You Think It, I'll Say It(39)
“I know it’s such a cliché, but I’d love to try directing,” Kelsey is saying. “One of my role models—”
“You know what?” Nina interrupts. “I do have to go. I really apologize, but I—I—” She pauses, and Kelsey looks at her. “I have a baby, and I need to go nurse her.”
Kelsey seems bewildered. “You have a baby?”
“In my hotel room,” Nina says. “She’s six months old. I never got her to take a bottle—I messed up, I have no idea what I was thinking. But she won’t take one, and she’s really finicky about jar food, and she needs to eat now.”
This is when, as if to offer proof—as if proof is necessary, as if anyone would lie about such a failure—Nina’s milk lets down. There’s that hardening in her nipples, then the release, the liquid spilling in two warm, fast lines, immediately soaking through her bra and shirt. Kelsey looks as if she has detected a bad smell. But when Kelsey speaks, her voice is dispassionate, almost clinically curious. She says, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Nina tries to sound respectful, not defensive, when she says, “You didn’t ask if I’d had a baby.”
Because it would have been self-centered and insensitive to tell you, Nina thinks. And because I didn’t realize Zoe’s existence would become relevant. And because you don’t care. Aloud, she says, “My daughter isn’t really used to people besides me. I’m sorry that I didn’t plan this better, but I’ll order a taxi back to my hotel.”
“Just Uber.”
“I don’t have Uber on my phone.”
“Where are you staying?”
“North Hollywood.”
“I’ll drive you,” Kelsey says. “If you’re trying to get there as fast as possible.” Even if there isn’t apparent sympathy in her tone, Kelsey is offering a favor, and Nina is not in a position to decline it. As she sets cash on the table and they walk out of the restaurant, she knows that without the check, she won’t be reimbursed by Gloss & Glitter.
I’m coming back to hotel now, Nina texts the babysitter from the passenger seat of Kelsey’s SUV. About 15 min.
Then Nina turns on her recorder and says, “So your dream kiss, on-screen or off—who would it be?”
Kelsey turns to look at her with an expression that is unmistakably appalled. Which Nina understands, but at the same time, it’s Gloss & Glitter’s signature question; the magazine’s writers ask this of all the subjects of cover profiles, even the occasional athlete. And getting a follow-up answer from a famous subject, after the interview, is a hundred times harder than getting it in the moment.
Coldly, Kelsey says, “Hmm. I’d have to think about that.” For several minutes, they listen to a pop channel on satellite radio, not speaking.
Kelsey has just turned off Santa Monica Boulevard when she says, “That stuff I told you about Scott and our breakup and the miscarriage—obviously, I didn’t mean for it to be in the article.” She sounds calm and certain, not nervous.
Fuck, Nina thinks. She says, “Oh, I promise I’ll handle it in a very respectful way.”
“After I specially requested you to write this piece, it would be a bummer to find out that I shouldn’t have trusted you,” Kelsey says, and there is in her tone a new steeliness, possibly a menacing quality—a bummer for you is the implication. Even so, if there were not two still-widening lines of breast milk running down the front of Nina’s shirt, if Kelsey were not chauffeuring her, surely she would say delicate and suasive things. At least she’d try.
As it is, Nina says, “I hear you.”
The hotel where Nina is staying has a circular driveway in front, with a fountain in the center. When Kelsey pulls into the driveway, Nina sees that the sitter and Zoe are standing outside. The sitter has Zoe propped on her right hip, and Zoe is big-cheeked and little-nosed, mostly bald, her plump arms emerging from a sleeveless pink shirt with a fish on it, her squat little legs bent in yellow pants, her feet bare.
Nina is surprised that they’re outside and more surprised that Zoe is not crying. To be sure, her expression is one of annoyance. But it’s also one of scrutiny and discernment. Even spending all day in a house with her, Nina is often caught off guard by the intelligence in her daughter’s eyes, and as they approach the hotel, from thirty feet away—that is, before it’s really possible—Nina feels that this intelligence is trained on her.
While still sitting next to Kelsey in the front seat, Nina understands that she will never see Kelsey again. They aren’t friends, they never were friends, they never will be. Nina will never again interview a celebrity. In fact, she will never again write for Gloss & Glitter or any other magazine. This part she doesn’t know, but six weeks from now—which, not coincidentally, will be ten days before her COBRA insurance expires—she will accept a grant-writing job at a nonprofit; she will enroll Zoe in daycare; Zoe will cry nonstop for the first six days and then, abruptly, be fine.
Kelsey will indeed be nominated for an Oscar; she won’t win, but four months from now, at the ceremony, she will present the award for Best Documentary Feature, and people who pay attention to such things will agree that her dress, a sheer ice-blue gown by Dior Haute Couture, is one of the night’s best. In the weeks prior to and following the Oscars, she will be everywhere in the media, her wardrobe and hairstyles, her upcoming projects, her girlish midwestern charm. And in a taped interview that airs just before the Oscars and is conducted by a legendary octogenarian television personality, an interview Nina will watch lying in bed while Zoe sits next to her eating oyster crackers from a purple plastic cup, Kelsey will tearfully describe the miscarriage she suffered in September 2014.