In Stereo Where Available Page 18

  “Lauren’ll be mad at me,” I told him. “She’s already afraid I’m going to move in with you and stick her with the rent. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “So give her a month. Say you’ll pay it through January. She’ll be able to find someone else, Fee. People do that all the time.”

  I gnawed my bottom lip and looked around the room. I wanted to be with him, I’d said yes to his proposal, and yet there was still a part of me asking, What about giving up my own space? What if something goes wrong? What if I find out it really is too good to be true?

  He walked over to me and tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Sleep on it, okay? You don’t have to decide tonight, but stay the night anyway. We’ve been up since six. We’re both tired.”

  I smiled at him a little. “Not that tired.”

  He grinned back. “Well, let’s go to bed anyway.”

  The next day, while Jerry was out grocery shopping, I loaded Tristan and Isolde’s cage into the front passenger seat and the guinea pig and rabbit’s box into the back and left them in the spare bedroom at Jerry’s house, closing the door against the cats and leaving a note taped to the freezer door. And when I came back a little later with Lucy the iguana and an armful of clothes on hangers, I found half of the bedroom closet already empty, for me.

  “We need to talk,” said Lauren.

  “I know. I was going to catch up with you after dinner.”

  “I’ve got time now.”

  She closed the file folder on the table in front of her and turned toward me in her chair. She still had her work clothes on, her smooth bluish-gray suit and suntan stockings and black high heels. Behind her black-framed glasses, her green eyes were sharp and businesslike. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be sitting across a restaurant table from her on a date, watching her mentally checking off the boxes of the application form in her head.

  “Where’d all the animals go?” she asked.

  “I took them over to Jerry’s. I was going to tell you. Thanks for taking care of them, by the way. Listen, I’m not running off on you. I’m going to be here another month, and then I’m moving in with him. February first.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to go off and stick me with the rent.”

  “I’m not. It shouldn’t be that hard to find a new roommate. I can ask around if you want.”

  She stood up and walked over toward me. “Damn it, Phoebe. You’re out of your mind. You’ve known the guy all of three months. He could be a psychopath for all you know.”

  “He’s not a psychopath. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Yeah, sure. You said you weren’t going to do this. Not two weeks ago, you told me I didn’t have to worry.”

  “Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize he was going to ask me to marry him.”

  Her eyes widened, and her gaze dropped down to my hand. “Oh, God!”

  “Anyway, obviously one of us is going to move out eventually. That’s the whole reason why we’re month-to-month in the first place. You’d do the same thing if one of your guys worked out. I’m giving you a month, okay? That’s as fair as I can make it.”

  “Yeah, that’s really fair. It must be really nice for you to just stand there and tell me how great a deal I’m getting, since you’re about to get a house in Kensington and free rent for the rest of your life.”

  “Free rent?” I folded my arms in front of me. “That’s a little snotty, don’t you think? I work, you know. And he’s not exactly a millionaire. You know what I think?”

  “No. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re jealous. I could tell you I’d pay half the rent for the next six months and you’d still be just as mad at me. You’re just angry that I got an A on a test I didn’t study for.”

  “Oh, bull. I am not.” She sat down in my armchair and kicked off her high heels. “I’m glad for you. Really.”

  The living room fell silent around us. Without the animals, the room seemed empty, like a house on moving day. Lauren stretched her toes out in her stockings, the maroon nail polish still perfect, her calves shapely and long in the muscles, like a tennis player. There was something a little babyish about her bottom lip, the way it tucked under the top one. She ran her hand along her cheek, her fingers slipping up under her glasses for a moment before resting at her temple.

  “I just want the same thing everyone else wants, you know?” she said.

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “Why does it have to be so hard?”

  “Maybe you should try looking for a guy who’s not perfect.”

  She smiled wearily. “You think I should lower my standards?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “No,” I said. “Just add in another category. Keep looking for all the same things, plus something to forgive him for.”

  Madison finally called me on Wednesday evening, almost a week after she’d won Rhett on Belle of Georgia. I’d watched her on Entertainment Tonight every night since then, making one appearance after the other in Los Angeles and New York and at a ski resort in Colorado, and I hadn’t even bothered to try to get in touch with her. She looked happy, waving that little Queen Elizabeth wave at the crowds as flashes went off around her. Even when she called, I could hear someone in the background giving directions in a loud, authoritative voice, telling other people where to stand.

  “Where are you?” I asked her.

  “Ummm…St. Augustine. No, Orlando. Orlando. Only for another hour, though. I need to be in New York tomorrow.”

  “That’s neat. I was just in Florida last week.”

  “Oh, you were? Listen, Fee, I’ll be back in a month or so, but do you mind watching Pepper until then, at least? Everything’s way too crazy for me to try to take care of her right now. Do you mind too much?”

  Pepper rolled onto her back, her little hind legs stretching out over my lap. On the other end of the sofa, Jerry scratched her stomach as he flipped through a copy of The Great Gatsby with his thumb.

  “No, I don’t mind. I’m sort of in the process of moving, and now that she’s got a yard to run around in, it’s really no problem at all.”

  “Oh, good. Are you renting a house now or something?”

  “Actually, I’m kind of moving in with somebody. A guy.”

  Jerry grinned and scribbled something on the notebook he had perched on the arm of the sofa. “A guy,” he mimicked in a dramatically deep voice.

  “Get out. You are not.”

  “Yeah. We’re, um…we got engaged.”

  “No way. No way. Just since I left? Do I know him? Is it Bill?”

  “No, no…it’s actually that guy who kept calling to talk to Karen. Remember him?”

  “You got engaged to him? What does he look like?”

  “He’s six feet tall and extremely sexy,” I said. Jerry’s eyes scrunched up with embarrassment, and he ruffled the fur on Pepper’s stomach.

  “Wow, I can’t wait to meet him. When’s the wedding going to be?”

  “We’re thinking June-ish.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect. We’re looking at early February for mine, but it’s not for sure. They want to do a Valentine’s Day special, but some people want it to be during the sweeps season, so it’s kind of up in the air right now.”

  “They’re going to do it on TV?”

  “Of course. That was part of the deal. Hey, I need to go. They’re calling me. I’ll give you a buzz in a week or so, okay? And congratulations. What’s his name?”

  “Jerry.”

  “Okay, give Jerry a hug for me. Love you.” She made a loud kissy noise and hung up.

  I set my phone down on the side table. “Madison sends her love.”

  “Hi, Madison. I feel like there ought to be some way to incorporate all this into my Great Gatsby lesson, and I just can’t figure out how.”

  “The pitfalls of excess, you mean?”

  “Something like that. Did I hear you say her wedding’s going to be on TV?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah. I guess they’ll actually get married, then. There’s no way she’d turn down a publicity opportunity like that.”

  “Well, as long as it’s all for the right reasons.”

  I pushed Pepper’s feet off my lap, and she flipped over, looking at me through the floppy hair around her eyes.

  “No, you know what?” I said, padding off to the kitchen in my bare feet. “She’s a little nutty sometimes, but she wouldn’t marry him if she didn’t really love him. Even Maddie would draw the line at that. She’s a good girl.”

  I lugged a box of old file folders and presents from my kids up the stairs to the second story, dropping it on the landing with a thud. Since the day I’d moved the animal cages over, my afternoons had been a nearly constant shuffle of moving things from the apartment over to Jerry’s, unpacking, and shifting things around. Jerry was happy and cooperative, clearing off shelves for me and emptying drawers, but it still felt a little strange to be moving my stuff into his place. It was his territory and, try as I might, I knew that for a while I would feel like not much more than a visitor. Even with all of Jerry’s cheerful hospitality, little reminders kept popping up that this house had been his for a very long time. Storage space, for example: there was none. Jerry was a tidy, organized, dyed-in-the-wool pack rat, and every square inch of usable space was either appealingly decorated or packed with Xerox paper boxes full of crap.

  Pushing the dust ruffle up under the mattress, I breathed a sigh out through my teeth and started shoving boxes aside. He, too, already had a box under there full of file folders and gifts from kids; I supposed it was only fair to leave that one there, under the circumstances. I pulled out the box beside it and tossed the top aside, glancing at its contents. Just a bunch of magazines and videos—but oh, my. Not just any magazines and videos. For a moment I stared; then I picked up a stack of tapes and flipped through them, checking to see if they were all what I thought they were. It was somewhere near the bottom of the stack that I found the powder-blue-covered Playboy Lingerie Fantasies video with a picture of Madison in the photo collage on the cover.

  I dumped the rest of the videos back in the box and kicked it back under the bed. Downstairs Jerry was sitting at the dining-room table, reading the newspaper and eating an afternoon bowl of Crispix. He still had his glasses on. I padded barefoot through the living room and tossed the video down on the table, where it skidded over and bumped gently against his cereal bowl.

  “What’s this?” I asked him.

  He glanced over from the paper, looking at the upside-down tape beside him. “It’s a videocassette tape,” he replied.

  “Yeah, I found it in your stash that you’ve got hidden under the bed.”

  This time he looked over his glasses at me, his eyes direct and level. “There’s nothing hidden anywhere in this house. It’s stored.”

  “Fine. Stored in an unlabeled box behind the dust ruffle under the bed.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do, put it all out on the living-room shelves?”

  “Actually, I was thinking maybe you could decorate the curb with it on trash day.”

  He shrugged. “If you want.”

  I twisted my fingers into the side belt loops of my jeans. “You don’t happen to have any explanation of why you’ve got a porno video of my sister?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t realize your sister was in it until you said something just now. I’ve had that video since long before you and I got together. You want me to throw it out, I’ll throw it out. Honestly, I wouldn’t want to watch it again, knowing your sister’s in it.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief. I thought we just agreed you were going to throw all of it out anyway.”

  He set the newspaper down. “Look, Phoebe. If you’re uncomfortable with the fact that I’ve got the same damn thing under my bed as every other man in North America, then go ahead and throw it all out. I think it’s a little silly considering you’ve got your own stash on the top shelf of the closet, but I’m not going to stop you.”

  “Excuse me? I don’t own any porn, Jerry. Apparently that’s your little hobby.”

  “Well, what do you call that box that’s filled up to here with Valentine cards and teddy bears and carnations that’ve been dead since—”

  “That’s memorabilia. There’s nothing pornographic in there. Go ahead and look if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t. It’s emotional porn, is what it is. I ought to be more offended by you keeping that stuff than you are by me having a box full of pictures of women I’ve never met in my life.”

  I came up to the kitchen table and wrapped my hand around the edge of one of the chairs, my engagement ring digging into my finger where it bumped against the wood. “That’s completely different,” I said. “There’s no reason on earth why you should have a bunch of sexual stuff around with other girls in it when we’re engaged. That’s just wrong.”

  He folded his hands in front of him and leaned toward me. “There’s no reason on earth why you should need reminders of other guys who’ve had a thing for you when you’re living with the guy who has a thing for you now. So, why aren’t you volunteering to throw that box out?”

  “Because it’s got nothing to do with our relationship.”

  “Neither does my stuff.”

  We stared at each other without blinking for a long moment. Finally I said, “You’re just being insensitive, you know that? Those are my memories. I don’t have to throw them out for you.”

  “But it wouldn’t even matter if you did, would it? It wouldn’t stop you from thinking about them. Not one damn bit.”

  I scowled at him. “Gee, that’s so comforting to hear when I just dug a video of my sister out of your porno collection.”

  “That one’s going in the trash. It’s up to you whether you throw both of those boxes out, or only mine, or neither of them. But I’ll tell you what, Fee. I would say it’s not in our best interest to put each other in a choke chain before we even get the rings on. If you know I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy, throwing my stuff at me really isn’t necessary. And I’m not in love with the idea of you coming in here like some kind of Taliban morality officer and caning me for owning ten stinking videos. But do what you want. It’s not like I have a lot of use for that stuff these days, anyway.”

  I left the boxes where I’d found them—both of them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Madison came back into town for a few days in mid-January, leaving Rhett somewhere in either Texas or possibly Montreal, depending on whether the network or its cable affiliate won the scheduling disagreement. They set her up at a boutique hotel in Washington, DC, but she decided to stay at our dad and step-mom’s for a day. Late that afternoon I got a call from Alexa, who sounded like she was watching alien spacecraft landing in the front yard.

  “It’s wild,” she said excitedly, her mouth close against the phone. “There’s an RV set up in our driveway with her people in it. Mom and Dad had to park on the street.”

  “Her ‘people’?”

  “Yeah, her bodyguard and assistant and some manager guy and a couple of other people. She’s in here with us, but they’re all out there on the lawn, and my mom’s getting really mad because they keep throwing their cigarette butts in the driveway.”

  “How’s she doing, though?”

  “Good. Weird. Madison’s always weird. This morning she was freaking out because her Mystic Tan’s flaking off and the only tanning place around here is the regular kind. She’s in the bathroom right now arguing with her assistant over whether she should get a bikini wax if there’s no way to replace her tan until sometime tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s a Mystic Tan?”

  “It’s one of those things where you take off all your clothes and—oh, wait a minute. Maddie’s coming out of the bathroom now. Hey, Maddie! You want to talk to Phoebe?”

  Madison’s voice came on breathlessly. “Hi, Fee. God, you wouldn’t believe how this trip is
going. I feel like I’m in the Congo or Africa or something. I forgot how backward this place is.”

  “The Congo’s in Africa, Maddie. Anyway, what’s so backward about Kensington? It’s the DC suburbs, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I know, Fee. I don’t need a geology lesson. Anyway, listen. I want to take you out tonight before I have to leave for New York. Are you busy?”

  “I don’t know, I guess not. Hold on.” I put my hand over the receiver. “Jerry. Are we doing anything tonight?”

  He turned the page of the newspaper on his lap. “Not anything your sister can participate in.”

  I took my hand off the receiver. “I’ve got some time.”

  “Great. I’ll pick you up at eight. You’ve got club clothes, right?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, put them on. Oh, oh, Colby’s calling. Gotta go. Bye.”

  At eight thirty Jerry peered curiously out the curtains of the front window and gave me a funny look. “I think your ride’s here.”

  “My ride? You mean Madison?”

  “I guess.”

  I stepped into my high heels and opened the front door. Outside was a black stretch limo with little purple lights running around the bottom.

  “Holy cow,” I said.

  “God, I’m jealous. I wonder if there’s a bar in there.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him as I slipped my arms into the coat he was holding up for me. “Jerry.”

  “What? I’m sure they’ve got Coke and stuff, too. That’s all I meant.”

  “Yeah.” I kissed him on the mouth, forgetting about my lipstick. “I’ll be home around midnight, I guess. I don’t know. I’ll call you if it’s later.”

  “Okay. Have fun.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall, peeking out through the curtains again and sighing. “I think I’m going to cry.”