by Jordan Cooke
JB was in the hot seat.
“And what is your opinion of Project Runway?” said Uncle Ross, leaning toward JB, waving a tiny shellfish fork in his face. “Does it compel you? Do you record it for viewing time and time again? Do you memorize the inanities that come from Heidi Klum’s mouth on a weekly basis?”
Uncle Ross had forgotten Corliss’s explicit instructions to sit back and stay out of JB’s business. His only purpose was to have her back until she got JB into the hot tub. But did Uncle Ross listen? Never. And now he was in the midst of a full-on gay inquisition—and JB was squirming under the scrutiny. His monkfish carpaccio appetizer sat completely untouched before him and Corliss was mortified. She had already moved on to the entrée—Alaskan king crab legs—and she tore into the fishy meat, taking out her nervousness on it.
“Um,” said JB, “I’ve only seen Project Runway a few times. I mean, I guess it’s a way to spend an hour, right? All those creative types on some crazy deadline.” JB wiped pretend sweat from his forehead. “Relate much?” He raised his hand in the air answering his own question. “Yes, officer, I do!” Neither Corliss nor Uncle Ross laughed. “Tough crowd,” said JB, shifting uneasily in his chair.
“Hmmm . . .” said Uncle Ross, squinting at JB as if trying to read his mind. “You’ve watched those shows only a few times. That’s very interesting.” He twirled his shellfish fork, and then pointed it at JB like a judge with a gavel. “But Corliss tells me you have an eye for fashion. Women’s fashion. That, in fact, you were responsible for her rather startling makeover a couple months back. Stripes with plaids!” Uncle Ross howled as if Corliss’s former fashion faux pas were a devastating riot.
Corliss shot Uncle Ross a really mean look.
Uncle Ross jabbed his fish fork in the air above his head. “But you rescued her from a life of that, didn’t you? You somehow knew enough to turn this drab Midwestern girl into an almost entirely presentable young woman. That’s a very interesting talent for a young man to have.”
“Um, I guess,” said JB, looking more and more stricken by the moment. “We had a fun day in BH doing the shops, hitting the spa. Guilty on count number two!”
“Uncle Ross,” Corliss interrupted finally. “Shouldn’t we—?”
But Uncle Ross put a finger to his lips and narrowed his eyes. Corliss knew he was going in for the kill. “Is women’s fashion something you’ve long been preoccupied with?”
Corliss, racked with anxiety, cracked a king crab leg in half and crab junk shot across the table at JB. “Looks like I’m in the line of fish fire!” he joked, wiping the gunk from his nose. Once again, neither Corliss nor Uncle Ross laughed. JB squirmed some more. “Boy, flying crab usually cracks everyone up. This is a tough crowd.”
“Are you avoiding the question?” asked Uncle Ross accusingly.
“No!” shouted JB. “Women’s fashion? Me? Oh, well, I guess we go way back.” Uncle Ross raised an eyebrow. “I grew up in a house o’ ladies—my older sister and my moms. I was the sole dude! I guess I got trained to keep my eye on hems. Paging Michael Kors!” JB laughed way too hard. “Why—why do you ask?” he gulped, looking like a scared little rabbit.
“Well, JB, I’m just interested in getting to know you,” Uncle Ross said slyly. “Corliss speaks very highly of you.” Corliss shot Uncle Ross a look that said “careful where you’re going with this one.” “In a professional sense,” Uncle Ross continued, taking Corliss’s silent warning. “But also in a personal sense,” he then said, completely disregarding Corliss’s silent warning. Corliss made a mental note to kill him after dinner. “And of course I’m a big part of Corliss’s life. I secured The ’Bu internship for her and rescued her from a dreary future in the field of psychology.”
“Uncle Ross!” Corliss interjected, totally fed up. “I have not in any way, shape, or form given up on my dream to help people in distress. I’ve just postponed it a little while I work in television.” She then used her fingernail to remove some crab that was stuck between her two front teeth.
JB smiled uneasily at Corliss. Corliss smiled uneasily at Uncle Ross. A moment passed with uneasy smiles and the sound of Corliss nervously sucking yet another Alaskan king crab leg. JB finally broke the silence. “Um, request on aisle seven—where’s the little boys’ room?”
“Just down the hall, right past the Statue of David replica,” said Uncle Ross.
“Right” said JB, “I’ll make a left at the marble gonads.” He moved his seat back and scampered away. Corliss wondered if he’d ever come back. She still hadn’t completely recovered from the Emmy afterparty when JB had chosen the company of Jack Osbourne in the next bathroom stall over Corliss in Versace.
“Uncle Ross,” she said sternly. “Stop grilling JB about his sexuality! Okay, so he’s a little . . . into girl things. But that’s why I like him! You’re just supposed to be here to keep me on track for the Jacuzzi maneuver. Remember?”
“Ah, yes,” Uncle Ross sighed, leaning back from the table and wiping the corner of his mouth with a taupe Jonathan Adler silk napkin. “The Jacuzzi maneuver! Fear not, my child. I have your back. And besides, I’ve heard everything I need to hear and I have my ruling on JB’s sexuality.”
Corliss leaned forward in her seat. There was no finer judge of homo-, hetero-, or metrosexuality in Los Angeles County than he. After secrets, judging gayness or the lack thereof was what Uncle Ross lived for. In fact, Corliss couldn’t remember a more joyous time in Uncle Ross’s house than the day he decreed that Lance Bass was unequivocally homo.
“Well, don’t you want to know?” he asked.
Corliss nodded fast, then closed her eyes as if she were going down a water slalom at Knott’s Berry Farm. She was white-knuckling it, that’s for certain, and Uncle Ross—evil queen that he sometimes was—was going to keep her on pins and needles. “Okay, all right!” she burst out. “Tell me the verdict!”
“Your adorably geeky little coworker is . . . not playing on Uncle Ross’s team.” Corliss slowly opened her eyes. Had she heard right? “Yes, Corliss, you’ve heard right! Break out the bubbly and dance in the street! JB is as straight as Victoria Beckham’s blowout.” Uncle Ross kissed her on both cheeks like she’d just won a beauty pageant. “Aren’t you relieved? I mean, I must admit he’s scrumptious—in a kind of geek chic way—and I certainly wouldn’t mind him playing on my team—third base would be nice,” he said with a naughty inflection. “But young Master Bader belongs to the ladies!” he declared triumphantly.
“Oh my God, Uncle Ross, that’s great!” She leaped up from her chair so fast she knocked over the entire gold-plated chafing dish of king crab legs. “Whoops,” she said as fishy gunk trickled down her Wet Seal jeans. Uncle Ross’s two new Goldendoodle puppies scampered over to lick at the fish pooled around Corliss’s pink Mephisto sneakers.
“Isn’t that adorable?” Uncle Ross said, looking at the puppies. “They can’t help loving what I love.” He shooed them away and leaned in to Corliss with a very serious look on his face. “Now that we have this very important info, Corliss, you can’t waste any time. You are to get out of those fishy jeans and into that Jacuzzi!”
“But Uncle Ross—” she said, suddenly terrified the moment was upon her. “I don’t think I can do it!”
“Steady, now. Listen carefully to me. I’m your second, right? I’m here to keep you on track. There’s a bottle of Bolly chilled to perfection in the Sub-Zero. I want you to uncork it, bring it outside to the hot tub—which I’ve heated to 104-degree perfection—and get workin’ on romance.”
“But Uncle Ross!” Corliss said, starting to panic just as she knew she would. “Are you sure JB is straight? I mean, really? I mean, on a stack of bibles—or whatever it is you worship—Zac Efron’s eyelashes?”
“Corliss,” said Uncle Ross, taking her by the wrist. “You’re spiraling just as you yourself predicted. JB is straight.
No gay boy would use the word gonads. Now buck up and don’t disappoint me. You are a Meyer
s, after all.”
Corliss was about to protest again when JB showed up. “Wow,” he said. “That bathroom is off the hook! Who knew Clay Aiken appeared on the cover of People magazine seven times?”
“Yeah,” said Corliss, throwing her head back and laughing so fake-hard that she started to really snort. “Who knew?!”
Uncle Ross’s Backyard—7:46 P.M.
Corliss didn’t know how she’d managed to pull it off—but there they were. JB and Corliss. Sipping champagne in the hot tub—and naked as, well, two naked teens in a hot tub. Actually, Corliss wasn’t totally naked. At the last crucial moment she’d refused to part with her bikini bottom, and she kept one arm clamped tightly around what Uncle Ross called her “almost chest.” JB, however, had gone the whole way. But his fist was pressed so hard over his naughty bits that a vein throbbed in his forehead.
“This is fun,” said JB in a way that didn’t seem like he was having so much fun. More like in a way that sounded to Corliss like he was about to be shot by a firing squad. Then she wondered if firing squads still existed. Because if they did, she might want to hire them to kill her because she was naked in a hot tub! Then she spent a few more minutes following the crazy train in her head back to what JB had said so she could respond to it without sounding like there was a crazy train in her head.
“It is fun!” shouted Corliss at a deafening level.
“Right?!” shouted JB, matching her ear-crushing volume. “I mean, what kid my age doesn’t want to end up naked in a hot tub?!” He cackled like a bipolar outpatient and chugged what was left of his champagne. “Tell me again, Ms. Meyers,” he said, wiping the bubbly from his chin (since he’d missed his mouth), “how exactly did we get into this here nekkid situation?”
Corliss shrugged and tried desperately to appear like the entire business was perfectly normal—but her face kept contorting into odd grimaces that she couldn’t control. The truth was, she didn’t know exactly how it had happened. The last thing she remembered was Uncle Ross shoving his best bottle of Bolly in her hand and giving her a way-too-hard push toward the hot tub. After that, everything went entirely black.
Had she slipped on one of the Indian slate tiles that surrounded the pool and awakened to find herself the kind of girl who gets naked in a hot tub? If she had, she wanted her old self back. Her skin was starting to pucker from being submerged in 104-degree water and her bikini bottom was beginning to chafe her thigh. Not to mention her reputation, which was now officially blown to bits if JB told anyone about this.
“Beats me!” Corliss finally belted to the heavens, before slamming the dregs of her champagne. As soon as it hit her stomach, she felt a kind of wooziness she hadn’t felt since the time she’d raided the fridge at Cracker Barrel and eaten three entire horseradish cheese balls in forty-five minutes. She gave JB a desperate look. He responded with one of sheer panic. Their faces froze like that until Corliss could no longer contain herself. She had to let the truth out. She had to speak her heart! Isn’t that what psychology teaches, she thought, as she plunged toward revelation? That the things we keep silently inside only fester and destroy?
“Um, it just occurred to me, Cor—and I could be a complete spaz for asking such a question—but is this supposed to be a date?”
“YES, IT’S A DATE!” she shrieked, flinging her arms wide—and inadvertently revealing her almost chest. JB’s eyes locked with hers. Corliss felt her heart pause, as if she had been cryogenically frozen. Their eyes twitched and pulsed in what to Corliss at least felt like an eternity of terrified silence.
“It is?” JB finally eked out, as his eyes slowly headed south toward her almost chest. Corliss responded by throwing herself underwater—where she had a direct view of JB’s lap. She closed her eyes against his boy bits as her heart beat like a Timbaland hook. Had she really just revealed her true feelings? Was she actually submerged underwater just inches from JB’s gonads? Wasn’t the whole tacky situation entirely porno? And most important, how long could she stay underwater before blacking out?
She knew she had to pull herself together. How bad could it be? She’d clarified her intentions. If JB thought less of her because of it, that was his problem, not hers. Besides, JB wasn’t all that and a can of Pringles. He belonged to the same freaks-and-geeks club Corliss did. So why was she flipping out so much?
Corliss resolved to open her eyes, look JB straight in the crotch, and wait for his response. She’d come to the brink of hot-tub nudity—not her proudest moment—but she wasn’t going to turn back now. She took one gigantic breath as she emerged from under the jets, rearing back like some unhinged sea monster. What she saw in front of her gave her an immediate answer: JB’s clothes—and JB himself—were gone. All that was left of him were wet footprints that led across the Indian slate toward the house. There, Uncle Ross stood on the lanai with a very sad look on his face.
“Gone?” Corliss managed.
Uncle Ross nodded. “He said he remembered something important he had to do. He seemed in quite a state so I lent him the Bentley. Somewhere on the 405 there’s a wet, terrified teen heading for the Valley in a $400,000 car . . .”
The ’Bu Soundstage—11:21 A.M., the Next Morning
“Who are these people?!” Max called to his assistants, who were standing at attention at his side. The assistants shrugged in unison at the droves of unidentified people scampering around the set. These hyperefficient strangers were taking measurements, jotting notes, and whispering among themselves with great urgency. They’d appeared out of nowhere about five minutes before and Max couldn’t find Corliss to help him get to the bottom of it.
“And where is Corliss?” Max said, increasingly perplexed. She’d been missing all morning. Her car had been spotted in the lot, but so far she hadn’t shown her face. She’d been behaving strangely for some time, but not showing up at all was utterly unlike her, and Max was getting worried. “Find Corliss!” he commanded, waving his hand in the air as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. His assistants fled in various directions.
Left alone, Max tried to imagine what the swarm of whispering, note-taking beings who’d taken over the soundstage were up to. Were they dispatched from the higher-ups at the network, sent to spy on him and report back? Had they come from accounting to see if he’d gone over budget with the multimillion dollar set? They certainly seemed like they were assessing something; they hissed conspiratorially and regarded everything in their wake with judgmental eyes. Their every move made Max lurch into paranoid overdrive. Finally, he summoned his courage and tapped one on the shoulder. “Excuse me. May I ask you what you’re doing here exactly?”
“Me?” said one of the swarmers, looking put out as he used his iPhone to grab a picture of a Tibetan finial. “I’m from Joy Etc.,” he said with his pointy chin in the air, as if that should explain it all, before grabbing another photo of one of the set’s vast Moroccan rugs.
Max’s eye twitched. He couldn’t imagine what Joy Etc. was. Some kind of cult? If so, why hadn’t his fellow Scientologists alerted him to their existence? They certainly looked like a cult: Each of them wore a light blue Hugo Boss pullover. “I’m sorry,” Max said, once again tapping him on the shoulder, “but there’s no proselytizing on the set. You’ll have to leave.”
The busy little man with the pointy chin and the iPhone looked at Max like he had three heads. “I think you have the wrong idea about us. Joy Etc. is the most exclusive wedding design firm in Los Angeles,” he huffed. “We’ve just been hired for the Ventura/ Michaels wedding.” Max staggered back. His set had been taken over by two hormonally infused teen stars—just as Anushka had predicted. “And now if you’ll excuse me,” the man said, “I need to figure out how I can possibly transform this soundstage into a place of joy. Orchids, tulle, candles, doves,” he said, rattling off his intentions. “J-O-Y. And frankly, it’s not going to be easy,” he continued, sniffing at the set. “It looks like Courtney Love threw up in here.” He then snapped a photo of a tufted dam
ask hassock. “All of this is either going to have to be covered, removed, or, frankly, set ablaze. Your set designer should be shot.”
The little pointy man moved off to confab with his colleagues, as they all shared images off their iPhones and made horrified faces. Max watched in growing dismay as they then began to make wild gestures with their hands, as if wiping out whole portions of the set. “Tulle! Candles! Orchids!” they began to yell, conjuring all these things with their hands. And then the chanting spread across the vast space: “Tulle! Candles! Orchids!” The voices rose in unison, creating a deafening cacophony.
Max covered his ears and inhaled deeply. It was either that or start shouting in his girly voice. He knew he had to put his foot down and reclaim his directorial authority—just like Olga said—but he was bone tired. He’d been up till 4 A.M. the night before slamming Patron with six Nigerian models at the Tropicana Bar. His head throbbed as the people from Joy Etc. chanted their joy mantra.
“Can someone please find me Tanya?” he said to no one because all of his assistants were off looking for Corliss. “Oh, forget it,” he said to himself, realizing the day—like so many others in his short career—was heading south fast. Then there was a tap on his shoulder. He turned, half expecting one of the Joy Etc. weirdos to engage him in their demented chant.
“Max!” said Tanya, dressed head to toe in a white silk Oscar de la Renta pantsuit. “I’ve been right behind you the whole time! Aren’t these Joy guys so, so talented? Their vision of my wedding is, like, totally off the hook! They want to build a hundred-foot-long portico of yellow orchids that will be, like, a place Trent and me will totally walk under! And then the whole thing will open up into, like, pow!—this explosion of tulle that hangs in big droopy things from the ceiling! And, of course, like, a gazillion votive candles will be suspended from that droopiness just, like, plopping down from heaven like ploppy little glowy things. That’s so joyful!”