Stewart let the cushions drop and turned around. “All right,” he said. “We get Gregor over here and see what he can do. But in the meantime, I’m going to use your other chair. I’m not going to sit on that.”
2
There were people who said that Kendra Rhode acquired friends and lost them when it served her best interests, and although that was only half true, Kendra didn’t understand why it was something she should be ashamed of. There was, in reality, very little Kendra understood about the man-on-the-street understanding of a “friend,” which seemed to her to be a pledge of mutual self-destruction: a friend was someone you attached yourself to, and stuck to, even if it meant chopping your own head off in full view of the American public. Did that make any sense? Why would anybody be like that, even for somebody she was married to? In Ken-dra’s world, there were exactly three kinds of people: family, about whom you could do nothing; people you knew, about whom you could do very little; and “friends,” meaning people you went to clubs with, and shopping, and got photographed with, who were important only as long as they were part of the scenery that built your image.
Arrow Normand had definitely been part of the scenery that built Kendra’s image, and so had Marcey Mandret, but it had actually been months since either one of them had interested her as individuals. With Arrow, there had been very little interest to begin with. Kendra had seen what was wrong the first day they’d spent hanging out together, and she didn’t believe, even now, that anybody else had ever been fooled. Kendra didn’t care much for “intelligence.” In her experience, “intelligent” people were either bitter and poor, or snobbish and self-important. Even the best of them took too many things too seriously, like art. That being said, Kendra saw no virtue in stupid people, either, and Arrow Normand was profoundly, almost breathtakingly stupid. She was also something worse. She was someone who could not maintain her identity, even for a second, without the help of the machinery that created it.
Kendra was smart enough to know that she did, in fact, have considerably more wattage than the people she hung out with. She had infinitely more wattage than Arrow, and enough more than people like Marcey so that if she was out with them the cameras would be on her. This was partly good luck, and partly calculation. You couldn’t arrange to be born with wattage, any more than you could arrange to be born a Rhode, but she’d been born with both advantages, and at the very core of her soul she believed she had deserved them. It was silly what people said to her sometimes, what people called out to her as she was walking into clubs or premieres or wherever it was everybody was being photo graphed. It would not have been a better thing to have started poor and worked her way up. The people who did that kind of thing were not interesting. They weren’t admirable. They were just the grown-up version of the kids they’d all called “grungies” in school, the ones who spent all their time trying desperately to qualify for the Ivy League.
The calculation part was trickier, and this afternoon Kendra was aware that she was taking a risk. She didn’t like risks, except for the kind that made people call you “daring,” meaning the silly kind, like taking off your clothes and jumping into the fountain at the Plaza. Zelda Fitzgerald was one of Kendra’s icons, and also one of her cautionary tales, the first in a long line of celebrity debutantes gone bad. Brenda Frazier, Gamble Benedict, Cornelia Guest. Kendra could come up with half a dozen names, girls who had come out and then blown out, or disappeared, after they’d gotten the reputation for being entirely crazy. It was why she was careful about what she drank and what she put up her nose, but it was also the reason she had days like this one. The trick to longevity was taking care about the things that should be taken care of, and never forgetting which those were.
If she had wanted to make a splash right off the bat, she could have gone right out her front door. There were no photographers at that door, but that was only because the door was set back from the road, and there was a gate. Robber barons knew a thing or two about maintaining their privacy and managing their publicity, although not enough not to get tagged with a name like “robber barons.” At any rate, there was a gate, and the photographers were camped out there, and she could have gone straight through in her car and gotten her picture taken just as much as she wanted.
Calculation really was tricky, however, and this afternoon Kendra had a lot of it to consider. There were things that could kill you in this business—which was the way she thought of it, her life, her career, this business, although she never did spell out, even to herself, what any of those things meant. Getting sloppy drunk and ending up in rehab, or, worse, in jail, was one of those things. She had actually been arrested once, for driving without a license, and the pictures in the papers the next day had scared the hell out of her. Drugs and liquor were only cool so long as it looked as if you and your friends could indulge in them without having to worry about the grubby little details, like federal laws. They were fun only as long as it looked as if you were in control of them and not them in control of you. There was nothing more pathetic than a celebrity who weaved and bobbed and made a fool of herself on camera, like Danny DeVito on that talk show. As soon as a celebrity appeared on camera obviously out of control of himself and his environment, you knew it was the beginning of the end. Or, worse, it was the beginning of the beginning, the beginning of the endless rounds of stories about epic drunks and bar fights and getting refused entry by clubs.