Actually I want you 10 page

I didn’t like to think about Cole coming here to score while on tour, so I didn’t say anything else. We rode up the escalator in silence, then took two steps to the next escalator, and rode that one up in silence. I walked him to the front of Yuzu. Cole pointed to the sign out front, which read: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE OR ADMITTANCE TO ANYONE.

Inside, we were led past a translucent screen into a surprisingly intimate seating area. We were early, because I was always punctual or better. Baby wasn’t there yet. I slid into one side of a dim booth, and Cole threw himself into the other. He leaned across the table on his elbows, invading my personal space, knocking the paper lantern askew and sending the menus sprawling.

“Just say it,” he said. I lifted my hand. Say what?

At the head of the table, the host cleared his throat. He looked very unamused by Cole. “Something to drink?”

“Water,” Cole said. “And Coke. And more water.”

I cut my eyes to the host’s. “Water for me, please. Don’t bring him a Coke.”

Cole protested, “Hey,” but the host seemed to agree with me that Cole didn’t need any more sugar or caffeine in him, because he nodded at me curtly and swept away.

“Oh, hey,” Cole hissed to me, leaning forward, hitting his head on the light. “Go time. Is that a phrase still? Because it is. Go. Time.”

“Hi, kids,” Baby said. She had manifested at the head of our table, her smile wide and dimpled as always. I kept imagining that she should loom and look like an evil genius, and she kept … not. “Where do you want me?”

Cole leaped up and slid into the booth beside me, crashing our shoulders together. He gestured to where he had just been. “There. Take everything that was mine.”

She sat down. She still wore the private, amused smile, like life entertained her. “I haven’t been here before.”

“We’ll get you a menu. A guide to the food in this place. A description of all the …” Cole lost interest in his own sentence. He drummed his fingers across the table; I put my hand over his hand, pressing it still.

Baby didn’t have Cole’s manic energy, but somehow her gaze kept subtly shifting so that I got the idea that she was taking in the entire restaurant. Mostly the people. Her eyes stuck on little interactions: one of the sushi chefs lifting his hand to gesture at another chef. The delivery boy at the door raising his eyebrows at the hostess. My hand on Cole’s hand.

I wondered if she saw us all as players.

Cole’s leg was jiggling beneath the table. I pressed my thigh up against his and it stilled.

A neatly dressed young woman with a red streak dyed in the front of her black hair came to the end of our table. She peered closely at us.

“Oh, we’re not ready,” I told her.

Her nostrils flared. “I am not coming for order. Masaki asked me to check on you.”

Something about her tone was enough that if it had not been my favorite sushi restaurant and if I had not been in front of Baby, I would have offered to give her something better to check on. But instead, I just said, “We’re okay. Thanks.” I couldn’t keep all of the chill out of the thanks, but I defrosted most of it.

The girl’s lips tightened, and then she left us alone.

“Weird,” Cole said.

“Interesting,” clarified Baby. “What’s good here?”

I flipped over the menu. There was an unsaturated and unappealing-looking photo of a California roll on the front. “All of the sashimi,” I said.

Cole ran a finger down the menu like a kid learning how to read.

“Have you ever had sushi before?” Baby asked him.

He shook his head. To me, he said, “You’ll have to show me how to use these. The pencils.” He’d removed the chopsticks from the paper sleeve and now he walked them toward me. I resisted the temptation to snatch them from him.

“Nice job on the filming today,” Baby said. “Mostly.”

Cole’s fingers stilled completely. “The Saturn ran out of gas on the way to the gig.”

“How inconvenient,” Baby said.

“I know it had three-quarters of a tank,” Cole said. It was strange to see him when he stripped away the performer and the humor.

Baby didn’t look sorry, though. She tapped a line on the menu and then she said, “It made excellent TV.”

“So did our wedding gig,” Cole said.

“No,” Baby replied. “That made fine TV. Everything has to be turned up really loud to make good TV.”

Icily, I said, “Like hiring some topless girls to bust into his apartment?”

Baby looked genuinely shocked. “I didn’t hire them!”

“Oh, come on,” Cole said. “Enough with the playing pretend.”

“Why do you think I wanted you, Cole?” Baby asked.

He regarded her, chin tilted arrogantly. I felt his leg still quivering beside mine, a bare fraction of the jiggling he wanted to do with it.

I answered for him, “Because you think you can destroy him on TV. For good TV.”

Her eyes widened. “You don’t believe that, do you, Cole?”

He just kept looking at her.

“You ruined the rest of them,” I said. I knew it would hurt Cole’s feelings, but I went on, “You want Cole because you think he’s an easy mark.”

Baby’s expression never stopped being shocked. “I wanted Cole because he was a performer. Because he knows how to work a crowd. Look, do you get it? He was a mess. But look at him now. He’s pretty again. Pretty makes good TV.”

I remembered what Cole had said when I’d first seen the list that Baby had made for him. She wants me to look like a disaster.

“Did you really think all those people on my shows collapsed and went crazy?” Baby asked. “That I did that? Nobody’s that good. No, they all knew what the world wanted.”

“They were fake?” I said, and hated the look Baby gave me, like she couldn’t believe how innocent I was. Of course I knew that reality television wasn’t real.

“They were curated,” corrected Baby. “They gave the viewers what the viewers wanted.”

Cole said, voice empty, “And the world likes us better falling down.”

Baby shrugged one shoulder as if this were an unchangeable fact. “Not real destruction, though. Do you know what’s bad TV? Someone passed out on a floor, drooling. Rock stars vomiting. Being too drunk to go to the studio. If I got a real disaster, I’d have no show. You ever seen an addict? Shitty work ethic.”

It was so the opposite of how I’d expected this dinner to go that I couldn’t quite comprehend it. On the one hand, what she said made complete sense. But on the other hand, I’d seen three topless girls in Cole’s apartment the night before.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Then why the half-naked girls, if not to tempt him?”

Baby said, “Tempt? Look at this —” She pointed to the two of us. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to indicate. Proximity, maybe. “Tempt? I saw those fangirls wandering around and simply pointed them in the right direction. I figured Cole had enough of a brain on him to make it into a good scene. I don’t cut and paste my shows to make drama. I just … line up the edges. Put people in situations and film what happens.”

Cole said, “But I’ve been making situations.”

“Not big enough,” Baby countered. “So I just throw in some variables when it occurs to me. Have I tried to trick you? Did you find drugs in the bathroom to tempt you? Beers in the fridge? Have I done anything to pull you off the wagon?”

Cole frowned. “The musicians. The ones I fired. That one is dead. Chuck.”

A ghost of something fluttered over Baby’s face. “Chip.”

“Yeah, well, Jeremy told me he was dead. And the other kid was into shit. That seems pretty — engineered.”

He hadn’t told me this. I wondered if that was because he hadn’t known what to do with the information yet or if it was because he hadn’t wanted me to know.

“They were disasters,” Baby admitted. “You can’t really predict someone’s crisis point, but you can guess. I figured Chip would work his way into the hospital during some gig. And that you’d have a giant shouting match with Dennis over you being clean now, and maybe someone would get hit. I don’t mind hiring real disasters for scenery pieces.”

“Does that mean Leyla has skeletons?” Cole demanded.

Baby laughed. “No. You’re just supposed to hate her.”

“Well done.”

“I did my research. Isabel, you’re still looking unhappy.”

I wasn’t unhappy, but I was suspicious. The other meltdowns had been so complete. So convincing. Was it just because I was like the rest of the American public, so ready to believe that a disaster was never truly cured? Or was it because I was just so ready to believe that Cole in particular wasn’t cured? “So, you’re not the enemy.”

“Isabel,” Baby said, “I’m not in this to get sued. If there’s something that ruins my heroes, it’s something they’ve done to themselves. I told you. I just put my people in situations. What they do with that situation is up to them. If there’s an enemy, it’s inside them.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything about Los Angeles was a cover for something else. The ugly masqueraded as pretty, and it turned out that now the pretty pretended to be ugly. I wondered if there was anything in this entire world that was real.

“So, you want me to try harder,” Cole said finally. “You want the show. The Cole St. Clair show.”

“I know you know how to do it,” Baby said. “I did my research, like I said.”

“Does it have to be down?” he asked. A little wistfully, if you knew him.

“Make it good. That’s all I care about. Ah —”

A different young woman stood at the table. She looked, if possible, slightly less welcoming than the last girl. She demanded, in a very unwaitress-y way, “What do you want?”

I dragged the menu toward me. “I —”

She shook her head. She was looking at Cole. “What do you want here?”

His expression was still puzzled. “She can order for me.”

Her gaze shot to me. Then back to him. “You’re here for food?”

Now his face cleared. “Oh. Oh, now I see. Yes. Food. This is her favorite restaurant. I like the look of those round ones in the photo.” With his index finger, he made little circles around the bloodless photo of the California roll on the front. Baby watched everything attentively.

The girl looked eight degrees more unfriendly, and then she vanished.

I turned to Cole. “You’ve been here before?”

Cole sounded a little bewildered. “When I said I thought I’d been here before, I didn’t mean here. Like, this place. I guess it could have been. They must have recognized me. Maybe they think it was … like before.”

Like before. Meaning that before, he would walk into a place and they would remember that he was a guy who wanted some cocaine with his entrée? I felt sick. I couldn’t even blame anyone but myself. I knew exactly who Cole had been before I met him.

Baby, however, just kept wearing that same private smile. And why shouldn’t she — Cole was only demonstrating his pedigree.

The host was back. Hovering behind him was the girl with the dyed hair.

“You are Cole St. Clair?” asked the host.

Cole nodded his head. Just one little jerk. He was all certainty and arrogance now, completely back in his public persona. He had become too large for his side of the booth; he’d turned this restaurant into a backdrop for his personality. This was what the rest of the world got from him.

“We told you before to never come back.”

Cole cocked his head. “Back?”

“We tell you that you were not welcome here anymore. Not you or your other friend, either. You ruined everything. I don’t forget your face after that.”

Sudden recognition, and something more pained and empty, flickered across Cole’s face. The latter so fast that only I saw it. “Oh. That. Look, that was a time long time ago. That’s not going to happen this time. I’m clean. I just want to have a nice dinner here with my girlfriend.”

I could have killed him for the casual way he threw the word out there, in the middle of all of this. Girlfriend.

The host was unsmiling. “Clean is not rumor.”

Now Cole was losing his good humor. “And what is the rumor, my friend?”

The girl with the dyed hair said, “You have moved on from China White to something better.”

Baby kept smiling. The world loved a loser.

“I am here,” Cole said levelly, “for some goddamn sushi.”

“Get out,” the host replied. He stepped back to allow us room out of the booth. “You are not welcome.”

“Well, my friend,” Cole said, gruesomely expansive, “that seems like rather shitty business sense. Do you normally do background checks on your patrons before they sit down? Is this a saintly restaurant? Only for nuns? Buddha? Any lesser angels who wander into Koreatown? However do you stay open turning away all the sinners?”

He had acquired the full attention of the sushi chefs and the waitress. They stared at both of us. I knew forever on after this, no matter what happened, I was going to be Cole St. Clair’s girlfriend to them. There was absolutely no good ending to this.

I could never get sashimi here again.

“Most sinners do not linger in our memory like you,” the host said coolly. “Out.”

I snapped, “What did you do, Cole?”

Baby watched each of us, back and forth, like a tennis match.

“It was a long time ago,” he repeated.

The host said, “Not long enough.”

I was as humiliated as I would have been if I had done something. “This is perfect. Let’s just go.”

Something burned furiously in Cole’s eyes, but he shoved out of the booth and tossed his napkin contemptuously on the table. “Rumor works both ways,” he told the host.

One of the guys behind the counter twisted his knife in the air slowly, just so the light caught it.

“Oh, I see you. I am terrified,” Cole said. “Keep your shorts on. We’re going.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so embarrassed. One of the perks about not giving a damn. I couldn’t even put words together.

I had spent so many afternoons doing homework at Yuzu, just being alone there where nobody knew me or what my facial expression normally looked like, and now my time there had gone from present to past in just a few minutes.

Out in the deathly fluorescent end-of-the-world mall, Cole told Baby, his voice cool and remote, “Rematch. I’ve lost my appetite.”

“Are you sure?” Baby asked as we headed back down the escalator. “Now would be a good time to shoot some good TV.”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Yeah, I’m sure. I can think of something better.”

Baby said, “Do it, then. I’ve got the greatest surprise for your birthday, but you have to earn it.”

We parted ways with her on the sidewalk. It was shockingly concrete white after the dim, timeless mall. We didn’t speak until we were back to the SUV.

“What was that?” I spat. “What did you do to those people?”

In the passenger seat, Cole shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? I saw your face. You know.”

“Isabel, I don’t remember.”

“Don’t lie to me!” I snapped. “I saw it! What did you do?”

“Victor and I —” In the passenger seat, Cole pinched his nose and, a second after, threw his fingers outward like he was chucking an idea away from himself. He had been restless before. Now he was rattling around inside his own body.

I guided the SUV through a traffic light, past an apartment building with a pagoda roofline. “I hope that means you’re trying to figure out how to tell me why I can’t ever go back to my favorite restaurant.”

Cole said, “Isabel, Jesus, give me a second.”

“Also,” I snarled. Now the rage was developing properly. “Girlfriend?”

“What, you want an apology for that, too? There’s probably an application I should’ve filled out before I was supposed to say it, right? Jesus. Of all the things —”

Of all the things. Maybe he’d had girlfriends before, but I’d spent a lot of time intentionally being no one’s. And now I didn’t even know if he’d been saying it just to put a suspicious waitress at ease or because he thought I was really his girlfriend. And I didn’t even know, after that, if I even wanted to be. I didn’t know if it mattered if your boyfriend wasn’t a mess if everyone else in the world thought he was.

Cole rested his temple on the window, his eyes cast toward the cloudless sky. “I’m trying,” he said finally. “I’m trying and it doesn’t matter to anyone. I’m always going to be him.”

“Who?”

“Cole St. Clair.”

It seemed on the surface like a stupid thing to say, but I knew exactly what he meant. I knew just how it felt when your worst fear was that you would be yourself.

Here’s what I knew: If I went back to the apartment by myself now, I’d go into the bathroom and slide a needle under my skin, and even though it was not drugs, even though it was so much cleaner than drugs, it would remind me of that person I had been not so long ago. The person who had gone to Koreatown to score and trashed a sushi restaurant when things went sour. I couldn’t take hating myself like I’d hated myself then.

So I begged Isabel to take me back with her, at least for a little while.

And she must have known me, because she did, even though she was angry.

Isabel’s mother lived in one of those houses that would be a lot nicer if the houses that flanked it weren’t nice in exactly the same way. It didn’t look like California to me — it looked like Upper Middle Class, USA. Isabel backed her huge SUV into the driveway; she did it so neatly and proficiently that I was sure she must have intended to crush the flower bed on the right. When she climbed out into the evening yard, her lips parted dismissively, and I knew I was right. This was guerrilla warfare: Isabel versus the suburbs. She hadn’t figured out yet that the only way to succeed was retreat. Or maybe she had, only her retreat was blocked. So she had decided to go down fighting.

It made me feel tired just looking at this neighborhood. It reminded me of my parents and Phoenix, New York.

We stepped into the center hallway, which smelled like air freshener. The decor was endlessly nice, and I forgot what it looked like the moment I moved my eyes. Isabel was out of place here: an exotic. She pursed her bubble-gum paradise lips and then we heard her mother call, “Isabel?”

Isabel had warned me that her mother would be home and that she would take care of it.

But then there was a lower rumble: a male voice.

Isabel’s eyes narrowed at exactly the same moment that Sofia appeared on the carpeted landing above us, looking equally out of place here — a drowsy-eyed transport from a silent black-and-white movie, complete with one of those side-curl hairdos and words printed in fancy font on the bottom of the screen. Her white hand gripped the stair rail.

She mouthed words. They would have been printed on the bottom of the screen like so: Your dad!

Tom Culpeper.

I’d last seen him over Victor’s dead body, two thousand miles away and a million years ago. Culpeper hadn’t known it was a guy in wolf’s clothing, though. He had just been trying to kill things with sharp teeth. So Victor’s death wasn’t really his fault. It was mine. Always mine.

I should have gone back to the apartment.

“Isabel? That was you, right? Sofia, is that Isabel?”

Both girls looked at me. Sofia silently scooted down the final stairs and started to touch my arm. Then she thought better of it and made a little hand-wheeling gesture. Words on the screen: Follow me! Isabel put a finger to her lips — Shhh (air kisses, baby/air kisses/follow my breath) — and stepped into another room.

As Sofia whisked me down the hall and straight through a fine, nice, forgettable kitchen toward an open patio door, I heard Isabel say coldly, “Oh, how wonderful. All of my DNA is here together again.”

Sofia didn’t stop until she’d led me two steps across a small deck and directly into a tiny wooden playhouse that butted up against it. It was the sort of playhouse with a green plastic slide and a climbing wall, and usually a wasp’s nest inside. The interior was about four feet square, and was dimly lit by the porch light. Sofia crawled into the far corner and curled her arms around her knees, and I sat in the other corner. I realized that we could still hear the Culpepers, especially when they came into the open-windowed kitchen a moment later. The small, green-shuttered window even gave us a view of the festivities — Sofia and I weren’t visible to them, but they were lit like a television screen.

“I see you picked up the dry cleaning,” Isabel said, voice still cool. She got herself a glass of water. She didn’t say anything to her father.

Isabel’s mother smoothed a hand over her hips. She wore a pair of meticulous white pants and a low-cut black blouse. She was one of those glorious women who was put together but not constructed. Usually mother-daughter pairings felt like before/after shots, but in this case, the two of them together just left the room in collective awe over the excellence of the genetics involved.

“Your father would like to know if we’d like to spend the weekend with him,” Isabel’s mother said.

Beside me, Sofia made herself into a smaller ball. All I could see over her knees were her enormous eyes as they gazed at the kitchen. They had a sheen as if she was crying, but she was not crying. I wondered how old Sofia was. Fifteen? Sixteen? She seemed younger. She still had that mysterious thing young kids had that made people want to take care of her instead of date her.

“Here?” Isabel said in the kitchen. “Or in San Diego?”

“Home,” Tom Culpeper said. He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking lawyerly. “Of course.”

Isabel smiled nastily at her glass. “Of course.”

Sofia whispered, “I wish I were like Isabel.”

I brought my focus back into the playhouse. “How do you figure?”

“She always knows what to say,” Sofia said earnestly. “When my parents fought, I just blubbered and looked stupid. Isabel never gets upset.”

I didn’t know about that. I thought Isabel was always upset.

“There’s nothing wrong with blubbering,” I said, and added untruthfully, “I blubber all the time.”

Sofia raised an eyebrow and smiled at me behind her knees. I saw just the corner of it, shy and disbelieving. She liked that I’d said it anyway. I pulled out my tiny notepad and wrote down the air kisses lyric before I forgot about it.

“Are your parents divorced?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Was your dad a dick lawyer, too?”

She shook her head. Her sheen-y eyes were a little sheenier. “Not a lawyer, and not a dick.” She couldn’t even say dick in a hateful way. She said it very carefully, like she was talking about anatomy, and she didn’t want anyone to hear her.

In the kitchen, I heard Isabel say, still very chilly, “Driving two hours doesn’t give you a particular claim on my time. I have plans. If you and my mother would like to enjoy a weekend of adult activities and flotation devices, however, I’m fine with that. You’re big people.”

“Being eighteen doesn’t give you a free pass to be rude, Isabel,” Tom said. I closed my eyes and thought about the different ways I would like to hurt him, starting with the easiest and working toward the cruelest: with my fist, with my words, with my smile. “Do you speak to your mother like this?”

“Yes,” said Isabel.

I opened my eyes and asked Sofia, “How long have your parents been divorced?”

Sofia shrugged and rubbed her finger on the interior of the playhouse. In the dim light, I saw that she was touching the words Sofia was here, written with a spidery font. She was sad in a way that didn’t ask me to do anything about it, which made me want to do something about it. I felt in the pocket of my cargo pants until I found a marker, and then I leaned past her and wrote Cole was here. I signed it. I’m good at my own signature.

Her teeth made a tiny crescent in the darkness.

I heard Teresa’s voice rise, and both Sofia and I leaned to listen again. I missed the end of her sentence, but Tom’s reply was unmistakable through the open windows and door.

“You and I both know that love is for children,” he said. “We’re adults. Compatibility is for adults.”

“Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,” Teresa replied. “Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my Bluetooth feel like shit.”

“Well,” Isabel said, thin and mean and condemning, “I’m going to leave you two here. I have things to be doing, like drilling a hole through my own temple. So long.”

Tom broke off his death stare toward his wife to look at his daughter. “I drove two hours to see you.”

Isabel’s back was to us, so I saw her arms crossed behind her back instead of her face, and I could see how she so savagely pinched the skin of her right arm with her left hand that the skin flushed red. But her voice was still glacial. “And now you’ve seen me.”

She clicked out of the room.

Tom licked his teeth. Then he said, “I see your parenting has done wonders, Teresa.”

There was no universe in which Tom Culpeper and I would be friends. Sofia ducked over her phone, texting rapidly. I saw nothing but Isabel’s name at the top of her screen.

A moment later, Isabel appeared around the side of the deck and squeezed into the playhouse — I had to crush right against Sofia to make room. Isabel looked carved from ice. Her eyes were pointed at the place where I’d signed the playhouse, but she wasn’t really looking at anything at all.

“Here,” I said.

I offered her the marker, but she didn’t take it. She said, “I want to forget I was ever here.”

Sofia volunteered, “I can go in and get some cookies if you want them.”

Isabel snapped, “I don’t want you to go get me any goddamn food, Sofia!”

Her cousin somehow managed to shrink without actually occupying any less space. Isabel closed her eyes, her mouth thinning.

I was sandwiched between two miserable girls and I had no car of my own to go anywhere else, and even if I did, it was a Saturn. And once Sofia had said cookie, I really did want one, because our dinner had been reneged by suspicious sushi chefs. But now Teresa and Tom Culpeper were having a proper scream fest in the kitchen and really, nobody could go inside without risking civilian casualties.

“I would take a cookie,” I said to Sofia, “but I’m watching my weight. Camera adds twenty pounds, you know, and there’s really no point to life if I can’t be handsome on camera.”

Isabel snorted. Sofia snuffled and murmured something.

“What?” I asked.

“Lens distortion,” Sofia sniffed. “That’s why it adds twenty pounds. Every — sniff — lens is technically a fish-eye so it makes the middle of everything bigger, like your nose and stomach and stuff. And all of the lighting and flash and slave flash and — sniff — whatnot gets rid of shadows and edges, so you look even fatter.”

“Well,” I said. “The more you know.”

The fight in the kitchen escalated. (Teresa had just shouted gloriously: Isn’t lawyer just another term for whore? And Tom had replied, If we’re talking about women who work all night long, I think the term is doctor.)

I retrieved my phone. “Want to see the episode we did today?”

Sofia said, “What’s it about?”

“That’s a surprise. I could tell you, but then I’d have to edit you out of the world’s fabric.”

Isabel opened her eyes. I thumbed through screens on my phone and navigated to the website. Both girls leaned a little closer to the illuminated screen in the darkness.

The episode began with my fight with Leyla and proceeded apace to the fight with Chad over Jeremy.

“What a jerk,” Sofia said.

“Doesn’t he know Jeremy was married to you first?” Isabel added hollowly. I knew she was saying it for Sofia, to sound like she was into the video-watching and to be forgiven for being mean earlier. It worked, too, because Sofia badly wanted to forgive her.

After I secured Jeremy, the three of us headed to the address Isabel had given me. It was the wedding of a super-fan in Echo Park. Well, according to Isabel it was a super-fan. A lot was resting on Isabel’s ability to both play me on the Internet and also know how to do her research. Because if this turned out to be just a normal person’s wedding or a casual fan’s wedding, we were heading to disaster. Timing was tight, and the Saturn mysteriously ran out of gas on the way. We were forced to walk for gas to a station where the attendant just happened to recognize me.

I paused the video. “So this is the part where I got to find out if Isabel really did know everything.”

Sofia said, “Why?”

“She’s the one who found the wedding.”

Sofia’s giant eyes turned to Isabel.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 565