The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  I remember my Chanel bag as I follow the hostess’s unhelpful directions to the bar, adjusting it on the chain so that it rests flush against my pelvic bone. When in doubt, lead with Chanel.

  The bar isn’t immediately visible at the foot of the stairs, and I walk around a second dining room space like an asshole, wondering if Brett would have gotten an escort, and if it would have been for her star or for her skin. When I finally locate the bar, it’s empty and unset.

  “This okay?” I ask the bartender, hoisting myself onto a stool.

  “You drinking or eating?”

  “Eating.” I rethink my answer. “Both.”

  He smiles in a way that makes me feel stupid for asking. His hair is slicked back and his beard is unkempt. His bow tie is baby shower pink. “Then this is okay.”

  I’m set up with a placemat and menu and silverware, then ignored for several minutes until a red-faced man in a rumpled suit takes the stool two empty seats over from mine. He is immediately given the bartender’s full attention; to his cocktail order I manage to tack on a request for a glass of white wine. What kind? the bartender asks, and I shrug, because I have no idea, only that I am desperate to feel the way I felt that day in Jen’s apartment, like nothing could ever go wrong again. Surprise me, I tell him, kittenish. But, like, he says, all business, dry, fruity, what? I weigh my options before telling him fruity. Who wants to drink something dry?

  The bartender tends to our drinks in the order that they are placed, though I know from Vince’s bartending days that you are almost always supposed to pour a glass of wine or beer before assembling a more complicated cocktail. The man gets his beverage and the bartender retreats to the other end of the bar. I’m forced to raise my hand to remind him I’m still waiting. He waves back with a patient smile that says, Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten you. After drying a rack of wineglasses steaming from the dishwasher, he opens a bottle of fruity white for me. He fills a glass to the top and empties the bottle into a mini wine carafe that he presents to me on the side with a Don’t tell anyone wink.

  “Sorry about that. I’m the only one back here tonight and we were out of clean glasses.” He flings a bar towel over his shoulder and folds his arms across his chest. His shirt cuffs are rolled to his elbows; his thick, veiny forearms say farmhand, his watch says Trust Fund Baby who dropped out of SMU sophomore year to start his own T-shirt line. He has warm, green-flecked eyes. People whose licenses list their eye color as hazel are usually reaching—they’re brown, just say brown—but in his case, I’d allow it. What are the genes needed to produce a child with eyes like that? I uncross my legs, thinking just how far Phoenix is from New York, how unlikely it is that this not-brown-eyed gentleman watches Saluté.

  “What can I get you to eat, miss?” he asks.

  Just as I’m no stranger to the vagaries of posh restaurants, I’m also no stranger to poor service with a smile, that ensuing whiplash of indignation and clemency. The moment you are sure this is it is always the moment you’re brought a free glass of wine, the moment that the handsome bartender offers his heartfelt apologies, miss. So you adjust your blinkers and you say, “The beet salad to start and the salmon.”

  “Excellent,” the bartender says, forgetting to collect my menu before he walks away.

  I find my phone and open my email. The glass is hot from the dishwasher and the wine tastes like a wedding bouquet, nothing like the crisp elixir poured for me in Jen’s apartment a few weeks ago. No matter, tomorrow I will be in L.A., where I’m all set for dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director at 8pm at Bestia. Exciting! my motion picture agent’s assistant added.

  Next is an email from Gwen, my editor, Re: Stephanie Simmons’s AQ. Every writer fills out an Author Questionnaire pre-publication. It’s distributed to different departments to help develop publicity and marketing plans. Steph, I need you to pull the AQ on Stephanie Simmons’s memoir first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks. I have to read this several times before I remember that Gwen’s assistant is also named Stephanie, and that she must have sent this to me in error. Still, what does she want with my AQ?

  I hear “Beet salad?” and half raise my hand to claim it, but the plate is set in front of the man to my right. I turn my attention back to my email. Vince has forwarded me the details of my flight to Marrakesh. 5:47 P.M. out of JFK, three days from now. We’ve arranged for him to meet me in the airport with a suitcase packed for Morocco; this way I didn’t have to pack for my book events, the Female Director dinner, and Brett’s trip. I wince. It’s going to be a brutal day of travel. But backing out of Morocco is not an option, not like backing out of Brett’s engagement party was, especially since I’ve recently come to the conclusion that now is the opportune time to extricate myself from the show. You may think such a shift in mind-set would give me carte blanche to bail on all the events I would never attend if the cameras weren’t there, but if anything, I’m under even greater obligation. I need to make it clear that I was an integral part of this season, that nobody phased me out. I want to quit while I’m on top, as they say. The top is like Mars, hostile to human life.

  The gentleman to my right is now cutting into a small steak, grilled a diligent brown, just as he ordered it. That’s what the bartender called him, indicating to a busser where to place the plate, “The filet is for the gentleman.”

  I move on to the mini carafe of wine. Also the temperature of soup, but nonetheless helping to fuel the bold fantasy I’ve nurtured since before my memoir came out; The Site of an Evacuation is a number one New York Times bestseller (done), I am both a massive commercial success and a critics’ darling (done), and a very famous and timely director or actress is committed to adapting my memoir for screen (almost done). I’m of course asked to return to the show, even though I will be a crusty thirty-five next season, but I demur, because I’ve got a better idea. Lauren Conrad crowing at Heidi—You know what you did!—may be the highest-rated reality TV episode of all time, but did you also know that Keeping Up with the Kardashians peaked in popularity when the sisters had babies? A motherhood storyline may sound heretical, but remember, our audience loves seeing unconventional women caving under the pressure to do the conventional thing.

  With this in mind, I pitch a spinoff where I get pregnant and move to Los Angeles to oversee the film project. I’ll live in a house with a yard and have a meltdown trying to put together a crib. A storyline about the comic discordance between having a baby and having zero maternal instincts is a classic knee-slapper. Is this right? I can imagine myself saying in the trailer, holding up my baby with her diaper on inside out and backward. Stephanie Ever After, Jesse would probably want to call it, and I would tell her, laughing, absolutely not.

  “Excuse me, you had the salmon?” A lonely filet is placed before me, but before the server can set down the accompanying plate of sautéed spinach, I stop him.

  “I never got my appetizer.”

  The server extends an unsympathetic “Oh.”

  “Excuse me.” I wave down the bartender, and this time he doesn’t dare give me a cute smile back. “I never got my appetizer.”

  “Oh no. Really?”

  “Really.”

  The bartender flags down a passing waiter. “Nathan,” he says. “This young lady had ordered a beet salad. Can you go back in the kitchen and check on that for her?”

  Everyone seems appeased by this, and the server attempts to set the side plate of spinach down again. “I would like my appetizer first,” I say, firmly, “then I would like my fish.”

  The gentleman to my right sets his steak knife down. A few people in the dining area break off their conversation, eavesdropping, but I have no problem standing up for myself when it’s clear I’ve been wronged. It’s the nebulous, middle-of-the-road disrespect where I can’t find my footing.

  “Of course. Of course,” the bartender says, removing the plate before me and dumping it into the trash so I can be sure they won’t try to reheat and reserve. “We are so sor
ry about this.” He disappears under the bar for a moment and reappears with the bottle of fruity wine, topping me off.

  “And can I get a glass of ice?” I ask, fearlessly. “The glass was a little warm.”

  The bartender does me one better and switches out my wineglass. “Again,” he says, “so sorry about this.”

  When the bill arrives, all I have been charged for is a single glass of wine. I leave a fifty-dollar tip and something else, holding tight to the merchant’s copy as I place my dinner napkin on the bar and reach down for my purse, hanging on a hook by my knee. It’s only when the gold chain strap is over my shoulder and I’m on my feet that I slip the signed receipt, upside down, into the check holder. I hurry out of the restaurant like I’ve just hidden a bomb in a trashcan, like I will be blown to smithereens if the bartender makes the discovery before I board the elevator to my room.

  I wake to a noise in the dark, like the sound of someone shaking open a new garbage bag, the way the plastic gasps for air. I am very still, waiting to find out if my broken brain has produced this track or if a maid is simply emptying the hallway trashcan. The last time I was in Phoenix, five months ago on my first book tour, a man chased me down after I passed through security.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am?”

  I refused to respond to “ma’am,” and so he had to say it twice.

  “I think this fell out of your bag,” he told me, giving the pill bottle three shakes, the world’s glummest tambourine. I about fell over thanking him, explaining that I need to be better about latching my purse, my husband is always on my case about latching my purse. And God, wouldn’t my husband die to hear me tell a stranger that he is right?

  The man laughed, his face shiny, like his smile had stretched his skin to its tearing point, the way men’s faces get when you let them believe that they are of any use to you anymore. “I know my wife can’t step foot on an airplane without her Xanax.” He gave me a neighborly wave good-bye. “Safe flight.”

  “Thank you,” I said, watching him go the other way, thinking how nice it was to be mistaken for a silly woman with a silly fear of flying.

  The next stop on the first book tour, five months ago, was Nashville, and there I decided I would again “forget” to latch my purse before sending it through the CT scanner, and I did the same thing in Milwaukee and Chicago too. I could have just tossed the prescription for Cymbalta into the trash, but that felt too intentional. I’d been using a pill cutter for the last few weeks anyway, under doctor’s supervision, and, well, my book tours are the ten days out of my year when I’d really rather not feel so . . . dampened.

  It took me ten years to admit to a doctor that occasionally, I hear things. Not voices, well, I suppose it is a voice, but it isn’t speech I hear. It is a word, sometimes a first name, sometimes a familiar sound—shaking open a garbage bag, or revving the engine of a lawn mower.

  Before I told my doctor about the voice, my blood pressure was one-forty over ninety. After my doctor told me that hearing things is not synonymous with schizophrenia or manic depression, that some 13 percent of adults will hear voices at some point in their lives, and that the cause can be anything from bereavement to stress, I clocked in at one hundred over eighty. I was predisposed to depression, that much was likely true, but my symptoms were dull and textbook, easily managed through sixty milligrams of Cymbalta daily. I have weaned myself off the drug once before, when the second book in my fiction series sold one million copies and the show was in its newlywed phase with fans, long enough to remember that oh, I do like sex as enthusiastically as I appear to in my books.

  The noise does not repeat itself, and I remind myself of what my doctor told me, that success is a stressor too. Although it’s a stressor I might enjoy, it’s a spotlight nonetheless, shining on things I thought I’d jettisoned on the therapist’s couch when—surprise!—all I did was stuff them into a coat closet before the company arrives. The reassurance fails to soothe, and I turn over in bed and locate my phone, charging on the nightstand. It’s 4:40 A.M., and Gwen has responded to my email. I read the exchange in its entirety, twice.

  Me: Gwen! I think you meant to send this to your assistant, Steph! Not me, Steph. But why do you need my AQ? All okay?

  Gwen: So sorry, honey! Yes, meant to send this to Stephanie my assistant. How is wherever you are?

  I compose a response.

  Phoenix, but Los Angeles in a few hours!! For the Female Director dinner. Will let you know how it goes. Then I go from there to JFK to Heathrow to Marrakesh for the trip. Crazy few days! It’s so confusing that I have the same name as your assistant! Just curious, though, why do you need my author questionnaire for the memoir? You know me—I worry! Everything okay?

  I hit send and swallow, dislodging the sweet film of that bad wine. I hear the noise again and I realize it is not the maid, emptying the trash in the hallway, and that it is not in my head, a result of going cold turkey on my medication somewhere over the Rocky Mountains five months ago.

  “What time is it?” the bartender groans, kicking off more of the covers. His rough skin scraping the cheap sateen sheets—that was what woke me up.

  “Almost five.”

  “Jesus. Go back to bed.” The bartender raises his forearm and shields his eyes against nothing. The room is practically invisible, though my eyes have adjusted enough that I can make out his empty wrist. Last night, after he read the note I left him on my check (Room 19. Only here tonight.), he had shown up and removed his nice watch, leaving it on the nightstand before we got into bed, something Vince used to do when we used to have sex.

  Boston, 2014, was the first time, though I thought about how easy I could get away with it at a hotel bar in Atlanta, considered it with a yoga instructor in L.A., and nearly called the number my black car driver slipped me after he picked me up from the airport in Tulsa. Looking back, I realize that after traveling all over the country for the second book tour, Boston felt familiar, and therefore like the last in my series of attempts to prove that I was too good to fit in anyway. I finally felt prepared for this particular challenge: The blooms hadn’t fallen off the show yet and the book was selling so well I had just gone on an antique Persian rug spending spree with money to spare for an Alhambra earring and necklace set from Van Cleef. I was thirty but I looked twenty-six. I was on TV. If I failed, there were plenty of affirmatives to cushion the blow to my self-esteem.

  The men in Boston did not feel like the hipster men of New York—rather, they felt like the WASPy guys who told me I was hot in high school and college but were too afraid to actually sleep with me. What were they afraid of? That they might like it? That they might like me? That they might have to take me home and explain me to their mothers? I could relate to that, at least—not knowing how to explain a black partner to a white mother. I dated a few black guys in college, and while I met some of their families, I never introduced them to mine. I had grown up reassuring my adoptive mother that although I was one of a handful of black members of our community, I didn’t feel like an outlier. I dressed like the popular girls and I played the sports the popular girls played and I spoke like the popular girls and I ultimately became a popular girl to prove to her that I felt welcomed and included, to soothe her lingering concerns over my adoption. People warned her that despite the privilege she could afford me, she could inadvertently make my life worse by raising me in a place where I would always feel out of place. On some level, I worried that if I brought home a black guy, she would interpret this to mean that she had failed at creating a home where I felt like I belonged. Like what she had to offer me in terms of connection and love and empathy had never been enough. Like I might have been better off without her—always her greatest fear.

  I knew Boston guys, the ones whose families had summer places on the Cape and degrees from small liberal arts colleges. But I had only ever known them through the lens of wingwoman or platonic friend. When I was younger, I had been quick to take my sexuality off the table before they could d
o it for me. It’s true that I didn’t neuter myself for Vince, but Vince had no pedigree. He may have been better-looking than the guys who rejected me growing up but as a struggling actor from a second-generation Italian family on Long Island, he was always a cut below. His degree didn’t say Colgate or Hamilton, and he didn’t have a long line of blond ex-girlfriends with pearls the size of jawbreakers in their ears. Who was I beating, really? Gia from Holbrook, studying for her nursing degree? It’s not an accomplishment to take men from the Gias, it’s an accomplishment to take them from the Lauren Bunns of the world, who would have slept with a guy like Vince, but married him? Not even blacked out in Vegas, something she did once, with a guy she met at the craps table.

  Jamie was the name of the first. Sort of fat. Really tall. He was funny, bearded, and jobless, drinking a Bud Light at the bar at Mistral. Vince hadn’t had sex with me in two months. That is a different thing than saying Vince and I hadn’t had sex in two months. Do you understand that? My husband couldn’t get hard for me but he could for everyone else, and I was still so young. Thirty. A baby. This couldn’t be it for me. Yes, both Vince and I have had sex with other people in our marriage, but I am not a cheater. I am an outsourcer.

  Jamie and I ended up back in my hotel because I was staying at the Taj and I wanted him to understand that he knew me too. A guy who occasionally serves Bloody Marys at his parents’ country club probably thinks he doesn’t have much in common with a woman who looks like the sassy sidekick to the hot girl on his favorite TV show, but money catches that trust fall. The sex was sloppy, neither of us finished, and when I woke up in the morning all that was left of Jamie was a few congealed specks of his urine on the toilet seat. But I had succeeded—or so I thought at the time. Because looking back, I’m now able to ask—but at what? Fucking an unambitious slob with decent breeding? He was my prize, and one I only felt worthy of collecting once I had amassed the advantages of fame? What happens when that goes away? And it would go away. That, or turn on me and last forever. I knew this from the start, but only in the most abstract of terms. The way anti-tobacco campaigns that attempt to deter kids from smoking with lung cancer horror stories don’t really work. It’s too far in the future to worry about having to talk through a hole in your neck now. That’s what I thought when I signed on to The Show. Yes, this will end, and maybe even badly, but not for many, many years. I always thought I had more time before someone punched a hole in my neck.