Famous (A Famous novel)

by Jenny Holiday

  “Well, Emmy,” Larry said, turning all fake-chummy. “Evan here is Dane College’s most famous professor.” He winked at her, and Evan was surprised by the sudden, overwhelming need to put his arm over Emmy’s shoulder, to physically mark her as off-limits or some caveman shit like that. “Or should I say infamous? But I guess you know all about his dark past, if you’re an old friend.”

  “Well, I know about his father’s troubles,” Emmy said, placing slight emphasis on the word “father’s.”

  “You mean his father’s crimes,” Larry shot back.

  “Yes,” Emmy said, “His father’s crimes.” There was nothing slight about the emphasis this time.

  “Well, looks like you’ve got a loyal little gal here,” Larry said, turning his fake friendly tone on Evan, though as usual there was nothing friendly about his narrowed eyes.

  The annoyance that was ever-present when Larry was around hardened into something less benign. “Emmy is a grown woman, Larry, not a ‘little gal.’”

  She’s not “mine” either. But he didn’t say that part. For some reason. Just gazed evenly at his boss.

  Larry put his hands up in an exaggerated pose of surrender even as he said, “I’ve signed you up as our departmental rep on the facilities committee, Evan.” Which had nothing to do with anything other than that it was a way for Larry to swing his dick around and assert his dominance.

  “I’m already on two committees,” Evan said. They were supposed to devote twenty percent of their time to “service,” and split the rest between research and teaching, and Evan was already doing a lot. He’d been warned by sympathetic older colleagues not to take on too much committee work, as it tended to expand to fill time that would be better used for things that would count when it came to tenure.

  “Yes,” Larry said, one of his nostrils twitching. “I forgot that you’re keeping score. I’ll ask Charles to do it. He’s always happy to help the department.”

  Evan refrained from pointing out that Charles was sixty-five years old, hadn’t published anything in two decades, and routinely garnered miserable teaching reviews. He arranged his features into something he hoped resembled neutrality and said, “Facilities committee. Great. Let me know when the next meeting is.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Emmy said, laying her hand on Evan’s arm. He’d wanted to touch her so badly before, but he hadn’t allowed himself to. Now she was touching him, and it was like a drug sending calming sedation through his veins. “Mrs. Johansen will be waiting for us, won’t she?”

  “Yes,” Evan said. Mrs. Johansen needed her hair done. That was way more important than this bullshit. “See you later, Larry.”

  Emmy was silent until they reached his car. Once they’d pulled away, she turned to him and whistled. “Holy crap, is the chair of your department actually Satan?”

  Evan chuckled. It was nice to have some external validation of Larry’s awfulness. “He’s pretty terrible, isn’t he?”

  “Um, yes!” She shook her head. “The way he announces himself in a social interaction as a Bellows scholar.” She made a dismissive noise.

  “It’s his way of asserting dominance. Pissing on his territory, if you will.”

  “But that presumes that I know—and care—who Bellows is.” She flashed an apologetic smile. “I mean, I’m sure Bellows is great, but…”

  He waved off her apology. “George Bellows. He painted working-class New York City in the early twentieth century. Larry, who, I must point out, is from a wealthy California wine-making dynasty, fancies that he identifies with the hardscrabble manliness of Bellows. Anyway, it wouldn’t matter if Larry was a Van Gogh expert. The point there was to intimidate you.”

  “Well, it didn’t work.”

  And that, in a nutshell, was what Evan loved about Emmy.

  Liked. What Evan liked about Emmy. She was so firmly herself.

  “And I can see now why this tenure thing is such a big deal,” she went on.

  “Nothing like having your fate in the hands of a sociopath,” Evan agreed.

  “It would actually be better, I think, if he was overtly evil. At least you would know where you stood. But he’s so slippery.”

  She was right. “Yeah, the minute he gets a clear opportunity, he’ll stab me in the back, I’m pretty sure.”

  “So why did he hire you to begin with?”

  “He didn’t. The chair at the time has since retired. Larry was on the hiring committee, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that he lobbied hard against my hiring.”

  “Why do you think he hates you so much? And why is he obsessed with your father? I’m right about that, yes? He is obsessed with your father?”

  “Yeah, but I think it’s an excuse he’s seized on. This is going to sound conceited, but I think it’s as simple as Larry feels threatened by me. I’ve published in better journals than he has, my courses are more popular, and I’ve won a bunch of early-career awards. Again, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but…”

  “Owning your accomplishments doesn’t mean you’re being a jerk.” She tilted her head and stared out the window like she was suddenly thinking of something else.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking that’s something I need to learn, too.”

  Evan wanted to ask her what she meant. She had a slew of awards, including Grammys. She had platinum records and sold-out world tours under her belt. Everything she touched turned to gold, basically. How could she be implying that she was anything less than aware and proud of all that?

  But he didn’t get a chance because she turned the conversation back to him. “Anyway, it sounds like you’ve hit the nail on the head. Mr. Manly Man is threatened by you, so he’s going to try to sabotage you. And since he can’t do it by legitimate means, he’s seized on this stupid bullshit about your ‘infamy.’”

  “Pretty much. I, of course, am not an apologist for my father, but it’s like Larry thinks we’re an organized crime family or something. He’s constantly harping on how our little college doesn’t need this kind of attention. I transferred here to finish my PhD, so I was a student here before I got my faculty job. I admit that when I first arrived, the media coverage of the trial was still going strong. There were reporters here covering the fact that Evan Winslow’s son had fled to the boondocks. But that eventually calmed down, and I’ve never done anything to draw attention to myself here. Quite the opposite—I came here to get away from that attention, to leave it behind.”

  She turned in her seat so she was facing him. “So what will you do?”

  He shrugged. “What can I do? Hope the rest of the committee talks some sense into him.”

  “Is it a vote? Like, democracy?”

  “Ostensibly. The question will be how much power Larry has over the other committee members.”

  She nodded and went back to staring out the window. He kept glancing at her, though, and caught her nod again, quite decisively, at the cornfields passing by their window.

  It was like she’d come to some kind of conclusion he wasn’t privy to.

  Chapter Nine

  While Emmy did Mrs. Johansen’s hair later that afternoon, she added a few items to her mental to-do list.

  Well, actually it was one big, honking item: defeat Larry the Bellows scholar.

  It came with several sub-items, though. Tactics of sorts, the first of which was kiss the hell up to the other tenure committee members. She just had to figure out how to do that.

  “How did those hamburgers work out last week?” Mrs. Johansen asked.

  “A barbeque!”

  “Excuse me?” Mrs. Johansen said.

  “I think we should have a barbeque,” Emmy said as she wove a braid across Mrs. Johansen’s forehead. “A party. For Evan’s colleagues, and we’ll make sure the members of his tenure committee have a great time.”

  “That is an excellent idea,” said Mrs. Johansen. “But he won’t go for it.”

  “I’ll handle tha
t part.” Negotiations would be easy, relatively speaking anyway. The food part was what terrified her. “What do you serve at a barbeque?”

  “Burgers, brats, potato salad,” Mrs. Johansen said. “I like a green salad at a barbeque, too, to counteract all the junk. Then you can make some cookies or brownies, or do s’mores over the coals.”

  Emmy frowned. “Is there any way I can get all that stuff catered?” But even as she asked the question, she realized the answer was no. Not if she was trying to show Evan as a down-to-earth member of the department. Someone who belonged in Dane and was not just an interloper from a rich and famous family.

  Evan chose that moment to come out to the porch where she’d set up their makeshift hair salon, and Emmy frantically mimed zipping her lip in Mrs. Johansen’s direction.

  “Whatcha got there?” she asked as she tied off the braid—Evan was carrying a stack of papers—hoping her voice didn’t sound too fakey.

  He flopped down on the swing and sighed. “These are my notes for the town art show. I’ve been in denial, but I’ve got to get the programs done. They need to go to the printer next week, so I have to figure out what the hell I’m doing. And then actually hang all the stuff—that’s going to take forever.”

  “I’ll do that part,” Emmy said, and when he started to protest, she kept talking over him.

  “Doesn’t she look great?” She made a Vanna White gesture toward Mrs. Johansen’s head. “I watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials on this braiding technique, and I think I did a pretty kick-ass job if I do say so myself.”

  “She does look great. But Emmy, you can’t hang the art show.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, I’m not—”

  “Seriously,” she interrupted. “I’m an art-hanging expert now.” She had sorted through all the art in his house and hung most of it. Really, there was nothing you couldn’t learn from YouTube. “You curate. I’ll hang. The show’s what? In a month and a bit?” Evan didn’t realize that the art show was another opportunity to impress the tenure committee, to demonstrate his devotion to Dane. She would make sure it was perfect.

  The mental list gained an item: kick-ass town art show.

  “Are you sure this isn’t bothering you?” Emmy asked, drawing Evan’s attention from his work. He looked up to see her setting her guitar aside and standing and stretching. The evening had advanced without him realizing.

  She’d been working on a song that was pretty far along. It was amazing to hear some of the snippets that had been floating through his house—and his mind—start to get stitched together. A song was being born, right in front of him, like it was no big deal. She was even humming a little, like she was thinking of where lyrics might go, and he was dying of curiosity to learn what they would ultimately be.

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s helping me.” Evan usually needed silence when he worked, but for some inexplicable reason, having Emmy around fiddling with her guitar made him extra productive. His hands had been flying over his laptop keyboard, and he had a pretty good draft of the art show program roughed out. It was a task he’d been dreading, and it was finally done. He had moved on to grading a stack of midterm essays from his summer course, and was making good progress through those, too.

  “I usually don’t let people hear a song before it’s done,” Emmy said. “I’m kind of obsessively private about it.”

  “I’m harmless,” he said.

  Emmy deepened her stretch, reaching her hands to the sky and arching her back, her breasts straining against the tight fabric of her tank top. She was wearing what Evan had come to think of as her “home” uniform—shorts and a tank top—rather than the baggy shirt and jeans she armored herself in when they went out. Her home uniform was a lot more…unsettling. The bright moonlight amped up the lightness of her white tank top against the darkness that framed her. She was so lean, you could see the outline of all the muscles of her torso and stomach through her shirt. He’d read interviews where she professed not to like her tall, slim build, where she called herself “gangly” in a disparaging way. But to Evan she seemed just right, like she was the way she was supposed to be. She inhabited her body—and her entire being—in a way that…well, in a way that cried out to be painted.

  When she was done stretching, she put her hands on her hips and regarded him, tilting her head. He was still sitting, so he had to look up at her. “You are a lot of things, Professor Winslow, but harmless is not one of them.”

  “So SilverCEO seemed like a better prospect than JollyGent,” Evan said to distract himself from her body and the almost all-consuming itch to paint it.

  It worked. “He sure did!” She wiggled a little like the idea was so exciting she had to move her body. It was not helping on the distraction front.

  “It would be great if she could find someone,” Evan said. “I worry about her all alone in that big house. What if she falls?”

  “How long has she been widowed?”

  “Eight years.”

  “No kids nearby?”

  “They never had kids.”

  “That seems kind of unusual for someone of that generation,” Emmy said.

  “She told me once that they tried for a while but after several miscarriages they gave up.”

  “Huh.”

  “Her family was interned during World War II. In California. She was five when they went in.” He didn’t think Mrs. Johansen would mind him telling Emmy. It wasn’t something she talked about a lot, but it wasn’t a secret, and it had certainly shaped her worldview.

  Emmy gasped and sat back down next to him on the swing. While she’d been sitting across from him on a chair before, he’d been thinking her presence was good for productivity. But now that her thigh was mere inches from his own, “productivity” no longer seemed like the right word.

  “Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat to get rid of the raspiness in his voice. “She doesn’t talk much about the actual experience, but she said after it was over, her mother was determined to appreciate every moment of life, and not to harp on what she didn’t have or fixate on what had been done to her. She taught Mrs. Johansen the same outlook, I think.”

  “That’s amazing. I would think an experience like that would make you angry—or at least bitter. How do you carry on like that when your own country locked you up?”

  “I wouldn’t say she wasn’t angry. But it’s like she cultivated the ability to let go of anger and be in the moment. Mrs. Johansen looks like a standard-issue old lady.” Evan chuckled thinking about how he’d come to that erroneous conclusion shortly after meeting his neighbor. “But in actuality, she’s kind of a Zen master or something. She’s always saying, ‘Live the life that’s in front of you.’” He glanced over at her house. It was bigger than his—three stories, and he knew she had trouble with stairs. “But I don’t know what the endgame is. She gets along okay for now, but she can’t live by herself in that house forever.”

  “Maybe we need to find her a younger man,” Emmy said.

  Evan laughed, and Emmy scooched against the back of the swing, rested her head on its top, and gazed up at the sky. He watched her face change as she retreated into her mind. Her eyes narrowed like she was thinking intensely about something. He could practically see the cogs turning in there, and he was overcome with the urge to know what was going on in that clever brain of hers. “A penny for your thoughts.”

  She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking about what a fine line it is—living in the moment and embracing experience like Mrs. Johansen versus… I don’t know, whatever is the opposite of that. Living a programmed life, I suppose.” She blew out a breath like she was frustrated with her own words.

  “A programmed life,” he echoed. It was an interesting phrase. “I don’t think Mrs. Johansen is advocating anarchy. We all live programmed lives to some extent, don’t we? We have to.”

  “Sure.” She turned her head to him, the rest of her body still lounging back against the swing. “
But the question is, who’s doing the programming?”

  He’d seen the misery in her eyes that first afternoon, when she’d appeared on his doorstep and said she’d run away from her managers. It’s why he let her stay when every instinct toward self-preservation had been screaming at him to do the opposite. “But you got away from them. You came here.”

  “I’m not talking about them.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Well, I am, but the hard part is thinking about how did I get to that point? It’s not just them. It’s me. I make bad choices, and then I react by overcompensating, by trying to dictate what I’m going to say or do or how I’m going to behave. I get overly worried about my image. I have to be, to some extent, I guess. But there’s always this internal struggle. Is that any way to live?” She huffed a bitter laugh. “It’s very un-Zen.”

  She was obviously struggling, but she was speaking so abstractly, he didn’t really understand what she was trying to say. “Can you give me an example?” From his vantage point, it didn’t seem like she’d made bad choices. Hell, she’d had a dream and set her mind to making it come true. It was damn impressive.

  “Okay, like, remember when we went to the farmers’ market?” He nodded. “Until I got recognized, that was the best time I’ve had in years.”

  Warmth pooled in his stomach at her words. He thought of all the pictures of her in ball gowns, at galas and award ceremonies, on the arms of famous men, on red carpets in Cannes.

  “Riding a bike!” she exclaimed. “Propelling yourself through space in order to get somewhere. It’s so simple, but I was so scared!”

  “You were scared?” She’d objected, but he hadn’t realized she’d been genuinely afraid. He wouldn’t have been so pushy if he had. A protective urge rose in his chest, as strong as it was tardy.

  “Terrified,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s like I have this inner critic. She’s always telling me not to do stuff. She’s very good at imagining the worst-case scenario. Like, a bike crash, the paramedics come, the paparazzi arrive.” Her smile disappeared. “So she tells me not to do stuff.”