by Jane Galaxy
“Claudia?” Vanessa flicked through a stack of bills and notices on the table—of course. Even when she paid on time, it was a never-ending stream of due dates. She’d need to start taking more work again soon. Hopefully her vacation hadn’t been for nothing—and speaking of which, she’d need to hustle even harder over at FB2 to get back up to speed after a week of being gone.
“You here?” There was no answer. She looked in the bathroom and the second bedroom where they kept a collection of plants on the only windowsill with decent light exposure, along with a few pieces of stacked-together furniture Papa had finished for his girls when they were ready to move out. Tonight it felt more like a dusty storage unit than a place where she’d always lived and never given a second thought.
Was this what money did to people, this quickly, this easily?
The apartment was quiet and still.
Her sister wasn’t here, and the door had been unlocked.
A curious sensation started at her ankles and began working its way up her knees and into the back of her spine—maybe it was fine, maybe Claudia had an extra group session tonight and didn’t think Vanessa would be back now. She hadn’t called or texted her sister to say when she’d be back exactly—she hadn’t called at all, actually, had simply sent a message that said
Landed in Europe. Everything’s fine
and left it there.
Her sister hadn’t been abducted from their childhood home in Queens and sold into sex slavery. There was no way Claudia had gone missing, her cane or her wheelchair to be found days later in a dumpster by a bridge as the conclusion of a precinct-wide manhunt that yielded no clues and would one day be a cold case for some upper-number cable channel to reenact with grainy photographs and dramatic voiceover narration.
No. Of course not. Vanessa’s rational, reasonable higher brain knew this.
The cold feeling kept rising through her limbs until it hit her chest and leapt into her throat, though. She had dumped the contents of the bag by the door to look for her cell phone when the door swung open, and Claudia came in with her cane.
“Oh,” said Claudia at the sight of her sister kneeling on the floor with designer clothing spread all around her. “You’re back.”
“Where have you been?” demanded Vanessa, rising to her feet.
“Down the hall, watching Sophia’s kids. She asked me to.” Claudia shrugged and came farther in to set her phone on the computer desk, surveying the green crocheted halter, the twist-front bikini top with an abstract flame pattern, and the Mary Katrantzou acid trip of a dress that lay on top of the pile. “Where’d you get all this?”
Vanessa gathered up the clothing and tucked it back into the Dior duffel, which she realized too late had the label facing up—
“Whoa, that’s not ours. What is all this stuff?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” Vanessa said with a sigh.
There was a long pause, the kind they used to have before Vanessa had started the pap job.
“I bet you’re tired, are you jet lagged?”
“Yeah, I’m tired, which means I’ll probably be up all night.”
She crouched to try to find the small zippered bag with the toothbrush she’d been using inside.
“So?” said Claudia after a moment. She was refusing to give up, and any other time, Vanessa might have admired that, but tonight it just felt like the start of a headache. “What did you do?”
Vanessa sat back on her heels.
“We traveled around Europe, and I photographed him. On beaches, doing charity work, things like that.”
“Mmm-hmm. And he just . . . bought you . . . a bunch of fancy clothing?” Even before that sentence was nearing its end, Vanessa could hear the reluctant cringe in Claudia’s voice. Her sister really wanted to know, but definitely didn’t want to ask. She looked at Claudia, leaning against the computer desk, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” said Vanessa. “Yeah.”
“Wow.”
She didn’t know how to answer that remark without feeling like she was going to say something snappish and angry, and kept her mouth shut. The toothbrush wasn’t in the zippered bag; she must have left it on the bathroom sink in Jax’s room or shoved it into a pocket just before they left for the airport.
And now Claudia was looking at her with a mix of surprise and what was probably disgust, right here where she was just trying to find a fucking toothbrush, her own sister standing here thinking about how she’d gotten railed by a movie star in exchange for some photographs—
Vanessa stopped searching. Claudia had spent several days by herself for the first time in essentially ever, had managed to broach the topic of her older sister’s sex life, and had just found her on the floor going through couture pieces. She stood again, camera in hand.
“Do you want to see the shots I took?”
Claudia’s reply was measured and quiet.
“Of course.”
They huddled together over the viewfinder.
“So the first ones are in Juan-les-pins, which is really far south along the coast in France.”
“Is that his car?”
“Yeah, he had it delivered, if you can believe that. They just came out with this model. That’s the inside.”
“Damn—how the better half lives.”
“He tried to make me drive it.”
“Did you?”
“Hell no, he’s . . . okay, but there’s no way I’d put myself on the line for however much that thing cost.”
Another pause, and then Claudia said,
“Okay? He’s in a Speedo the size of an eye patch, has abs like a college diver, and he’s okay.”
Vanessa felt her face heating up in spite of herself. “Fine, he’s nice and funny, and he can be generous. I guess.”
“You guess,” said Claudia, and took the camera to click through more shots of Jax off the edge of the boat. “Good lord, girl.”
He was better than okay, come to think of it. They got along, on some level; the sarcasm and teasing seemed to blend better when it was the two of them playing off each other. It was almost like she owed him a chance to be a better person than how she’d always thought of him. And—maybe she was imagining it, but did he seem more natural when she was around, too? He relaxed out of the Jax Butler persona and into an actual human being?
Contrary to Claudia’s reactions, Trevor didn’t see the value of the photos beyond beefcake when Vanessa showed them off the next day.
“Jax Butler doing volunteer work while on holiday—I never thought I’d see the day when that boy would stoop to the classic footie-with-the-kiddies goodwill tour to get the public on his side. Have a nice time in the warm blue waters with him, did you?”
Vanessa held the camera viewfinder against her chest, and she could almost hear Trevor squawking a bit in protest at the sudden disappearance of a shiny new haul.
“Hey, don’t be an ass,” she told him with a carefully-lowered amount of venom in her voice. “Don’t forget that first set shoot netted you a nice profit.” She almost succeeded in saying it without any obvious bitterness.
“Sweetheart, darling, I love these. This is very charming, the girlfriend perspective is great, and it’s just enough ahead of the curve that nobody’s doing it yet.”
“But?”
“I am absolutely not questioning your ability to track down some really outrageous exclusives—it’s definitely your specialty these days—”
“But.”
“—but it needs drama. I need drama, Vanessa. Excitement. I need more of what you brought me before!” Trevor tossed three magazines onto his desk, all with the words “awards season” and “contenders” somewhere on the cover. “Movies Now and its fuckin’ ilk are moving out of blockbuster season, and the only papers out there doing narratives are fashion mags and their fuckin’ in-house portrait photographers!”
“So am I allowed to send these through to Mindy, or are you telling me I just wasted a week of potential c
ommissions for nothing?”
He sighed and held up his hands.
“Work out a deal with Mindy if she can find a buyer, but I’m telling you—Jax Butler sells because he’s the best kind of star there is: outrageous and above nothing, not even his own dignity. Get me Butler doing something naughty, something illicit, and I’ll raise your rates, Vanessa. Hell, we’ll get you on staff. Signed paperwork and everything.” He slipped his rectangular blue sunglasses with the connected lenses onto his face and grabbed his cell phone from the desk to head for the door. “That’s a promise!”
She stood with her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed at the space where he’d just been. Trevor had promised her a lot of things in the past and had reliably let her down every time—the only thing different about this was the mention of a staff position, which was an interesting new bargaining tactic. One he surely knew he could dangle in front of her just to rile her up.
Vanessa dropped the card with the heavily edited version of the shoot at Mindy’s office and wandered off in search of an empty cubicle with her laptop. Sam was out on doorstep patrol with the rest of the guys, and the only sounds in the office were the television sets, which Mindy tended to keep turned down when Trevor wasn’t around, thankfully.
She settled in, flipped open the lid, and pulled up the photos she hadn’t shown Trevor—the ones without Jax in them, with far more drama.
Standing in Kos, she had been strongly reminded of what it felt like to photograph people who didn’t respond to her presence or her camera with a graceful flexing of arm extended to best show off a handbag or careful brush of a hand over hair when that hand had a $6,000 watch strapped around it.
The lives there on the island were narrowed to singularities: what to eat, where to get something to eat, how to survive this day before the next one, what to remember and how not to lose oneself in the face of hardship and indignity.
Vanessa missed the old work, doing the serious photojournalism, the real photos that had come from spying on her neighbors and family from the fire escape and gradually developed into a portfolio and the possibility of art school. Not the endless running around on walkie-talkies, speculating and gossiping about who would be eating lunch where.
This trip had been a palate cleanser, capturing the tail-end of a stranger’s broken smile, dust motes floating through trapezoidal rays of light along a promenade where people slept on cobblestones, a woman trailing her fingers along her chin and watching her children play in a puddle in the middle of a rutted-out road.
Pictures like that didn’t tend to sell well. They could be shown free at summer community art fairs, and people would stop and look and say, “Well, that’s good that you’re bringing attention to the issue,” but they would never buy the print of a haunted-looking child to hang on their wall at home. And news agencies, magazines, had hundreds of samples from photographers looking to claw their way into the business, so many samples that there was no way that submitting something ever came to anything, and then you wound up back for another semester of graphic design class at community college—
It was a hard fact, and a bitter one to swallow, too.
Vanessa’s great passion in life just wasn’t the kind of thing that people wanted to absorb.
Chapter Eleven
KNUTE FORSYTHE WAS one of the most ridiculous human beings ever created by God or whichever brain trust of acid-soaked government test subjects had managed to get in charge of manifesting the absurd onto the physical plane.
Jax liked him.
Or at least, he thought he might, if it were actually possible.
They had met at an old restaurant in Manhattan that Jax was pretty sure was actually an employee cafeteria for some kind of paper products sales company. Either that, or it was a baroque art piece run by hipsters who were more committed to normcore aesthetic than anyone he’d ever witnessed. There were a lot of receding hairlines up here. Either way, no one had looked at either of them the entire time they sat eating three hot dogs dressed with nothing but relish (Knute) and a club sandwich that came in a plastic box (Jax).
“This is my favorite place to come and relax,” Knute had said. “I have no shame in spending an entire afternoon basking under the counter girl’s negligent inattentions and contemplating the sociopathy of the human condition as it is influenced by our collective time on a tidally-locked planet.”
Jax looked down at his cafeteria tray. The hallmark stamp on his knife said Horn and Hardart. He had no idea what any of it meant.
“Also the slushies have free refills after 1pm.”
They took a car to the warehouse Knute used as production offices—he talked the whole way about a film he was writing about a pair of centuries-old werewolves living in Seattle who never actually transformed because it was always cloudy, and who used their relative immortality to be the true inspiration behind major scientific innovations. This was, Forsythe said mysteriously, a metaphor.
“To have the expanse of the human experience ultimately dictated by the whims of a tiny satellite—” He made a tch sound and shook his head, sending the giant sculpted waves of silvery-white hair on his head into a delicate wiggle.
This man swept Cannes and Sundance with reliable precision. The one with the hair like a Japanese painting and a fear-based obsession with the Moon.
“This is why it’s good that I talk with you,” said Forsythe.
“Really,” said Jax in a voice he hoped was not too sarcastic. The man sitting across the table barely blinked at this.
“I’ve seen your photograph in many publications, and you are always wearing sunglasses after dark.”
He paused and gave Jax a significant look that the younger man had no idea how to interpret, and so he simply nodded.
“And here I thought you were just another foolish child seduced by the glitter and glass of fame,” the director told him. “But perhaps I was mistaken. Your agent tells me you are interested in a part in my next film.”
“I’m looking to make some changes.”
“And give up a life of super heroics and the big victories?”
“Well, not with a contract as secure as this one, but. . . .” Jax tried to think of the right way to put it.
“You want to be taken seriously, to be a serious actor, and the mad Dane has the answer, you think.”
Jax looked at Knute Forsythe for a moment. The older man’s expression didn’t give off a vibe of disdain or judgment for such a bold statement. Maybe he’d misjudged the European’s perception.
“Sacrifices are a tricky thing to wrangle,” the older man went on. “I am not a stranger to this.”
“Oh?”
“I do coffee machine commercials in Sweden to help finance my little projects.” He turned in his office chair to look out the window. “But I never compromise: they are all cast with Sami people and filmed in the middle of a primal storm on the tundra; one has to preserve one’s aesthetic integrity somehow.”
“Sure. No. Yeah.”
“If you want this part, you must divest yourself of what you consider to be the normalcy of your life as it stands. Let me see what you’ve got.”
It turned out that Forsythe was gearing up for a half-filmed, half-animated version of something called The Hopkins Manuscript. He had Jax read for the part of Edgar, a teacher who becomes aware of impending global disaster and tries to warn others. The script made a couple dozen references to German animation and something called Kummerspeck—
“Grief bacon,” said Knute when Jax stopped to read that out loud to himself.
And it all felt very out of his league, but somehow familiar, in the sense of normal people responding to a terrifying situation in the only way they knew how.
Kind of like him, walking into a director’s office and announcing that he wanted something smaller and less certain than being an A+-lister in a multi-picture contract making hundreds of millions of dollars.
When they were finished, Forsythe sat back in his office chair a
nd stared at Jax. The Dane’s overwhelming presence wasn’t so uncomfortable now. That was true for a lot of auditions: once it was over, you knew there wasn’t much left to scare you, at least in the moment.
“Oh-kay,” Knute finally said. “There is a car outside to take you back to where you will go.”
And that was that.
In the back of the ride, Jax texted Natalie to thank Barry for the string-pulling. Blackmail. Whatever it had involved to get in front of Knute.
There’s a bottle of whisky making its way to his doorstep as I’m writing this, she answered.
Look at you go, Jax wrote.
All planning and thinking
All with the foresight
Jax drummed his index fingers against the top of his phone case, contemplating the next set of messages down from Natalie’s.
Wyd tonight?
It took Vanessa the entire length of a stoplight to respond.
Screwing around, organizing shit and cleaning out my hard drive, watching a forensic true-crime show and trying to decide what to eat for dinner. What’s up?
He wrote another quick text to Natalie first.
The Houndstooth was one of those rare New York upper-floor restaurants that had hung on through countless neighborhood do-overs and rent increases. It had been a jazz nightclub with a full orchestra at one point, then a disco with a light-up floor, and then, sometime in the 1980s—after renovations failed and the owner jumped off a bridge—was famously described in the papers as a good immersive experience, if you wanted to know what it was like to wait in line for bread at a Leningrad grocery store in mid-February.
Some enterprising young restauranteur picked it back up, dusted it off, and gave it a surgically-precise transformation back into the type of place where celebrities could bask in their own fame without the risk of actually running into normal people.
It had striped silk wallpaper with walnut wainscoting and huge curtains drawn back over the wall of windows looking down toward the financial district. The head waiter, reportedly a defector from beyond the Iron Curtain, never spoke, only observed, and knew everybody’s secrets. The code was strict and strictly enforced by staff: no autograph hounds, no peeks in by tourists off the street to see who was there, and above all, no paparazzi allowed.
