by C. D. Reiss
“It’s good money,” she said, trying to talk me into a Thursday night lounge job. “And no pay to play. Just cash and go home.”
“I hate those gigs. I hate being background.”
“Two hundred dollars? Come on, Monica. You don’t have to learn any songs; one rehearsal, maybe two, and we got it.”
Gabby had spent her childhood getting her fingers slapped with a ruler every time she made a mistake on the piano. Her playing became so perfect she barely had to work at it. She was so compulsive her every waking moment was spent eating, playing, or thinking about playing, so the word “rehearse” couldn’t apply to her because it implied an artist taking time out of their day to get something right, not a compulsive perfectionist basically breathing. She was a genius, and in all likelihood, her genius plus her perfectionist nature drove her depression.
“I only want to sing my own songs,” I said.
“You can spin them. Just, come on. If I don’t bring a voice on, I’ll lose the gig, and I need it.” That hitch in her voice meant she was swinging between desperation and emotional flatness, and it terrified me. “Mon, I can’t wait for the next Spoken gig. I’m twenty-five, and I don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have a lot of time. Every month goes by, and I’m nobody. God, I don’t even have an agent. What will happen to me? I can’t take it. I think I’ll die if I end up like Frieda DuPree, trying her whole life and then she’s in her sixties and still going to band auditions.”
“You’re not going to end up like Frieda DuPree.”
“I have to keep working. Every night that goes by without someone seeing me play is a lost opportunity.”
Performance school rote bullshit. Get out and play. Keep working. Play the odds. Teachers told poor kids they might be seen if they busted their violins on the streets if they had to. Dream-feeders. Fuck them. Some of those kids should have gone into accounting, and that line of shit kept them dreaming a few too many years.
I looked at Gabby and her big blue eyes, pleading for consideration. She was mid-anxiety attack. If it continued over the coming weeks, the anxiety attacks would become less frequent and the dead stares into corners more frequent if she didn’t take her meds regularly. Then it would be trouble: another suicide attempt, or worse, a success. I loved Gabby. She was like a sister to me, but sometimes I wished for a less burdensome friend.
“Fine,” I said. “One time, okay? You can find someone else in all of Los Angeles to do it next time.”
Gabby nodded and tapped her thumb and middle finger together. “It’s good,” she said. “It’ll be good, Monica. You’ll knock them out. You will.” The words had a rote quality, like she said them just to fill space.
“I guess I need it too,” I said. “I got fired last night.”
“What did you do?”
“Spilled drinks in my boss’s lap.”
“That Freddie guy?”
“Jonathan Drazen.”
“Oh…” She put her hands to her mouth. “He also owns the R.O.Q. Club in Santa Monica. So don’t try to work there, either.”
“Did you know he’s gorgeous?”
A voice came from behind me. “Talking about me again?” Darren had shown up, God bless him.
“Jonathan Drazen fired her last night,” Gabby said.
“Who is that?” He sat down, placing his laptop on the table.
“He didn’t do it. Freddie did. Drazen just offered me a severance and referred me to the Stock.”
“And apparently he’s gorgeous.” He raised an eyebrow at me. I shrugged. Darren and I were over each other, but he’d rib me bloody at the slightest sign of weakness. “I haven’t heard you talk like that about a guy in a year and a half. I thought maybe you were still in love with me.” I must have blushed, or my eyes might have given away some hidden spark of feeling, because Darren snapped open his laptop. “Let’s see what kinda wifi I can pick up.”
“I don’t talk like that about men because I prefer celibacy to bullshit.”
Darren tapped away on his laptop. “Jonathan Drazen. Thirty-two. Old man.” He looked at me over the screen.
“Do not underestimate how hot he is. I could barely talk.”
“Earned his money the old-fashioned way.”
“Rich daddy?”
“A long line of them. He makes more in interest than the entire GDP of Burma.” Darren scrolled through some web page or another. He loved the internet like most people loved puppies and babies. “Real estate magnate. Our Jonathan the Third…” He drifted off as he scrolled. “BA from Penn. MBA from Stanford. He brought the business back. Bazillionaire. He’s a real catch if you can tear him away from the four hundred other women he’s getting photographed with.”
“Lalala. Don’t care.”
“Why? It’s not like you’ve had sex in…what?” Darren clicked around, pretending he didn’t care about my answer, but I knew he did.
“Men are bad news,” I said. “They’re a distraction. They make demands.”
“Not all men are Kevin.”
Kevin was my last boyfriend, the one whose control issues had turned me off to men for eighteen months. “Lalala… not talking about Kevin either.” I scraped the bottom of my ice cream cup.
Darren turned his laptop so I could see the screen. “This him?”
Jonathan Drazen stood between a woman and man I didn’t recognize. I scrolled through the gossip page. His Irish good looks were undeniable next to anyone, even movie stars.
“He has been photographed with an awful lot of women,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s been a total fuck-around since his divorce, FYI. If you wanted him, he’d probably be game. All I’m saying.” He crossed his legs and looked out onto Sunset.
Gabby had a faraway look as she watched the cars. “His wife was Jessica Carnes,” Gabby recited as if she was reading a newspaper in her head, “the artist. Drazen married her at her father’s place on Venice Beach. She’s half-sister to Thomas Deacon, the sports agent at APR, who has a baby with Susan Kincaid, the hostess at the Key Club, whose brother plays basketball with Eugene Testarossa. Our dream agent at WDE.”
“One day, Gabster, your obsession with Hollywood interrelationships will pay off.” Darren clicked his laptop closed. “But not today.”
six.
I think one could be at Hotel K, get blindfolded, taken to the Stock, and believe they’d been driven around and dropped in the same place they started: same pool, same chairs, same couches, same music, and same assholes clutching the same drinks and passing off the same tips. What was different was that there was no Freddie. The Stock had Debbie, a tall Asian lady who wore mandarin collar embroidered shirts and black trousers. She knew every superstar from just their face, and they loved her as much as she loved them. She could tell a movie mogul from an actress and sat them where they’d have the most professional friction. She coordinated the waitresses’ tables according to the patron’s taste and coddled the girls until they worked like a machine.
She was the nicest person I’d ever worked for.
“Smile, girl,” Debbie said. I’d been there a week and she knew exactly how many tables I could handle, how fast I was compared to the others, and my strong suit, which appeared to be my magnetic personality. “People look at you,” she said. “They can’t help it. Be smiling.”
It was hard to smile. We’d had three good shows in a row, then Vinny disappeared into thin air. We’d banged on his office door in Thai Town, went to his house in East Hollywood, and called four hundred times. No Vinny. Every gig he had lined up for us fell through. My momentum was slowing and I didn’t like it.
“What’s your freaking problem?” said one dude as he threw a dollar bill and three dimes on my tray. “You need a blast of coke or something?” He’d looked like every other spikey-haired, fake-blonde, Hugo Boss-wearing douchenozzle who namedropped from zero to sixty in three beers. But Debbie had put his name on the ticket, probably as a favor to me. His name was Eugene Testarossa, the one guy at W
DE I’d wanted to meet for months. In my depression over stupid Vinny, I hadn’t recognized him.
I stalked toward the bathroom on my break and bumped into a hard chest that smelled of sage green and fog.
“Monica,” Jonathan said. “Hey. Sam told me he hired you.” His green eyes looked down at me and I wanted to break apart under the weight of them. As he looked at me, his face went from amused to concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, just a bad day. Whatever.” I stepped toward the bathroom, but he seemed disinclined to let me go so easily.
“I got your report. Thanks. It was very professional.”
“You assumed a waitress couldn’t put together a sentence?” His glance down told me I’d been a bitch. He didn’t deserve my worst side. I tried to think fast; I didn’t want a barrage of questions about my life right then. “The Dodgers lost and I’m from Echo Park and all, so I got a little down.”
“The Dodgers won tonight.” His pressed lips and bemused eyes told me he understood I was half joking.
I shuffled my feet, feeling like a kid caught lying about kissing behind the gym. “Yeah. Fucking Jesus Renaldo pulling it out in the ninth like that.”
“He’s got five good pitches in him per game.”
“He tends to throw them in the bullpen.”
“Or trying to pick a guy off.” He shook his head. He looked normal just then, not like the guy behind the desk undressing me with his eyes.
“I’m sorry I was such a bitch just now.”
“I’m used to it.”
“No, you’re not. Come on. People are nice to you all day.”
He shrugged. “You lied about why you were upset. I get to lie about how people treat me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “I have season tickets on the first base line.”
I felt my eyes light up a little, and getting so excited over something someone else had embarrassed me.
“I could bring you sometime,” he said.
“You haven’t seen a Dodger game until you’ve seen it from the bleachers. Six dolla seats, yo.”
He laughed, and I laughed too. Then Debbie showed up at the end of the hall.
“Monica!” she called out, tapping her wrist.
“Shit!” I cried out and ran back to my station, turning to give Jonathan a wave before rounding the corner.
I put on a smile and made myself as intensely personable as I could. I saw Jonathan at the head of the bar, talking to Sam and Debbie, laughing at some joke I couldn’t hear. When I went to the station to pick up my tray, he looked at me and I felt his sight. He was gorgeous, no doubt. I could write songs about that face, those cheekbones, those eyes, that dry scent.
I wished he’d go away. I tried not to look at him, but he and Sam were still talking at one in the morning. Debbie stood at the end of the service bar, counting receipts, when I came by with a ticket, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m sorry I was talking to Mister Drazen in the hall,” I said. “I used to work for him.”
“I know.”
“How often does he come around here?”
“He and Sam have been close since they went to Stanford together, so… once a week? Should I arrange for him to be here more often?”
My cheeks got hot. To Debbie, who read people like neon street signs, the blushing was visible even in the dim lights. I glanced at him across the bar. He was looking at Debbie and me. He lifted his rocks glass, a bunch of melting ice in the bottom. Sam had gone to take care of some late-night hotel business, and Jonathan was alone.
“Perfect,” Debbie said to me. “You will bring him his refill.” She hailed the bartender, a buffed out model who worked his body more than his mind. “Robert, give Mister Drazen’s drink to Monica.”
“Debbie, really,” I said.
“Why?” asked Robert, pouring a glass of single malt from a shelf so high I would have needed a cherry picker to reach it. “I’m not pretty enough?”
“You’re plenty pretty,” Debbie said. “Now do it.” She put her hand on my forearm and spoke quietly. “You need more practice dealing with his social class. For you, as a person. Getting used to it will only benefit you. Now go.”
Being mothered was nice, I guess. My mother had been more or less absent since I went to high school, which was about when she and Dad moved to Castaic. I never felt abandoned, but I could have used a hand with the day to day bullshit.
Drazen watched me come around the bar with his scotch. I wondered if he knew that made me uncomfortable or if he even gave it a thought. I wondered if the difference in our relative positions bothered him or turned him on. He was a bazillionaire and a customer. I was a waitress with two nickels making heat. This had to be a turn on.
“Thanks,” he said when I placed the napkin and drink on the bar, a job Robert could have done in half the time.
“You’re welcome.”
We looked at each other for a second or ten. I had nothing to add to the conversation, but his magnetic pull made words irrelevant. I was stepping away to leave when he said, “I meant it, about seeing a game.”
“I meant it about the bleachers.”
“I like to get to know someone before they drag me out past centerfield.” He clinked his ice against the sides of his glass. “The company has to be pretty engaging that far from the plate.”
I wanted to mention the stunning color of his eyes. I wanted to touch his hand as it rested on the edges of the bar. Instead I said, “Your fellow fans keep you on your toes, especially if you wear red.”
“Can I see you after work?”
The clattering noise in my chest must have been audible. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been asked out or the object of a proposition in the last year and a half; all of the men who wanted me were simply too easy to politely reject. If I had a brain in my head, I would reject Jonathan Drazen right out of hand. Politely.
“Maybe,” I said. “Company’s got to be pretty engaging at two thirty in the morning.”
Sam showed up, and since I didn’t want to be seen talking up my ex-boss, I walked away without confirming that he’d feel engaging at that ungodly hour.
seven.
I spent the next hour and a half talking myself out of meeting with Jonathan after work, if he even showed. He was going to be a distraction, I could tell. I couldn’t be in the same room with him without feeling like I needed to touch him.
I thought about Kevin. A fine specimen of a man, he’d had much the same effect on me as Jonathan Drazen, complete with fluttery stomach and tingling cheeks.
I’d been with Darren over six years when he admitted to kissing Dana Fasano. We were in the process of either breaking up or getting married. I went to a party downtown with a friend whose name eluded me right then, and there he was. Kevin was talking to some girl in the corner, and when he glanced over her head, his eyes found mine like he was looking for them. I froze in place. He had brown eyes and thick black lashes, and when we saw each other, the distance between us became a plucked cello string, vibrating, making a beautiful sound.
I didn’t see him again for another half an hour, yet I had felt him circling me, tethered, even when we talked to different people. Finally, in the crowded kitchen, he was behind me, and I knew it because I could feel him before I even saw him reach over me to slide a beer from the sink.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He held the beer bottle toward me, his hands slick on the glass, cold water pooling in the crevice between his skin and the bottle. “Is the opener over there?”
I took the bottle from him, overreaching, as I’d done with Drazen, so I could touch his cool, wet hand. Then I put the bottle cap on the metal edge of the counter and pulled down swiftly. The cap bent and popped off, clinking to the floor. I held up the bottle for him. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” He considered the bottle, then me. “See that girl over there?” He pointed at a girl
about my age with short, dark hair and striped leggings.
“Yeah.”
“In twenty seconds, she’s going to come over here and ask what I’m working on for my show. I don’t want to tell her.”
“So don’t.”
As if on cue, the girl saw Kevin and walked over. It was the first time I experienced him as a charmed person, and it would not be the last.
“It would be better if she didn’t ask. My paintings are secret before a show. If I tell her, she’ll own them. Her soul will own them. I can’t explain it.” The kitchen was crowded, slowing the striped leggings’ progress and pushing us together, forcing us to whisper.
“I get it,” I said. I would have gotten anything he said at that point. I would have claimed to understand quantum mechanics if he explained it to me. “They aren’t born yet,” I continued. “If she sees them while they’re being made, she knows them as children. Their insides.”
“My God, you get me.”
I had no snappy reply. I wanted to get him. I wanted to get everything he said from now on. He touched my chin. “If I kiss you, she’ll turn around and go away.”
In retrospect, that was the lamest come-on imaginable from him. He’d done much better in the year following. But at the party, the word “kiss” breathed from his beautiful lips, was all I needed. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he slipped one around my waist. Our lips met, and I held back a groan of pleasure. I’d only ever been with Darren, and I loved him. I would always love him, but kissing that man, like that, with his taste of malt and chocolate, uncovered physical sensations I didn’t know could come from a kiss. I felt every pore of his tongue, every turn of his lips. The world shut off and my identity became a glow of sexual desire.
I went home barely able to walk from wanting him and completed my breakup with Darren the next day. If desire was supposed to feel like that, I needed more of it. I felt awake, alive, not just sexy, but sexual. Thoughts of him infected me until I saw him again and we tumbled into bed, screwing like wild animals.