Between You and Me (7 page)

I watch the disk slow over the 8, doing a mental slide show of my bar life. “Okay, this is so profoundly wrong. Know that I know how wrong this is before I tell you. But I met up with this guy I’d been seeing or, really, got him to meet up with me. Anyway. We’d been drinking and making out, and it’s the moment, but, like, he wasn’t going to invite me back to his place, and my place was a million miles in the wrong direction, and I remembered I had a friend who lived only a block away. So we get into her lobby, and I say to the doorman, all chipper, ‘Oh, hey, I’m just here to see Victoria.’ At three in the morning or whatever. Anyway, we ducked into the fire stairs and had sex against the wall and then got in two cabs. As I’m saying this, I realize I should have sent Victoria some flowers.”

“Or her doorman.”

Having shifted from awkward, stilted reverence to TMI—“What about you?” I push myself to ask, as she chose the topic.

“I want to have sex in a stairwell.”

“Oh, my God, if you could have sex in any square inch of your house, you do not want to downgrade to a stairwell.”

“Oh, yeah, where? In my room—with the adjoining wall to my
parents?” She pushes into her next disk and then waits for me to line up my shot.

“I can see that would be . . . ”

“Right?”

She knocks my disk out. “I want to get a place somewhere, or a maybe a whole island or something, and just spend a weekend wandering around with my guy in our underwear.”

“You’ve done that in, like, four of your videos.”

“Cuz that experience is totally how it looks,” she cracks. “It’s freezing cold, there’s forty crew guys standing around in down coats and ski masks, and the dude I’m frolicking with is gay.” She pushes the next disk, and it makes a soft sliding
whoosh
as it departs from her pole. “It’s hard to imagine there’s someone you could spend that much time with, desert-island time, and still want to spend more. Someone where you don’t even have to talk, but you feel he’s just so there for you.”

“I’d settle for someone sharing a cab ride to my apartment.”

She lines up her last disk. “I haven’t even kissed a guy in . . . forever.”

“Really? Not even that football dude?” It flies out of my mouth.

She spins to me. “Are you seriously asking me that right now?”

“Sorry—”

“He smells like jock-itch spray. Just a little bit, you keep sniffing around him because you’re, like, is that? It can’t be . . . sniff, it is! Gross. Have some confidence in me, Logan.”

“I do.” I laugh, relieved.

“Your turn.”

I line up my pole.

“It takes a light touch,” she advises as she wedges hers under her arm like a crutch. “So, you have a boyfriend? Mr. Stairwell Guy?”

“Yes, I have a”—how to put this—“guy.” I look to the palm fronds. “Who texts me”—I pull my sleeves down over the heels of my hands—“with his penis.”

She cracks up. “That’s good. Delia’s not really one to talk the girl talk from experience. One more match?”

“Sure!”

She beats me three more times before announcing that we have to get back. As we cut into the thicket between the properties, her shoulders have come down a discernible inch. Mine are starting to. She retrieves her notebook from the rock pile. “Oh, Logan, I feel like Eric was it. He was the one I got.”

“I can’t believe life works like that.” I follow her gaze to the patch of clouds. “Do you mind if I ask what happened to you two?”

She drops her head. “Like, every possible thing that could. We were both on the road. We’d been together forever. We were both getting restless—I mean, really, I was getting restless. You’d have to be pretty antsy to look twice at John Mayer.” She shrugs. “I want to be in love again,” she says as she lights a final cigarette.

“Me, too,” I agree, running my hand over the moss. “I thought I would be. In Oklahoma, we’d be on our third kid by now.”

“But you can just meet someone.” She squints as she inhales.

“And you can meet an-y-one.”

“But it’s impossible to tell if anyone’s for real. Impossible. Even girls. Even just a friend—someone who isn’t either on my payroll or some editor’s.”

“I’ve really missed you,” I say, because five days ago, I was in a cubicle, and two hours ago, she wasn’t talking to me, and now we’re here in this cove of trees. “And I hope you know that’s for real.”

She abruptly stubs out her smoke, pursing her lips as she unfolds her mirrored aviators. She slides them on despite the dimming light. “You hung up on me.” She cuts to where I’ve been afraid to go.

“I—I’m sorry,” I stammer. “It’s just I hadn’t heard from you in years.”

“I’d been a little busy.” She crosses her arms like one of her video personas.

“I know,” I say, forcing my voice not to abrade in response, because how could I not? When I got that call in college,
her
voice was not only coming through my phone, but also both dorm-room walls.

“I was offering you Delia’s job.”

“I appreciated that, believe me, but—”

“But what?”

“You were acting like we’d talked five minutes ago.” I feel myself getting hot, unable to temper this plume of anger I thought extinguished. “Not five years.”

“‘Make Me Yours’ had just gone platinum. I was excited,” she says, sounding small again. “My life was finally changing. Everything. I wanted you there.”

“But
my
life had changed. I fought my parents so hard to go to NYU, they refused to pay. I was working a million jobs to cover tuition. My grades were barely hanging on. How could I just drop everything to go on some tour?”

“You didn’t think I was going to make it,” she says simply.

“Kelsey, I always have. Everyone always has.” I look away from my distorted reflection in her lenses. “I hope you can forgive—”

“I don’t do that.” She walks away.

It takes me a second to follow.

I’m at a total loss. So I tried. I got a tan, I got some sleep, I ate Michelin-starred interpretations of my hometown food, and now I’m ready to go back to my miserable, crap-box apartment and say I tried.

“Kelsey, where’ve you been?” Michelle stands from the couch. “I need to check fits, and I was looking everywhere. Delia said you went running, but you weren’t in the gym—”

“ ’Cause we were down at the beach. I’m hungrier than a wakin’ bear, Momma. Let me grab something. What time’s your plane tomorrow, Logan?” Kelsey calls as she continues to the kitchen with Michelle in tow.

“Eleven
AM
?”

“Well, I don’t want to keep you from your packing and all that,” she says with undeniable finality before disappearing around the corner. My face stinging, I turn toward the staircase, but see, down the hall to the offices, the blondes all leaning toward Delia’s door like frightened children.

“Andy, I didn’t see the harm.” Delia’s voice rises.

“That girl’s a stranger!”

“Logan’s family!”

I freeze.

“Which is exactly why you should’ve run it by me—just stick to your job!”

“Taking care of Kelsey is my job!”

“She’s gonna be fine!”

“How?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

Then she says something that I can’t make out.

Glass smashes—my breath catches. I walk directly up to my room and turn the lock.

I’m just packing the last of my things and Googling airport hotels when what sounds like the howl of a wounded animal reverberates through the house. I run out to see Delia walking quickly up the steps, her expression inscrutable.

“I don’t understand!” Kelsey shouts from below. “Delia, apologize!” she cries desperately, twisting in Michelle’s arms. “Daddy, she’ll apologize.” But Delia just climbs, her hand gripping the railing. “Apologize!” she screams.

“I can’t,” Delia says, her voice low as she inhales her tears, continuing past me without turning back.

“Daddy?” Kelsey entreats, but he just lifts his hands in defense, like an overwhelmed parent facing a remorseful dog and a bitten child.

Michelle tries to shield Kelsey, pulling her close, but she breaks away and runs up the staircase, flying past me to slam her door on all of us.

An hour later, I watch
from my bathroom window as Delia, laden with suitcases, gets into the limo with Peter’s assistance. A wet-faced Michelle hugs her good-bye, but Kelsey doesn’t come out. I make myself dinner from a can of mixed nuts scavenged from the armoire. Any lingering instincts I had to rebroach the past with Kelsey have been snuffed, and now I’m just trying to make myself very small in this very large room and hold my breath until Peter can assist me out of here, too.

“Logan?” My door cracks, and I jump from the bed.

“Hi! Oh, my God, how are you?” It opens all the way to reveal
Kelsey wearing a glittering minidress and carrying peep-toe stilettos, her only accessory a tiny gold pendant inlaid with a diamond K.

She shuts the door soundlessly behind her. “I’m showing you L.A.”

“The designer?” Confused but going with it. “It’s a gorgeous dress.”

She unzips my suitcase. “The city. I’m showing you. Tonight.” She roots through my clothes, her eyes puffy beneath deftly applied concealer.

“But—”

She’s still for a moment. “Please.” Her voice is faint, and I have to lean in to hear her. “Don’t make me ask.”

I quickly get dressed as she paces outside the bathroom door, tapping the heels of her shoes together. “You ready?” She peers in as I dot on blush. “Wow, you look really pretty.”

“Thank you. Are you sure you feel up—”

“You have to take your shoes off, okay?”

I step out of them, and she flicks off the bathroom light. I pick up my clutch and go to the door.

“No,” she whispers. “This way.” She steps on the toilet lid and throws her leg over the windowsill to the trellis below. “Just don’t knock the camera on the right when you come down,” she whispers before descending the greenery as if it were a ladder here solely for this purpose. Peering over the sill as her feet find the dirt, I get a glimpse of the adolescence we missed sharing. An adolescence in which she seems suspended.

I’ve barely reached the flower bed before Kelsey takes off sprinting down the winding drive, and I race to keep up, our bare feet slapping the pavement. “Kelsey,” I whisper breathlessly. “Are we running to L.A.?”

“There.” She points to waiting headlights.

Kelsey spends most of the
cab ride on her phone, calling her dancers, who make no effort to cover their shock that she’s choosing to go out and be in public on the heels of Eric’s announcement. But her cheerful
voice does not betray either heartbreak bracketing her day. “We’re passing the giant doughnut—we’ll be there in ten.” She flips open her clutch, pulls out a small package of wipes, and begins to dab the dirt from her feet. She rubs until her skin is reddening.

“Kel.”

She looks to me, brow tight, whitened teeth digging into her glossed lower lip, and I’m incongruously reminded of a day in ballet class. She couldn’t have been more than eight and was already
the
most organized of any of us, keeping all of her rubber bands, bobby pins, and hairnets in separate containers, old metal Band-Aid boxes she covered in glitter. But that day, she couldn’t find her tights. She emptied out her tote over and over, knowing that Miss Natalia, so not her real name, wouldn’t let her in bare-legged but would charge Michelle for the class anyway. Kelsey just looked at me and started to shake. I don’t remember what happened next, just the expression on her face, begging me to fix it.

“You should clean your feet,” she says. “I don’t want you to mess up your shoes.”

“I’m . . . I could give a shit about these shoes.”

She smiles, and then tears overtake her.

“Oh, Kelsey, I’m so sorry my coming here has made such a mess. I think Delia—”

“No. Nope!” She dabs under her each of her kohled eyes. “I don’t want to talk about her. At all. Don’t talk about her, okay?”

“Okay,” I agree.

“I just.” She exhales. “I don’t know how we’re going to get in. Usually, it’s all set up for me. I’m not even sure how to—”

“I obviously don’t know the first thing about any of this, but what if we just roll up to the front door and kind of zoom in?”

“Zoom?”

“Zoom. Maybe we could zoom.”

The car pulls up outside a shuttered 1940s movie theater in a stretch of dilapidated, abandoned storefronts. Half the light bulbs are missing, and the glass of the marquee is shattered. But then, I see that the carpet to the door is fresh and there’s a line of teens waiting to get in. “They’re all so
young
,” I say.

“Studio execs’ kids,” she surmises from the LVs and double Cs emblazoned on their accessories.

“Who look like they’re going to a costume party—come as your jaded twenty-something self.”

“Far cry from Coleman’s,” she says, referring to the only place that would let high-schoolers loiter on a Saturday night.

“Ready?” She grips my hand and I time to pull us onto the sidewalk right behind the girls from another car. They go to join the line, but we walk straight for the bouncer. He’s about to redirect us when Kelsey tilts her face up. The papparazi cameras flash. He unclips the rope, and we slide in just as the teens’ phones are raised en masse, thumbs clicking away.

“Isn’t it a school night?” I ask over the thump radiating from the end of the long corridor.

“I think they all have tutors who do their homework for them,” she says as she follows me down the hall, which has been left untouched. Or demolished and rebuilt yesterday to look like this. The walls are covered in peeling, dust-encrusted silk. The carpet is worn to lace. The snack counter is open, and two ladies dressed like
Rocky Horror
extras are slinging truffled popcorn. Above their heads, where prices should be, someone has written in chalk,
Concessions! 1. Your political party will never accomplish what you need it to. 2. Your taxes will always be higher than you want them to be. 3. You will fall out of love.

I pull her along into the theater, hugging the wall as I get our bearings. The room is vast, with a carved wood ceiling like the Ziegfeld. But the seats have all been torn out, and people are dancing on the sloping floor. On the stage, a translucent partition has been erected to put the VIPs tantalizingly just out of reach but not out of view. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get up there, so I just make for the exit sign nearest and pray that someone who works here can escort us. Suddenly, I feel Kelsey tug me back and turn to realize an Ed Hardy-bedecked dude has grabbed her hand.