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“Well?” Pandy said.
“It’s a fucky business, okay? A big fat fucky business. Where people get burned. Where people steal ideas and credit. Where they don’t even pay you if they can get away with it.”
“Okay. I get it,” Pandy said miserably.
“Actually, I don’t think you do.” Doug looked bummed, as if Pandy had disappointed him. “This is the reason why I don’t want to be with an actress. I don’t want to deal with this shit day in and day out. You’re a writer. I thought you were different.”
Stunned, Pandy took a step back. Her chest felt swollen and achingly heavy, as if her heart were drowning in sorrow.
“I’m sorry, Doug. Please,” she said plaintively. “I don’t know what came over me.”
She must have looked truly distressed, because Doug suddenly softened. “It’s okay,” he said, holding out his arms and pulling her close for a hug. “Let’s forget about it, okay? I’m leaving soon anyway.”
“Shhhh.” Pandy put her finger to his lips.
Doug slung his arm over her shoulder. They strolled slowly down Fifth Avenue, shuffling their feet like the saddest old couple in the world.
They reached Rockefeller Center, where they stopped to watch the skaters.
“Want to go skating?” Doug asked.
“Sure,” Pandy said with false enthusiasm.
She stared down at the awkward forms bel
ow. With a small sigh, she thought of how different they were from the perfect cast-iron figurines her family had placed under the Christmas tree when she was a kid. The skaters had been part of a traditional Christmas scene that included miniature houses and a church clustered around a reflective piece of old glass that formed a skating pond. She remembered how she and Hellenor had been fascinated by the “pond.” The glass was more than a hundred years old and contained mercury, which their mother claimed could poison them if the mirror broke. Every year, she and Hellenor would hold their breath as their mother carefully unwrapped the ancient glass and gently placed it on its bed of white cotton batting under the tree.
Then they would all breathe a sigh of relief.
Hellenor said that if the mirror broke, they would have to use a speck of mercury to chase down the loose droplets. Mercury was magnetic; if they could herd the specks, they would miraculously join together, and then technically the mirror wouldn’t be broken anymore.
Unlike what had happened to her family.
Pandy shuddered. She just couldn’t lose SondraBeth, too.
* * *
Doug left for Yugoslavia the next afternoon.
He promised to call, but as he stepped up into the white van waiting for him at the curb, Pandy sensed that he was beginning to morph into someone else—Doug Stone, movie star—and had already forgotten about her.
The van pulled away. Pandy walked beside it for a moment, willing Doug to catch her eye but getting only his profile. I’m never going to see him again, she thought as the van disappeared around the corner.
She went back up to her loft. The echoing space felt gray and cindery, as if she were trapped inside a cement block.
And at last, exhausted, frustrated, and miserably alone, she began to cry.
Two days later, when she was still dragging around in a funk—feeling “wounded,” as she explained to Henry, who told her to buck up—she went out to buy the tabloids. There was a photograph of her and Doug in every one, taken by a sneaky paparazzo while they’d held hands strolling up Fifth Avenue.
They were smiling and laughing, staring into each other’s eyes, entranced.
The photos must have been taken while they were on their way to the set. Back when they were still “happy.”
DOUG STONE FINDS LOVE WITH THE CREATOR OF MONICA, read one caption, while another proclaimed they were “hot and heavy.”
The words, all so untrue, were like shards of glass piercing her heart.
Pandy peered closely at the photographs, looking for clues to explain what had gone wrong, why the pictures and words showed one thing while the reality was so different. But no matter how hard she examined the photographs, she still felt like she was missing something.
