“Come on, Pheebs, my shooting schedule is pretty light. Whad’ya say?”
He doesn’t ask what she’s rushing back for, but it’s a valid question. Back to traffic and smog and martini shakers. To the too-stylized Rosebud patrons and the next generation of hostess/actresses who look at Phoebe as a tragedy, convinced they’ll never work their way up to bartender because their big break must be mere days away.
“I can’t, sweetie.” Phoebe rubs Adam’s cheek. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay, but promise you’ll come back in the next few weeks? My treat.”
“I may have to go home and see my parents first.”
“Of course,” Adam says apologetically. “If you can wait a little bit, I can come with you, maybe.”
“That’d be nice,” she says, knowing it won’t matter; his filming is solid for the next two months.
She checks in, and he walks her to the security line. He tastes like toothpaste when they kiss.
“I love you,” she says, and is struck with the memory of seeing Oliver off after he’d helped her move to LA eleven years ago, when the world had been dewy and hers for the taking, when she’d never met Adam Zoellner and Chase was still in high school.
“I love you, too, Phoebe Fisher,” he says. “Stay snuggly for me.”
Sweet and charming, trying to cram her into the remaining spaces of his new world.
* * *
Los Angeles without Adam is more quiet than lonely.
Rosebud is loud and bustling as always, but it’s mostly background noise. Clinking glasses and drink orders, superficial conversations of people trying so hard to skate on the surface—designer labels, pilot season, which people in the bar they want to screw.
Adam orders Phoebe a cell phone with a Canadian plan and calls several times a day. Sometimes it’s because he needs a prescription refilled or a crucial piece of paper faxed; other times he has a few minutes between takes and wants to check in. Usually he’ll ring her from the hotel to say good night, but that’s when Rosebud is getting slammed. None of their conversations last more than half an hour. When she’s not working or talking to Adam, all the other minutes of her day are quiet.
Dating, it turns out, had eaten a large chunk of time, and now that she’s not accepting invitations from men at work or coffee shops or bars, her interactions are quicker and more perfunctory. The space around those moments quiet, too.
Jerry, the manager at Rosebud, acquires a new girlfriend who’s allergic to his bull terrier, so Phoebe volunteers to take Kraken on nights when the girlfriend stays over. Pretty soon she’s keeping the dog on nights when Jerry’s girlfriend isn’t sleeping over, and then after Jerry and the girlfriend break up. Finally Jerry asks if Phoebe is interested in keeping the dog permanently. Because she loves Kraken’s velvety head and the way he licks her calves after she puts on lotion, Phoebe happily agrees. Occasionally Kraken pants, and he’ll bark on the rare times the doorbell rings, but generally he’s also quiet.
Quiet time still passes. She calls her brother’s apartment, listens to his voice, and wonders about Sharon Gallaher, who could seemingly delete Chase from her life. She goes through Adam’s mail and sends him what’s important, skims his NYU alumni magazine, paying heightened attention to who majored in what and the kinds of careers they have now. She talks to Gennifer and assures her she’ll visit in the next few weeks. Once in a while, she’ll try to grab a drink with Melissa and Burke, but they had both left Rosebud, and it’s hard to coordinate around everyone’s schedules.
Adam’s mother calls one Tuesday morning, even though she probably knows her son isn’t there.
“How about you, love?” Anna Zoellner asks. “How are you doing?”
Maybe it’s because Anna seems genuinely concerned, but Phoebe isn’t sure what answer to give and flirts with the honest one: that everything in her life is somehow different without Chase, even though she’d seen him only three times in the past two years.
“I went to see Adam in Vancouver,” she says instead.
Hearing the joy in Anna’s voice, Phoebe tells her about how friendly the cast is and how much they like her son, about how amazing he looks in costume with the Rowen makeup, and how exciting it is in BC. All the things Adam doesn’t share with his mother despite loving her with a connection more fierce than Phoebe’s ever felt for her own mother, even before her mom moved halfway around the world.
“That’s so wonderful,” Anna says again and again.
Phoebe wonders if Adam told his mother that the two of them are a couple, wonders if Anna always assumed that they were or would be. Wonders once again about why lovely and smart Anna chose to stay in small-town Florida long after her son was gone.
“Can I ask you a question?” Phoebe asks. Anna agrees. “How old were you when you went back to school?”
“Oh, I was in my midtwenties. I had Adam and I was working, so I went at odd times and took a lot of classes at night, when my parents could watch him.”
“Did you feel weird being older?”
“People of all ages were there,” Anna says. “Are you thinking about going to school?”
“Maybe.” Like a shot of Red Bull it occurs to Phoebe she definitely is. “I kind of want to mix things up a bit.”
“Well, you’d be fantastic,” Anna says. “College is sort of lost on the kids who come right from high school. It’s good to have experience under your belt, so you can appreciate it.”
* * *
Two weeks later Phoebe flies to Chicago, where her stepmother is waiting at passenger pickup. On the ride from O’Hare to Evanston, Gennifer tries to warn Phoebe that her father isn’t back to his normal routine, but nothing prepares Phoebe for the sight of Dad watching Law & Order on the couch in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. He’s wearing jogging pants and a pharmaceutical company T-shirt, no socks or shoes; clearly he hasn’t shaved in a while. On the glass coffee table, where his feet are propped up, is a plate with an uneaten sandwich.
“Lar, honey, Phoebe’s here,” Gennifer says tentatively as Phoebe continues to stare.
“Hey, princess.” Her father turns and, after what seems like a long time, stands to hug her. Beneath her arms he feels softer and smaller than usual—the reverse of Adam. Then he’s back on the sofa, eyes on the flat-screen where Jerry Orbach and the handsome Latino detective are searching for clues in a run-down apartment building.
Unsure what to do, Phoebe sits beside him. From the open kitchen, Gennifer asks if they want anything to eat. Neither one of them responds, but Gen comes back with a bag of tortilla chips and homemade guacamole, perches on the light blue love seat.
“The other day there was a Law & Order with an actor who was the spitting image of Adam.” Gennifer’s voice is cookie dough and Romper Room, the way she sounded the first time she met Phoebe and Chase and didn’t know how to interact with her boyfriend’s children. “Remember, honey?”
“Yeah,” Phoebe’s father says. “Looked exactly like him.”
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Gennifer is still bubbling. “I told Larry, ‘I bet Adam’s been on that show.’”
“He had a couple of small parts after college,” Phoebe says, but Gennifer gives her a pleading look, so Phoebe continues, explains that in one episode Adam played the murdered victim and in another he had a few lines as a suspect’s prep school friend.
“Remember which one it was, Lar?” Gennifer asks. “It must have been the school one, right?”
Her father makes an affirmative grunt. Then they sit there, and Phoebe realizes she’s never watched an entire episode of the show, decides she likes the state psychiatrist. Sam Waterston gets his conviction, and the credits roll.
Another episode starts immediately after, but Gennifer turns to her husband and animatedly says, “Weren’t you going to ask Phoebe about Adam’s fingers?”
“Oh, yeah.” Her father nods with the most energy he’s shown since her arrival.
“What?” For a shocking, horrible minu
te, Phoebe thinks her parents are referencing her sex life.
“When he was here,” her father explains, “it looked like he had mild frostbite on his left hand.”
“He’s fine, Dad,” Phoebe says, looking at Gennifer, who nods encouragingly. “I’ll ask him about it.”
* * *
She does ask Adam when he calls three hours later while she’s trying to nap.
“My hands are hunky-dory,” Adam says. In the background someone is barking orders about camera direction, and she realizes he must be on set. “But they’d be better if they were touching my gorgeous girlfriend.”
Giggling, she lets herself feel light. She walks to the dresser and absently plays with forgotten objects in her old jewelry box—hoop earrings, her high school class ring, a P necklace.
A few more minutes of banter about missing each other, and he changes tone, sounds serious.
“So Kathleen Turner is producing and starring in a remake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Sean Bean, and they like me for the young professor.”
“Sweetie, that’s great,” Phoebe says. It’s been years since she’s read the play, but she remembers enough to envision Adam in the role, going from cocksure to confused, as the older couple play out their game.
“It would probably be really small distribution—just her passion project—but that’s pretty cool, right?” Adam earnest and excited.
“It’s amazing. Will you be able to do it if the show gets renewed?”
“They’d shoot in New England over the summer.” He pauses. “But if the show does get picked up, would you maybe want to get a place here? We need to move anyway.”
Probably true. TV stars, even stars on basic cable shows that haven’t aired yet, should live in nicer apartments than their shabby two-bedroom in Studio City.
“That might be fun, right?” Adam asks.
“Maybe.”
“Well, we’re probably getting ahead of ourselves,” Adam is saying.
Next to the jewelry box is a stack of sympathy cards her friends had sent, generic sentiments from people at her old high school and her acting workshops. There’s one beige card with a simple tree on the front, postmarked from Italy.
Phoebe—
I know that it’s been a while, but I was deeply saddened to hear about your brother. My thoughts are with you and your family.
—Oliver
It’s the first and only contact she’s had with Ollie since dropping him off at his father’s house three Thanksgivings ago, when her brother was here with Sharon Gallaher.
On the phone, there’s a commotion in the background, Adam briefly talking to someone else, words muffled.
“Okay, I gotta hop, Pheebs, love you.”
When he hangs up, she realizes she’s said nothing about her father and Law & Order, nothing about her stepmother’s coddling of him. Wonders why she didn’t tell Adam, hasn’t told him about calling Chase’s apartment or her sizzling hatred of Sharon Gallaher and all those other quiet things.
* * *
While Phoebe had lived in her father’s house only a year, her brother had more time here. All of high school and breaks from the University of Wisconsin, enough years to settle in and make his room a home. Yet when Phoebe tries to picture what’s on the walls or even the view from his bedroom window, she comes up blank. There might a long-abandoned guitar from his Jim Morrison phase in the corner, maybe a Pulp Fiction poster? She can’t even remember the color of his bedspread—blue or green, something nondescript boy?
She’s not sure what she expects to find when she opens the door to his room, but it’s certainly not Gennifer sitting on the bed (gray plaid spread) staring out the window.
“I’m sorry.” Gennifer stands, as if an explanation is needed. “I … sometimes I come in here.”
“That’s perfectly fine,” Phoebe says, understanding with absolute clarity.
When Chase died, her real mother blew in from halfway around the world, cried, hugged old friends, got bundles of cards and condolences. Then she was gone, back to Hong Kong, where her life hadn’t intersected regularly with her son’s for more than a decade.
Gennifer, who’d never had a shred of biological claim to Chase, had been the one who picked him up from track and cross-country practice all through high school, the one who sent him packages of homemade cookies while he was away at college.
Gennifer had been the one he’d been coming home to when he was having trouble with his girlfriend. She’d been the one who had to contact family members, pick a casket, and make sure her stepson was in the ground within three days, in accordance with her adopted religion. Gennifer is the one who has to babysit her near-catatonic husband. Who has to apologize for missing Chase, for sitting in a room in her own home.
Getting up, Gen starts to leave. While she still looks young, with her regular Botox and dyed hair, she has quietly slipped into middle age, forty-three, possibly too old to have her own children if that was something she ever desired.
Phoebe reaches for her arm. “Do you wanna go out to dinner? Somewhere nice, maybe?”
Her stepmother nods enthusiastically, and Phoebe feels crushingly guilty she’s never asked before.
Over the years, Gennifer and Phoebe have often lobbied for French or Mexican over her father and brother’s consistent vote for steakhouse dinners, but the two women agree on Gibson’s and manage to get a reservation for nine. Phoebe changes into a little black dress and puts on makeup for the first time in a long time, and Gennifer, graceful in a pencil skirt and silk shirt, drives them down Lake Shore Drive.
The all-male waitstaff smiles approvingly as they take their seats in a corner booth, split a porterhouse and creamed spinach, go through a bottle of red, and order another.
Light conversation about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with her father or brother or Sharon Gallaher or the wars. Things like Elizabeth Taylor films on the classic movie station and how, though they are insanely overpriced, classic Chanel handbags are exquisite.
“My roommate at Loyola had five,” Gen says. “They’d been her grandmother’s.”
“What was your major?” Phoebe asks, stunned she doesn’t already know this.
“Communications.” Gen chuckle-snorts. “I wanted to read the news on TV. Silly, right? I hardly ever watch the news now.”
“Did you ever try?”
“At the college news station, sure.” Gennifer looks at the last sip of Burgundy in her glass. “Then I had some entry-level thing set up with a local channel in Iowa, but a few months before I was supposed to leave, I started temping for your dad. And I … he hadn’t even asked me out—he was sooo proper about everything—but I just knew, you know? So I canceled on Iowa.”
Strange, Phoebe’s older now than Gennifer was when she decided to gamble on a divorced man with two kids who hadn’t even asked her out. Is that the fourteen years between them? A different generation, when love, or even the possibility of love, always trumped career?
“I’m glad you didn’t go,” Phoebe says, maybe the first time in seventeen years she’s acknowledged that her stepmother has made her life better than it might have otherwise been.
Gennifer tears up. “Aww, honey, you know you and your brother…”
“I know. Chase knew, too.”
One more glass of wine, and Phoebe can’t help but think of the other person who should have loved Chase, should have come to his funeral. And for the first time since Sharon Gallaher hung up on her four months ago, Phoebe says the girl’s name out loud.
“I don’t understand how she could not come,” she says.
Gennifer shakes her head. “From what he told me, they were breaking up.”
“But they were together for years.”
“People react to things in different ways.” It’s not enough, but Gennifer is too nice to say more, so Phoebe nods.
A waiter brings a giant slab of chocolate cake, tells them it’s from the gentlemen at the bar—two men in expens
ive suits, older than Phoebe but younger than Gennifer, with the transitory look of people in the city on business—who nod from across the room.
“It’s been so long since I’ve been out without Larry,” Gennifer says, pink flush on her cheeks. “How do we tell them that we’re taken?”
Adam in Vancouver, getting bruised and filming love scenes with the Jericho Jeans girl, calling when he can.
“We don’t tell them anything,” Phoebe says. “We just thank them on our way out.”
And they do.
* * *
Her father is still on the couch in the living room when they get back, and Phoebe sits next to him after a tipsy Gennifer kisses his cheek, slips off her heels, and stumbles upstairs. The channel that reruns classic sitcoms is on—Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia are huddled around the kitchen table eating cheesecake while a laugh track punctuates their one-liners.
“You and Gen have fun?” her father asks.
“We did. You should take her out more.”
Her father bobs his head in agreement. “I will, I’m…” Slight shrug. “You know.”
It occurs to Phoebe that she’s seen this before, with Adam when the Goners pilot didn’t go. She’d had no idea what to do then either.
“I asked Adam about his hands,” she says. “He said they’re great and thanked you for asking.”
“He treat you well, princess?”
Phoebe rests her head on her father’s shoulder. “Yeah, Daddy, he does.”
“Good.”
They watch syndicated episodes of The Golden Girls and Cheers into the wee hours of the morning, and Phoebe realizes she hasn’t called Chase’s apartment in Manhattan since noon.
* * *
Two days later Phoebe meets a very pregnant Nicole for thousand-calorie salads and garlicky bread at Leona’s, where they talk about names for the new baby (a boy this time, to go with Nicole’s three-year-old daughter) and how Evie wants to start her own PR shop in LA.
Both Evie and Nicole had been at Chase’s funeral. Nic, bump barely showing under her long coat, had leaned on Dave’s arm as they navigated the uneven sod of the cemetery. Phoebe hadn’t called her, but Evie had come in from New York, shockingly demure in black boots and leather gloves, pale and visibly shaken. Only Sharon Gallaher, who’d shared Chase’s life, his bed, probably whatever dreams he’d had, hadn’t been in attendance.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 16
