In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (34 page)

In six weeks you’re scheduled to start a two-year-long project in New York, but you’re considering asking for a delay until your father is up and running, even though you’d specifically asked for the job—a chance to work with other propulsion engineers from Europe and Japan.

A knock on the half-open door, and Phoebe Fisher’s father walks in before getting an affirmative response.

“How’s everyone doing today?” He nods politely at you and your sisters clustered in chairs around your father.

The four of you nod back, uttering some variance of “good,” as Larry Fisher plucks your father’s chart from the foot of the bed.

A week ago, when your father finally admitted he was going to have surgery, he’d mentioned his cardiologist knew you. “He’s the father of the girl you went with in high school,” Dad said. “The pretty one with black hair. He had a picture of her on his desk.” While it didn’t surprise you at all that Phoebe’s father recognized you two days later at the pre-op meeting, the fact that your own father remembered how Phoebe once fit into your life was surprising and touching, made you once again grateful Maura had never said anything about the two of you.

Bobbing his head as he examines the clipboard, Larry Fisher smiles, says everything looks good and your father should be able to leave by the end of the week.

Turning to you, he mentions he had a conversation with Phoebe last night. “She was happy to hear that everything’s going so well for you, Oliver.”

“How is she?” you ask.

“Really good. She’s finishing her master’s at Michigan and has a job lined up in LA. And, I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell anyone yet, but she just got engaged.”

“That’s great,” you say. “Give her my congratulations.”

When Phoebe’s father is out of the room, Karen rolls her eyes. “Like you needed to know she’s getting married. And what? It only took her until she was seventy to finish school?”

You shrug, knowing Karen, as always, is simply trying to help.

Visiting hours winding to a close, you tell your father you’ll be back the next day and ask Natasha if she is ready to go.

You’d invited her to stay with you in Printer’s Row instead of at Dad’s house with Karen, and she’d been contagiously excited by the idea. It means crunching up and sleeping on the couch so she can have your bed, but the two of you have actually been having a pretty good time. Tomorrow you promised to take her to Dark Tower Comics.

You’re gathering your coats when Karen points to the muted television mounted on the wall, where a plane is floating on a river surrounded by emergency boats.

“Turn it up,” your father says, invigorated and alive.

In silence the four of you listen to the newscaster explain how the pilot ditched the crippled plane in the Hudson and miraculously everyone survived.

“Did you ever do anything like that?” Natasha asks your father.

“No.” He sighs. “We trained for stuff, had some drills in the Air Force, but nothing like that ever came up. I honestly wasn’t sure you could successfully ditch.”

There’s awe in his voice and some disappointment that he’ll never have that opportunity. And you understand this, understand
him
like you never did in your youth.

Putting a hand on his shoulder, you tell him with sincerity, “If you’d had to, I’m sure you could have done it, too.”

LOS ANGELES

It’s the first day of filming for
E&E: Rising
’s fifth season, but Adam is on his cell phone looking down at Bel Air from his condo in the Wilshire Corridor. In his ear, Marty is weighing the pluses and minuses of signing on for the
Murder Island
sequels. The lone pro appears to be monetary, the cons all other aspects of the project.

“It’s another four months in New Zealand,” Marty is saying. “And that takes you right out of pilot season if we decide to go in that direction.”

“I
did
get really sick of lamb,” Adam says vacantly.

The floor-to-ceiling windows—which had seemed open and freeing when Adam bought the twenty-fourth-floor unit five years ago—now make him feel trapped, like a goldfish in an aquarium.

“They’ll have a bigger budget this time, but who knows if that will help,” Marty continues.

By the time it was actually released,
Murder Island
had been edited down to an eighty-six minutes so slim the plot was largely incoherent. That hadn’t dissuaded scores of teen fans from racing to the theater to watch Adam—wearing a not-quite-believable wig and playing a charismatic cult leader—stab, spear, and scalp a handful of young stars from other QT and CW shows. The film had opened at an astonishing number one (the
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
remake, meanwhile, hadn’t cracked the top ten, though it did make a couple critics’ year’s-best lists) right around the time his contract with
E&E: Rising
was up. It had made the decision
not
to go back to 5:00
A.M.
calls and two hours of daily makeup for a show that was hemorrhaging viewers all that much easier. He’d told Marty he wanted to do more films; he’d hoped they wouldn’t all be
Murder Island
movies.

“It’s a paycheck, buddy, plain and simple. You can make this your franchise, make buckets of money—which, believe me, I got no issue with—but you’re not gonna win any awards.”

Reviews for
Murder Island
had ranged from mediocre to bloody, but even the harshest critics acknowledged Adam had been a “bright spot,” “fun to watch,” or, his personal favorite from Roger Ebert: “Zoellner, so promising in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, does the best he can here but is worthy of a much better movie.”

“I don’t know,” Adam says. “Will it hurt me?”

“Not if you want a five bed/six bath in Malibu.”

Adam doesn’t particularly want a five bed/six bath in Malibu. He doesn’t use half the bedrooms and bathrooms in his home now, and the beach reminds him too much of Florida. Maybe some desert house in Palm Springs or a sprawling ranch in Montana or another place where they have sprawling ranches—anywhere but LA.

“Give it a few days,” Marty says. “They need you more than you need them, so make ’em squirm.”

“Okay, buddy?” Marty is asking, and Adam realizes an acknowledgment is required.

“Sounds good.”

Hanging up, Adam checks the text messages he’d ignored while on the phone. Relief when he sees they’re not from Phoebe.

Cecily:
On set, totally sux without u
.

Thirty seconds later:
Come back—Ron tired of hearing about my shits!!

Then from Ron:
She’s not kidding. You MUST guest star soon
.

Cecily again:
Yes, guest star! SPLEEN, SPLEEN, SPLEEN!!!!

Wistful, Adam types a message for both of them, saying they should have Enchanted Ales on him tonight. Thinks about his non-fishbowl apartment in BC, tries to remember what exactly it was about Vancouver that drove him bonkers. The rain?

He’s missed several e-mails as well: NYU’s Office of Annual Giving looking for another donation; organizers from a charity softball event asking if they can add him to their roster again; fan letters begging him to return to the show—one of them mildly threatening.

And then, because he can’t really put it off any longer, he plays Phoebe’s message from this morning: “Hey, it’s me. So, um, I got a job lined up and I’m coming back to LA in the spring. And I’ve got some other news. So when you get a chance, give me a shout.”

There is absolutely no news Adam wants to hear from Phoebe Fisher.

That’s not really accurate. If it was simply that she was returning, he could be persuaded to hear about that. But since she offered that as a throwaway before advertising the “other news,” he’d wager eons and empires she’s married or getting married, or she and her kid boyfriend are joining the circus to then get married by a clown. None of this is news he wants to hear. As long as she’s happy, he’s happy … well, happy-ish, which frankly seems like an enormous emotional maturity leap for him. But that doesn’t change the fact that his grand experiment of being vulnerable and committing to someone was a spectacular failure.

Still, he knows he needs to call her back, realizes if he’d called her back last year after he’d lashed out and told her he’d slept with Cecily, Phoebe probably wouldn’t even have this news to share.

Slumping on the suede sofa, he wonders if it’s his couch or Phoebe’s. After a decade of living together in one configuration or another, isn’t it all their stuff? He should give it to her. She’ll probably need furniture. If she’d take it, he’d gladly give Phoebe the whole fucking aquarium condo.

He mutes the giant flat-screen TV that’s always on now that he lives alone and, for all intents and purposes, is unemployed. Phoebe is the top person on his phone’s Favorites list, but he manually types in the numbers anyway.

She picks up on the second ring. Her apprehension is palpable, so he shares a story about a recent dinner with his publicist, where Evie convinced him to help poach an A-list actress at the next table and hilarity ensued. Phoebe laughs; Adam laughs.

No one could ever say Anna Zoellner’s bastard son wasn’t good at convincing people he felt things he didn’t.

He lets her tell him about her new gig at Cedars-Sinai starting in June, and about how all the kids at Michigan can’t stop talking about
Murder Island
. Lets her work up to telling him she’s engaged. Without overplaying his congratulations—she
would
be able to tell that was fake—he asks polite questions. Lets her tell him “probably July” and “something pretty small, maybe the back room at Rosebud.”

On the television he catches a bizarre image: a plane in the water, shivering people standing in clumps on the wings. Even with all the ships coming to help them, they look so alone and adrift.

And then, when she’s finished all those things she had to say and he had to hear, she speaks his name with infinite tragedy. “Adam.”

In some other world, maybe, this is the time when he makes a play, voices something dramatic and game changing.

“Phoebe,” he starts, but knows that he has to get off the phone before he says more, because anything else he could say would only hurt her, and he has been trying so impossibly hard
not
to do that anymore.

“I should get going, I need to call Marty. Let’s get dinner when you’re back.”

After hanging up, he actually does call his agent.

“I want to do the sequels.”

“You’re sure?” Marty asks. “An hour ago you were pretty on the fence.”

“Yeah, I know. I got a craving for lamb.”

12   i guess i knew that

“I fucking hate you,” Evie Saperstein says as a greeting. Walking onto the patio of Chateau Marmont, she gives Phoebe’s cheek a kiss. “Six months after having a kid and you look like a Victoria’s Secret model.”

Phoebe thanks her, but the truth is, she hasn’t lost the last fifteen pounds of baby weight and is astonished, after years of starving herself and sticking her finger down her throat in the name of her “acting” career, how little she actually cares.

“Must be how you hang on to that hot young husband,” Evie says. This is likely meant as a compliment, so Phoebe just smiles.

Calling Evie “Ms. Saperstein,” a pert hostess leads them to a table in the shade next to scantily clad blond starlets Phoebe doesn’t recognize. She never knows anyone anymore, and it seems bizarre that that used to be such an enormous part of her world. Actually, everything about her previous life in Los Angeles has felt alien in the year and a half she’s been back.

As they are unfurling napkins, a waiter dips over, asks if “Ms. Saperstein” would like her usual—a crab BLT not on the menu—and Phoebe orders the chopped salad. Between counseling at Cedars-Sinai, running her group sessions in the evening, hacking out a few hours a day when her schedule meshes with Cole’s, and making sure Cassie is fed, changed, and napped, Phoebe hasn’t seen Evie for months, and there is much updating: the married tech billionaire Evie’s sleeping with; how Cassie is starting to be more fun and less bloblike; and potential work crossovers—meeting some of Evie’s clients might be nice for Phoebe’s patients, or as Evie describes them, “some of your sad people.”

Dishes cleared.

Phones checked.

Dessert discussed but ultimately not ordered.

Then Phoebe does the thing she tries never to do. The thing she knows puts Evie in an uncomfortable position.

“Is he okay?” she asks. There’s no need to specify the “he” is Adam.

“I take it you caught his meltdown on Howard Stern?” Evie shakes her head.

“Part of it.”

Her friend Melissa (who may or may not have slept with Adam a million years ago) had e-mailed her assuming she’d heard the show, the subject line,
Your Boy’s Hysterical.
And when Phoebe found the Web link for the broadcast, Adam
had
been extremely witty as he bashed
Murder Island 3
and its director while Stern and guest David Arquette goaded him on. It was also incredibly unprofessional. After so many years of Adam diligently doing everything asked of him—committing to inanely written scenes, shaving his head and waxing his chest, Comic-Con panels and DVD commentaries when bigger actors couldn’t be bothered—to hear him trash a project was shocking.

“Minerva and I have been cleaning
that
up all week,” Evie says, and explains that Howard and Adam met at a charity softball event and Adam had stopped by the show without Evie’s sanction. “Honestly, in a few days everyone will forget about it. Even New Line acknowledges the film was a shit box.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Phoebe says.

“So you guys really don’t talk at all anymore?”

Since coming back, Phoebe has seen Adam one time. Because he’d told her to call, she’d left him messages when she and Cole moved into the little Craftsman bungalow in Los Feliz. An assistant she’d never met called to set something up (and offered to ship over
anything
Phoebe wanted from the condo—actually, to sell her the place for a “very fair price” that Phoebe suspected would have been significantly below market). Adam had canceled thrice; then he’d been in New Zealand filming. Finally they’d gotten lunch at Tavern. Looking too thin and vaguely stoned, he’d spent the majority of the meal fiddling with his phone, flirting with the waitress, and declaring everything “tight.” On the drive home, Phoebe had to pull over to puke up steak salad and green-olive bread. Two days later she found out she was pregnant, but she’s still not entirely convinced the vomiting was morning-sickness-related. Her wedding invitations had already gone out at that point; Adam sent his regrets and a check for too much money. She never cashed it. Though she didn’t send him a birth announcement, an even bigger check arrived in a generic card when she had Cassie six months later.