The sour cherry surprise

He relaxed in the sauna for a few minutes, then showered and toweled off. Ran his fingers through his newly styled short hair, which was camera ready without combing… “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up…” He also had camera ready teeth (whitened), eyebrows (waxed, which hurt like hell) and an engaging new on-camera delivery, thanks to Sylvia One, the media coach who had de-ummed his delivery and taught him to embrace the camera like a good friend. And he embraced it in an entirely new Ralph Lauren wardrobe courtesy of Sylvia Two, his personal stylist (for some unknown reason, all of the people in New York who did this kind of thing were women named Sylvia). Today Mitch was dressed in a dazzling white oxford cloth button-down, cashmere single-breasted navy blazer, Polo jeans that were four sizes smaller in the waist than he used to wear and black penny loafers. Basically, it was the same outfit he used to schlump around in except much nicer. Plus he was no longer shaped like an avocado. Actually, here was how Sylvia Two had put it: Mitch now owned his look.

Energized by his workout, he bounded out the front door of the club into the bright sun beating down on Columbus Circle, a buoyant spring in his step that was like Astaire walking on air. Equinox had two other branches downtown but Mitch no longer lived downtown. His old apartment on Gansvoort in the now impossibly chic meat-packing district was being converted into an impossibly chic French bath and bedding emporium. He’d just moved into a ground floor apartment on West 105th Street with a wood-burning fireplace and a deep, narrow garden where he could continue to grow herbs and Sungold tomatoes like he had out on Big Sister. Clemmie, his snuggly Dorset house cat, had happily gone Manhattan with him. But Quirt, his lean outdoor hunter, had run and hid in the woods. So Bella Tillis, who’d rented his carriage house, had inherited Quirt when she took over the place. Quirt was really more Des’s cat anyway.

It was 11:30, but by no means the start of Mitch’s day. He’d been up since dawn writing his review of the new Nick Cage film and generating fresh content for his Web sites and polishing up his proposal for Ants in Her Plants, the new film reference guide that he hoped would do for screwball comedies what his first three bestselling guides-It Came from Beneath the Sink, Take My Wife, Please and They Went That-a-Way-had already done for sci-fi, crime and the western.

Mitch’s feet still wanted to take him to Times Square, but the newspaper had relocated to a new complex on West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue when a giant media empire gobbled it up earlier that year. Lacy Nickerson, the distinguished, old-school arts editor who’d lured Mitch to the paper from a scholarly journal, had been ousted in favor of Shauna Wolnikow, age twenty-eight, who went by the title of intergroup manager, not editor. Shauna’s mandate was to platform Mitch’s career, which meant turning him into a multimedia content provider for all of the empire’s outlets. He was now a highly visible on-camera personality for its twenty-four-hour cable news network. Contributed film reviews and on-air chat time to its talk radio network. Hosted a weekly online interactive chat group. Maintained a daily blog. And ran an advertiser-supported Web site tied in with his reference guides, where he provided capsule reviews, DVD picks, movie trivia and all sorts of amusing video downloads. Thanks to Mitch, cineastes across the globe could now, with a mere click, catch Troy Donahue singing the theme song to Palm Springs Weekend. Shauna had also taken to flying him around the country for speaking engagements before college film societies in places like Houston and Columbus-where the empire happened to own television stations that were just dying to have Mitch appear on their local morning news shows.

Even though Mitch had always been much more at home in a darkened screening room than in the limelight, he was throwing himself into his new career with enthusiasm. But it was a bit of whirlwind. He was so busy he barely had time to watch the movies he was reviewing. He definitely had no time to play the blues on his beloved sky blue Stratocaster anymore.

Yet here’s something he noticed as he made his way through the crowd of humanity on West 57th Street: He was a Somebody now. People recognized him. Good-looking young women checked him out with frank interest.

And here’s a thought he couldn’t chase from his head: When Des sees me on TV she’ll be sorry she picked the other guy.