Dedication (30 page)

He takes off his coat and lays it beside him. “You went to the Mercer? Did Joss get you their blood orange mojito—it’s awesome.”

“Oh my God, Jake!”

He stands up. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” he says with a defensiveness that only spurs me.

“Like what? Annoyed?”

“It’s not my fault,” his voice rises. “You keep talking to me like any of this is my fault. Stop blaming me.”

I stand, straining to temper my anger. “I am not blaming you. I just—” I’m brought up short by his suddenly stricken expression, some seed of panic rising in him I’m compelled to quell. “I just missed you. I’m here to be with you.”

At my words he pulls me into him, enveloping me, his voice once again deep and calm. “I know. Today sucked. It sucked. Everything ran over. I was miserable.” He kneads his fingers through my hair the way I adore, the way no one else has ever been able to, although it seems so obvious and what is wrong with boys? I slide my arms around him, my hands slipping under his T-shirt. “Tomorrow we’ll spend the day together. We have three more days till New Year’s and they’ll be fantastic. I promise. I’ll make it better. Just hang in through New Year’s.” He pulls his hand away, his ring caught in my hair.

I reach up to help him untangle me, but we are two hands too many for the project. “Just take it off,” I say, my eyes watering from the tight pain.

“What?” He tugs.

“Ouch! Stop! Just take it off and I’ll do it.”

He fidgets for a moment before the ring drops, the metal pulling my head to the side. I catch the platinum skull, flipping my hair forward to see the strands barbed in its ruby eyes.

“I’m starved.” Jake drops back onto his elbows on the ottoman, idling back on its tufted expanse. “You?”

“Yes.” I unhook my hair and smooth it over my shoulders. “No. Actually, I was starved three hours ago. Now I’m just tired.” I slouch to the floor next to his boots, looking down at the knobby silver cranium, sliding my thumb in and out of it.

“So, I’m your boyfriend, huh?” He nudges my thigh with the rim of his sole.

“I guess.” I toss the ring to him and he heists up to catch it, sliding it back on.

“Someone’s pouting.”

“I’m not pouting.” I scowl, pulling my legs up. “I’m just kind of…”

“What?”

“What are we doing here, Jake? How does this work?”

“It…is working.” He looks at me blankly.

“No, I mean, this is your life. I have a life of my own. How do we combine them? I’ve been thinking we could get a house down in Charleston, something beautiful on the water and you could set up a studio down there, I guess…make it a home base so I can continue with my—”

He arches an eyebrow. “I already have three houses.”

“Okay. So, maybe we can pick one of them. I mean, I guess I could telecommute. I don’t know. I still don’t know how this is all going to shake out at work.”

He reaches down to take my promise-ring-laden hand. “I’ve spent enough time apart from you. I want you on tour with me. I want to see your face in the morning, like you said. Every morning.”

I pull my hand back. “My children aren’t growing up on an airplane, Jake.”

“Children?” his voice rises.

“Don’t you want them?” mine follows in tandem as I twist to face him.

“Eventually…” He nods down at the floor, his hand coming up to swipe at his chin.

“Like, how eventually?”

He shrugs.

“Jake?”

“Don’t know, Kate.”

“Okay, but this is the stuff we have to figure out.” I feel like crying.

He shakes his head, letting out a little laugh. “I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“I’d like to make them, I know that much.” He reaches down to take my forearms and pulls me up onto him on the smooth leather as he reaches for my zipper. “So much thinking, Hollis,” he murmurs as he bites ever so gently into my neck. “Always so much thinking. Let me.” His mouth roves to mine. “Let me show you how to stop.”

“NOBODY MOVE! WE BLEW A FUSE!”

I sit up in bed.

“CALL THE SUPER!” Joss brays as my cell peals from the bedside table. People are shouting responses to her and running back and forth outside the door as I reach for the phone.

Seeing my boss’s number I take a deep breath and answer. “Lucas, thanks for getting back to me.”

“Kate, hi. Happy New Year.”

“Thirteen more hours,” I say, slipping my feet to the floor. A charge of footsteps thunders past in the hall.

“So, Kate, had a good holiday?” he asks, his tone nervous—so much better than the outrage I’ve braced myself for. “I was glad to hear your mother’s okay.”

“Lucas, please do not fire me.
I promise,
this whole thing will blow over in one news cycle and I can retreat from the spotlight with Trudie Styler and Ali Hewson and no one needs to know—”

“Kate—”

“Lucas, I know this is awkward, but I assure you I have no plans to be publicly or, more importantly, professionally associated with Jake. My work is my work and his work—”

“But you can call on him, right?”

“I’m sorry?”

“He’ll come with you to Argentina, tour the factories with you and some photgraphers, this could be very good for us.”

I reach for my jeans. “Uh, I hadn’t even considered—”

“Well, consider. Consider the attention Jake could bring to sustainable development. The impact he’ll have if you channel his fans’ attention. Can you set up a call with him?”

“Well, he’s about to go on tour…”

“Just a quick five minutes to get things in motion, Kate.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but—”

“Fantastic. This is fantastic. Call me back.”

“Okay.” I click the phone off. So the good news is I still have a job. The bad news is that job is now about getting a good photo-op with my boyfriend. Nauseated, I reach for yet another new TSE turtleneck from the pile Kirsten left for me.

Halfway to the living room I hear Joss shout, “OKAY! GOT IT! TRY IT NOW!” and
Poltergeist
light blasts down the dark hall.

“HAS ANYONE SEEN THE DIOR?”

I step tentatively into the room teeming with dancers contorting and stretching against every surface while they wait for one of the numerous mirrored stations, manned by makeup artists wielding brushes and hair stylists wielding dryers, to free up. “KATE, YOU’RE IN FIVE!” an impossibly slender black man in stiletto heels shouts to me from across the chaos.

“Jake?”
I cup my hands to my mouth and call directly out.

“Champagne?” Faux-hawk crosses to offer me a black-stemmed flute, a glitter 2006 tiara squashing his crest.

“No, thanks. Where’s Jake?”

“Suit yourself, but tonight’ll be all work, so you may want to have your New Year’s now,” he says, knocking back his own glass.

“Kate!”

“Jake!”

“Yeah, babe, over here,” he beckons from the other side of a rolling mirror.

I step over its sandbagged base to see Jake sitting in a director’s chair getting facial acupuncture from a petite young woman while he and a man in a baseball cap watch the tape of rehearsal on a small monitor stuck in among the jars of pancake. And Jake is naked. Balls-out. Naked. “Uh, Jake…”

“Yeah, babe, can you grab me a rice cake—they’re on the buffet table.”

“And a robe?” I ask as a cadre of dancers walk past to get their costumes pinned.

“What? No, it’s Naked Day!” He throws his arms up, the needles shaking. “And could you put a little dollop of almond butter on it? Thanks.”

I turn away, my eyes watering from the whatthefuck that is careering around my skull. I spot Joss by the buffet flipping through the ledger. “Joss.” I grab her arm.
“Whatthefuck?”

She peels my fingers off her silver-flecked Chanel jacket. “Is there a problem?”

“Why is Jake naked?”

“It’s Naked Day,” she says with none of his enthusiasm.

“There are at least twenty young women in this room who are eighteen at best. At best. Get him to put a robe on.”

“Okay, tweedle, I can’t
get him
to do anything. And he is performing live for millions of people tonight. As are you. So let Miss Thomas get you started.” She trills her fingers at the man in stilettos.

Jake is suddenly at my elbow, needles still jiggling. “Jake, put some fucking clothes on.”

“Kate, I have to get up there tonight and bare my soul. I’m sorry if it offends you, but its just what I need to do to tap into the vulnerability they expect.” He reaches over me for a rice cake and takes a grinning bite as he orbits back to the chaos.

“
How
is this not a massive liability issue?”

She smacks the book shut. “You have no idea how good I am,” she states. “Before Jake I had a client who cooked his wife’s after-birth on a hot plate in the hospital room and ate it in front of at least eight witnesses. And no one ever knew. I am that good.” I can’t close my mouth. She shrugs, clearly unenthused, but tempered by a paycheck. “He needs to commune before he performs—”

“Which, when he’s on tour…” It sinks in.

“Is every day. But don’t worry, all the surfaces in the bus are slip-covered.”

“Great. Great,” I exclaim with manic sarcasm. “No, that’s a comfort.”

“MISS KATE!”

I wave at Miss Thomas as he taps his palm with a golden canister of Elnett and nod that I’ll be right over. “We’re not due at MTV for twelve hours,” I appeal to Joss. “I’m not spending all day trussed up like a Vegas showgirl.”

Eyes back on her plan of attack she pronounces, “They want you in extensions, and that takes hours. Get over there.”

“Right-o.” Before she looks back up, I dodge into the hallway reeling from the bedlam and the fact that the love of my life needs to be—needs to be—naked in the middle of it. I push against the nearest door, finding myself in a pitch-dark space, running my hand along the wall for the overhead. I wince as the heel of my palm is scratched by something. Trying again more carefully I brush the plate lightly with my fingertips, finding the small switch. I toggle it, illuminating the room, and see that the vertical dimmer has lost its cover, the razor sharp half-inch of metal sticking out unbuffetted. I turn around to find I’m in an emptied dressing room that immediately recalls those teenage girls’ bedrooms where the parents have invested way too much money or emotion to update it, so heavy metal posters are taped up over preexisting murals of unicorns and fairies.

Here the decorative motif is dolphins: holding up the vanity table, sparkling in tiny gemstones at the juncture of the floor tiles, frolicking in the ceiling frescoes, arcing across the turquoise silk of the curtains. And somewhere in the back of my brain it clicks that Jake’s girlfriend prior to Eden had one hit titled “Angel of the Sea.” Layered over the polished travertine is Eden’s handiwork—photos from magazines of the Southwest taped up haphazardly over the walls and mirrors, a cow skull atop the jewelry case, and poetry on every wall—written in ink, in lipstick, in eyeliner—lyrics I recognize that made it into her songs and meters of verse so raw, so personal, I cannot imagine anyone sharing them from a stage.

Unsure if reading walls is the same thing as reading a diary I nonetheless take in every word, riveted. She writes about the road, about wrestling with addiction, about her mother, and about a son whom she wants to protect always. Did she have a baby? Back in Arizona? I read on, piecing it together through the metaphors, his heart is a radiant bird, his smile a crooked line she cannot cross, his voice a fall of ash, a flight of dandelion, a ring of smoke. And, oh. It’s Jake.

A chill runs up my legs from the stone and I take a seat at the vanity, pulling my feet up. And there, taped to the mirror, is a fertility chart, her basal temperature written in the corner of each day—97.6, 97.6, 97.6. It spikes to 98.6 and then the three following days are circled with big exclamation points. And over that in eyeliner she wrote
Jake can go fuck himself. And Madrid.
I’m guessing he didn’t make it back for her ovulation.

There’s a firm knock at the door. “Kate?” a male voice asks.

“It’s open!” I call, suddenly eager for company even if that company wants to give me extensions.

Faux-hawk pushes it in, his tiara askew. “For you.” He proffers a FedEx box.

“Me?”

“I was told.” He sashays over and places it on the table in front of me before giving the walls a once-over with his kohled eyes. “God, she’s brilliant.”

“Not crazy?”

“Nah.” He positions one hand on his slender hip. “She’s an artist, the real deal. But that’s one artist too many in a marriage, if you ask me.” He looks in the mirror over my head and refluffs his crest.

“How about two artists too many?” I ask.

Tipsy, he shrugs, not doing the math. “Oh, and don’t take too long. Miss Thomas is running around the place gripping your hair like he scalped someone.”

“Thanks,” I say as he shuts the door, the noise of Jake’s circus suctioned out behind him, leaving me in the sealed silence of Eden’s refuge. My stomach squeezes as I recognize the scratchy slant of Dad’s handwriting on the address label. Right, that. Them. I carry the cardboard over to the clenched drapes and drag the swaths of silk open, the bright December sun washing through the floor-to-ceiling window, muting the collage around me with its whiteness.