It suddenly sounded like Emma was speaking Italian--of course Jack recognized her spiel. "Pleeze tell-a Jack Burns--eet's Maria Antonietta Beluzzi on da fon-a!"
"I'm-a sorry. Jack Burns ees in the meedle of an interview," the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press said.
"Tell heem I mees-a holding hees pee-nis!" Emma said.
"Eet's a Ms. Beluzzi," his interviewer said, handing him back his cell phone. "Eet sounds urgent."
"So what do you weigh this morning?" Jack asked Emma.
"Two hundred and fucking five!" Emma wailed--loudly enough for the journalist to hear her.
"You have to go on a diet, Emma," he told her, for what had to be the hundredth time.
Jack Burns was thirty-two in 1997--Emma was thirty-nine. He had a better metabolism than she had, and he'd always watched what he ate. But now that Jack was in his thirties, even he had to be more strict with his diet.
Emma didn't understand dieting. Her one bottle of red wine a night had become two; she had pasta for lunch. Here she was, pushing forty, and her favorite food was still gorgonzola mashed potatoes. Jack kept telling her: she could spend all day on the ab machine at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills--she could be bench-pressing her own weight--and not work off those kinds of carbs.
Jack could see that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was writing everything down--including, as he would later read in her interview, the "two hundred and fucking five." She even spelled Maria Antonietta Beluzzi correctly; naturally, it turned out that the journalist was Italian.
"Emma--" Jack started to say.
"He calls her Emma and brutally tells her to go on a diet," the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press would write.
"Fuck you and your diet, Jack," Emma said sharply on the phone. "I want you to know I've taken good care of you in my will." Then she hung up.
"Your-a girlfriend?" his interviewer asked. "I mean-a one of them."
"Kind of," Jack replied.
"Ees Ms. Beluzzi an actress?"
"She's a voluptuous tobacconist," he said. Although the journalist didn't write this down, voluptuous would somehow make it into her interview--but in reference to Emma.
"I suppose-za you have, or have-a had, many girlfriends," Jack's interviewer said.
"Nobody serious," he said, for what had to be the hundredth time--with apologies to Michele Maher.
Jack was tired. He'd had too many interviews, with too many prying and insinuating journalists. But that was no excuse. He shouldn't have lost control of this interview. He shouldn't have so recklessly, even deliberately, allowed this lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press to imagine anything she might want to imagine--but he did.
Of course it wasn't the interview that would bother him; such things aren't truly damaging, not for long. But that Emma's last words to Jack were about her will--well, that would hurt him forever.
By the time the interview was published, Emma would be dead--and the Italian journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press had figured out that he couldn't have been having a relationship with Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, the big-breasted tobacconist in Fellini's Amarcord. (Ms. Beluzzi would be old enough to be Jack's grandmother!)
It had to have been Emma Oastler Jack was talking to, the journalist wrote--he and Emma, who were "just roommates," were known to be living together--and anyone who'd seen the famous author recently knew at a glance she was overweight, if not that she weighed as much as two hundred and five pounds. (In this context, Jack's use of the word voluptuous appeared to mock Emma for becoming so fat.)
Besides, the Italian lady concluded, Emma was said to have been depressed that her third novel--after many years, it was still only a work-in-progress--was growing too long.
"How long is it?" all the journalists would ask Jack, after Emma's death. But by then he had learned, the hard way, to be more careful with the press.
That trip to New York, Jack was staying at The Mark. He had registered in the name of Billy Rainbow--the character he played in the soon-to-be-released film he was promoting at the press junket. He usually registered in hotels in the name of the character he was playing in his most recent, not-yet-released movie. That way, the Jack Burns fans couldn't find him.
They weren't all exactly fans. Some of the "chicks with dicks" had taken offense that Jack repeatedly denied he was a transsexual or a transvestite. In almost every interview, Jack said he was a cross-dresser only occasionally--and only in the movies. Real transsexuals and transvestites were offended; they said that Jack was "merely acting." Well--of course he was!
So Jack was registered at The Mark as Billy Rainbow; the front desk screened all his calls. Jack always told his mom where he was staying--and who he was, this time--and of course Emma knew, and his agent, Bob Bookman, and his lawyer, Alan Hergott. And the publicist for whichever studio was making his most recent movie, in this case Erica Steinberg from Miramax. Naturally, Harvey Weinstein knew, too. If you were making a Miramax movie, Harvey knew where you were staying and under what name.
At the time, Jack was sleeping with the well-known cellist Mimi Lederer, so she knew where he was staying, too. In fact, he was in bed with her--asleep at The Mark--when Emma died.
That night, after dinner, Mimi had brought her cello back to his hotel room; she'd played two solos naked for him. It had been awkward at dinner, because Mimi wouldn't check her cello. The big instrument, in its case, occupied a third chair at their table; Mimi would look at it from time to time, as if she expected the cello to say something.