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I cut my eyes to the host’s. “Water for me, please. Don’t bring him a Coke.”
Cole protested, “Hey,” but the host seemed to agree with me that Cole didn’t need any more sugar or caffeine in him, because he nodded at me curtly and swept away.
“Oh, hey,” Cole hissed to me, leaning forward, hitting his head on the light. “Go time. Is that a phrase still? Because it is.
Go. Time.”
“Hi, kids,” Baby said. She had manifested at the head of our table, her smile wide and dimpled as always. I kept imagining that she should loom and look like an evil genius, and she kept . . . not. “Where do you want me?”
Cole leaped up and slid into the booth beside me, crashing our shoulders together. He gestured to where he had just been.
“There. Take everything that was mine.”
She sat down. She still wore the private, amused smile, like life entertained her. “I haven’t been here before.”
“We’ll get you a menu. A guide to the food in this place. A description of all the . . .” Cole lost interest in his own sentence.
He drummed his fingers across the table; I put my hand over his hand, pressing it still.
Baby didn’t have Cole’s manic energy, but somehow her gaze kept subtly shifting so that I got the idea that she was taking in the entire restaurant. Mostly the people. Her eyes stuck on little interactions: one of the sushi chefs lifting his hand to gesture at another chef. The delivery boy at the door raising his eyebrows at the hostess. My hand on Cole’s hand.
I wondered if she saw us all as players.
Cole’s leg was jiggling beneath the table. I pressed my thigh up against his and it stilled.
A neatly dressed young woman with a red streak dyed in the front of her black hair came to the end of our table. She peered closely at us.
“Oh, we’re not ready,” I told her.
Her nostrils flared. “I am not coming for order. Masaki asked me to check on you.”
Something about her tone was enough that if it had not been my favorite sushi restaurant and if I had not been in front of Baby, I would have offered to give her something better to check on. But instead, I just said, “We’re okay. Thanks.” I couldn’t keep all of the chill out of the thanks, but I defrosted most of it.
The girl’s lips tightened, and then she left us alone.
“Weird,” Cole said.
“Interesting,” clarified Baby. “What’s good here?”
I flipped over the menu. There was an unsaturated and unappealing-looking photo of a California roll on the front. “All of the sashimi,” I said.
Cole ran a finger down the menu like a kid learning how to read.
“Have you ever had sushi before?” Baby asked him.
He shook his head. To me, he said, “You’ll have to show me how to use these. The pencils.” He’d removed the chopsticks from the paper sleeve and now he walked them toward me. I resisted the temptation to snatch them from him.
“Nice job on the filming today,” Baby said. “Mostly.”
Cole’s fingers stilled completely. “The Saturn ran out of gas on the way to the gig.”
“How inconvenient,” Baby said.
“I know it had three-quarters of a tank,” Cole said. It was strange to see him when he stripped away the performer and the humor.
Baby didn’t look sorry, though. She tapped a line on the menu and then she said, “It made excellent TV.”
“So did our wedding gig,” Cole said.
“No,” Baby replied. “That made fine TV. Everything has to be turned up really loud to make good TV.”
Icily, I said, “Like hiring some topless girls to bust into his apartment?”
Baby looked genuinely shocked. “I didn’t hire them!”
“Oh, come on,” Cole said. “Enough with the playing pretend.”
“Why do you think I wanted you, Cole?” Baby asked.
He regarded her, chin tilted arrogantly. I felt his leg still quivering beside mine, a bare fraction of the jiggling he wanted to do with it.
I answered for him, “Because you think you can destroy him on TV. For good TV.”
Her eyes widened. “You don’t believe that, do you, Cole?”
He just kept looking at her.
“You ruined the rest of them,” I said. I knew it would hurt Cole’s feelings, but I went on, “You want Cole because you think he’s an easy mark.”
Baby’s expression never stopped being shocked. “I wanted Cole because he was a performer. Because he knows how to work a crowd. Look, do you get it? He was a mess. But look at him now. He’s pretty again. Pretty makes good TV.”
I remembered what Cole had said when I’d first seen the list that Baby had made for him. She wants me to look like a disaster.
“Did you really think all those people on my shows collapsed and went crazy?” Baby asked. “That I did that? Nobody’s that good. No, they all knew what the world wanted.”
“They were fake?” I said, and hated the look Baby gave me, like she couldn’t believe how innocent I was. Of course I knew that reality television wasn’t real.
“They were curated,” corrected Baby. “They gave the viewers what the viewers wanted.”
Cole said, voice empty, “And the world likes us better falling down.”
Baby shrugged one shoulder as if this were an unchangeable fact. “Not real destruction, though. Do you know what’s bad TV? Someone passed out on a floor, drooling. Rock stars vomiting.
Being too drunk to go to the studio. If I got a real disaster, I’d have no show. You ever seen an addict? Shitty work ethic.”
It was so the opposite of how I’d expected this dinner to go that I couldn’t quite comprehend it. On the one hand, what she said made complete sense. But on the other hand, I’d seen three topless girls in Cole’s apartment the night before.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Then why the half-naked girls, if not to tempt him?”
Baby said, “Tempt? Look at this —” She pointed to the two of us. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to indicate. Proximity, maybe. “Tempt? I saw those fangirls wandering around and simply pointed them in the right direction. I figured Cole had enough of a brain on him to make it into a good scene. I don’t cut and paste my shows to make drama. I just . . . line up the edges. Put people in situations and film what happens.”
Cole said, “But I’ve been making situations.”
“Not big enough,” Baby countered. “So I just throw in some variables when it occurs to me. Have I tried to trick you? Did you find drugs in the bathroom to tempt you? Beers in the fridge? Have I done anything to pull you off the wagon?”
Cole frowned. “The musicians. The ones I fired. That one is dead. Chuck.”
A ghost of something fluttered over Baby’s face. “Chip.”
“Yeah, well, Jeremy told me he was dead. And the other kid was into shit. That seems pretty — engineered.”
He hadn’t told me this. I wondered if that was because he hadn’t known what to do with the information yet or if it was because he hadn’t wanted me to know.
“They were disasters,” Baby admitted. “You can’t really predict someone’s crisis point, but you can guess. I figured Chip would work his way into the hospital during some gig. And that you’d have a giant shouting match with Dennis over you being clean now, and maybe someone would get hit. I don’t mind hiring real disasters for scenery pieces.”
“Does that mean Leyla has skeletons?” Cole demanded.
Baby laughed. “No. You’re just supposed to hate her.”
“Well done.”
“I did my research. Isabel, you’re still looking unhappy.”
I wasn’t unhappy, but I was suspicious. The other meltdowns had been so complete. So convincing. Was it just because I was like the rest of the American public, so ready to believe that a disaster was never truly cured? Or was it because I was just so ready to believe that Cole in particular wasn’t cured? “So, you’re not the enemy.”
“Isabel,” Baby said, “I’m not in this to get sued. If there’s something that ruins my heroes, it’s something they’ve done to themselves. I told you. I just put my people in situations. What they do with that situation is up to them. If there’s an enemy, it’s inside them.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything about Los Angeles was a cover for something else. The ugly masqueraded as pretty, and it turned out that now the pretty pretended to be ugly. I wondered if there was anything in this entire world that was real.
“So, you want me to try harder,” Cole said finally. “You want the show. The Cole St. Clair show.”
“I know you know how to do it,” Baby said. “I did my research, like I said.”
“Does it have to be down?” he asked. A little wistfully, if you knew him.
“Make it good. That’s all I care about. Ah —”
A different young woman stood at the table. She looked, if possible, slightly less welcoming than the last girl. She demanded, in a very unwaitress-y way, “What do you want?”
I dragged the menu toward me. “I —”
She shook her head. She was looking at Cole. “What do you want here?”
His expression was still puzzled. “She can order for me.”
Her gaze shot to me. Then back to him. “You’re here for food?”
Now his face cleared. “Oh. Oh, now I see. Yes. Food. This is her favorite restaurant. I like the look of those round ones in the photo.” With his index finger, he made little circles around the bloodless photo of the California roll on the front. Baby watched everything attentively.
The girl looked eight degrees more unfriendly, and then she vanished.
I turned to Cole. “You’ve been here before?”
Cole sounded a little bewildered. “When I said I thought I’d been here before, I didn’t mean here. Like, this place. I guess it could have been. They must have recognized me. Maybe they think it was . . . like before.”
Like before. Meaning that before, he would walk into a place and they would remember that he was a guy who wanted some coc**ne with his entrée? I felt sick. I couldn’t even blame anyone but myself. I knew exactly who Cole had been before I met him.
Baby, however, just kept wearing that same private smile.
And why shouldn’t she — Cole was only demonstrating his pedigree.
The host was back. Hovering behind him was the girl with the dyed hair.
“You are Cole St. Clair?” asked the host.
Cole nodded his head. Just one little jerk. He was all certainty and arrogance now, completely back in his public persona.
He had become too large for his side of the booth; he’d turned this restaurant into a backdrop for his personality. This was what the rest of the world got from him.
“We told you before to never come back.”
Cole cocked his head. “Back?”
“We tell you that you were not welcome here anymore. Not you or your other friend, either. You ruined everything. I don’t forget your face after that.”
Sudden recognition, and something more pained and empty, flickered across Cole’s face. The latter so fast that only I saw it. “Oh. That. Look, that was a time long time ago. That’s not going to happen this time. I’m clean. I just want to have a nice dinner here with my girlfriend.”
I could have killed him for the casual way he threw the word out there, in the middle of all of this. Girlfriend.
The host was unsmiling. “Clean is not rumor.”
Now Cole was losing his good humor. “And what is the rumor, my friend?”
The girl with the dyed hair said, “You have moved on from China White to something better.”
Baby kept smiling. The world loved a loser.
“I am here,” Cole said levelly, “for some goddamn sushi.”
“Get out,” the host replied. He stepped back to allow us room out of the booth. “You are not welcome.”
“Well, my friend,” Cole said, gruesomely expansive, “that seems like rather shitty business sense. Do you normally do background checks on your patrons before they sit down? Is this a saintly restaurant? Only for nuns? Buddha? Any lesser angels who wander into Koreatown? However do you stay open turning away all the sinners?”
He had acquired the full attention of the sushi chefs and the waitress. They stared at both of us. I knew forever on after this, no matter what happened, I was going to be Cole St. Clair’s girlfriend to them. There was absolutely no good ending to this.
I could never get sashimi here again.
“Most sinners do not linger in our memory like you,” the host said coolly. “Out.”
I snapped, “What did you do, Cole?”
Baby watched each of us, back and forth, like a tennis match.
“It was a long time ago,” he repeated.
The host said, “Not long enough.”
I was as humiliated as I would have been if I had done something.
“This is perfect. Let’s just go.”
Something burned furiously in Cole’s eyes, but he shoved out of the booth and tossed his napkin contemptuously on the table. “Rumor works both ways,” he told the host.
One of the guys behind the counter twisted his knife in the air slowly, just so the light caught it.
“Oh, I see you. I am terrified,” Cole said. “Keep your shorts on. We’re going.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so embarrassed.
