b) ask him gently to stop
c) close the door and give him some privacy
d) explain the dangers of masturbation
e) report him to the head nurse
I was taking a class in this. I was taking a class in this.
I was going to college. I was going to college.
I was going to be a doctor. I was going to be a doctor.
If I repeated all of these things like a mantra, they would not only be true, they would start to make sense, or at least feel true, or feel like they made sense.
Hours thinned to minutes. The morning with Cole had been in color, and everything else was in black and white.
I sold a tank top.
My mother called. “Isabel? Are you wearing the white pants?”
The other day, someone had showed me a collection of portraits done by a photographer interested in familial similarities. Each face was actually two stitched together: a father on one side, for instance, a son on the other. If one had been done of me and my mother, nothing about the altered photograph would have struck viewers as unusual. We were the same height and weight, and we both had blond hair and blue eyes and one eyebrow that hated you. It was quite possible for us to share each other’s clothing, size wise, although it rarely happened. I wasn’t interested in smart skirts, and my mother wasn’t interested in a bare midriff.
But the white pants we shared. They were high-waisted, pencil-legged, Hollywood-chic perfection. I wore them with cropped leopard-print tops that showed a tantalizing half-inch of skin. My mother wore them with a slinky black blouse that was, in my opinion, more suggestive than my version.
“Who are you trying to impress?” I asked.
“Don’t be rude,” my mother replied. “Is that a yes or a no?”
“I took them to the cleaners. There was something on them. It was disgusting. I don’t want to think about it.”
My mother clucked. “It was coffee. I’m going to the cleaners now. I was going to take them. When are you home tonight?”
“Eight, if there’s no traffic. But I’m going right back out again with Sofia. When do you go to work?”
“Eight, if there’s no traffic.” My mother was on a series of night shifts at the moment. Part of it was because she was the new doctor in an old hospital and the night shift was given to the grunts, but part of it was because working the night shift meant she could sleep through the real world the next day. It saved on wine costs.
“Oh, well, see you tomorrow.” I wasn’t particularly crushed by this, nor was my mother. My graduation and initiation into the age of majority merely granted societal approval to our relationship. It wasn’t that my mother was a hands-off parent. It was that she’d been so hands-on for so long that my psyche maintained the imprint of her palm even when she removed her hand from me.
The day dragged. Cole didn’t call. I didn’t call him. What did I want? I didn’t know.
If you are considering getting serious with a rock star but he is filming a reality show that will probably result in death or hospitalization for one or both of you, what do you do?
a) laugh and close the door
b) ask him gently to stop
c) close the door and give him some privacy
d) explain the dangers of masturbation
e) report him to the head nurse
At the end of the day, Sierra’s husband, Mark, came in. He didn’t really serve a purpose, but he liked to come in and mess over the receipts like it was something. I wasn’t exactly sure what he actually did for a living. Something male-modelish. He had the sort of face that sold sunglasses.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he greeted me. It sounded funnier when he said gorgeous than when Sierra said it. Sierra used lush and beautiful and dreamy and lovely like other people used indefinite articles. I suspected Mark really did mean I was gorgeous, and I suspected he found all of Sierra’s monsters gorgeous. But why shouldn’t he? We were all hired to look a certain way, which was to say, we were all hired to look like Sierra, and he obviously found her attractive.
I didn’t reply, but I raised an eyebrow, which was the same thing, for me.
“What are you doing?”
“Studying.”
“What?”
I almost said masturbation, because it would be funny, but after Mark had just said gorgeous, it seemed like that would be flirting.
“How to save people from themselves.”
Mark moved some papers around. He was doing absolutely nothing except messing up a system one of the monsters had devised. “They tell you about that on the Internet?”
Everyone in the world knew that everything in the world was on the Internet. I scraped listlessly at the bottom of my consciousness for any part of me that might care enough to think of an entertaining way to report this to Mark. I found nothing.
My phone buzzed. It was Sofia.
“Sofia, what?” I kept meaning to start answering the phone with Culpeper, because I liked the masculine idea of stripping my first name. And because it sounded less mean than What?
Sofia sounded abashed. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just —”
Her apologizing for something that was clearly not even her fault irritated me even more. “Oh, God, Sofia. It’s fine. I was just being a bitch. What?”
“I was just calling because I wanted to tell you that it’s up. The first episode, I mean, of Cole’s show.”
Already?
“You probably already know. I’m sorry. I —”
“Sofia. Stop saying sorry. What’s the URL? Oh, right. With threes instead of es. Don’t forget about tonight. Wear something red.”
After I hung up, I navigated to the website on my phone. The screen was tiny and the speaker shitty, but it would have to do. My stomach panged with a little nervous, wretched twist. Those crafty damns found ways to give themselves when I was least expecting them.
The episode had already begun; Cole was auditioning bass players on the beach. He had surrounded himself with dozens of speakers of all sizes. Every time a would-be player approached, Cole produced a communal bass guitar, shouted an announcement to the onlookers, and then made a little ta-da hand gesture. The gesture must’ve been some holdover from NARKOTIKA, because every time he did it, the gathered idiot fangirls made supersonic noises.
This annoyed me. It was like they had some intimate knowledge of him that I didn’t. Didn’t they know that had nothing to do with who he really was? They thought they knew him. Nobody knew him.
The sound of each audition spiraled out over the beach from the barracks of speakers. Leaning on the ancient, wood-sided speakers closest to Cole was a thin, rangy guy with shoulder-length blond hair and aviator sunglasses. He was so incredibly scruffy that he had to be either a hippie or famous.
Text appeared on the screen beneath his face: Jeremy Shutt, former NARKOTIKA bassist.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this bit of Cole’s past appearing in his present. It felt like one step closer to that ragged rock star who’d collapsed onstage.
Mark pushed himself on the counter beside me to watch; I tilted my phone so he could see better.
A crowd had gathered around Cole. He was so electric, his body language so magnetic, that even on this tiny screen I could feel the tug of his spell. I envied the ease of it until I remembered that he’d had a lot of practice — he was meant to be exciting to watch from even the cheap seats in an auditorium.
Cords snaked like vines across the sand; Cole was encouraging people to plug in their own speakers. A variety of tiny iPod speakers studded the ground, as well as bigger, fancier speakers some people must have brought. It looked like an electric tree studded with weird fruit.
And the bass players kept coming.
I didn’t know how they all knew to show up. Maybe Baby had used her contacts. Maybe Cole had. Maybe there was a core group of NARKOTIKA fans blogging his every move. Or maybe it was just because he had such a huge crowd and so many speakers and had some
how turned Venice Beach into his playground.
Onscreen, a little girl plugged in a small orange speaker and clapped delightedly. Cole St. Clair became just that little bit louder.
“I heard that while I was driving in,” Mark said. “I wondered what it was. That’s got to be so loud. That’s got to be illegal.”
None of the players satisfied Cole, though Jeremy shrugged approvingly at some. There was one guy, a crowd favorite, who kept playing and playing and playing. A winner?
But then Cole switched off the amp. He shook his head.
The crowd groaned, but Cole just twirled his hand. He turned away, and the guy didn’t exist for him anymore. I’d always wondered how Cole got anything practical done, how he’d come so far, and now I saw. People were no longer people, they were just parts of the plan, in the goal. And parts could get moved around without thought or emotion.
It made me think about all the girls Cole said he’d slept with on tour. That had seemed like such an impossible feat to me, not because I disbelieved him, but because I couldn’t imagine letting that many people have access to me. It sounded exhausting, frantic. Now I suddenly saw it, though. How he turned people into objects, and how easily he could be done with them.
Inside my heart was cool and dark.
“This guy is unbelievable,” Mark said, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking about Cole or the next player. A few dozen more speakers had been plugged in since the last time the cameras had focused on them. It was hard to tell where they were all getting their power from. Jeremy had to keep going away to tinker with something.
“I guess I remember some of their stuff. Are you a NARKOTIKA fan?” Mark asked.
“I know him. Cole, I mean.”
“Is he really like that?”
Cole was like that. He was also not like that. It just depended on when you saw him. Wasn’t that everybody, though? “Sure.”
“Next Saturday, we’re having a thing at the house,” he said. “The others are coming. Are you?”
“Others?”
As Cole dismissed yet another bassist on the screen, Mark waved a hand around the shop. Oh. The other monsters.
“What sort of thing?”
Mark picked up the seagull foot. “Just a thing. No pressure. Think about it. Yeah?”
I kept all expression from my face, but inside I was a little flattered. I said, “I’ll think about it.” I tried to imagine going to a thing with Cole.
On the show, Cole turned away all comers as yet more speakers got plugged in. The cameraman walked along a string of speakers that trailed out for yards and yards: big black rectangles and palm-sized red ones and square gray ones.
The cops came, of course. They looked as if they expected trouble, but this Cole was not trouble.
“We’re not hurting anyone,” he said, gesturing broadly. “Look at all these happy faces.”
The cameras swung over the crowd, who obligingly chirruped and cheered and leaped for attention. Cole was right: Most of them were happy. How easily he had surfed their individual thoughts and moods and replaced all of that with his noisy joy.
The cops informed Cole that he was violating noise code.
“I am glad to hear it,” Cole replied, and he really did sound glad. “Do either of you play the bass?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I need a bass player.”
A cop laughed.
So did Cole. Then he stopped. “No, seriously. Give us a whirl and we’ll shut this thing down.”
The cops, captains of reason, eyed the cameras, the crowd, and each other. Cole smiled beatifically at them.
Reason died.
Of course the cops played. Did they have a choice?
One officer played. The other danced. The crowd was apoplectic. Officer Bass wasn’t the greatest player, but it didn’t matter. It was a cop playing a bass amplified by three hundred speakers and Cole St. Clair’s smile.
The world belonged to Cole.
“Now you stop?” the cop asked. “That was the deal.”
Cole said, “I still don’t have a bassist.”
Surely this wasn’t how it ended. Not all of this fuss for nothing. The crowd was hushed.
In the quiet, Jeremy stepped forward. He shook his head, as if in disbelief. Tucked a bit of his blond hair behind his ear. “Fine, Cole. Fine. I’ll do it.”
For a second, a bare, bare second, I saw Cole’s real smile, and then it dissolved into his show smile. He did a complicated man shake with Jeremy, and then grabbed his hand and held it over his.
“We have a winner!” he shouted.
He leaned close to Jeremy then, speaking quietly, as if it was just between them. But I knew Cole, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten the cameras.
This was what he told us all: “Welcome back, man.”
Credits rolled.
It was a brilliant little piece of TV.
I felt unexpectedly proud of Cole. He had been right, earlier, at least about one thing: He knew what people wanted. It didn’t mean he was going to stay out of trouble, but he was very good at what he did. For one brief, crystal moment, I wished he was here, because in this moment, I could have told him that without any of my usual brittleness.
But he wasn’t. So all I could think was: Isabel, don’t fall in love with him again.
“Dinner,” I told the phone as I walked back to the apartment. I was holding a nine-dollar orange juice that Baby’s budget had paid for. The sign outside the juice store had said CHANGE YOUR FUTURE WITH SUNSHINE IN A GLASS. My future was looking pretty great already, and I couldn’t wait to see what would happen if I added orange juice to it. “That’s the next meal.”
“What?” said Isabel. There was something satisfying, really, about just calling her number and having her pick up.
“Dinner. Next meal. You. Me. What a delicious plan we have.”
“I can’t,” Isabel replied. “I promised my cousin Sofia that I’d go out with her. She’ll become a creepy old lady if I don’t take her out.”
“I like it when you’re noble. You could come to my place,” I said. It was hard to tell if the orange juice was changing my future, because I hadn’t known where I was heading before I started drinking it. “There is room in the shower for three.”
“I am not taking my cousin to your shower for a good time. What sort of lesson does that teach her? You could come out with us.”
I didn’t know what kind of a person this Sofia was, but I didn’t feel up to small talk. Right now I was basking in the contentment of having done a job well and having earned a damn orange juice. “What sort of music is playing tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“You live in L.A. and you don’t know?” I actually didn’t know who was playing, either, but it felt like something that I would know if I actually lived here.
“I don’t like concerts. People jump around and smell, and the music sounds like crap.”
“I don’t know if I can talk to you if you’re going to be spewing this blasphemy all the time.” I paused to look at a sign that advertised a professional phrenologist. The sign also featured a line drawing of a bald man in profile with stars around his head. It was hard to understand what the product on offer was. “Have you never been to a concert that you liked?”
“Let me think about it; no, no, I haven’t. Have you ever been to one you actually like? Or do you just think you ought to like them?”
“That’s a ridiculous question,” I replied, although possibly it wasn’t. I hadn’t been to a lot of shows until I was the show, and it turned out that the music industry disapproved of you missing your own concerts, even if you didn’t think they were a good time. “Is Sofia real?”
“What? I don’t even know why she is the way she is. Nothing in her childhood seems to support her level of neuroticism. Wait. You mean is she a real person? I didn’t invent a cousin to get out of dinner, Cole. I’d just tell you.”
I asked, “Are you going to pick up
next time I call you?”
“I did this time, didn’t I?”
“Say yes.”
“Yes. Conditionally yes.”
I finished the orange juice. I was trying to be magnanimous in light of the discovery that tonight wasn’t going to involve Isabel Culpeper’s lips. This juice had changed my future in unpleasant ways. “What conditions?”
“Sometimes you do things like call me forty times a day and leave obscene voicemails and that’s why I don’t pick up.”
“Ridiculous. That doesn’t sound like me. I would never call an even number of times.”
“Also, sometimes you call only because you’re bored and not because you have anything to say, and I don’t want to be some sort of living Internet that you summon to entertain yourself.”
That did sound like me.
“So go home and write your album and then call me in the morning and tell me where we’re going this weekend.”
“I’ll be all alone.”
“We’re all alone, Cole.”
“That’s my little optimist,” I said.
After I hung up, I walked back to the house.
I thought about kissing Isabel in the shower.
I thought about how I had the evening alone in this strange New Age paradise.
I thought about working on the songs for the album.
I thought about calling Sam.
I thought about getting high in the bathroom.
I crossed the yard to the stucco house where Leyla was staying. The sliding door to the yard stood open.
Inside, it was mostly just a white sofa and a lot of bamboo. The evening light through the front windows made it look like an elegant eco-car showroom, minus a car. Leyla sat in the middle of the floor performing yoga or meditation. I couldn’t remember if they were actually different things. I thought meditation was the one that didn’t require special pants.
I knocked on the doorjamb.
“Lily. Leyla. Can I talk to you a second about tomorrow? When we make the world a better place?”
Leyla blanketed me with a heavy-lidded, pacific gaze.
“Oh, you.”
“Yes, me. Funny story: That is also the first thing my mother said to me.”