Avery had seen a science fiction movie (some opening DX had dragged her to) in which a woman’s blood had been replaced with a blue liquid that gave her limitless strength but eventually killed her. She felt like that now, minus the superpowers. Her body temperature had dropped. Her head swam. The street rushed by like a video game looping through the opening credits over and over again. Block after block. She couldn’t say no to Alistair, who had been there for her her whole life and now just wanted her to think.
“It won’t be what you want either,” Alistair added. “If we go back and catch her walking home or in her apartment, Ponza’s going to make it a shit show. You’re not going to kiss and make up. Ponza’s going to post some blurry photo of you two, and then every homophobe in America is going to trash Merritt in the comments. It’ll be weeks before you get a moment alone with her. Just call her.”
Avery called Merritt ten times that night and again in the morning, but the phone just rang until she reached the Hellenic Hardware voice mail.
* * *
The following day Avery stood in the master bedroom of Uncle Oli’s apartment with Greg and Venner. Greg hadn’t wanted to talk at the command center. They weren’t leaving Portland just yet, but the way Greg had told her let her know this was not a happy development. Now Greg locked the door behind them. The decorations looked garish. The iridescent curtains lit up at night and were supposed to look like a swath of northern lights. During the day they looked like a shower curtain.
Greg sat down on one of the Swools, the bouncy stools that were supposed to enhance your abs or your posture or your moral fiber. He looked like he had no fiber left in him. Meanwhile Venner paced in front of him. In his hand he held a tablet open to the Hollywood Insider. The top of the screen was an innocuous story about DX’s father’s ex-wife, supermodel Vivan de Laris, breaking up with her boyfriend. JFK had been seen in the Heathrow Airport. Avery could lose twenty pounds of belly fat overnight by eating This Amazing Miracle Science Food!
“A-ver-y!” Venner said. It came out in three distinct syllables. He shoved the tablet at Avery. “What is this? What. Is. This?”
Then she saw it. An overexposed photograph of her own terrified face looking over Merritt’s shoulder, their arms still wrapped around each other. AVERY AND ALISTAIR AT THE GAY BAR! the interior headline read. AND WHO IS AVERY’S SPECIAL FRIEND?
Ponza had caught them. She should have followed Merritt home. At least then they could have spent the night together. They could have flung the windows open and made shrieking love for everyone to hear. If Avery hadn’t been so distraught, the mere thought would have filled her with a hot eagerness. To release her cries of pleasure! To scream like a porn star! Do it, baby! Right there! Don’t stop! That kind of exclamation had struck Avery as overwrought (like car salesmen on TV) until Merritt had first brought her to orgasm. Every time she came, it was harder to stifle her cries. But she wasn’t thinking about that now. She was thinking about Merritt’s voice mail answering again and again. No call back. No text. No knock on Avery’s hotel room door.
“So?” Venner prompted.
“I don’t know…” Avery looked toward the door. “I…don’t…”
What could she say? That’s not me. It’s not what it looks like. We were practicing…For what?
“Avery Crown doing the nasty with some boy-band lookalike.” Venner jabbed his finger at the screen.
Did he think it was a boy?
“He was….” Avery stumbled over her words. “Crew…a friend of DX’s…It’s nothing. I didn’t…We didn’t. He just attacked me, and…”
“Do you think I’m stupid!” Venner threw the tablet down on the bed. “Do you think I accidentally produced seven of the top ten unscripted shows on TKO? Do you think they sent me up here to fix King and Crown because I needed to get out of the office? That’s Merritt Lessing, and you have been sleeping with her since you saw her at your reunion. You stay someplace on Burnside, and I’m pretty sure she wore your Gucci rose garden print silk tank the other day.”
“Are you stalking me?” Avery said.
“I know everything that goes on on my shows.”
“It’s not your show,” Avery protested.
Greg stood up and paced across the room. “We don’t live in a void, Avery.” He sounded like a father whose child had been hauled into the police station.
Avery stared at the tablet glowing on the bed. It occurred to her that this was the only picture she had of her and Merritt together. The TKO transcribers had looked at hundreds of hours of the two of them on film, and this was the only picture that showed what they really were.
Greg rubbed his temples. “Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing Merritt? Venner, why didn’t you tell me she was seeing Merritt?”
Avery had the sense that Greg was in nearly as much trouble as she was.
“If you think I know about Avery and Merritt, you all get careless,” Venner said. “You think I’ll protect you. If you think I don’t know, you’re careful, but not careful enough. Clearly.”
“I could have protected her!” Greg said.
“This isn’t Greg’s fault or Alistair’s,” Avery blurted.
“Alistair has the self-preservation of a teenage lemming, but it’s not his fault,” Venner said.
“Are you going to fire us?” Avery asked. “Or Merritt?” The thought hit her like the hardwood door slamming into its frame. Merritt had surely signed a morality contract. “You can’t take the Elysium from her.”
“You and Alistair are lucky,” Venner said. “I don’t want to fire you. We just filmed a fantastic season, and it’s only going to get better.” He sat down on another Swool. “America loves Avery and Alistair.”
Venner wasn’t talking about her. He wasn’t talking about the person she’d been in the center of Merritt’s field, staring up at the sky, or the person Alistair brought calm-you-down King Cobras to the way people on British dramas serve tea.
“They don’t want to see you break up over some reality-TV walk-on,” Venner said.
“You said Merritt was the next big thing,” Avery said.
“Not if this breaks open. It’s not even interesting. If you were running some sort of bondage sex club, if there was a link between you and a terrorist cell, that would be interesting. This is just…”
Venner paused, rubbing his hands together hungrily. All things considered, Avery had seen him rage more over a broken camera stand. Actually, he looked like someone who had finally hit his stride, as though all the little crises of production were beneath him. Now, finally, a hurricane had hit land. The dams had broken. The house had collapsed. And Warren Venner was in his glory.
“But married. Why haven’t King and Crown tied the knot? That’s the question. The answer is your other producers were dicking around. They didn’t see the possibilities. They didn’t get that unscripted moves forward. It’s real life, not a soap opera.”
“What do you mean ‘married’?”
“Married. You marry Alistair King.” Venner looked happy. “It’s perfect. We’ll refilm the finale. Alistair will propose. You’ll say yes. Star will leak a sneak peek. King and Crown get married. Maybe the last day of summer. That’s romantic. I’ll talk to TKO about a spin-off. Six episodes. Maybe on the Bride Channel. You don’t want a baby, do you? That would play really well with the Midwest. After you’re married, of course.”
“On the show?”
“On the show. In real life. You know Dan Ponza will look up your marriage license as soon as you tweet I do.”
“I am not marrying Alistair in real life.”
“You love him,” Venner said matter-of-factly.
“Like a brother. Like my best friend. I’m gay.”
“It’s only for two to three years. TKO won’t ask for more than that. Then you can divorce. You already spend all your time together anyway. Legal will help you get an airtight prenup. The way Alistair manages his money, you’ll need it.”
“You can’t
do that,” Greg said with a sigh.
“I’m not your property,” Avery said. “You can’t tell me who to marry in an actual legal wedding. We can do a fake wedding on TV, if you want, but I’m not…I’m just not. I have a life outside this show.”
Venner looked calmer than Avery had ever seen him. He stood up and straightened the edge of his suit jacket.
“Look, Avery, you’ve got two options. We give the Hollywood Insider something that sells more copy than Avery-diddled-her-dyke-costar or you’re done.”
Avery opened her mouth to protest, but Venner stopped her.
“And before you get all sanctity-of-marriage on me, you need to think about Alistair. You’re smart, Avery. You treat this like a job. You give twenty thousand dollars a year to breast cancer. A couple scholarships. You support the women’s shelter. You wear all the stuff you get comped. Alistair has poured a million dollars into wells in Sudan. That America Wyoming Foundation will ruin him. He gets all emotional about black lung disease, and then he promises everything to everyone. The America Wyoming Foundation doesn’t have enough funds to cover all the donations he’s scheduled. It won’t have anything if he loses this show. And no one is going to want Alistair King after he gets cuckolded. At least the gays will love you. You can do home decorating demos at Pride, and you’ve saved enough money. Invest smart and you can sit around eating bonbons for the rest of your life.
“But Alistair King will be forty, broke, and dumped by a B-grade TV hostess who’d rather hang out with drag queens. He’s better than you, prettier, more talented. He’s the heart and soul of the show, but that means he goes down hard. No one really cares about you, Avery. But they’re going to hate Alistair for not being a man. And, by the way, if he goes off this show, he doesn’t have enough money in savings to pay his taxes. So you might not want to marry him, but he’ll be living with you, unless you send him back to Wyoming to work in the mines.”
“Think about your fans too,” Greg said. “They love you. There’s so much wrong in the world right now. They just want a show that makes them feel safe. If they find out it’s all been a sham…”
The right answer was Of course I’ll marry Alistair. The right answer was The Bride Channel. What fun!
“I have to talk to Merritt,” Avery said.
Greg slumped on the Swool, which was hard to do since its whole purpose was to keep you upright (and probably optimist and resilient too). She could almost see him shrink with paternal despair. It was like each of his vertebrae had collapsed into the one below, a telescope sliding in on itself.
“I’m sorry,” Avery said. “I need time to think.”
Chapter 31
Merritt picked up an antique door (with original hardware…an attractive add-on she would have cared about six weeks ago). She slammed it on a sawhorse she had set up at the side of the loading bay. She hoped the door would shatter into a thousand splinters. But it was hardwood, and as it hit the sawhorse, it sent a painful jolt through her shoulders. Everything was painful. She thought Avery had healed something inside her, but she’d been wrong. Merritt was like so many antiques; it was the rust and old paint that held her together. Avery had stripped those away. Now hurt and disappointment that would have stung before knocked her down. She couldn’t close her eyes without reliving Avery and Alistair’s kiss, and she couldn’t shake the knowledge that whatever Avery said—even if Avery begged her to stay—they were over.
She hadn’t even stumbled across Avery and Alistair’s wedding announcement. It had jumped out at her. The day after the Mirage, she had tried to distract herself with e-mail and invoices. The interns had installed an off-brand browser on the Hellenic Hardware computer, and a banner blared news at the user. EARTHQUAKE. FIRE. THIS THING IN YOUR REFRIGERATOR COULD KILL YOU. AVERY CROWN AND ALISTAIR KING TO TIE THE KNOT.
It hadn’t even been thirty-six hours! In one photograph, Avery held Alistair’s hand as he spun her around on a parqueted dance floor. WE’VE NEVER BEEN HAPPIER, the headline read. Beneath a picture of Alistair and Avery beaming, a side box read, YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS THE NEXT KING & CROWN FINALE.
Now her phone vibrated in her back pocket. She didn’t need to look at the screen to know who was calling. Twenty missed calls from Avery. It wasn’t that Merritt didn’t want to talk to her. She wanted to throw herself in Avery’s arms and spill out all her fears and sorrows. But the only conversation they could really have now was, Look, you know as well as I do, this won’t work. She was afraid she couldn’t have that talk without yelling at Avery like she had in Avery’s trailer or simply falling to the ground to cry.
Merritt picked up a planer and drew it along the surface of the door, peeling back a strip of ornate wood carvings.
“Merritt!” Alex, her intern, exclaimed from behind her.
Merritt stared down at the wood in front of her. Her planer had filed down the carved fruits and goddesses that swirled across the door’s surface. She set the planer down at the very edge of the door and gauged another yard of wood.
“That’s bloodwood!” Alex said. “That’s high-relief nouveau-Balinese. What are you doing?”
Bloodwood. High-relief. She’d worked hard to teach him the vocabulary, to teach him that it mattered. It was hard to convince a boy who had lived behind a dumpster and now dreamed of being a YouTube makeup blogger that the Janka hardness rating meant something. She wished she cared. Instead, she handed him the planer.
“I couldn’t,” he whispered.
“Go ahead. Fuck it up.”
Alex looked as if Merritt had held the planer to her own throat. “I’m going to get Iliana,” he said.
“She’s on her honeymoon. It’s just a door. Finish it off. Scrape it. Paint it. You can’t save it now.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re young and sweet. You haven’t ruined anything yet. Do it now. Get your first out of the way.”
Her phone rang again. It was inevitable; she would have to talk to Avery, and she’d have to be the one to say it, to break it off. Avery wouldn’t have the decency to do what had to be done. Merritt pulled the phone out of her pocket and accepted the blocked number.
“I’m not ready, Avery!” she blurted.
“Avery is here!” Venner’s voice boomed unexpectedly. “Avery is ready. Alistair is ready. We have a film crew costing me hundreds a minutes, and you are not here.”
“We’re done. The show is over. I’m out of your life and your lights and your fake world.”
“You are not,” Venner said. “Our people have been calling you. We stayed in Portland for another three days. We need to film the proposal scene, and we need you there. It’s in your contract, Lessing. Look it up, and get over here.”
Merritt called her attorney, Kristen Brock, Portland’s premiere civil rights lawyer and the wife of a customer who owed her a favor.
“You have to go,” Kristen said after a brief pause. “They own you.”
* * *
An hour later Merritt was once again standing at the archway that led into the Elysium courtyard. How many times had she stood there? She was days away from signing for the deed, and yet she felt like this was the end. If there had been something magic about these walls, that magic had dissipated.
Before she could enter the fray of cameras and cables, Avery rushed over, ignoring Venner’s, “Get back here.”
“I can explain,” Avery said, clutching Merritt’s hand and breaking Avery’s own prohibition against touching on set.
Merritt pulled away. She could see Avery standing on Burnside looking up at Merritt’s window the first night they’d made love. She saw her own keys suspended in the streetlight a second before Avery caught them. At that moment, her whole soul had cried out, Stay.
“You don’t need to explain,” Merritt said. “I know.”
“I tried to tell you about the marriage, but you wouldn’t answer, and now we’re shooting the engagement, but it’s just for show. You have to know Alistair and I aren’t like that
, and you’re the one I want, and this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, and I’ve messed it up again.”
There were no pauses between Avery’s words. Her expressive face was full of earnest concern, as though her biggest fear in the whole world was hurting Merritt. As though a really good explanation of why she had shown up at the Mirage, danced with Merritt, pushed Merritt away, kissed Alistair King, fled, and then got engaged could fix the situation.
“I need you in here,” Venner called out.
She was glad for an excuse to walk away. She couldn’t cry in front of Iliana; she certainly couldn’t cry in front of the entire King & Crown crew.
As soon as they were all gathered in the courtyard, Venner launched into a lecture about his days on Cop Brides.
“We knew the biggest threats those officers faced wasn’t on the streets of New York. It was the wedding,” he said.
The King & Crown crew looked grim. The Portland crew had stopped whistling and hanging around the catering truck. Like guests at a stranger’s funeral, they were being polite. They would move on to another Portland gig as soon as the season was over. The King & Crown crew—most of whom had been with the show since the beginning—were probably polishing their résumés in case a white wedding wasn’t enough to save Avery’s reputation. They eyed Merritt warily.
Merritt could not believe she was there. She watched Avery, her skin shimmering with pearlescent pink glitter, her hair pinned up with silk cherry blossoms, the most precious creature in the world, and Merritt felt a stab of sadness so acute she thought she would faint.
Alistair came up beside her as Venner talked. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“You got what you wanted,” she shot back, not bothering to lower her voice.
“No I didn’t,” he said. “She’s my best friend. Look at her. You’re breaking her heart. Why didn’t you call her back?”
“I don’t know how you guys do this for a living,” Merritt said. “I can’t wait to get back to the hardware store.”
Worth the Wait Page 21