Jessie wrapped her arms around herself as she felt her intuition tingling, not in a dangerous way but just with the sense that, like every other woman in the room, she was attracted to this eminently well known, successful twenty-three-year-old. Yet she didn’t want to desire him in any way. Charlie was out of her league, even if she were to have any interest in men. Which she didn’t. Or thought she didn’t, at the time.
Later on that first day, Charlie strolled over to Jessie and stopped a few feet away, cocking his head quizzically.
“And you are?” he asked.
“Jessie,” she responded after taking a brief moment to size him up as well, her voice edged with a growing confidence gleaned from the workshops.
He thrust out a hand and she tentatively took it.
“The famous Jessie,” he said, testing her name on his tongue, rolling it around to see how it fit. “My dad’s a fan. How do you like this acting thing?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I like it, I guess.”
“You seem bored.”
She figured rightly that was his way of saying why aren’t you swooning over me like everyone else? But the slight cockeyed grin and flicker of humor in his playful eyes led Jessie to believe he at least had the ability to laugh at himself, at where life was taking him. Surprised, chiding herself, she grinned back.
“Maybe I am.” It was a challenge, and he took it.
Charlie’s films were mostly romantic comedies, although he’d really gotten noticed in the acting world after a serious dramatic role as a seventeen-year-old NBA bound underdog basketball player. Lately, he’d been too happy-go-lucky to face the demons that can accompany serious dramatic roles, so he’d opted for the fun stuff, which echoed his womanizing, drinking, partying lifestyle. He was about to begin a six-week shoot on a romantic comedy to be shot on the island of Curacao. His star was luminous, far reaching.
When he set his eyes upon Jessie, two things happened. One, he found he couldn’t look away, and two, he caught himself wondering if what his dad said about her was true – could she in fact act? He needed a co-star for the rom com.
Minus the bodyguard, Charlie went back a few more times that momentous summer and worked with the street folk in the acting workshops. He helped them refine their talents for the end of season play, which was a light comedy. By then, though, he’d seen enough of Jessie’s thespian skills to recognize what his father already knew.
Jack made a call to his friend, Deirdre Keating, a talent manager who popped into the play with her music producer husband, Charles, and the rest, as they say, was history.
***
It was a rare but true partnership in every sense of the word. Deirdre and Charles Keating ended up occupying such an important and necessary part of Jessie’s life that they began to think wistfully of her as the daughter they’d never been able to conceive. Yet Jessie kept her secrets and, to their credit, even though they spent hours together almost as a family, Dee and Charles did not push her. At first, after all, she was their client. But, like Jack, they too found themselves deeply drawn to the forlorn girl with the beautiful music.
All Jessie told them about her personal life and how she ended up on the streets on the Downtown Eastside of Canada’s west coast hippie city was that she was from the east coast, Prince Edward Island, that her father was dead and her mother was remarried to a man Jessie didn’t like. She maintained her mother was out of her life, that they were estranged from the time Jessie was fourteen. Jessie filled in only a few more blanks - that she spent some of her teen years in Charleston, South Carolina, with friends.
For eight years, that was as much as Charles and Dee got from their talented, quickly famous young ‘adoptee.’ When the truths of Jessie’s past would finally surface, it would be because other terrifying events propelled the couple to seek out certain facts about Jessie’s life before they knew her, when she was a waif living on their streets. They would learn more when life determined they must.
In the meantime, Charles got a kick out of the fact that Jessie, such a quick study at acting, and such a natural star, ended up dating Charlie Deacon. He loved that a young man with his namesake was very likely to become his sort of adopted son-in-law. Charles Keating didn’t laugh very often – he was a serious man who worked hard in the sometimes unscrupulous music biz to establish a highly profitable record label, and who had merged into occasionally producing film over the past seven years as the digital revolution chipped away at record label profits. Graying, sixty something, distinguished, he thought his capacity to love a ‘daughter’ was long gone. Jessie was as much a surprise to him as he was to her.
Deirdre – Dee, as Jessie called her – was a gracious, elegant lady, also in her sixties, who often wore Donna Karan and other designer clothing, always with a matching handbag and shoes. She wore her golden gray hair in a sleek bob just below her delicately pointed aristocratic chin, and always complemented her hairstyle with diamonds and pearls. She was the last person on the planet Jessie would have thought would take a liking to her, but Dee was friendly and caring, and not immune to the forlorn blue eyes of her new protégé. In other words, in spite of her years as a talent manager, she was not yet disillusioned by the system.
Charles and Dee lived in a beautiful home in North Vancouver, rather set apart from other wealthy folk and celebrities in the area, and so perhaps that was one reason why they and their new ‘talent’ hit it off. Almost from the start there was a trust between the three, an unspoken code that said ‘yes, we prefer to stay a little away from the rest of the world, in our own company.’
They needed each other in their lives and, although many secrets remained, they became deeply embroiled in each other’s worlds.
Success came quickly and without mercy to Jessie, both as an actor and as a singer songwriter. She had a massive repertoire of original music, including songs her father wrote that she adapted as her own. She made certain every record she made included her beloved father’s music and instrumentation from the Gibson, even though she was fast able to afford any guitar on the market. She dealt with success the way she dealt with all of the new, nice surprises in her life – with grace, dignity, and a reserve everyone thought was a barrier from the sudden world of fame, but which she knew – and what Charles and Dee suspected – was in fact an impenetrable wall of grief. When you loved and lost and suffered like a victim of war, in the manner Jessie did from the time she was twelve, you’d live an arm’s length away from anyone who tried to get close. This Jessie did, and she did it well, even with those who became closest to her - her surrogate parents, Charles and Dee, and her boyfriend Charlie as well.
Charlie was the easiest of all from whom to remain distant. Jessie fell into an easy, comfortable relationship with him, and with his family as well. She was always quiet and well behaved, unlike some of the female stars that rivaled her down in Hollywood. She and her man rarely fought, even though he continued to carry on with his womanizing, party-boy lifestyle. His friends thought it was because she met him before she became a celebrity, and so perhaps she hung onto the illusion that he was bigger than life. She knew – and perhaps Jack and Charles and Dee as well knew, at least on some level – that she put up with Charlie because he offered her a place to hide and that, in fact, his party boy ways were acceptable to her because she didn’t really love him, at least not in the way true lovers should love and adore each other.
She was comfortable with Charlie. When out to dinner with him, she would often be seen nodding and listening as he babbled on about another film or gossiped about Hollywood celebrity antics south of the border in L.A., where they occasionally travelled to attend industry parties and, more often, worked. Charlie was a safe haven for Jessie. He was narcissistic yet attentive to her as a trophy girlfriend, friendly and kind to others, generous and giving to his family, and a perfect host at his club. Yet there was something missing that others picked up on. Jessie allowed him his indiscretions that, in fact, he cut down on in t
heir early years but in later years returned to in spades, sometimes reaching gossip status in the industry rags lining grocery store shelves. She trusted Charlie to be kind to her and not to ask too many questions about her past and, because he was a self-centered celebrity from the time he was a teenager, he was negligent as a caring boyfriend and partner, and a perfect fit for a shell shocked gal afraid to get too close for fear of losing – yet again – those she cared about.
But then as Charlie’s indiscretions became even more regular fodder for the rag press, and Charles and Dee gently prodded their girl to expect and demand more of Charlie, including marriage, the loneliness became more profound, and success built Jessie’s brick wall even higher and thicker.
Sometimes in the evenings after dinner in their grand North Van home, as the magic light of the evening exploded into lovely, deeply saturated sunsets, Dee would sit in wonder and stare at Jessie. Spying her staring out at the gardens, lost in some deep unexplained reverie, Dee would feel a heavy sigh of loss coming on for the girl she loved. On those nights, the sadness was still palpable, even though Jessie was now able to enjoy the fruits of her talents and successes. When it rained, the sadness doubled. Jessie would go somewhere deep inside herself where naught but the music could reach her, and Dee would mourn for the little girl she never knew.
On one such occasion, as they watched the rain drip down the windowpane, the sun peeked surprisingly out from behind a wondrous grey cloud and lit the raindrops in the most beautiful way, leaving streaks of striking pinks and blues and purples echoed in the glass. Dee was lost in the beauty of it all, the girl she’d come to love as her own daughter sitting there next to the window, watching the rain, maybe composing some beautiful new melody in her head the world could soon love, or perhaps going over lines from her next film. Dee was startled when the sun formed a sanguine prism, and her girl’s expression turned to an exquisite sadness as she reached out to touch a colored raindrop and then, abruptly, got up and left the room.
These were the only clues Dee ever got to what was ticking inside Jessie’s head – well, that and her music, until the day Jessie went into Charlie’s Club and watched her philandering man rather heartlessly kick out one of his own old friends. Within a year a long buried light seemed to ignite within Jessie, and everything changed.
***
Chapter Three
The day Jessie met Josh, Charlie asked her to marry him. Just like that. No pre-emptive gestures such as roses or chocolate or sudden trips on the Keating jet to Paris for French cuisine. He took the elevator up to her condo, the modest two-bedroom penthouse she’d had in downtown Van since the part in the first rom com years ago.
That, she later thought, should have been my first clue. Charlie rarely came up to Jessie’s place – they usually hung out at his penthouse in Burnaby.
That day, though, there was Charlie standing in her living room, all jumpy and nervous. He had endured another recent inglorious headline in the Vancouver Sun Entertainment section, and was perhaps feeling that asking Jessie to marry him would circumvent the bad press and raise his image a little. At least that’s what Jessie often thought throughout their tumultuous engagement – that Charlie needed a profile boost. She wondered if he was seeing the error of his ways, but in truth she didn’t really care. As long as he left her alone and treated her fine, she was mostly okay with his sketchy lifestyle.
He sauntered into the condo and couldn’t settle. Maybe deep down, intuitively, Charlie sensed things were going to change forever that day. He walked over to the grand piano by the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, and plunked out a few random notes. Wandering over to the bookshelf on the south wall, he arbitrarily pulled out a novel. After a moment he rammed it back into its hole, shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets and then meandered over to the kitchen island across the open concept room, glancing occasionally at Jessie to see if she was watching.
Jessie was standing with her purse over her arm, dressed to the nines for her gig at Charlie’s Club in sling back shoes and a lacy little black dress. She often played there, using it almost as a rehearsal space where she could try out new songs. Charlie loved it. His club was always full when Jessie was a featured performer. The clientele thrilled to it because, well, they simply adored Jessie and her music.
She was ready to go, and unsure why Charlie was dragging his ass and looking peevish. For a moment her heart almost stopped and she wondered if he was going to break up with her – she actually got a little excited at the prospect – but then, when Charlie realized her quizzical look meant he better step it up, he spoke.
“I was thinking,” he said in his serious Charlie voice, his eyes following his pointy finger around a fictional line on the granite countertop, “maybe it’s time we got married.”
Jessie was silent. She was still on the train of thought that perhaps they were breaking up – she had a little speech hastily prepared. She bit her tongue before she could blurt out, well, maybe it’s for the best, you philandering sunuvabitch. Instead she caught herself saying, “Well, yeah, okay. I guess we should, it’s been what, seven years or so?”
And that was that. Jessie and Charlie were engaged and about to embark on a Royal Canadian Wedding of sorts. As they walked out to the elevator to make their way to Charlie’s Porsche, Jessie was numb. She had to push all thoughts of Sandy out of her mind by repeating over and over again, “I am marrying Charlie Deacon. I am marrying Charlie Deacon.” She pictured Jack and knew he would be happy, and that helped. But overall she just felt kind of sad, and wished the numbness would spread deeper inside, like when the dentist gives you a needle to numb the pain and it gradually spreads into the deep hidden recesses.
But this was real life and now there would be a wedding to plan, and Charlie was nothing if not at least safe and non-abusive, so Jessie told herself things were really not so bad. Life could be a lot worse than being married to a film star, even if he was today’s rag bag fodder for his lavish sexual escapades.
As they drove up out of the dark womb of her building’s underground parking into the golden evening sun, Jessie stared out of the window while Charlie cranked some party tunes and tapped the steering wheel in time to the music. He merged onto a busy street and seemed to relax with each passing moment as Jessie’s anxiety increased. She turned and watched him sing along, taking note that not once did he look at her as they drove down to his club on Burrard. He did, however, speak - while looking straight ahead, of course.
“Oh,” he shouted over the music. “Guess we should get a ring, eh?”
Somewhat incredulous, Jessie nodded slowly and then turned back towards the window, where she watched the sights and sounds of the city fly by. This time, she had to choke back her tears as she thought of Sandy and a life without celebrity, and just how wonderfully, magically cool that would have been, if indeed it could have been.
***
Charlie’s Club was a modern affair; sterile, white with chrome trim, lit here and there with unnatural reds and greens and blues. The place had a central bar around which patrons sat reflecting on their little elevated lives with disdain and indifference. The women crossed their long legs and leaned on the bar sipping martinis while the men fawned over their ladies, shading them from competition while at the same time protecting them - by big talk of politics and film - from the artificial, inconsequential existences most were living. Music from some unknown satellite station played insignificantly beyond the humdrum of gossip and tales, counterpoint to the gurgling rush marking the creation of ice, and the clatter of the odd dropped and broken glass.
The club awoke from a perpetual state of ambivalence when Jessie took the stage. Everyone sat up straighter and jostled for position, like animatrons that suddenly found a connection to power. A new buzz elevated the ambience, higher pitched and excited; suddenly, with Jessie in the house, patrons realized there were spicy scents of exquisite foods to test the palate, colorful new drinks on the menu, laughter; rainbows of li
ght. Her music lent energy to any environment. It stripped away the fake and the effort to belong, and left the real, the essence. Jessie’s songs let you find yourself again. Often from a first person perspective, her music gave you permission to feel, to be in touch with your own emotions, to stop hiding from yourself and everyone else. Take back your clouds, I tell the rain; I feel the scorching heat of the sun on my skin. It’s raw but it’s real, and that’s okay.
Charlie and Jessie were not at the club long before Josh Sawyer stumbled in. Jessie turned to look at him, as did everyone else, because he was under the influence of some strange drug he’d indulged in just a little too much, and he could barely hold himself up. Tall, athletically built, enveloped in some protective and isolating aura, he careened delicately over to a stand-up bar situated across the room from the main bar, where Jessie was seated as the gregarious Charlie chatted with the bartender. Jessie knew who Josh was, because he and Charlie were old high school buddies. Both their fathers were television and film personalities, and the boys had attended a special high school for the offspring of celebrities who often travelled and removed their kids from school with some regularity. As a teen, Josh made a film around the same time Charlie did, but something happened between the boys that abruptly ended their friendship. When pressed, Charlie refused to talk about it, and when he and Josh inadvertently met, Charlie was always the first to look away, mumbling a quick ‘hey,’ and then disappearing.
All Jessie really knew about Josh other than that, was that he was usually drunk or under the influence of something or other, he apparently lived off his father’s money in a large house on the beach in the University of British Columbia (UBC) area, and he had a turbulent, sometimes violent relationship with his father, which often made headline news. In other words, as Charlie often said under his breath after running into his old best buddy, ‘he is a loser.’
A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One Page 4
