Three Story House: A Novel (36 page)

“No, no. We’re all here. I want you to tell them.”

All around her, the people she loved most in the world raised their glasses of hundred-year-old whiskey and toasted the possibility that everything would work out in the end.

A
re you sure you aren’t bothered by the cameras?” Isobel asked Tom. He hadn’t even blinked twice the first time she showed up at the home improvement store trailed by Jake and the rest of the crew, which had grown to nearly a dozen people this time around. But now they were on a date—or what passed for a date on reality television.

“What cameras?” Tom asked, holding her purse while she slid into the green booth.

“Don’t talk about the cameras,” Kitty said. The sound girl had indeed been promoted to field producer for the pilot, which they’d sold to the investors and the studio as
Southern Bel
. Of course the fact that no one had ever shortened Isobel’s name to Bel didn’t concern Craig. “It’s a concept,” he’d said to her. “Nothing’s set in stone.” He had however insisted that everyone call her Bel, which made for lots of stuttering as the cousins and Tom got used to the forced nickname.

Isobel sat down. “Is this a local place?” she asked, looking around the restaurant, which was in the only part of Memphis that reminded Isobel of the West Coast. Tom took his seat—or rather he expanded into the space, looking at home in the restaurant as he did everywhere.

“You come here a lot?” she asked.

“Enough,” he said, handing her a greasy plastic-coated menu. She didn’t understand how he could be so comfortable in his own skin. Lizzie thought it might be because he spent his weekends on stage with that band of his, but Elyse said it was because his parents were still together.

“Why the band?” she asked. The point of this outing had been to establish that they were dating—for the show. Craig had talked to her about making sure the conversation covered their backgrounds because it would make it easier to set Tom up as a character.

“Youngest child,” he said, shrugging.

“Me, too,” she said, raising her diet soda in a mock toast to an accomplishment neither one of them had any say in. “What does that mean? We’re immature brats who’ll fight over who gets the most attention?”

“Nah,” he said. “Or rather only if we’re ever on stage together—there’d be a fight.”

“I’d win,” Isobel said, wondering what sort of band he had. Lizzie told her that in Memphis music flowed out of the Mississippi and into everyone’s veins: having a band was like saying you restored old cars. It was what people did in their spare time. Still, she wasn’t convinced it was a hobby until Tom got out of his car to pick her up for their date. Instead of wearing a T-shirt or other merchandise advertising his band, he had on a short-sleeved button-down that was tight in a way that indicated vanity about his looks. The restaurant was a local burger chain—known for its buttered buns and cluttered décor. They encouraged people to write on the walls, and at the booth where they sat, thousands of people had autographed the plaster or scrawled bits of wisdom. They took turns reading them to each other while they waited for their food.

“For a good time call your vibrator,” she said.

“Here’s one. ‘Be careful, I bite.’”

“Mrs. Looper is a pooper.”

He laughed the loudest at that. “That’s something Bobby would write.”

“Bobby?”

Tom looked away from her, and then the waitress arrived with their food. He showed her how to put the toothpick in her straw and launch it at the ceiling where thousands of others had landed, their cellophane flags making the tiled ceiling look like a map of places people had been.

“How does a thing like that start?”

He reached across the table and held her hand. “How does anything start?”

She lowered her eyes and then took a bite of the burger. What was between them felt different from most of the other dates she’d been on. She didn’t know if it was because he was different or because of who she allowed herself to be in Memphis. For one thing, she’d never once sucked in her stomach when she saw him. In getting to know him at the home improvement store, there’d always been a context for their conversations. She’d ask him about the grit on sandpaper or the best glue for pipes and then if they ran out of things to talk about, she could bring up insulation or light fixtures. Mostly they hadn’t run out of conversation.

She tried to picture him in his other life—performing on stage. Not that she knew much about it. He had the sort of face that would always look younger than he was—at least unless he lost his hair. What beautiful hair he had, a sandy blond color and always somehow looking as if he were two weeks overdue for a cut. He reached for his soda, and she scooted forward in her seat so that their legs touched. His feet tapped out a rhythm that she felt under the table as his knees moved up and down to the song in his head.

“No, really. Tell me about your band?” It felt artificial to ask him, but Craig had wanted to establish that theirs was a new relationship, so he’d told them to go over stuff and pretend like it was a first date, even though it wasn’t. Tom had agreed without really agreeing.

“You know, I sing and stuff,” he said and then pushed aside his empty burger basket and leaned across the table, drawing her into a kiss. It felt more private than it ought to because her hair created a curtain around them. He smelled like lemons.

“Oh,” she said when he pulled back. Two of the cameramen and Kitty with her damn mic had moved in so close that Tom accidentally elbowed one of them in the back when he slid back to his seat.

“I like you,” he said.

It made her want to kiss him again. Instead, she looked around the restaurant to see what sort of interest their display had drawn. A few tables from their booth, several college-age students had their heads together whispering. They looked up at their table and then returned to a heated discussion. Of course they’d drawn attention. Isobel told people she hated to be stared at, but it wasn’t true. The cameras made it more obvious that she was someone other than an ordinary person. “I think I’ve been recognized,” she said, discreetly pointing out the table.

Tom nodded. “Part of the job, huh?”

“Kind of hard not to be, given all of this,” she indicated the crew without actually pointing them out.

“Can we go out after this? There’s a—”

“Excuse me.” They were interrupted by one of the girls from the other table.

“Of course,” Isobel said, turning toward her, ready to sign whatever it was she wanted, and also to talk a bit about what it had been like to be on the show. Girls this age typically wanted to talk about how they’d been awkward and how much they’d loved seeing her transform on the show. This girl was pretty though, and Isobel couldn’t imagine her ever going through an awkward stage.

“No, no,” the girl blushed and tugged at the hem of her shirt, which had the image of a nut silkscreened on it. “I’m sorry—I was trying to—it’s just that I was there last night and I—”

Tom took the sharpie the girl had in her outstretched hand. “You want me to sign the shirt?”

The girl nodded. Isobel eyed the logo that distorted itself over the girl’s large breasts.
Fat Squirrels
. She leaned forward. “It’s easier to sign on the back,” Tom said, putting his hand on the girl’s waist and nudging her slightly so that she turned around. “Mind your hair.”

The girl gathered her long black hair in her hand and then giggled as Tom touched the pen to her shirt and scrawled out his name. Across the room, her friends hooted at her. When he was done, he touched the girl’s shoulder and thanked her for coming to the show. “I haven’t missed one,” she said and bounded back to her table.

“I guess you’re the famous one.” Isobel fumbled with her purse, wanting to get enough cash out to pay for their date. It seemed important that she remain in control. She dropped two twenties on the table and bolted, moving so fast that the crew didn’t realize she was leaving until she’d stepped out the front door and onto the sidewalk.

In the time it took her to draw two deep breaths, Tom was out on the sidewalk with her. “Hey, hey,” he said.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Can we ditch them?” he asked, taking her elbow and steering her toward his car. On the ride over, Jake and Kitty had been in the backseat, filming their pre-date chatter, which had mostly concerned the work they needed to do to finish the kitchen.

Isobel hesitated. She should say yes and jump in the car with Tom, but it would be foolish to piss off Craig and the crew for a few moments of private conversation. She dug her heels into the ground. “I can’t. I—”

“Really?” he crossed his arms.

“Another time.”

The skin around his eyes and his mouth tightened. “I don’t want to talk about it in front of the cameras. I like you and anything I say about the band will make it seem like I don’t like you and you’ve got a dozen reasons not to like me. Most of which you don’t even know yet.”

“Like what?” she asked, afraid of what answers he might give. And yet she wanted to know who Bobby was and why he was often vague about where he was during their time apart.

He looked at the door to the restaurant.

“This isn’t how I wanted to do this.” He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling on the ends. “I have a kid. I’m a recovering alcoholic. I knew who you were the moment you first wandered into the store and I pretended I didn’t because I wanted you to think more of me.”

The door opened and the crew stepped out into the street. Kitty missed the step and stumbled, one of her shoes sliding off her foot and clattering into the street. Why on earth was that girl wearing heels? She looked like a toddler with lipstick. Isobel looked at Kitty, trying to figure out what else was different about her. She felt the heat of Tom’s body next to hers. Isobel thought about the matchbox car she’d found in his sweatshirt and the movie tickets. Part of her had thought it was another woman, another date, but she hadn’t asked him. Now she wanted to ask him about his kid, but she knew that anything said with the crew around would be put on film and used when the moment was right. A good editor could do wonders with scenes. What had happened in the restaurant could be made funny or romantic. They could make Tom look like a dick or a nice guy. It depended on which way their story went. Isobel wished she could see the future, wished she could know how their story would turn out. She grabbed his hand and squeezed.

“Sorry,” she said to Jake, who she knew was giving her the stink eye behind the camera lens. She still needed him on her side with the show. As much as she trusted Jake, she’d come to loathe Craig.

She let Tom open her car door for her.

He slid into the driver’s seat and took several deep breaths before starting the car. “Isobel—I mean Bel,” he said. “It’ll be fine. Just fine.”

Behind her, Jake and another crew member entered the car, adjusting their equipment to make the transition appear seamless. Tom settled himself in the driver’s seat and turned on the car. Then, because she wanted to let Tom know that she understood what he was trying to say, she put her hand on his thigh and squeezed. “I think you’ll like my dad,” she said, raising her voice so it would be clearly heard over the car’s engine and the shuffling of feet and bodies. “He’s sort of a jack of all trades and way back when, before he had any of us children or got married or got divorced, he played keyboards in his college band.”

“So long as he doesn’t play the accordion, we’ll get along fine,” Tom said, taking up her hand and massaging the back of it as they drove.

Attention,
she thought, leaning her head against the window. It felt like a force that needed a formula. If Newton had been a youngest child instead of an oldest, surely he’d have discovered the law of attention, which identified the amount of attention needed as inversely related to one’s capacity to feel loved. It became more apparent every day that this particular television show was a bad idea. In fact, the whole idea of her trying to remain an actress was probably a bad idea. But having those cameras around closed up the vacuous hole inside her that craved attention. And yet she wasn’t an extrovert. The paradox of Isobel was that while she preferred to be in the corner hiding from people, whenever she found herself there, she got mad because nobody was paying her any attention.

“You should be talking,” Jake said from the backseat.

Kitty murmured agreement and shifted through a notebook she’d been carrying around. “Talk about Thanksgiving,” she said. “We don’t have anything on that yet.”

“Thanksgiving it is,” Tom said.

Isobel felt the attention on her as they talked, and the heat of the camera acted faster than all the shots of whiskey they’d drunk when they found the stash to ease her mind about all she didn’t know of her own future.

In preparation for Isobel’s father’s coming, Craig had asked to talk to each of the cousins about their fathers. As the crew had filmed them over the last week, a story slowly emerged. It was strange to think of reality shows as having writers, but they did. Someone back in California, a woman named Beverly, looked at the footage they’d shot and read through the production notes. It was her job to try to make a story out of the raw material they sent. She’d decided, according to Craig, that the arc should focus on the visit of Isobel’s father.

The day before her father arrived, the production crew transformed the front closet into a sort of private confessional. Craig followed Isobel around the house, giving her the highlights of what Beverly thought should happen.

“We should start with a scene of you embracing on the porch.”

“He’s not going to call me Bel or really do anything you tell him to do,” she said to Craig. “I want you to know that right off.”

Craig crossed his arms when she protested. He listened and then continued giving her notes, which included the fact that they weren’t finding her relationship with Tom believable. “We need to understand why the two of you are together. Find a way to have him save a cat or whatever it is that would make him likable.”