My Life in Black and White Read Free Page A

detectable beneath the thick layer of foundation and lashes of lipstick. She looked like a writer about as much as I looked like Santa Claus.
    “You write?” I asked in a tone more snooty than I intended.
    “I’m a poet,” Kiki enthused. I grabbed another slider and shoved it in my mouth whole. “But I want to switch to journalism.”
    I continued to chew on this bit of information and the slider. “That’s a big switch,” I said as sincerely as I could.
    “I know. That’s what I keep telling myself.” She shook her head like she was discussing giving up an opera career at the Met. “But no one’s buying poetry.”
    “Sadly, no one’s reading it either,” I interjected.
    “Riiight?” she agreed in a high-pitched voice. “But I know all about how this reality thing works, and I could write inside scoops and do post-mortems and things like that.”
    She was no dummy. She knew the term “post-mortem.” Magazines like
Hollywood Hush
loved first-person stories, as did entertainment television shows. A successful contestant could parlay their fifteen minutes of cavorting fame into a career if they were smart. And I never met a smart cookie I didn’t respect.
    “Sure, we can have coffee and chat about writing,” I offered and smiled at Kiki for the first time. She beamed, which made me like her more. Smarts and enthusiasm got you places in this town, not to forget Kiki’s plastic-fantastic attributes.
    “That’s awesome!” she hugged me. “Are you here to cover the show? I can introduce you around if you like.”
    I shook my head, “My husband worked on it.” In these situations I preferred to be vague.
    “Who is your husband?”
    I hesitated as long as I could. “Dean Lapointe,” I said and waited for the inevitable reaction of surprise. I was never what people expected, but Kiki gaped in a way that alarmed me. “You seemed shocked,” I said flatly.
    Her eyelashes fluttered like a moth trying to land on a light bulb. “I had no idea that Dean was married,” she exclaimed, looking more alarmed than me.
    “We have a policy of not telling people in the industry. Except for our closest friends, that is,” I said politely. Liar. But what else could I say? That my husband was embarrassed that I wrote for
Hollywood Hush?
That my husband disliked wedding bands because he didn’t like how his felt on his finger? Or that lately it was something more than rings he didn’t like the feel of? That was enough reality for a dozen television series.
    As if sensing my attempt at faking it, Kiki touched my arm, “You shouldn’t worry about him.”
    “I wasn’t,” I stuttered and felt my heart race as the heels once more wobbled beneath me. Sensing my anxiety, she flushed.
    “No, of course not. Why would you? He’s just a man, that’s all I meant. And we all know how
they
are! Riiight?”
    “Riiight,” I drew out the word in a perfect imitation of how she had said it, but she was gone before she could hear it.
    It was time to leave. Clearly Dean didn’t intend for this current crop of “stars” to know anything about me. I wondered if he
had
seen me earlier and turned his back anyway. Feeling a fool, I moved through the packed room towards the exit, past a leather sectionalsofa stuffed with the men and women who had appeared on the show. The door was only a few feet away, but by then it was too late; Dean was standing in front of it like a Walmart greeter when he saw me. He was shaking hands with a man who produced a sitcom. The sitcom’s star had just fallen off the wagon, and I had written an unflattering but honest story about it. This wasn’t going to be pretty. Dean pasted a smile on his face, but not before I’d seen the flash of disappointment. As I walked towards him one agonizing step at a time, afraid I would topple over, I felt a desperate urge to have Kiki at my side for reinforcement. The pace was excruciating, as though the world had become a slow-motion film.
    “You didn’t