Billionaire Beast

I trail off.

“When you go against him?” Ida asks.

He used to say the words to me all the time, but now that I go to repeat them, they catch in my throat.

“It’s time for a commercial break,” Ida says. “I’m here talking with Emma Roxy. When we come back, we’ll be talking to Emma more about her ordeal and what kind of things she sees in her future. Stay tuned.”

Someone offscreen calls, “We’re out!”

Ida leans toward me. “I know this is hard for you,” she says, “but we’ve got to keep things moving if you’re going to be able to say everything you want to say.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better,” I tell her, and with that tiny act of me humbling myself before her, she’s no longer trying to hide that smile.

Right now, I hate Ida and I hate the studio audience and I hate the home audience and I hate everyone who has anything to do with this show. Right now, they are all just projections of Ben, every single one of them.

I know intellectually that I’m feeling this way because I’ve kept this toxic memory inside of me long enough to hate anyone I talk to about it, but sitting here, I feel like I’m back in that relationship and every person in this room is just another aspect of him.

“We’re back in five, four, three…”

Ida pats my knee for reasons alien to my understanding, and she turns toward the camera, saying, “We’re back with Emma Roxy, talking about the relationship that almost ended her career before it began.”

I don’t know where she got that. The only time Ben ever got in the way of m

y career was before that trip to the lake. Most of the time, my success in the movies was his own wet dream because that would only increase the value of his thrall.

“Emma,” Ida says, “we’ve talked a little about your history with this man, but let’s fast-forward to when he comes back into contact with you. Did you know from the start that he was trying to blackmail you, or—”

“I wouldn’t say that I knew he was going to blackmail me, specifically,” I tell her. “Once I knew who I was talking to, though, I knew the conversation wasn’t going to mean anything good.”

“How much did he ask for?” Ida asks.

“While Ben’s still in pretrial, my attorney advised me not to go into specifics on that, but I can tell you that it was a substantial amount,” I tell her.

“Okay,” Ida says. “What can you tell us about that arrangement?”

The way she speaks the words makes them come across less accusatory than she actually means it.

“He informed me that he had those photographs of me, and that, if I didn’t want them to become public, I’d do what he wanted me to do,” I answer.

“And you went along with this?” Ida asks.

“I didn’t know what else to do at the time,” I tell her. “Maybe that sounds stupid, but—”

“No, sweetie,” she says in a saccharine voice that only proves my point that nobody’s going to be able to replace Oprah, “it’s not stupid at all.”

“This all happened, the blackmail, after we started working on this movie and it’s my first major feature, so I was trying to keep my name out of the tabloids if at all possible,” I tell her.

“Okay,” she says, and I’m done pretending.

“You know what?” I ask. “That’s actually not true. The truth is that I remembered what I looked like the weekend those pictures were taken—at least that I had bruises all over me. I didn’t want that to be what people saw when they came to my movies or when they met me in person. I don’t want those bruises to be what my life is all about. Maybe that’s what’s happened now, maybe not. It’s too soon to tell, but I just didn’t want people to see the bruises.”

“So it wasn’t the nudity that bothered you so much; it was the bruises?” Ida asks, and she jerks back a little when she sees the look on my face. It’s not a happy one.

“I like my privacy,” I tell her, “but the bruises are the bigger deal to me, as they were at the time.”

“What do you see when you look at those bruises?” Ida asks.

“I really haven’t looked at the pictures,” I tell her. “I glanced at them briefly a while ago to make sure that I was being blackmailed with something he actually had, but as soon as I saw what they were, I closed the file. I haven’t really looked since.”