Eventually, Andy got her to tell him a few stories—how she’d taught herself to smile with her lips pressed together because her teeth were terrible until the agency paid for veneers, about how she’d had no friends and no one had asked her to junior or senior prom. Andy nodded and made sympathetic noises, but he wasn’t sure he believed her. Her anecdotes had a polished quality, like she had read a book on what could possibly make a beautiful girl sound sympathetic and memorized the answers. When the talent scout had spotted her in a mall’s food court when she was seventeen, she said, she’d assumed the guy was playing a trick on her, right up until he’d handed her his business card. She’d been gawky and flat-chested; she’d towered six inches above the tallest boys, and she’d been skeletally thin—an advantage for runway work, but a look that had done her no favors with the guys in Valdosta.
“And none of the girls in school liked me,” she said. This at least sounded like it might have been true.
“I bet they just hated you because you’re . . . you know,” said Andy, unsure of the words to express Maisie’s beauty, or whether he was even supposed to mention it explicitly, whether it was somehow gauche or rude. Even though it wasn’t fair, he couldn’t stop comparing her with Rachel, whose face, in his memory, was pretty but not stunning, whose hair was nice, but nothing like Maisie’s shiny mane, and who, if he was being honest, had gained a few pounds since she’d moved in with him. Everyone else in his world was so fitness-minded. Even the civilians he’d meet in the sneaker shop or at the diner were all in training for a sprint-distance triathlon or an ultramarathon or an Ironman . . . and there was Rachel, content with a two-mile hike followed by a picnic, followed by her complaining all the way back about how she was stuffed and how her boots were giving her blisters and why couldn’t they just take a nap.
While Maisie smiled and put her hand on his forearm, he thought about the way Rachel pronounced NFL as “Niffle,” and then laughed, every single time. He considered how disagreeable she could be at parties. “I’m sorry,” she’d say after Andy had asked why she’d change the subject or even walk away every time the conversation swung back to running . . . which, in a room full of runners, was often. “I have limits. There’s only so many times I can hear about whether tempo runs with pickups are better than fartlek intervals, or whether it’s heat, then ice, or ice, then heat, or why the Kenyans are dominating the mile. Is it so bad to ask someone what they’re reading? Except,” she sighed, “it’s always Once a Runner.”
At his prompting, Maisie told him about her Sports Illustrated shoot, how they’d flown six models to a resort off the coast of Croatia in the middle of March. The call time had been 4:00 a.m., the ocean water, crystalline and turquoise, had been freezing, and the shore was so rocky that three of the girls had cut their feet and they’d had to photoshop out the blood.
“So of course I was so nervous that I forgot to pack a brush. I asked one of the hairdressers if she had one that I could borrow, so she gives me a key to her suite, and I get there, and I scream, because it looks like a mass murder, with, like, twelve scalps laid out on the bed . . .” Eventually she’d learned that the hairdressers had packed multiple sets of extensions for each girl. “SI did focus groups. Men are big on hair,” she said. “They also like it when the girls touch each other. That’s a direct quote from some guy’s survey. ‘I like it when they’re touching each other.’ ”
Andy had listened, enchanted: by her beauty, by her stories, by the way people looked at them, how every man in the place seemed to regard him with respect bordering on awe. Across the table, smiling from behind long, lowered eyelashes, Maisie seemed both exotic and familiar, both like him and unlike anyone he’d ever met.
He’d thought that he’d been happy, enjoying the routines of coupled life: simple meals at the little table in the kitchen, the way Rachel’s stuff had blended with his—her framed art posters on the wall, her lotion in the bathroom, her books scattered everywhere, the way the apartment would smell like her shampoo for hours after she got out of the shower, the sound of her voice rising and falling as she talked her clients through their crisis of the day. But here in this restaurant, on a cool, clear spring night, with a lovely woman across the table and the city glittering outside, he decided that maybe things with Rachel had gotten a little bit stale. He was only twenty-seven. Was he really ready to settle down? Besides, Rachel took him for granted, hanging around in sweatpants, spending entire evenings with a mud mask on her face. A few nights before she’d left for Los Angeles, he’d been doing his laundry and she’d been reading on the couch. He’d gone to kiss her and had noticed that, in addition to the garlic and the spices from the vegetarian chili she’d made, there was another smell in the room. With a pair of clean track pants in his hand, he’d said, “Jesus, was that you?”