The foyer echoed back her voice. The piano caught and reflected the morning light glinting through the oversize windows. It hurt her eyes. She put her sunglasses back on. Melody wasn’t in the kitchen or in the den or in the living room or the gym or the screening room. She wasn’t out back in any of the lounge chairs around the pool. She wasn’t under the waterfall, where sometimes she went to be alone. There were no cars in the garage, but that wasn’t unusual because Melody didn’t know how to drive. Melody wasn’t in the garage either. She wasn’t in the second gym attached to the garage, where sometimes she went to be alone. Charlie went back to the house.
“Please don’t be dead,” ascending to the second floor. “Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead.”
She was preoccupied with Abbott’s school meeting, she knew this, but seriously, somewhere in that very, very, very large house, a young starlet might lie expired via a “pills” overdose. She hoped Melody was alive. Please just be sleeping one off.
The bedroom door was locked. Charlie knocked. She turned the knob, pushed, and waited. Nothing. She pounded on the door. “Melody! Are you in there? What the fuck? Come on, open up.”
She pounded again, and again turned the knob and pushed. Why was she surprised to find it locked? And then it opened and she was staring at a shaggy-haired dude with a puckered face like that of a constantly annoyed runway model. He wore baggy, many-pocketed cargo shorts and his hair looked as if it was about to just say “fuck it” and become full-on dreadlocks. He smelled of peat moss. Standard-issue California surfer-mimbo if ever there was one.
“Hey, man, you got the breakfast?”
This question caught Charlie off guard. “What? Is she alive? Did you call 911?”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“Why do you keep calling me ‘man’? She said pills. How many pills? What pills? What the fuck is going on? Just tell me now, I’m not a cop or a narc or anything.”
“Chill, man. There are no pills.”
“Why’d she text me she’d taken pills?”
“We did have a pretty good time.” He frowned and shook his head. “No pills, though. Nope. Just”—he threw up his arms—“booze. And some weed, I think.”
Charlie’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Where is she?”
The guy gestured limply behind him to a crumpled mass of black hair, black clothing, black sheets. “Sleeping.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Charlie. Who are you?”
“I’m Charlie!”
His head jerked back like a frightened bird’s. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Get out of my way.” Charlie stepped around him into the bedroom. Melody was facedown, her hair spread out like a black fan. Surfer Charlie stood slack-jawed, scratching his stomach.
“Come right in,” he said to the air around him, stifling a yawn with the back of his hand.
Charlie rolled Melody over, stretching a goopy blob of spit from the sheet to her mouth. Melody coughed and opened her eyes.
“I’m sleeping,” she mumbled.
“You have to get up.”
“Maybe we should throw cold water on her?” Surfer Charlie ventured. Charlie looked at him. “I’m not saying we have to.”
She’d roused Melody like this three times in the past month. It had been two years since Patrick Kuggle had cut her out of his life. She was drawing the breakup out to indefinite lengths. In Melody’s mind the trauma was occurring in real time, constant and anew. Everything turned into an uphill battle. The bulk of Charlie’s daily efforts was spent keeping Melody on task: getting her to the set on time, shepherding her through interviews, prepping her for appearances, making sure she showed up at photo shoots and parties and often literally holding her hand at these functions to assure everything went smoothly. Plus the constant, mind-numbing management of the deluge of Internet activity that came with 900K Twitter followers and a trail of paparazzi like a wedding gown train. Policing YouTube videos. Reading gossip magazines. Making sure Melody always wore panties when she went out, lest we have another “vag shot” on TMZ. Charlie also spent a great deal of time fielding Melody’s drunken texts and quelling emotional meltdowns. Just this past Friday night, Charlie had received a series of increasingly perplexing and misspelled texts from her client, who found herself, through no fault of her own, of course, getting thrown out of a West Hollywood nightclub after learning that Patrick Kuggle was there, along with the bulk of his self-proclaimed Vagina Squad. Melody had stormed over to their table and hurled a full drink in his lap, then allegedly pushed one of Kuggle’s top VS lieutenants, Adam Cartwell—guitarist for Blast!—with whom she’d also briefly been involved, though thankfully no children resulted. Kuggle’s bodyguard, the towering ex–Secret Service fruitcake Bernard Havilland, was now claiming to have injured his wrist in the melee. Leilani had called Charlie and asked her to get down there ASAP and calm everyone down. This included the nightclub owner, Kuggle, Cartwell, and Havilland. Luckily no one wanted to take it any further. They just wanted Melody out of there. She’d made quite a scene, by all reports.
Upon arrival Charlie had been ushered to a back room, where Melody sat sobbing, claiming, “I’m not going back out there! He ruins everything! I think I’m losing my hair!”
The nightclub owner kept looking at his cell phone while admonishing Charlie to please “take her out the back entrance,” to avoid anyone who might have been tipped off. Charlie brought the Volvo around to the alley, left it running, ran in and hooked Melody under her armpits, and dragged her out. Then she drove Melody back to the Chalet and put her to bed. The whole thing was over with by three and Charlie went back to Silver Lake. Rey opened his eyes long enough to tell her Abbott had woken up screaming about “pony monsters” while she was gone and he was not happy about having to deal with that on his own.
Charlie had lain on her back, unable to sleep. Eventually she got up, got dressed, and went for a run. Her usual routine was to drive to Runyon Canyon. The trail there offered, in her opinion, the best public bench in the country at its summit. It looked out over the whole basin in all its smog-laden glory, with views from Century City all the way south to downtown and even past that to, like, Long Beach if visibility was right. The canyon’s main trail was three and a half miles and she looped it twice even though it was still pretty dark. On the second pass she stopped at the bench to do three sets of seated dips and one hundred push-ups right in the dust. She took in the scenery and finished up with a cool-down walk back to the car. This was the one true way she got away from everything. A break from Melody, from Rey, from Abbott, from her mother. She never took her phone with her to the canyon, so communication of any kind was impossible. This was her ritual of escape and return. Offering a modicum of rejuvenation. It often didn’t happen until late in the evening, as the sun was setting. After she fed Abbott and set him up with his crayons and drawing paper in the den and if Rey was home and willing to keep an eye on him.
The fitness tracker on her wrist had indicated 9,956 steps. When she’d gotten home, both the men in her life were stirring. She showered while Rey got Abbott dressed. “Hate pants!” she heard him scream. She fed him. More screaming. He threw his breakfast at the wall. “Hate pancakes!”
Now she watched Melody stagger to the bathroom in nothing but a pair of black boy shorts. Her wonderfully shaped, perky breasts swayed ever so perfectly. Melody didn’t close the door, just bent over the toilet and puked.
Surfer Charlie stood gawking. “Gnarly.”
Charlie turned to him. “You’re still here?”
He jerked his head as if she’d blown foul air in his face. “Harsh.”
He blinked and turned and left. Melody continued to puke.
“You need to be at this Nylon shoot in”—Charlie checked her phone—“less than an hour. This is perfect.”
“Don’t yell at me,” Melody said. She sobbed while she vomited.
Charlie crossed her arms in front of her
and leaned against the door frame. The cream-colored curtains were drawn tight over all six enormous windows and the sun was diffused through them to cast the bedroom in muted mid-morning splendor. Pale oblongs of light slanted across the hardwood floor. There was a gold-bordered mirror hanging above the black credenza. Charlie stood waiting while Melody finished up, hobbled to the sink, ran the faucet, and plunged her face into cold water. She surfaced sputtering and moaning. Charlie pushed out her lower lip and blew hair out of her eyes. She took a towel from the door hook and held it out. Melody dabbed at her face, her tears, and the bits of puke at the edges of her mouth.
“Look at me,” Charlie said. Melody raised her dark, bloodshot eyes. “If you get ready and we get there on time, we can have Mashti Malone’s later.”
“I don’t want Mashti Malone’s.”
“Well, what do you want?”
Charlie mouthed the words as Melody said them: “Zankou Chicken.”
“Fine. Zankou. Whatever. Just get ready!”
“Don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you. No one hates you. I’m just”—she searched for a word—“worried.”
“That’s even worse!”
“Why did you text me you took pills?”
“I don’t remember doing that.”
“It’s not the kind of text I like getting at eight in the morning while I’m taking your son to school.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
The sides of Melody’s mouth curled into a smirk. The dimples, the high cheekbones that still looked embossed with bits of heaven dust even after a round of heavy barfing.
“We need to get you public-ready,” Charlie said.
“I don’t want the public to see me.”
“Sure you don’t.”
“The world is cruel and indifferent.”
“I just want you looking your best for all the people who are going to buy this magazine with you on the cover.”
Melody held up a finger. “Tweens.”
“You owe them your career.”
“I owe them nothing.”
Melody went to the dresser and opened it and rooted around, pulled out shirts, held them up, frowned, dropped them. “I hate all of my clothing.”
“You say this every day.”
“I think Patrick’s stalking me,” Melody whimpered.
Charlie cringed. She’d seen the Twitter barrage ping-ponging the World Wide Web, and most of it dubbed Melody the stalker. Someone had managed a phone snapshot just as the drink left her hand, destined for Kuggle’s lap. Charlie had done some tweeting of her own from Melody’s “official” account (@therealmelody) to try to halt any escalation and quash the beef. The goal was to make it seem like a joke. As if Melody and Patrick were having a great time together at the club. It also meant a call to Kuggle’s people and another round of begging him to let it slide and not fire away with anything too derogatory. Considering his not-too-shabby Twitter following of 526K and Blast!’s 1M+ Facebook likes, having to curtail a heated tweet-off ramped up by loyal fans on both sides was not how Charlie wanted to spend her day.
Melody sat on the bed with her head hanging to her chest.
“Please don’t just sit there,” Charlie pleaded.
“I’m depressed.”
“Dressed is what you need to be. I was supposed to be at Abbott’s school a half hour ago.”
Melody lifted her head, her eyes big and full. “Oh, the little guy! What did they say?”
“Nothing yet. We’re still here.”
Melody stood up, in her panties. “You’re right! Let’s go.”
She walked to Charlie and hugged her. She was warm and smelled of booze, sleep, sex, and puke, but somehow Charlie didn’t mind. Melody started to cry and Charlie, not knowing what else to do, returned her embrace. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
* * *
Breathe, he reminded himself. Take a big breath. Hold it. Let it out. Think about going outside. Picture it. Step onto the sidewalk. Start walking. No reason to be nervous. No one’s going to be out now anyway. There’s a hurricane. He was supposed to be somewhere. Oh yeah, he’d told his mother he’d help sandbag the shop. He said he’d meet her and Minnie’s husband, Carl. He’d forgotten. He’d lost track of time working in the basement. It was dark down there. Sometimes, if he didn’t open the tiny curtains on the high windows, he could pretend it was any time of day. He stayed up pretty late these days. It’s temporary, he reminded himself. It has to end at some point. You’ve got to get back out there, his mother told him. Not just out of the house but into life. You’ve got to get a job, his father told him. Sure, you’ve been there years at this point, he thought, but you’ll get out. You can’t stay forever. He was hot. It was hot in the basement. He went upstairs. The old black-and-white TV on the counter in the kitchen was on, tuned to the local news. The same TV had been there since he was a kid. His mother must have left it on. Shadow wasn’t there. His food bowl was empty. The house was super quiet. He listened for his father, either muttering or snoring or cursing himself. He heard the weather. The guy on the news announced that the hurricane had made landfall in the city. The picture changed to the meteorologist’s screen. The storm was presented as a swirling, thermal-hued vortex smash-twirling up the East Coast, the edges of its tendrils beginning to lash down on Hudson, and because of this, the five o’clock service at Saint Mary’s was going to be 86’d. He wasn’t sure, though. He needed to call his mother and find out. Where was his phone? He’d been in the basement sanding all day yesterday and so he didn’t go with her to Mass and was now in danger of not seeing Audrey for days. Not that it mattered, because she didn’t know he was in love with her or that he was, let’s be honest, stalking her. Why didn’t she know? Easy. Because he never ever said a word to her. He was a creeper in the truest sense.
He worried that if the power went out or something worse happened, he’d spin out of control. The more he worked on his little wood projects he had going, the more he felt he was losing his grasp on reality. But at the same time, the work was good. Was the work good? He didn’t even know. No one ever saw it.
He’d been derailed this morning when his father started screaming about how he couldn’t breathe. “Help me! I can’t breathe!” over and over until Armie went up there and calmed him down. Then he heard the old man yelling at Ana about something just a couple of minutes ago. Or was it hours ago?
He went back down and sat at the little folding table that served as his desk and jotted down a list of what he thought a good day would look like:
1. Up before nine.
2. Granola (or something healthy) for breakfast.
3. A “good amount” of exercise: i.e., walking past Audrey’s house.
4. Eye contact with Audrey if/when possible.
5. Progress of some kind on a project. Right now: table and chairs.
6. Progress. Of any kind.
Crawling out of the basement. This was the goal. He needed to get to Mass. He needed to find his mother and ask if she was going. He’d join her. He didn’t care about church. Not really. Audrey did. And so he went to be near her. He didn’t talk to her. Of course he didn’t do that. But he could at least look at her.
This was what Armie knew about Audrey Tan: She lived with her grandmother Ying, who was ninety-two and in poor health and shambled around like a hunchback. Audrey’s parents were dead and she cared for Ying, worked as a teacher, believed in God, and was, in Armie’s opinion, painfully pretty, yet without pretension, without vanity.
When Armie felt anxious and needed to move his legs, he walked. And so what if his route took him past a little gray house, and so what if that little gray house happened to be the Tan residence?
He knew she volunteered at the soup kitchen, so he volunteered there too. His logic was that she would not judge him, because she followed the path that Jesus had laid out, and that dude was famous for saying forgive peop
le, accept them, love them as they were. Not as they were supposed to be. Love them even if they lived in their parents’ basements and didn’t have a job or any money. Love them even if they sometimes cried in the shower or talked to themselves outside your house but never actually went up and rang the buzzer but just stood there awkwardly in the yard or on the sidewalk or behind a tree and then walked away.
His infatuation with her stemmed back to high school, when as a senior he managed to ask her to prom and to his astonishment she accepted. Audrey’s parents had died the year she turned eight. Mom in a car accident and Dad to a heart attack not long after. If it was possible, she’d been even more of a recluse than he had been through adolescence, and turned devoutly Catholic through her grandmother’s influence. She’d gone off to college in Syracuse and they’d lost touch and by the time she returned six years later with a master’s in education, he’d already lost his job and the stock money and the last of his confidence in the stupid and misguided imbroglio with PG-Micnic Inc., and he couldn’t even stomach the thought of saying one word to Audrey. And it was all Josef’s fault. If he’d just never listened to his asshole brother, if he’d never taken the job in the first place . . . He suspected he was depressed. He replayed his conversations with Josef. All those “Invest the money!” and “A savings account is the dumbest thing you can do!” talks.
Armie tried to quantify his problems. Just how bad off was he? He was, it seemed, unemployable. His father was sick. Dying, in fact. He lived in his parents’ house, in the basement no less. He didn’t even warrant a real bedroom. He was broke, with zero prospects, and his best friend was his mother. He played bridge with her and her old-lady posse because, let’s face it, what else did he have to do? Armie wondered if, granted the opportunity, he might not trade places with literally anyone else on the planet. That was hyperbole, he told himself, but it felt significantly true in context. At least most other people created families or held steady jobs or contributed meaningfully to society. He did none of this. He shivered in the chair and shook himself to jolt any amount of energy into his body.
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