chapter 6

Nancy spent the rest of the afternoon putting together her presentation. At 5:30, her associate, Charley, brought his papers into her office. "Did you want to grab a bite before the meeting?" Charley asked.

Even though she knew she shouldn't, Nancy agreed to a quick dinner. She figured that she could use the energy. "We can stop somewhere on our way downtown.”

Even though she wasn't really hungry, Nancy ordered a full dinner and finished every bite. She even had the waiter bring a second basket of bread after she polished off the first one.

"I'm not used to a woman with a healthy appetite," Charley commented. Somehow, the way he said this sounded like a compliment. "My girlfriend treats eating as a chore," he said sadly.

"Well, I really haven't had anything to eat all day," Nancy explained. "I wouldn't want to pass out in the middle of our meeting."

It turned out that, even if Nancy had starved all day, this wouldn't have been a problem. The Ziffs had an assortment of neat little hors d’oeuvres laid out for their meeting. As they worked through the papers, Nancy picked absentmindedly from the tray. Suddenly, she was aware that Charley had been watching her nibble and she blushed.

"I'm sorry for keeping you so late." Peter Ziff apologized. "I know you're probably hungry. Can you join us for dinner?"

Charley turned to Nancy and answered, “Sounds great to me. How about you Nanc?” Nancy agreed to go along just to put the final touches on her recommendations. She was puzzled that Charley would agree to go to dinner with the Ziffs so quickly and would assume to include her since he was well aware she had finished a full meal before the meeting.

They went to a great Italian restaurant known for being part of the scene with models and movie stars. The waiter approached the table and started to take their orders. Charley deferred to Nancy with the encouragement, “I know you didn’t have a chance to get lunch today, you were so busy getting ready for tonight’s meeting. What looks good to you?” Nancy was confused as to what Charley was trying to do. She looked at him to see if he was somehow making fun of her but he just smiled and said, “I hear that the fresh pasta here is great.”

With the waiter standing next to her, Nancy surprised herself by ordering an interesting sounding tomato and basil pasta dish to go along with the red wine that had been ordered for the table. The garlic bread was terrific.

The Ziffs offered Charley and Nancy a ride home in their limo. Since the Ziffs lived downtown and Nancy lived uptown, the Ziffs got dropped off first. Once they were alone in the limo together, Nancy grilled Charley about why he had trapped her into having a second dinner. She tried to make it sound as if she had only ordered dinner with the Ziffs to be polite. Charley responded with a smile, “You may have ordered to be polite but you ate because you were hungry.”

“You know I couldn’t have been hungry,” Nancy retorted, “I had dinner with you!”

“There are different kinds of hungry,” Charley answered. “Besides, watching you eat the hors d’oeuvres at the meeting let me know you still had an appetite.”

“I don’t think I’m comfortable with you paying attention to my appetite,” Nancy challenged. “I think that’s a little weird.”

“Melanie told me that you're going through some hassle with Kevin,” Charley offered. “I just thought it might be nice for you to have a little encouragement,” Charley answered.

“Encouragement? What the hell kind of encouragement? To eat two dinners when I had no business having one?” Nancy was aggravated but not really angry. After all, Charley had done nothing but give Nancy the latitude.

“Not everyone plays into the ‘you have to be anorexic to be beautiful’ game,” Charley explained. “Did you see those girls sitting at the table across from us? Obviously models, Obviously starving themselves for some imagined concept of beauty. The only problem is, women aren’t supposed to look like that.”

Nancy was surprised by Charley’s intensity but continued, “I don’t think anyone could confuse me as being anorexic. I’ve eaten my way out of most of my wardrobe and I’m on my way to eating myself out of my marriage. Kevin's right, I should be on a strict diet. Kevin doesn’t share your attitude that ample flesh is the beauty of woman.”

“That’s his problem,” Charley laughed.

Pulling up in front of Charley’s apartment, Nancy tried to get back on equal footing, “What. Are you one of those guys from the talk show circuit who are into distortion?” Nancy joked.

“Distortion implies defective or abnormal,” Charley answered with more sincerity than Nancy expected. “More than half of the women in the U.S. are a size 16 or larger. I’ll admit I am not turned off by a woman whose body looks like a woman’s. I’ll even admit that maybe I’m turned on by a woman who has an appetite. Whose sensual pleasure for eating is more powerful than her self-control.”

Maybe it was the wine, but all Nancy could offer in response was, “Oh, my!”

As Charley stepped out of the limo, he turned back to Nancy and offered, “I’ve known you for a couple of years, now. I don’t know what’s going on between you and Kevin but I know that you haven’t seemed yourself for a while. We work together, so I want to be careful, but if you need to talk, I’d like to be a friend and I am willing to listen.”

Nancy watched as Charley walked into his building. She realized that she wasn’t thinking of him romantically or as somebody that she worked with but as a guy who was being nice to her. She started to think about how Kevin really hadn’t been nice to her for a while and then she started to question whether he had ever been “nice” to her and then she started to wonder how he would react to her if she became one of those women who wore a size 16 or larger. She realized that, in her current condition, she really wasn’t that far off. With that day's consumption of food, she figured that she had probably undone any progress she had made since starting her diet. Her size 10 clothes had become impractical, with seams splitting, and even her size 12s were getting tight. Another ten pounds and she would be into 14s.

As she rode alone in the limo, she did the math. Calculating roughly, she tried to figure out how many calories she had consumed during the day. Restaurants are tricky. A meal could be 1000 calories or 2000 calories depending on how much food was on the plate and how it had been prepared. At any rate, she knew that whatever weight had been lost in four days had probably been regained in one. If 3500 calories equaled one pound, then 35,000 calories were ten pounds. She wondered how hard it would be to consume an extra 35,000 calories if she tried. Was it possible to eat that much extra in one week? 5,000 extra calories a day? In a month, it was only a little more than 1,000 extra calories a day; one Big Mac and fries extra each day and she’d be a size 14 in less than a month. An extra 350 in the morning at work five days a week, which is only a Danish and not even really trying, and in one year she would gain about 25 pounds. That could even push her past a 14. Nancy realized that this shouldn’t surprise her since she had already managed to gain about 30 pounds in six months without even thinking about it. Nancy began to wonder how anyone could be less than a size 14 if two extra snacks a day could be the difference between her weighing 130 or 170.

The limo hit a pothole and Nancy felt all of the food bounce in her gut. She rubbed her hand on her belly and realized that what had felt relatively flat that morning now had a pronounced roundness. She started to worry whether Kevin would be able to tell the minute he saw her. She asked the limo driver drop her ten blocks short of her street. Nancy figured that maybe a short walk could help.

Walking up Amsterdam Avenue, Nancy wasn’t really tempted by the first Haagen Daz ice cream store, but she didn't make it past the second. She rationalized that if she had failed on her diet for a day, she might as well make the best of it. She ordered a two-scoop sundae. And she enjoyed it.