They cannot be for real. I try to keep in mind what Marge said, that this can all be changed later, and just smile and nod.
“And then there's the whole tabloid magazine thing. I'm not sure that's going to grab enough people. I'm thinking more visual . . . like Belinda becomes a television personality.”
But . . . but that makes no sense. How could Belinda be on TV when she's supposed to be a secret identity? They're going to ruin everything.
Desperate, I casually slide my foot over to Marge's and tap her toe.
Marge casually moves her leopard-print Manolos (I'm pretty sure they're Manolos), blatantly ignoring me. “And then, her father sees her on TV.”
“This would be Devlin the brute.”
The brute? My father? My father hesitates before swatting a fly.
“Pete, I think.” Marge turns to me with a don't-say-too-much-look. “That's his name. Right, Belinda?”
“Yes, butâ”
“And Pete Devlin beat her as a child for years.”
Hold on! Now this has gone too far. Marge is getting confused with Belinda's fictitious father from the
New York Intelligentsia
article.
“Or,” Mr. Bigshot booms, “how about sexual abuse? That's always good.”
“Unless it's been overdone.” Marge frowns. “Do you think child sexual abuse has been overdone?”
“Never. It can never be overdone. There's always room for more abuse on cable.”
“Alrighty then. Abuse it is. Mr. Devlin abused his daughter for years.”
“Wait!” I jump to my feet, sending the chair tumbling over with a crash.
“Belinda,” Marge chastises me sternly, “remember what I said about saving your comments for later. We can work out the details afterward, right, Bill?”
“Just brainstorming, brainstorming,” says Mr. Bigshot.
Marge winks to let me know she's on top of it, that we're in cahoots. Hesitantly, I pick up the chair and sit down again. Carefully.
“Now, about her sister, Eileen,” Marge says.
“The crack addict/prostitute?”
That's it. “Stop!” I shout. “Stop it. I cannot hear you talking about my family this way. My father would never do such a thing to me and my sister, sure she has her faults, but a crack addict/prostitute she is not.”
“Belinda,” Marge hisses.
“And it's Nola. Nola Devlin. There is no such person as Belinda Apple. Never is, never was. That's the whole point of the story.”
“What's this?” Mr. Bigshot looks at Marge, confused.
“Don't look at
her
. She doesn't know,” I say. The anger is getting the better of me, but I can't help it. I wish Charlotte were here. At least she knows me. Er, kind of.
Suddenly, I hear Nancy's voice in my head, urging me to stand up for myself, how if she'd learned that lesson long ago, she wouldn't have become fat and miserable.
“I'll tell you what's what,” I say.
For five minutes I tell Mr. Bigshot the truth. I made up my identity because I was fat and they wouldn't give me the column. I really live in New Jersey. My family is very stable. My mother goes to church every Sunday and every Wednesday night for forum. She bakes cookies for taxpayers. We all believe in God. I love my sister even though she picked out Morticia Addams bridesmaids dresses and has a boyfriend who requires kibble. Potato salad is our family signature dish.
With each new fact, Mr. Bigshot's face falls a little more until by the end he is studying his watch.
“Listen, I've got a conference call with Vancouver in a minute. I'm sorry that we'll have to cut this meeting short. Thanks so much for coming in,” he says, shaking my hand. “And I'm sure either I or Marge will be getting back to you, Belinda.”
“Nola,” I say weakly.
He shoots me his finger. “Right.”
“It's over,” I ask, “isn't it? I've screwed everything up.”
“No, no,” he coos. “It's all good.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
There is much to be said for the calming effects of Southern California sunshine, a light Southern California breeze, and a rooftop pool. Several hours go by as I lie facedown on the chaise longue underneath a pink-and-white umbrella, napping and thinking, a hotel towel draped over my ass. There is just no way you can wear a swimsuit with a skirt in L.A. if you are under the age of, like, ninety.
What gets me about my meeting at Sweet Dream was how it all ended in a snap. Once I stood up for myself and told the real story, Mr. Bigshot lost all interest. There wasn't even a follow-up question. And then, to make matters worse, in the car Marge Tuttweiller said nothing except, “You might have held off. I would have handled everything. I know you're naive, but I would have expected that even you could have understood how negotiations work.”
Perhaps Nancy was wrong. Maybe standing up for yourself should only be done in limited circumstances, like when they're about to kick you off an overcrowded plane even though you bought your ticket six months before. Or when a pushy mother butts ahead of you in the deli line.
“I'll call you,” Marge said. “Though I wouldn't hold my breath.”
This means that every two minutes I open one eye and check the porter, who is standing by the towels, staring into space. I haven't eaten a thing all day. A first since I had the Great Stomach Flu of 1999, and what's even weirder is that I'm not even hungry.
“Having a nice sunbath?”
I turn my head away from the porter. In front of me are two long, long legs rising to a teeny white bikini bottom and a bellybutton ring in a slim waist rising to a bust that's so huge it blocks off the sun like a solar eclipse.
Gloria of the bit-off earring.
“I'm recovering from my day,” I tell her.
“Yeah. Me too.” She sits across from me on the other chaise. I want to advise her to put on a shirt, as her plastic breasts are conspiring to break out of their bikini-top prison. “I didn't get the part.”
“I'm sorry. Are you sure?”
“Yup. After all these years I think I know a pass. They didn't have to say it but I'm”âshe glances at me wearilyâ“too fat.”
“You?” I wish Nancy and Deb had been here to hear that gem. “You're tiny.”
“Not tiny enough. Not L.A. tiny. This morning I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, saw my pouch of a tummy, and said, âGloria. You are going to have to do something. You are out of control.'”
I wrap more of the towel around me and sit up fully, trying not to surreptitiously inspect whether she does or does not have a pouch of a tummy. “You can't be serious. How much do you weigh?”
“Around one-nineteen. Maybe even one-twenty. That's like one-thirty, one-thirty-five with the camera, you know.”
Cinderella numbers. Even the 130. Of course if she drained the saline out of her breasts that'd be three pounds right there, but what woman wants that kind of advice after spending all that money on implants?
Gloria sighs and tells me her tale of woe. “It's a rough business. Do you know that the producer on the last show I was in sent a certified letterâa certified letter!âto my agent warning me that I was gaining weight and if I didn't drop ten pounds, I'd be cut? And here I thought I was really knocking off my character. You should have read my fan mail. Not one letter said, âHey, Gloria, you're getting chubby.'”
I think about what I would do if I were in her shoes. “I couldn't live in a world like that. I mean, weight can be an issue where I work too, but not to that degree.”
“I'd give anything to be like . . . you.”
“You mean fat?”
Gloria lies back and adjusts her sunglasses. “I mean more like being myself instead of having to fit this certain mold of maximum and minimum measurements. You don't have to worry about every bump of cellulite or if the fried calamari you ate the week before is going to get you canned.”
Fried calamari, I think, 11 points. “I never thought of it that way.”
“You should. You're lucky. I mean it.”
“Gloria”âI lean toward her, bent as I am on a new mission to set her straightâ“you're the one who's lucky. I know you work hard to keep your weight down, and that's admirable. On the flip side, I don't have men biting off my earring in the hallway of the O.”
She raises her glasses and squints. “You could if you wanted to, Nola.”
“No, I couldn't. Look at me. I'm one hundred and”âI check myselfâ“I'm several more pounds than you are. What man wants me?”
“Think about what man wants
me.
A guy who's just interested in big tits and a firm butt and long legs and nothing more. The guy who bit off my earring, by the way, got my name wrong twice. Kept calling me Gigi.”
She doesn't understand. No woman who's been thin all her life can understand. If you tell them you need to lose weight, they say in a perky little voice, “Well, lose it then!”
Gloria touches my dimpled knee. “This is going to sound very L.A., Nola, but sometimes the fat that does us the most harm is the fat between our ears.”
“Miss Apple?” It's the porter in his white jacket. No phone. “The front desk called. There's someone in the lobby to see you. They say they have a four p.m. appointment.”
Marge? I didn't have an appointment with Marge, did I? “Did they give a name?”
“It was a Mr. Stanton. A Mr. David Stanton of Stanton Media.”
That's when I remembered the fax.
Quickly saying good-bye to Gloria, I rush to my hotel room to shower off the sunblock and change out of my old-lady swimsuit, my brain buzzing. The fax. The fax. There was something on the fax that 'Enri of the errant H handed me when I checked in about a meeting being arranged with Stanton Media.
Except . . .
David Stanton couldn't be meeting me. He's in London. He wanted me to meet him at the Ritz there today. What is he, an eighty-eight-year-old Superman? Able to leap continents in a single bound? There must be more to that Ensure stuff than I knew.
I get out of the shower and, on a whim, approach the hotel scale. They don't have scales in hotels on the East Coast. In California, though, they're everywhereâin the hotel gym, by the pool . . . It must be a state law, like not smoking.
I cannot believe my eyes. Is this for real? Back at home the scale wouldn't budge from that one number. It gives me hope that I'll reach my goal by Christmas. I
love
the Cinderella Pact.
Now, what have I been doing right? I haven't had a bowl of Special K since I've set foot in this state. Then again, I really haven't had much to eat of anything. I fell asleep last night after getting off the plane, made a cup of tea in my hotel room . . .
Brrring.
Shoot. I almost forgot. David Stanton. I snatch up the phone without waiting to hear who it is. “I'll be right there.”
“Where?” It's the unmistakable nasal twang of Marge Tuttweiller, agent to the stars.
My heart stops. “Marge?”
“You asked me to call you, right?”
She doesn't have to say any more. If it were good news she'd jump right in with how much they loved the proposal, how much money they were paying me. “It's bad, isn't it?”
“That depends.” She pauses dramatically. “Sweet Dream does want to pass, for now . . .”
“I knew it.” My shoulders slump as I throw myself on the bed.
“I said
for now
. They may reexamine the option later.”
“What does that mean?” Is this more California agent double-talk or sincere encouragement?
“They love your story, Nola. I have to admit, I was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“When you gave that speech about your real life in New Jersey and being too fat. Bill Benjamin ate it up.”
“I thought he hated it. He suddenly had a conference call.”
“He really did have a conference call. No, he was impressed. He's so used to people telling him what he wants to hear that it's startling when someone tells him the truth. To use his words, he was very impressed.”
“So what's the problem?”
“Two things.” Marge clears her throat, just like my mother. “The first and most important is your, um, visual projection.”
“Pardon?”
“Your presence as a larger woman, Nola. I'm sorry. I think it's because Bill had an image of you as Belinda Apple. You know, thin and British and trendy.”
Oh, God, is this humiliating. “And I am anything but.”
“It's just that you didn't match his mental image. You know how that is. For example, let's say you eagerly go on vacation, like, to a Caribbean resort, anticipating palm trees and white beaches with no one on them and instead you find it's crowded with families and trash. It's somewhat disappointing.”
Thanks, Marge. Thanks for calling me trash.
“I was talking to Charlotte and we had this brilliant brainstorm. Why don't you go ahead and write the script and we'll bring it back to Bill.”
“Script? Written by whom? I thought the deal was dead.”
“It was Bill's suggestion, actually. It'll save him money and it'll be in your own voice. I think it's a terrific concept.”
I've never written a movie script before. The only person I know who has is Nigel Barnes.
“Of course, you'll start off with a treatment. Though a treatment
and
a script would be ideal.” It's as though Marge is having a one-way conversation with herself and I'm just here to keep her company.
Line two is blinking. David Stanton. I feel awful that I've kept him waiting so long. “Gotta go, Marge. Thanks for everything.”