Fired. Her reminder that this job is not just a job. Now I have duties and subtext. To show her I’m not a shitbird. That I want this job, this change, this lifestyle. That I don’t want to go back to TV news, to nights, to nothing. That I’m at risk of losing this, this weird magical position in this weird magical place, of having to go crawling back to the TV-news world, to see Jackie’s smug face, to beg her to put me back on the schedule, put me back in the dark, in the night. If I can even go on living at all.
I leave Kathi’s bedroom and sit back down on one of her Chinese Parisian chairs. I can feel my hair growing by the second. By the minute. By the hour. Sitting, hungry, empty, still not knowing exactly what Kathi Kannon, film icon, really expects of me, still not knowing exactly what I need do to make her happy, what I need to do to keep this job, this suddenly fragile new lifestyle.
Hey, Siri, I need help.
I pull out my phone and see my pathetic reflection in the glass. A push of the home button pulls up the colorful apps, and the cheery designs seem to mock me. I look at my voicemails—three new messages from Dad—all surely deletable. His timing has always been perfect. I call him back.
“Just get rid of whatever you want,” I say.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Nothing matters,” I say, my other hand clutching my keys, my thumb rubbing, squeezing, nearly crushing Mom’s locket.
6
I’m about to lunch with film icon Kathi Kannon and Rita Wesson, a former child actor—Kathi worked with her many times in the early years—now turned go-to crisis publicist for emergency (and celebrity) cases only. She’s actually more like the opposite of a publicist: Her job is to keep her clients out of the press. That straight heartthrob caught with his gay lover—he paid for Rita’s house in Montauk, and you’ll never know he’s a happy queer. That bleached-blond Disney star photographed smoking a joint while driving down Sunset Boulevard—she paid for Rita’s Bentley, and those scandalous pictures will never see the light of day. That beloved Oscar-nominated grandpa accused of embezzling from his charity—he paid for Rita’s newest face, and, well, every mysteriously missing dime is now enthusiastically accounted for.
“Please drive faster, Cockring,” Kathi says.
“Sure,” I say, pushing the gas harder.
Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade.
I’m nervous to meet Rita, sure. But I love an outing. I’m grateful for the few moments in this job where I have a clear objective, a clear task to accomplish. Step one: Drive Kathi to our lunch. Easy. I mean, easy enough. I’m still anxious having to drive her Lexus, the first one I’ve ever been in, much less behind its wheel. I’m careful with her in the car, as I would be if carrying glass, flowers, puppies. I yield to everyone. I let other cars ahead of me at STOP signs. I stop at yellow lights.
“If you stop at one more yellow light, Cockring, you’re fired.”
“You are precious cargo,” I say. “I’m trying to keep you safe and—” I look over and she’s glaring at me. “I mean to say…” I correct myself, “sure, got it!” I nod to her and to myself, reassuring me that clear instruction is good and helpful and an antidote to my floundering, my wondering what on earth to do, what on earth Kathi Kannon wants from me.
The lunch outing plays out exactly as one would imagine—valet parking, escorting Kathi into Katsuya in Brentwood, eyeballs turning toward us, fans looking at her, looking at me. We pass through the glass doors and there’s Rita, in leather pants and hair that only looks so perfect when it’s treated to a blowout at least three times a week. That producer accused of peddling child porn—he pays for her hair care.
Kathi and Rita make eye contact and are drawn together like magnets, Rita awkwardly complimenting Kathi’s figure and Kathi curiously observing Rita’s hair, pinching a clump of it between her fingers and mumbling something through gritted teeth like, Don’t you look pretty.
I’m waiting for my moment to be introduced to Rita when the Katsuya hostess gets my attention. “May I help you?” she asks kindly, unfazed by the mini-spectacle brought on by our entourage convening before her.
“Table for three, please,” I say. The hostess looks down at her iPad and starts tapping away, entering numbers and swiping to reveal a map of tables, the layout of the bar, and, finally, a lower-level area with a few booths.
Kathi reaches out and grabs my forearm, softly squeezing it—squeezing it or wiping her hand on it, who can be sure. “It’ll just be a table for two, Cockring,” Kathi says to me, her other arm still entwined with the lovely Rita’s.
The math is brutal—a subtraction, a cut. And the one severed is mercilessly me.
“Right, of course,” I say, blushing, learning my place in a painfully hot instant. I turn back to the hostess, shrugging like it’s something that happens all the time, me being surgically excised from a lunch that has been living its life as an elaborate fantasy in my mind over the last twenty-four hours, now dead in a fraction of a second.
The hostess turns to Kathi and Rita; I no longer exist. “This way, ladies,” she says pointedly, the air from her movement toward them blowing my hair back like a fart scene in a campy comedy. She leads Kathi and Rita to their subterranean table, this entitled hostess, her perfume mixing with the smell of the sushi and my humiliation. My stomach growls as I look down at the coral-colored valet ticket still in my hand, that ticket to an event that will never come.
PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS DISAPPOINT YOU! I hear my father yelling, the same way he yelled it on the soccer field when I was a kid, not to me but to my teammates, while pointing to me and teaching the other boys that I was their weak link. That I was the person who would always let them down. That I was the reason we lost the game, that I was the disappointment, that they couldn’t count on me to move the ball up the field. And yet is he right? Just as I constantly disappointed him and my teammates, do I disappoint Kathi Kannon? Is this our human curse, all of us forced to share a planet and none of us satisfying one another? I wish to prove my father wrong, to prove that there is an order to this chaos. Therapista says I only need to prove it to myself.
I step outside the restaurant and take a seat near the valet stand, on a wood bench that looks as out of place as it is uncomfortable. I imagine some designer architect balking at it, screaming, What is that doing here outside of my beautiful restaurant?! I don’t care if people need a place to sit! Tell them to go eat at Wendy’s!
I make eye contact with a young woman sitting beside me and I force a smile, wondering if she’s judging me, if she saw my recent rejection, if she’s going to ask me about Kathi and Rita and my new, fancy life.
“You must be Charlie,” she says, in her bright-yellow tank top and black leather pants, shockingly similar to the ones Rita is wearing. I give her a look up and down, racking my brain to figure out her identity, when she catches me staring. “Oh … yeah, these pants. Such an awkward coincidence. Rita bought two sizes of these and this pair didn’t fit her, so she gave them to me. When I showed up to take her to lunch today, she was wearing hers but there was no time for us to change, so we’re kinda twins. Sick, right? Hi! I’m Jasmine. I’m Rita’s assistant.”