Last Night at Chateau Marmont (25 page)

Julian sighed and kept reading. “Rook, can you please stop worrying about us? We’re fine. I promise.”

She was quiet for a few moments as she thought about this, knowing she didn’t actually want to have more sex—not now, not being this tired—but that she wanted
him
to want to.

“Did you lock the front door when you came home tonight?” she asked.

“I think so,” he murmured without looking up. He was reading an article on the best guitar techs in America. She knew he had zero recollection of whether he’d locked the front door or not.

“Well did you or didn’t you?”

“Yes, I definitely did.”

“Because if you’re not sure, I’ll get up and check. I’d rather be inconvenienced for thirty seconds than dead,” she said with a deep, dramatic sigh.

“Really?” He snuggled deeper under the covers. “I couldn’t disagree more.”

“Julian, seriously. That guy on our floor died just last week. Don’t you think we should try to be a little bit more careful?”

“Brooke, sweetheart, he drank himself to death. I’m not sure that could’ve been prevented if he’d locked his door.”

She knew this, of course—knew every single thing that happened in the building because the super was a constant talker—but would it kill Julian to give her a little attention?

“I think I might be pregnant,” she announced.

“You are not,” he replied automatically and continued to read.

“Yeah, well what if I was?”

“But you’re not.”

“But how do you know? Mistakes happen all the time. I could be. Then what would we do?” She managed a faux sniffle.

He smiled and finally—finally!—put down the magazine. “Oh, sweetheart, come here. I’m sorry, I should’ve realized earlier. You want to cuddle.”

She nodded. Beyond immature, but she was desperate.

He shimmied over to her side of the bed and enveloped her in a hug. “And did it ever occur to you to say, ‘Julian, oh loving husband, I want to cuddle. Will you pay attention to me?’ rather than picking fights?”

She shook her head no.

“Of course it didn’t,” he said with a sigh. “Are you really concerned about our sex life or was that all part of the plan to get a reaction?”

“Yeah, just going for the reaction,” she lied.

“And you’re not pregnant?”

“No!” she said, a little louder than she intended. “Absolutely, definitely not.” She resisted asking him if it would be the worst thing in the world if she actually
were
pregnant. They’d been married five years, after all. . . .

They kissed good night (he suffered the spackled-on moisturizer, but not without a nose wrinkle and a highly exaggerated gagging sound), and she waited the requisite ten minutes until his breathing steadied before pulling on her robe and padding out to the kitchen. After checking that the front door was locked (it was), she headed over to the computer for a quick surf.

In the early days of Facebook, she’d been content to confine her online time to the all-encompassing world of Ex-Boyfriend Stalking. First she searched out her handful of longer-term boyfriends from high school and college, plus that Venezuelan guy she dated for a couple months in graduate school who fell somewhere between a fling and a relationship (had his English been just a touch better . . . ) and brought herself up to date on their lives. She’d been pleased to see that each and every one of them looked worse than when she’d known them, and she repeatedly wondered the same thing that was on the minds of so many twentysomething women: why was it, exactly, that nearly every girl she knew looked far better than she had in college when every guy looked fatter, balder, and much, much older?

A couple months had passed like this until she became interested in anything beyond pictures of her senior prom date’s twin boys, and before long she began accumulating friends from every era of her life: kindergarten in Boston, while her own parents were still doing their graduate work; sleepaway camp in the Poconos; high school in suburban Philadelphia; dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances from undergrad at Cornell and her master’s program at NYU; and now, colleagues from both jobs at the hospital and the Huntley School. And although she’d forgotten the existence of many of the early friends until their names resurfaced in her Notifications folder, she was always eager to reconnect and see what the last ten or even twenty years had brought.

Tonight was no different: she accepted a friend request from a childhood playmate whose family had moved away in middle school and then hungrily scanned the new profile, registering all the details
(single, graduated from UC Boulder, currently living in Denver, appears to love mountain biking and guys with long hair), and sent the girl a quick, cheerily bland message that she knew would likely be the beginning and the end of their “reunion.”

She clicked the Home button and was transported back to the addictive Live News Feed, where she quickly scanned her friends’ status updates on the Cowboys game, their babies’ daily milestones, their Halloween costume ideas, their happiness that “TGIF!” and the photos they’d posted from various vacations they’d taken all over the world. It wasn’t until she’d scrolled to the bottom of the second page that she saw Leo’s update, in all caps, of course, as though he were screaming directly at her.

Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Thankfully, her regular e-mail inbox pinged with a welcome distraction before she could dwell on the grossness of Leo’s update.

The new e-mail was from Nola. It was the first (well, really the second: the very first had merely read: “SAVE ME FROM THIS HELL!!!”) Brooke had heard from her since she’d left, and she opened it eagerly. Maybe there was a
chance
she was having fun? No, it was impossible. Nola’s vacations trended more toward the skiing in the Swiss Alps/sunning in St. Tropez/partying in Cabo types. They were generally frequent, expensive, and almost always included a man extremely fond of sex whom she had only just met and most likely wouldn’t see again once they returned home. Brooke literally hadn’t believed Nola when she announced that she’d signed up for a group tour of Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos . . . alone. Staying in two-star hotels and guesthouses and traveling by bus. A single backpack for over two weeks. A comprehensive lack of Michelin-starred
restaurants, Town Car services, or hundred-dollar pedicures. Zero chance of partying on a new friend’s yacht or wearing a single pair of Louboutins. Brooke had tried to talk her out of it by showing Nola her own honeymoon pictures to Southeast Asia, which were replete with close-ups of exotic insects, house pets as dinner, and a collage of all the squat toilets they’d encountered, but Nola insisted it would be fine right until the very end. Brooke wouldn’t say I told you so, but judging from the e-mail, things were going exactly as expected.

It took mere seconds for Brooke to respond.

She hit Send and heard Julian padding toward her.

“Baby, what are you doing out here?” he asked sleepily as he poured himself some water. “Facebook will be here in the morning.”

“I’m not on Facebook!” she said indignantly. “I couldn’t sleep so I came out here to write Nola. I don’t think she’s loving her travel partners.”

“Come back to bed.” He began to drink his water as he walked back to the bedroom.

“Okay, I’ll be right in,” she called out, but he was already gone.

Brooke awoke instantly from the noise in the apartment, bolted straight up in bed on full alert, terrified until she remembered that Julian was actually home that night. They hadn’t gone to Italy; instead, Julian had been on a city-hopping tour of major radio stations, meeting DJs, doing brief in-studio performances, and answering callers’ questions. Once again, he’d been gone for two straight weeks.

She leaned over to read the bedside clock, a task made harder by Walter’s hot tongue on her face and her inability to find her glasses. Three nineteen
A.M.
What on earth was he doing awake when they had to be up so early?

“All right, come along,” she crooned to Walter, who was wagging and jumping at this unexpected nighttime excitement. Brooke wrapped herself in a robe and padded to the living room, where Julian sat in the dark, clad only in boxers and a pair of headphones, playing his keyboard. He didn’t appear to be practicing anything so much as zoning out—his gaze was fixed on the wall opposite the couch and his hands moved across the keys without a hint of awareness. If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought he was sleepwalking or on drugs. She was able to sit down next to him before he was even aware of her presence.

“Hey,” he said, pulling his headphones down around his neck like a scarf. “Did I wake you?”

Brooke nodded. “It’s muted, though,” she said, pointing to the keyboard, which was hooked up to the headphones, “so I’m not sure what I heard.”

“These,” Julian said, holding up a handful of CDs. “I knocked them over just a minute ago. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Brooke snuggled close. “You okay? What’s going on?”

Julian wrapped his arms around her shoulders but seemed no less distracted. His eyebrows knit together. “I guess I’m just really ner
vous. I’ve done a lot of interviews by now, but none as big as the
Today
show.”

Brooke grabbed his hand, squeezed it, and said, “You’re going to be great, baby. Seriously, you’re a natural at this media stuff.” Maybe that wasn’t exactly true—the few television interviews she’d seen Julian do so far had been a little on the awkward side—but if there was ever a time to lie . . .

“You have to say that. You’re my wife.”

“You’re absolutely right, I do have to say it. But I also happen to mean it. You’re going to be amazing.”

“It’s live and it’s
national.
Millions of people watch every single morning. How terrifying is that?”

Brooke nuzzled into his chest so he couldn’t see her expression. “You’re just going to go out there and do your thing. They’ll have that stage set up outside and all the screaming tourists, and it won’t feel any different than a tour performance. Far less people than that, actually.”

“Fewer.”

“What?”

“Fewer. It’s ‘far fewer’ people, not ‘less.’” Julian smiled weakly.

Brooke punched him. “So that’s what I get for trying to comfort you, huh? Grammar correction? Come on, let’s go back to bed.”