“All right. Because?”
“Because I don’t want to cry.”
A pause. “So don’t cry. I recognize it’s a daytime talk show but you’re not contractually obligated to produce tears.”
“Barry….”
“Given your image it’s probably better if you don’t. Should you change your mind, of course, you’re allowed to cry. This one is all up to you.”
“Barry!”
“Yes?”
“Just give me the itinerary.”
* * *
Okra’s eyes were a nice tawny color, about two shades lighter than her skin. They matched her hair, and were set off by her green pantsuit. She set those pretty eyes on Vonnie, and Vonnie found that she wanted to tell this woman everything, then cry and eat a sundae.
“First let me say, and I think the audience will agree, you look stunning.”
The audience clapped at Vonnie’s brown boot-cut yoga pants, cream wrestling shoes and patterned three-quarter sleeve top, all emblazoned with Survivanoia’s spiky S logo.
“I understand you have a jogging suit that recycles your sweat so you can shower while you run. Save some time.” More clapping.
Vonnie pulled the nod-and-smile card, still not completely sold on the post-apocalyptic features of her new wardrobe—a hybrid of ideas from Nike, who recommended casual-sporty, and Chloe, who really dug her company’s clothing but couldn’t wear it herself. (“None of it comes in plaid.”) Vonnie had felt ridiculous at first, but each time she unexpectedly caught her own reflection she thought, Oh, that girl is pretty. Also, everyone else complimented her.
“We’ll talk more about the clothing in a minute, but first,” Okra turned from camera three to Vonnie. “You know what I’m going to ask you, right? The thing everybody wants to know.” Those tawny eyes held Vonnie’s. “What led you to try to kill yourself?”
Vonnie took a deep breath, swallowed her first answer, reword it, borrow Barry’s words, lighten up…“Did you…hear the record?”
A kind smile lit Okra’s face. “Even the title, really. Painful.”
Vonnie gave an exaggerated shrug. “I’ve been thinking of calling my comedy tour Asshole.”
The studio audience laughed at what would be bleeped out of the aired version.
“Let’s discuss your response. Because that’s really what your comedy is at its heart, isn’t it? A response? To the cruelty of your husband?”
Vonnie, for the first time, considered this question. She apparently took her time doing so because Okra set a hand gently on her arm. “Vonnie?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“My comedy isn’t a response to TJ’s—Bagga’s—anything. It’s just easy for me to make fun of him because I know him so well.”
“But would you have been motivated to go on stage if he’d been a more appreciative husband? A more accessible husband? A less violent husband.”
“Motivated? That was a fluke.” She recounted the story of her night at Adlibs, with the angry little comic she hadn’t insulted and the kick she got from being on stage. “I like to think TJ—Bagga—is laughing with me. I know his dad is. My father-in-law?” She found a camera, “Hi Frankie!”
“So—I think many of us expected more rage. But you don’t sound very angry. Would you say your comedy has been therapeutic?”
Vonnie frowned in thought. “It’s easy to look at where we are and be nothing but angry. But the fact is we loved each other. You know, they market you. You get turned into a commodity and it changes you. And it’s easy to lose yourself in that.”
Vonnie’s brow creased and she gazed at the floor. How had she not figured this out before? Again Okra’s hand touched her arm.
“I’m sorry. I just…uh.”
“You didn’t realize it until now, did you?” The depth of empathy in the talk show queen’s eyes made Vonnie’s hatred finally break, and she knew now it was receding.
“You still love him.”
“Yeah.” And Vonnie didn’t cry. She laughed. Again she found the camera. “I still love you, TJ!”
A collective “Awwww” from the audience.
“Well, there you have it,” Okra stated to a camera. “Coming up next, Victoria Dodds, winner of our ‘Who Looks Most Like Their Avatar’ Contest. Then: up close and personal with Survivanoia. Vonnie’s wardrobe comes from their newest clothing line. Want to catch that tsunami wave? Mountain bike in Lebanon? You can! Baroness Dacianna Von Worthington will tell us how, up next!
“But first, our in-studio audience will now reach under their chairs and find their DNA kits. During the break we’ll all find out what life-threatening diseases we are predisposed to!”
CHAPTER 5
“Are you psycho?” These were Chloe’s words, down Vonnie’s cell phone as she stood outside the greenroom, wanting food and not to be yelled at. “I still love you?”
“It just came out, I can’t defend it. Can we talk about this when I get back?”
Chloe expressed a few more bursts of frustration and dismay, then apologized for being crazy. “I just worry about you. Come home soon.”
Vonnie agreed and hung up. As she tucked her cell phone away, she found a woman grinning at her sympathetically around a salt bagel smeared thick with lox spread.
“Best friend in a panic?” the woman asked in a low rumble, and Vonnie’s anxieties fled like sidewalk pigeons. Her face must have borne the curiosity she couldn’t articulate, because the woman gave a kind smile and nodded. “I’ve been there. Both sides. The crazy concerned friend and you, the dummy.”
“I guess I did sound pretty dumb.”
“Only to the inexperienced. Here’s something they don’t tell you in charm school. Sometimes, a person has to look back, all the way back, in order to reach her destination.” The red-haired woman winked at her.
Vonnie cocked her head, disconcerted. Something about the sentiment resonated, left her hopeful and lonely and feeling as though she’d heard it before but only recognized it now. Her mind struggled to find the source of this déjà vu, but in vain.
The redhead waved the bagel at the sound stage. “I think you just glanced in the rearview out there today. You’ve still got some peering to do.” She drifted past Vonnie, graceful and smooth like a guardian angel. “But not today. Get some food before you’re called back on.”
The woman moved toward the stage and Vonnie watched her, dumbfounded with admiration. Over six feet tall but moved like a dancer, and hair the color of fine wine in the coolest braid Vonnie had ever seen, oh Nike would love this woman, who was this woman? Didn’t Chloe say something about oh!
“Are you the Baroness?”
The remarkable redhead turned, nodding. “Dacianna. Nice to meet you.”
“You made all my clothing. I mean, not you personally but, you know.”
The Baroness swallowed a mouthful of bagel, smiled. “The company sells clothing and gadgets to help fund real science. People like kitsch, so we give ‘em what they want.”
“You’re making me feel cheap.”
“It’s a misappropriation, I suppose, but it’s better than using science to kill people, don’t you agree?”
“Uhm, yeah.”
“Then don’t feel cheap. Be proud! Think of it as supporting scientific research. Especially since you’re famous; now everyone will want some. Probably we should be paying you to wear it. Or at least giving it to you.”
“I’m pretty sure you are, actually,” Vonnie admitted; Chloe had in fact pulled some kind of strings and gotten Vonnie’s entire wardrobe donated.
“Oh, yeah? Say, maybe you are kind of cheap!” The Baroness stuffed the rest of her bagel in her mouth and punched Vonnie in the arm like a kid sister and Vonnie couldn’t recall the last time she felt so lucky.
* * *
“I. Still. Love. You.” These words dripped from Chloe’s mouth as she stood with Vonnie at LAX baggage claim. “How could you? In front of all those people?”
Vonnie pulled at one of her pigtails, opened her mouth, but only shrugged.
Chloe stared her down for a long moment. “There goes your suitcase.” Her finger followed a red Briggs and Riley as it spun past on the carousel, but her eyes stayed trained on Vonnie.
Vonnie had anticipated this, of course. She sighed. “What’d Frankie say?”
Chloe blinked.
“I know you hang out with him all the time. So you might as well tell me.”
“I don’t hang out with him all the time.”
Vonnie cocked her head. “You’ve got a crush on him, don’t you?”
“He’s older than my dad. Was.” Chloe turned back to the baggage carousel, so Vonnie couldn’t see if she blushed or not.
“Chloe and Frankie sittin’ in a tree—”
“You’re changing the subject.”
They claimed Vonnie’s bag and headed out to the sticky-hot and very smelly parking garage.
Vonnie yanked off her fawn corduroy jacket, but her lacy cream camisole was still sticking to her by the time they found Chloe’s boxy yellow car. She yawned, which made her cough. “Geez, has anyone dropped dead in here yet from exposure?”
“Sure. They use ‘em in baggage inspection.” Chloe’s voice had an edge to it that Vonnie recognized. They got into Chloe’s car, which was even warmer than the parking garage.
“Heater’s not fixed yet, huh?”
“The heater is fine. It’s the engine that’s broken and no, it’s not fixed yet. If air conditioning is so important to you, maybe you should find time in your schedule to buy your own damn car. Or: You’re married to a cabdriver, for crissake.” She lurched out of the parking space and squealed down the slick black ramp.
“I’m married to, and in the process of divorcing, a cabdriver’s son.”
“Whatever, you knew what I meant.”
Vonnie took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Listen. I was just kidding about Frankie.”
“It’s not about Frankie. Even though I don’t have a crush on him, and if I do it’s not a sex crush, it’s more like a Dad crush.”
“Yeah. Your dad is kind of my point.” She paused while Chloe paid the parking toll, refusing the money Vonnie offered her.
“I work, okay? I’m not a charity case.”
“Okra was really nice,” Vonnie told her.
“Yeah, she seemed it. But they all seem nice on camera.”
“I was thinking: You should go on there.” A pause. “She’d take you.”
“I don’t wanna do that.” Chloe was suddenly mumbling.
“It’s good money.”
Chloe glanced at her, raised an eyebrow. “Please.”
“It is! And people want to know. A ‘Where is She Now’ story.”
“You know that’s sick, right?”
“Any sicker than what I’m doing?”
“Vonnie, you’re married to—divorcing—a dickhead. That’s all. Like a gazillion other women. Your dickhead just happens to be famous and you happen to be clever. But your situation is commonplace.”
Vonnie thought of Barry’s calmness in the face of her ranting. “All right,” she prompted her friend. “And?”
Chloe glanced at her again. “And mine isn’t.”
“Which is why it’d be good.”
“No. Nobody will connect with it and—whatsa’ matter with you! Does it occur to you that I don’t want to get in front of a million people and talk about what life is like after being sliced out of my mother by some fucking psycho? My stepmother didn’t even know for seven years! My father didn’t want to tell his own wife, and you want me to tell a nation of strangers?”
“I think it might be therapeutic. Sometimes to move forward you have to look all the way—”
“Therapeutic! I’m sorry, what? Has this new career sucked your brain out your ears?”
“Chloe, look. You’ve never talked to anybody about your dad and—”
“Thousands of people lost family that day. There’s nothing special about me.”
“And thousands of people are suffering from PTSD! And those people don’t have your fucked up history.”
“Oh, so now I’m fucked up.” She stopped the car with a small screech that lurched Vonnie forward. Vonnie was surprised to see her condo complex—Chloe drove super fast when she was agitated.
“I’m handling this in my own way,” Chloe assured her.
“The Food Channel doesn’t qualify as counseling.”
“You know what? I really wanted to hear about your trip, and especially about the Okra show, because that supercool redheaded woman on after you was my boss. My big boss. But right now? I feel like killing you. So please just get your stuff out of my car and I’ll call you in a few days.”
Vonnie took her suitcase from Chloe’s backseat. She watched as the yellow box raced away to become a dot, heater pumping, stereo blaring a Leonard Skynard song that they both hated.
* * *
“I don’t want to do the TJ shtick anymore.”
Barry nodded from across his desk. “The Okra stunt was brilliant. Utterly unexpected. Even I didn’t anticipate it.”
“I’ve got thirty minutes of new material.”
“Typed?”
“Yes.”
“With you?”
“Yes.” She opened her leather satchel.
“Email it to me. What else?”
“The Home Piracy Network show films on Friday. If you want to review it you need to review it tonight.”
“HPN wants the material they know. As does Buster DelGrosso. Owner of Busta’ Guts Food an—”
“I know who he is.” Vonnie tapped his desk with a French-manicured fingernail. “Am I contractually obligated?”
“Contractually obligated.” Barry mumbled the phrase to himself, rolling it off his tongue like a lemon seed. “Technically, no. They’ll film whatever you perform at Busta’s. They are equally non-obligated, however, to produce what they record.”
Vonnie held Barry’s gaze, imploring.
He relented, giving her the advice she knew he had. “Do the Busta’ Guts show with the TJ material. Switch in ten minutes of the new material. That way it will look like you’re doing them a favor, giving both Busta’s and HPN something nobody else has seen yet. Keep it that way for the show Sunday, then reverse the ratio.”
“What’s Sunday?”
“Purple Dot.”
Vonnie’s eyes hooded.
“Just like you’re thinking, yes: The same night as Bagga Chips.”
“You booked me across the street from him!”
Her agent nodded.
“Barry! No.”
He closed his eyes for a beat, then set down his pen and folded his hands.
“The marketing potential for both of you is enormous.”
“We both already pack the house.”
“Correct. And if you play Purple Dot the same night he plays the Wontspin, that rivalry will be preserved regardless of whether you change out your material.”
“What if we squelch that rivalry?”
Barry shook his head, frowning. “Animosity works well.”
“Jesus Christmas, Barry! Why don’t you just give us switchblades and tie us together? What do you do, meet with TJ’s agent over knish and say ‘how can we maximize and package their hatred, real or imagined?’”
Barry blinked at her. His brow knitted and he shook his head, appearing—for the first time Vonnie had ever seen—confused.
“What?”
“I tho
ught you knew,” he said. “I am TJ’s agent.”
* * *
Vonnie squinted through the chipped paint blocking the greenroom windows of Purple Dot. “My line isn’t as long as his.”
“Your building is smaller.” Chloe relaxed into the plush couch, munched a sliced apricot from a platter of fresh fruit that could have fed both lines of people outside.
The greenroom still smelled of fresh paint. Cream colored walls and a sky blue carpet contrasted pleasantly with the brown leather couches, making the room optimistic but adult.
The coffee table—vast, glass, curvy—held a silver platter slightly smaller than a coffin, overflowing with SoCal fruits.
“Right, smaller,” Vonnie mumbled, dejected. She skulked away from the window, rubbing her sweating hands on her coffee-colored cords. She picked up a slice of papaya, sniffed it, set it back down again. “I’ve come all this way, and here I am still in his shadow.”
“Did you look into getting a new agent?”
Vonnie sucked air through her teeth. “Barry’s really good.”
Chloe fished around the platter, found a fig and sampled it.
“Where’s Frankie tonight?”
“I thought you’d bring him,” Vonnie teased, and Chloe flicked a grape at her.
“Hey! Watch the threads.” She ran a hand down the length of her vanilla hoodie, one of her favorites with its big hood and three-inch S-emblazoned cuffs. A switch in the left cuff turned on heater coils like in an electric blanket, only these ran off the static electricity produced by friction of her skin against the fabric.
Chloe tossed another grape. True to her word, as always, she had called a few days after their airport argument. They’d had lunch at Chloe’s, absolutely mouth-watering roast duck (despite Chloe’s claims of the meal still being in the experimental stages), and on Thursday, she’d gone with Vonnie to Busta’s. Then earlier tonight, they’d been driven out of Club Tattoo by…“What’d you call those people at Tattoo again?”
Chloe answered around a mouthful of grape. “The Porno Mafia? That’s what Ben called them. I don’t know anything about them.”
“And your boss was the guy in the biker jacket?”
“With the Hawaiian shirt, yeah.” Chloe grinned the way she always did when she talked about Geo.
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