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how to text. He told me soon after that night he started receiving texts from other women. I assumed that the woman who bought him the phone had noticed on the phone bill that he was now texting, so she started using it as another method to attempt to reach him. I read some of the texts, if one came in while I was sitting there. (He hid nothing from me.) The ones I always read were from the old girlfriend, the one he went to dinner with at the beach. Irritating? That’s an understatement. Clearly this “friendship” was not ending soon enough for me.
    In the morning, we went running together. I went out in my running clothes; and he joined me five minutes later and we ran together, right out in the open, next to the Mississippi River. I really couldn’t believe we were running together side by side in light of day. I still can’t believe it. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
    After he left the hotel, I took a shuttle bus to the airport and rented a car to drive to Des Moines, Iowa.
    I took a little tour of booming Des Moines and ended up at the Hotel Fort Des Moines. I parked my little white rental car in the parking lot across the street and went into the restaurant. I ordered a burger and red wine. As I was eating, I saw John Davis, the ketchup guy, walking outside, talking on his cell phone. Johnny called me on the phone and told me I had to wait until they brought him food from Centro. I really didn’t realize that being a mistress would involve so much waiting. I ordered another glass of wine.
    The next morning, I put a bandana over my wet hair, and my small purple Paul Smith sunglasses. As I walked out of the hotel, a tall guy in his late twenties, with disheveled hair wearing glasses, was walking into the hotel as I was walking out. I knew this was a staffer but I didn’t look at him closely. I wanted out fast. I went out to my car and realized I’d forgotten to get a validation from the front desk of the hotel to get out of the parking garage. I walked back, hoping that the staffer would be finished with his checkout, but he was standing there, checking out the room number I had just stayed in.
    The lady at the desk asked what room I was in before she validated my ticket. I panicked, said, “Never mind,” and hightailed it out of there.
    I kept thinking that the staffer must have known something. I just had a feeling that he knew me. I was freaked out. Did I just get Johnny busted over a parking validation?
    I paid the parking garage and drove to the airport, my mind racing the entire time. This was all my fault, I was in trouble, and I was going to get punished. What would the punishment be? He would break up with me.
    When Johnny called me later, he laughed. He said nobody saw anything, and if they did they didn’t tell him.
    But who was that guy in the glasses? Johnny didn’t know which staffer he was. My description did not ring a bell, but more than that, he didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in the contents of my mind. He thought it was hilarious that my little run-in had triggered the notion that he was going to break up with me. But mostly he seemed to be in awe of the fact that I shared the whole experience with him. Nobody else in his life was ever open with him.

FOUR
    Working Girl
“Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
— J OAN C RAWFORD
    I WROTE UP A TREATMENT but I knew from my years in LA attempting to get projects off the ground that to get the video project up and running, I needed someone who could bring what I was lacking to the table: big credentials. This was low-budget filmmaking in uncharted waters. And at that time, I happened to know a guy, Cary Woods, who was known for being a groundbreaking indie producer. His movies had much bigger budgets than this, but he was an innovative guy, and I was pretty good at guerrilla filmmaking, given my experience writing and directing many shorts on very small budgets,