Good in Bed Read online

  “This,” he said, pointing with one spindly finger. “What was this, exactly?”

  I shrugged. “It was just… well, I met this woman. I was typing her announcement and there was a word I couldn’t read, so I called her, then I met her, and then…” My voice trailed off. “I guess I thought it sounded like a story.”

  He looked up at me. “You were right,” he said. “Want to do it again?”

  And a star was born… well, sort of. Every other week I’d find a bride and write a short column about her – who she was, her dress, the church and the music and the party afterward. But most of all, I wrote about how: how my brides decided to get married, to stand up in front of a minister or rabbi or justice of the peace and promise forever.

  I saw young brides and old brides, blind and deaf brides, teenage brides pledging themselves to their first loves and cynical twentysome-things taking vows with the men they called their baby’s fathers. I attended first, second, third, fourth, and a single fifth wedding. I saw eight-hundred-guest extravangazas (an Orthodox wedding, where the men and women danced in separate ballrooms and there were a total of eight rabbis in attendance, all wearing Tina Turner -style glitter wigs by the end of the night). I saw a couple get married in adjoining hospital beds after a car accident that had left her a quadriplegic. I saw a bride left at the altar, watched her face crumple when the best man, his face pale and grave, made his way down the aisle and whispered, first into her mother’s ear, and then into hers.

  It was ironic, I knew, even then. While my peers were writing hip, sarcastic first-person columns for nascent online magazines about being single in the nation’s big cities, I was toiling at a little local newspaper – a dinosaur, quivering on the tar pit of extinction in the evolutionary scale of the media – investigating marriage, of all things. How quaint! How charming!

  But I couldn’t have written about myself the way my classmates did, even if I’d wanted to. The truth was, I didn’t have the brio to chronicle my own sex life. Nor did I have the kind of body I’d be comfortable exposing, even in print. And sex didn’t interest me the way marriage did. I wanted to understand how to be part of a couple, how to get brave enough to take someone’s hand and leap across the chasm. I would take each bride’s story, each halting narrative of how they met and where they went and when they knew, and turn them over and over in my mind, looking for the loose thread, the invisible seam, the crack I could pry open so I could turn the story inside out and figure out the truth.

  If you read that little paper in the early 1990s, you could probably see me at the edges of a hundred different wedding pictures, in the blue linen dress that I wore – plain, so as not to call attention to myself, but dressy, in deference to the solemnity of the occasion. See me in the aisle seats, my notebook tucked into my pocket, staring at a hundred different brides – old, young, black, white, thin, not thin – looking for answers. How do you know when a guy is the right guy? How can you be sure enough to promise someone forever and mean it? How can you believe in love?

  After two-and-a-half years of the wedding beat, my clips happened to cross the right editor’s desk at the precise moment that my home-town’s big daily paper, the Philadelphia Examiner, had, as an institution, decided that attracting Generation X readers was of utmost importance, and that a young reporter would, by her very existence, draw those readers in. So they invited me to move back to the city of my birth and be their eyes and ears on twentysomething Philadelphia.

  Two weeks later, the Examiner decided as an institution that attracting Generation X readers mattered not a whit, and went back to desperately trying to shore up circulation among soccer moms in the suburbs. But the damage had been done. I’d been hired. Life was good. Well, mostly.

  From the start, the single biggest drawback to my job was Gabby Gardiner. Gabby is a massive, ancient woman, with a cap of bluish-tinged white curls and smeary, thick glasses. If I’m big, she’s super-size. You’d think we would enjoy some solidarity because of our shared oppression, our common struggle to survive in a world that deems any woman above a size twelve grotesque and laughable. You would think wrong.

  Gabby is the entertainment columnist for the Philadelphia Examiner and has filled that post, as she’s fond of reminding me and anyone else within earshot, “for longer than you’ve been alive.” This is both her strength and her weakness. She’s got a network of contacts that spans both coasts and two decades. Unfortunately, those decades were the 1960s and 1970s. She stopped paying attention somewhere between Reagan’s election and the advent of cable, so there’s a whole universe of stuff, from MTV on down, that simply doesn’t register on her radar the way, say, Elizabeth Taylor does.

  Gabby’s age could be anywhere from sixty on up. She has no children, no husband, no discernible hint of sexuality or hint of any life at all outside of the office. Her lifeblood is Hollywood gossip, and her attitude toward her subjects is rarely anything less than reverential. She talks about the stars she covers, mostly thirdhand, in reprinted bits of regurgitated gossip from the New York City tabloids and Variety, as if they are her intimates, her friends. Which would be pathetic if Gabby Gardiner were the least little bit likable. And she’s not.

  She is, however, lucky. Lucky that most of the Examiner’s readers are over forty and not interested in learning anything new, so her “Gabbing with Gabby” column remains one of the most popular parts of our section – another fact that she frequently remarks upon, at top volume (allegedly she shouts because she’s deaf, but I’m convinced that she does it because it’s more annoying than simply talking).

  For my first few years at the Examiner we left each other alone. Unfortunately, things escalated last summer, when Gabby took a two-month leave to address some nasty-sounding medical problem (“polyps” was the only word I caught, before Gabby and her friends shot me laser-beam hate looks, and I scurried out of the mailroom without even having retrieved my copy of Teen People). In her absence, I got to write her daily column. She lost the war, but won the battle: They kept calling the damn thing “Gabbing with Gabby,” appending a short note in an embarrassingly small font about how Gabby was “on assignment” and that “Examiner staff writer Candace Shapiro is filling in.”

  “Good luck, kid,” Gabby had said grandly, waddling over to my desk for her farewell, beaming as if she hadn’t spent the past two weeks lobbying for the editors to run wire copy instead of giving me a chance while she was off, presumably being de-polyped. “Now, I told all my best sources to call you.”

  Terrific, I thought. Hot gossip about Walter Cronkite. Can’t wait.

  That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Every morning, Monday through Friday, I could look forward to my daily call from Gabby.

  “Ben Affleck?” she’d rasp. “What’s a Ben Affleck?”

  Or, “Comedy Central? Nobody watches it.”

  Or, pointedly, “Saw something on Elizabeth on ET last night. Why didn’t we have it?”

  I tried to ignore her – to be pleasant on the phone and every once in a while, when she got particularly crabby, to toss in a line about “Gabby Gardiner will return at the end of September” at the end of the column.

  But then one morning she called and I wasn’t there to pick up my phone, so Gabby got my voice mail, which was basically me saying, “Hello, you’ve reached Candace Shapiro, entertainment columnist at the Philadelphia Examiner.” I didn’t realize my misstep until the paper’s executive editor stopped by my desk.

  “Have you been telling people you’re the entertainment columnist?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. I’m just filling in.”

  “I got a very irate call from Gabby last night. Late last night,” he emphasized, with the expression of a man who did not appreciate having his sleep interrupted. “She thinks you’re giving people the impression that she’s gone for good and you’ve taken over.”

  Now I was confused. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  He sig
hed again. “Your voice mail,” he said. “I don’t know what it says, and, frankly, I don’t want to know what it says. Just fix it so Gabby isn’t waking up my wife and kids anymore.”

  I went home and wept to Samantha (“She’s completely insecure,” she observed, and passed me a pint of half-melted sorbet as I moped on her couch). I raged on the phone to Bruce (“Just change the damn thing, Cannie!”). So I took his advice, altering my voice mail to say, “You’ve reached Candace Shapiro, temporary, transient, impermanent, just-filling-in, in-no-way-here-for-good entertainment columnist.” Gabby called the next morning. “Love the message, kid,” she said.

  But the damage was done. When Gabby returned from her break she took to calling me “Eve” – as in All About – when she spoke to me at all. I just tried to ignore her, and focus on my extracurricular activities: short stories, scraps of a novel, and Star Struck, the screenplay I’d been laboring over for months. Star Struck was a romantic comedy about a big-city reporter who falls for one of the stars she interviews. They meet cute (after she falls off a bar stool ogling him at the hotel bar), get off on the wrong foot (after he assumes she’s just another plus-size groupie), fall for each other, and, after the appropriate Act Three complications, end up in each other’s arms as the credits roll.

  The star was based on Adrian Stadt, a cute comedian on Saturday Night! whose sense of humor seemed in sync with my own – even when he was doing his memorable three-month stint as the Projectile Vomiting Pilot. He was the guy I’d watched all through college and beyond and thought, if he were here, or if I were there, we’d probably get along. The reporter, of course, was me, only I named her Josie, made her a redhead, and gave her stable, straight, still-married parents.

  The screenplay was what I’d pinned my dreams on. It was my answer to all of my good grades, to every teacher who’d ever told me I was talented, to every professor who’d ever said I had potential. Best of all, it was a hundred-page response to a world (and to my own secret fears) that told me that plus-size women couldn’t have adventures, or fall in love. And today I was going to do something gutsy. Today, over lunch at the Four Seasons, I was interviewing actor Nicholas Kaye, star of the forthcoming Belch Brothers, a teen-pleasing comedy featuring twin brothers whose gas gives them magical powers. More importantly, I was also interviewing Jane Sloan, who’d executive-produced the movie (with one hand holding her nose, I figured). Jane Sloan was a hero of mine, who, before her slide toward the crassly commercial, had written and directed some of the sharpest, funniest films Hollywood had ever seen. Better yet, they were films with sharp, funny women in them. For weeks I’d been distracting myself from the missing-Bruce blues by constructing an elaborate daydream of how we’d meet and she’d immediately recognize me as a kindred spirit and potential collaborator, slipping me her business card and insisting that I contact her the moment I turned my attention from journalism to screenwriting. I even smiled a little, imagining the look of delight on her face when I modestly confessed that I had indeed penned a screenplay, and that I’d send it to her if she liked.

  She was a writer, I was a writer. She was funny, I figured, and I’m funny, too. True, Jane Sloan was also rich and famous, successful beyond my wildest dreams, and about the size of one of my thighs, but sisterhood, I reminded myself, is powerful.

  Almost an hour after I arrived, forty-five minutes after we were scheduled to meet, Jane Sloan seated herself across from me and laid a large mirror and a larger bottle of Evian next to her plate. “Hello,” she said, her throaty voice emerging through her clenched teeth, and proceeded to give her face a few healthy squirts. I squinted at her, waiting for the punch line, waiting for her to crack up and say she was kidding. She didn’t. Nicholas Kaye sat down beside her and shot me an apologetic grin. Jane Sloan finally put the mirror and bottle down.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” said Nicholas Kaye, who looked much like he did on TV – cute as a button.

  Jane Sloan shoved the butter dish aggressively across the table. She picked up her napkin, which had been folded into the shape of a swan, opened it with one dismissive flick of her wrist, and carefully wiped her face with it. Only after she’d set the napkin, now stained ecru and crimson and mascara-black, onto the table, did she deign to speak.

  “This city,” she pronounced, “is wreaking havoc on my pores.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid as soon as the apology had left my mouth. What was I sorry for? I wasn’t doing anything to her pores.

  Jane waved one pale hand languorously, as if my apology for Philadelphia was of no more consequence then a mold spore, then picked up her silver butter knife and started poking at the flower-shaped butter pat in the dish she’d just banished to my side of the table. “What do you need to know?” she asked, without looking up.

  “Umm,” I said, fumbling for my pen and my notebook. I had a whole list of questions ready, questions about everything from how she’d cast the movie to who her influences were, and what she liked on TV, but all I could think of was, “Where’d you get the idea?”

  Without lifting her eyes from the butter, she said, “Saw it on TV.”

  “That late-night sketch comedy show on HBO?” Nicholas Kaye said helpfully.

  “I called the director. Said I thought it should be a movie. He agreed.”

  Great. So that was how movies got made. Strange little butter-averse pint-size Elvira with squirt bottle makes phone call, and voilà, instant film!

  “So… you wrote the script?”

  Another wave of that ghostlike hand. “I just oversaw.”

  “We hired a few guys from Saturday Night!,” said Nicholas Kaye.

  Double great. Not only did I not work for Saturday Night!, I wasn’t even a guy. I quietly abandoned my plan of telling her that I’d written a screenplay. They’d probably laugh me all the way to Pittsburgh.

  The waiter approached. Both Jane and Nicholas scowled at their menus in silence. The waiter shot me a desperate look.

  “I’ll have the osso bucco,” I said.

  “Excellent choice,” he said, beaming.

  “I’ll have…” said Nicholas. Long, long pause. The waiter waited, pen poised. Jane poked at the butter. I felt a drop of sweat descend from the nape of my neck, down my back, and into my underwear. “This salad,” he finally said, pointing. The waiter leaned in for a look. “Very good, sir,” he said, relieved.

  “And for the lady?”

  “Lettuce,” Jane Sloan mumbled.

  “A salad?” the waiter ventured.

  “Lettuce,” she repeated. “Red leaf, if you have it. Washed. With vinegar on the side. And I don’t want the leaves cut in any way,” she continued. “I want them torn. By hand.”

  The waiter scribbled and fled. Jane Sloan slowly lifted her eyes. I fumbled my notebook open again.

  “Umm…”

  Lettuce, I was thinking. Jane Sloan is eating lettuce for lunch, and I’m going to sit here and suck down veal in front of her. And, worse yet, I couldn’t think of a thing to ask.

  “Tell me your favorite scene in the movie,” I finally managed. A horrible question, a freshman-at-the-school-‌paper question, but better than nothing, I thought.

  She smiled, finally – faintly, fleetingly, but still, it was undeniably a smile. Then she shook her head.

  “Can’t,” she said. “Too personal.”

  Oh, God, help me. Rescue me. Send a tornado shrieking through the Four Seasons, uprooting businessmen, sending fine china flying. I’m dying here. “So what’s up next?”

  Jane just shrugged and looked mysterious. I felt the waistband of my control-top pantyhose give up the fight and slide down my midsection, coming to rest at the top of my thighs.

  “We’re working on something new together,” Nicholas Kaye volunteered. “I’m going to write… with a couple of my friends from college… and Jane’s going to show it to the studios. Would you like to hear about that?”

  He launched into an enthusiastic description of what
sounded like the world’s dumbest movie – something about a guy who inherits his father’s whoopie cushion factory, and how his father’s partner double-crosses him, and how he and the spunky cleaning lady triumph in the end. I took notes without hearing, my right hand moving mechanically over the page as my left hand ferried food to my mouth. Meanwhile, Jane was dividing her lettuce into two piles – one of mostly leaf pieces, the other of mostly stem pieces. Once this division was complete, she proceeded to dip the top third of the tines of her fork into the vinegar pot, then carefully spear a single piece of lettuce from the mostly leaf side and place it precisely in her mouth. After exactly six bites – during which time Nicholas polished off his salad and two pieces of bread and I downed half my osso bucco, which was, all things considered, delicious – she patted her lips dry with her napkin, picked up her butter knife, and started poking the butter again.

  I reached over and pulled the butter dish away, thinking that I couldn’t stand to see this, and, also, that I had to try something, because the interview was going down the crapper. “Cut it out,” I said sternly. “That butter hasn’t done anything to you.”

  There was a pause. A pregnant pause. An icy, yawning crevasse of a pause. Jane Sloan stared at me with her dead black eyes.

  “Dairy,” she said, as if it were a curse.

  “Third largest industry in Pennsylvania,” I countered, without any idea of whether it was true. It sounded about right, though. Whenever I went for a bike ride that took me more than a few miles out of the city, I saw cows.