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“Enjoy your reporter,” he said, and he kissed me on the forehead. And then he was gone, off to a world of scrub brush and red, red rocks in the car he’d rented the day before at the airport.
* * *
The biographer and I met for brunch at a bistro on a side street off the strip, where it was quiet and we could talk. It was about a thirty-minute stroll from the Buckingham Palace. We met at eleven thirty, and the first thing that struck me was that she was a Brit named Britt. I told her I would have to work her first name into my show, and she smiled good-naturedly, clearly supposing I was kidding. I was not. She was my age and a freelance writer, and she had hair that was blonder than mine—it was the color of corn silk—and deep green eyes. She was wearing a skirt and, despite the heat, a cardigan sweater. This was going to be her first book, but she knew her Diana. When she told me stories, they often ended with her laughing in a fashion that was contagious and husky. We talked at length about the queen’s passing, and even though I held a bit of a grudge toward Elizabeth for the way she had distanced herself from Diana, I was moved by how much the old girl meant to Britt Collins. I was touched. I learned where I was wrong about the queen and her legacy. It was going to be very difficult for Charles to wedge his yeti feet into his mother’s size four go-to-court pumps.
Britt also revealed a few details about how the Windsors felt about the TV series and the musical and the movies I’d never heard before, and I gobbled them up like shortbread—though, I must admit, at one point I had a pang of jealousy that the royal family thought about Emma Corrin and Kristen Stewart but most likely had never even heard of me. That was a bit of a dagger in the back.
At one point over our scones and jam (yes, she ordered that, and so I did, too), she leaned in to me and asked, “Your accent. Is it always this…British? Didn’t you grow up in Vermont?”
“I did. When I talk about Diana, I tend to fall into the accent. You’re not the first person to notice.”
“It’s good. I grew up in London, and I can assure you it’s quite deft.”
“Thank you.”
“But do you ever—forgive me—worry that you take this all a tad too seriously? This impersonation?”
I sat back in my chair. “No, I don’t,” I told her. “I want people to have a good time and see a good show.”
“Did you ever have a Vermont accent? I suppose there is one.”
“There is and, yes, I did. A bit. They got rid of it at Tisch. Pulled it out of me like a bad tooth.”
“That’s where you went to university?”
“Conservatory. Or, at least, more conservatory than university for me. NYU.”
She looked down at a bit of pilling on her sweater and used two fingernails like tweezers to pull some away. “What I mean about taking this Diana impersonation seriously is this: Diana, by the end, was pretty damaged goods. It’s none of my business and I’m not writing about you, but I’m curious: what is the greatest tragedy in your life? A heartbreak? A death?”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” I said, stalling.
She rested her elbows on the table (which surprised me), made a couch for her chin with her linked fingers, and continued, “Why, day after day, do you do…this?”
“Not because of a heartbreak or a death,” I assured her.
“You’re an actor—”
“I was an actor. This is different.”
“So, you’re not acting?”
“I’m…performing.”
“You do the heartbreak so well. You do the bulimia so well. It’s wrenching.”
“Her story is wrenching. It’s why it’s told and retold.”
“And your personal story is not? There’s nothing in your family history that makes you shudder with sadness or wince?”
“No,” I told her, and here I was acting. “There is nothing there at all.”
* * *
At one forty-five, Yevgeny and I texted. I was back at my casino, ensconced in my cabana, deconstructing my brunch with that British writer. I hoped I’d helped her with her book and it hadn’t been a waste of her time. I hadn’t enjoyed answering her questions about me, but I had reveled in her dish about the Windsors. I’d asked for her business card so we could stay in touch, but she was all out and scribbled her vitals on a piece of paper she tore from her notepad.
Yevgeny cheered me up by texting me a selfie of himself staring at the petroglyphs not far from a picnic area parking lot. He was wearing a safari hat and shades against the sun. He had done his homework and wanted to see them before he set off on what the tourism rangers considered a moderately strenuous hike. By then I had long convinced myself that at some point I’d told him Betsy had adopted a child and shared with him the girl’s name. Just because he had been born in Russia, I needn’t be paranoid about everything. Referring to the rock carvings, he texted me:
They’re not that old.
