her.

She sits quietly for a second and then
asks, “What is it?”

“They’re different things,” I tell her. “I
didn’t want the pictures released to the public because I didn’t like the
thought of everyone seeing what he’d done to me. I didn’t want to look at the
pictures myself, because…”

“It’s all right,” she says at the first
sign of hesitation.

“I hate the fact that I’m smiling,” I tell
her. “In every one of those pictures, I’m smiling. That’s when I really started
to feel like he had me in a way that I couldn’t possibly escape. He could take
pictures of my battered, naked body and still get me to smile for the camera. I
didn’t like that then and I don’t like that now.”

“I was going to ask about that—a lot of
people, even after you gave your press conference, thought that those pictures
might have been doctored in one way or another,” she says. “Whether it was the
bruises that might be fake or that you weren’t actually naked in the original
and someone put in another person’s—you know how that sort of thing works,” she
says. “The one thing that always chilled me to the bone, though, was that smile
on your face.”

I wonder if we should be discussing why
she was looking at the pictures in the first place. That just seems like a lot
of schadenfreude for an ostensibly bubbly and caring member of the talk show
community.

“I’ve got to be honest,” she says, “when I
saw that first photograph, I thought those pictures might have been doctored,
too. It was that smile. I couldn’t imagine someone going through all of that
and still being able to put a smile on her face—”

“I didn’t do it out of courage,” I
interrupt her. “I did it out of fear. There’s nothing inspiring about that
smile; it’s a smile that I wore because I didn’t want to make him angry.”

“You did what you had to do,” Ida says. “I
think that’s the best way to think about it, because who knows what could have
happened if you refused? He could have beaten you or he could have drowned you
in the lake—there’s no telling what—”

“I don’t like to think about that,” I
interrupt her. “Even now, it still feels, sometimes, like I’m playing with
someone else’s poker chips and at any moment, he’s going to come back to claim
me and put me in that place again.”

“Powerful words,” Ida says, though I have
no idea what she’s referencing. “We’ll be back after this break for our last
segment with Emma Roxy. Stay with us,” she says.

“And we’re out!”

Ida leans toward me for a moment and says,
“I noticed I touched a couple of nerves in that last segment. Don’t worry, the
next one is all about the bright future you’ve got ahead of you and the wonderful
ways in which you are blessed and blah, blah, blah,” she says. “There shouldn’t
be anything too drastic.”

At least it’s nice to know the mask comes
off.

“Yeah,” I say. “Could someone get me some
water?”

Ida snaps her fingers, gets someone’s
attention I can’t see and mouths the word “water” while pointing at me.

I see the man run off the set and I look
over the crowd. Some of the audience members are looking at me or otherwise
toward the stage, but the rest of them have their heads turned, talking to each
other. Almost everyone in the room is smiling.

I glance back and see the man coming
toward the stage, but one of the directors or someone in similar position of
authority stops him.

The man’s looking back and forth between
me and the man that’s holding him up, talking to him. He nods a couple of times
and then just stands there as the man who stopped him calls out, “And we’re
back in five, four,
three
…”

“We’re back with Emma Roxy,” Ida Falcone
says and it’s not until that moment the man with my bottle of water is allowed
to come up to the stage and hand it to me. They wanted to make sure they got it
on tape and they couldn’t do that if we weren’t “back.”

I unscrew the lid and take a sip of the
water, just to ease my throat and Ida turns back to me.

“Now, we’ve heard some of the terrible
things that you’ve gone through,” she says, “but you’ve also got a lot to look
forward to, don’t you?”

The way she phrases it, I don’t know how
to answer.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “I suppose.”

“Well, you
are
dating Damian Jones, aren’t you? I’d say that’s something to
look forward to,” she says and the audience cheers.

Maybe it’s the shortened “commercial
break,” but I’m having trouble seeing how they’re going to make this drastic
transition work on broadcast.

“We’ve gotten to know each other a bit
over these past few months,” I answer.

The rest of the conversation is just more
of the boring drivel that I thought I’d end up missing after Ben sent off the
pictures. I still don’t miss it.

Finally, the show’s over and Ida and I
pose for some pictures on the stage—although it’s not entirely clear who’s
taking the pictures and why—and she points me back toward Sweater Guy, still
standing in that same spot, just offstage.

“You did great,” he says as I get close.
“I thought that was a very powerful show. How did you think it went?”

“I think she’s kind of a cunt, but you
seem like a decent guy,” I answer and just keep walking as he stops.

It’s the middle of the day and I’ve still
got to get back to the set and lay down a couple of scenes. We’re getting so
close to wrapping up filming and I’m just wondering what I’m going to do with
my time.

I’ve gotten a lot of offers since those
pictures came out, more than a few from Lifetime, but nothing’s standing out to
me.

Now that I’m almost done with my
breakthrough film, I have an enormous decision to make: What kind of actress am
I going to be?

Recent events are lending a lot of
opportunities for me in the revenge genre, but I don’t want my work to be about
my life. That’s kind of the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be.

Taking everything outside of my career
itself out of the picture for a moment, the first big question is whether I’m
going to stick with lighter movies, comedies with big name actors and that sort
of thing or if I want to branch out straight out of the gate.

I could always do another film similar to
Flashing Lights
and
then
try something else after I’ve gotten some more notoriety (for
my work as an actress,) but the problem with that is that I’d have to fight
being typecast.

There’s still time for me to figure it out
and the offers seem to keep coming, so I’m not going to let my small death on
screen a few minutes ago be overshadowed with simpler worries like my career.

I get out to the parking lot and I’m
mobbed by women from the audience and, once they recognize me, random people
walking by the studio set.

Nobody’s asking for an autograph right off
the bad which is kind of surreal. Mostly, everyone just wants to tell me that
they wish me well and that they’re glad I got out of such a bad situation,
etc., etc., etc.

I’m working my way through the crowd and
the first few headshots start to come out, their owners looking for a
signature.

The crowd loves me now, but if I start
refusing autographs to this many people without someone standing next to me
telling everyone that I’ve got to go, this could turn ugly pretty quick, so I start
signing.

With all these people handing me headshots
and photos from magazines and t-shirts, I’m not worried about writing personal
messages to everyone. I’m just trying to get through so I can leave.

For the most part, the people around me
are respectful, but as more time passes, the people toward the back want to get
closer and the people at the front don’t want to leave where they are and I
start getting jostled around a little bit. I’m starting to lose my balance when
someone grabs my arm and pulls me upright and toward them.

“
I
have
a few pictures I’d love for you to sign,” the man says and I look up,
horrified. It’s Ben. He’s wearing a hat and aviator sunglasses, I assume
because if he didn’t, these people around me would tear him to shreds, but it’s
him.