Good in Bed

“I think you had it worse than I did,” I reasoned, as we let our clay masks dry. “I mean, when Kevin talked about ending a long relationship, everyone who watched knew that he meant you. But with the article, the only people who knew that C. was me were…”

“Everyone who knew you,” said Maxi.

“Yeah. Pretty much.” I sighed. Between the seaweed and the salt and the New Age music and the warm and gentle almond-oiled hands of Charles the masseur, I felt like I was wrapped in some delicious cloud, miles above the world, away from telephones that didn’t ring and resentful coworkers and snooty publicists. Away from my weight… so much so that I wasn’t even worried what Charles amp; Company were thinking as they rubbed and oiled and rolled me around. There was just me and the sadness, but even that didn’t feel very heavy just then. It just felt there, like my nose, like the scar over my belly button I got from picking at a chicken pox scab when I was six. Just another part of me.

Maxi grabbed my hand. “We’re friends, right?” she said. And I thought, for a moment, that she probably didn’t mean it – that this was a version of her quickie, six-week, movie-set friendships. But I didn’t care.

I squeezed back. “Yes,” I said. “We’re friends.”

“You know what I think?” Maxi asked me. She raised a single finger-tip. Instantly, there were four more shots of tequila in front of us, each one paid for, no doubt, by a different adoring guy. She picked up a glass and looked at me. I did the same, and we gulped tequila. I set the glass down, wincing at the burn. We’d wound up at Hogs and Heifers after all. We’d had a late lunch at Virgil’s, where we’d sampled ribs, barbecued chicken, banana pudding, and cheese grits. Then we’d each bought about six pairs of Steve Madden shoes, reasoning that although we might feel fat, our feet didn’t. Then it was on to the Beauty Bar, where we’d bought all ma

“You know what I think?” Maxi repeated.

“What’s that?”

“I think that we actually have a lot in common. It’s the body thing,” she said.

I squinted at her. “Huh?”

“We’re ruled by our bodies,” she pronounced, and sipped at a beer that someone had sent over. To me, this sounded very profound. This, perhaps, was because I was profoundly drunk. “You’re stuck with a body that you think men don’t want…”

“It’s a little more than a theory at this point,” I said, but Maxi wasn’t about to have her monologue interrupted.

“And I’m afraid that if I start eating things I like, I’ll stop looking the way I look, and nobody will want me. Worse than that,” she said, glaring through the cigarette haze, “nobody will pay me. So I’m stuck, too. But what we’re really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need,” she said, pounding the bar for emphasis, “is to just stop thinking of ourselves as bodies and start thinking of ourselves as people.”

I stared at her admiringly. “Thass very deep.”

Maxi took a deep swallow of beer. “Heard it on Oprah.”

I did another shot. “Oprah’s deep. But I have to say that all things considered, I’d rather be trapped in your body than mine. At least I could wear bikinis.”

“But don’t you see? We’re both in prison. Prisons of Flesh.”

I giggled. Maxi looked offended. “What, you don’t agree?”

“No,” I said, snorting, “I just think that Prisons of Flesh sounds like the name of a porno movie.”

“Fine,” Maxi said when she’d stopped laughing. “But I have a valid point.”

“Of course you do,” I told her. “I know that I shouldn’t feel the way I do about how I look. I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.” I sighed. “But you know what I want even more than that?” Maxi looked at me expectantly. I hesitated, then took another tequila. “I want to forget about Bruce.”

“I have a theory about that, too,” Maxi a

“I can’t hate him,” I said sadly. Suddenly my lips felt as though they were forming words a good foot or two away from my face, like they’d decided to just detach themselves and head for greener pastures. It was a common side effect when I’d been enjoying too many libations. That, and a liquid sensation in my knees and wrists and elbows, like my joints were coming unhinged. When I got drunk I started remembering things. And right now, because there was Grateful Dead on the jukebox (“Cassidy,” I thought), what I was remembering was how we’d gone to pick up Bruce’s friend George to go to a Dead show, and while we were waiting we’d slipped into the study and I’d given him a very quick, extremely hot blow job underneath the stuffed deer’s head mounted on the wall. Physically I was sitting at Hogs and Heifers, but in my head I was on my knees in front of him, my hands cupping his ass, his knees pressing my chest as he trembled and gasped that he loved me, thinking that I was made for this, made for nothing but this.

“Sure you can,” Maxi urged, yanking me out of the basement and into the tequila-soaked present. “Tell me the worst thing about him.”

“He was really sloppy.”

She crinkled her nose adorably. “That’s not that bad.”

“Oh, you have no idea! He had all this hair, see, and it would get in the shower drain, and he’d never clean his shower, but every once in a while he’d just, like, scoop up a clump of this disgusting, awful, soap-scummy hair and, like, park it in a corner of the tub. The first time I saw it I screamed.”

We did another shot. Maxi’s cheeks were flushed bright, her eyes were gleaming.

“Also,” I continued, “also he had disgusting toenails.” I burped, as delicately as I could, against the back of my hand. “They were all yellow and thick and raggedy…”

“Fungus,” said Maxi knowledgeably.

“And then there was his minibar,” I said, warming to the task. “Every time his parents went on a plane, they’d bring him those mini-bottles of vodka and scotch. He’d keep them in a shoebox, and whenever anyone would come over for a drink, he’d say, ‘Have something from the minibar.’ ” I paused, considering. “Actually, that was kind of cute.”

“I was going to say,” agreed Maxi.

“But it got a

“Tell me,” asked Maxi. “Was he really good in bed?”

I tried to prop my head in my hand, but my elbow wasn’t doing its job, and I wound up almost bouncing my forehead off the bar. Maxi laughed at me. The bartender scowled. I asked for a glass of water. “You wa

“No, I want you to lie to me. I’m a movie star. Everyone else does.”

“The truth,” I said, “the truth is that…”

Maxi was laughing, leaning in close. “C’mon, Ca

“Well, he was very willing to try new things, which I appreciated…”

“Come on. No editori… editorial…” She closed her eyes, and her mouth. “No spin. I asked a simple question. Was he any good?”

“The truth” I tried again. “The truth is that he was very… small.”

Her eyes widened. “Small, you mean… down there?”

“Small,” I repeated. “Tiny. Microscopic. Infinitesimal!” There. If I could say that word, I couldn’t be as wasted as I thought I was. “I mean, not when it was hard. When it was hard it was pretty normal-sized. But when it was soft, it was like it telescoped back into his body, and it just looked like this little…” I tried to say it, but I was laughing too hard.