Landline (5 page)

But Georgie took pity on him. She poured three packets of Sweet’N Low into Scotty’s mouth, and he woke up sneezing. Then she made him drink half a can of flat Diet Coke to perk him up before he drove home.

She and Seth stayed and stared at the whiteboard for a while after Scotty left. They’d mostly worked on characters today—drawing a sprawled-out family tree showing how everyone on the show was connected, and brainstorming stories that could branch out from each of them.

A lot of what they were doing was just remembering all the ideas they’d come up with over the years, some of which had definitely expired.
(Chloe decides to be emo but never figures out what it means
.
Adam is overly defensive of Monica Lewinsky.)
They’d been talking about these characters for so long, Georgie could see them in her head—she could do all their voices.

Seth pulled down a few notecards they’d taped to the wall. “It’s still good, right? Inherently? The show—it’s funny?”

“I think so,” Georgie said. “We’re not moving as fast as we should be.”

“We never are. We’ll get there.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, Seth was smiling his just-for-her smile. It was smaller than the ones he gave everyone else. More eyes. Less teeth.

“Go home,” he said. “Get some sleep. You still look exhausted.”

She was.

So she did.

W
hen Georgie got home, the front door was locked. She fumbled for a minute with her keys.

She’d left a few of the lights on, so the house wasn’t dark—it just felt dark. Georgie realized she was tiptoeing. She cleared her throat. “It’s just me,” she said out loud, to prove that she could.

She tried to remember the last time she’d come home to an empty house, and couldn’t. Not this house.

They’d moved out to Calabasas when Georgie was pregnant with Noomi; their old house, a squat, mint green bungalow in Silver Lake, only had two bedrooms, and there were more tattoo parlors and karaoke bars in their neighborhood than kids.

Georgie missed it. Not the tattoo parlors and the karaoke bars . . . She and Neal never went out much, even before Alice and Noomi. But she missed the house. How small it was. How close. She missed the scrubby excuse for a front yard, and the crooked jacaranda tree that used to drop sticky purple flowers onto her old Jetta every spring.

She and Neal had decorated that house together. They’d gone to the hardware store every weekend for a year to argue about paint. Georgie would always choose the most saturated color on the card.

“You can’t
always
pick the bottom color,”
Neal would say.

“But the bottom color makes all the other colors look dull.”

“You’re looking at them wrong.”

“How is that possible?”

Neal almost always let Georgie win; their house in Silver Lake looked like Rainbow Brite lived there—and you could tell which walls Georgie had painted, because she was lousy at edges and corners.

They both had jobs then. Neal worked weekends. So there were plenty of days and nights when Georgie had their old house to herself. She’d watch TV shows that Neal would never watch with her. (Everything on The WB.) And then, when he got home, he’d climb over her on the couch and bother her until it was time to make dinner.

That was back when Georgie still pretended to help. When she’d hang out in the kitchen with him and drink wine while she watched him slice vegetables.

“You could do this for a living,”
she’d say.
“You could cut tomatoes in a tomato-cutting commercial, that’s how good you are.”

Then Neal would chop extra loudly and wave the knife over the tomato slices with a flourish.

“I’m serious. You could be an Iron Chef.”

“That or work at Applebee’s.”

Georgie had a regular spot on the kitchen counter, and Neal worked around it. He’d pour her too much wine—and feed her pieces of things before the rest of dinner was ready, blowing on the fork until the bite was cool enough. . . .

How many years ago was that? Eight? Ten?

Georgie dropped her phone and keys onto the coffee table, on a stack of Noomi’s picture books, and wandered into the kitchen. The plate of salmon stir-fry that Neal had made two nights ago was still in the refrigerator. She hadn’t felt like eating it then, even though she’d been starving. She didn’t bother to heat it up now, just grabbed a fork and brought it out to the living room, sitting on the couch and turning on the TV for light. There were two new episodes of
Jeff’d Up
on the DVR, a rerun and an hour-long Christmas special.

The Christmas special had been a pain in the ass to film. The script had Jeff and Trev both secretly bonding with a stray dog they were pretending to hate. Jeff would kick the dog out of the house, then Trev would let the dog in, then Jeff would go looking for it, trying to sneak it in himself, then he’d get caught and kick it out again. The laugh track had more “aw”s than laughs, and Georgie could tell the sound guy had just used the same “aw” over and over.

The dog was a mistake.

Jeff German had insisted they use
his
dog, an ancient beagle that couldn’t take direction and that nobody else was allowed to touch. Then it turned out that the kid who played Trev was allergic to dogs, and his mom followed him around with an epinephrine pen the whole day. He didn’t end up needing it, thank God, but his eyes got all runny and puffy.

“It’s fine,”
Seth said.
“It looks like he’s been crying.”

“Let’s get rid of the dog,”
Georgie said.
“Let’s make it something else.”

“You just don’t like dogs. What do you want? A cat?”

“I was thinking an orphan.”

“Fuck no, Georgie. The network will make us keep it.”

Normally, Georgie would text back and forth with Seth while they watched
Jeff’d Up
. But her phone was plugged in on the other side of the room, and she didn’t feel like getting up.

She’d get up if Neal called.

Which wasn’t likely, not this late—Neal hadn’t called her back all day.

Georgie had tried him half a dozen times since lunch, and every time, the call went to voice mail. She’d tried his mom’s house, too, but got a busy signal. (It’d been so long since Georgie had heard an actual busy signal, it kind of confused her.)

She set her empty plate on the coffee table and pulled the afghan up over her shoulders.

“Awwwww . . . ,” the TV audience said.

Georgie looked up at the ceiling. Neal had painted a spray of flowers there. They started at one corner, then wound down onto the wall. Blue with white starbursts—she forgot what they were called.

Neal had picked out this house. In Calabasas. He liked the porch and the yard. The wide-open kitchen. The fact that it had a real second floor and an attic. (Their house in Silver Lake was one and a half stories, with the bedroom up in the half. Neal hated the way you could hear the rain hitting the roof at night.)

Georgie was five months pregnant when they moved in, so she couldn’t help paint. (Fumes.) Also, she and Seth were working as showrunners by then, so her hours were crazy—and also, she felt like garbage.

She felt like garbage that whole pregnancy. She gained more weight with Noomi. She had more pain. Her fingers got so swollen and purple that she’d stare at them while she typed, imagining she was Violet Beauregarde—imagining that Seth was going to have to roll her out of the writers’ room when she went into labor.

(She didn’t end up going into labor. Georgie was really good at getting pregnant, but not so good at getting the babies out. She never had a real contraction with either of the girls.)

Georgie had been relieved when Neal started painting the walls without her. At first he chose colors from the bottom of the paint strip—there were a few Georgie-bright rooms. But mostly this house was white. Or pale yellow. Or watery blue.

He’d started painting murals a few years ago, when Noomi grew out of her baby sling and was okay playing with Alice on the floor. Georgie came home one night and found a willow tree curling out of her closet.

Neal painted landscapes and seascapes. Skyscapes. (Was there such a thing?) He painted murals all over the house, never finishing one before starting another. Georgie didn’t ask why.

Neal didn’t like to be
asked
things. It made his jaw tense. He’d give you a flippant answer. Like, whatever you were asking, it wasn’t any of your business.

Like nothing was anyone’s business.

Like nobody should ask questions that didn’t absolutely need to be answered.

Georgie had gotten really good over the years at not asking questions. Sometimes she didn’t even realize she wasn’t doing it.

This house really was much nicer than their old house. . . .

Neal was better at picking out paint and arranging furniture than Georgie had ever been. Plus their laundry actually got done now that he did it.

“It never ends,”
he’d say.

“We could hire someone,”
Georgie would offer.

“We don’t need to hire someone.”

Their neighbors had a nanny and a cleaning lady, a lawn guy, a pool guy, and a dog groomer who made house calls. Neal hated them.
“You shouldn’t need a staff of people larger than your own family. We don’t live in a manor.”

“Like the Malfoys,”
Alice said.
“With house elves.”

Neal was reading her the Harry Potter books.

Neal mowed their lawn. In worn-out cargo pants and T-shirts that he’d had since high school. He always smelled like sunblock, because without it, he’d immediately burn. Even with the sunblock, the back of his neck was stained red.

Neal trimmed the trees. Neal kept tulip bulbs in the refrigerator and sketched garden plans on the back of Whole Foods receipts. He’d pore over seed catalogs in bed and make Georgie choose which plants she liked best.

“Purple eggplant or white eggplant?”
he’d asked her last summer.

“How can you have a white eggplant? That’s like . . . purple green beans.”

“There are purple green beans. And yellow oranges.”

“Stop. You’re blowing my mind.”

“Oh, I’ll blow your mind. Girlie.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

He’d turned to her then, pen cap in mouth, and cocked his head.
“Yeah. I think so.”

Georgie looked down at her old sweatshirt. At her threadbare yoga pants.
“This is what does it for you?”

Neal smiled most of a smile, and the cap fell out of his mouth.
“So far.”

Neal . . .

She’d call him tomorrow morning. She’d get through to him this time. This was just—this had just been a weird couple of days. Georgie was busy. And Neal was busy. And time zones weren’t on their side.

And he was pissed with her.

She’d make it better; she didn’t blame him. Everything would be better in the morning.

Morning glories
, Georgie thought to herself just before she fell asleep.

O
ne missed call.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Georgie’d woken up on the couch this morning a half hour after her alarm would have gone off if she’d remembered to set it. She ran upstairs to take a shower, then threw on a new pair of jeans and the Metallica T-shirt. (It still smelled more like Neal than like Georgie.)

When she went to grab her phone on the way out, she saw the text alert:

One missed call

An Emergency Contact

That’s what Neal was filed under in Georgie’s contacts. (Just in case.) (Of something.) There was a voice mail, too—she hit
PLAY
but Neal hadn’t left anything, just a half second of silence. He must have called while she was in the shower.

Georgie called right back, got Neal’s voice mail and started talking as soon she heard the beep. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. I just missed your call, but I won’t miss it again—call me. Call me whenever. You won’t be interrupting anything.”

As soon as she hung up, she felt like an idiot. Because of course he’d be interrupting something. That’s why Georgie had stayed in L.A., because she couldn’t be interrupted.

Fuck.

Georgie wasn’t any good that morning.

Seth was pretending not to notice. He was also pretending not to notice her Metallica T-shirt.

“It feels weird to be writing a different show in here,” Scotty said, looking around the writers’ room. “It’s like we’re doing it in our parents’ bed.” He was sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the conference table, even though there were eight empty chairs closer to Seth and Georgie. “I wish the front-desk girl was here to make us coffee. Georgie, do you know how to make coffee?”

“Are you kidding me?”

Scotty rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that in a sexist way. I just genuinely don’t know how to turn on the coffee machine. You’d think they’d make that part obvious.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” she said.

Seth looked up at Scotty over his laptop. “Why don’t
you
go get us coffee?” he said. “We won’t need any fart jokes for at least a half hour.”

“Fuck you,” Scotty said. He frowned at the framed
Jeff’d Up
poster on the wall. “It’s kind of like we’re doing it in
Jeff German’s
bed.”

“Nobody’s doing it,” Georgie said. “Go get us coffee.”

Scotty stood up. “I hate leaving you guys alone. You forget that I exist.”

“I haven’t forgotten you,” Seth said, picking up his cell phone. “I’m texting you our orders.”