FEBRUARY 1994 #3
He didn’t love me, of course. He just planned on making my success about him before he ruined it because he couldn’t resist taking a moment to shoot at me. Once, he built me up so high, and now I was his to tear down.
I think I was just as upset at myself as I was at him.
Fuck all of this.
I stood up, pushing Oisín off me. I started walking down the street, and then I ran.
The paps followed me all the way to the bloody Metro. I can’t explain why. Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I thought it was a more iconic shot than me crouched in the street, bawling over a boy I should have cut loose a year ago.
I got off at the nearest stop and hailed a taxi to take me home.
The driver did a double take, giving me that familiar look: I know you, but I can’t remember who, exactly, or where, exactly.
But give me a week—I was about to become an It Girl of Hollywood.
Oscar Woes for Sundance’s Golden Couple
Nadine Heywood and Oisín Connellan Split???
Nadine Heywood Subpar on Subway
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, throwing another magazine onto the table and nearly taking out Ruchi’s coffee cup in the process.
The article was particularly cruel—a shot of me crouched on the street zoomed in, circling creases in the fabric of my dress and proclaiming stomach rolls, the self-satisfied headline scrawled across it: Star Too Big for Romance.
Ivan had phoned that morning, asking if I was alright, telling me about a murder mystery he’d been working on whose plot he was happy to put into practice on Oisín if I so wished. Venting to him was likely the only reason I wasn’t breaking down in the face of this deluge.
Still, I wished he weren’t on a set in Santorini, that I had other friends, that I wasn’t talking about this with someone whose affection I paid for.
I wished I could break down—and that they might be there for me all the same.
“Honestly, I think you spun it well.”
I gave Ruchi the sort of look she often leveled me with. “This is my life we’re talking about.”
“You knew what you were getting yourself into.”
I stood, pacing the confines of my hotel suite. I’d packed a suitcase and left the house in Westwood. There was a future without Oisín—and quite a bright one, which made him ruining it all the more infuriating.
He hated me too much to even ride the coattails of my success. That stung.
“Right, and this time I made an okay call. But next time? I need to be able to hurt, Ruchi.”
“The game’s changing,” she said with a shake of her head. “You’ve spent the last year running from them, no wonder they’re glad to pin you down in a moment of weakness.”
“So I’m supposed to play nice with those leeches?”
“Yes. Call them. Use them. Feed them. And then they won’t go looking for blood elsewhere. Or, well, I suppose they will, but it won’t be a pack of them chasing you across the city.”
“You think we should use them for this?”
She considered. “Let’s work it out. Oisín hasn’t made a statement yet, and any PR worth their salt will be treading a fine line—near enough to this scandal to still be relevant, but as close to the Oscars as they can get to steal your spotlight and place it on him.”
“I’m not even nominated.”
“No, but the films are, and, frankly, you’re the most interesting actress in both. You’re young, you’re hot, you’re going through a breakup and just sobbed your way home on the Metro in front of half the photographers in the city. You’re the one the world cares about.”
———
The world, it turned out, included Harper Moore.
I hadn’t heard from her, obviously. Amos had mentioned her only briefly, and only as “that mad woman Stampy dated.” I hadn’t even really considered that the rest of my old class at CADS would have graduated and might even be on their way to roles of their own.
Not until Ruchi phoned me and asked: “Who the fuck is Harper Moore?”
“What?”
“Harper Moore. Her PR just got in touch and asked if I wanted to set up a press moment.”
“Why?”
“He said to check out Swish magazine. She’s on some new show on AHX. She went to—”
“Central Art and Drama School, yes.”
“Nadine, what the hell did you do to her?”
“Nadine Heywood stole my boyfriend,”
Claims New Star of AHX’s City Girls
“That’s it?” I asked, flipping to the appropriate page—hardly able to focus my gaze on the words because Harper was staring back at me.
It had only been a few years, but they’d chiseled her into perfection and polished her to a shine.
Her mother would be proud—she held herself just like a model, hands on her hips, all jaunty angles as she leaned forward toward the lens, that long neck of hers jutting up from the high collar of the black dress she wore like it was bared to be bitten or slashed at your pleasure.
She did not need to do anything but exist for me to feel threatened. Only she had done something, hadn’t she? I found the right section.
But despite the looks inherited from her mother, the iconic ’70s model Greta Liao, Harper has been thoroughly unlucky in love.
“Oh no, let’s not discuss that,” she says with a smile that doesn’t hide the pain behind the words.
“I lost the only man I’ve ever loved to the biggest star in Hollywood. You can’t compete with that.”
If this beautiful woman sitting before me can’t compete, surely nobody can. “No, no, sorry,” she says when I press. “It sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? I’m not saying Nadine stole my boyfriend … Well, okay, maybe I am saying that.”
“Nadine Heywood?” Not exactly the biggest star but certainly a rising one—and a woman whose own heartache has been well documented of late. But is there more to it? Perhaps this is simply karma coming back for her.
“Oh no, I shouldn’t be saying any of this. But yes, Nadine Heywood stole my boyfriend. It obviously didn’t work out for her either.”
———
“God, she looks good,” Amos said, leaning over my shoulder.
“Shut the fuck up, Amos.” I snapped the magazine closed with more aggression than I thought myself capable of. He plucked it out of my hands, dropping the tape he’d been measuring my hips with, and opened it back up again to peruse himself.
Harper. I almost couldn’t believe she was real.
She surfaced a little too regularly in my thoughts, an infestation I couldn’t shake.
But that’s what she’d become—a haunting thought, a rallying call, an idea to spur me on.
Not a person in her own right, living her own life and plotting a course straight toward me.
But clearly somewhere between CADS and this adolescent shout in a newspaper, I’d lingered far more substantially in her mind.
There was a sort of pleasure in that.
Ruchi was watching me carefully. “It’s only this one interview. I don’t imagine it will get more traction.”
“Maybe it should,” I said quietly, looking back at Harper’s smug face gleaming out of the pages in Amos’s hands. God, she was such a prick. This stank of desperation—and wasn’t that laughable? That she might need to use me to claw her way up Hollywood’s ladder of fame?
She’d hate that even more, I think, to know her fame owed itself to my name on her treacherous lips.
“What do you mean?” Ruchi asked.
“Maybe it should gain more traction,” I said. “Feed the press. Give them something easy so they’ll stop going for what’s hard. This is it. If they want a scandal, it’s this one. Set up that meeting with Harper.”
“Better idea,” she said, smiling at the plan. Ruchi was a publicist first and foremost because she was an agent of chaos. She loved the frenzy. “She put her call in the papers. Let’s answer her back on a stage.”
Amos hummed. “Do it at the MTV party this weekend. I was going for ‘Heartbroken Sweetheart Hopeful for Happiness,’ but I’ll pull something else together. I’m thinking something that says: ‘Karma’s a Bitch, and So Am I.’”
———
So there I was, hair straight and slicked down my back, large opals studded through my ears to remind everyone that I was the successful one in this equation.
The dress was a simple black shift, which was not my usual color—too harsh against my white-blond hair.
But it pulled attention where it was needed—to the heels, curved and razor sharp, a hint of new-age absurdity and so difficult to walk in I suspected I’d be barefoot the moment I left the carpet.
There was a hint of the Diana revenge dress to it, and it was over the top in the way that would come to define Amos’s style—or rather, the style of Amos DuPont (his mother’s surname, apparently—he claimed it better encapsulated his brand).
A style that was audacious and daring and said, Yes, we really did that.
And I was the face of it.
I wasn’t sure what the party was, some MTV thing that attempted to position itself as one of culture beyond music.
The carpet was chaos. Instead of reporters joining us in neatly organized lines with assigned times for each of us, they lined up behind the barricade of the photo drop and yelled their questions.
“Nadine! How are things going with your boyfriend?”
“Which one?” I tossed back, pivoting on one of those spearhead heels. “Oisín, or the guy I supposedly stole from that bitch Harper Moore?”
That’s all it took. Swearing was quite the escalation, especially to an American press who still counted “F-bombs” in their media. Everyone wanted to know who had caused it. Everyone wanted to know why.
From that moment, you couldn’t say one of our names without hearing the other within, nestled in its contours, echoing beneath every sound.
Harper had reached up to claw her way out of anonymity.
And I’d leaned in, grabbed her, and hauled.