Jennifer Weiner - Good in Bed

“Never,” said Andy loyally.

“No, I am. I’ve turned into one of those horrible people that just talks about their ex-boyfriend all the time, until nobody can stand to be around them and they don’t have any friends…”

“Cannie…”

“… and they start drinking alone, and talking to their pets, which I do anyway… oh, God,” I said, only half-faking a collapse into the bread dish. “This is a disaster.”

The manager hurried over. “Madame!” he cried. “Is everything all right?”

I straightened myself up, flicking bits of bread from my sweater. “Just fine,” I said. He bustled off, and I turned back to Andy.

“When did I become a madame?” I asked mournfully. “I swear, the last time I was at a French restaurant they called me Mademoiselle.”

“Cheer up,” said Andy, handing me the last of the paté. “You’re going to find someone much better than Bruce, and he won’t be a vegetarian, and you’ll be happy, and I’ll be happy, and everything’s going to be fine.”

I tried. Really, I did. But I found myself so preoccupied with Bruce miser y that it was hard to get anything done at work. This is what I considered as I sat on an Amtrak Metroliner bound for New York and Maxi Ryder, famously ringletted and frequently dumped costar of last year’s Oscar-nominated romantic drama, Trembling, in which she’d played a brilliant brain surgeon who eventually succumbs to Parkinson’s disease.

Maxi Ryder was British, twenty-seven or twenty-nine, depending on which magazines you believed, and had been known, early in her career, as something of an ugly duckling until, through the miracle of rigorous diet, Pilates, and the Zone (plus, it was whispered, some discreet plastic surgery), she’d managed to transform herself into a size-two swan. In fact, she’d been a size two to start off with, and a beauty to boot, but had gained twenty pounds for her breakthrough role in a foreign film called Advanced Placement, playing a shy Scottish schoolgirl who has a torrid affair with her headmistress. By the time that film had reached the States, she’d shed the twenty pounds, dyed her hair auburn, ditched her British manager, hooked up with the hottest agency in Hollywood, founded the inevitable production company (Maxi’d Out, she’d called it), and been featured in a Vanity Fair spread of homes of the stars, wearing only a black feather boa, curled seductively beneath the headline “Maxi’s Pad.” Maxi, in other words, had arrived.

But for all her talent and her beauty, Maxi Ryder kept getting dumped, in the most public ways you could think of.

She’d done the typical starlet-in-her-twenties thing, popularized by Julia Roberts and practiced by the generation that followed, which was to fall in love with her costars. But while Julia would have them yanking her toward the altar, poor Maxi just got her heart broken, again and again and again. And it didn’t happen quietly, either. The assistant director she’d fallen for on Advanced Placement showed up at the Golden Globes sucking face with one of the girls from Baywatch. Her costar on Trembling – the one with whom she’d played a half-dozen torrid love scenes, where the chemistry between them was so palpable it practically soaked your popcorn – had broken the news to her, and the rest of the world at the same time, during a Barbara Walters’ “Ten Most Fascinating People” interview. And the nineteen-year-old rock star she’d picked up on the rebound had gotten married in Vegas two weeks after they met to a woman who was not Maxi.

“It’s a wonder she’s doing any press at all,” Roberto, the publicist at Midnight Oil, had told me the week before. Midnight Oil was a very small, somewhat obscure New York PR firm – leagues below the big agencies that Maxi’d typically deal with. But between Advanced Placement and Trembling, she’d spent six weeks in Israel making a tiny little movie, a period piece about a kibbutz during the Seven Day War… and tiny little movies generally had small-time publicity agencies, which was where Roberto came in.

Seven Day Soldier would probably never even have made it to American art houses, had it not been for the Oscar nomination Maxi had gotten for Trembling. And Maxi would probably never have done any publicity for the movie, except she’d signed on to it before she’d made it big, which meant she’d agreed to be paid bupkes, and to publicize the film “in any way the producers deem appropriate.”

So, needless to say, the producers saw a chance to at least have an enormous opening weekend based on the strength of Maxi buzz. They’d flown her in from a shoot in Australia, set her up in the penthouse of the Regency on the Upper East Side, and invited in what Roberto referred to as “a select group of reporters” to enjoy twenty-minute audiences with her. And Roberto, bless his loyal heart, had called me first.

“Are you interested?” he’d asked.

Of course I was, and Betsy was thrilled in the way that editors usually are when plummy scoops fall into their laps, even though Gabby grumbled about one-hit wonders and flashes in the pan.

I was happy. Roberto was happy. Then Maxi’s personal publicist got in on the act.

There I was, moping at my desk, counting the days since Bruce and I had spoken (ten), the length in minutes of the conversation (four), and contemplating making an appointment with a numerologist to figure out if the future held anything good for us, when the phone rang.

“This is April from NGH,” rapped the voice on the other end. “We understand you’re interested in speaking with Maxi Ryder?”

Interested? “I’m interviewing her Saturday at ten in the morning,” I told April. “Roberto from Midnight Oil set it up.”

“Yes. Well. We have a few questions before we sign off.”

“Who are you again?” I asked.

“April. From NGH.” NGH was one of the hugest and most notorious public relations firms in Hollywood. They were the people you called if you were famous, under forty, found yourself in the midst of some kind of unsavory and/or illegal mess and wanted to keep all but the most fawning and tractable press far, far away. Robert Downey hired NGH after he passed out in someone else’s bedroom in a heroin haze. Courtney Love had NGH redo her image after she’d redone her nose, her breasts, and her fashion, and they smoothed her transition from foul-mouthed grunge goddess to couture-clad sylph. At the Examiner, we called them Not Gonna Happen… as in, that interview you were hoping for, that profile you wanted to write? Not Gonna Happen. Now, evidently, Maxi Ryder had enlisted their assistance as well.

“We would like your assurance,” April from NGH began, “that this interview will focus exclusively on Maxi’s work.”

“Her work?”

“Her roles,” said April. “Her acting. Not her personal life.”

“She’s a celebrity,” I said mildly. Or at least I thought it came out that way. “I consider that her work. Being a famous person.”

April’s voice could have frozen hot fudge. “Her work is acting,” she said. “Any attention that she gets is only because of that work.”

Normally I would have let it drop – just gritted my teeth and grinned and agreed to whatever ridiculous conditions they wanted to impose. But I hadn’t slept the night before, and this April was pushing all the wrong buttons. “Oh, come on!” I said. “Every time I open People magazine I see her in a slit skirt and big, dark, don’t-look-at-me glasses. And you’re telling me she just wants to be known as an actor?”

I’d hope that April would take my remarks in the half-joking manner I’d intended them. But I wasn’t sensing a thaw.

“You cannot ask her about her love life,” April said sternly.