Sarai Walker - Dietland

I watched Ellie for years, but when the show went off the air I became obsessed with something else and I hadn’t thought of Marlowe again until Verena mentioned her. I couldn’t recall ever seeing Marlowe on TV after Ellie. She seemed to have disappeared.

The night before I was supposed to meet Marlowe, I lay paralyzed on the sofa with electric shocks and nausea thanks to my continuing withdrawal from Y——. I found episodes of Ellie online, and while I went in and out of sleep, the show played in the background, a happy memory from my life on Harper Lane.

The next morning I was early to meet Marlowe at Café Rose. Before I left home, Verena had called and asked me to bring one of Alicia’s dresses. I chose a white poplin shirtdress with purple trim, now folded in a bag at my feet. The opening credits of Marlowe’s sitcom played in my head, with Marlowe in her raincoat, running around Manhattan in the drizzle, never mussing her glorious hair.

I expected her to look different in person, not only because she was older. Celebrities usually looked different in real life—I knew that from my days at Delia’s restaurant, which sat at the edge of West Hollywood. Whenever a famous actress walked through the door it was usually a disappointment. I expected the women to radiate light like they did on the screen, where a tiny movement—the brush of lashes against a cheek—was exquisite and beautiful, a raven batting its wing. In person they were ghostlike, their normally bold features faint, as if their likenesses had been reproduced so many times that they were becoming faded.

This wasn’t the case with Marlowe. When she arrived at the café, she didn’t look like a dialed-down version of her former self, but like an entirely different person. I guessed that no one ever recognized her in public. She must have weighed around two hundred pounds, maybe more. Her long hair was gone, replaced by a short crop, which was still honey colored but threaded with gray. Wayward strands were pinned back with a tiny red barrette. She was wearing a white sundress, her skin tanned, the muscles in her arms and legs defined despite the roundness. There was a baby strapped to her chest, who was facing outward and smiling. He was a gyrating mass of bare arms and legs, a demi octopus.

“I feel like I know you already!” Marlowe said, settling into the chair across from me, having had no trouble picking me out of a crowd. “I’m Marlowe, this is Huck.” I managed a startled hello.

She said she wanted to meet away from Calliope House so we could be alone and talk. As she settled in, disentangling her things and finding places for them on the empty chairs, I looked at her face, examining it for traces of Ellie, but I couldn’t see any. The voice was the same, though, honeyed to match her hair, and it was funny to hear its tones directed at me in conversation rather than coming from a TV.

I went to the counter to fetch Marlowe a coffee and a cruller, which I offered to do to save her the trouble, given the baby. I couldn’t imagine what kind of makeover she had in mind. Perhaps it was a reverse makeover, where she was going to make me look worse than I already did. I felt bad for thinking this, but beautiful Ellie was gone and in her place was this chunky, short-haired woman with a baby.

When I returned to the table, Marlowe had taken the baby out of his carrier and was bouncing him on her lap. While she ate the cruller she fixed her eyes through the massive plate-glass window next to our table and said, “You know, it’s been about fifteen years since I left Hollywood, but sometimes those British tabloids send a pap to long-lens me eating a taco or something.” With her mouth full of pastry, she held up her baby-free hand to the café window and extended her middle finger. “You never know if one of them is watching.”

I decided to tell her about growing up in Myrna Jade’s house, where I was watched. This was something I’d been unwilling to share with Verena, but Marlowe and I had more in common. I never thought I’d have anything in common with a TV star.

“I remember that little house on . . . what was it, Hanover Street?”

“Harper Lane.”

“Harper Lane! I can’t believe you lived there. I drove by that house once when my aunt visited me out in L.A. She was ancient and wanted to reminisce about the stars of old. When she spotted Myrna Jade’s name on the star map we just had to go.”

“Was that when you were playing Ellie?”

Marlowe nodded. When I was watching Ellie on TV, Marlowe was driving by my house, watching me.

“I loved Ellie,” I said, cringing at the way I sounded, but I couldn’t help it. “I really wanted to look like you. I begged my mom to buy the shampoo.”

“Sugar, the shampoo wouldn’t have helped you look like me. I wasn’t entirely au naturel back then. It took a committee to make me look the way I did. But those days are behind me.” She cupped her breasts and gave them a squeeze. “I can assure you there’s nothing inside this body with a serial number now.”

Marlowe said that even her name hadn’t been real. Her birth name was Marlowe Salazar, Marlowe being her mother’s maiden name and Salazar her father’s surname. Her management company thought Salazar sounded too brown, so they poked around in the family tree until they found the name Buchanan. “I was ethnically cleansed. I never changed the name back because it’s my brand now.”

On Marlowe’s left bicep there was a message, black script on flesh, but I couldn’t read it. As she fed the baby bits of pastry, I leaned closer: women don’t want to be me, men don’t want to fuck me.

“Is that a tattoo? A permanent one?”

She laughed. “Of course.”

“But what does it mean?”

Marlowe said she would tell me the story of the tattoo, but first I went to order her another coffee.

During the break between the fourth and fifth seasons of Ellie, Marlowe traveled to Italy for an extended vacation. Her handlers and her parents were pressuring her to accept a film role, but Marlowe wanted a break. She was exhausted from the pressures of carrying her own show and wanted to spend the summer out of the spotlight and on her own. “In L.A., so many people wanted a piece of me. I needed to get away.”

Ellie was not broadcast in Italy and Marlowe could enjoy anonymity there, as much as was possible for any beautiful woman in Italy. She pinned her hair to her head and wore a ball cap and frumpy, loose-fitting clothes. Nobody on the plane recognized her. In Rome, she went sightseeing like every other tourist and ate whatever she wanted. The producers of Ellie had her on a strict diet, so Italy was like a giant all-you-can-eat buffet. “Breakfast at the hotel was bread smeared with chocolate. Did you know that’s actually a thing in Italy? I went for gelato at Giolitti’s, sampled pasta dishes at two different trattorias, ate pizza rustica while walking around the market at Campo de’ Fiori and then I took a picnic to the Villa Borghese gardens, where I ate olives and cheese and drank wine while sitting under a tree. That was Day One.” Marlowe said that the food combined with anonymity was like a narcotic.

I didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, but the thought of walking the streets with no one watching me, and eating whatever I wanted, was exhilarating. When she said it felt as if her feet never touched the ground, I could practically feel it myself.

One afternoon she was walking through Trastevere taking photos when she passed a barbershop filled with old men. She peeked in the window, planning to take a photo. On the counters were jars filled with blue Barbicide and black combs; the men smoked and read newspapers; a dog slept in the doorway. She put her camera away and went inside. “I decided right then and there, on what was essentially a whim, to cut off my hair. All of it. I sat down in the chair and took off my cap. My hair tumbled out. I tried to explain to the barber what I wanted, but he didn’t understand. He had probably never seen that much hair in his life.” Marlowe braided her hair, from the nape of her neck down to the ends, and then she took the barber’s scissors and cut the braid off. Her description of it was like a scene from a horror movie.