For the next week and a bit, Avery vacillated. Sometimes her time with Merritt seemed to stretch out forever. One night was a lifetime of pleasure and laughter. Other times she felt like a giant clock counted down behind her head. A minute gone. An hour gone. A day. Avery and Merritt didn’t talk about Avery’s impending departure, although everything on set was ten days left and nine days left and when we get to Cincinnati. Then there was one week left. Pam had texted flight arrangements for Avery, Alistair, and the crew. The semitrucks that moved the equipment had arrived. They had exactly one week together.
It was too much to bear. She needed the kind of bad advice only DX could give. The morning of the seventh day before departure, Avery asked the van driver to take her to DX’s studio…because, of course, in the process of visiting Avery in Portland, DX had also set up a recording studio and was at work on her next soon-to-be-platinum album. The studio was set up in a Victorian house in an old neighborhood, half houses, half old businesses. Avery pushed the door open tentatively. A young woman in a leather bra and miniscule leather shorts lounged on a sofa reading a book and smoking out of a hookah. So much for security. DX was probably too cool to need it.
“They’re down there.” The girl nodded toward a narrow door in the hallway.
It was clearly the stairwell to the basement. A base beat rattled the wooden steps. The stains on the walls looked like horror-movie plasma. It was just the kind of place DX loved.
And there she was. Behind a wall of recording equipment, DX belted out her latest opus while her bandmates milked every possible note of anguish and exhilaration out of their instruments. When DX saw Avery, she stopped mid-bar and stepped out of the studio.
“Avery!” She grabbed Avery around the waist. “I’ve been staying away so you had time to sex up that hot woman of yours.”
“DX! Shh!”
The band swigged their beers and the drummer lit a joint the size of a cigar.
“They’re not paying attention,” DX said. “Guys, take five. I need a minute with my girl.”
The band filed up the stairs.
“Isn’t this place great?” DX said.
“Is it soundproofed?”
“No. That’s the point. Everything is soundproofed and remastered now,” DX said. “Here you’re right in the middle of a love song and bam! Some bus rolls by overhead, and that’s life. Right? You don’t get ten takes. Everybody who listens to that sound is going to be, like, ‘Yeah, I was there.’”
“Is that why people listen to music?”
It was DX. Of course her millions of fans would want to hear the truck go by.
“Guess what this place used to be,” DX said. “Smell it.”
Avery sniffed before she could stop herself. There was a faint smell of burnt metal and chemicals.
“It smells like cheap carpets.”
“It was a funeral parlor, but Portlanders aren’t doing funerals like they used to. They all want to get buried in burlap bags and composted. So the family rents this out as office space.”
“DX, it’s not an office,” Avery said. “Have you ever been to an office?”
“I try not to. Those fluorescent lights suck your soul.” DX grinned and perched on the back of one of the vinyl couches that lined the concrete bunker. “You look like someone stole your dog. Talk to me.”
“I don’t even know if I’d like a dog,” Avery said.
“How about a jackal-dog? I know this guy who breeds them in Australia. A golden jackal and a dog. You can pick your dog. I’d go malamute, but you’d probably want to water it down with a pug.”
Avery stretched out on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. It was like being at a really bad therapist’s office.
“I don’t want a jackal-dog. I’m just saying, I’ve never had a dog. I don’t know if I’d enjoy a dog. I decorate things for a living, and I don’t know how I’d decorate my own condo.”
“This is about Merritt.”
“She’s wonderful.” Avery closed her eyes. She wanted to repeat Merritt’s name over and over. She wanted to have kinky sex encased in nylon bodysuits, and she wanted to watch old John Cusack movies and eat ice cream with her.
“I don’t want to leave,” Avery said.
DX reached over Avery’s head and pulled a bottle from behind the sofa. “Real absinthe.” She took a swig and held it out to Avery.
Avery shook her head. “I’ve only known her again her for a couple of weeks. We were just supposed to spend the summer together, but it’s all gone so quickly, and I don’t want it to end. When we make love…she’s so tough and she’s so fragile.”
“Those are the best,” DX said, as though she were knowledgeably picking out peaches or lobsters at the Saturday market. “Tough but vulnerable. You want to save them, but you don’t have to.”
“I don’t know if she trusts me. Her friends are going to get married in a lesbian bar, and I can’t give her that.”
“What does Alistair say?”
“He says I’m complicated to someone like her. He says I have to be careful. If we stay together, I need to get her to sign a nondisclosure contract and date her like a normal person, tell people she’s my trainer. But what if Dan Ponza sees us?”
DX gestured with her bottle. “Forget Dan Ponza. I know a guy who can take care of Dan Ponza.”
Avery said “no” quickly and firmly. DX probably did know someone who could take care of Dan Ponza. Avery would be considered an accessory.
“I remember once when we were at Vale, Merritt and her uncle and his boyfriend went away for the weekend, and I missed her. Like everything was empty without her. So I told my dad I was going away with friends, and I drove to Astoria, where they were staying. I thought I would run into her.”
She remembered standing on the boardwalk on the mouth of the Columbia, the wind whipping rain in her face, and thinking how foolish the trip had been. She wouldn’t find Merritt. And then she had. At an antiques store. Merritt had been handling the receiver of an old telephone, putting it to her ear and saying, Hello, lovely, I’ll be home soon.
I’m home now, Avery had answered, and Merritt had whirled around, delight and surprise filling her face.
“I told her I just wanted to take my new Miata out for a drive. But I thought I could die right there, I was so happy to see her. Merritt’s uncle invited me to stay in their rented cottage. Merritt and I wrapped up in blankets and sat outside on the porch. The whole town is on a hill, and we could see down to the river. We could see the stars, and I almost kissed her, but I didn’t. I want to do something. I want to convince her. But what if I’m not good enough? What if Merritt dumps me? What if we get caught and I wreck King and Crown and then she leaves me? What if she makes it and then she doesn’t want me?”
“You mean on TV?”
“Yeah.”
“That girl doesn’t want to be a reality-TV star.”
“What if she gets picked up by a real director? Venner thinks she’s got what it takes.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You’re worried that she’s going to get too famous for you? You think she cares about that stuff? You’re worried that she’s going to win an Emmy and dump you?”
“She could.”
“That’s your mom talking. All that”—DX affected a snooty accent somewhere between British aristocracy and Harvard professor—“‘I know your birthweight and now I know everything.’ Your mom doesn’t know shit about shit.”
“She knew you’d be huge.”
“I was a rock star at thirteen. She doesn’t get credit for discovering me.” DX took another sip of her absinthe. “Just quit.”
“I can’t do that to Alistair. He hitchhiked to L.A. from Wyoming. He slept in a sleeping bag in the snow so that he could get to Hollywood. And he made it. And he made me.”
“You made yourself.”
Upstairs the band had resumed their practice, and an acoustic version of DX’s “Uber to Hell” filtered through the ceiling.
“What would you do if you weren’t a singer?” Avery asked.
“I’d start a cult.”
“No, for real?”
DX’s face said, Yes, for real.
“What would I do?” Avery asked.
She was waiting for DX to tease her. If she had wanted grudging sympathy, she would have gone to Alistair. She hoped somewhere behind the absinthe and the bravado, DX might have an answer.
“What do you want?” DX nudged Avery’s shoulder. “Sit up.”
“I want to know that I’m good enough.”
Avery sat. DX put the absinthe in her hand, and Avery took a small sip. It tasted like flowers and liquorish.
“Good enough is being alive,” DX said.
“Says the woman who’s been downloaded a million times.”
“Three point two million,” DX said. “But you know what? If I kicked it all and moved to some tiny island off Greece and starved to death because I couldn’t fish worth shit, I’d still be a fucking rock star, even if I’d never recorded a single song.”
“You ever feel old?” Avery asked. “Or like you might be getting old? One day you’ll be old? Old is waiting for you?”
“Oh, don’t go on about eighteen to thirty-two like Alistair. I’m going to be like my dad but without the drugs. He’s sixty-seven, and when he gets onstage he rages like he’s twenty-one.”
“I don’t even own a house.”
“I have four. Do you want one?”
“Kind of. I always thought I wanted to travel with Alistair for the rest of my life. We’ve been together for fifteen years.”
“You said she gave you a dress for prom fifteen years ago. Do you still have it?”
Eight (sometimes twelve) hard plastic wardrobes traveled by semitruck everywhere Avery went. Some were installed in her hotel, sometimes one in her trailer. There was always one she insisted on, although she never wore the clothes it held. They were hers. The camouflage sweatpants Alistair had given her. A pair of jeans with the ass ripped out that she had fantasized about wearing with a G-string. And the dress. Preserved like the wedding dress it was. She waited for it in every city.
“Yeah,” she said.
“She bought it for you before you met Alistair. You’ve known her longer.”
“That’s not how you think about these things,” Avery said.
“Or you fell in love with her in five weeks. You pick.”
“I’m not in…”
DX’s look said she wouldn’t believe the lie.
Avery knocked back another swig of the absinthe. DX put her skinny hand over Avery’s. She wore enough skull rings to make her own catacomb.
“This isn’t hard, Aves. You tell Alistair you’re sorry. You’ll be careful. He’ll still be your bestie. Then you tell Merritt you love her. You say, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been clear. I want you to own me like the moon owns the sun. I know that I’m in the closet, but look around at these other women. I’m a frickin’ star!’ You don’t have to go back and forth about this. Save yourself the trouble. This is just who you are.”
“DX, if good enough is being alive, aren’t all those other women moons and stars too?”
DX grabbed her by the back of the neck and gave her a shake. “Do you think I would have been friends with you for twenty-three years if you were just as good as everyone else?”