by Daniel Price
“Okay.”
I stood up so fast, I became dizzy. I held my hands out, standing perfectly still until the room stopped spinning.
“Okay. I’m going.”
“I’ll walk you out,” said Big Bank with ominous inflection.
“No,” Maxina replied. “I’ll do it. Someone help me up.”
Big Bank pulled her to her feet. Honestly, I would have preferred his send-off to Maxina’s, but I wasn’t in a position to voice my preferences.
The Judge, Doug, and Big Bank all glared at me as Maxina walked me to the foyer.
“I see the little love mark on your neck,” she said.
“Yeah. I’m sure that was evidence, too.”
“Scott, I’m working at about thirty percent capacity right now. And about five percent of that thirty percent is considering the possibility that you didn’t orchestrate this. But whether this happened on purpose or by accident, whether you’re malicious, incompetent, or just plain jinxed, it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that this did not end well.”
“No,” I said, glancing back into the house. “No, it did not.”
“There’ll be plenty of blame to go around. I’ll certainly get my deserved share. But the biggest slice is going to you. Fair or not, that’s just the way the game is played. I feel compelled to tell my colleagues what a horrible mistake it was for me to hire you.”
“Then do it.”
She opened the door for me, then gazed out at the sunny street. “I have a lot of colleagues, Scott.”
“I know how it works.”
She looked up at me again. We were both having a terrible morning, and we were both a shade of our usual selves, but even our shades were bright enough to speak in soft language. She was asking for a reason not to ruin my career. I couldn’t offer one. All I could give her was my blessing. I couldn’t get away from this Scott Free.
Maxina blew a long and weary sigh. She squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll keep the Judge off your back.”
“Keep him off Harmony’s back.”
“He won’t touch her,” she replied. “Even I can’t touch her now.”
I grinned. I couldn’t help it. For Jeremy’s sake, and for the sake of my own conscience, I didn’t want to take pleasure in Harmony’s ultimate triumph. But I was only human, and she was a loved one of mine.
________________
It took me five minutes to stumble back to my car. I sat behind the wheel with my hand on the ignition key. My attention was captured by that damn red phone on the floor. Ever since yesterday, I’d been afraid to pick it up. But now that everything had reversed itself, now that up was down, left was right, black was white, I figured it would be cool to the touch again. I figured Harmony would love to hear from me.
One last time, I called her up. She answered after the very first ring.
“Hey baby!”
“Harmony.”
She hesitated. “Oh. Gosh. I’m sorry. I was expecting someone else. Who’s this?”
“You know who this is.”
Another pause. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir.”
“Harmony, it’s Scott.”
“You definitely have the wrong number, then. This ain’t Harmony. And I don’t know any Scott.”
At first I took it as an act of childish petulance and grew annoyed. Then I realized she was just being cautious.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I’m not recording this.”
“I didn’t say you were. I just said you got the wrong number.”
“So who am I talking to then?”
She mulled it over. “Danesha.”
“Well, hi, Danesha. My name is Scott. Scott Singer.”
“Is it now?”
“Yeah. Turns out it really is.”
“I don’t know,” she mused. “It’s kind of hard to believe you when it sounds like you’re disguising your voice.”
I laughed. No wonder she was antsy. “I’m not disguising my voice. I just have a cold. I got it yesterday from standing in the ocean. Remember?”
“No. Why should I? I don’t even know you.”
My amusement faded fast. “All right. You know what? This was a bad idea. I’m sorry I bothered you. Take care of yourself.”
“No. Wait. Don’t go.”
I paused. “Yes?”
“Did you say you were calling for Harmony?”
“I did.”
“As in Harmony Prince?”
“The one and only,” I replied. “Is she around?”
“No, but she’s all I see on the news these days. What do you think of her?”
I smiled. “There’s no simple answer to that question.”
“Well, what do you think about her future? I mean, this shit with the tape...”
“Nah. The tape’s a fake. If there’s one thing I know, it’s Harmony’s voice. And that’s not it. I figure by lunchtime, she’ll be completely exonerated.”
“And after that? “
“After that, she’s home free.”
She squealed with delight. She must have been on pins and needles, wondering if her daring stunt would work. There was no point in keeping her guessing. She deserved to hear it, especially from me.
“Yeah,” I confessed. “That woman’s unstoppable.”
“Really, now? I thought maybe you’d tell me there’s some people coming after her.”
“What, like hit men? No. No. That’s not what she needs to worry about.”
“What does she need to worry about?”
I vented a long, hot breath. “Well, there’s that little blond girl in Wisconsin who’s going to go missing in a week or two. There’s that cute little Cuban boy who’s about to get caught up in an international custody battle. And of course there’s the next Annabelle Shane, who’s probably loading up her daddy’s pistol as we speak. These are the people who are coming after Harmony. If I were her publicist, I’d tell her to work hard, work fast, and use every bit of the limelight while she’s got it. With luck, she might really go places.”
Her silence was tepid. “You really sound sick.”
“I know. That’s what I get for standing in the ocean.”
“Yeah? You regret it?”
I fixed a vacant stare out the windshield at the endless row of neat little houses.
“I regret it,” I said. “More than anything I’ve done in my life.”
“And I bet you’d do anything to take it back,” she replied cynically.
“No.”
“No?”
“No. There are some things I wouldn’t do.”
“Like what?”
I was going to tell her that I’d never sacrifice an innocent man. Not on purpose, anyway. But there was no point in splitting hairs. We were both the architects of Jeremy’s fate. Unlike me, Harmony was smart enough to see that somebody had to lose this dirty game I’d started. There was no point in faulting her when in truth I was just so damn impressed. I was so damn impressed that she managed to win by my rules.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I can’t take it back. But if I could wish for anything in the world right now, I’d wish for ten more seconds of credibility with Harmony Prince. I’d even settle for five.”
“Five seconds.”
“Five seconds where my words go past her suspicions, around her doubts, and straight on through to the woman inside.”
“That’s asking a lot,” she said.
“I’m not asking. I’m wishing.”
“What makes you think you even deserve five seconds?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s what Harmony thinks.”
She thought about it for a few moments.
“Why don’t you try me instead? I’ll be Harmony. And you can be whoever you claim to be. I’ll give you five seconds. How does that sound?”
“Discouraging.”
“Well, you’re just gonna have to take your chances, mister. You ready?”
“Sure.”
“Okay...go.”
“I wish you well.”
I ran out the clock in silence. Harmony laughed. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That was hardly even one second!”
I shrugged. “I guess I didn’t need the whole five.”
“You are so strange.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s what Harmony thinks.”
Her laughter died down. Now she opened her balcony doors and stepped out into the high ocean breeze. I could hear the wind static.
“I met this guy once,” she told me. “He was a strange man, just like you, but he was all charming and funny and shit. And he had a nice face. Even though he was older than me, and white, I got a little bit of a crush on him. He seemed kind of sweet on me, too, but he had a job to do and he was fixed on doing it. See, he had this crazy idea. He had this crazy thing he wanted me to do for a client of his. Nothing dirty. Just crazy. And somehow, God knows how, he talked me into doing it.”
“You regret it?”
“Well, that’s the thing. Right before I agreed, I asked him to promise me something. I asked him to promise me that when this was all over, when everything was said and done, that I wouldn’t hate him.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “Do you?”
“It don’t matter. He didn’t promise that. He just promised that when this was all over, when everything was said and done, I’d be glad I met him.”
“And are you?”
“That don’t matter either,” she replied thoughtfully. “Turns out it ain’t over.”
We were both silent again. I stared at the empty passenger seat. It was hard to believe that our relationship had begun only ten and a half days ago, when she dropped my ticket into the punch clock at the Flower Club. The meter had been running ever since. At forty hours, we shared a kiss, and then forever disappeared inside each other’s red phones. At eighty hours, she became famous, and then suddenly turned me on. At two hundred and thirty hours, I called her a bitch, and then slowly began to crumble. And just fifteen minutes ago, at the two hundred and fifty-hour mark, I made plans to immolate myself. For her well-being. For her forgiveness. For my own peace of mind. I was ready to break her fall with my very own body. That was a pretty dramatic affair for a man like me. It was a pretty remarkable run for a courtship that—at Flower Club rates—would cost a mere six thousand dollars before tip.
“I don’t love you, Scott,” she said, finally abandoning the façade. “But I don’t hate you, either. I could have easily hated you for what you said to me yesterday. But we been through too much together. And given everything that’s happened, given everything that’s changed and everything I learned, I have to say I’m glad I met you.”
I leaned my head back, smiling, squeezing out tears.
“But you’re a stranger to me now. That’s the way it has to be. You understand?”
Wiping my eyes, I nodded.
“You there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “I hear you.”
And she could hear me. It wasn’t the most theatrical of breakdowns, especially when parsed through a cellular link, but she could hear my choked-up voice. It was the closest I’d ever come to standing naked in front of her. I was glad it was Harmony. I was glad she was the ear witness to such a rare emotional event.
“You know, I’ve been waiting for this one guy to call,” she said facetiously, “but I don’t think it’s gonna happen. So you know what? I think I’m gonna get rid of this phone. I think I’ll drop it right off the balcony.”
“Just be careful,” I said. “You could hurt someone.”
“Yeah, well, if I do, I’ll just have to live with it.”
“Just live well, all right?”
“You take care of yourself now, stranger.”
“You too.”
“I’m dropping the phone now.”
“Do it.”
She did it. I could hear the wind whistle through the receiver as Harmony let me go. When the phone hit the pavement, the resulting noise was so loud, I had to turn my head away. Ka-CHINK! It was like an aluminum bat hitting a stack of quarters right behind a megaphone. I couldn’t even imagine the number of high-tech fragments spread out on the sidewalk. I wished I could have dropped my phone with her. They could have died thematically together, bleeding circuitry so far and so wide that people wouldn’t be able to tell where one device began and the other one ended.
It wasn’t meant to be, I suppose. But I couldn’t complain. This was a fine way to end our arrangement. As for my own red phone, it would have to die elsewhere. Symbolically, there was no better place than the ocean. It was in for a cold, dark swim. Not now, but soon.
There was no hurry. I wasn’t going anywhere.
________________
By a quarter after three, my mind and body had both collapsed to mush. I’d spent the last five hours laid out on my sofa, wallowing beneath my blanket as the television infused me with a running drip of zeitgeist. The current distraction was Babes in Arms, a 1939 Busby Berkeley number with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. I knew I was in trouble when I started laughing at the jokes.
Madison came back from the kitchen with a hot cup of lemon tea and placed it on the coffee table. Funny that she came to work in a turtleneck sweater. So did I. My brain wasn’t entirely dead. I still had a nice big hickey to hide.
“Thank you,” I creaked. “You know, you really don’t have to take care of me.”
She sat down on the floor. “Oh, shut up. What else am I going to do here?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“I still can’t believe they fired you.”
I sniffed. “Yeah, well, that’s the way it works sometimes.”
Harmony’s plan had reached fruition sometime around noon. Much ado was made about the fake recording, the evil attempt to frame her. I didn’t watch a moment of it. All I knew I heard from Madison. I assured her the tape wasn’t made by anyone from the Hunta camp. In fact, they fired me simply because they thought I was the one behind it. That was sort of true.
“Will this be bad for your freelance business?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Things are going to be real quiet for a while.”
“That’s not fair.”
I wriggled my way down to the floor, between the couch and the coffee table. I took the mug in my hands.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “We’ll manage.”
“But what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to finish this nice cup of tea you made me. I’m going to lie back down on the sofa. And then I figure I’ll either get better or die. I haven’t decided which.”
Madison smirked. “Don’t die.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d miss you.”
After a few long moments, I put the tea back down and muted the television. Despite my minor release in the car, there was still a tempest brewing inside of me. I was filled with emotions that were constructive and otherwise, positive and otherwise. I would not expose my cherished assistant to such untested energies. Otherwise...
“I’d miss you, too,” I said.
“God, Scott. I can’t stand seeing you like this.”
“I’m all right,” I assured her, unconvincingly. “I’ll be all right.”
I tried to meet her gaze, but she stared me down in three seconds.
“Can I please give you a hug?”
“That’s sweet of you, Madison. But I don’t want to get you sick.”
“It’s all right. My mom’s already coming down with something. If I don’t get it from you, I’ll get it from her.”
I let out a weak laugh. Doesn’t that figure?
“Still, I don’t know if she’d want us crossing certain professional boundaries...”
“Scott…”
Madison crawled her way over to me, curling up against my side. She threw her arms around me, then rested her head on my shoulder.
“It’s a h
ug,” she said. “There’s no crime. No scandal. It’s just a hug. You need it.”
After a few awkward beats, I put my hand on her back. Damned if she wasn’t right. Damned if this wasn’t all the medicine I needed right now.
“I warned you I was a business jinx,” she quipped. “You should have listened.”
“Madison, hiring you is one of the few things I don’t regret.”
“You make it sound like this whole thing’s your fault.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s all my fault…”
“You didn’t form the Bitch Fiends,” she declared. “You didn’t put a gun in Annabelle Shane’s hands. You didn’t tell the media that lynching Hunta was a perfect way to spend sweeps. And you didn’t tell Harmony Prince to lie.”
She was three for four, but this wasn’t the day to correct her. Thank God this wasn’t the day. Thank God, thank Fate, thank Harmony.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s still a rough trade. You sure you want to go into it?”
She ruminated on it a moment, then heaved an airy breath. “I might as well now. I mean, you were right. Once you get that X-ray vision, you can’t turn it off. I see the business spin behind everything now. All the dirty tricks, all the ulterior motives, all the colored words. I see lots of colored words.”
On TV, Mickey Rooney and his flock of happy halflings continued to dance, jump, and kick to beat of absolutely nothing.
“I guess it never used to be that way,” Madison mused.
“There were still plenty of illusions back then. They were mostly just happy illusions.”
“Do you think people are getting worse, Scott? Or are we just getting more cynical?”
I mulled it over. “I don’t really know. I mean I’ve worked for some of the world’s most disreputable businesses. And I’ve met some of the nicest people there. I’ve also met some real assholes who worked for nonprofits and charities. You just can’t tell at a glance.”
The movie ended with a grand splash. The credits began to roll.
“But there are good people out there,” I said, rubbing her back. “There always will be.”
“There’ll always be liars, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s nothing new. There have always been liars and there have always been lies. It’s human nature. That’ll never change.”
