Chapter 6
The day the show first aired, I was visiting my mom in Pennsylvania.
“So . . . this is what you’ve been working on.” My stepfather peered over his glasses.
“I don’t understand it,” said my mother.
“They’re both hot,” said Andrew, who was also home for Thanksgiving. I considered telling my brother about Maggie’s childhood crush but kept my mouth shut. No need for Andrew to get cocky.
“It just seems very trivial,” said my mother, wringing out a kitchen towel while clips from Jason and Maggie’s wedding played across our living room TV. “What can anybody learn from this? Why would anybody want to watch this?”
“Again,” said Andrew. “They’re hot.”
“It’s looking at celebrity culture,” I said. “And . . . consumption. And the way we all think about ourselves.”
“The way we think about ourselves?” My mother was skeptical.
“Yeah. In relation to . . . a celebrity love story.”
“Why should we think of ourselves in relation to a celebrity love story?” The theme song was playing, a generic love song off Maggie’s second album. It didn’t especially make my case for me.
“Mom, I’m not writing a dissertation. It’s a job.”
“Well, it’s like the Kennedys, isn’t it?” my stepdad said. “Or what was that TV show in the ’70s where they followed around an average American family?”
“Those are two entirely different things, Ron,” said my mother.
I said, “You’re not our demographic.”
Honeymoon Stage’s premiere got so-so ratings, but whoever made the call to replay the first three episodes incessantly over Thanksgiving weekend deserved more than a raise.
By the time our leftovers were gone from the fridge, I had gotten the email from Lauren confirming that we would be back to start shooting Season Two after the holidays.
My mother told me she was happy for me, but I couldn’t help feeling she was slightly disappointed.
We had already discussed what I would do if the show wasn’t renewed, and floated the possibility that I’d come back to Pennsylvania.
With the pickup, that return to the East Coast was quite clearly not going to happen, so to make her feel better, I extended my visit from one week to six.
This meant I wouldn’t be back in LA until the new year.
The California Christmas season was monotonous and depressing, the light displays tacky and off putting without actual winter weather to offset them, so being home among colorful foliage and brisk mornings that smelled like snow wasn’t too much of a sacrifice.
The show wouldn’t start filming again until after the holidays, so there was nothing I needed to rush back for.
The only thing that I would really miss was Gabe.
We weren’t officially dating, so it seemed weird for me to broach the topic of our distance. I still couldn’t fully decide if he was a semi-celebrity and I was a pack mule, if we’d had a fling that would burn itself out or if I was falling in love with him.
I’d known him three months, during which our primary mode of communication had been email. I hadn’t seen him perform or really listened to his music. I hadn’t met his friends. We’d only ever spent the night together at Maggie and Jason’s.
“But if you think about it another way, it’s like you two grew up together,” said Celia over the phone.
I felt like I was back in high school, lying on my twin bed, looking up at the Brat Pack poster pinned to my petal-pink walls and gossiping about boys that I imagined as entirely different people than they actually were.
“He was on TV,” I said. “I didn’t know him.
” If anything, the incongruence of our adolescent experiences made Gabe even more foreign to me.
While I’d sharpened my pencil in Algebra 2, he’d been dancing on a soundstage.
While I’d sat on the bench in gym class, Gabe had signed his name on photos of his face.
We didn’t make sense together. Yet there was the fizz in my chest.
While I had days of nothing but family board games and quick trips to the store to grab whatever my mom had forgotten, Gabe was still working in Los Angeles.
He’d done Thanksgiving with the band, and though he himself had done a decent job with the turkey, apparently the other contributions were garbage.
They’d stayed in town to gear up for a big meeting or to start something new at the recording studio.
He was cagey about the specifics, which naturally made me more curious.
I trawled LimeWire for any live recordings of him or the band.
I wasn’t tech savvy enough to access video files, but those were mostly from The Tiger Crew, so I was not especially interested.
Watching a young Gabe felt creepy, which was why I’d asked Celia not to dig out her old VHS tapes of the show while she was visiting her dad.
I didn’t want to moon over a preteen boy.
I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted Gabe to dig up old footage of me.
Listening to a bootleg recording of his solo set from 2001 felt different.
Gabe was an adult man, with a growly baritone and a rootsy singer-songwriter appeal.
His were simple, heartfelt lyrics with the occasional clever pun.
They sounded like him, like who I knew him to be, like how he’d played on the couch when we were alone at Maggie and Jason’s.
Authentic. When his voice broke with emotion, I thought about his hands, his arms, the rest of him.
Live at Joe Weed’s 8/6/01 became my constant companion. He had a song about his grandfather, another about a love affair he couldn’t put behind him, a Patty Griffin cover.
When I spoke with Gabe on the phone, I didn’t push for professional details or mention I had found his music and was playing it incessantly.
I was all but doodling hearts and wedding dresses in my notebooks, but I’d never let him know.
We bantered, and I joked about my mother’s book club, and he vented about the rising studio rental fees.
A mystery novel I was reading. A new burger place he’d found.
A friend who was taking him surfing, and how much he was dreading it.
My morning wandering the King of Prussia mall in search of a blue double boiler.
He was headed to his parents’ for Christmas, and assured me once he got there he, too, would be the king of jigsaw puzzles.
I didn’t ask him what his parents did or if he got along with his sister.
I didn’t ask him if he missed me as much as I was missing him.
The August 2001 version of Gabe poured his heart out over my computer speakers every evening, but I said nothing about it.
I wanted nothing to betray that I was terrified of how much I was falling for him.
During those six weeks I spent regressing in my childhood bedroom, Jason and Maggie were climbing the It List. They did a round of press to kick off Honeymoon Stage, and the same clip of her making kissy lips at him on Hollywood Access played everywhere.
They were America’s golden couple, the perfect alchemy of laurels and potential.
He, the once-prince who would never be king; she, the star still being polished.
Maggie’s Honeymoon Stage theme song became a certified hit.
Her concerts had always been solidly attended, but now they were packed.
She’d done radio appearances and none had been the wiser, but now when she pulled up to a studio, she needed security to make a path for her among the swarming fans.
The other clip that made the rounds—from the Today show to Oprah to ESPN, thanks to Jason’s clout—was the scene where Maggie was trying to make him pasta.
In this episode, she lugs the pot from the cabinet and fills it under the tap.
She grabs the dry boxed spaghetti. She realizes pretty quickly that, in order to fit them, she will have to break the noodles in half, so she does.
The floof of the bangs. The bite of the lip.
Once they’re all in there, she turns on the burner.
“I hope that’s not how your wife cooks you dinner,” said one sports talking head to the other. “No wonder Jason Dean’s dropped so much weight.”
“She’s going to have to go back to school for home economics,” cracked a late-night host.
On Saturday Night Live, they had a popular male singer don a blond wig and straight up throw food all around a set kitchen, pretending surprise as marinara sauce splashed the fake fridge.
This was all excellent news for the network and, therefore, for me.
Once things got rolling, the frenzy fed itself.
Us Weekly published shots of Jason putting coins into a parking meter, Maggie grabbing a Diet Coke at Rite Aid.
The more their everyday exploits made it into the tabloids, the more eyes the network got on the show.
By mid-December, Maggie was hiding under blankets in the back seat of her car to avoid being trampled by her audience, and Jason had changed his cell phone number twice.
Where once we might have been lucky to catch Maggie’s music video on TV, it now ran nonstop.
The same went for her singles on the radio. She’d traded privacy for success.
One of her escapades even made it to CNN on a bit about the perils of celebrity.
Maggie and Sally Ann got run off the road by a group of paparazzi—they’d been at a nail salon, and someone inside must have tipped off the vultures.
The trip back to Calabasas turned into a high-speed chase that almost sent them over a guardrail and into the canyon.
The hood of the BMW in which I’d first seen Maggie was shoved in like an accordion.
A reporter stood at the side of the cliff, gesturing to the dented rail.
“A salon trip almost ends in tragedy for pop star Maggie McKee and friend,” the man said, somber faced in his navy logo windbreaker.
In the past, Maggie had always been referred to as an up-and-coming pop star; with Honeymoon Stage, it seemed she’d finally come.
Sally Ann apparently needed six stitches where a shard of glass had sliced her side.
Maggie was photographed wearing one of those foam neck braces, ducking into a juice place. None of the paparazzi were injured.
Photos from the accident ran on the cover of Star, and I wondered if the same assholes who’d caused it were the ones who got paid for the images. In line at the local grocery store, I picked up a copy and flipped through.
It seemed cliché to have someone else’s near-death experience wake me up to my own self-sabotage, but that was how it happened.
I looked at the headlines, the pictures of the twisted metal, and imagined it had been me in the car with Maggie.
What if the guardrail hadn’t held? If I fell into a coma tomorrow, Gabe would never know how I actually felt about him.
As scary as it was to open myself up, I had to at least try.
That night Gabe was supposed to call me, and while I waited, I thought about what I would say.
I wanted something serious with him, something exclusive.
I wanted him to want to fly to Philly, cost irrelevant, and declare his devotion.
I wanted him to meet my family. I even wanted him to sing to me. I was in deep.
The trouble was, we hadn’t discussed us. Every so often, Gabe would say “We should talk about—” and sensing where this led, I’d interrupt him. It was too scary. There was too much possibility that we would get hurt.
But I drank two of Ron’s IPAs, and I told myself that I could do it.
I would swallow my pride and confess to being afraid that Gabe was too good to be true.
I’d admit to how much I’d been thinking about him, how much I wished he’d come home with me for the season, how I’d been listening to his music, how much it pained me to imagine him with anybody else.
I watched my phone, pretending to read my book as it grew later, past the time Gabe had told me he’d call.
I called him, but he didn’t pick up. I had another beer, regretted it.
I played the opening of Gabe’s bootleg concert and listened to him welcome the crowd.
I checked my email, turned my ringer up. Still nothing.
The first time my dad left, he was supposed to meet me and my mom at Andrew’s hockey game.
He was going to come straight from work, and my brother kept glancing up from the ice at the empty seat next to me.
Andrew had on all his gear, so I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew what it would look like.
His mouth set, lips turned in between his front teeth like he was making a fist with his face.
My dad was often late, if he showed up at all.
We were used to him bailing and then apologizing with some present my parents couldn’t afford and we kids had never asked for.
Moon shoes, a Nintendo, an Easy-Bake Oven.
After he disappeared that first time, there hadn’t been a present—there’d been nothing at all.
Gabe had never stood me up before. Gabe wasn’t my father. He was probably just busy with his family. Maybe he’d meant nine p.m. Pacific time. Maybe he’d fallen asleep.
I brushed my teeth. I didn’t have to be alone.
I could go take a shot of whatever my mom and stepdad had collecting dust in their liquor cabinet, wait a few minutes for it to kick in, then call my ex, who would be visiting his own parents a neighborhood away.
I’d deleted his number from my phone, but I knew it by heart.
If he was sober, he could come pick me up, and if he wasn’t, we could each walk fifteen minutes and meet at the park.
He could save me from my feelings for Gabe. We could fall into each other.
The old Cassidy would have called him. But I was different now—both work and my romantic relationships felt real in a way that they hadn’t before Gabe and Honeymoon Stage.
Gabe hadn’t picked up the phone. So what?
It didn’t have to change anything; I would talk to him the next day, summon the courage to confess my desires a second time.
There was no need to abandon my conviction simply because Gabe got caught up talking to his sister or putting up holiday lights with his dad.
I closed my book and turned off my bedside lamp, convinced that he would call me in the morning. But he didn’t.