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“His name’s Axel,” Ellen continued. Then she gave a sly smile, her lips pressed together. “He’s nice to look at, too.”
So she’d seen me staring. I tried not to flush in embarrassment. “You seem taken with him,” I said, turning the tables on her.
Instead of debating me, my aunt nodded. “I’m old, not blind or stupid. You should go over there and introduce yourself.”
“Aunt Ellen, please. You’re not trying to set me up, are you?”
“Well, you don’t have to look for romance if you don’t want it. But you should introduce yourself anyway. You could use some friends.”
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but then I closed it again. Because, in fact, I didn’t have any friends. I had known a lot of people in Los Angeles, and I’d liked them, and I’d thought they liked me. But when everything fell apart and I ended up here, broke in my aunt’s house in Portland, I hadn’t heard from a single one of those people. Not one.
“I don’t think a guy like that wants to be friends with me,” I said.
“Shows how wrong you are,” Ellen said. “Axel is friends with everyone. I’m sure he’d be friends with you, too. But that would mean you have to get dressed and go knock on his door.”
TWO
Brit
I didn’t knock on the neighbor’s door. At least, not until a few days later.
I did, however, google him. To borrow a phrase from my aunt, I was fat and depressed, not blind or stupid. It seemed the apathy caused by the crash and burn of my entire life hadn’t entirely killed my curiosity. I looked him up on my laptop while propped up on pillows in bed in my aunt’s spare room after I’d finally showered.
His name was Axel de Vries. There he was, in every photo that Google showed me of the Road Kings—the blond, lithe man who lived next door. He was the band’s drummer. The Road Kings had never had a chart hit, but they were legendary as a live band, and they’d toured for a decade before breaking up five years ago.
I wasn’t sure how I’d missed them—they must have played L.A. while I was there. Then again, I’d been busy with my then-successful career. And Pierre hadn’t liked me going out without him. He would never have let me go to a concert.
My stomach turned at that phrase as my brain delivered it.Let me.Those days were behind me. I had to remember that no onelet medo anything anymore, not ever again. I clicked another photo.
Axel was recognizably beautiful in each picture, but he also looked different. It was something about the lines of his body, the angles of his cheekbones—the mysterious effects of a person moving through life, the years subtly changing the shape of him. He didn’t specifically look older now, or younger then; he just looked different.
Part of it was that he was thinner in the pictures, which was surprising in a man who currently looked like he had no body fat. Were his chin and jawline sharper then, or was that because he’d covered them with a beard now? I couldn’t put my finger on it. Every photo online was from the time when the band was still together. There wasn’t a single picture on the internet of Axel de Vries in the last five years.
So he’d dropped out of the public eye, then. Years in L.A. had taught me that there was nothing more shameful than having fame, then losing it. My former clients would rather crawl onto the freeway than admit that they had once been photographed, but no one cared to take pictures of them anymore.
My man-boy neighbor didn’t seem tormented. Then again, I’d only seen him for a few seconds as he got some junk out of his car, and I was reading too much into it.
Since I was already snooping, I looked for any mention of Axel being married, divorced, or otherwise involved. There was no mention of a wife or any public hookups with models, actresses, or the like. This, too, was unlike the usual L.A. script of famous people dating each other to garner a few clickable headlines, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this information. If Axel was secretly gay, then so was the rest of the band, because there was no hookup news about the rest of them, either. Either they were all in the closet, or they just kept their private lives out of the press—by choice. Who did that?
I snapped my laptop shut, resolving to put my new neighbor out of my mind. He was just another has-been celebrity, not worth my attention. Still, I might have looked out the window more often than I had before, just in case I got a glimpse of him.
He went running every other day, early, springing out of his front door around six a.m. and returning an hour later. His car came and went at random times during the day, as if he didn’t keep regular hours, but he was always home by nightfall, and he didn’t go out again. I didn’t see any women and I didn’t hear any parties.
* * *
For a woman of seventy-one,Aunt Ellen was busy. She had a better social life than I’d ever had. She was out with her walking group one morning—a bunch of seniors who got together to walk the waterfront—when I heard the unmistakable sound of a lawn mower, then the louder roar of a leaf blower starting up. I looked out the window to see a landscaping truck pulled to the curb and a crew working on our front lawn.
I knew Aunt Ellen, and God bless her, she was the cheapest woman alive. She had an entire kitchen drawer full of used Ziploc bags and squares of tinfoil carefully smoothed and folded to reuse. The idea of the woman who preserved the wrapping paper from her Christmas presents, the woman who had spices in her cupboard dating from 1991, paying an entire crew to mow her lawn was outrageous and definitely wrong. There must be some mistake. Feeling unusually feisty, I put on jeans, a tee, and flip-flops and walked outside to clear up the problem.
“Hi!” I shouted at the closest man, the one with the leaf blower. He was wearing earphones to block out the noise, but he saw me when I waved my arms. Guessing correctly that I had some kind of problem, he barely missed a beat and pointed to one of the other men, further down the lawn. The universal gesture ofTalk to the boss, over there.
I crossed the lawn toward the man in grass-stained pants and a fraying shirt who was pulling rakes from the back of a pickup truck. He was about sixty, grizzled and leathery, and he regarded me with blank-eyed curiosity as I approached.
“Hi!” I tried again. “I think there’s some mistake and you’re on the wrong lawn.”
The man didn’t answer me. He also didn’t seem the least bit surprised that he had made a mistake. He smiled at me, showing cigarette-yellowed teeth, and said nothing.
“This is Ellen Winchester’s house,” I said. “I don’t think she hired you to come here.”
