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was.
    Lift weights? They put that in, too.
    Just no name. And no face.
    Every reporter in town probably had her name already. But thepapers didn’t tell the reader and acted like they were being more noble than the Queen of England.
    Hannah thought it was a bunch of shit. It was like saying there was this city, millions of people, just across from New Jersey, lots of tall buildings.
    You just couldn’t tell people it was New York.
    “She is thirty-one years old,” Perez wrote today. “She had all these dreams about being a great actress. But she has not dreamed much lately, certainly not since that night last October, in a quiet little Connecticut town where a lot changed and her nightmare began.”
    Jesus H. Christ.
    Perez didn’t put in there that she’d been waiting tables lately. Maybe it was hard for him to get worked up about waitresses.
    “She is nearly six feet tall. She tries to work out every day. Her brother is a struggling actor, maybe you’d even recognize the face, if not the name. But this is real life now, for brother and sister. They want justice for what happened to the sister last October in Fulton, Connecticut.”
    Hannah put the paper down again. She had been putting it down all day, sometimes covering it up on the coffee table with some of Jimmy’s trade papers, but then picking it up again, starting to read in different places. And every time she would start to get worked up, she would think to herself, What did you expect?
    She went over to Jimmy’s phone, the one shaped like a Giants helmet he’d gotten for subscribing to some magazine, and punched out the phone number at her apartment.
    Jimmy told her not to be surprised when the whole world had the number. Hannah had said to him, “But it’s unlisted.” Jimmy just gave her one of those looks, like she was still twelve years old, like he was the smart one, and told her they could get
Madonna’s
number if they needed it.
    It was always “they” with Jimmy. Or “them.” Him against them, them being agents, or directors, or casting directors, or other actors.
    Hannah had stayed away from the phone yesterday, but now she was curious, punching out her code, listening to the tape rewinding, stopping finally, the first loud beep.
    “Miss Carey.” Male voice. “I’m from
Fox News at 10
 …”
    Beep.
    “Hannah, my name is Carly Wilson from the television show
Inside Edition
 …”
    Beep.
    “Page Six of the New York
Post
calling for Hannah Carey, it’s nine o’clock in the morning, what day is this?…”
    She picked up a pen and Jimmy’s message pad off the counter and kept track, making four lines, then drawing a line through them, until she was up to sixteen calls and the tape on her machine finally ran out, for the first time in history. The
National Enquirer.
Beep. Liz Smith’s assistant. Beep. Geraldo Rivera’s show. Beep. Thirteen from the press in all, two from friends, one from Bobby, her trainer at the Vertical Club, telling her to get her fine ass over there, he’d beat up anyone who came near her.
    She went into the guest room and put on black tights and a black T-shirt and an old U.S. Open tennis sweatshirt and her high-top Reebok cross-trainers and the black
Guys and Dolls
cap Jimmy had bought her when they went to see the revival. Then she threw a change of clothes into a gym bag. Get over there and sweat, she told herself, and don’t think too hard on where all this was going.
    If the messages were like this, what was the rest of it going to be like?
    She went downstairs, past the door to the acupuncturist’s office, which always had somebody waiting outside, and then out of the great old brownstone and into the sun on West Seventy-first, between Amsterdam and Broadway. Her brother had had one real part, one piece of steady work, playing a doctor for two years on
One Life to Live
before finally being killed in a tragic car accident. It was long enough to buy the apartment. Jimmy still bitched that if the