Reunion. Therese Fowler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Two

      Inside Blue’s apartment was the life she’d been living for ten years, or seasons, as she’d learned to call them. Ten seasons of ratings pressures and growing competition, the challenge of keeping a laser-sharp focus on what daytime audiences want, but trying to do it on her terms. “Style and Substance,” was the headline of her recent Elle interview. That was the goal. Sometimes they achieved it.

      Ten seasons of expanding success. The apartment’s structural remodel had come after season two, and the color scheme back then … what had it been? Pale blue and lavender with light woods? Or was that the following incarnation? She could no longer recall. Only that the décor had been updated four times—every two years, the way some people traded up vehicles. The apartment needed to be current, Marcy said, because Blue sometimes entertained there. Marcy handled it all just the way she handled most of the other details of Blue’s life. Saint Marcy, Blue often called her, and Marcy would say, “Ha! Not after the life I’ve led.”

      It was all talk, though, had always been all talk with her. The worst Marcy had done was what they were all doing that year they’d shared the dilapidated house. Taking on new names—Blue had tried out Skye, after the heroine of a book she’d read, but became Bubble when her belly began to round—inventing themselves, dabbling with drugs, with sex (though she’d quit both when her periods quit) … and while some people might consider them Hell-bound for their behaviors, Blue wasn’t convinced. She and Marcy and their various housemates had been young, rudderless, sure of their invincibility and the idea that they had so much time ahead of them that they could waste it freely, using homemade bongs and listening to Prince. So much time that even the biggest of mistakes would sooner or later melt away and be forgotten, like tonight’s snow after tomorrow’s sun.

      The apartment was newly decorated in what Blue thought of as Twenty-first Century Lodge style. Though the work was completed weeks ago, the scent of fresh paint and new wool rugs persisted, in a pleasant, low-key way. The place looked marvelous, all warm woods and natural stone and leafy plants throughout the wide-open space. Marvelous and unused. Marvelous and bereft. An Architectural Digest spread, after the magazine’s crew had gone.

      In her bathroom she pulled off the elastic that bound her hair. Highlighted chestnut, her stylist called the color, with hints of honey and cinnamon, as if her head were a pastry. Wholesome was the word the media often used to describe her, suggesting that somehow her nut-honey-cinnamon hair and her long-legged tomboyish build explained her success. They’d changed their tune a bit when she made it onto the Forbes Top 50 list. Now she was wholesome and driven, wholesome and savvy, wholesome and well connected and well dressed.

      Style and substance, how surprising, how unusual!

      A woman who made her living on TV did not, strictly speaking, have to be attractive to succeed, but if she wasn’t, the media loved to say so. Hence the hour she’d just spent at the gym, an hour for which she paid a ridiculous amount of money in order to get exclusive time with Jeremy. An effective hour, though, repeated five times each week (up from the three that used to do the trick); she was in top physical form. If while doing stretches, crunches, leg lifts, she sometimes thought of Jeremy’s sculpted body making better use of hers, where was the harm in that?

      Her bathroom’s new wallpaper, an amber grass-textured weave, kept bringing to mind a Hemingway story—not one of the novels they would be promoting on the show next week, but another, about Mount Kilimanjaro and a couple waiting for rescue at a nearby camp. The short story, a tale of regret, had been a favorite of Mitch Forrester’s … and Mitch had been a favorite of hers.

      As she washed her face she recalled Mitch reading her the story one evening early in their short-lived relationship. He’d been pensive—something to do with his ex-wife and the difficulty he was having in getting to see his son. “There are only so many chances to get things right,” he’d said, but she hadn’t understood very well at the time. She’d been barely nineteen, sure that life was a broad and endless series of chances. After all, didn’t they live in the land of opportunity, where success in business, in life, in love, was no accident of birth but could be made? Wasn’t Mitch in charge of his own destiny? What was there to regret at his age, twenty-seven? He could have a new wife. (Her.) He could have new children. (Hers.) For two promising months she had done a very effective job of ignoring anything that contradicted her vision, and then he’d set her straight. And then … then, he’d set her free.

      Less easy to ignore, these days, were the lines in her forehead and the tiny sunbursts spreading, now, from the corners of her eyes. Her softening jawline. Thinner lips. Less easy to ignore was her makeup artist’s insistence that the miracle of Botox was her salvation. Easier, though, if she quit looking in the mirror. She pressed the light switch and left the room.

      She now had the whole sixth floor of this historic art deco building. An entire floor was more space than she needed, by far—as if that mattered; what did need have to do with her life anymore? Here it was just her and Peep, her tabby Maine Coon cat. He slept most of the time, and she was gone most of the time, so their pairing worked out well. With the apartment’s lights still off, the falling snow looked like a shimmering veil outside the east-facing windows. In daytime, that view included Lake Michigan as seen between downtown’s towers. Out the north side was a view of slightly lesser buildings, one of which housed the studio. The apartment was swept and dusted and vacuumed weekly, the floors polished monthly—and before and after every cocktail party. The refrigerator was stocked, the wine bottles circulated, all by a Marcy-directed staff that Blue never saw.

      She went barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen on marble floors the color of bitter chocolate. Why colors seemed so often to be named for food she wasn’t sure. Her kitchen cabinets were crème brûlée, and her granite countertop was confetti orzo. The wall color throughout all the main rooms was something to do with squash: pale summer squash? Light butternut purée? Whatever. She wasn’t Martha Stewart.

      There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?

      She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, her, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.

      Calvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.

      “Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”

      “She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.

      “No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”

      “Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, СКАЧАТЬ