Dedication (29 page)

“Is Elizabeth your doctor?” I ask, suddenly stricken that he has a horrible wasting disease kept under wraps.

“My herbalist. She’s amazing. With all the flying I do, I have to keep my immune system strong. She’s in L.A. but you should do a phone session.”

“Okay!” Jocelyn leans against the counter and crosses her arms. “So, since I’m guessing you haven’t listened to your voice mail while you’ve been playing
Blue Lagoon,
MTV’s ripping me a new one over pulling the duet with Eden. They’re threatening to cut all promos for the album, so I told ’em at midnight, when the ball drops, you’ll sing ‘Katie’ with the genuine article right by your side—they can run it on ‘Best Of’s’ into the next millennium. Fantastic, huh?” She claps her hands.

“Gluten-free French toast?” the chef asks me in a low voice.

“Actually,” I turn, overwhelmed and not a little grossed out, “I’m going to get dressed.”

“Sit tight for five, okay?” Jocelyn puts a bagel in my hand. “So, today’s rundown: work out, meet with the execs from Japan, who did a circle jerk around your signed contract last night, by the way. Then rehearsal.”

Jake gives a thumbs-up as he shovels in his macrobiotic breakfast. “Great,” I say. “I’ll go to the Met.”

“No.” Jocelyn snaps her ledger shut and turns her attention to me, fighting the reflex to cross my kimonoed arms in front of my face like Lynda Carter. “So far, all the American public has seen of you is postcoital shock, a shot of you with a blanket over your head climbing down a tree, and one
very
heinous yearbook photo—”

“It was not postcoital. There was no coital.” I put the bagel down on the table. “And everyone had Julia Roberts eyebrows.”

“Uh-huh. So, today, we set the tone. We let America see who Katie is.”

“Kate,” Jake reminds her again, his face hidden behind
Spin.

“Thanks, but, Jake, are you listening?” I tap the glossy cover. “Because I don’t really—”

Just then a flushed blonde in her mid-forties strides in shaking out the pelts of a gray shearling, whose suede is the matte complement to the polished stainless steel. She brings her fingertips to her pursed lips and splays them with a kiss. “Thanks for the Maserati, darling. My husband’s already absconded with it.”

Jake drops the magazine. “Glad he liked it.” He leans coquettishly across his place setting and lifts his stubble-glazed face up to her. “Never leave me again?” he pleads. “Those MTV people had me in a Wookie hat, Kirsten.” He smiles, winking at me. “I looked like
such
an asshole.”

“Oh, baby, you have to learn to say no.” She twirls off her coat and tosses it on the counter, revealing a very expensive looking charcoal cashmere sweater and matching velvet jeans.

“I didn’t want to get them angry at me.” He pops open another bottle of kimchi the chef deposits between us and raises the
Times.

“Kirsten manages Jake’s brand,” Jocelyn informs me as Kirsten grabs a croissant and rips the tip off. “She’s here to give you yours.”

“Howdyado?”

My mouth opens as I try to formulate a response, but I am now, like, twelve responses behind. I maneuver the corners momentarily to turn up in acknowledgment of Kirsten’s greeting. “I don’t need a brand.”

Jocelyn slaps her ledger closed. “Then you need to go back to cow country and get a new boyfriend.”

“Joss…” Jake sends out a warning flare from behind the wall of newsprint.

Kirsten shoots Jocelyn a look. “Katie.”

“Kate,” I correct, staring imploringly at the Business Section. “Jake?”

“Kate,” she continues. “People are a little overinvested right now, with the upcoming album, the Christmas breakup—”

“The fact that newlyweds have been stomping on each other’s toes to your story for almost a decade.”

Kirsten shoots Joss another silencing look and I’m sensing some sort of good-cop bad-cop as Kirsten leans in to lull me with dulcet tones. “Today is a wonderful opportunity to get off on the right foot with the American people.”

I pull my robe closer. “Except the American people already know way more than, frankly, is appropriate. Whatever foot we got off on was ten years ago. They have six albums about me. That’s all I’m gonna give.”

The man in the tracksuit folds the last section and stands, suctioning seaweed from his molars. “Ready?”

Jake leaps from the banquette, abandoning his fish to come around and kiss me. “Have fun,” he whispers in my ear. “We’ll catch up in a few hours.” He starts to pad out.

“Jake, can you at least stay until we’ve finished this conversation?”

“I really can’t, but don’t worry, that’s the whole point. You don’t have to worry. You don’t even have to think about it. Everyone here is going to take amazing care of you.” He gives me a quick kiss.

“I don’t need to be taken care of!” I call after him as he waves from the door. But Jocelyn and Kirsten are staring me up and down. “I don’t need to be taken care of.”

“What’s the reconstruction?” Jocelyn punders. “She’s certainly not Eden.”

“No, she’s not. So, that’s what I’m working with—playing up the contrast. How youthful you are. You radiate…youth. So, starting right now no cigarettes, no Red Bull, no diet pills, and whatever you do, I
beg
you, when you exit a car
knees together.
So first we’re gonna get you in some fabulous Stella McCartney gear and send you around the reservoir a few times, let the paparazzi chase you. You’re a runner, am I right? No matter—your adrenaline’ll kick in. Then we’ll all spend the day shopping organic, eating vegan, visiting a rock-climbing wall, and getting a colonic. By the end of the day every magazine will have gorgeous shots of this youthful, healthy girl.”

“Um, no. No, no, no and absolutely, positively, over-my-dead-body no.”

Jocelyn slaps her binder on the marble counter. “Okay, look, Yokel Ono, update: the box set drops in less than two weeks. Jake reuniting with his long-lost love buys me exactly one news cycle. One. So, we need you to fucking maximize.” She pauses. “We could knock you up?”

“No.”

“See, now you’re just being an asshole.”

“Now I’m just being a woman in a bathrobe in a strange kitchen being told she has to square dance with the American people while her boyfriend has his snot analyzed.”

“But Jake’s not just a boyfriend, is he?” Jocelyn cants her head. “You love him. You want the best for him. And you have decided to come on board his life.”

I hold her gaze, letting that sink in. “Okay. I will give you one day. One.” I turn to Kirsten. “No cigarettes, no Red Bull. But no colonics, no running, and no, and I mean no, baby. Certainly not
this
news cycle.”

Jocelyn consults her schedule. “Fine. Tonight you’re having dinner with Chris and Gwynnie.”

“Paltrow?”

“There’ll be paparazzi outside the restaurant—so, remember, healthy!”

At midnight I finally hit
SEND
on the mea culpa e-mail to my boss its taken me four days in New York to get up the nerve to write. A butter-colored bar appears at the bottom of the screen,
“Wireless network unavailable.”
Annoyed, I get up from Jake’s bed with my glowing laptop and circle the dark room, trying to reconnect with the evasive signal. “Come on, come on,” I mutter, eager for him to get my impassioned argument for why he should continue to employ a tabloid-strumpet.

I open the door and start haltingly walking the unlit hall, waiting for any sign of connectivity, praying my battery doesn’t die. Then a door halfway down opens, shedding a trapezoid of light on the black cement. “Hello?” I call.

“Hey,” one of the office staffers says as I walk in. She’s flipping the collar of her coat out and shutting down the computers.

“Hi, I didn’t realize anyone was still here.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, sliding a stack of file folders into her white patent leather tote, the canary yellow wood bangles on her wrist clacking. “We’re in the home stretch.” As her Mac screen pops to black she reaches behind her to pull a poster-size 5 off the wall, revealing a 4 beneath it.

“Oh, the number of days until the Asia tour launches,” I say, getting it.

“No.” She pulls her ponytail out and sticks the rubber band between her teeth. “Well, yes. But it’s
our
—” She swirls her arm at the elbow to indicate the office. “Countdown to getting our lives back.” She pulls the holder out and refastens her hair. “I mean, it’s totally exhilarating, but when he’s in town it is just nonstop. That man has the work ethic of the Pilgrims.”

“He does?” I ask. “I assumed this pace was being dictated by the label.”

“Oh no.” She clicks off the desk lamps. “When he’s not in the studio, he’s touring. While he’s on the bus he’s reading scripts, while he’s filming he’s reviewing contracts, while he’s promoting he’s researching every global problem you can name. And he takes insane care of himself, just insane.” She shakes her head, like a parent at the school play. “The man cannot stop. So…” She blows her bangs up. “For three months matching his pace is the touring team’s problem, and we can catch up on laundry and sleep. But we do miss him.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s just what being someone in his position looks like,” I say, trying to reconcile this new image and wondering if he’d had unlimited funds at seventeen to fill that house with an entourage, this isn’t exactly what Susan’s replacements would’ve looked like.

“Oh, no.” She heaves her tote up on her shoulder. “No. We’ve all come from other offices and no one experienced anything like it. Except Sadie, who did two years with Madonna. I don’t think he’s taken a vacation since I got here.”

“Really.” The vision I’d been nurturing of Jake and me walking our children, sand buckets in hand to the shore, ebbs away.

“Yeah. Can I help you with that?” she asks, indicating the laptop as she backs me out the door, looping her floor-grazing scarf around her neck.

“Oh, just trying to send some e-mails for work, you know, explaining the tree house debacle, but I lost the connection.”

“Oh yeah, here.” She pulls a file folder from her tote and hands it over. “Your clippings.”

I flip it open in the crease of my laptop and finger through the calculatedly apple-cheeked pictures of me, all under varying captions of
Jake’s Katie—why we love America’s new girl-next-door.
“Wow,” I say as she watches me watch myself touring New York, Kirsten and Jocelyn half out of frame. “You guys just decide ‘healthy’ and then they…and these. Wow.” Stunned, I hand it back to her.

“You okay?” she asks, slipping it in her purse.

“Sure, yeah, I mean, it’s wholesome and that’s the important thing. I think my career can survive this,” I say, praying I’m right, praying I haven’t just flushed my master’s degree.

“And try the sauna. It’s never worked, but, for some reason, the signal’s really strong in there.”

“Okay…”

“Fourth door down on your left. Off the massage room.”

“Great. Thank you.” With a wave she heads toward the elevator, and I burrow deeper into the apartment to see if a dormant sauna can open my Bluetooth, if not my pores.

Well past hungry as it is well past the after-hours supper Jake was supposed to pick me up for, I recross my legs on the extra-long ottoman where I’m slouched in the now mostly empty living room. I tried sitting on the floor, but the poured cement sent a damp chill into my lumbar. In the dim light provided by the skyline below, I stare at the shadowy bare spaces left by Eden’s departure and try to picture my Pottery Barn chair or garage-sale desk filling them in. But the result is so laughable I return to the previous hour’s game of imagining kids hanging out in here after school, sprawling on the cement, a Heller-esque tray of goodies between them, small fingers leaving Cheetos imprints on the pony-skin chaise. And where am I? What will I be doing?

“Waiting,” I mutter, stretching to grasp the Pellegrino left for me by the chef as he departed for the night. I pull the slice of lime off the rim and squeeze it, making a satisfying hiss as the juice sprays into the water, the density getting trapped by the bubbles. I take a sip, pressing my lips together as the elevator starts to move, the cables visible through the open door across the room.
Clack clack, whir.
I breathe, my own motor in sync. It shudders to a stop, the bars parting. Coat open, he stretches up, his fingertips catching the doorframe as he leans forward. “God, it’s amazing to have you there—”

“Waiting.”

“For me.” He lunges across the room, covering the twenty feet between us in a pace. “You were all I could think about,” he says into my neck.

I twist out from under him to place my glass on the floor. “So, was this like a hot thing for you and Eden?”

“What?”

I slide my hips over so I can face him. “Like, you’d spend the day, or month or year with your people, and she’d be with her people, and you’d be thinking about each other. Was that, like, fore-play?”

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem is that I’ve spent the last three days, no, not with my boyfriend—”

“I’m more than your boyfriend—”

I hold my palm up to silence him. “I’ve spent the last three days being baby-sat by Satan’s minions while being chased, and I do mean
chased,
by paparazzi.
I
got a smile of sympathy from Nicole Kidman as we both tried to leave the Mercer Hotel—only they followed
me.
”