Trading Up (62 page)

The unlikely friendship had begun nearly two weeks ago, on the day the
Post
headline had screamed, “MODEL PROSTITUTE” above a slightly grainy photo-18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:25 PM Page 331

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graph of Janey taken from the Victoria’s Secret catalog, in which she was wearing a filmy peignoir and mules with pink ostrich feathers. It was the time of year when it feels like winter will never end, and that winter, the winter of 2001, had been particularly snowy. Dirty piles of snow lined the streets, and slushy puddles the size of small ponds formed in the crosswalks. One’s feet were always damp and everyone, it seemed, was cranky.

In truth, the friendship started because Wendy was bored, and Janey couldn’t leave the suite.

And so, nearly two weeks ago, at three o’clock on the afternoon of the

“MODEL PROSTITUTE” headline, the phone rang. On Janey’s first day back from Paris, the phone had rung incessantly with calls from reporters, and Janey had been expressly forbidden to answer it. But the hotel was well-versed in the special needs of celebrities, and the next day they switched the number. And then the phone hadn’t rung at all, except for Selden, who had called about six times to make sure that she was still in the suite, and her new publicist, Jerry Grabaw, who wanted to see if she needed anything and kept reassuring her that everything was going to be okay . . . eventually.

Well, she knew
that
, she thought in annoyance. After all, wasn’t the whole thing really just one . . . big . . . huge . . .
mistake
?

She’d picked up the phone expecting it to be Selden, but instead it was Wendy Piccolo.

“May I speak to Selden, please?” Wendy’s deceptively sweet voice had inquired, and Janey recognized it immediately.

“Selden is in his . . . office,” Janey said, as if any intelligent person would know this. Wendy was not put off. “Janey?” she asked.

“Yes,” Janey replied stiffly, wondering how Wendy might think it could possibly be anyone else.

“Actually,” Wendy said, her voice betraying a touch of guilt, “I called to talk to you. I was wondering how
you
were doing.” Janey seized on this gambit like an eagle snatching a rabbit from a field—so far no one, it seemed, had been the least bit concerned about how
she
felt; they were all too busy worrying about how her problem affected
them
. “It’s a total
nightmare,
” she cried. “There are something like a hundred photographers outside and I can’t leave the suite . . . I’m going insane. And then all this publicity and people calling . . .

And the worst thing about it,” Janey said, walking to the window and, for probably the thirtieth time that day, peeking through the closed curtains at the crowd of photographers standing across the street, “is that not a word of it is true. What nobody seems to understand is that I
did
write a screenplay . . .”

“Of course you did,” Wendy said, her voice trembling with outrage in the tradi-18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:25 PM Page 332

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tional female manner of always championing the woman’s cause over the man’s.

After all, it wasn’t the facts that mattered necessarily, but the moral fairness of the situation, she thought, and she continued: “Even if you
didn’t,
it wouldn’t matter.

It’s Comstock who’s committed the crime, not you or those other girls.” Oh yes. The “other” girls. Janey had nearly forgotten about them. But who
were
they? Call girls, waitresses, and aspiring actresses. No one had ever heard of them before. They weren’t famous . . . and it wasn’t their pictures on the cover of the
New
York Post
day after day. “The problem is that none of
them
wrote screenplays,” Janey said. “So the press lumps
me
in . . .”

“Because you’re beautiful and well known,” Wendy explained. “Face it, Janey, without you, they wouldn’t
have
a story.” She was just so
right,
Janey thought, and told her so . . .

And then, to her slight surprise, Wendy called again the
next
afternoon. She’d talked to the other actors in the cast of
Streetcar,
she said, and they’d all decided that Janey was this incredibly tragic figure, just like Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter.

Janey hadn’t read the book, but she had seen the movie with Demi Moore, and, she had to admit, it
was
just like that. Then Wendy said that someone suggested they should all get T-shirts made with “the model prostitute” printed across the front to wear in sympathy. Janey had laughed uncomfortably at the idea, but she liked the fact that people were thinking about her, and she had even liked the way Wendy had said the word
Streetcar,
as if Janey were an insider in the theater, too.

And now, Janey sat on the arm of the flowered chintz couch, swinging her leg in boredom. In the great female tradition of friendship, she and Wendy were having nearly the same conversation they had every day.

“It’s just so dull to have to stay in all the time,” Janey moaned.

“I know, Janey,” Wendy said sympathetically. “But I keep telling you: You’re going to have to leave that suite one of these days . . .”

“Oh, but I
can’t,
” Janey sighed in irritation. “Selden will kill me. He won’t even let me go near the window.”

“What’s
Selden
going to do?” Wendy asked, for about the fifteenth time.

“Divorce you? If he was, he would have done it
already
. . .”

“I suppose you’re right,” Janey sighed.

“Why shouldn’t you?” Wendy asked craftily. “Go out, I mean.” She, too, was getting slightly tired of the same old conversation—she wanted something to happen so Janey would at least have something new and entertaining to tell her about, which she would then be able to share with the rest of the cast of
Streetcar
—not to mention all her other friends.

“Maybe
we
should go out—together,” Janey said, expelling a large, slow breath of air, as if it weren’t really something she expected to be able to do. She, naturally, 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:25 PM Page 333

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was being equally as crafty—she knew that if she was seen with Wendy Piccolo, whom the press, apparently, “adored,” it would go a long way in shoring up her own shaky social position . . .

“Oh, we will.
Soon,
” Wendy promised, without any intention of making this a reality—or certainly not in the near future. Talking on the phone with the Model Prostitute (which was how she and all her friends referred to Janey behind her back) was one thing, but being seen out with her? She wasn’t that dumb, and besides, her agent would kill her . . .

But as she didn’t want to insult Janey (not just yet anyway, someone would probably make a movie out of Janey’s life, and Wendy had half a mind to play her), she added, “You
know
I really want to, but I can’t—at least not for six weeks, not until I finish the play . . .”

“I should come and see you in it,” Janey said.

“Oh do!” Wendy said. “You and Selden should both come.”

“If only I could make people understand that I
did
write a screenplay . . . ,” Janey cried, returning to her favorite topic.

And then, as she always did when the subject of the mysterious screenplay came up, Wendy said pleadingly, “Janey, why don’t you just go and get it?”

“But I
can’t,
” Janey said. “I told you, it’s in my old apartment and I can’t leave the hotel . . .”

“But you could give me the keys,” Wendy said, “and
I
could go and get it . . .”

“You’d never find it,” Janey said with a deep sigh. “That place is such a mess—I had a tenant, you know, that polo player Zizi, and apparently he was a pig . . . I’m not sure even I could find it, or that it’s even there. My worst fear is that maybe I left it in that cottage I rented in the Hamptons two years ago . . .”

“Oh, I
know,
” Wendy said, “but even so . . .”

“And I never turned it in,” Janey said mournfully. “So there’s no date on it.

There’s nothing to prevent people from thinking I wrote it after the fact . . . after I’d been accused.” And, of course, there were
other
reasons as well, she thought . . .

“I suppose there is that,” Wendy said, a touch of annoyance creeping into her voice.

The moment passed, however, and the two women hung up with promises to speak later.

Janey kicked at the leg of the coffee table. Maybe, she thought, she
should
give Wendy the key to her apartment to go look for the screenplay. Of course, there was no screenplay, only thirty pages, but the fact that she’d sent Wendy to find it would shore up the reality that there was one. She could just imagine Wendy defending her to the rest of the cast of
Streetcar
: “She sent me to look for it,” Wendy would say,

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But it was too risky to send Wendy to her apartment, Janey decided. If she did happen to find the screenplay . . .
No,
she decided. She couldn’t be too careful these days . . . She stood up and went to the window again, peeking carefully through the curtains. There were only three photographers now—a motley little crew who were stamping their feet in the cold. They looked like the dregs of the paparazzi; the kind of guys no one would have talked to in high school. Every day, their numbers had dwindled by three or four, and the scene was now a far cry from the day she’d returned, and walked in to find at least fifty photographers stationed across the street. There was such pandemonium that the police had finally erected blue barriers, but even
that
was nothing in comparison to the scene at the airport . . .

She’d had no idea that the story was so big until she had gone through customs and passed through the swinging doors into the corridor that led to the exit. Oh, she’d known that she was “in trouble” and that Selden would be furious with her, and might even be angry enough to threaten to divorce her. But she was quite sure that she would be able to convince him otherwise—if she felt like it.

So when she saw that the corridor was filled with a mob of photographers instead of the usual limousine drivers in search of their passengers, it still didn’t register that they were there for her. And then one of them had screamed out, “There she is!” And there she was indeed, pushing her own unwieldy luggage cart filled with her Louis Vuitton suitcases like some schlub from New Jersey, and she hadn’t even had time to put on her sunglasses . . .

And then they were all screaming her name and shouting things at her, like,
What was the most amount of money she’d ever been paid for sex?
There were so many of them, and the flashes from their cameras were literally blinding . . . Naturally, it was frightening, but there was something that was just a little bit heady about it, and she remembered thinking that this was how Princess Di must have felt . . .

And then they were all around her—in her face and in front of the cart—and finally, she just couldn’t move and she threw her arm over her eyes and opened her mouth to scream . . .

And then a man’s hand emerged from the sleeve of a pinstriped suit and grabbed her arm, pulling her away, and some other man was pushing her cart like a lawn cutter through the mass of photographers, mowing them down, and suddenly they were on the curb and there were five policemen standing outside and the man in the pinstriped suit was urging her into a long black limousine with tinted windows. The man followed her into the car and slammed the door behind him, while the photographers surrounded the car, still shouting and snapping pictures. The man—he was older and attractive in a conservative, dull kind of way that is the sign of people with no imagination—crawled forward to the partition. “Go, Chester, go!” he shouted to the driver.

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“What about the luggage, sir?”

“Ronald will take care of it. Just get out of here before they start breaking windows . . .”

The car had taken off with a lurch, and Janey fell back against the seat. And then there was silence. The man turned to her and held out his hand. “I’m Jerry Grabaw, by the way,” he said with a slight Brooklyn accent. “Your husband hired me. I’m your new publicist.” His mouth stretched into an ironic smile. “Congratulations,” he added. “Now you’re really famous.” Janey had just looked at him in shock.

Janey peeked through the curtains again. In the last five minutes, one of the photographers had left—but maybe he’d only gone to get something to eat. Well, she certainly
was
famous now, Janey thought, letting the curtains fall back together as she glanced at the pile of newspapers stacked in the corner, with no thanks to Jerry Grabaw.

She knew Selden was paying Jerry Grabaw a lot of money, but so far, he hadn’t taken any of her “theories” seriously—like, for instance, the fact that George Paxton was the one who was responsible for bringing her down. “An interesting idea,” Jerry had said smoothly—in his pinstriped suits, he looked, and acted, Janey thought with annoyance, more like a conservative businessman than a celebrity publicist—

“but in light of the facts, I think we have to let Comstock Dibble take the blame.”

“George is a
friend
of mine, Janey,” Selden fumed, as if to remind her of this obvious fact. “Why would George do anything . . .” She was about to open her mouth to speak, but the expression on Selden’s face made her think better of it. On top of everything else, it probably wasn’t a good idea for Selden to know that she’d gone behind his back right from the very beginning to ask George for help . . . or that she’d then gone to him for money . . . And she certainly didn’t want him to ever suspect how far she’d gone to try to get it . . .

She spied through the curtains again. Jerry had told her to keep the curtains closed and to stay away from the windows, because the paparazzi had telephoto lenses that could take a picture from a hundred yards away through glass—not that she’d want them to get a shot of her looking like this, anyway. She’d hardly changed her clothes in the past two weeks, thinking that there was no point if no one was going to see her. But how many photographers would be there tomorrow? she wondered. Two . . . one . . . maybe they would all be gone. They were giving up, she realized, and considering today’s
Post,
which had hardly mentioned her at all, they were possibly even losing
interest
. . .