Chapter 5 #2
Six months later, I would rack my brain to remember specifics of these conversations that had not been recorded, looking for signs of what was to come. But the nature of toxicity is that it hides in plain sight—a chemical staining your lipstick a shade you’ll literally die for.
That night, the fire alarm in the upstairs hallway had been giving off weird flashes of light, and I’d been dispatched to go figure out what was wrong with it.
Had they not been busy, this would have been a great activity for Jason and Maggie.
He’d pull the thing out of the ceiling while she fluttered below him, asking questions about eardrum damage and secondhand smoke.
As it was, they had their dinner for the animals, and Lauren wasn’t comfortable keeping the alarm on the fritz until they returned.
When I got up on a ladder and yanked the monitor out of its slot, it gave off three sharp yelps.
“Oh!” Maggie opened her door and peered up at me. “I’m glad somebody’s fixing that.”
“At least trying to,” I said, pressing the reset button. Maggie had on a short red dress with a cowl-neck and a full lace back. Her hair had been curled, and her makeup perfected. The perfume she used was something fruity with vanilla, and I caught a whiff of it as she came over.
“You can probably just turn it off,” she said. This struck me as a dangerous idea. “We’d all still be perfectly safe. There’s one in each of the bedrooms and another at the end of the hall. Jason’s memorabilia cost more than the rest of the house put together. It’s very well protected.”
I popped out the batteries, slotted the monitor back in, and climbed down.
Maggie’s bra strap showed through the lace on her shoulder, and if she were Jen or Celia I’d have said something and helped her tuck it away.
Instead, I did a weird sort of shimmy with my arm to try to silently communicate. She just stood there.
“So, this thing tonight,” I said. She hadn’t gone back in her room, so I waited by the ladder. “It’ll be fun?”
Maggie shrugged. “It’ll be fine. Jason’s not drinking.
” Jason was on the wagon three weeks out of the month and hanging slightly off the other one.
I had the sense that a camera crew was good for him—we kept him in line.
He wasn’t—it had been explained to me numerous times by various members of his team—an alcoholic.
“Does that make it less fun?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Not really,” Maggie said. Her door hung open, and through it I’d expected to see her team, discarded dresses on the bed, abandoned lipsticks. Instead, the room was clean and empty.
“Jason’s still getting dressed,” I said. “And you’re all ready.” The look she gave me told me that she knew where I was going, that she’d been waiting for me to get there. “Why do you let them make it seem like you’re up here taking forever while he waits?”
Maggie looked up at the fire alarm, the light fixture in the ceiling. “I know what they say about me,” she said. “If they’re going to say it anyway, it might as well be on my own terms.”
I thought that I knew some of what they said about her—at least I knew how Dan bitched and how Lauren complained.
Rahul thought she was a spoiled brat, and Eli wanted to sleep with her.
Vinnie never said anything unkind, but that was Vinnie.
It was possible he had a novel of frustrations he would never let anyone read.
A few weeks after I’d moved west, one of my ex’s friends had accidentally texted me about how fucked in the head Cassidy was and how he was actually much better off without her.
Clearly the guy had our numbers confused and was saying what any pal would say to his friend.
Still, I had been hurt. How would I feel knowing that strangers everywhere were dissecting my waistline or my smile, debating the authenticity of my breasts or the functioning of my brain?
Nobody had ever looked at a piece of my life and assumed that, by doing so, they’d put together all of me.
Just then Jason came down the hall in his undershirt and dress pants, a towel slung over his shoulder.
“What up, Cassidy? You need help carrying that ladder?” I shook my head. He turned to Maggie. “You look beautiful, babe.”
This seemed like my cue to head downstairs, but Maggie was still watching me.
She had so much that we children of the ’80s had been taught was important: an expensive red lace dress and glimmering purple eyeshadow, a huge solitaire diamond winking at me from her left hand and a smaller set dangling from her ears.
My jeans had a massive rip in the knee and another beginning at the crotch, which meant I’d spent the day walking like a robot so as not to rip them open and bare myself to the whole crew.
There was some kind of grease from the ladder smeared across my inner arm.
But that didn’t seem to be why she was looking at me.
Why was she still standing here? What could I offer her?
“Have a great night, guys,” I said, closing the ladder. As I was turning the corner, I saw Jason gently rearrange that strap from Maggie’s bra.
That evening, I called Gabe on my drive home.
Despite three weeks of online banter, we hadn’t seen each other since our date at Home Depot.
Mostly this was due to my long work hours, but it was also because the thought of our potential next steps together made me nervous.
The more I got to know Gabe, the more I thought we had the makings of an actual relationship.
He would call me every few days, but usually I could only whisper a quick “Try me again later” from set.
That night was the first time I’d called him.
“Well, hello.” Gabe’s voice provided the perfect antidote to six p.m. traffic.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m driving home. If I hang up on you suddenly it’s because I’ve been rear-ended.”
“I’ll come look for you on the 101.”
“Actually,” I said, “want to come look for me at my tiny and probably not-so-clean apartment in Silver Lake? And then maybe together we can go look for, say, dinner?”
I was surprised at how easy it was to ask him out. I wasn’t tripping over my words or feeling nauseated or immediately regretting things. Maybe watching Jason and Maggie’s genuine affection had been good for me.
When Gabe got to my place, I was getting out of the shower, but Jen and Celia were both home to let him in.
It was immediately apparent that I should have had Gabe meet me at a restaurant.
Jen acted normal, but Celia turned into a new version of herself.
I could hear them through the wall as I got dressed.
“Oh my god, you got so tall.” She had on her coffee shop voice, a higher, brighter tone than when she spoke to me and Jen.
“Lucky for me.” Gabe also sounded different, an awkward politeness I hadn’t heard before.
“Jen didn’t watch your show, so she doesn’t know. He was so little! The little sweet one.” I was sure Celia would spend most of her evening regretting this whole interaction.
“Do you want something to drink?” Jen’s relative normalcy made me feel less like I should abandon my makeup and rescue him. I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to look pretty for Gabe.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
When I got out to them, about ten minutes later, he was sitting on the edge of the couch with both my roommates flitting around him, though Jen, at least, was refilling his plastic cup of wine.
“You took a while.” She raised an eyebrow.
Gabe looked up at me. It was a shock to see him again after so much digital flirtation, and he was just as magnetic as I had remembered. He had on dark-wash jeans and a button-down instead of a T-shirt, which gave me confidence that he, too, viewed this as an actual date.
He greeted me with a hug that would have been awkward even without nerves, given our difference in height, but touching him made me a live wire.
My head buzzed with the sound that little metal thing made when it brushed up against the sides in the game Operation.
Wake up, my body told me. Pay attention.
Celia and Jen watched us leave like proud parents, waving at me from behind the curtain hanging in our kitchen window.
Neither Gabe nor I had thought about where we should go.
“I realize now maybe I should have planned ahead,” I said.
“And ruined all the fun of circling the neighborhood? Never. What are you in the mood for? Tacos? Burgers?” I didn’t care and told him it was nice just to be having dinner.
“My one night off for, like, the next three weeks.”
We went to a Mexican place, and over steak quesadillas, I learned that Gabe was not a vegan.
He thought animals were fine, but he’d be perfectly happy not to ever have pets of his own.
If he had to have a dog, he’d be okay with it, so long as it wasn’t a loud one.
His ideal morning was spent hanging out at home, playing music on his guitar.
“What kind of music?” I asked. “It’s weird that we’ve been talking for so long and I don’t know what kind of music.”
Gabe shrugged, getting fidgety. “Just stuff I write.”
“Well, duh.” I almost asked him if he was actually in a boy band that he’d neglected to mention, but, sensing his tenderness, decided to stop myself from teasing him.
“We’ll get there,” I said. “I’ll get it out of you eventually.
” I could feel each of my heartbeats, the strength of that eventually and what it implied.
Gabe had been shy, but now his eyes filled with a confident intensity.
I swallowed. “So, you play guitar?” I figured this question was generic enough.
“Guitar and piano.” I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were on the tabletop, fingers drumming. I imagined them holding my face, thumb on my pulse point. I imagined them running the length of my body, and could feel myself flush.
“And that’s how you got onto The Tiger Crew? By playing guitar and piano?”