eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Ruby Maxwell has what every young woman dreams of: a glamorous job hosting a successful talk show, a penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and a boyfriend who only wants to put a Tiffany diamond on her finger. But she also has unsettling dreams about the Appalachian home she ran away from at age seventeen, dreams that make it impossible for her to find peace -- or love. When a reporter inadvertently uncovers her secret past, he sets in motion a chain of events that place Ruby in the harsh spotlight of public opinion and threaten to destroy the life she has built for herself.
As her two worlds collide in Annie Garrett's Because I Wanted You, Ruby is haunted by the memory of the man she once loved and cannot forget, the idealist who saw more in her than she saw in herself. And even as she faces her mistakes, she tries to believe the fortune cookie adage that she carries with her at all times: "Love does no wrong that can't be made right."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466865518 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 226 |
| File size: | 278 KB |
About the Author
Annie Garrett is the pen name of a successful celebrity journalist who has written for Entertainment Weekly and New York magazine. Her first novel, Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996. The author lives with her husband in Maine.
Annie Garrett is the pen name of a successful celebrity journalist who has written for Entertainment Weekly and New York magazine. Her first novel, Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996. The author lives with her husband in Maine. Later books include After You and Because I Wanted You.
Read an Excerpt
Because I Wanted You
By Annie Garrett
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1997 Annie GarrettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6551-8
CHAPTER 1
They had named her Ruby Blossom Bottom. Ruby because she was their jewel. Blossom after her great-grandmother. Bottom because it was her daddy's name and his daddy's before him and because there was no escaping it. There were days, and today was one of them, when she woke in the still, colorless part of the morning and believed she was waking on the mountain in Kentucky. Her legs were twisted and tight against her body. Her heartbeat raced at her temple and again low on her neck. She was hot and damp and ashamed of something she couldn't even name.
Rolling toward the window, she watched the rising sun cast color down the tree-lined valley of Fifth Avenue and filter into the penthouse apartment, where, she realized again, and with relief, she had escaped. She had. The man breathing on the other side of the vast mattress was proof. The garnets and the ambers of the old tapestries, the antiques from the best auction houses, they too were proof. And the Dutch timepiece ... Oh, cripes, the time. She bolted out of bed and, as she passed the mirror on her dressing table, glimpsed herself in the silk nightgown, saw the red tousle of hair; there she was: Ruby Maxwell. Still Ruby Maxwell running late.
Joad would've been downstairs five minutes already. She pulled something Donna Karan and easy out of her closet, buttoned it even as she sat down at the dressing table. She put on her face without seeing it, traced the eyelids in kohl, sculpted the cheeks with powder blush. As a child she'd spent hours composing her expression in a little dime-store mirror she'd found on the school playground. She'd sucked in her cheeks and pretended the cheap little glass was a camera recording the way her pale skin stretched smooth over precipitous cheekbones. She'd narrowed her eyes and imagined the bright lights deepening the shadow under her square jaw and blanching out the freckles scattered across her nose. Hour after hour, she'd daydreamed that the camera was seeing her, nipping and tucking her into someone else, someone far, far away.
Her eyes darted again to the old Dutch clock on the mantel and then immediately back to the beveled mirror and her reflection. She traced on lipstick but didn't even have time to test it. No matter. All day, she would have to smile without always exactly meaning it. Why do it before her mascara was even dry?
Stepping into new suede Maud Frizon heels, she glanced at the bed. Paul hadn't stirred. His breath moved evenly in and out, quiet as the ticking clock. She hesitated, then crossed hastily to the bed and bent over him, dashing a kiss on his right cheek, where he would find the lipstick impression when he went in to shave. It was the least she could give him, this daily souvenir of her affection.
Poor Paul, she thought, as she stepped into the elevator and pressed the lobby button three times fast. And it struck her, even as the words echoed in her — it struck her as ironic and absurd and unutterably sad that she should think that of Paul Carrigan. But there it was. Poor Paul.
She flashed her first smile of the day at the doorman, and it spread into the real thing as Joad held the limo door open for her. He bobbed on the balls of his feet, still the asphalt athlete, always moving, moving. "Mornin', RubyDoo," he said as he took her elbow and guided her into the leather interior. Folding his rubberband frame in behind the wheel, Joad bounced in the seat twice to settle his energy down, then handed her back a Starbucks cup. "Decaf skim mochaccino with cinnamon," he reported, but she had no doubt of it. He always bought an espresso for himself and a decaf for her.
"Bless your heart," she told him.
"Dag, Ruby," he said, as he studied her in the rearview mirror. "Who stepped on your face?"
"What?" she said, angling past him for a shot at the mirror. She couldn't see any egregious mascara smears or blush smudges. "What?"
"Under your eyes, woman. Look at those bruises."
She grimaced. "Hush up and drive. I'm just a little tired."
He grimaced right back, fired the engine. When he had nosed the Mercedes into the bumper-car traffic, he picked up his copy of Variety and waved it. "Great ratings this week," he told her. "Wanna see?"
"I'll take your word for it."
"Top of the charts." Joad read the trades the way a lot of guys read Yankees scores or the Intel index.
"I believe you."
"Dag, Ruby."
He tapped the wheel to some music that was playing in his head, something hip-hop. He'd been doing that the first time she met him, when they were both working on the Spencer campaign. He'd introduced himself as Joad Finkelstein, and of course she'd heard of his dad, a famous-among-the-intelligentsia Communist essayist from The Nation who was married to an NYU lit teacher, all of which accounted for the Grapes of Wrath nomenclature. Anyway, Joad had of course gone public schools all the way, and about the time he hit Bronx Science, he started acting like a brother, like his homies. And Ruby had to admit that despite blue eyes and curls the color of halvah, the guy did have soul. He also had one of the quickest minds she'd ever met and one huge failing: He was afraid of his own potential. When she'd been tapping talent for the show, she'd wanted him onboard. "I'm working on my screenplay," he'd demurred. Since it was the same screenplay he'd been working on ever since she'd known him, and as far as she knew he'd never told anyone what it was about or even what genre it was, she pressed. Finally, he said he'd work for her if he could be her driver; that way he could write on the side, and anyway, he'd done a thesis on limo drivers at Princeton and had always thought it a romantic line of work. She told him not to be ridiculous and reminded him that he didn't even have a driver's license, and he'd shrugged and said he'd get one. And he had. Now, he dug the heel of his hand into the horn, and she thought how easily he'd nailed the nuances of city driving.
She looked out the window at all the kids in private-school uniforms and the men in suits and the women in skirts and sneakers rushing toward the Eighty-sixth Street subway station. She remembered what that felt like — to take the steps down at a staccato pace and hip your way through the turnstile while not spilling your coffee and race onto the train just before the door closed and to bump into some guy just hard enough so that a little coffee spurted up out of the drinkhole and all over his yellow tie and then to apologize all over yourself and then have to stand there crushed up next to him for six stops because it was rush hour and everybody was going your way. It wasn't so bad, really, looking back.
"You gonna watch the TV today?" Joad asked over his shoulder.
"Nah." She reclined, rested her head on the high back of the seat. She knew full well, and naggingly, that she should be sharpening herself against the morning shows, but not yet. "Give me some music," she said.
Joad's index finger hovered over the CD changer's buttons. "Salt-N-Pepa, maybe?"
"You wish," she said.
"Boyz II Men?" He tweaked an eyebrow at her hopefully.
"Bryan Ferry," she said.
He groaned, and she knew he was just full of crap because she'd once had the guys from Chic on her show and even they had found Bryan Ferry inspirational.
She aimed a mollifying grin at Joad's rearview mirror. Then, she took off her shoes, which pinched, and put her feet up in the seat that faced her. Music rose around her like incense, and she tried to disappear into its tantalizing tones, tried to follow Ferry's eerie voice, beckoning. It was night music, haunted by shadows and lights in the distance. It had always meant Manhattan to her, Manhattan as Oz. She had first heard Bryan Ferry the night she found Paul, or the night Paul had found her. And that seemed a long time ago: seven years ago this very night.
At seventeen, she had run away with her cousin Liza. They had met just after dawn in Jackson at the bus station, paid their Dairy Queen countergirl money for two tickets to New York. Liza had her own reasons and a suitcase full of L'eggs panty hose and polyester blouses from the Goodwill shop, all of which she dressed up with her grandma's old jewelry. Ruby had her ACT scores and her 4.0 grade-point average and a letter of recommendation from a teacher named Dewey.
None of the kids called him Mr. anything. He was too young and spirited to be anything but Dewey to them. The boys liked him because he could target you with the football from forty yards, and the girls because he had a wiry shock of hair, black-and-blue as a crow's wing, and also odd, grape-colored eyes. Ruby liked him especially because he could quote Shakespeare and make her hear how it echoed with familiar things. He made her understand that no matter how President Johnson and Walker Evans and Al Capp had portrayed the mountain people in their poverty, something of Shakespeare's voice survived through them. Dewey believed that. He was a graduate student from Eastern Kentucky, who'd had a chance to make it out of Appalachia but instead had come back to try and make a difference. To Ruby, he had made all the difference.
He had taken her walking that first spring up on Rain Crow Mountain, and she had made him laugh with stories about what it was like over on Shoulderblade, over at her family's cabin perched precariously above the hollow, where, when the wind wasn't blowing through the pines, you could hear the creek rattle past. It was her habit to spin her own hardships into a story the way the women of her family had long ago spun flax from the garden into cloth for their kids' backs. You made do with what you had. And making it all into a story was the best she could do, telling it like gossip, like gossip that hurt somebody else and not Ruby herself and all her brothers. "We had this old hen we called Easter because she always hid her eggs," she told him, laughing. "Sometimes our only chance at breakfast was finding whether she'd laid 'em in the seat of the broken-down tractor Dad never hauled away or in Raphy's boot by the back door or in the hollow stump down where the sweet williams grow."
The mountain path they were following was more like a tunnel through the heavy growth of rhododendrons. No sunlight penetrated, but the mountain laurel was blooming and the pines scented the air. She thought how the green was like a room around them, hushed as a church. Somewhere during her storytelling, Dewey had sat down on a boulder that poked up out of a coldwater stream, and she had settled on another. They had put their bare feet in a quiet pool, moved their soles over the stones rubbed to velvet by the spring torrents. Then his foot had touched hers. The cold water had numbed her to most everything, but she thought she felt it and then confirmed it with a glance. They stayed that way for a while, his foot over hers.
That's how it had started. And it had ended with Ruby and Liza on a Greyhound. They had come to Manhattan, but they couldn't find any place they could afford to live, not there or in Brooklyn or in Queens. The only apartment they found was in the South Bronx, in a lone building standing on a block of others that looked as though they had been bombed. Even theirs had elevator shafts gaping open and falling-apart stairs. Down on the street, the two girls stood out as much as their building: their translucent Scot-Irish skin, their musical drawls, Ruby with her lean and towering build topped by the red hair, Liza with her blond fall that swished back and forth across her belt. All these marked them as strangers.
For the first few days, they came and went to the subway stop together. They walked fast for the first block, faster on the second, and broke full-tilt into running on the third. Nobody moved to harm them, but guys whistled and called lewd things to them, chided them for not smiling at the suggestions. And one day, Ruby had just pulled herself up and faced down a short guy whose quicksilver tongue especially impressed his towering buddies. "Excuse me," she said. "We haven't met. My name is Ruby." She held out her hand.
He glared at her a minute, then a grin spread across his face like wind blowing across a still pond. And she grinned back. He introduced himself as Bone, and after that, he always walked the full way with Ruby or Liza when he saw one or the other headed to or from the subway. The other guys held their tongues, and the ones who smiled at Ruby, she smiled back.
Ruby made the trip to the subway every weekday, going to Barnard and begging her case. She wrote letters. She trailed the dean along the intersecting paths on the campus. She introduced herself to anyone who would listen, tracked down important alumni, the chairmen of scholarship committees. "Hey," she'd say. "I'm Ruby Blossom Bottom." She wrote it on every form she could find, signed it with the gravity that depended on somebody else seeing in it what she saw in herself: Ruby Blossom Bottom.
* * *
Joad turned up the music as he crossed the Queensboro Bridge. He was weaving around to its rhythms in spite of himself, although its power was somehow lost on Ruby today. Bryan Ferry's voice swirled emptily outside of her just as the sunlight swirled, sparkling, in the East River. As the car neared the far shore, they were greeted as usual by the billboard touting Ruby's talk show. Emblazoned with her face, it beamed down over the interborough traffic, her smile the size of a stretch limo. Ruby never looked at that billboard, and she didn't now.
She screwed her feet back into the suede pumps as Joad swung into the studio lot, through security, and under the awning that said only RUBY! Guilt nipped at her; she should've been using the drive time to return a few calls or at least to watch a taped snippet of what the other talk shows had done yesterday. But she hadn't. And all she could do now was draw a deep breath, steel herself, dab at her lipstick.
There were already a few fans waiting, only the professionals at this hour. Theirs were the faces she had started seeing again and again in the months since the show had rolled out in syndication. They had jobs in the lot's cafeteria or in maintenance, and they came every day or so to get her photograph signed for this friend or that. So they said. Maybe they sold them or hoarded them for a day when they might really be worth selling.
Anyway, when Joad opened the door for her, the autograph seekers pounced. Today they were all holding out the fresh issue of Cosmo with Ruby on the cover. She paused to sign some of them. Ruby, she wrote in sweeping letters engineered to leave no doubt how she saw herself and how she knew everyone else saw her too: Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.
* * *
Inside the atrium, her high heels sparked on the tile corridor and her stomach rumbled with the dread that was as familiar to her now as hunger. As always, the security guards nodded respectfully from their posts. The cleaning man paused in emptying the ashcan and grinned up at her. And when she emerged through the double glass doors into the office mazework of the show and her presence fell across the staffers working there, every face turned like a sunflower to her. Every one of them smiled.
"Morning," she trilled.
"Morning, Ruby," they chorused.
And then she closed her office suite's door behind her, wrenched off her shoes, exhaled. The blinds had all been drawn open, and there was a sesame bagel on her desk, tofu cream cheese on the side. Her personal assistant, Eden, was efficient that way, thought morning light would prevent a dip in the biorhythms and that breakfast was definitely not a cup of Starbucks on the way into work. Ruby could hear her in the adjoining office, already policing the blockade between Ruby and the riot of her responsibilities. The buzzing and knocking and ringing had begun, insistent: All those smiles had come calling.
Spreading a smear of tofu on a quarter of the bagel, Ruby was pierced for the umpteenth time with the question of what to do about Eden. Her assistant had been home-schooled among the northern California redwoods, the only child (overpopulation mathematics applied) of leftover-hippie parents who envisioned her following in their Birkenstock footsteps. Instead, Eden had put herself through college by being Cinderella at Disneyland and had graduated first in her class at UC–Santa Barbara. Afterward, though she wore her hair trimmed short like Louise Brooks and checked off her daily appointments 7 A.M. to 9 P.M. in a Filofax, she had suffered in Hollywood from the lack of family connections — no Spelling in her name, no Barry-more in her blood, no Tarsis offering a hand from a higher echelon in the Industry. So she moved East and applied to Ruby. She had accepted the job of personal assistant gamely but only with the understanding that within the first year Ruby would reward extra effort with promotion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Because I Wanted You by Annie Garrett. Copyright © 1997 Annie Garrett. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.