You Think It, I'll Say It(34)
Off the Record
On the plane from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, Zoe cries so hard that a flight attendant offers to take her from Nina and carry her up and down the aisle. As Nina knew it would, the handoff, which lasts fewer than five minutes, makes Zoe cry even harder, but Nina allows it to happen as an act of contrition toward the other passengers. When they land at LAX, Zoe falls asleep inside the baby carrier that’s strapped around Nina’s waist and shoulders and sleeps as Nina walks off the plane, uses the bathroom, and heads to baggage claim to collect the suitcase and car seat. While Nina is trying to locate the line for taxis, Zoe wakes up enraged, so Nina finds another bathroom, sits on the toilet seat (there’s no lid, and unsure if it’s grosser to do this with her pants up or down, she chooses down, atop a layer of toilet paper), and nurses Zoe while the motion-detecting flusher goes off several times. When they are finally settled in a taxi, it’s late afternoon in L.A.—presumably, traffic-wise, the worst time—and a pleasant sixty-five-degree October day. Zoe cries all the way to the hotel. She is six months old.
They go to sleep early and Zoe wakes only once during the night to eat, then wakes for the day at three forty-five A.M., which, to be fair, is six forty-five A.M. in Indianapolis. The sitter is not due at the hotel for another five hours. Nina eats food from home, two granola bars and a banana that has become very bruised and mushy, which Zoe declines to share. For an indeterminate but extremely long stretch, they play a game where they lie on the bed with their faces close together and Nina taps her own nose and makes a delighted gasp, then taps Zoe’s nose and Zoe makes the same noise. Even after they have been up for quite some time, it’s still dark outside the window of the hotel; they’re in North Hollywood, and down the hill, lights are visible on the Ventura Freeway.
Nina counts, and from the time they left her mother’s house (her house now, though she still isn’t used to thinking of it this way) to the time they will arrive back home adds up to forty-two hours. This means that the $5,000 she is being paid to write the profile of Kelsey Adams divides into $119 an hour of travel, at least before taxes. It’s not an eye-popping amount—a successful writer would be paid significantly more—but she needs the money. Although she has little confidence that she’ll be able to successfully pull off the trip’s logistics, it’s enough to make it worth trying. Also, and somehow this feels more embarrassing than being broke, interviewing Kelsey again makes her feel like less of a loser.
Nina brought two board books to L.A., Bear on a Bike and Barnyard Dance!, and, as she always does, Zoe gazes for a particularly long time at the pages of Bear on a Bike on which the bear is visiting the beach. What, Nina wonders, does she see?
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The first time Nina interviewed Kelsey was almost three years ago; they met for lunch in midtown Manhattan, not far from Gloss & Glitter’s office. The slot Nina was interviewing Kelsey for was called 3QW—Three Questions With—and would constitute a sixth of a magazine page, though Kelsey’s publicist seemed to be willfully pretending that the piece would be longer and kept offering Nina increasingly elaborate “access.” (They could attend a fudge-making workshop together!) Although the publicist’s freneticness made Nina anticipate disliking Kelsey, Kelsey turned out to be warm, down-to-earth, and curious about Nina herself, which was rare in interview subjects. Kelsey was tickled to learn not only that Nina, too, had grown up in the Midwest but also that they shared a birthday. The day of the interview, Kelsey was twenty-eight, and Nina was thirty-one. For the previous two years, Kelsey had had a minor role on a very popular network sitcom that Nina had watched only in preparation for the interview; Kelsey played the sitcom family’s mail carrier. By the time Nina’s article about her ran, Kelsey had been cast as the lead in the HBO drama Copacetic, now in its second acclaimed season. The new movie she’s starring in, which is expected to garner her an Oscar nomination, will be released at Christmas.
All of which is why, since Nina returned to Indianapolis, whenever people ask if she met anyone famous when she worked in New York, she mentions Kelsey, even though Kelsey wasn’t that famous when Nina interviewed her. Nina makes a point of saying how nice Kelsey was and sometimes includes the fact that, as they were leaving the midtown restaurant, Kelsey suggested that the two of them hang out again. Nina does not include that Kelsey then added, “Is that weird?” and that Nina replied, “No, not at all,” even though she did think it was weird—not intensely weird, but weird enough to imply that Kelsey was lonely. Mostly, Kelsey seemed to Nina young, sweet, very pretty, and neither idiotic nor particularly smart. Plus, whatever Kelsey’s impression was of Nina, it wasn’t accurate, because a situation in which one person is continuously asking the other questions and treating all the responses as interesting isn’t representative of what it would be like for the two people to socialize. They never did hang out. The more time that has passed, the more Nina has seen her own snobby earnestness (her earnest snobbiness?) as laughably and characteristically self-sabotaging—she could have been friends with a celebrity!
Still, Nina was shocked when Astrid, her former boss from Gloss & Glitter, called to offer Nina the cover profile of Kelsey. First, Nina was shocked that Astrid called her in Indianapolis, something Astrid hadn’t done since laying Nina off, more than a year before. Also, Nina was shocked that Astrid was offering her a major article instead of another crappy sidebar about sunscreen or PMS. And then Nina was shocked when she learned that Kelsey Adams had requested her—her, Nina, by name—to write the profile because Kelsey felt that back in 2011, they’d really “clicked.”