"All About Eve"
If you remember Eve at all now it would most likely be as the tabloid pop star of the roaring 90’s and certainly hers was a life of spectacular highs and lows, much of it lived out on the front page. But to understand Eve’s last act, you have to go behind the stage curtain and travel through the kitchen entrances, servant’s elevators and rooftop helipads of celebrity Manhattan - New York City
I write this story now under the terms of my own surrender. It’s just possible, if I tell the whole story this time these bastards will let me out of here...
That week, Thanksgiving 1999, began with the eastside sunrise blistering through my hotel windows. A Chelsea hooker wrapped herself in a shroud of bed sheets apparently fending off an invisible demon. After I focused I realized life was indeed not over, it was the same ghastly record stuck in the same scratchy groove.
“Leaving?” I asked. Her eyes blinked once, then again suddenly opened wide.
“God I hate this part,” she said. “I thought you were my Dad.”
Clearly my little winning streak was over, my career as a novelist lay behind me, my wife gone a year. At fifty-two, I had found the secret to living with my empty middle age was to develop relationships with things instead of people, preferring melancholy songs and old photographs. Back when I drank, I moved in the wrong direction but God help me, at least when I drank I moved. Now I was just Pete Maguire on a dry drunk, waiting for the last call.
New York was colder than Cleveland that day, snow gathered in the doorways like the wind-blown wrap of a debutante’s dress slung over a filthy homeless woman. Walking to work from the subway, the streets were full of life, but I kept to myself, wanting simply not to hurt anybody and not wanting to be hurt.
In the offices of The New York Times, my fellow drones worked the hive, turning coffee into ink and newsprint. The sixth floor of the Metro Section sounded like the center of a circular parking garage and telephones rang like a bookie joint. Down the aisle rolled the mail girl, with her squeaky cart. Her pager went off as she stopped at my desk; its noise was piercing and painful.
“Why is everybody horning me?” she said.
“Good morning, Yajing.”
“Let me say you something, Mr. Maguire.”
“I’m writing obituaries here, little girl, did you die or are you just lost?”
