“Good morning,” said Kate tentatively, feeling like an outsider in her own kitchen.
“Would you like some eggs?” offered Sapphire. “I think I could find one or two more in the fridge, although to tell you the truth, it is not very well stocked.”
Was she actually being scolded for not stocking the fridge? “No, thank you. To be honest, I really don’t have much of an appetite.”
“Yes, that is quite apparent,” said Hamilton. “You know, Kate, you really should eat something. The big head/small body lollipop look is so last year.”
“You know, Kate, he’s right,” Sapphire interjected. “No man wants to cuddle up at night with a bag of bones.”
“Excuse me?!?”
“I’m just saying—as a friend—that you might want to put on a few pounds before you head back out there.”
“Before I head back out there? What is that supposed to mean?” Kate couldn’t believe her ears. Was her dear “friend” Sapphire actually giving her dating advice in front of her husband?
“Okay, Katie, I think you need to sit down and take a deep breath,” said Hamilton, gesturing to the chair across from him as he lovingly pulled Sapphire down into the one at his side. “Sapphire and I have something we need to talk to you about.”
Kate obediently took her seat. “Okay.”
“I think it is fairly obvious what is happening here.” Hamilton looked toward Sapphire, who placed her hand gently over his and looked up at him adoringly.
“Well, it’s not obvious to me,” Kate lied, trying desperately to stall the inevitable.
“Sapphire and I have fallen in love.” With that, they both looked toward Kate as if awaiting her blessing.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Kate’s pain and disbelief propelled her up to a standing position.
“Oh dear,” said Sapphire, moving closer to Hamilton, who placed a protective arm over her shoulders as if to shield her from Kate’s bad breeding.
“Now, Katie, I don’t think that sort of language is necessary, do you? I was sincerely hopeful that we could all discuss this like the evolved adults we are—well, that some of us are and some of us are striving to become.” He smiled condescendingly at Kate, as one would smile at the village simpleton.
The room had started to spin. Kate saw bits and pieces of Hamilton’s and Sapphire’s smug faces as they came in and out of focus, but mostly what she saw was her own rage and confusion. She needed them to know how much pain they were causing her—how wrong, cruel, and misguided they were—but all she seemed to be able to manage was another strained “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Oh, Katie,” said Hamilton, shaking his head in pity and disappointment. “I can see we are not going to get anywhere with you right now. You are clearly too upset to have a rational conversation. As usual, you are letting your emotions run away with you.”
“Letting my emotions run away with me?” Kate stammered. “What reaction should I have, Hamilton? Should I give you my fucking blessing?”
“That would be lovely, Kate, but I honestly don’t think that you are up to it quite yet. I think that would be a great area to discuss with Penelope when—”
“Fuck Penelope!”
Hamilton gasped at this blasphemy.
“Oh dear,” Sapphire simpered; moving even closer to him.
“I have no interest in sitting here watching you throw a tantrum, Kate,” Hamilton said, maintaining his affectation of patience. “Nor do I wish to drag Sapphire into your little drama.”
“My little drama? You two are having an affair!”
“See, Kate, that is exactly what I am talking about—that kind of dramatic, accusatory language. Sapphire and I are not having an affair, we are in love. Frankly, you know as well as I do that you and I have been growing apart for some time.”
“No,” said Kate, the reality of the situation finally beginning to sink in. “I did not know that.”
“Well then, you were the only one. Penelope and I have been discussing it for months.”
“Discussing you and Sapphire?”
“No, of course not. What has happened between me and Sapphire is, well, a happy surprise.”
“Not for everyone,” Kate snapped.
“There is no need to be rude, but I see that you just can’t help yourself. I really think it would be best if you left before you say something that you regret.”
Kate couldn’t believe her ears. “Are you kicking me out of my own house?”
“Oh, come on, Katie, was it ever really your house?”
Kate sank back down into the nearest chair. Her legs had turned to jelly, so she was really left with no other choice.
“Sapphire and I have decided that we want to live together,” Hamilton went on, “and we think that living together in this house makes the most sense for us.”
“But…what about me?” Kate hated how pathetic she sounded, but she just felt so darn…pathetic.
Sapphire leaned into Hamilton and, in a stage whisper that could have been heard across a football field, said, “It’s just like you said. She is totally making it all about her.”
“I know, baby,” said Hamilton, planting a kiss on her surgically miniaturized nose. Turning to Kate, he said, “If you could just try to stop being so overly emotional and see this situation objectively, you would see that it is best for everyone. Sapphire and I are two people, so we need the space this house affords, and—let’s be realistic here, Kate—the only thing in this house that is really yours is your wardrobe…such as it is.”
Kate opened her mouth to protest, but before she could utter a word, she was struck dumb by the realization that what he said was true. Hamilton had chosen the house without her input while she was spending a month at the Ultimate Health spa preparing for their wedding with a month-long liquid diet. By the time they got back from their honeymoon, the house had been completely furnished. The truth was, most of her clothes had been bought by a stylist, so they didn’t really have much to do with her, either…such as they were.
Kate sat silently for a moment, then made a painful admission: “I don’t know where to go.”
“Oh, Kate, do you really think I would ever put you out on the street?” asked Hamilton, kind again now that he sensed he was going to get his way. “Haven’t I always taken care of you?” Kate admitted to herself that, yes, he always had taken care of her, and she began to relax into her habitual response of letting him do so.
“Yes, you have.”
“Exactly, and I am not going to stop now.” He smiled at her. “Now, you’d better go start getting your things together, okay?”
“Okay,” said Kate dully, standing up on numb legs and turning to go.
“Your mother is expecting you.”
14
Kate stood on her mother’s doorstep willing her finger to ring the doorbell. She knew in her heart of hearts that this was a terrible mistake, but Hamilton had convinced her that this was the safest place for her to be. “The hotels are crawling with paparazzi, Kate. Do you really want to deal with that right now?” And just like that, he had gotten his way again. Maybe this is for the best anyway, thought Kate. Maybe this is the time that my mom will step up and be there for me.
Then her mother opened the door.
“Hello, Kate,” she said coolly, making no move to welcome her into the house.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Well, I guess you should come in.” Her mother stepped backward in the marble entryway, opening the door just wide enough for Kate to step through. “How long do you think you will be staying with us?”
Kate bristled. “I don’t know, Mom. What’s standard for women who have been dumped by their husbands?”
“Oh, Katie, do you really think it is necessary to talk like that?” Kate had forgotten that, to her mother, any sentence that contained both “dump” and “husband” was profanity.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but it’s true.”
“I know it’s true, dear, but
that doesn’t mean we have to talk about it.”
“What would you like to talk about, Mom?”
“Honestly, Kate,” sighed her mother, “I don’t have time to talk. Your father and I have an event at the club and then we have a dinner to attend, so I won’t have time to talk to you at all until tomorrow.”
“Should I have my people call your people to book an appointment?”
“Oh, there it is again. Do you really think sarcasm becomes you? You know, Katherine, no man wants to come home to that sort of attitude.”
“Hamilton isn’t breaking up with me because of my sarcasm, Mom.”
“No,” conceded her mother. “Not just your sarcasm.” She turned on her heels and headed down the hallway, leaving a shell-shocked Kate standing in the open door. “Well, are you coming, dear? I barely have time to show you to your room before I need to get your father ready for our party.”
“Yes, I’m coming,” answered Kate, collecting herself and following her mother through the unfamiliar house.
Kate’s parents, Henry and Marcia, had moved out of her childhood home the day Kate graduated from kindergarten and relocated several times, following their hobbies from condo to condo. First they had moved into a two-bedroom unit in Marina to try their hand at boating. When they realized they didn’t especially like the water, they decided to try their hand at horseback riding and bought a large three-bedroom near the equestrian center in Studio City. They soon found that, although they loved horses, they couldn’t take the heat of the valley in the summer, so they bought a town house on the Mountaingate Country Club property in Bel Air and took up golf. In each home, Kate’s designated space got smaller and smaller. It wasn’t due to lack of room. In their current home, Henry and Marcia had four bedrooms, but each one served a more important function than welcoming their daughter. They each had their own office (for what, Kate never understood), and the only other spare room was their designated junk room. Or, as Kate would be calling it for the foreseeable future, home.
Struggling with the foldout cot, Kate could hear her parents getting ready in the room next door. More accurately, she could hear her mother directing her father’s attempt to get dressed. “Oh, Henry, you can’t be serious. You can’t wear that. Just put on what I laid on the bed.” Then there was her father’s familiar mumble, followed by her mother: “How could you not see it? It’s right there on the bed. I swear to god, Henry, you better pray I don’t pass on before you do or you’ll die of starvation.” Mumble. “Why? Because you won’t be able to find the refrigerator, that’s why.” Mumble…mumble…squeal! “Oh, Henry, you stop that right now. You’re going to mess up my makeup.” Giggle…mumble…giggle.
Kate went out to sit in her car.
Fighting or fucking. That was her parents in a nutshell. And there just wasn’t room in their little shell for Kate. She often wondered why they had decided to have a child, finally coming to the conclusion that they had simply wanted to see what a child born of their love and exceptional DNA would look like. Once they got a good look, they seemed to lose interest.
Kate rolled down her car windows to avoid suffocation and wondered how long it would take her parents to notice that she had left the house.
Ha.
When she was nine years old, one of her little girlfriends had asked her, “You know how when you’re really mad at your mom and dad? And you hide from them and then they can’t find you? And then they get really worried and your mom cries and everything? And then they find you under the sink and they are all happy and everything and then they give you ice cream?”
“Yeah,” said Kate, even though the one time she had hidden from her mom (under the bed, since her mother used Kate’s bathroom cabinet to store her extra makeup), she had woken up in her hiding place the next morning. The note her parents left for her on the kitchen counter said they had gone out for breakfast.
“Of course, I would probably get arrested for sleeping in my car in this neighborhood,” Kate said to her rearview mirror. “And Lord only knows if my parents could fit bailing me out of jail into their busy social calendar.”
She sat in her car until she saw her parents’ pink Buick pull out of the garage. Henry never complained about driving a car that was the exact shade of Pepto-Bismol, his pride in his wife’s Mary Kay cosmetics success blinding him to his emasculation. Kate waved as they drove by, even though she knew that her wave would go unanswered. Her mother would never take her eyes off the vanity mirror, and her father would never take his eyes off her mother.
Unobserved pouting was just as unsatisfying at thirty years old as it had been at six, so Kate decided to surrender to the fact that she would be spending her first night as an abandoned woman alone in a strange condo. Dragging her bags down the long hallway to the junk room, Kate realized that, in spite of the thirty years of evidence to the contrary, she had somehow imagined that she would spend this evening being comforted by her mother. How could she have forgotten that her mother viewed pain as a contagious disease, particularly when caused by something humiliating or embarrassing? The simple truth was that Marcia was not a fan of anything that made one less attractive. Cancer was always bad because of the hair loss, but anorexia was a negative only in extreme cases. Kate secretly believed that her mother was disappointed that she’d never been featured in any “Scary Skinny!” magazine photo spreads. Looking down at her jutting hip bones, she thought that perhaps her mother would finally be proud of her—until she remembered that she’d just been dumped.
Skinny and dumped.
Marcia would never be able to compute such an oxymoron. Kate pictured her mother, arms flailing wildly as her body spun around in circles, repeating, “Does not compute, does not compute,” until her head finally popped off from the strain.
The sound of Kate’s laughter echoed back to her through the empty house. Was there anything sadder than a woman laughing alone? Or, more to the point, was there anyone crazier than a lone laugher? Or, thought Kate, is there anything sadder, crazier, or more pathetic than a woman wondering whether her pathetic life is more sad or crazy?
“No,” Kate said aloud. “Except maybe talking to yourself.”
She considered trying to squeeze herself into the space under the bathroom sink but shuffled into the family room instead and settled into her father’s La-Z-Boy recliner. If she was going to die of loneliness, she would breathe her last breath while watching E!
When she woke up at dawn the next morning, she found a note from her parents. They hadn’t gone out for breakfast without her.
They had gone to Palm Springs.
This called for a full-fat latte.
15
Michael wondered if arriving at Starbucks before it opened was a new low or a new level of accomplishment. When he had woken up at four-thirty a.m., his mind had been racing with story ideas. He couldn’t wait to get up and start writing, but when he sat down in front of his computer his mind went blank. He looked around his carefully decorated condo. The black leather couches and glass coffee table belonged to “Michael the agent.” In spite of the beautiful ocean views, this was a place for quick catnaps squeezed in between business dinners and breakfast meetings, not a place that welcomed a day spent in creative pursuits. Like so many of the accoutrements of his glamorous life, his home didn’t seem to fit him anymore. Maybe it never had. Now, standing outside of Starbucks at five a.m., chatting with his fellow laptop-clutching insomniacs, Michael felt as though he had discovered something that he suspected the members of his high school’s marching band had known all along: nerds have more fun.
When the doors finally opened at five-thirty, the teenager who stepped aside to let the line move inside shook his head indulgently at his crazy regulars. He had to be up at this hour or he would be fired. The fact that these loonies chose to be here, looking as happy as Michael did, was just plain wrong.
“Good morning, Chad!”
“You do know that it is annoying to be so chipper this close to daw
n, don’t you?” growled the hungover teenager.
“Annoying, Chad? Or charming?” Michael all but skipped over to “his” table to put down his computer before taking his place in the line that would be only this blissfully short until the rush began at six a.m.
“Annoying,” said Chad, settling in behind the counter.
Michael laughed and considered where a cranky barista could fit into his new story.
Since he had begun writing in earnest, he found his life much less annoying. Almost anything—or anyone—was fodder for one of his stories. Even Sapphire Rose had graduated from being a constant source of irritation and frustration to being a wellspring of material for a modern fairy tale he was writing about a wicked stepmother who tortured her beautiful and kind stepdaughter by forcing her to undergo experimental plastic-surgery procedures that she was considering for herself. He hadn’t figured out how the story would end yet, but he was thoroughly enjoying the process of transferring his ridiculous experiences with Sapphire onto the page. He was also enjoying writing about the beautiful stepdaughter. He called her “Cat.” At some point, Cat would be rescued by a handsome prince. Michael thought he might call him something along the lines of “Michael.”
Looking around the quiet coffeehouse, Michael reminded himself that 5:45 a.m. was probably too early to realistically expect to see Kate. He was still buzzing from their conversation the day before. She seemed to like him, too, even though she thought he was just a struggling writer. In fact, they had chatted for an hour and she hadn’t even asked him what kind of car he drove, which had to be some sort of record for the Los Angeles dating scene. They really hadn’t had time to talk about cars, though. They’d talked about the horrors of sixth grade and the escape they had both found in books. They’d talked about the difficulty of staying sane and grounded while negotiating the drama of West Los Angeles. And they’d spent quite a long time trading mother stories. They had talked like old friends.
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