by Megan Crane
Jenna had allowed herself exactly two minutes to feel sorry for herself, which had then extended through her shower in the bright pink and white bathroom, but no one could tell she was sulking while she was underwater, could they?
Once out of the shower and dry, Jenna had then had the profoundly creepy experience of digging through another woman’s wardrobe for something to wear. She’d found out two things very quickly.
One, that Aunt Jen wore an incredibly floral perfume. Anais Anais, if Jenna’s nose was right, which Jenna had not worn herself since a junior high school dance but could still identify at a sniff. The vivid memories the scent brought back to her, of standing off to the side of the gym feeling ugly and unloved while Tripp Mason danced to ‘Crazy For You’ with Kelly St Pierre, took her long moments to dispel – much the way they’d taken most of high school to get over in the first place.
And two, that Aunt Jen actually hung up all her clothes and kept her closet and dresser neat and organized, which was something Jenna had never managed to do no matter how many times she read Real Simple and vowed to turn over a new leaf. It made it very easy to pick out an outfit. Feeling as if it was Halloween, Jenna rummaged through a selection of carefully ironed and pressed jeans that were the Eighties version of designer denim: Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, Sergio Valenti, and Sasson. All of them with unflattering high waists and straight or tapered legs, in washes that screamed ancient and ugly to Jenna’s eye. Those being among the nicer things that screamed through her brain. The acid-washed pair with ankle zippers almost made her pass out from the visual horror of it all. Jenna didn’t recall her aunt looking like such a fashion victim, but then, what had she known about fashion in 1987? She’d been twelve. All she’d wanted from life was a Benetton sweater.
In the end, there was only so much Jenna could do. No matter how organized the closet, it was still filled with Eighties fashions. The Eighties clothing revival of the early 2000s was, she’d discovered, very much inspired by the actual Eighties clothes, but not, it turned out, the same as Eighties clothes. This was a good thing for the early 2000s, and not so good for Jenna. But that was how she’d talked herself into a pair of stirrup pants (!) with penny loafers (!!) under a formless, gigantic cotton sweater that would have easily fitted three of her. At which point, there was no sense being coy about her hair, was there? She had already been forced to accept the fact that the Eighties did not provide much in the way of appropriate frizz-busting products for curls in the summer heat – or at least, Aunt Jen did not possess any. So she held her head upside down under the hairdryer, used half a bottle of hairspray, threw a bright yellow banana clip into the mess, and that was that. She looked in the mirror and nothing but big hair looked back.
She was about as Eighties as it was possible to get.
And then she couldn’t dawdle any longer, because she knew it would result in another apoplectic phone call from Ken, and another call might have her in tears. Very much not the New Jenna she was going for.
The cab screeched to a halt in front of the Wild Boys’ town house, jerking Jenna back into the moment. She was not at all happy about it – because the moment meant confrontations she would rather put off indefinitely. But wasn’t that how she’d ended up in this mess in the first place? She paid the driver what seemed like a laughably small sum and crawled out of the car, the sickly-sweet smell of her head full of Aqua Net hairspray surrounding her for a moment and making her cough.
She really didn’t want to go inside. Really did not want to go inside, from the bottom of her heart.
The thought of facing Tommy again made that heart pound and her face flush, and not, for a change, with suppressed yearning, but with abject embarrassment. What was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to act? Her instinct was to slink off in shame, or pretend he didn’t exist, which was the only way she’d ever handled even remotely comparable situations in the past. She couldn’t run away, however, without risking Ken Dollimore’s ire – to say nothing of homelessness – and she imagined that it would be difficult, to say the least, to pretend the lead singer of the band she had come to hang out with did not exist.
Grow a pair, Jenna, she ordered herself then, squaring her shoulders and hiking up her chin. This is not high school. He is an international superstar and will take no more notice of you than any other insignificant groupie – of which he has millions, as you well know. What makes you think the most humiliating moment of your life even registered in his?
Oddly soothed by the realization that Tommy was unlikely to recall the night before, much less deliver knowing or mocking looks or something equally horrifying, Jenna marched up to the front door and submitted to the exact same entrance exam of the day before.
‘Name?’ the butler asked tonelessly, as if he’d never laid eyes on her. Had she not remembered it so clearly, she might have wondered herself.
‘It’s Jenna Jenkins,’ Jenna said. Her eyebrows arched up. ‘Just like it was yesterday. I haven’t changed it.’
He did not so much as blink. ‘And the nature of your business?’
‘I’m supposed to sit in with the band,’ Jenna said. ‘Again.’
‘And are you expected?’
‘I certainly hope so. Otherwise, we’ll all be awfully embarrassed, won’t we?’
Though he did not alter his expression in any discernible way, Jenna was left with the distinct impression that should there be any embarrassment, the butler did not plan to share in it.
‘If you’ll be so kind as to provide a licence or some other form of identification, such as a passport,’ he intoned as if he was auditioning to be an automated system, ‘you can wait here in the vestibule while your identity is verified and your appointment is cleared.’
‘I think it might be easier to fly carry-on with a full make-up bag than it is to get into this house,’ Jenna told him, and not in a complimentary way.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Delivered in a snide tone, with a snotty sort of blank look to match, as if Jenna had started speaking in tongues.
‘Never mind,’ she said, and showed the butler her teeth.
He made her wait extra long as revenge, she was sure, but eventually she was cleared to enter the premises.
Her foot was on the top stair outside the top-floor studio when the door in front of her opened and Duncan Paradis stepped out. Her skin crawled. And then kept on crawling, when Eugenia Wentworth appeared behind him. Her face was in mid-pout, which morphed into a full scowl when she saw Jenna.
‘What is she doing here?’ she demanded, putting her hands on Duncan’s shoulders as if she needed assistance to stand, which might very well have been true in the heels she was wearing.
‘You’re no fucking use to me if you’re not where I tell you to be, are you?’ Duncan asked Jenna in a relatively mild tone. Jenna wasn’t fooled; she could see his expression, flared nostrils and all.
‘I had no idea what time I was supposed to be here this morning,’ Jenna said crisply. New Jenna, she thought. ‘I’m so sorry. Ken was appalled.’
‘I don’t give a shit about Ken Dollimore,’ Duncan growled at her. ‘And I don’t give a shit about you either. Do you have anything to tell me? Were you here last night, or did you fuck that up too?’
Wow, she disliked this man. And the woman hanging all over him, gleeful to watch him light in to someone else. But Jenna ordered herself not to react.
‘I was here,’ she said as calmly as she could, especially given the images of the night before that paraded through her head. ‘Nothing came up. It was mostly songwriting, which didn’t allow for much talking.’
Duncan glared at her for a moment, then grunted. Whether to himself, to Jenna, or simply because he was a pig, Jenna didn’t know.
‘Make sure you’re here on time from now on,’ he suggested in that soft, evil voice. ‘You don’t want me on your ass.’
‘No,’ Jenna agreed. ‘I certainly don’t.’
When his gaze turned suspicious, she pasted on a
polite smile, and stepped to the side with apparent meekness to let them brush past her on their way down the stairs, off to do things Jenna preferred not to imagine.
‘Have fun,’ Eugenia murmured, wreathed in sarcasm. As if prancing off somewhere with Duncan was any great triumph.
Jenna sighed when they disappeared around the landing, and tried to rub the sudden knots out of her neck with her hand. Then there was nothing else to do but walk into the studio.
Inside, Sebastian was behind the glass, playing a guitar solo. Richie stood off to the side of him, nodding along to the music and waiting for his cue. Nick, angry scowl at the ready, was behind the console with three men Jenna had never seen before. And Tommy was right there in the little lounge area separate from the two closed-off studio areas, sitting directly in her line of vision, his body packed into tight jeans and a white T-shirt, and arrayed across the leather chair with all the bonelessness of a cat.
Awkward.
He did not look as if he had any trouble remembering who Jenna was, or as if she had mercifully faded into the great anonymous sea of his groupies. In fact, his mouth tilted over into that little smirk when he saw her, which was as good as an announcement that he remembered every detail of the night before.
Jenna refused to give him the satisfaction of reacting, so she did nothing. She stood tall. She met his gaze. She somehow kept from turning beet red. She waited.
‘Don’t be late again,’ he told her in a soft voice, without so much as blinking. ‘You can’t build trust if you’re sleeping in while we’re working, can you? And then what will you tell Duncan?’
He glanced away for a moment, fighting a smile.
She decided she hated him.
Then he looked back at her, those green eyes wicked and still so clear, and Jenna knew she was a liar.
10
Life – or her paranoid schizophrenic delusion, and Jenna wasn’t sure some days which one was the worse possibility – settled into routine. It was amazing what a person could get used to. For one thing, she was immersed in a world she knew a lot about, but which was very different in daily practice from what she’d imagined. Or anyway, her reaction to it was different – perhaps because she was no longer locked in her usual epic Tommy Seer fantasy.
The aftermath of the Iran-Contra hearings, and President Reagan’s acknowledgement that ‘things had gone astray’, fascinated her in a way neither had originally – perhaps because she was old enough this time around to be outraged. She scoured the New York Times every day. She followed the Senate hearings on Judge Bork, laughed over John McEnroe’s antics at the US Open, skimmed over the visit of Pope John Paul II, marvelled at the way Donald Trump was seen as an actual force to be reckoned with rather than a reality-television hack, and read about Mayor Koch’s plan to commit the mentally-ill homeless to Bellevue against their will. The war against terrorism was alive and well in 1987, Jenna discovered – it was not an invention of the 2000s. In fact, it seemed to have a whole lot more to do with the Pan-Am airline hijacking in 1986, the cold war, the Iron Curtain, and Libya.
She took herself to the movies, because it just so happened that the summer and early fall of 1987 were loaded with movies. And not just any movies: the movies that had so thrilled her as a teenager that they’d helped form the foundation of her subsequent thoughts on life and romance, to her shame.
She saw Dirty Dancing in the theatre, which her parents had not allowed her to do back when she was a kid, and sighed just as much over Patrick Swayze on the big screen as she had over the VHS tape she’d watched on the sly years before. She saw The Big Easy and thrilled anew over the heat between Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. She saw No Way Out and managed to restrain herself from shouting out Kevin Costner’s true identity in the first scene. She saw Fatal Attraction on its opening night, and felt gleeful at the shock and dismay of the males in the audience.
‘So much for Glenn Close’s career,’ she heard one guy tell his friend as they all shuffled out of the theatre, with a punctuating bark of a laugh that clearly meant he was angry. ‘She was great in The Big Chill, but she’s finished. Talk about career suicide.’
‘I’m betting you’re wrong about that.’ Jenna turned around, looked him in the eye, and announced this, not caring when the two men stared at her in shock. ‘I’m betting she’ll have a long and glorious career, actually.’
The man shook his head at her, as if she were very dim. ‘No man will ever pay more money to see that crazy broad,’ he informed Jenna. Condescendingly. He and his friend snickered.
‘Just remember you said that,’ Jenna suggested, with a smile.
And then there was The Princess Bride, which Jenna had never before seen on the big screen. She fell in love with the movie all over again, and saw it more than once, as if she could melt into the movie – become it, somehow.
In the bookstores she ran her hands over fresh new copies of her old favourites Hollywood Husbands by Jackie Collins and Through a Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen. She was thrilled to see Stephen King’s It and Patrick Suskind’s Perfume on the bestseller list, both of which had disturbed her when she’d read them sometime in the early Nineties.
But mostly, she worked.
If that was what it could be called.
There was a clever advertisement for Charivari boutiques that she kept seeing everywhere that read: what is expected of New York is the unexpected. The same could be said of double-agenting for an international pop star and his devious star-maker manager.
Duncan made a point of lying in wait for Jenna each morning. He pounced somewhere between the butler (who continued his obnoxious entrance exam daily) and the studio door, lurking around the town house doing God only knew what. Jenna wondered if in later years Duncan would perhaps consolidate his power base, and therefore wouldn’t find it necessary to skulk around quite so much. At least, she had never read a word about Duncan subjecting his later acts to the sort of scrutiny he demanded and performed on the Wild Boys. She had to wonder if it was a chicken/egg scenario.
Not that she did much wondering while she was experiencing the pleasure of having Duncan vent his considerable spleen all over her.
‘I don’t believe that pompous little shit isn’t talking,’ Duncan growled at her today, having cornered her in the kitchen when she foolishly stopped for some caffeine. The lack of Starbucks confounded her, daily.
The good thing was, the New Jenna Project had helped. Not that Jenna was enjoying herself or these little chats, but she wasn’t cringing away in fear, either. She called that progress.
‘Tommy talks a lot,’ Jenna said, pretending she was completely serene as she mixed milk and sugar into her coffee. ‘But he generally wants to talk about different tracks on the album, or argue with Nick about whose ego is larger and so who is the bigger danger to the band, like Sting and Stewart Copeland in the Police.’
‘This is bullshit,’ Duncan growled. ‘You’ve been hanging around with them for a month, and this is the best you can do?’
‘I can’t make them plot against you,’ Jenna said, with a little bit of a laugh.
‘You think this is funny?’ he demanded, stepping closer and trapping her against the counter. He loomed over her – one of those men who was not afraid to use his bigger body to intimidate. He was close enough that she could see the veins bulge in his thick neck, and his Adam’s apple bob angrily above his collar.
‘No, of course not,’ she said, trying to stay calm. ‘But I tell you everything they say. I’m not sure what else I can do.’
‘We’re talking about money,’ Duncan hissed at her. ‘Not whatever fairy tale you have in your head about rock stars and music videos. This is about money. And I have no intention of losing out on my investment.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ Jenna murmured. She aimed for soothing, but feared it came out more strangled.
‘I made that little punk what he is,’ Duncan ranted. ‘I made him! He was nothing when I found him!’
Jenna
had by now heard a variation on this theme at least once a day. Tommy was ungrateful. Tommy was an upstart. Blah blah blah. She tuned Duncan out, and tried to edge along the counter and away from him.
‘Duncan? Where are you?’
Jenna was delighted to hear Eugenia’s rancid tones waft into the kitchen, sing-songing in from the next room. Saved by the bitch, she thought happily, then schooled her expression to something more neutral when Duncan’s head swung back towards her.
‘You better hope I don’t decide you being here has been a waste of my time,’ he hissed, leaning in way too close, so Jenna could feel his breath puff against her cheeks.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Jenna promised, craning her head away from him, and then sagged back against the counter in relief when he stepped back, out of her personal space at last. Note to self: never turn your back to a room, not in this house.
Seconds later, Eugenia stomped into the room, wearing her usual expression of distaste, which only sharpened when she saw Jenna. She opened her mouth.
‘I don’t have time for your whining today,’ Duncan barked, cutting her off before she could start. She clamped it shut with an audible click. ‘I have meetings,’ he continued, running a hand over his tie and his suit jacket, one that made Jenna think of Tony Soprano again. ‘Trump,’ he said significantly. Eugenia sighed in admiration. Jenna had to force herself not to ask if the two of them were planning to compare bad-hair tips.
Then she had to force herself to look away from the kiss they shared. Duncan held Eugenia’s cheek in his palm. It was … almost tender. Disturbing on a whole new level.
When he left, barking orders down the hallway in the direction of one of his assistants, Jenna returned her attention to her coffee. She stirred the hot liquid with a teaspoon and quelled her urge to fling some of that liquid into Eugenia’s face when the other woman stepped into the personal space that Duncan had so recently vacated. What was with these people?
‘You are standing too close to me,’ Jenna said, without inflection. ‘Do you want coffee?’
