Alix Ohlin - Inside

She joined a gym and got Adam to hire her a personal trainer, who put her on a diet so restricted and confusing that she spent most of her time shopping for the peculiar ingredients; the rest of the time, low blood sugar made her feel too weak to think clearly about anything, even Diane. One day at the gym, she was drinking a shot of wheatgrass at the juice bar when a guy said, “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

“Then why are you talking to me?” she said.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “It just looks like you worked out a little too hard. You look like you could use a steak.”

Anne picked up her bag and slid off her stool. As she did, she almost fainted; spots crossed her vision, and she had to lean against the counter for balance. The guy grabbed her arm, his muscles rippling. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and Adidas sweatpants and she said, “Yeah, I probably need some meat,” which made him smile.

Two hours later they were back at her place, in bed. There was so much she had forgotten — the roughness and heft of a man, his smell and force. She never even asked him his name.

So began a period of sleeping around, of dates in restaurants, of men in bars. A dentist, a studio executive, a chef, another studio executive, a Pilates instructor, and the original gym guy, whom she ran into at the juice bar from time to time. She finally learned his name — Neal — and got him to take her to a restaurant where she and Diane used to go, whose food she missed, and then back to the cottage. They were dozing in bed around eleven when somebody started banging on the door.

It was Diane, and she was weeping and drunk. “You cunt,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Fuck you. I’m here to call you a whore.”

Neal, hearing voices, came out wearing boxers and holding his cell phone. Anne wondered if he was going to call the police, or ask Diane if she wanted a steak. A good protein source was his answer to everything.

“Well, now you have,” Anne said. “So I guess you can go.”

“You’re a coldhearted bitch,” Diane said. “You had to fucking sleep with guys from my office . I had to hear about this in meetings. You couldn’t at least do me the decency of whoring outside the entertainment industry?”

“Everybody out here works in the entertainment industry,” Anne said.

“I don’t,” Neal said.

“Who the fuck are you?” Diane said.

“I’m Neal.”

“Sorry,” Anne said. “Diane, Neal.”

“Is this your boyfriend? Do you already have a boyfriend?”

“Is this your girlfriend?” said Neal, an edge of interest in his voice.

It was too much. Anne started laughing — it was hysterical laughter, not genuine, but the only person who knew her well enough to recognize this was Diane, and she was lost to her now.

Diane was sobbing. She reeked of alcohol and perfume. Anne could picture it perfectly: she had taken a bath, drunk a bottle of wine, trying to soothe herself, and wound up in a fit instead. Only the image of Diane’s naked body, slick with soap, enabled Anne to stop laughing and calm down.

“Diane,” she said gently. “Go home.”

Sometimes at night her skin ached for Diane, and the only cure for this was to have somebody else in bed with her. Hence Neal became a regular. They worked out and slept together a few days a week. It wasn’t a relationship; it was exercise. Neal bought her gifts: a notebook so she could write down what she ate every day, a heart-rate monitor, a juicer. It didn’t seem to bother him that she bought him nothing in return. But when his parents came to town, he wanted her to meet them. She would have understood if he’d said that he wanted them to see her, to show her off. But he actually wanted them to meet so that she could get to know him better.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Man,” he said, “you really are this cold. My friends thought I was making it up.”

“You’ve never complained before.”

“I should’ve listened to that Diane. Are you, like, autistic? My friends said you were the perfect woman. Sex and a workout partner without any obligations. But that’s, like, weird.” When he got worked up, Neal sounded like a teenage girl.

“If it really means a lot to you,” she said half-heartedly, “I’ll go to dinner.”

“No, that’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want to put you out.”

This, for them, was a long conversation. He wasn’t much of a talker, just a teddy bear of physical perfection, something to hold in the night. She’d thought he might be the ideal man, but he was letting her down now. He went around the apartment gathering up the juicer, the heart-rate monitor, the pedometer watch. She understood; it was expensive stuff, he could sell it or use it himself. He wasn’t made of money.

Standing in the doorway, he said, “You aren’t even upset, are you?”

“I’m not sure why you think I should be.”

“The thing is, if you never get upset over anything, doesn’t that mean you just don’t give a shit?”

Anne looked at him, glad they’d never tried having conversations before. “I guess so.”

“And if you never mourn for anything you lose, doesn’t that mean that nothing in your life’s worth anything?”

Anne raised her chin. “Life insights from the gym guy,” she said. “Workout for your soul along with your body and mind.”

“Okay, you mock.” He touched her cheek. “I’m not Diane; I’m not so heartbroken. But I’m not spending much longer around you, either. I don’t want to turn into a robot. You take care. Don’t forget to eat your protein.”

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.