Famous (A Famous novel)

by Jenny Holiday

  He laughed. She was overthinking this. He was the curator, not the artist, and this was the town art show in Dane, Iowa, not the Guggenheim. But okay, she’d worked so hard on this—he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without her, not even close—so he’d let her have her dramatic entrance.

  Sounds good. See you at seven.

  He got up and headed back to his office, surprised to find he was actually excited about the show. How had Emmy managed to turn this thing he’d been dreading all summer into something he was looking forward to?

  Maybe she really was magic.

  There were a lot of cars parked outside the show. Evan’s excitement was joined, suddenly, by a twinge of nerves. But, he reminded himself, Jerry’s barn conversion had turned out great, and probably many of tonight’s attendees were here to see the barn that would become the new community center arts annex as much as they were the show itself. And it wasn’t like he had to impress anyone; it was only the town art show.

  “Evan!” It was Melissa and Ken, whom he greeted warmly. They’d mentioned earlier that they were going to stop by, so it wasn’t a surprise to see them, but still, he was touched by the gesture. His department had never been particularly collegial, and he hadn’t really known what he was missing until, suddenly, he wasn’t missing it.

  But before he could get too carried away on a warm, fuzzy cloud of Oprah-style gratitude, Larry pulled up. Well, hell, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction, right? So much for “it wasn’t like he had to impress anyone.” And the bar for impressing Larry, would, of course, be high. It would be unreachable, in fact, because his boss would keep moving it, ensuring that it stayed perpetually out of Evan’s grasp.

  “Couldn’t miss your little show,” Larry said, getting out of his car.

  Evan watched as Melissa and Ken fled inside, leaving him alone with Voldemort, as Emmy called him. “Good of you to come,” said Evan evenly, forcing himself not to rise to the bait Larry had set with his snarky “little show” comment. God, he needed to get tenure, if for no other reason than he would be done walking on eggshells around this asshole.

  Once inside, he calmed down a bit. The place looked amazing. He had seen it almost all done, but the addition of the guests, the festive bar set up in one corner, and the gentle, warm lights installed in the rafters of the former barn painted the art—the whole space—with a lovely glow. It was really something.

  “Hi.”

  So was Emmy. “Hi,” he said, his pulse kicking up a notch as she smiled at him.

  And there she was, the magician. The woman who’d made everything happen. And by everything, he didn’t just mean the show. She’d fixed his house and his professional relationships. She’d…thawed him somehow, even though he hadn’t realized he was frozen. She’d pushed her hair back from her face with a headband, so she was looking a little less shaggy puppy dog than she generally did in public. And she was wearing a dress, though it was loose-fitting. He spared a momentary thought for whether she looked too much like herself but told himself he was being paranoid. If she hadn’t been discovered at the densely-populated Minnesota State Fair, she certainly wasn’t going to be at an obscure art show in Dane.

  “Everything is amazing, Emmy,” he said, and she blushed at the praise. “You’re amazing,” he added, wanting to see if he could make that blush deepen. It did. Damn, how long till they could get out of here?

  “Evan!” Melissa sidled up holding a plastic cup of wine and wearing a huge grin. “You have been holding out on us!”

  Evan frowned, unsure what his colleague was talking about.

  “Don’t be mad,” said Emmy, taking his arm.

  Foreboding uncurled in his gut. “Don’t be mad about what?” He let her lead him through the crowd, his eyes scanning the space as they went. Nothing seemed out of place. He tried to keep up with the greetings that were being lobbed at him, nodding to well-wishers. But he couldn’t hear what they were saying. He couldn’t hear anything, actually, over the buzzing in his ears. It was like locusts getting louder—an ominous soundtrack inside his head. He kept twisting around. Something was wrong, and he needed to see what it was.

  Emmy stopped suddenly, near a corner. There was an odd little alcove inside the barn. It was effectively dead space, and when planning the exhibition, Evan and Emmy had discussed what to do with it, ultimately settling on hanging a bulletin board with some information about the community center’s arts programming.

  “What did you do?” he said in a low voice, but he knew, suddenly, with a terrible certainty, what he would find when he turned that corner.

  “People should see what you can do,” she said, her voice low to match his, but resolute.

  He rounded the corner, his whole body shaking.

  And came face to face with one of his paintings of Mrs. Johansen.

  His knees almost gave out. He had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself, so he wouldn’t crumple in front of the whole town. In front of his tenure committee, for fuck’s sake.

  “I told you I don’t paint anymore,” he said, still staring at the painting. It was a good painting, and she’d had it well framed. Those facts, though, weren’t enough to counteract the crush of…betrayal.

  This was what betrayal felt like. He knew this feeling.

  There was also panic. The hot tendrils of panic crawling up his spine, like they had all those years ago in Miami, when he’d had to run a gauntlet of reporters on his way in or out of court.

  He turned to her. He knew this feeling, too: standing there in front of someone you loved and watching them hurt you.

  “I don’t understand how you could do this,” he whispered, unable to get the volume of his spoken words to match the scream in his heart.

  “You can’t just hide your talent,” she said. “Who cares about how it was nurtured? I’m sorry you went through some shit, but you can’t let it derail your whole life. Life is too short not to do what you want to do, not to make the kind of art you want to make. I’m forcing your hand. I know you think you’re angry, but—”

  “I think I’m angry?” How could she be so presumptuous? “I guarantee you, I am angry.”

  “She’s right, Evan,” said Melissa, who must have followed when Emmy came to fetch him. “If there’s more like this, you need to let your work find an audience.”

  There was a crowd gathering, and suddenly everyone was talking over everyone, Emmy defending herself like she occupied some sort of moral high ground, Melissa praising his work, lots of other voices weaving over and under each other.

  “Evan, you need to listen to your friend,” Melissa said. “She’s right. This painting is marvelous.”

  “I don’t know,” said another voice that Evan recognized right away. Larry. Approaching with a sneer. “I’m not sure Miss…” He sniffed and turned to Emmy. “Anderson, is it? I’m not sure Miss Anderson is any kind of expert on art, either as it relates to quality or to marketability.”

  Emmy took a step forward. “Hold on.”

  “I won’t hold on,” said Larry. “Art—well, great art, which this most decidedly is not—is about truth. Beauty. It communicates something besides ego. What do you”—he let his eyes run up and down Emmy—“know about that, Miss Anderson? Who are you to decide what is great art?”

  “Oh my God!” came a voice from the crowd.

  Evan whirled, trying to pinpoint who had spoken, but it was impossible, because the crowd started shifting, surging, closing in on them.

  Emmy’s eyes darted around frantically, perhaps sensing, as he did, that the shit was about to hit the fan.

  Don’t move! he wanted to yell at her, but his mouth wouldn’t obey. Even as everything was ratcheting up inside him, a cacophony of volume and discordance, his voice was drying up. So he tried to reach for her to…what? Shield her? He wasn’t sure, just that he had to get to her, to try to stop—

  “Holy shit! Is that her?”

  Emmy turned toward the voice, and Eva
n, who had reached her side, went with her. The way he’d grabbed her, lunged toward her, really, had tangled them up together, one of his arms across her shoulders, the other resting on her forearm. He’d made them into a unit, and there wasn’t time to undo it before…

  “That’s Emerson Quinn! Emerson Quinn is here!”

  Emmy gasped.

  And a series of flashbulbs went off.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Three days later – Los Angeles

  “All right,” said Martin Eklund, Emmy’s producer. “That’s good enough for now. Let’s break for an hour. Let me fiddle with this a bit.”

  Emmy took off her headphones and made her way from the recording booth to the control room. Martin held his hand up for a high five, which Emmy reflexively gave him. This made Brian, one of her managers, do the same thing, so she high-fived him, too. Claudia was in the background talking a mile a minute on the phone, but she hustled over, grinned, and gave Emmy her own high five, yammering the whole time. Emmy felt like an athlete working her way down a line of opposing players, slapping each other’s hands and saying, “Good game.”

  The next person in line was Tony.

  Tony did not offer to high-five her.

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He’d made his views known. Disapproval practically radiated off him.

  “I think we’ll be able to wrap this track tomorrow,” said Martin. “We should figure out what you want to record next. Do we want to plan on some writing time?”

  “Emerson has a bunch of songs ready to go,” Tony said.

  This wasn’t news to her team. She’d played them the songs she’d written this summer.

  Their response had been…underwhelming.

  But it had only been three days. The album would take months to put together. The first step was to record a bunch of stuff. They could battle it out later in terms of what stuck.

  Maybe. Because right now, all Emmy knew was that working on Song 58 was at least forward motion. It gave her something to do, a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Something to focus on so she wouldn’t cry.

  Because she had turned into a crier. In some ways, that was the worst part of the fallout from the summer. After Dane, and the beautiful illusion she had created there, she couldn’t stop crying. She wanted so badly to get back on her no-crying streak, but her eyeballs wouldn’t cooperate with her brain. She cried in bed at night, reading e.e. cummings so many times that she had all his absurd poems memorized. It was like some higher power was pouring water through her eyes and she was incapable of stopping it.

  Except when she was working. When she was working, she wasn’t crying. It was like Mrs. Johansen said: Live the life in front of you. Thirty-six hours ago, she’d been in Iowa. Now she was here.

  Being here was all she could do right now.

  And, to be brutally honest with herself, she wasn’t sure anymore that they weren’t right about the song. Song 58 was good. It was clever and catchy. And, after all, she had chosen Brian and Claudia because they knew what they were doing, and her career had gone stratospheric after she’d signed with them. So when they said it wasn’t a good idea to totally change her sound in one fell swoop…well, maybe they were right. She had a formula, and it worked, Claudia had said, gently suggesting that they include one or two of the new songs on the new album rather than all of them.

  “I’ll be back an in hour,” Emmy said. If they were breaking, she was going to take a walk. She needed forward motion. If she stopped moving, she would cry. Hell, right now it felt like if she stopped, she might die.

  Tony was at her heels as she pushed out of the studio into the hallway. She just wanted some goddamned peace. Was that too much to ask? For the first time in Emmy’s life, she was questioning whether having Tony around was a good thing. Like, maybe things would be easier if he just…wasn’t here.

  “You’re making a mistake,” he said in a low voice when he caught up with her.

  She punched the button for the elevator. “Do we have to have this conversation again?”

  “I’m not talking about the song.”

  That stopped Emmy in her tracks. He wasn’t talking about the song? Song 58 was all he’d been talking about since they landed in L.A. and Brian and Claudia suggested they start recording it. They had lined up Martin and studio time, had everything arranged so all she had to do was show up. “Well, you could have fooled me,” she said, a little astonished at how mean she sounded. “Because you seem obsessed with Song 58.”

  “I mean, yes, I think you should be recording the songs you wrote this summer, but—”

  “Tony, you know it’s not that simple.”

  “It is that simple! You’re falling back into exactly what you were trying to escape. It’s Song 58, and pretty soon, Martin will have another one ready, and then it will be Song 59. You’re starting to think that Claudia is right, aren’t you? Song 58 is the thin end of the wedge.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t about the song.” She braced herself for more of his onslaught.

  It didn’t come, and that was somehow worse than if he’d kept yelling at her. He shook his head, looking so utterly disappointed with her. It was unsettling. From day one, Tony had believed in her unwaveringly.

  “What was I supposed to do, Tony?” she said, deciding to finally address the real issue, the one she’d been stubbornly avoiding in favor of mindless forward motion. “He didn’t want me, not for keeps. I was going to have to leave in a couple weeks anyway. What does it matter?”

  “You know it matters.”

  The elevator arrived. She stuck her hand in the door to hold it open and said, “Tony, look at me.” He met her eyes, and she saw steely determination in his. It was what had propelled them up and out of Minneapolis, and now it had turned on her. “Are you with me or are you against me?”

  His eyes softened, and he sighed. “You know I’m with you, Em. I’m always with you.”

  She pressed her lips together and swallowed. She’d be damned before the crying was going to spill out into her professional life. “Then we are done talking about this. Not just today, but forever. Do you understand me?” She was shaking. She never spoke to Tony like this, like she was his boss. They had always been partners in everything, despite his current job title. But if he didn’t let up, she was going to have to…make some changes.

  He nodded stiffly, got on the elevator, and looked at the floor. Like Jace used to do. Sweet Jace, who’d written her a letter confessing that Brianna, his state fair girlfriend, had been pestering him about whether Emmy was Emerson Quinn. After the art show where Emmy had been exposed, Jace wrote, he’d confronted Brianna and she’d admitted to tipping off TMZ about the uncanny Emerson Quinn lookalike in Dane, Iowa, who was mentoring a young songwriter. He’d been abject, and she had reassured him, via an old-fashioned paper letter, because she didn’t want to open the lines of communication in an ongoing way, that it was okay.

  She’d been living on borrowed time in Dane anyway.

  She put on her sunglasses so Tony wouldn’t see her tears.

  Evan kicked his sneakers against the edge of his porch, trying to dislodge the grass clippings that had accumulated on them from mowing the lawn. If only he could dislodge the heavy dread that had taken up permanent residency in his chest as easily.

  “Thank you!”

  He turned and lifted his hand. It was Mrs. Johansen, who’d opened her front door and called to him from across the yards. He’d cut her lawn, too. “No problem.”

  “Come in for some lemonade.”

  He shook his head as he grabbed his mail from the box mounted next to his door. “Thanks, but I can’t. I have a ton of stuff to do.” He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her raising her eyebrows at the lie. He hustled inside.

  He felt bad blowing her off, but honestly, he was annoyed at her. One of the things he’d always loved about Mrs. Johansen was her realism. Emmy would have called it her Zen. She took life as
it came and made the best of it. So he wasn’t sure why she had been riding him so hard about Emmy.

  Even after he’d told her everything about his past, explained the origins of his allergy to the spotlight, she wouldn’t let up. Which was grossly unfair. She of all people knew how hard he had been working toward tenure. She should understand how important this life was to him, how it was worth any sacrifice.

  For God’s sake, there were paparazzi in Dane. An Entertainment Tonight truck was parked outside the new arts annex. Some of the community center kids had been talking to the media, enthusiastically telling stories about their time with Emerson Quinn in disguise. His only consolation was that they hadn’t found him, hadn’t ferreted out his role in the story. Yet.

  He hoped they would clear out soon. And even after Emmy left—and hell, she’d left fast—the media had stuck around, like they couldn’t believe she was actually gone.

  He shared the sentiment. As he went inside, his eyes moved automatically to the bench in the entryway, Cheer Bear’s former home.

  When she’d run away from the show—he still had no idea how she’d gotten back to his house—he hadn’t been that far behind her. He’d had no idea what he was going to say to her. He’d been left reeling from the one-two punch of her having displayed his art and then watching her cover be blown so spectacularly. Clearly, she couldn’t stay, and they’d been planning to part ways in a couple weeks anyway, but he hadn’t wanted her to leave without…what? Some kind of closure? He didn’t even know. So he’d followed her blindly, hoping that when he saw her, he’d find the right thing to say.

  But when he’d come barreling in the front door that night, the first thing he’d seen was that empty bench.

  And if he knew one thing for sure, it was that if Cheer Bear was gone, so was Emmy.

  It had been for the best. He told himself that then, and he told himself now.

  But to make matters worse, he feared that he hadn’t just lost Emmy, he’d lost Mrs. Johansen, too. Because he was resolved to avoid her until she let up about Emmy. And since it didn’t seem like she was ever going to do that, he feared that his closest friendship in Dane had been another casualty of the summer.