Actually I want you 5 page

“Da,” he said, rather coolly. His expression had sharpened; it was twitchier than the person who had greeted me, or the person who had invited me into the shower, or the person who had been kissing me. He listened for a moment. “Right. E-mail it to me, then. Oh, this is my excited voice. You have no idea.”

I started to pick up the things that had scattered across the shower. I turned the stool upside down and piled the bowls and eggshells in the cavity inside.

Then I stepped out and leaned against the sink as he stood in the middle of the bathroom, thumbing through his phone. My heart was still thudding. He leaned beside me, his shoulder against mine, still looking at the phone.

My thoughts were a movie screen with nothing projected on it.

After a moment, he tipped his phone to me so that I could see the e-mail on it. From: Baby North. Subject line: AUDITIONS.

T tells me you’re doing auditions on the beach. I’ve touched base with people to make sure the world knew to come. When you’re done with that, I’ve jotted some other ideas in the notebook. Let me know.

Cole pulled a small notebook from his back pocket. It looked brand-new, but when he flipped it open, the first page had slanted, excited handwriting:

Reveal your identity to fans in the music aisle of Target.

Run a block party.

Crash a wedding.

Steal a car.

You know. Be yourself.

“I thought this was a show about you recording an album?” I asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

“Who would watch that?” he replied. He frowned at the list, but not like he was upset with it. More like it was a slightly perplexing shopping list, and he was contemplating the mechanics of fulfilling it.

“Are you really going to do all of those things?”

“Maybe,” Cole said. “I can think of better ones.”

“She wants you to be a disaster.”

He tapped the notebook against his mouth. “She wants me to look like a disaster.”

“Those are the same thing.”

He was very disinterested in this line of questioning. “This is just performing. I know what they want.”

“Who is ‘they’? How did we get plural all of a sudden?”

“The masses. The people. Don’t you watch TV?”

I did watch TV. I watched Baby’s shows. I thought of those knee-high cameras. Perfect angle for catching a shot of someone on his way down.

I wanted to tell him to quit the show and stay here for me.

But that was the opposite of not getting in too deep.

Things were starting to get projected on the movie screen of my mind, and they were all things that might make me cry if they happened.

I pushed off the sink. “I have to go to work.”

“Work,” echoed Cole, as if he had not heard the word before. “How can you work and help me destroy the hopes of a dozen hopeful bass players at the same time?”

“I can’t. And I’m not going to be on your — your thing. I’m not part of the Cole St. Clair show.”

“How boring that is.” Cole’s face was carefully expressionless, though, so I knew he meant frustrating or upsetting instead of boring.

“Well, that’s how things run in the Isabel show. Call me next time you’re off camera.” For some reason, I was irritable now. It was as if every time my feelings were prodded into action, the first thing was always pins and needles.

I opened the bathroom door.

“Wow. Just like that?” Cole asked.

“Just like that,” I replied. “Frosty.”

I stepped back into the view of all the cameras. Cole, still out of their reach in the bathroom, held a pretend phone to his ear. He mouthed _____ me, only I didn’t think the verb was call.

A smile flashed across my face despite myself. His own smirk bloomed so quickly in response to it that I knew he’d been waiting for me to do something forgivable.

Really, that made two of us.

After Isabel had gone, I felt charged and ready to be Cole St. Clair. I was so high that it made me think about how I used to replicate this feeling with drugs. Thinking about that feeling made me imagine how once upon a time, I would have gone looking for some now: not for right away, but for later, as a reward for good behavior. A private high in a harmless environment. Even through my thoughts of Isabel, I felt a surge of nerves and anticipation, some part of me already planning for the treasure hunt through L.A.

I shut it down, feeling dirty for even remembering it.

Thinking it is not doing it.

I thought of how I’d been a wolf just a few hours before. Last time for even that, for a while, I told myself. It wasn’t a crime, but I didn’t need it.

Then I got to work. I called Jeremy on my way to the beach, even though I knew what he’d say, because he’d been a part of NARKOTIKA, which meant he’d been a part of me.

He picked up on the fourth ring.

I peered at my reflection in shop windows as I walked down the sidewalk. “No chance you want to play bass for me again, right?”

“Hey, man,” Jeremy replied, in his slow, easy way. He had the most glorious Southern accent you’ve ever heard on a guy from upstate New York. I’d known him long enough to remember him before he’d cultivated it. If he was shocked to hear from me after a year of silence, he didn’t show it. “I thought you were underground.”

It was at once comforting and suffocating to hear his voice. He was all tied up with my memories of NARKOTIKA, and they were all tied up with my memories of everything before becoming a wolf. It was all awful nostalgia.

“I have emerged like a wondrous butterfly,” I told him. “And now I am going to be on the TV.”

“Yup.”

“I need a bassist. I —”

“Shhh,” Jeremy said, soft as a feather. “I’m Googling you.”

I waited. There was no point hurrying Jeremy. It was like punching fog. I walked half a block in the brilliant sun while he researched my recent life.

“The only problem with you on a reality show,” Jeremy said finally, “is that reality’s never been your strong point.”

I paused to look at a window full of sunglasses. A tiny, tinted version of me appeared in each lens. “They hired me the absolute worst bass player.”

“Cole, I doubt that,” he replied mildly. “They seem like smart people. They used integers to represent the letters in their website name.”

“There was nothing about the guy that was right. And she got me a guitarist, but that’s another story.”

“Guitars are the ones with six strings, right? Have I seen one before?”

I looked in another store window. This shop only sold belts in the color blue. It seemed unnecessarily specialized. “I told her no guitarist.”

“I assume he’s already gone.”

“Oh, yeah, of course. So now I’m going to audition people on the beach, and the best thing would be for you to show up and be the best.”

Jeremy said, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m the best.”

He would not brag, even in jest. This was the Buddhist in him or something. He’d become Buddhist around the same time he’d become Southern.

“You know what I mean. I’m auditioning for a Jeremy, and you’d be a Jeremy.” I paused at another store window. It was impossible to tell what some of these shops sold.

“You know I’m playing with another band, right?” he asked.

I knew. He wasn’t the only one with access to a search engine. I wasn’t offended. I’d been theoretically missing for more than a year and then theoretically out of the music business for several more months than that. I’d have found another band, too. “They are not as cool as me.”

Jeremy thought about this. “No. They aren’t. But I like them, and I don’t want to leave them in a tight spot.”

“It’s only six weeks. Then they can have you back. Undamaged. Entire. The only thing different about you will be that your mind will be blown by the time spent with me.”

“I have no doubt of that. It wouldn’t just be six weeks, though. You’re touring for the album, right?”

I assumed so. That was what you did — make an album, play some shows, sell some records. There was a thrill to it, when it was going well. I was good at it, when it was going well.

It was just when things weren’t going well that it got dangerous. Mostly to me, though. Not often to bystanders.

“So?”

He paused as if he were thinking about it. But like I said, I knew Jeremy. Back when we were in the band, we all knew one another better than we knew ourselves. That was the reason why we were the band. So I already knew what he was going to say. I just didn’t know quite how he was going to say it.

“I don’t think you and touring is a good idea,” he said. “It’s going backward.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I said, “Sideways. Backward is unnecessarily negative.”

“Look, Cole, I’m really glad you’re …”

He didn’t finish the sentence, leaving it wide open for me to imagine what he was going to say. In Los Angeles. Making music again. Still alive.

What it came down to was that he didn’t trust me.

His doubt left a bigger dent in my Teflon heart than I would have expected.

Eventually, Jeremy merely asked, “Can I come to the auditions anyway? To watch?”

“Only if you help me choose your successor.”

“I’d like that.”

Neither of us said anything about Victor. Maybe I was the only one thinking about how we weren’t talking about him. Maybe it was easier when you hadn’t been the one digging his grave. When you hadn’t been the one to put him there.

— What about Victor, Cole?

Remember how we did everything together? I convinced him to become a werewolf with me. Now I’m in a loft in California and he’s in an unmarked hole in Minnesota.

— He chose it, too. It wasn’t all you.

Sometimes I pretend that’s true.

“Cole, you still there?”

“I’m always here,” I replied, though I hadn’t been, really, for a moment. “Watching you sleep.”

“I know you are. I feel it. What’s the way? Today? What’s your way?”

My reflection in the store window finally smiled. The way. The way. When we were on the road before, back before everything went to shit, every show was different. It wasn’t just that we’d play a different set. It was that we’d come dressed as zombies, or we’d play a song backward, or we’d soak a pumpkin in gasoline and set it on fire. It was about the music, sure — that was always the most important thing — but it was about the game, too. The hook. Somewhere in there, we’d started calling it the “way.” What’s the way, Jeremy? What’s the way, Victor?

Actually, it was always this:

What’s the way, Cole?

“I was looking for props here, but it’s useless,” I said.

“Anything I can do?”

I was about to tell him no, I had to think more, but then, all of a sudden, my brain turned over and something caught.

I narrowed my eyes. “How are the speakers on your sound system?”

Sometimes I took online quizzes to find out if I was a sociopath. Society thinks there are more male sociopaths than female, but that is a dirty, dirty lie perpetuated by the media. There are more unfeeling girls out there than they would like to admit.

Maybe I wasn’t crazy. But if I wasn’t, then everyone else was.

I didn’t know why I kept being shitty to Cole. And by Cole, I really meant everyone else in the world.

He was only a few miles away from me. In California. In L.A.

At work, the minutes seemed fuzzy and timeless. I redesigned a sparse pile of mauve boat necks, and then I dusted the plants, and then I went into the back room. Sierra was not in, but she’d left evidence of herself in a pile of fabric scraps and “inspirations,” which was what she called the weird things she collected to influence her clothing. Since I’d been in the store last, she’d added a glass milk bottle, a freeze-dried leaf of some kind, and, grotesquely, a seagull’s foot.

I couldn’t wait to hang up whatever bit of fashion was inspired by a dismembered gull part.

Pushing Sierra’s stuff out of the way, I sat on the counter and pulled out my notes for my CNA class. The hardest part about the class, in my opinion, was trying to remember what CNA stood for. Certified. Nursing. Assistant. I’d been told that it was a good thing to have if you were trying to get into premed, but it was hard to imagine why. One of the browser windows on my phone was still open to a practice test question. It was this:

If you walk into a client’s room and he is masturbating, what do you do?

a) laugh and close the door

b) ask him gently to stop

c) close the door and give him some privacy

d) explain the dangers of masturbation

e) report him to the head nurse

I was taking a class in this. I was taking a class in this.

I was going to college. I was going to college.

I was going to be a doctor. I was going to be a doctor.

If I repeated all of these things like a mantra, they would not only be true, they would start to make sense, or at least feel true, or feel like they made sense.

Hours thinned to minutes. The morning with Cole had been in color, and everything else was in black and white.

I sold a tank top.

My mother called. “Isabel? Are you wearing the white pants?”

The other day, someone had showed me a collection of portraits done by a photographer interested in familial similarities. Each face was actually two stitched together: a father on one side, for instance, a son on the other. If one had been done of me and my mother, nothing about the altered photograph would have struck viewers as unusual. We were the same height and weight, and we both had blond hair and blue eyes and one eyebrow that hated you. It was quite possible for us to share each other’s clothing, size wise, although it rarely happened. I wasn’t interested in smart skirts, and my mother wasn’t interested in a bare midriff.

But the white pants we shared. They were high-waisted, pencil-legged, Hollywood-chic perfection. I wore them with cropped leopard-print tops that showed a tantalizing half-inch of skin. My mother wore them with a slinky black blouse that was, in my opinion, more suggestive than my version.

“Who are you trying to impress?” I asked.

“Don’t be rude,” my mother replied. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“I took them to the cleaners. There was something on them. It was disgusting. I don’t want to think about it.”

My mother clucked. “It was coffee. I’m going to the cleaners now. I was going to take them. When are you home tonight?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic. But I’m going right back out again with Sofia. When do you go to work?”

“Eight, if there’s no traffic.” My mother was on a series of night shifts at the moment. Part of it was because she was the new doctor in an old hospital and the night shift was given to the grunts, but part of it was because working the night shift meant she could sleep through the real world the next day. It saved on wine costs.

“Oh, well, see you tomorrow.” I wasn’t particularly crushed by this, nor was my mother. My graduation and initiation into the age of majority merely granted societal approval to our relationship. It wasn’t that my mother was a hands-off parent. It was that she’d been so hands-on for so long that my psyche maintained the imprint of her palm even when she removed her hand from me.

The day dragged. Cole didn’t call. I didn’t call him. What did I want? I didn’t know.

If you are considering getting serious with a rock star but he is filming a reality show that will probably result in death or hospitalization for one or both of you, what do you do?

a) laugh and close the door

b) ask him gently to stop

c) close the door and give him some privacy

d) explain the dangers of masturbation

e) report him to the head nurse

At the end of the day, Sierra’s husband, Mark, came in. He didn’t really serve a purpose, but he liked to come in and mess over the receipts like it was something. I wasn’t exactly sure what he actually did for a living. Something male-modelish. He had the sort of face that sold sunglasses.

“Hey, gorgeous,” he greeted me. It sounded funnier when he said gorgeous than when Sierra said it. Sierra used lush and beautiful and dreamy and lovely like other people used indefinite articles. I suspected Mark really did mean I was gorgeous, and I suspected he found all of Sierra’s monsters gorgeous. But why shouldn’t he? We were all hired to look a certain way, which was to say, we were all hired to look like Sierra, and he obviously found her attractive.

I didn’t reply, but I raised an eyebrow, which was the same thing, for me.

“What are you doing?”

“Studying.”

“What?”

I almost said masturbation, because it would be funny, but after Mark had just said gorgeous, it seemed like that would be flirting.

“How to save people from themselves.”

Mark moved some papers around. He was doing absolutely nothing except messing up a system one of the monsters had devised. “They tell you about that on the Internet?”

Everyone in the world knew that everything in the world was on the Internet. I scraped listlessly at the bottom of my consciousness for any part of me that might care enough to think of an entertaining way to report this to Mark. I found nothing.

My phone buzzed. It was Sofia.

“Sofia, what?” I kept meaning to start answering the phone with Culpeper, because I liked the masculine idea of stripping my first name. And because it sounded less mean than What?

Sofia sounded abashed. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just —”

Her apologizing for something that was clearly not even her fault irritated me even more. “Oh, God, Sofia. It’s fine. I was just being a bitch. What?”

“I was just calling because I wanted to tell you that it’s up. The first episode, I mean, of Cole’s show.”

Already?

“You probably already know. I’m sorry. I —”

“Sofia. Stop saying sorry. What’s the URL? Oh, right. With threes instead of es. Don’t forget about tonight. Wear something red.”

After I hung up, I navigated to the website on my phone. The screen was tiny and the speaker shitty, but it would have to do. My stomach panged with a little nervous, wretched twist. Those crafty damns found ways to give themselves when I was least expecting them.

The episode had already begun; Cole was auditioning bass players on the beach. He had surrounded himself with dozens of speakers of all sizes. Every time a would-be player approached, Cole produced a communal bass guitar, shouted an announcement to the onlookers, and then made a little ta-da hand gesture. The gesture must’ve been some holdover from NARKOTIKA, because every time he did it, the gathered idiot fangirls made supersonic noises.

This annoyed me. It was like they had some intimate knowledge of him that I didn’t. Didn’t they know that had nothing to do with who he really was? They thought they knew him. Nobody knew him.

The sound of each audition spiraled out over the beach from the barracks of speakers. Leaning on the ancient, wood-sided speakers closest to Cole was a thin, rangy guy with shoulder-length blond hair and aviator sunglasses. He was so incredibly scruffy that he had to be either a hippie or famous.

Text appeared on the screen beneath his face: Jeremy Shutt, former NARKOTIKA bassist.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this bit of Cole’s past appearing in his present. It felt like one step closer to that ragged rock star who’d collapsed onstage.

Mark pushed himself on the counter beside me to watch; I tilted my phone so he could see better.

A crowd had gathered around Cole. He was so electric, his body language so magnetic, that even on this tiny screen I could feel the tug of his spell. I envied the ease of it until I remembered that he’d had a lot of practice — he was meant to be exciting to watch from even the cheap seats in an auditorium.

Cords snaked like vines across the sand; Cole was encouraging people to plug in their own speakers. A variety of tiny iPod speakers studded the ground, as well as bigger, fancier speakers some people must have brought. It looked like an electric tree studded with weird fruit.

And the bass players kept coming.

I didn’t know how they all knew to show up. Maybe Baby had used her contacts. Maybe Cole had. Maybe there was a core group of NARKOTIKA fans blogging his every move. Or maybe it was just because he had such a huge crowd and so many speakers and had somehow turned Venice Beach into his playground.

Onscreen, a little girl plugged in a small orange speaker and clapped delightedly. Cole St. Clair became just that little bit louder.

“I heard that while I was driving in,” Mark said. “I wondered what it was. That’s got to be so loud. That’s got to be illegal.”

None of the players satisfied Cole, though Jeremy shrugged approvingly at some. There was one guy, a crowd favorite, who kept playing and playing and playing. A winner?

But then Cole switched off the amp. He shook his head.

The crowd groaned, but Cole just twirled his hand. He turned away, and the guy didn’t exist for him anymore. I’d always wondered how Cole got anything practical done, how he’d come so far, and now I saw. People were no longer people, they were just parts of the plan, in the goal. And parts could get moved around without thought or emotion.

It made me think about all the girls Cole said he’d slept with on tour. That had seemed like such an impossible feat to me, not because I disbelieved him, but because I couldn’t imagine letting that many people have access to me. It sounded exhausting, frantic. Now I suddenly saw it, though. How he turned people into objects, and how easily he could be done with them.

Inside my heart was cool and dark.

“This guy is unbelievable,” Mark said, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking about Cole or the next player. A few dozen more speakers had been plugged in since the last time the cameras had focused on them. It was hard to tell where they were all getting their power from. Jeremy had to keep going away to tinker with something.

“I guess I remember some of their stuff. Are you a NARKOTIKA fan?” Mark asked.

“I know him. Cole, I mean.”

“Is he really like that?”

Cole was like that. He was also not like that. It just depended on when you saw him. Wasn’t that everybody, though? “Sure.”

“Next Saturday, we’re having a thing at the house,” he said. “The others are coming. Are you?”

“Others?”

As Cole dismissed yet another bassist on the screen, Mark waved a hand around the shop. Oh. The other monsters.

“What sort of thing?”

Mark picked up the seagull foot. “Just a thing. No pressure. Think about it. Yeah?”

I kept all expression from my face, but inside I was a little flattered. I said, “I’ll think about it.” I tried to imagine going to a thing with Cole.

On the show, Cole turned away all comers as yet more speakers got plugged in. The cameraman walked along a string of speakers that trailed out for yards and yards: big black rectangles and palm-sized red ones and square gray ones.

The cops came, of course. They looked as if they expected trouble, but this Cole was not trouble.

“We’re not hurting anyone,” he said, gesturing broadly. “Look at all these happy faces.”

The cameras swung over the crowd, who obligingly chirruped and cheered and leaped for attention. Cole was right: Most of them were happy. How easily he had surfed their individual thoughts and moods and replaced all of that with his noisy joy.

The cops informed Cole that he was violating noise code.

“I am glad to hear it,” Cole replied, and he really did sound glad. “Do either of you play the bass?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I need a bass player.”

A cop laughed.

So did Cole. Then he stopped. “No, seriously. Give us a whirl and we’ll shut this thing down.”

The cops, captains of reason, eyed the cameras, the crowd, and each other. Cole smiled beatifically at them.

Reason died.

Of course the cops played. Did they have a choice?

One officer played. The other danced. The crowd was apoplectic. Officer Bass wasn’t the greatest player, but it didn’t matter. It was a cop playing a bass amplified by three hundred speakers and Cole St. Clair’s smile.

The world belonged to Cole.

“Now you stop?” the cop asked. “That was the deal.”

Cole said, “I still don’t have a bassist.”

Surely this wasn’t how it ended. Not all of this fuss for nothing. The crowd was hushed.

In the quiet, Jeremy stepped forward. He shook his head, as if in disbelief. Tucked a bit of his blond hair behind his ear. “Fine, Cole. Fine. I’ll do it.”

For a second, a bare, bare second, I saw Cole’s real smile, and then it dissolved into his show smile. He did a complicated man shake with Jeremy, and then grabbed his hand and held it over his.

“We have a winner!” he shouted.

He leaned close to Jeremy then, speaking quietly, as if it was just between them. But I knew Cole, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten the cameras.

This was what he told us all: “Welcome back, man.”

Credits rolled.

It was a brilliant little piece of TV.

I felt unexpectedly proud of Cole. He had been right, earlier, at least about one thing: He knew what people wanted. It didn’t mean he was going to stay out of trouble, but he was very good at what he did. For one brief, crystal moment, I wished he was here, because in this moment, I could have told him that without any of my usual brittleness.

But he wasn’t. So all I could think was: Isabel, don’t fall in love with him again.

“Dinner,” I told the phone as I walked back to the apartment. I was holding a nine-dollar orange juice that Baby’s budget had paid for. The sign outside the juice store had said CHANGE YOUR FUTURE WITH SUNSHINE IN A GLASS. My future was looking pretty great already, and I couldn’t wait to see what would happen if I added orange juice to it. “That’s the next meal.”

“What?” said Isabel. There was something satisfying, really, about just calling her number and having her pick up.

“Dinner. Next meal. You. Me. What a delicious plan we have.”

“I can’t,” Isabel replied. “I promised my cousin Sofia that I’d go out with her. She’ll become a creepy old lady if I don’t take her out.”

“I like it when you’re noble. You could come to my place,” I said. It was hard to tell if the orange juice was changing my future, because I hadn’t known where I was heading before I started drinking it. “There is room in the shower for three.”

“I am not taking my cousin to your shower for a good time. What sort of lesson does that teach her? You could come out with us.”

I didn’t know what kind of a person this Sofia was, but I didn’t feel up to small talk. Right now I was basking in the contentment of having done a job well and having earned a damn orange juice. “What sort of music is playing tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“You live in L.A. and you don’t know?” I actually didn’t know who was playing, either, but it felt like something that I would know if I actually lived here.

“I don’t like concerts. People jump around and smell, and the music sounds like crap.”

“I don’t know if I can talk to you if you’re going to be spewing this blasphemy all the time.” I paused to look at a sign that advertised a professional phrenologist. The sign also featured a line drawing of a bald man in profile with stars around his head. It was hard to understand what the product on offer was. “Have you never been to a concert that you liked?”

“Let me think about it; no, no, I haven’t. Have you ever been to one you actually like? Or do you just think you ought to like them?”

“That’s a ridiculous question,” I replied, although possibly it wasn’t. I hadn’t been to a lot of shows until I was the show, and it turned out that the music industry disapproved of you missing your own concerts, even if you didn’t think they were a good time. “Is Sofia real?”

“What? I don’t even know why she is the way she is. Nothing in her childhood seems to support her level of neuroticism. Wait. You mean is she a real person? I didn’t invent a cousin to get out of dinner, Cole. I’d just tell you.”

I asked, “Are you going to pick up next time I call you?”

“I did this time, didn’t I?”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 541