Chapter 3 #2
“Are you staying for dinner?” Andy asked Aisha.
“No, I came by to say hi to Rosie and then immediately leave,” she said. “Obviously I’m staying for dinner. Is that a problem?”
Andy held up his arms like he was surrendering to the police. “Just don’t know why Tess can never say she’s inviting people over instead of letting us randomly show up and find out.”
“It feels so special that I’m home for such a long stretch and I get to make dinners and see you both more,” I said.
“Sorry I planned it weirdly. Honestly I’m a little—you know I don’t like having a personal assistant and I do it as rarely as possible, but I’m not always the best at lining up my own life. Which, I know. Aloud it’s ridiculous.”
I turned to preheat the custom Miele oven I’d had installed before I’d even moved in all the way.
By necessity my life was fairly cordoned off into discrete corners, but if I were a normal person with a normal life, I’d let everything overlap.
“Plus you know I love bringing people together when I can. It’s the most Scorpio thing about me. ”
“God, this conversation again,” Andy grumbled.
“That is such a Capricorn reaction,” I said, which made Aisha cackle. “So you two will be honest with me if I ask you something, right? Is my car an asshole’s car?”
“The Porsche?” Aisha asked, as Andy said, “A hundred percent.”
“Wait, you both think that?”
“Don’t you remember when you got it?” Andy asked. “Pretty sure I said something like, Wow, this car, really?”
“I thought you meant it more like, Wow, this car, really!” I trimmed a sheet of parchment to fit my favorite baking pan. “It’s literally my dream car.”
“Yeah, we’re aware,” Aisha said, though nicely, as she scratched Rosie’s head between her little ears. “That’s why I’ve never said anything. But would I talk behind your back if you weren’t my best friend?”
“Hmmm,” I said, though it came out a bit more emotionally than I’d intended, and Aisha and Andy both looked at me with the raised eyebrows of concerned loved ones.
“Oh, hey, I can’t believe I didn’t ask yet!” Aisha beamed at me. “How was your first day of rehearsal?”
“It was …” I searched for the word that fit the big blank in that sentence, and got out my mandoline so the summer squash would be julienned as beautifully as possible.
My mother had believed in perfection where meals were concerned, and I felt the memory of her in everything I did in the kitchen, in not wanting to let her down.
“Everything OK there?” Aisha asked, her eyebrows back to their previous concerned setting. Andy’s hadn’t really left.
One of my very favorite things about both of my very favorite people was that my fame and success hadn’t altered how they treated me.
The world could have seen Tess Gardner as the girl who just kept winning; meanwhile Aisha and Andy would be squinting concernedly in my direction if I deserved it.
Still, occasionally it would have been nice to get away with putting on a performance and leaving it at that.
“This isn’t public knowledge yet,” I said, “but a MeToo-type story is breaking soon on Geoffrey Gordan.”
Aisha’s eyes widened. “Wow. That’s extremely shitty news.”
“I’ve been in the business way too long to think the creeps have been weeded out, but—I don’t know.
I hate that he’s one of them. He hand-picked me.
” I focused on sliding squash back and forth carefully so that I didn’t slice off my fingertips.
“Which I suppose there’s an implication there.
No one was offering me hand-picked original roles for the stage. Was he just hoping—”
“No,” Aisha said, rising to her feet. “Tess, the play’s a big deal. Don’t let him take that away from you. Though—what’s happening now? I’m assuming he’s out.”
“He’s out,” I said, careful with my words as with the surgically sharp blade. “They replaced him last-minute with Rebecca Frisch.”
Saying her name aloud felt like confessing a secret to the entire world.
“I know Geoffrey Gordan’s a big deal,” Aisha said, walking to the refrigerator, “but this feels like a good change. I’ve heard great things about Rebecca Frisch.”
“Mmmm,” I said, noncommittally.
“What’s with you?” Aisha opened the fridge and took out a bottle of grenache blanc. “Can we open this? Anyway, you’ve been talking about this for months and now—”
“And now it’s different,” I said. “And, yes, open it. Pour me a glass too, please.”
“Andy, open this.” Aisha walked the bottle over to him, and he sighed dramatically before pulling a multitool out of his pocket.
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way,” Andy said, pulling out the cork and handing the bottle back to Aisha, who pretended to swoon, “and I know you’re on this whole thing to change your image, but does it have to be a play? This shit makes you miserable.”
“What are you talking about—ow.” On the very last piece of squash I’d gotten too cocky, too careless, and nicked myself on the sharp blade of the mandoline.
“I got it.” Andy fast-walked out of the room, only to return mere moments later with hydrogen peroxide and a bandage. “I got you that metal glove for Christmas.”
“I always think I’m better than the metal glove,” I said, letting him handle it like we were still kids and his one year on me made him miles more mature and capable.
“Don’t be a jerk about this, OK? I know you don’t care about theatre, but it’s important to me.
Nothing’s ever felt like home the way it has.
Making another indie film no one sees isn’t going to give me that. ”
“People saw The Only One,” Aisha said gently.
“Not the Academy.”
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Andy said. “You can tell us this whole story, but you already did the theatre thing, and you hated it.”
“What?” I asked, genuinely confused. “What are you talking about? And why didn’t you say something before?”
“You know I try not to shit on your dreams,” he said. “Or your dream cars.”
“Thanks,” I said sarcastically, or at least as sarcastically as I got, which was barely.
“Look, I know it was a long time ago, but when you got back from that theatre thing in Ohio,” he said, and my nerve endings stood at attention, like the slightest breeze would make me scream, “you were miserable.”
Aisha raised her eyebrows, less concern and more spill the tea.
“Maybe I should tell you something,” I said, considering it as it came out of my mouth, which was absolutely the wrong time, because now the cat was out of the bag, the horses were loose from the stable, the train had already left the station.
“What do you want to tell us?” Aisha asked in the firm-but-gentle tone I was sure she used with all of her campers and students.
“Rebecca was there too,” I said. “She was an actor then.”
“Ooooh,” Aisha said. “Were you two enemies?”
Andy shot Aisha a look. “Enemies? What is this, Bravo?”
“You reference Bravo a lot for a man who claims he doesn’t have a favorite Housewives franchise,” Aisha snapped. “Whatever. Rivals, then.”
“No.” I focused on laying squash slices into the baking dish in even shingled rows so that I didn’t have to think too much about what I was going to say. “We were the opposite of enemies.”
“What do you mean?” Aisha asked, and the edge was gone from her voice. It was one reason I loved her so much, the empathy that seemed to guide all of her interactions. It shouldn’t have been scary to tell her anything. It had just been so long ago when I’d buried it.
“We were in love,” I said, eyes still on the baking dish, throat tightening, heart beating like I was in the middle of a run. “Like … very seriously so. We were going to spend our lives together. And then I did something too awful to discuss and I broke her heart.”
Aisha and Andy were so silent that I couldn’t take it any longer and had to break the shield I’d made for myself out of a downcast gaze and a baking dish full of summer squash. Their faces, though, told me nothing more than their silence.
“Sorry.” Aisha hurried to my side. “I’m—no, god, I’m doing a shitty job of this. Do you know how many people come out to you when you run an arts camp? I’m usually great at being supportive and not making it about myself.”
I turned back to the safety of draining the marinade from the salmon. Come out. I hadn’t thought about the fact that it was what I was doing. Somehow in all the years of being who I was, I’d never considered that coming out would ever have anything to do with me.
“You should have said something.” Andy got up from the table to stand on my other side.
Rosie, thrilled with the activity and unaware of the gravity of the situation, practically skipped around our ankles.
“You were falling apart. That whole drive. We’d pull off to get gas and food and, I dunno, you’d been crying and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. ”
I waved my hand. It had been a long time ago, but the memory was stark, the points we’d plotted beforehand along Highway 40, non-creepy gas stations and food options that weren’t all McDonald’s or Taco Bells.
It was going to have celebratory road-trip vibes; I would have a bachelor degree and a summer’s worth of paid stage experience, and Andy would have a savings account flush from the two jobs he’d worked for the last year since he’d graduated.
We were going to get the hell out of Illinois to LA, the city where dreams came true.
Making the trip fresh off of someone else’s heartbreak had never been on the itinerary.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Aisha asked Andy.
“I didn’t know!” he said, his perennially chill tone a little pointed. “I just thought something happened like her wig fell off during a performance or whatever.”
“What?” Aisha and I asked at the exact same time.
“I don’t know!” Andy literally threw his hands up in the air. “I figured it was some kind of theatre thing. That was the worst thing I could think of happening onstage.”
“Your poor sister was driving across the country with a broken heart, and you were thinking of wigs?”
“I didn’t have a broken heart,” I corrected. “That was Rebecca.”
“You seem pretty heartbroken over her broken heart,” Aisha said, glancing at Andy.
“Don’t,” I said. “I was fine. And I’m fine now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Andy asked softly. “I feel like an asshole.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I said with a practiced casual shrug.
I’d made it casual, after all. I’d dated men before Rebecca!
Boys at least, in high school and college.
I’d decided that I’d date them again. Early on in my career, I let Erica suggest appropriate guys to be seen with, and I slept with some of them.
I even dated a few, for real … ish. The guys thought it was real, at least, and I was a great actress.
I never felt the way I had back in Ohio, but wasn’t life just a series of disappointing love affairs until you found the one?
It wasn’t worth dwelling on, especially if my career couldn’t hold that other possibility.
Plus work kept me busy; a year would go by in a flash while I’d been filming, doing press, training so I had the abs apparently required to don Princess Platinum’s costume.
It was easy not to date anyone even if it hadn’t been on purpose.
“You could have told me,” Andy said, and I could feel the Don’t make it about you! vibes radiating from Aisha. “My best friend’s gay, as you know.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then,” I pointed out.
“Jon came out like a year or two later, right? I didn’t know what you’d think.
And remember Mom when she found out, how she was going to pray for him and his family like he had cancer or something.
Dad wouldn’t even discuss it! Imagine if I would have told them I … ”
“I’m not talking about Mom or Dad,” Andy said. “Man, I wouldn’t have said the thing about your car if I knew—”
“Andrew Gardner, I am going to murder you,” Aisha said. “Can we focus on your sister and not yourself, please?”
“Actually, I’d love to focus on anything but me,” I said, sliding the baking dish into the oven, setting my favorite pan on the stovetop, and opening the refrigerator to get out everything for the salad.
I was starkly aware that Andy and Aisha were still staring at each other as if they could have an entire conversation about me using only eye contact.
Still, after what felt like an entire lifetime, I’d told my two favorite people almost the entire truth about me, and they were still standing there literally next to me.
“Aisha, didn’t you have an app date last night? ”
“Ooh, yes,” she said with a laugh. “Is this a good time to tell you about the gentleman I went out with?”
“There’s literally nothing more I want in the world right now.”
Aisha grinned at us. “First up, guess how many vapes he brought?”