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“Well, you’ll see it soon enough,” she said. “The rest of the band moves in tomorrow. You want something to drink?”
I wanted to ask her about the band she’d assembled for me, but I thought it would sound like I was nervous. Instead, I asked, “You got a Coke?”
The kitchen was big and spare. Nothing looked particularly residential or even human. The cabinets were all thin slats of pale wood, and the walls were covered with exposed PVC pipes headed to the upstairs. The fridge looked like a surprise, like it ought to have been a vat of some commercial fluid instead. I needed no one to tell me Baby lived alone.
She handed me a Coke. One of those glass bottles, satisfyingly cold in your hand before you even cracked the cap. Baby watched me tip my head back to drink before she put hers to her lips. She was still appraising me. Looking at my throat and my hands.
She thought she knew me.
“Oh, I have —” She used just her pinky to pull open a drawer, and she withdrew a notepad. One of those tiny ones, palm-sized, that urged you to be brief. “This is what you wanted?”
I was pleased she remembered, but I just nodded coolly as I accepted the pad. I slid it into my back pocket.
“Look, kid,” she said, “this is going to be hard.”
My eyebrows twitched at “kid.”
“I want you to know that I’m here whenever you need me.
If the pressure gets to be too much, I’m just a phone call away.
Or if you want to come over, that’s fine, too. The house is only a mile from here.” Her concern looked genuine, which surprised me. From her body of work, I’d expected an infant-devouring monster.
“Right,” I said. “You told me. See, I already have your number programmed.”
I flipped my phone around so that she could see her number and above it, in the name field, Nervous Breakdown/Death.
Baby laughed out loud, absolutely delighted.
“But I am serious. You’d be surprised how the cameras can get to you,” she added. “I mean, they won’t be on you all the time, of course. Mostly just for the episodes. A little bit in the house, you and the band. You pretty much tell them where and when you need them. But, you know, the viewers can be pretty cruel. And with your background . . .”
I just flashed my NARKOTIKA smile at her again. I’ve seen it, this smile of mine. In magazines and on blogs and in liner notes and in the ever-fond gaze of the mirror. I’ve heard it takes more muscles to frown than smile, and I’m sure it’s true when it comes to this particular expression. It’s just a twitch of the lips, really, just a narrowing of the eyes. Without a single word, it tells the other person that not only have I got them figured out, but I also have it figured out, where it stands for the world.
I mostly use it when I can’t think of anything clever to say.
“It’s been a bit much for others,” Baby admitted, as if we didn’t both know the fate of her previous television subjects.
“Especially if they have a history of . . . well, substance problems.”
I kept smiling. I swallowed the rest of my Coke and handed her the bottle.
“Let’s see the house,” I told her.
She smashed the Coke into a recycling bin the color of the sky. “What’s the hurry? You East Coasters are always in a rush.”
I was about to tell her I had dinner plans, and then realized I didn’t want to tell her who I had them with. “I’m excited to see this future you’ve planned for me.”
Chapter Five
· isabel ·
“I made sandwiches,” my cousin Sofia said as soon as I walked in the door to the House of Dismay and Ruin that evening. She said it so fast that I knew that she had been waiting for me to walk in the door so that she could say it to me. Also, I knew that even though she said sandwiches, what she meant was please look at this culmination of a culinary process involving more than four hours of preparation.
I asked, “In the kitchen?”
Sofia blinked huge brown eyes at me. Her father — one of the numerous males who had been jettisoned from our collective lives — had aptly named her after the drop-dead gorgeous actress Sophia Loren. “And a little in the dining room.”
Great. A sandwich that filled two rooms.
But there was no way I couldn’t accept one, even if I was meeting Cole for dinner. Sofia was my cousin on my mom’s side. She was a year younger than me and lived in breathless fear of failure, time passing, and her mother falling out of love with her. She also adored me for no reason I could discern. There were plenty of other people more worthy of her adulation.
“They wouldn’t all fit in the kitchen?” I kicked off my slouchy boots at the front door, where they landed on a pair of my mother’s slouchy boots. The empty coat rack rocked, tapping against the sidelights before righting itself. God, this place was soul-sucking. Although I’d been here for twenty-one Tuesdays, I still wasn’t used to it. The McMansion was sterile enough to actually remove pieces of my identity every time I returned to it, insidiously replacing them with wall-to-wall white carpet and blond hardwood floors.
“I didn’t want to be in anyone’s way if they wanted to make something else,” Sofia replied. “You look pretty today.”
I waved a dismissive hand at her and walked into the dining room. Inside, I discovered that Sofia had spent the afternoon preparing a long, color-coordinated buffet bar of homemade sandwich toppings. She’d carved flower-shaped tomatoes, roasted a turkey, shaved a cow’s butt. Conjured four different flavored vinaigrettes and aiolis. Baked two different kinds of bread in two different shapes.
It was arranged in a spiral with the vegetables in the very center. Her phone and huge camera lay at the end of the table, which meant she’d already put it on one of her four blogs.
“Is it all right?” Sofia asked anxiously. She crumpled a napkin in her lily white hands.
This was usually the part where people assumed Sofia suffered from heavy parental expectation. But the only thing I could tell that my aunt Lauren expected of Sofia was for her to be as stressed out as she was, and Sofia seemed to be doing that admirably.
She was a finely tuned instrument that hummed in emotional resonance with whomever she was standing closest to.
“It’s a gross overachievement as usual,” I said. Sofia sighed in relief. I circled the table, examining it. “Did you vacuum the entire upstairs, too?”
Sofia said, “I didn’t get the stairs.”
“God, Sofia, I was joking. Did you really vacuum?”
Sofia peered at me with giant, luminescing eyeballs. She was such an imaginary animal. “I had time!”
I attacked a piece of bread with a serrated knife. Goal: sandwich.
Side effect: mutilation. When Sofia saw my struggle, she hurried around the table to help me. Like a slow-motion murder scene, I wrestled the knife out of her hand and cut two uneven slices on my own. Aunt Lauren had no problem with her being so goddamn subservient, but it bothered the hell out of me.
“What about that book you were reading?”
“I finished it.”
I selected roast beef and shaved Parmesan. “I thought you had that collage-sculpture-thing.”
Sofia carefully watched me select a very green mayonnaise.
“The first part is drying.”
“What is this? Arugula? When is your erhu lesson?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about Sofia as the whitest girl in the world taking erhu lessons. I couldn’t decide if they counted as cultural appropriation or not. But Sofia seemed to enjoy them, and she was good at it, like she was good at all things, and no one on her erhu blog ever seemed to complain, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Watercress. It’s not until tonight. I already practiced this morning.”
“How about a nap? Normal people nap.”
Sofia looked at me very heavily. What she wanted was for me to take it back and tell her that no, she was actually normal, everything was fine, she did not have to take deep breaths because this was not an emergency, this was life, and this was how it looked for everyone.
Instead, I returned her heavy gaze with a long blink, and then I took a bite of the sandwich. I couldn’t believe Sofia had spent yet another afternoon with condiments as friends.
“You should get a life,” I told her, swallowing my bite. “This is delicious and it offends me.”
Sofia looked cowed. Whatever small creature that was my guilt was pricked. And now I was thinking about how my mother kept saying the same thing to me. Getting a life, I mean.
I kept telling her I would get a life just as soon as I found people worth hanging out with. It was possible Sofia just hadn’t found anyone worth her time yet.
I said, “Look, let’s go out tonight. You can put on something red.”
“Out?” she echoed, just as I remembered that I was supposed to be going out with Cole. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but on the other hand, I could. Because it was like having a good dream and forgetting it by the time you got downstairs for breakfast.
I felt a not entirely great sensation in my stomach, like someone was opening an umbrella inside it. It was like I was afraid of Cole, but it wasn’t that. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be who he thought I was. He’d been so charmed by the idea of me in California, like the state and I would be good for each other.
I wondered what I was walking into.
“Damn,” I said. “Not tonight. I have dinner out. But tomorrow night. Red. You and I.”
“Dinner?” she echoed.
“If you keep saying everything I say, it’s canceled.” I took another bite of the sandwich. It really was an exceptional sandwich.
“Where’s your mother?”
I never knew how to refer to my aunt Lauren. When I said Lauren to Sofia, it sounded like I was being snotty. When I said your mother, it sounded like I was being cold. And I could not say your mom, because I never said the word mom if I could help it. Probably because I was snotty and cold.
“At a closing,” Sofia replied. “She said she’d be home before Teresa.”
Teresa was my mother. When Sofia said it, she sounded neither snotty nor cold. She sounded respectful and fond. What ferocious magic that was.
The doorbell rang. Sofia looked martyred. “I’ll get it.”
She did not want to get it. Getting it meant she might have to speak to whoever was behind the door, and if she spoke to them, they might judge her clothing or hair or face or skills and find any of these things wanting.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “Seriously. I’ll get it.”
Only it was a celebrity at the door. Before my brother died, he used to say that things came in threes. Three celebrities in one day. Not bad, even for the greater Los Angeles area. This one was a petite woman with a heavy brunette fringe half covering her sleepy green eyes. She was beautiful in a casual, vintage way that looked so effortless that it must have taken a long time to achieve. She was not a woman. She was a picture of a woman. It took me a moment to place her, because she was one of those third-tier celebrities who got featured in interior tabloid pages and on slow-news days on gossip blogs. Her name was something strange, I remembered. It was — “Hi, I’m Baby North,” she said. “Are you Isabel?”
She clearly thought I would be shocked into something by hearing my name, but I made it a point of pride to not be shocked by anything. Especially after my sense of surprise had pretty much been broken by the appearance of Cole St. Clair earlier in the day. I could feel Sofia behind me, though, and I could just tell that her mouth was ever so slightly open.
“Sofia,” I said, stepping out onto the too-bright front stair, “would you go check the oven? I think I left it on.”
There was a pause, and then Sofia vanished. She was not stupid.
“What’s this about?” I asked. I didn’t realize it wasn’t polite until it came out of my mouth.
“An opportunity. If you’d give me a moment, I can introduce myself, tell you who I am, what I do —”
“I know who you are,” I said. She was a very pretty vulture who reanimated corpses for web TV, but I didn’t add that part, since I figured she already knew. I had an uncomfortable feeling inside me, a sense of why she was here, and some part of me knew I wasn’t going to like it.
“Good!” she said, and she smiled hugely. I didn’t trust that smile, because it was so great. It was wide and dimpled and symmetrical, a pinup girl from the past. “Can I come in?”
I surveyed her. She surveyed me. Her car sat on the curb behind my SUV. It was very chrome-y.
“No,” I said.
Her mouth changed and became something much more real. “Well, okay.”
Now manners were starting to catch up, so I added, with as much icy congeniality as I could manage, “It’s not my house. I wouldn’t want to compromise their privacy. And like I said, I know who you are.”
“Clever,” Baby said, like she really thought so. “Well, I’ll make this quick, then: Are you dating Cole St. Clair?”
I tried to keep my face blank, but surprise robbed me of my secrecy. I knew my expression had given me away for half a second.
“I don’t think dating is a word I would use,” I said.
“Right,” she replied. “I’d like to ask you if you’d like to be on a show with him. Cool, right? It wouldn’t take a lot of your time, and it can open up a lot of opportunities. ’Specially for a beautiful girl like you.”
The uncomfortable feeling inside me grew and solidified. I held the doorknob. “What sort of show?”
“We’re just doing a quick little show following him and his band around while they record their next album.”
