Maybe the Moon

not so bad these days, believe it or not.”
    “Your taste has diversified, that’s all. You never ate anything but macaroni and cheese.”
    He laughed. “You remember that?”
    “I remember everything,” I said.

    I barely recognized the commissary. There were new chairs and tables and a witty new mural, rendered in bright ceramic tile, that depicted all the great stars of Icon standing, one after another, in the cafeteria line. Mr. Woods was there, of course—the shortest diner by far, except for the cartoon stars—predictably elated over a bowl of rum raisin ice cream. Callum picked up trays for both of usand led the way down the line, telling me what was available. I settled on chicken Kiev with mashed potatoes and Key lime pie.
    “You need something green,” he said.
    I pointed out that the pie was green.
    “The asparagus looks nice,” he said.
    “Don’t be my mother, OK? It’s obnoxious when you’re dressed like a cop.”
    He paid for the food and got a table for us next to the window. After a brief foray around the room, he found something for me to sit on: scripts on loan from a reader across the room. I settled onto them with a chuckle. “They call this coverage, don’t they?”
    He chuckled too and took a sip of his iced tea.
    “Who’s here?” I asked, looking around. “Anybody good?”
    He shrugged. “Bridget Fonda.”
    “Where?”
    “In the corner over there.”
    Sure enough, there she was, entirely recognizable, but smaller than I’d imagined. I wondered if she could say the same of me.
    “She’s hot, isn’t she?” Callum, to my amazement, was managing a reasonable facsimile of a leer. “I’d punch her ticket in a minute.”
    I gave him a friendly but pointed look. “You and who else?” Something flared up behind his eyes, but he extinguished it and reached for his iced tea.
    “I know you’re on the lot,” I said, tucking a napkin into my Peter Pan collar, “but it’s just ol’ Cady here, remember.”
    He was reddening noticeably. “You don’t know all there is to know about me.”
    “I’m sure I don’t,” I said, and pointed at his plate with my fork. “The asparagus do look nice.”
    He gazed down at them.
    “I should’ve gotten those,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

    We stayed off the Subject after that. I didn’t even bring up Jeff, though I was dying to get Callum’s angle on the affair. I called Jeffthis morning, by the way, thinking he might have been invited to Icon, too, and wanting his take on my own invitation, but he wasn’t home. I left a message, but so far there hasn’t been a peep out of him. For all I know, he and Callum are already kaput.
    Over dessert, Callum said: “I had a nice visit with Philip and Lucy in Malibu last week.”
    Lucy is Philip Blenheim’s wife of six or seven years. He was still a bachelor when I knew him, so to me Lucy is just another drawn shiksa face I see sometimes in paparazzi shots. She stays in the background as much as possible, dropping babies with long Old Testament names and decorating their three—count ’em: three—local mansions.
    “Everybody says she’s nice,” I said.
    “She is. Really down-to-earth. You’d like her a lot. She’d like you.”
    “Well…if her husband did.”
    Callum frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “Oh, you know. All that business.”
    “What business?”
    I filled him in briefly on my spat with our director: how I’d granted one lousy interview to a local trade sheet and Philip had put me on his shit list forever. “Everybody on the set knew about it,” I told him. “I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
    “I guess I do,” he said, “barely.”
    “Let’s just say we aren’t chummy anymore.”
    “But he likes you, Cady. We talked about you a lot.”
    My mouth went completely slack. “When?”
    “Last week in Malibu.”
    “You and Philip talked about me?”
    He mocked my amazement. “Yes, Cady.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He’s very fond of you.”
    “Oh, right.”
    “I’m telling you, he was delighted I’d run into you. He said he’d lost track of you.”
    I’m listed, of course, but I didn’t bother to point that out; I was too bowled over by what I was hearing.
    “I’m sure he’d be hurt,” Callum added, “if he thought you were mad at him.”
    “ Me mad at him ?” All I could do was laugh. “Have we just stepped through the looking glass or something?”
    Callum laughed with me. “I wish you’d heard it, Cady.