"Sure, I can stay. Keep the champagne coming." I pulled out my chair and propped my feet up on the railing, delighting in the way Jax raised his eyebrows at me.
I held out my empty champagne flute and waited for him to fill it. He obliged and then set the bottle of champagne down and reached for his own flute. "To fake romance."
"Because the real kind never works." I smiled as I lifted my glass. "Cheers."
A few days before I met Jax at the bar, Mom and I had gone shopping in Great Barrington. She needed to find fabric for some new curtains. "It's a gorgeous house. Overlooks the cliffs. Antiques everywhere," she explained as we wound with the road into town. "The couple gave me full creative freedom. They only use the house for a few weeks a year over the summer and the occasional Christmas party. They don't even want to be bothered — can you imagine?" She shook her head.
We couldn't imagine. That was never our life, to own a few extra homes. We'd brushed up against such things in the past and no doubt left the telltale marks of the bourgeoisie: the overly eager greeting, the dropped jaw.
That day Mom was wearing perfectly pressed white chinos, silver sandals that showed off her red toenails, and a crocheted sweater in an autumnal shade of orange. She wore her light-brown hair to her shoulders, her gray strands beat into submission with the help of regular coloring. The silver bracelets on her wrist clinked together as she pulled the car into a parking stall and tugged the emergency brake. She checked her watch. "I have to be quick. I'm meeting the girls for lunch. You know what they say: if you're late, you're a dollar short."
The center of Great Barrington is lined with little specialty shops and restaurants, places to buy stationery or handbags or to select a cheese-and-wine pairing for your next cocktail party. Mom avoided all of those stores and headed down a side street to Barrington Threads, which is the most expensive fabric store I have ever entered. Even if I sewed, I couldn't afford to make myself a pincushion from this material.
"'Morning, Dale!" she called out as she swept inside.
The elderly man stocking bolts of fabric on the shelf raised one hand. "Good morning, Mrs. Mallory!"
She'd never changed her last name after the divorce, and she still allowed people to refer to her as "Mrs." It struck me as oddly sentimental for someone who normally had no patience for such things. Mom operated in the world of the aesthetic: textures and colors and lighting. The emotional world had never interested her.
She stood in place, frowning down the rows. "I need blue. It has to be cerulean. And I was hoping to find a complementary damask." She looked this way and that before finally saying, "Let's try down here."
I was along for the ride and the company, except that I disappeared there in the fabric store. There was only my mom and the fabric. She slid her fingers along the threads, feeling for textures, checking them under different lights, holding paint samples against them. She liked to collect swatches. Half the time, she'd leave a store with nothing more than a collection of squares and possibilities. When I headed out on these errands with my mom, I ended up standing alone, watching her, feeling like an extra wheel.
"So I understand you're working with your father again?" She lifted one carefully sculpted brow at me. "How's that going?"
"Fine, I guess."
"And are you baking?"
"I'm on the coffee machine."
She paused to study a dark-blue fabric. Raw silk, if I had to guess. "Hmm. Your talents are wasted making coffee, Wren." She gave me a look. "If you're working in that bakery, you should at least be developing some useful skills. What is it they say about how it's better to teach someone to fish? It's the same with baking." She pulled the bolt of raw silk from the shelf and set it down. "I'm going to need a swatch of this."
"I don't like baking."
"That's just because you don't know how." She moved on to the next shelf and pulled a bolt of fabric from above her head. "This could work for the dining room. They have these lovely French doors and a lilac bush by a balcony. It's charming."
I drew a finger across a knobby light-blue material. "Have you seen the bakery lately?"
She released a long breath through her nostrils and returned the bolt in her hand to the shelf. "I'm not a breakfast person, honey. You know that. Just a cup of coffee for me."
"I don't mean that." I scratched at my ear and weighed my approach to the delicate discussion. "I was thinking that, you know, Dad hasn't changed the interior of the bakery for years. Ever, really. And I thought maybe you could swing by sometime and maybe help to give it an update." She continued with her review of the fabrics, and I wondered if she had heard me at all. "Mom?"
"It's awkward with me and your father. We've drawn certain boundaries." But she stopped, turned halfway to me. "Let me think about it."
It was the best I could hope for.
By the time we were finished, Mom had accumulated piles of bolts in various shades and textures of blue, and Dale had clipped swatches for her and attached them to little squares of card stock. "I'm going to have to sit with these later and come back tomorrow or Tuesday," Mom mused, as much to herself as to me. "I'm already running late for lunch."
"You're meeting them in Archer Cove?"
"Yes. I'll have just enough time to drop you off." She smiled and reached out to stroke my hair. "Too bad you don't enjoy interior design. I could use some help on a few new accounts I picked up last week."
"I'll stick to coffee," I said. "I'm getting better at it. When I finally move to the city, I can work as a barista and write on the side." This, I felt, would be an infinitely better option than sorting the mail, like I had in LA.
Mom sighed. "Your father should at least teach you a few recipes. He's just never been good at letting people in." She collected her bag of swatches. "Dale, it's always a pleasure. I'll probably see you tomorrow."
"Have a great day, Mrs. Mallory."
We headed back to the car, Mom's sandals clacking with each step as we swept past shops that I wished I had time to browse. "We'll have to come back," I said, pausing in front of a stationery store. I didn't have the money to buy expensive stationery, but I enjoyed the feel of paper and embossing.
"Absolutely." The lights to the car flashed and she opened the trunk remotely, dropped the bag inside, and clack-clacked to the driver's side. "We'll come back, and next time we'll have lunch."
Mom didn't have her interior design business, The Space Lift, when I was a child, but she used to perform some version of it on our house. It kept her busy when Dad was putting in all those hours on Wall Street. She made comforters and pillows, throws and curtains, seasonal table runners and napkins. She'd host the other mothers in the neighborhood for tea and sew new tablecloths and napkins for the occasion. Her favorite guests were Rosa Foley and Mickey.
One day as we sat on the perfectly green front lawn of her new mansion, Mickey informed me that I had fat ankles. "You can barely see them. See?" She held up one bare leg for me to admire. "I'm small boned. I have slender ankles."
I'd never thought about my ankles before. I mean, they worked just fine. It was sort of like noticing your liver. "So?"
"You'd probably never be able to model," she said. "I model. I'm in this year's Sears Christmas catalogue."
This is how it went. They'd come over for tea, or we'd drive into the city and shop at Bloomingdale's, and Mom and I would come away feeling a little bit flawed. Mom started paying more attention to her hairstyle and makeup, and she seemed to be on a perpetual diet. Still, she was happy. Being close to Rosa meant that Mom, the daughter of schoolteachers, had arrived somewhere. Dad was not as enthusiastic about the friendship.
"She's shallow, Lil," he said once as Mom recounted a shopping trip and Rosa's comments about the season's garish colors. "Her life is consumerism."
"You say that now, Hank," she replied with a laugh, "but wait until this summer. Rosa has a friend who has a place in the Hamptons. She says we can all stay there. For free."
Dad turned and
walked out of the room rather than replying, and Mom smiled to herself, probably counting this as a victory. Then, weeks later, Dad quit his Wall Street job and declared he was going to buy a bakery in Archer Cove, a seaside town we'd visited a few times. He dropped this news on us one night when we were eating Chinese takeout.
"And where are we going to live?" Mom demanded. She had frozen, her empty chopsticks hovering in mid-air.
"There's an apartment above the bakery. Three bedrooms." Dad calmly took a sip of his water. "I'm done working eighty hours a week to subsidize everyone else's dreams. We can afford this, and it's the right time to make a change."
We packed the house and moved two months later. Mom lasted exactly eight days in that apartment before renting out a room at the Archer Cove Inn, where she plotted how she would create her own interior design business. She was going to live in Great Barrington, just in a little place for now, until she got The Space Lift off the ground. "The thing I have going for me is taste," she explained as she took a sip from her glass of ice water. Inside floated two rounds of lemons. "I've always been good at this kind of thing, Wren. And it's time for me to work outside of the home. You're in middle school, and your father and I…we grew apart."
Mom didn't have room for me in her new apartment, so I lived with Dad, which suited me fine. At least with Dad, I knew that if he wasn't at home, he was in the bakery. Mom was more elusive, chasing something that required her to constantly move and shift, like a sparrow pestering a hawk.
Excerpt from Celebrity Burn, June 23
Posted by: Rubee
Poppy Hayes made quite a splash at the premier of A Night in Venice, but not for the reasons you may think. The five-foot-ten blonde stunner looked almost unrecognizable with her line-free smile and pouty lips, but she has not admitted to undergoing surgery or receiving Botox injections. She wore her long hair in sexy loose waves and a side part and opted for natural makeup, choosing a fresh, glossy pink lipstick and a smidge of mascara. When asked about her new look, Poppy attributed her appearance to power yoga, healthy eating, drinking eight glasses of water a day, and regular colonics — a combination that she called "life altering." "Good health begins in the gut, so I'm trying to flush out all of the toxins that accumulate over the years and contribute to aging."
Uh, thanks for sharing, Poppy, but that last part may be a bit too much information. And colonics have smoothed out your wrinkles? Sure they have (wink wink). This blogger isn't ready to give up the search for that Botox receipt just yet.
CHAPTER THREE
Jax called his publicist, Taryn, to tell her he was in love. She couldn't have been more pleased. "I love it," she said sharply, the way she said everything. "Be sure to send me your schedule and I'll notify the right people."
We were sitting in his suite. Jax was on the bed, lying back on the pillows stacked against the headboard. I was perched on one of the leather couches, my spine rigid, my ankles pressed together, my hands folded on my lap. Like a complete tight-ass, I realized, and shifted to toss one arm across the armrest so that I looked more like I wanted to be there, in the same room as a hot leading man. But to me, he was just a means to an end.
"What do you mean, our schedule?" Jax watched the cell phone in his hand while he spoke. He'd put Taryn on speaker. "I've already given you my —"
"Your schedule. When you're going to a restaurant. When you're going for a walk. And make sure you hold hands," Taryn added. "People love that."
"Ah." He glanced down and started to scratch at something on the comforter. "Got it."
"Tell her to be sure to obstruct her face," Taryn said. "Keep it mysterious. Is she there now? Tell her to do that."
Jax looked at me. "Taryn wants you to obstruct your face."
"Yeah, I heard. How am I supposed to do that?"
"What? Is she there? Is that her?" Taryn didn't wait for the response. "Make sure to tell her to get a wide hat. You know, one of those sun hats? A straw one would be cute. Wear her hair in her face. Keep her head down."
I folded my arms. "Maybe I should just wear a paper bag on my head."
He brought his hand up to his forehead and started rubbing it. I almost felt bad for him, having to deal with a publicist who barked at him like that. "What's that about, Taryn? Why does she need to hide her face?"
There was the sound of a car honking in the background. "Just tell her to obstruct her face, but not in an obvious way. Just create some mystery. Everyone will be dying to know what she looks like. Yeah, gimme a venti mocha soy latte, no whip. Jax? You still there?"
"Yeah. Still here."
"Does she have a name?"
Jax glanced at me. "I'd like to keep her name out of the press for now. She's a little…shy."
I threw a pillow at him, but missed.
"Whatever. Anyway, I think it's great you're in love, babe. Just make sure you sell it, okay? Make sure you're not seen with anyone else. Capece?"
"Yep."
"And Jax? I'm assuming she's hot, babe. This isn't going to work with a plain Jane."
He met my gaze and then shifted. "Yeah. Okay."
"Gotta run. We'll talk. Ciao."
He tossed the phone to the side of the bed. "Well, we have Taryn's blessing." He stretched out along the bed, reaching his muscular arms to the side.
"As long as no one sees my face." It stung, as did his failure to defend me from the "plain Jane" assault. I pulled a green throw pillow onto my lap and brought my knees up to my chest.
"She doesn't mean anything by it," Jax said, directing his words to the ceiling. "Isn't anonymity what you want? Our relationship should mostly consist of you heading up to my suite." He turned his head to grin. "It's the best kind of relationship, anyway."
"Please. I don't want to spend my life in this suite, sitting around while the paparazzi imagine we're…you know." A flush crawled up my cheeks.
Jax rolled onto his side. "We're what, Wren? Feeling each other up? Having sex?" He grinned. "Bonking each other mindless?"
My face was burning. I'd once had a therapist who assured me that I couldn't be held responsible for the thoughts that entered my mind, only for my response to them. God help me, but right then I was thinking about what it might be like to be one of the women Jax was actually attracted to, one of the many gorgeous, leggy women he'd taken home to, as he put it, "bonk."
Fine — I was wondering how he bonked. There, I said it. I couldn't help it, as he'd dangled the suggestion right in front of me. Dangled wasn't the right word. That made me think of his…forget it. I had to look away and change the subject.
"That's not the point," I said. "I don't want to spend all of my free time sitting around here."
He shot me a devilish smile. "We could always do what they imagine we're doing. Why waste the opportunity?"
"Has hell frozen over? Thanks anyway."
He shrugged and rolled onto his back again. "Can't say I didn't try."
"I still —"
"Bring a book, Wren. Play solitaire. Write one of your —" he waved a hand dismissively in my direction. "Movies. We're not talking about months of this, anyway. A few weeks, tops. Just enough time to enjoy the festival and attend a few parties." He turned his head. "That's still okay, right? You'll attend parties with me? Because I don't want to interfere with your social calendar. I'm sure it's burning up."
A smile pulled tightly across my face. "I can always find time for someone as charming as yourself." I glanced at the time. "I've been here for two hours. I can't imagine that you'd be able to perform that long. You know, since we're going for verisimilitude here."
"You might be surprised." Jax continued to stare at the ceiling, unaffected by the barb. "But lunch and a quickie works for me. Just make sure to wear the hat and keep your head down. We want people to think you're hot." He reached over to the nightstand, grabbed a remote control, and turned on the television. After flipping through a few channels, he landed on a soccer game.
I was already setting the hat on my
head again, tucking my hair underneath. I finger combed some strands over my cheeks, feeling unkempt but better concealed. Then I slung my handbag over my shoulder. "So should we, uh, make plans to see each other again?"
"Afraid you might miss me, darling?" His mouth quirked into a rakish, one-sided grin. "We have the party on Friday. We'll be in touch before then."
"Right. Brennan's red carpet event." I thought through my clothing options. I was confident I didn't own a thing that I'd want to be caught dead wearing. "So, should I get a dress?"
"Oh good lord, no. I'll take care of that. And I'll have someone here to help you dress that night. I'll send a car by your place."
"Should I write down my address?"
He pointed to the desk in the corner. "I think there's a pen and paper there."
I thought about my little apartment, with all of its boxes still piled in the hallway and Crabby Andy's in the back, and paused to consider whether I could send Jax's "car" anywhere else. No, I couldn't.
I scribbled my address on the paper and set it aside. "There. Well. I guess I'll be seeing you."
"Yep."
His gaze was fixed on the soccer game as I walked toward the door, and while I realized the entire relationship was a farce, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. Shouldn't my willingness to go along with this charade inspire some kind of affection?
I closed the door gently behind me and hurried down the steps, not wanting to meet anyone in the hall. No. This was not about any kind of affection. This was about getting my work into the hands of a producer who could change my life. This fake relationship was about succeeding for real.
As I breezed through the reception area and into the summer evening, I vowed to get to work on that screenplay.
I returned to my apartment, brewed a pot of coffee, and set my laptop on my kitchen table, determined to write. I had been working on a screenplay for ages, but it never seemed quite right. I had the outline of changes in my mind, and I needed to get working on them before the threads were lost forever. The day was warm, so I opened the windows wide, allowing the gentle breeze to infuse my apartment with the scents of salt water and fried clams. As the coffee brewed, I watched a few cooks from Crabby Andy's congregate for a cigarette break beside the Dumpster. I frowned. The advertisement had promised me ocean views.
The Coffee Girl Page 4
