by CD Reiss
“You shouldn’t be. She looked me right in the eye when she made her claim on the contents of your closet. If the truth is something you need to use, she’ll tell it. But I wouldn’t count on her to lie,” Margie said.
“Monica? No. I’d never ask her to. She’s...” I stopped myself, wanting to use words like clean and pure. They sounded ridiculous. “She’s honorable.”
“God help you, then.”
“I don’t want her talking to Jessica.”
“What did you want me to do about that?” Margie asked as if bored, but I could tell she knew what I was going to ask.
“I want Will Santon’s team back.”
“You want to follow her. After she just got over surveillance equipment in her house. You’re a paragon of sensitivity. Really.”
I stopped outside Karen M’s. I saw Eddie at a window seat. No small thing. A year ago, they would have seated him by the bathrooms. “Do you want her talking to Jessica? Because that woman’s going to lie. She’s going to turn a sexless spanking into a grudge fuck, and then I’m going to be the one licking a doormat.”
Margie sighed. “I gotta tell you, little brother, on the rare occasions you feel something, you go deep.”
“And with respect to that, I’d appreciate your indulgence.”
“Take Santon. But on a personal note…”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t get caught. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re on thin ice already.”
We hung up. Sheila was my favorite sister, but Margie was always a voice of sanity when things got chaotic.
I sat across from Eddie. The window looked over a line of tall bamboo meant to block the sight of Wilshire Boulevard traffic. Eddie looked at the menu, then at me, then back at the menu, as if he didn’t know exactly what was on it.
“Nice tie,” I said as an opener.
“Thanks.” His tone was clipped and quiet. I knew the guy. He was a percolating case of verbal diarrhea unless he was pissed off.
“I hear they’ve changed to locally grown tomatoes,” I said, “so avoid the caprese.”
“I heard the same.”
“There’s a shitstain on your cuff,” I said. He glanced at me, then away. “Are we dating, Ed? Did I just fuck your best friend or get you the wrong birthday gift or something?”
Eddie, reengaged in the conversation, leaned on the window, spreading his arm over the table so he could fuss with a matchbook. “My boss gets back from a trip Friday. Some last minute thing to look at property up north, and he saw the girl I’ve been pushing. But according to him, I’ve been doing it wrong. My whole marketing strategy? Wrong. So he’s managing her. He’s signing her. Personally. Harry Enrich hasn’t personally managed talent in fifteen years.”
“She’ll be happy to hear it.”
“She shouldn’t be. It’s not all skinny ties and burning CDs any more. He hasn’t caught up to MySpace falling apart. She’ll be on his learning curve when he doesn’t even know he has one. That leather corset’s gonna start looking real comfy.”
The waiter came. We ordered quickly. That had apparently been bothering him, and I needed to clear it up. He was burned. The collection of talent was his job, and a singular voice had been pulled from under him. In a city full of hopeful musicians, voices like Monica’s were impossible to come by. Needles in haystacks. Finding another voice he could use could take him a year or a lifetime.
“Ed, listen. I don’t want any hard feelings. But it wasn’t happening your way. I could have gotten Randy from Vintage Records up there just as easy.”
“Randy Rothstein? Please.”
“But I kept it at Carnival out of respect for you.”
He laughed. I admit I smiled as well. The notion was ridiculous. He was up a creek and had a right to be angry. I had the right to not care.
“You went over my head less than a week after you beaned me,” he said. “I had a headache for a day and a half.”
“I apologized.”
Eddie pushed his drink aside as if it was an actual obstacle. “Listen, asshole. If you had a problem with me signing your girlfriend, you could have told me.”
“So you could what? Tell me to go fuck myself? She wasn’t signing with you anyway. Not all decked out in leather and chains.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Ed. She was walking. Who’s going to know it better than me? I saved your ass and hers. Now you can all make money together.”
“I got nothing. Enrich can have her. Without a marketing angle, she can sing like a mermaid and it wouldn’t matter.”
“Mermaids don’t sing. You’re thinking of sirens.”
He shook his head and smirked. “You need to go out and find me another girl who likes to get tied up.”
“I have one for you.” I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Nice voice, but she comes with an angle. Might not be as hot as what you had in mind, but it’s like a slot and a tab. She’s got something already going.”
“I swear to god. Where do you find the time?”
“She’s an artist,” I said. “Think Laurie Anderson but drop dead gorgeous. Plays everything. She can play the spoons and bring you to tears. Has the chops for installation and performance work, knows the art scene.”
“Not as commercial,” he said.
“It’s what I have.”
“You got a name?”
The waiter came with lunch, and I wrote the name on a napkin.
seven
MONICA
I headed down Echo Park Avenue on foot, phone to my ear.
“Are you in the house?” I asked as I pushed the gate open.
“Just got dressed,” Darren said.
“I’m on my way. No, wait, I’m on your patio. Are you alone?”
He opened the door in jeans and his red Music Store polo. “Yes. How was the trip home?”
“I really, really like that plane.” I pocketed my phone.
He stepped aside, and I entered. My stuff was all over the living room, neatly piled, but the room still looked as if someone had been crashing on his couch without paying rent.
“Did the police question you?” he asked.
I was a little taken aback, and it must have been all over my face. “How did you know?”
“It’s all over the society pages. And the LA Times, you know... It’s news if it’s about rich people beating their wives.”
“She’s not his wife, and he didn’t beat her.” I defended him and his word, knowing that the truth and Jonathan had a passing, convenient acquaintance.
“Not in the conventional sense.” He placed his laptop on the kitchen bar and spun it so I could see the screen. Then he set about making coffee as if he didn’t want to look at my reaction.
The Celebrity section. A section I ignored because Gabby had always read, assimilated, and digested the entire thing every morning, distilling it for me over breakfast. I was grateful I wasn’t in the habit of looking at it because the day after Jonathan was arrested at Santa Monica airport, a picture of him and his ex-wife appeared in Rumors Bureau column. It was the only mention of his arrest anywhere in the news, and it was short, with little but a wedding picture of two people happy to commit to each other. The burning jealousy that bubbled from my gut left an awful taste on the back of my tongue. He was mine. I owned him. Those pictures were lies.
“Monica?” Darren watched me as he filled the pot with water.
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
“It barely says anything. Arrested at the airport on domestic abuse charges brought by his ex-wife. History of kinky activity. Wife declines comment because she’s ‘too upset,’ Oh, and I’m an unidentified female passenger. His little trick fuck whore. Remind me never to look at the internet again.” I pushed the laptop away and turned to my pile of crap. I could have stalled and pretended to rummage through my stuff, but I knew exactly where that manila envelope was. I ran my hands over it, the aged edges, the curled flap.
“That what I think it is?” Darren asked.
“Yeah. Did you open it?”
“It’s long and involved, so I just put it back.” He looked at me over the edge of his coffee cup.
“Great. Long and involved.” I slid out the contents. Eight and a half by eleven printed pages, stapled. About twenty pages, pure text. Double-spaced with wide margins. Markings all over it in red pencil. Lines. Scribblings. Hash marks. Slashes. Across the top: Lloyd Willman/Evert Toth, ed.
“It looks like someone’s term paper.”
He looked over my shoulder. “I think the ed. means editor. My first assumption was that it was a newspaper article.”
“Fan-freaking-tastic.”
“And unpublished, looks like. Or it wouldn’t look like something someone handed in for eleventh grade finals. My sister was a scary girl. I think digging dirt on people was more fun for her than actually trying to get them to sign her.”
“When do you have to leave?” I asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
I threw myself on the couch. I flipped through. All words and marks. I looked up at Darren, who was wiping down the counter. I cleared my throat.
He didn’t look up when he said, “You’re stalling.”
“Why would I stall?”
“You tell me.”
I had a hundred answers.
Because I know half-truths and pieces of a story.
Because I’m committed to a man who is still a mystery to me.
Because I love him, and I will stand by him, no matter what the papers say.
Because Jonathan lies.
So I didn’t answer but tilted my head down and read.
eight
The star of the article was the rain.
There had been a winter of storms. I was nine. Dad was away, as usual. Christmas sucked because we were broke and the crawlspace flooded. Pebbles from the driveway of what became the Montessori school came in on a tide of floodwater, pecking the north side of the house for hours.
I hadn’t done the math before. Why would I? Why would I remind myself that I was in third grade when he was busy having sex and falling in love? But that was the year I learned multiplication and long division and the year Jonathan lost Rachel.
The story wasn’t much different than I’d imagined. A party had started out as a family affair for Sheila Drazen, and it became wilder and more drug-infused once the adults left and the kids arrived. The police found a bong containing chartreuse absinthe, the remnants of White Widow bud, and sixteen-year-old Jonathan S. Drazen III’s DNA.
What happened after was the stuff of police procedurals, but according to witnesses, Jonathan argued with his girlfriend, Rachel Demarest. She grabbed his keys and ran into the rain. Everyone assumed she was keeping his fucked-up ass from driving. The next morning, Jonathan was found passed out on the muddy front lawn of a house a quarter mile off, and his waterlogged car was found on the beach three miles south with no girlfriend in it. A day and a half later, he was committed to Westonwood after an almost successful suicide attempt. It wasn’t a half-hearted cry for help; he did almost die of heart failure.
Three months in Westonwood. The place was known for its lockdown: no phone, no radio. Nothing. A prison for the rich and disturbed.
But while he was away, his world was not quiet. What had happened during the rains had rippled outward in those months, and the Drazens had deflected and shrouded all of it.
Rachel’s body wasn’t found, and her death dissolved an already troubled family. The police had been to the Demarest house for over a dozen domestic disturbances over six years. Neighbors told stories of sexual abuse by her biological father, and near constant yelling and fighting after her stepdad moved in. Rachel had found solace in her classmate Theresa, who opened the Drazen home to her for study.
In the months before the accident, according to Rachel’s mother, Rachel started coming home with gifts. Pearl earrings. Gold bracelet. A new laptop. She became closed and distant. When police questioned Mrs. Demarest about the gifts, she threw around accusations. She didn’t believe her daughter had had an accident. She wanted the matter looked into because Rachel had been intonating that the Drazen family wasn’t all they were cracked up to be. She called the LA Times, who interviewed her and dismissed her as a crackpot, and the LA Voice, which seemed to be the paper the article was written for.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to talk to anyone. She called everything off and became non-responsive to further investigation. No interviews, and only the required police depositions, which she attended with a very expensive lawyer.
The Demarests had been paid off, that much was clear, and the article ended right there, mid-sentence.
“What the fuck?” I said. “Even this thing is half a fucking story.”
Darren stepped into his shoe. “What’s it say?”
“His girlfriend from sixteen years ago died under suspicious circumstances, and the family paid off anyone associated with it. Or got them fired. For all I know, the rest of the article is about who they killed.”
“You gonna tell him?”
I slid the papers back in the envelope. “How can I? I don’t know if any of this is true. It could be someone’s idea of a short story. He’s got enough shit going on without me coming to him with this....this.... I don’t even know what this is.”
“Gabby’s causing trouble from the grave.” He shrugged on his jacket. “I like that.”
“You would. Can I use your computer? I want to look up some of this.”
“Yeah. Not that I care, but will you be here when I get back? You look like you got your walking shoes on.”
“I’m going home today.” I glanced at my pile of crap, wondering if I could make it on one trip.
“I’m thinking about Gabby’s room.”
“Move in.”
“Did you ask?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll ask daddy if it’s ok if a boy lives with me.”
I thought that was hilarious. Darren didn’t.
nine
The all-knowing internet revealed a big fat goose egg, but I was never much of a researcher. I did find Evert Toth, who had a masthead listing as managing editor of elLAy Rag, a local left-wing free paper picked up in coffee shops all over the city. Though one might assume such a paper was trash from front to porn-filled back, it wasn’t. Some of the biggest exposes, blown whistles, and no-bullshit journalism happened inside. I called the paper, got routed all over the place, and finally ended up on voice mail. I left a message.
I walked home, phone in hand, unwilling to put it in my pocket. I had something else to do. Someone else to call.
I was many things. I was submissive. I was masochistic. I was trusting. I was a sexual slave. But obedient?
Not as much.
I rooted around my bag and found a matte white card. I stopped at the corner because if I waited until I got home, I might change my mind. I dialed the number. The voice that came over was silky smooth, betraying nothing, giving nothing.
Hello, you’ve reached the workshop of Jessica Carnes. Please leave a message after the tone, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If you are a curator calling to schedule a studio visit, please press five.
I choked a little. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to probe her plans. I wanted to represent myself as her friend and ally to bring back information to Jonathan, but I suddenly felt highly unqualified to protect him.
I almost hung up, but her caller ID would reveal who I was, and if I hung up, I’d look weak and manipulative. She wouldn’t trust me. She’d use me. I needed her to respect me if I wanted her to attempt to partner with me.
“Hi, Jessica. This is Monica Faulkner. I’d like to take you up on your offer to talk if it’s still on the table. Thanks.”
I hung up before I could say something stupid or laugh nervously.
Fuck.
What did I just do?
ten
The Stock was busy. Super busy. Wal
l-of-drunk busy. Ass-pinched-turn-around-and-I-can’t-tell-who-did-it busy, especially considering rain threatened on the horizon. I put on a happy face, but my preoccupation reduced the power of my customer-service smile. I couldn’t check my phone while I was working, and I needed to know if Jessica had called me back. I wanted to see Jonathan’s texts, because I was sure there was at least one.
I barely had time for a break, but I ran to the bathroom. On the way out, I saw Debbie.
“I’m going at midnight,” she said. “Robert’s handling the tips.”
My disappointment must have shown on my face. Not about Robert managing the tips. The system for their division was fool-proof, which was good since Robert needed a system with exactly that name.
“What?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk to you after the shift.”
She looked at her watch. “You have four minutes.”
“I don’t want to say it so fast I offend you and lose my job.”
“So don’t.”
I’d rehearsed it a billion times, but there was no neutral way to ask. “You told me I shouldn’t have taken Jonathan seriously, and you told him I’d moved on.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t understand the question. He’s not usually serious. It looked to me like you’d moved on.” She shrugged as if everything had been on the up and up.
I started to feel like maybe it had been, and I was the one who had the problem. “I’m sorry to be blunt, but it gave me the impression, well...that it was...” I stopped. How had I painted myself into such a corner?
Debbie just waited for me to get myself out. She didn’t say a word or look impatient.
“Why do you want us together?” I asked. I managed to not use the word manipulative.
“You think I’m motivated by something other than friendship?”
“I don’t pretend to know.” Another wait. I felt as if I could hear the seconds go by.
Debbie didn’t look at her watch, and there was no clock in the hall, but when she straightened a fraction and said, “Time’s up,” I knew she was right to within the second.
