Sad Desk Salad (26 page)

“
Besos,
” Shira says, and I hear the puckery sound of air kisses waft toward me.

The door closes and I watch as Shira’s back gets smaller and smaller down the long hallway. I wait until she’s out of sight before I walk up to Becky’s room and knock confidently on the door.

Chapter Thirteen

I don’t hear anything from the other side of the door for a full minute. Just as I’m about to walk away from room 714, I hear that little voice say, “Shira?”

“No, it’s not Shira.” My heart starts beating more quickly. What am I going to tell her instead?

“Who’s there?” the voice asks, a slight tremor creeping in.

“It’s Alex,” I blurt out. Damn it. I should have given her a fake name.

“Oh! Come in!” the voice says, to my total shock. The door opens and Rebecca West is standing there, three feet away from me. Unlike Savannah Guthrie, who looked so much smaller and tidier than I had expected, in person Becky West is much more robust. She looks like a beautiful farmer’s daughter, her long blond hair in a loose braid and her face devoid of makeup. She’s wearing black yoga pants, a fitted tank top, and flip-flops. I look down at her feet and admire her clear pedicure. I’m trying to avoid making eye contact because I’m scared.

When I do finally look up, she’s smiling at me. How can she be smiling at me? Didn’t I just cause her to have the week from hell?

“I didn’t know you’d be coming so soon. I would have tidied up for you,” Becky says. I look around the room. It’s nearly spotless. The only sign that a person has been living here is a pair of worn Converse upended under a chair. Darleen West really has drilled her girls with good manners, I’ll give her that much.

“The room looks great, don’t worry,” I say tentatively.

She grins back at me. “I’m so glad you guys are interested in me and my story. I was having a pretty rough day when I got that call from your boss. Guess MTV really does make everything better.”

Aha. Molly’s intel about the Kardashian-style program was 100 percent correct. Becky thinks I am an MTV lackey coming to work out some detail of her TV show. I don’t want to affirm her assumption and outright lie to her but I don’t want to announce myself as the blogger who posted her video, either.

I’m trying to figure out my next move when I realize that neither of us has spoken for longer than is comfortable. Becky’s looking at me with a politely questioning expression, so I blurt out, “Do you mind if we sit? I’d like to ask you a few questions for background for my boss.” I even take out my digital recorder and wave it in her face. No surreptitious taping necessary, and nothing I’ve said aloud so far is a lie. This isn’t illegal, is it?

“Of course,” Becky says, giving me a practiced smile like a QVC hostess.

Whoever is paying for Becky’s digs spared no expense. She’s in a master suite, and we sit down on a brocade sofa that probably costs more than my rent. A verging-on-gaudy chandelier dangles above us, the glass casting shards of light onto Becky’s clear face. She crosses her ankles demurely as she sits. She’s so perfectly poised I wonder if she’s received media training in the past few days, or if she’s just naturally this way, or if this is the result of Darleen’s meticulous mothering.

When my conversation partner is awkward, I always get awkward; I’m generally a pretty good talker, but big empty silences make me blurt out randomness to fill the void (Do you like dogs? What’s your sign?). The opposite seems to be true with Becky West. Her noblesse oblige raises my level of confidence and discourse, and I’m able to just launch into it. I press record on my little device and nudge it toward Becky on the ornate glass table in front of us.

“Describe for me the days leading up to the release of the video,” I say, crossing my own legs at the knee.

“I was working at an MIT robotics lab for the summer, creating a robot that is capable of cleaning your entire house. Sort of like a Roomba on steroids. My boyfriend, Danny, was living with me at the MIT dorms. We were having a really great time,” Becky says. She’s lightly smiling as she tells me this, and it’s clear that she’s told this story before several times. There are no extra words or natural pauses.

“And then?”

“And then I was at the lab on Wednesday until around six. My phone doesn’t work in the lab because it’s in the basement. When I walked out of the building and turned on my phone, I had forty-seven missed calls. My first thought was that something had happened to one of my sisters.”

Oof. I push down the guilt. I can’t tell if Becky notices my discomfort because she just continues on with her story.

“But the first voice mail I got was from Mother’s lawyer, Gil. He explained precisely what had happened.”

“Your mom didn’t call you first?”

“My mother is an extremely busy woman,” Becky says curtly, her back straightening.

“Didn’t it bum you out that you didn’t hear from her directly?”

“Of course not,” Becky says. “Listen, I know a lot of people say a lot of things about my mom, but she really does just want the best for us. That’s why she wrote that book. She really believes in her philosophy and just wants to share it with the world.”

I deride this internally at first. Becky has obviously been trained like a show dog by her domineering mom. There’s no way she really feels that way about Darleen.

But then I think about it for a minute. Becky does seem incredibly centered, especially for someone who has just had her life upended. Maybe Darleen’s methods have something to them.

Besides, Darleen is still her mother. No matter how complicated that relationship is—and I truly have no idea what that must be like—of course Becky’s going to defend her mom to some stranger. I think about how livid Darleen’s comments about working moms made me—I took them personally, as if she were talking about my specific mother, when she wasn’t. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have at least half the media calling your mother a monster. I start to feel a smidge of retroactive shame for slamming Darleen so hard on Chick Habit.

Once again, I realize I haven’t spoken for a weirdly long time. Becky is still waiting patiently for my next question, her expression open.

“So . . . then what did you do?” I ask quickly.

“I went back to my apartment so that I could look at Chick Habit myself. I’ve read the site before. I used to even like it.”

It never occurred to me that Becky was a reader. I never think anyone I write about reads the site—I wouldn’t be able to be so hard on them if I did. My organs cringe but I push on.

“Do you have any idea how the video got online?”

“I know exactly what happened.”

I look at her expectantly. Becky twists a lock of baby-fine hair in her right finger and, for the first time in this half-fake interview, stares off into space. This is a chink in her heretofore unflappable demeanor. She doesn’t look hurt, exactly, but I wonder if that’s the subtext.

The silence is killing me, so I say, slightly too loudly, “What happened?!”

Becky takes a deep breath, and then the story comes tumbling out, as if she’s been storing it up for just this moment. “My boyfriend’s nutbag sister, Cassandra, had been visiting us over the weekend. She basically hated me on sight, and I have no idea why. Danny’s always so nice to her even though he knows she’s a crazy person.

“We were supposed to go to Fenway Park with her on Saturday—I went out of my way to get really good tickets—but she said that she wanted to stay in and rest. She claimed she wasn’t feeling well.” Becky winces. “I should have known she just wanted to snoop around.”

“So she found the video?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Well, it was just sitting there on Danny’s desktop. She didn’t exactly need to be Sherlock to find it.”

“And you’re positive she sent it?”

“Positive. Danny loves me. He would never betray me this way. I don’t know what his sister’s problem is. I think she’s just jealous because she has no life. She uses their family money to run some magazine about revolutionaries that twelve people read. She’s always talking about ‘exploding’ people’s expectations.” Becky puts air quotes around “exploding” and rolls her eyes. “She really believes her stuff is going to change the way people think. As if anyone cares about whether the word ‘seminal’ is sexist.

“But I still can’t understand why she sent it to that Chick Habit website. She’s always talking about how much she hates it.” A tremor creeps into Becky’s voice and she abruptly stops talking, plastering on that shopping-network smile instead.

As I look across the sofa at her, those huge baby blues betraying the emotion she’s trying to hide, I realize what’s been missing from my job, what I’ve been shoving away all week, maybe all year: empathy. I came here expecting to expose Becky as just another fame whore, but now that I’m just a few feet away from her, I can’t help but like her. Besides, she might not even be signing on as a reality TV star if I hadn’t posted the video in the first place. I can’t condemn her for something I helped create.

Part of me wants to admit to my deceit right now, to tell Becky that I’m the one who published the video. But I’m too scared. I feel like I’m in too deep, and it’s easier for me to just play along.

“After it went up, what happened next?”

“Danny and I had a big fight, and I dumped him. Which is the worst part of this entire thing. It wasn’t really his fault.” She sniffs and adjusts herself in her seat, dropping the grin. She’s composed now but not happy.

“
That’s
the worst part? What about the world seeing your boobs? What about the drugs?” Damn it. So much for sounding professional.

Becky shrugs. “Having the world see the video was embarrassing, I guess,” she says with a sanguine expression. “And my mom was super super pissed. After I talked to the lawyer, she eventually called me and read me the riot act. But as I explained to her, everyone my age has embarrassing videos and photos lying around, and if they ever become famous they’re just going to come out. Look at what’s happening to all those politicians, and they’re in their forties. I really think this is a net positive.”

“A net positive?” I repeat. She sounds like she’s reading from a PR guru’s playbook.

“Of course,” Becky says, her plastic smile returning. “Would you be here arranging for my family’s MTV show if that video never got out?”

“I guess not,” I tell her.

She must be reading my dismay at her lack of genuine upset, because she turns her whole body toward me and puts her cool fingertips lightly on my arm. An expression of deep concern washes over her face. “Do you think it would play better if I were more upset about it? Because I can be sadder,” she says gently, and just as the word “sadder” comes out of her mouth, her eyes start to well with tears.

I spend another ten minutes asking Becky more questions, but they drop out of my mouth without much oomph or consideration. When I stand up to leave, Becky gives me a big warm hug. She’s almost a head taller than me and her lanky arms drape lightly across my shoulders. She smells like Ivory soap and, somehow, water. “Thanks for coming by!” she says.

“Don’t thank me,” I tell her, wanting to be honest at least once in our conversation.

“Um . . . okay!” For a half second Becky looks confused, before she tames that emotion with her ever-present smile.

I take two steps away from her but then abruptly turn back around. “Are you really going to be all right?” I ask her.

“Of course,” Becky says. “We West women are resilient.” She smiles once more, politely, then closes the door.

While riding down in the elevator I consider everything I’ve just seen and heard. I’m still trying to parse the experience of being face-to-face with someone I’ve thought so much about as a moving image on my computer screen, comprised of pixels and sound. Certainly Becky is more calculating than I ever imagined, but she’s also just another twenty-year-old with a complicated relationship with her mother. How much of this charade is Becky and how much of it is just her responding to Darleen’s expectations? Even though my mother and Darleen West are like night and day, I’ve definitely pushed myself harder and farther because of what I thought my mother wanted for me.

As I walk back across the grand checkered lobby of the Pierre and out into the sunlight, I realize that I don’t think Becky’s canniness absolves me. Though it’s going to work out for her in the end, I still regret publishing the video. If I had gotten the full story first, if I had done the investigating and spoken to Becky and Darleen and Danny and even this shadowy Cassandra figure—would that have made it okay? Maybe, maybe not. But I could at least tell myself that I had tried to be fair.

I cross Fifty-ninth Street and head toward a bench right outside the bounds of Central Park. I find a place far enough away from the carriage horses and their barnyard stench where I can sit and collect myself. I play back a little bit of the interview to be sure that it recorded, and Becky’s girlish lilt is clear and fresh. I don’t know what to do with it. Should I just take the Internet drubbing I clearly deserve, allow the blackmailing BTCH to publicly humiliate me, and protect Becky’s (probably quite lucrative) deal with
People
? Or should I spill Becky’s whereabouts and let the Internet draw its own conclusions about her behavior?

I can’t decide just yet so my mind drifts back to Becky’s boyfriend, Danny. How must this be affecting him? I imagine him up in Boston, walking gloomily next to the Charles under an overcast New England sky. Even though she’s a master manipulator, I bought that Becky really had feelings for him, and I know that losing your first love is a special kind of devastation. This makes me wonder what Peter’s doing right now. Is he at work, plugging away and pushing out all thoughts of me? Is he distraught, sniffling over his financial models? While I’m picturing Peter’s office and his sleek desktop, I suddenly shift to a mental screen shot of Becky West’s Facebook wall. Danny Crandall—the one who said simply that he was sorry and that he loved her. That’s her boyfriend.