Chapter 5 #3
Gabe laughed, breaking our tension. “I got onto The Tiger Crew by placing second in an Elvis Presley impersonation competition.”
“I’m sorry, what? How could you not have mentioned this the second we met?” I called the server over to order another round of drinks.
“I got into Elvis through my uncle, who was always playing his records. I used to sing along and do these bits, and my uncle heard about this contest when I was ten. They put a clip of me on the local news, and my parents got a call from an agent.”
“Why didn’t you place first?”
“It was an adult competition. What do you want from poor preteen me?”
I knew what I wanted from twenty-five-year-old him. Our legs touched under the table.
“Anyway, I liked performing and playing music, and school was a bummer, and a variety show seemed as good a road as any. It was cool to make money. My parents weren’t weird about that part.
They put it away for me, and I wasn’t our sole breadwinner or anything.
But they had to pack up and move me and my older sister down to Florida, where the show was filming.
They traded our house for a condo, and I’ve sort of felt like I had to prove that they made the right call ever since. Otherwise, it was a fairly cushy gig.”
“For a ten-year-old.”
“By then I was, like, twelve.”
After the show he’d moved to Nashville, where he’d worked writing songs for other people, which was fine, but he’d have rather been performing on his own.
He wasn’t trying to be some sort of pop superstar; he just wanted the songs to feel real.
Country music wasn’t cutting it—hence the move to LA, with the band guys I’d met at their studio.
I didn’t have an Elvis-contest origin story, but it would have been simple enough to tell him about my mom in Pennsylvania and my own childhood obsession with TV.
I was too nervous, so instead, in exchange for details about Gabe’s life, I offered him bits about Honeymoon Stage.
Although I’d signed an NDA, it seemed innocuous to share the little stories from our set.
Sally Ann often came in with sex hair. Maggie’s manager had fake teeth that he could pop in and out.
Jason’s cousin dipped tobacco, and sometimes when he spat into a cup, little brown droplets hit the couch, which I then had to clean so that it wouldn’t be gross for the show.
They kept the pool at eighty-five degrees. Maggie wasn’t as dumb as she seemed.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Gabe. I hadn’t quite forgotten that he’d crushed on her ten years ago, rather had been successfully storing that bit of trivia in a part of my brain that would keep it from complicating whatever the two of us were developing.
“That’s right, you know her.”
“Knew her,” he said. “It’s been a while.”
“I bet she’d want to say hello, if you ever stopped by.” It could be nice for Maggie to see an old friend. She didn’t seem to have many.
“It might be weird,” Gabe said. I didn’t press further. Something in me knew that asking Gabe to divulge more would change things between us, complicate our attraction in a way that I wasn’t ready for. He was an itch I was both dying and terrified to scratch.
Gabe was a gentleman, and he left me at my door with a kiss. He leaned down, and I stood on my tiptoes with my hands on his shoulders.
Kissing Gabe was unlocking a secret garden door, then standing in awe at its threshold. I wanted all of him, but settled for his lips and teeth and tongue. He was a muscular kisser, deliberate and firm. I could have invited him back up to my room, but I didn’t.
“I think I like you,” I said, hiding my face in his chest before going inside.
“And I like you.”
Much of the time on the Honeymoon Stage set, Maggie was at her computer or running errands or at the studio while Jason putzed around the house.
In one episode, Jason decides that he wants to have a kitchen garden, never mind that neither he nor Maggie cooks.
This idea was Lauren’s—she’d get nervous about the risk involved in some of the things he wanted to do with ladders or forklifts, and was always steering him toward more insurance-friendly tasks.
Here he is buying seeds at the hardware store.
Here he is digging up sod, sweat pooling under his white undershirt, which he then removes and uses to wipe his dirty brow.
It was rare to see one of Jason’s projects reach completion.
Their purpose, both for his own use and that of the show, was to give the feeling of purposefulness rather than actually accomplish a task.
Off camera, we’d often hire a handyman to finish what he’d started.
When the digging is done and it comes time to plan this kitchen garden, Jason calls through the house to see if anyone grew up on a farm.
Eli did, but he’s behind the camera, so Dan tells him to pretend that he didn’t.
Maggie has just left for a photo shoot. Her hair-and-makeup team comes clomping down the stairs.
Brent shrugs, goes to the fridge for a Red Bull.
“Maybe I can help?” says Sally Ann.
I was not invited on the vacation to Mexico.
Production brought all the field producers, four of the camera guys, Vinnie for sound, and some executive’s niece and her friend to be PAs.
Lauren and Dan both grumbled, but there wasn’t anything they could do.
I thought I’d get the week off, might spend it sleeping or visiting Gabe at his studio.
Instead, they asked if I would babysit the house.
I was at the house constantly, but I’d not once been alone in it.
The first night that I spent tucked under the white duvet in the small upstairs guest bedroom, I thought each whoosh of the air conditioner was someone trying to break in.
When the lawn sprinklers went off on their seven a.m. timer, I spilled a full cup of coffee on myself.
I showered it off in the en suite guest bathroom, my chin lifted to the waterfall showerhead, soothed by the dark-gray stone.
That evening my anxiety spiked. There were burglaries all over Los Angeles, and even though my neighborhood was objectively less safe than Calabasas, I never worried when I was at home, because we had nothing to burgle.
No self-respecting thief would find it worthwhile to shimmy up the building’s drainpipe for our secondhand cast-iron skillet or our set of mismatched chairs.
At Jason and Maggie’s, bounty was everywhere.
Not only did the gated community and pillared porch scream money, but the Dean–McKee duo was also well known.
Jason had been a member of the Phillies team that got death threats from a Mets fan back in 1995.
People were nuts. You couldn’t trust them to be reasonable.
By nine p.m. I’d double-checked all the locks on the doors and double-bolted the garage.
My guest room had its own TV, but I felt weird staying there all day, so I was parked in Jason’s usual spot in the living room, flipping through channels.
Somehow the television light made the rest of the house seem even bigger, even emptier.
I covered myself in the loose-knit shawl Maggie had left draped on the back of the couch and was just settling into a made-for-TV movie when I was jolted by the sound of something splatting.
“What the fuck,” I said to ’90s Tony Danza.
The noise had come from the left side of the house, which faced the hills, which in itself made me sure that some creepo had been hiding in the mountains, waiting for Jason and Maggie to leave so he could—what?
Steal Jason’s baseball stuff? Maggie had told me it was valuable.
“We have cameras,” I said out loud. No one responded, which was probably, I reasoned, the best-case scenario.
Wrapping the shawl around my chest like armor, I made it to the back patio door.
The outdoor lights were on, which meant someone had been there.
Those sensors were top of the line; I had tested them myself.
I was about to leap to the wall phone and dial 911 when I noticed the bird hopping drunkenly around the patio tile, the smudge on the glass.
I felt immediate relief. Those birds were forever flying into the windows.
I must have made a beacon of the house with all the lights.
The bird itself was less a threat than a clear warning I was losing it alone in the house, and I still had five more days to go. I considered asking Celia to come stay with me tomorrow. I considered asking Gabe.
Once I’d opened the door to the idea of having Gabe over, it became more and more appealing.
I tossed and turned all night debating it.
I had known him for eight weeks. We still weren’t meeting all that often in person, though we’d begun to talk for longer on the phone.
I’d been to his place in the Valley once, on one of my days off, when I didn’t have to take care of the parts of my life I’d let backslide.
We’d fooled around, but I hadn’t spent the night.
I’d had to be at work early the next morning.
Suddenly, I had no pressing commitments.
The biggest logistical hurdle was the cameras, but I knew all of them and how to make sure they were completely turned off.
No one had said I couldn’t socialize while house-sitting.
There were people at the house all the time, people Jason and Maggie didn’t know, people production didn’t recognize.
It would hurt no one if I ordered some pizza and slept with Gabe in the guest bedroom to hold on to my sanity.
It would be fun to have Gabe in Calabasas, to play house. Afterward, I’d wash the sheets.