Famous (A Famous novel)

by Jenny Holiday

  She blew out a breath. Summarize herself in a few sentences. The CliffsNotes version of her life. It shouldn’t be so hard. But the fact that it was might be part of the problem.

  “You know I was planning to move to L.A. after we met at Vicky and Tyrone’s wedding,” she began. “I did, and I…made it in the music business.”

  He nodded. “Good for you.” The praise was delivered in a matter-of-fact way, like he wasn’t surprised. She toyed with the idea of telling him that at times, the confidence he had shown in her at the wedding had been the only thing keeping her going. She hadn’t always believed in herself, but on the worst nights, the ones where she’d been tempted to hop a plane back to Minneapolis, beg her parents’ forgiveness, and get her old coffee shop job back, she’d remembered the extraordinary man from the wedding who had been so sure she was going to succeed. She hadn’t wanted to let him down, which was stupid because she’d never expected to see him again. But the memory had been enough to keep her putting one foot in front of the other until, somehow, she’d done it.

  “I have been wildly successful by any external measure,” she said, still struggling with how to explain things.

  “But?” he prompted.

  “But it’s almost like there’s a machine at work now. The Emerson Quinn machine. I have these managers. They’re very…persuasive.”

  “So you ran away from the Svengalis.”

  That was pretty much it. She laughed, but it sounded bitter to her own ears. “I’ve just come off a ten-month tour.”

  He whistled. “Damn. You really are a big shot.”

  “It’s time to start working on the next album, but I don’t…”

  “You don’t want to do it.”

  She shook her head. That wasn’t it. She wanted to do another record. The fact that she hadn’t picked up her guitar or sat at a piano for twenty-four hours was making her a little crazy, actually. “I want to write the next album by myself.” The declaration came out a little breathless. Actually saying it out loud for the first time was scary, but also exhilarating. “Not only without co-writers, but, like elementally by myself. Physically alone.”

  And it wasn’t only the business side of things she was running from. She decided to be honest with him about that, too.

  “Also, I’ve had a string of…bad relationships. I feel like there’s so much noise in my life that I can’t make good decisions anymore. I need to clear my head and be by myself for a while.” She blew out a breath. “I want a break from my entire life, basically.” Wow, it sounded pretty pathetic summed up like that.

  “And you can’t tell them this?”

  She slumped forward and rested her head on the table. It was too heavy to continue holding up. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “So you came here. Why?”

  “Still hard to explain,” she said, deflating a little bit more.

  “Try.”

  She lifted her head and looked him straight in the eyes. No sense dissembling. He was either going to let her stay or he wasn’t. If he didn’t, she’d never see him again, so what did she have to lose by telling him the truth? “I was working with a co-writer yesterday. We wrote the first song for the new album. It’s called Song 58.” He furrowed his brow. “It’s a placeholder title. Song 58 is sort of a heartbreak ballad with a twist at the end—which is kind of my thing. It was fine. It should have been fine. But I…freaked out. I don’t want to do Song 58.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t even know. Maybe I can’t do anything else. But I want to try. But I feel like to really give it a shot, I need to physically get some distance. So I sprang myself from my golden cage and tried to think if there was anyone I knew who might help me. If there was a place I could go where I might be safe. It was…hard to think of somewhere. Of someone.”

  Evan made a weird, strangled noise in his throat. She might have laughed if she hadn’t felt like she’d slit her wrists and bled out all her stupid, childish wishes in front of him.

  “Why me, though?”

  What could she do but keep telling him the truth? Keep showing him all her insecurities? “Because you listened to me that night on the roof in Miami. You believed in me. You said I should be in touch if you could ever be of any help.” She took a deep, shaky breath, forcing herself to keep meeting his gaze. “No one had ever done that before. Or has since, really, at least not without some ulterior motive. And when I ran away, I tried to think who in the world I could trust. I thought of you.”

  “All right.” He spoke quietly, and his eyes glittered with an intensity that hadn’t been there before. “You can stay a few days. A week, tops. Until you figure out something else. But I have one condition.”

  The hope that slammed into her was as abrupt and forceful as her fear had been at the farmers’ market. The idea of a haven. A respite. A chance to breathe. It shimmered before her like a beautiful mirage. She hardly dared to blink for fear it would disappear, prove to be merely a fevered projection of her desperate, overheated mind. “What?” she whispered, almost afraid of what he was going to say.

  “I hate to get all double-oh-seven on you, but you’re going to have to stay in the house, or disguise yourself or something, because no one can know who you are.”

  She couldn’t help letting loose a peal of laughter. He had no idea how on board she was with that condition.

  He must have thought her laughter signified incredulity, though, because he slapped the table in front of him. “I mean it. I’ve done my time in the spotlight, and I’m not going back there. Not ever. Not for anyone. Besides that, I can’t have a media circus descend. I’m up for tenure this year, and some of my colleagues already think I’m trading on my father’s infamy—that I got the job to begin with because my last name is Winslow. So no one can know that you’re here. No one.”

  Her laughter died in her throat when she heard how passionately, how urgently, he spoke. She of all people understood his wish to remain out of the spotlight. Fame did weird things to people. For her, it was the price of doing music. For him, there was no payoff whatsoever.

  So she stuck out her hand for him to shake. “You got yourself a deal.”

  By the time Evan slid one of Mrs. Johansen’s casseroles out of the oven and began to assemble a salad from the farmers’ market haul, several hours had elapsed. Plenty of time for second thoughts to creep in. And third thoughts. After he had driven his surprise houseguest to Walmart and trailed her while she picked up some clothes and hair dye, she’d disappeared into one of his guest rooms for the balance of the day, leaving him ample time to google her shit.

  And what a lot of shit there was. When she’d said she was “extremely famous,” it wasn’t as if he hadn’t believed her. But he hadn’t been prepared for three hundred and seven million Google results. Or for a cascade of photos of her doing everything from eating at a restaurant to walking a red carpet in a ball gown to sneaking out of some boy band member’s house in the middle of the night—that last one seemed to have set off a firestorm of gossip. God, he was glad he hadn’t known, all these years, who Emmy NoLastName had become. To know that there had been millions of pictures of the muse that got away just sitting there for his perusal? It would probably have unhinged him more than his father’s trial had.

  Which was why he’d invited Mrs. Johansen to dinner. He needed a buffer.

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang.

  As he greeted Mrs. Johansen in the entryway, Emmy came bounding down the stairs wearing a new combination of shorts and tank top and sporting a jet-black hairdo that made her pale skin look even paler. She looked like the love child of Marilyn Manson and the Gap.

  The hair didn’t suit her at all. He tried but failed to hold back a laugh.

  She stuck her tongue out at him, which only made the pixie/goth juxtaposition all the more absurd. “At least it does the trick,” she murmured in his direction.

  Proving her point, Mrs. Johansen said, “I don’t think I’ve m
et your friend.”

  Emmy shot him a look as she sashayed past, eyebrows raised so high she might as well have said neener, neener, neener. It was funny—it was like now that they’d gone through the weirdness of her arrival, and the intensity of negotiating the terms of her stay, they had snapped back into the flirtatious banter they had enjoyed at the wedding.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Johansen. Emmy Anderson. I dyed my hair since we met each other this afternoon.”

  She’d handled that well, seamlessly slipping the fake last name they’d decided she should use into the conversation. “Anderson” sounded suitably generic for this part of the Scandinavian-settled Midwest—he hoped.

  Mrs. Johansen curled her lip. “Why? It looked so much better before.”

  Evan did laugh then. Mrs. Johansen did not fit most people’s stereotype of an elderly woman. Yes, she was a casserole-making machine, but she had quite a mouth on her and never hesitated to say exactly what she thought—unlike a lot of Midwesterners, who tended toward passive-aggression. Nope, Mrs. Johansen favored aggressive-aggression.

  Emmy smiled and shrugged. “Sometimes you gotta mix it up a bit.”

  They settled down to dinner—tuna casserole complete with crunched-up potato chips on the top, which Mrs. Johansen had included in a little baggie taped to the foil pan she’d made the casserole in.

  “So, Emmy. You and Evan are a couple?”

  “No!” Emmy turned pink. Of course, everyone was pink because of the heat, but she turned bright pink. “Evan and I are…”

  He waited for her to finish the sentence, but when it became clear she wasn’t going to, he came to the rescue. “Old friends. We were neighbors growing up,” he added, feeling like they needed a more specific backstory.

  “In Miami,” Mrs. Johansen said, but not, seemingly, with any suspicion.

  Shit. He hated lying to Mrs. Johansen, but what choice did he have?

  “Yes!” Emmy yelped, and he was thankful she had stepped up to do the actual lying. “I’m at the start of a vacation, and I decided to come see old Ev for a bit.” She punched him in the arm. “And besides, I am not in boyfriend mode right now.”

  “Why not?” Mrs. Johansen asked, and he found himself interested in the answer, too.

  “I’m taking a break from men for a while.” She glanced at him, and he couldn’t read her expression. Then she looked at her hands, which were folded at the table, and let a silent moment elapse before adding, “If you want to know the truth, I’ve had my heart broken one too many times in recent years.”

  Evan had learned during the afternoon’s crash course in Emerson Quinn that she was famous for immortalizing her ex-boyfriends in songs. She had referenced a “string of bad relationships” earlier, but he was surprised to hear her suggest that she’d had her heart broken. The dominant interpretation out there seemed to be that she ate men for breakfast—and then wrote songs about them and got rich.

  Emmy cleared her throat, then blew on a bubbling forkful of tuna casserole. “So, yeah, I have declared a moratorium on dating for a good long while.”

  “I have not,” Mrs. Johansen said. “And yet I can’t get a date to save my life. Which, given how old I am, anyone who went out with me might actually be called on to do.”

  “Have you tried internet dating?” Emmy asked before popping the cooled bite of casserole into her mouth. “Oh my God,” she moaned. “This is so good.”

  “Men in my age bracket aren’t on the internet.”

  “Well, who says you have to stick to men in your age bracket?” Emmy parried.

  “I like her.” Mrs. Johansen pointed at Emmy but spoke to Evan. Then she turned to Emmy. “Do you have one of those camera phone things?”

  Emmy nodded. “Want me to help you set up a profile?”

  Evan groaned as the two women began talking excitedly about how Mrs. Johansen could present herself to best attract would-be suitors, but nobody heard him.

  As Evan cleared the table and handed Emmy a tub of ice cream and a scoop, Emmy came to the shocking realization that she was having a good time. It was an odd sensation, not having the eyes of the public on her. Not having to watch what she said, how she sat, what she wore. How she laughed, whether she had lipstick on her teeth, if anyone she had ever dated was in photographing distance.

  She liked it.

  She also liked tuna casserole, it turned out. A lot—she’d had two helpings.

  And the company was first-rate. Mrs. Johansen was funny and friendly, once you got past her sometimes-brusque exterior. She made Emmy nostalgic for the years her grandmother had taken care of her after school. Emmy was looking forward to helping her try to get a date or two. She had the idea that this was what friends did—helped each other with their OkCupid profiles. Of course, most people’s friends weren’t seventy-nine, but hey, a girl had to start somewhere.

  And then there was Evan. Nerdy, gorgeous, cranky, complicated Professor Winslow, her co-conspirator. It was a good thing she had already declared it the Summer of No Men, because—there was no point in lying to herself about it—he was a temptation. There was an air of contained strength about him that was magnetic. His movements were graceful but measured, his eyes all-seeing but slightly shuttered. It was like he was holding back some part of himself, and the longer she was around him, the more she wanted to know what it was.

  “So I know you don’t paint anymore,” she said as she slid him a dish of ice cream. “But do you have any of your old stuff around?” His head snapped up, and his eyes darkened. Why did she feel like she’d done something wrong? She tried to clarify. “You have so much art in this house, but I’m not sure any of it is yours?”

  “You paint?” Mrs. Johansen asked.

  “No.” Evan spoke sharply. “I used to. But not anymore. Not for years.”

  Emmy still didn’t understand why he was so weird about this subject. He’d been the same way seven years ago. It was almost like he was talking about an addiction: I don’t drink anymore. “He was really talented,” Emmy said. “Supposedly poised to take the art world by storm, and—”

  “I don’t paint,” Evan snapped, in a tone that brooked no opposition.

  Okay, then. She was the guest here, she reminded herself, and if her host wanted to be all intense and weird over an abandoned career, it wasn’t her place to poke at him.

  “What do you do, Emmy?” Mrs. Johansen asked, clearly trying to diffuse some of the tension that had settled around the table by changing the subject.

  “I, ah, I’m a writer.” She hated deceiving Evan’s friend, and she thought a version of the truth was probably safe. Mrs. Johansen would have said something long ago if she had recognized Emmy. And Emmy was a writer—of songs. “I’m hoping to get some writing done while I’m here, in fact.”

  “Oh, have you published anything I’d know?”

  “No, no,” Emmy said quickly. “But I’m hoping the work I do this summer will…change things for me.”

  That, at least, was the absolute truth.

  “I think I’ll leave you two to ice cream,” Evan said stiffly, having ignored the half-melted bowl in front of him. “I have tons of work to do tonight.” He pushed back from the table.

  Mrs. Johansen smiled and shook her head. “No rest for the weary—or the untenured.” Then she turned to Emmy. “Did Evan tell you he’s up for tenure this fall?”

  Emmy shook her head. She didn’t exactly know what that meant, but it didn’t seem that now was the time to ask, given how annoyed he’d been with her questions about his painting.

  “Well, then he probably also didn’t tell you about his villainous department chair.” She grinned. “Honestly, academia is worse than a soap opera. My husband used to quote Kissinger, who apparently said, ‘The lower the stakes, the larger the egos.’ She set down her napkin. “So you both have summer projects—that’s nice.” Then she yawned. “Time for me to turn in.”

  “I’ll walk you across the yard,” Evan said.

  “Speaking o
f internet dating,” Mrs. Johansen said as Emmy followed them to the entryway, “if you’re not going to take this one yourself, maybe you can set him up with a profile, too. Never met a more chivalrous young man. He shouldn’t be rattling around alone in this huge house all the time lost in his work.”

  Both women ignored Evan’s eye-rolling, and after arranging to visit Mrs. Johansen tomorrow to finalize the OkCupid profile, Emmy stood on the porch and watched the pair shuffle across their adjoining yards, Mrs. Johansen hanging on to Evan’s arm like they were in Downton Abbey—if the young, handsome heir to the earldom had favored frayed, faded jeans and bare feet.

  Emmy took a deep breath and shook off the sense of unease that had permeated the evening since she’d brought up Evan’s painting. The air was heavy, sweet with the scent of the roses that covered Evan’s untidy, overgrown front yard. A soundtrack of crickets gained momentum.

  This was a good place. She was lucky to be here, even if only for a little while.

  She tilted her head back and looked into the sky, which was bleeding from light to dark blue as the evening’s first stars popped out, and tried to think why on earth Evan Winslow would give up painting.

  Chapter Five

  “Why don’t you paint anymore?”

  Evan rubbed his eyes against the bright sun as he shuffled into the kitchen the next morning to find Emmy already in it. He had avoided the question last night by going directly upstairs to his bedroom after seeing Mrs. Johansen home, and he was going to keep doing it. “Good morning to you, too.”

  “Coffee?” she asked, popping up before he could answer and pouring him a cup. She had made herself at home. In addition to brewing a pot of coffee, she had found the newspaper from out front. It was…oddly satisfying to see her making herself at home in his kitchen.

  “Your room okay?” he asked, partly out of real concern but also as a tactic to continue delaying the discussion of his abandoned artistic dreams.