In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (7 page)

“It’s okay.” She forces a laugh. “I’ve got good reflexes.”

“No, iz not okay. I…” Adam’s still not looking at her, but lays one hand on her shoulder, the other against the tile wall for support. He ducks so his forehead touches hers, and she feels blood pulsing through him where their skin meets. A bead of his sweat skis down her cheek, tastes like alcohol.

Phoebe had been hesitant to let Adam move in when her old roommate packed up and went back to Iowa. She knew Adam wanted to sleep with her and figured that if they were living together, they might get drunk or bored and things would end badly (he’d already boned half the girls in their acting class). But when he booked the
Goners
pilot and they actually
did
hook up, it had been nothing like that at all. Adam’s agent had called with the news, and when he’d gotten off the phone Adam had looked beatific, so otherworldly happy, that Phoebe couldn’t
not
touch him.

“Phoebe,” he says with something that sounds like gravitas. Maybe now he’s going to apologize for the way he’s been for the past few weeks, acknowledge he’s lucky to have her. Maybe tell her he wants to give them a real try as a couple. Or not, tell her he wants to go back to being friends.

Nope, he’s going to fall into her.

He’s too thin and a good two inches shorter than the six one his head shots claim, but it’s still 165 pounds of deadweight boy suddenly in her charge, and she stumbles against the wall.

“Adam, come on,” she says, shaking him back to consciousness.

And she wants to tell him he can’t do this, not because she wants to be his girlfriend, but because she read the
Goners
script and it was shit—he deserves better than an asinine frat-boy character making PMS and date-rape jokes. Because it’s one dumb setback and he’s so close (so much closer than she’s ever been), and so many untalented people make it, all the truly gifted ones who keep trying
have
to. Because before he walked into Thetta Tunney’s workshop buzzing with the kind of commanding energy that felled trees and whistled teakettles (the kind that Jake James mustered to get her into that bathroom), she’d forgotten a lot of things, had started believing she’d come to California to seat starlets, go on dates with cheesy millionaires and washed-up actors, and irk her cardiologist father by not enrolling—even part-time—in one of the many area schools. Because when she and Adam put up their scene from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
in class, he was so good it made her better, made her remember why she was enduring the city’s smog and traffic in the first place.

Of course she can’t say any of this now. So she oversees the unsteady mission to his bed, pulls off his shoes, and flops down beside him. As she plays with Adam’s sandy hair, the last thing she hears before falling asleep is Katie Couric’s cheery voice on the
Today Show
three hours ahead in New York. “Good morning, America. We still don’t have a winner.”

*   *   *

The country hasn’t elected a president and Phoebe hasn’t decided about Thanksgiving a week later when she nearly trips over Jake James outside the Dan Tana’s restrooms after puking up fifty dollars worth of meat.

“We meet again.” Jake smiles, and Phoebe can tell he has absolutely no idea who she is or why he knows her. After exchanging pleasantries, she leaves him to ponder and goes back to her date—an entertainment lawyer she met at Rosebud who’s polite enough to stand when he sees her approaching their table.

Lawyer is a bit on the quiet side, but she’s always been good at drawing people out, at getting them to talk, and soon she has him chatting about his work, joking about his high-maintenance clients. Lawyer asks softball questions—where she’s from, her family, and career. She talks about the print work and the industrial films, the local television commercials, and the Dannon spots five years ago that had seemed the gateway to something bigger but never amounted to anything more than six months of royalty checks.

“So do you think we’ll have elected a president by January?” she asks during a lull in the conversation. “Maybe we were just given two crappy choices.”

Inching his hand closer to hers, he agrees. “Isn’t that so often the case?”

Another bottle of wine, drinks at a nearby bar, and Lawyer takes her hand as the valet brings around his silver Maserati. He waits until they’re on Santa Monica Boulevard before asking her if she’d like to check out the amazing view at his place.

“I’m sure it’s stunning,” she says, “but I can’t sleep with you tonight.”

“I didn’t mean to imply…” He looks stricken she made that assumption, takes the turn onto Sunset toward her apartment. “I…”

“You don’t have to apologize.” Unhooking her seat belt, she slithers across the console to his lap, tells him to pull over, which he does without question.

If she
really
liked Lawyer or planned to see him again, Phoebe would start by unbuttoning his shirt, then lick circles around each nipple, travel down his stomach, spend a good few minutes teasing his inner thighs with her breath until he squirmed and moaned. She doesn’t plan on seeing him again, but he seems a fundamentally decent man, and she’s encountered so many less-than-decent men since moving to LA. Men who pushed her head into their crotches or dropped pills in her drinks. Strong men who got rough. Drunken men who probably thought the sex was more consensual than it was. Lawyer isn’t one of those men, and he deserves a reward for that. So for him she does this: runs her fingers down the shaft of his cock, tongues the head, swallows him down. The gearshift pokes her hip, and his grasp on her hair borders on pain, but Lawyer doesn’t take long, remembers her name when he comes.

“Oh, Phoebe.” Shuddering, he strokes her cheek. “Sweet, sweet girl.”

His semen in her mouth is powdery bland as he drives her home. She wonders if he tastes it when she kisses him good night.

Blue light from the TV flickering across his face, Adam is still boneless on the couch when Phoebe gets in after midnight; the tinge of unwarranted guilt.

“Do we have a president yet?” She leans on the doorjamb to pull off her shoes.

“Your lipstick’s smeared.” He’s so nonchalant he could be telling her he changed a lightbulb. “Silver Maserati get lucky on the first date?”

“Do you care?” No anger, she actually wants to know, is
desperate
to know.

He turns back to the screen. She follows, reads the ticker scrolling along the bottom:
FLORIDA
SECRETARY OF
STATE
KATHERINE
HARRIS
ANNOUNCES
BUSH
LEADS
GORE BY 300 VOTES.

Thinking Adam won’t answer, Phoebe starts toward her bedroom, stops when she hears him stand.

“I used to,” he says evenly. A half-full bottle of Corona is on the coffee table, but his eyes are sharp. He isn’t drunk, isn’t high. “Not so much lately.”

“Because you don’t care about anything?
Goners
didn’t go, so nothing will ever matter again?”

“Things like you?” Voice hemorrhaging sarcasm, he’s next to her—too close, really—she can smell her lavender body wash on his skin spiked with sweat. “Because what we had was
sooo
meaningful?”

“Whatever, go back to your pity party.”

She actually feels the change in temperature as his pupils narrow.

“Poor, poor Princess Phoebe,” he says with a venom she’s only heard once, in their scene from
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, his Brick berating her Maggie, smoldering yet calm. “I apologize. I realize I haven’t been telling you how beautiful, how fucking special you are. Aphrodite herself, rising on the half shell.”

She remembers Adam’s mother’s visit, how Anna Zoellner mentioned her son had been a National Merit Scholar and gotten a full ride to college, remembers Adam is smarter than she is.

“Frankly, I thought I’d earned a reprieve,” he continues. “Thought maybe some other poor bastard could pick up the slack. But I was wrong. I’m not allowed to be upset about
my
life, because you need your favorite toy.”

“I know you’ve had a rough couple of weeks—”

“No, I don’t think you understand,
princess.
This is all I’ve got. I don’t have the option of shilling yogurt or marrying well because I’m so very, very pretty—practically perfect since the new nose and fake tits.” He taps the bridge of her nose, pulls his finger back before she swats it away. “People don’t just give me things on the off chance I might sleep with them.”

“Says the great wandering womanizer. Stop.”

“You should be an escort; it would be more honest.”

The terrifying thing that will haunt her is that this moment, with her blood furious and heart in hyperdrive, could go either way. Sure, she wants to slug him. But she also wants to slam him to the wall and devour his mouth, wrap her legs around his hips and carve hieroglyphics in his back with her nails while he fucks her.

Her palm stings after she slaps him.

His hand balls into a fist. For a fractured second that’s more interesting than scary, Phoebe thinks he’s going to hit back, channel all that energy into a weapon, wonders what it would feel like to have her nose broken again, this time without anesthetic.

But he’s still Adam, taught by his grandparents to call people “sir” and “ma’ am,” to hold doors open, say “please” and “thank you,” and never, ever contemplate striking a woman.

Not physically at least.

Exhaling something between a laugh and a sigh, he unclenches his fist and runs fingers through his hair—a gesture she knows means he’s stressed. Under the pink of her handprint, he’s ashen, purple half-moons beneath his eyes; she’s about to apologize.

“You’d never actually need to be an escort, though, would’ya,
princess
?” he says, placid and deadly. “Wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of hassle if we admitted your daddy is the one I actually owe two months’ rent?”

Tears stinging her sinuses, she’s in her room, door shuttered, before he can say anything else.

A smash.

Peeping through the gap in the door hinges, she notes there’s a hole in the living room wall and Adam is muttering, shaking his hand. It looks like it hurts; she hopes it does.

According to the Rolex her dad and Gennifer gave her for graduation, it’s ten past four, six in Chicago. She catches her father before he leaves for his daily jog.

“It’s a little early out there,” he says. “Everything okay, princess?”

Poor, poor Princess Phoebe.

“I was just missing you guys.” She tries to sound normal. “Can I come home for Thanksgiving?”

*   *   *

The next morning (noon, really) there’s still a hole in the wall, but the entire apartment has been scrubbed, scoured, and swept. Shoes she kicks off in the living room (all those fancy high-heeled sandals she can afford because her father still supplements her income) neatly lining the wall outside her bedroom.

Though he’s not in it, Adam’s room, too, has been cleaned, mounds of dirty clothes and wrinkled issues of
Variety
gone. The only thing not filed or folded away is a new box of résumé paper and a cartridge of printer ink on the slim desk by the window. Laundry detergent smell as she sits on his bed and picks up a framed photograph from the nightstand—Adam and his mother at the base of the hills, the Hollywood sign in the background too iconic to be real. Phoebe had taken the picture and gotten it framed for Adam’s birthday.

After he filmed
Goners
, Adam had paid for his mother to come to LA and then slept on the couch for a week so she could have his bed (a completely alien notion to Phoebe, whose own parents would never contemplate staying anywhere less than a four-star hotel when they visited). Worn and achingly beautiful, Anna Zoellner looked a decade older than Phoebe’s mom despite being ten years younger. Every aspect of Anna had fascinated Phoebe—from the mystery of Adam’s father (“I’ve never met him,” the only thing Adam ever said on the subject) to the fact that Anna brought Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
to the beach—it was intangible, a lesson locked in the lines around Anna’s eyes and the white threads in her raven hair, how looks and intelligence apparently didn’t guarantee shit. So Phoebe had tagged along when Adam took his mother to all the touristy places—the Walk of Fame and Santa Monica Pier—places Phoebe hadn’t been since Oliver drove out with her after high school. As she was leaving for the airport, Anna hugged Phoebe, whispered in her ear, “Take care of my baby.” Phoebe had to swallow back tears; it was the first time in twenty-five years anyone trusted her to do anything more important than look pretty.

What a fabulous job she’s doing.

*   *   *

Adam isn’t home by the time Phoebe leaves for work. Not there when she returns nine hours later, feet knotted, dress stained with spilled soda. But the hole in the wall has been plastered, a slight discoloration the only indication anything ever happened. That’s been painted when she gets home the next night, and there’s a bowl of the pears she likes on the kitchen counter with a note advising her to help herself. Adam’s door is closed, lights out. Pressing her palm to the paneled wood, she can’t decide if he’s snoring or not.

Phoebe doesn’t actually see Adam again until the next afternoon, when she catches a glimpse of him leaving the bathroom, towel around his waist. She doesn’t talk to him until the day after that, when he calls Rosebud at the start of her shift. Melissa hands her the phone.

“Sorry to bother you at work.” He sounds normal, if a bit hesitant. “Your friend Evie called and said she needs to know about a reservation on Wednesday night. She made it sound important, so I thought you might want to call her back before you got slammed.”

Next to Phoebe, Melissa mouths, “Invite him here.”

“Oh, thanks.” Phoebe lowers her eyes, as if he were in front of her and she couldn’t look at him. “I, um, I’m going home for Thanksgiving, and my high school friends are planning this dinner.”