Joy Moore Sixteen Months Ago
Joy Moore
EXCERPT FROM UNTITLED JOINT MEMOIR WITH BENNY ABBOTT
Sixteen Months Ago
The backstage of Detroit’s Fox Theatre is a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells covered in autographs from everyone who’s graced its stage in the last thirty years.
At the insistence of an excited production assistant, we’d added to the stairwell collection in black Sharpie beside the cast of Sesame Street Live!
There were ten minutes left to “relax” before curtain call.
We’d performed in a number of cool places, but the Fox was tops.
One hundred years old, decked out in an opulent blend of Eastern motifs, this movie palace had seen the likes of Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Prince.
We were not worthy, and yet we’d sold all 5,174 seats. This was the grand finale to our tour.
“Ooh.” I pointed to a signature halfway up the stairs. “Alice Cooper.”
Benny made an unexcited sniff from the upper landing.
“You didn’t look.”
He glanced over. “Cool.”
He didn’t sound right. “You okay?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He was definitely not okay.
The production assistant, a fresh-faced Gen Zer, waited for us in the doorway. I glanced around the dimly lit stairwell, realizing we were otherwise alone.
“Would you mind giving us a sec?” I asked her.
“Of course. Yes. Sure. Yeah. I’ll just be…” She fluttered a hand and then shut the door.
Benny stared at me under raised brows. I closed the gap between us, meeting him on the upper landing.
“What’s going on with Luna?” I whispered.
It had been all I could think about through Sioux City, Park City, Minneapolis, and now Detroit.
For weeks I’d waited for the right moment to talk to him about this, and for weeks it never came.
He shook his head. “No news.”
“None?”
“We said we’d talk when I got back.”
“That’s it? That’s all?”
“More or less.”
“Seriously? Vague is not a good look on you.”
He seemed to consider his options. “Her two best friends from law school are starting their own firm,” he said eventually. “They want her to be a founding partner.”
“How exciting.” When he didn’t return my smile, I said, “Not exciting?”
“They’re in San Francisco.”
“Oh.” I let myself picture it briefly, and my shoulders dropped. “Oh.”
“It’s a good opportunity for her.” His tone did not match his words.
“Absolutely,” I said with equally unconvincing enthusiasm. “But I’m confused. You said you’ve been fighting. And … reevaluating.”
He nodded. “She thinks this could be a fresh start.”
“Oh,” I said again.
The stairwell was unusually quiet, letting in only a fraction of the ruckus from the grand lobby. Our fun-loving fans were filing in, drunk and armed with reinforcements, laughing as they spilled their way to their seats, but all we could hear was a murmur, a gentle white noise.
“Anyway, I, uh…” He raked his curls. “I don’t know what to do.”
I tried to picture my life without Benny, and found it was easy to do.
We’d done it before. For three years, the most miserable time of my life.
In those years I’d lived as if trapped in a terrarium, defeatedly pressing my hands to the glass.
Depression lies, my friends. He is a beast, and I believed him when he told me I was unlovable.
That Benny no longer cared. That I was the problem.
After coming out the other side, I promised myself I would never again live without my best friend.
My chest constricted and I found I couldn’t breathe. As if the ghosts of the Fox Theatre had wrapped their icy fingers around my heart.
“Are you okay?” Benny asked.
I shook my head, eyes filling with tears.
He grasped my arms. “Talk to me. Are you not feeling well? Do you need to sit down?”
“Don’t,” I managed. “Don’t leave.”
He exhaled all the air in the world and rested his forehead on mine. Our noses touched. I closed my eyes. Even when I began to calm, neither of us moved.
I opened my eyes. “Hi.”
“Hi.” His breath was warm on my lips. He ran his hands up and down my arms. “You scared me for a second there.”
We blinked at each other. Up close, his eyes expanded like deep pools, and I lost myself in them for a minute. “I don’t want you to leave.”
I was talking about long-distance moves, but I meant that moment as well.
I didn’t want to leave the stairwell, the corridors covered in signatures.
I wasn’t ready to go back to real life. Now that we’d survived our “survival” tour, I was already feeling nostalgic.
I’d gotten used to the grind—the planes and cars and hotels and continental breakfasts and call times and coffee runs.
We were all tired, and I never got a minute alone with Benny, but at least I could see his face every day.
Still forehead to forehead, he said, “I don’t want to leave either.”
My breath caught, our entire friendship passing before my eyes. Snuggling under blankets at the cemetery movie night. Scavenger hunts in art galleries. Costume parties, and bar crawls, and tacos at all hours. My insides fluttered.
“You’re my very favorite person, you know that?” I whispered. No qualifiers, no caveats. They were the truest words I’d ever uttered.
Benny’s eyes smiled. “You’re mine too.”
And this was, of course, when Xander cleared his throat.
BENNY AND I broke apart. Flustered, I punched Benny on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for the pep talk,” as if our forehead-to-forehead whispers were no more than a pregame huddle.
“Anytime, champ,” Benny said, taking my lead. His face was beet red.
Mine probably was too.
We waited for Xander to overreact, to yell, to scream the way he had when he found me in Benny’s room, but this time he kept his cool. “Ready for showtime?”
“Ready steady,” I said, widening my eyes at Benny as we all headed for the stage.
The next hour and a half went by in a blur.
If asked to recall anything I said at any of our shows, I’d be at a loss.
That heady adrenaline is too muddling. What I do remember is how bittersweet this final performance felt.
Benny led with a story about an exotic animal show gone wrong, and I concocted ridiculous solutions for how to survive, and we laughed, and we cried, and we signed all the things.
And then we were done. Our tour was over.
I was still riding my postshow high when Xander and I returned to our hotel room.
“I saw you,” he said, shutting and bolting the door.
I blinked. Benny and I had just been treated like megastars by 5,174 people. He may as well have been speaking another language. “Saw me what?”
“I saw you backstage.”
Disappointment rose like bile. “I—I don’t know what you mean.” My act was laughable even to my ears. The memory of the stairwell swept through me like a hot flash and I felt my face going red again. “There was nothing to see.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“What? No. God, no.” It was clear he didn’t believe me so I doubled down. “We were…” I searched for the word. “Huddling.”
“You were huddling.” He breathed out heavily through his nose. With a growing sense of alarm, I watched him pace back and forth in front of the tightly made bed.
“Xander, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not … we’re not…” Try as I might I couldn’t finish the sentence.
He sank down onto the bed and put his head in his hands. “I do everything for you.”
“I know. I do. And I love you for that.”
“Just for that?”
He sounded so hopelessly sad. I pressed my hands to his shoulders and nudged his legs apart. He wrapped his arms around me, and I rested my cheek on his head. “I love you. Period. You’re my husband. There’s never been anyone else.”
He may not have believed me, but he let it go.
I’D BE LYING if I said we were fine, though.
We at TSMSYL gifted ourselves a six-week hiatus to recover from the tour, and instead of relaxing in the town house as I’d intended, Xander whisked us away to Big Bear Lake.
He insisted it was exactly what the doctor ordered.
A second honeymoon. A chance to reconnect without all the triggers of real life.
I needed to talk to Benny. He had to assume something was going on when Xander changed our flights, sending us home a full twelve hours apart, but there was more than could be explained in a text, so we arranged a place and time to catch up in LA.
When Xander sprang Big Bear on me, I pushed Benny back a week, only to learn, as we rounded the final bends into the cozy mountain town, that my husband had booked not one, or two, but three weeks of vacation.
I balked, but Xander was positively giddy.
What did I mean, I didn’t want to stay three weeks?
Why hurry back to smoggy LA when we could cozy up in a lakeside cabin at seven thousand feet?
Why, indeed. And so we hiked, and slept, and lunched in the village.
Rode pontoon boats around the lake. I didn’t bring it up again because I didn’t know how.
He’d cleared my schedule. On paper, I had no reason to go back.
When we returned to Los Angeles in late June, the need to clear things up with Benny had fizzled.
We never did address the weirdness, and I convinced myself it was because Benny wanted to forget it ever happened.
Luna was no longer talking about starting a firm up north, and while I had no idea what her earlier vacillation meant for the future of their marriage, I assumed they were working on things.
Why confuse the matter by bringing up the Fox Theatre stairwell?
And so we went back to the way things were before the tour.
With one major difference: we were now flush with cash.
While I knew this would be the biggest perk of enduring thirty-eight live shows in nineteen cities across the United States, the final total floored me nonetheless.
Xander and I were ready to upgrade from our budget town house to a proper single-family home.
I won’t bore you with details, but suffice it to say Xander was particular. His list of must-haves was lengthy, and LA’s market was tight. I didn’t expect a perfect match. I only hoped we could find a place near Benny and Luna in the Hollywood Hills.
But Xander wasn’t interested in the Hollywood Hills.
The property he set his heart on was a 1931 Spanish revival in Mount Washington.
I won’t pretend I hated the house, but this was farther out than I’d hoped to live.
Without traffic it was a twenty-five-minute drive to Benny’s house.
With traffic, who knew? Not to mention, there was nothing within easy walking distance of the hill.
No restaurants, no theaters, no big-box stores, no pharmacies.
I would need a chauffeur to go anywhere. Xander knew this.
“But we weren’t talking about Mount Washington,” I said.
I fought him on it. For the next several days I showed him listing after listing in Hollywood, Thai Town, Los Feliz, Franklin Hills.
“Stop,” he said, pushing my phone away. “There’s no point.”
He admitted then that he’d already put in an offer.
Already signed the electronic forms in my name.
We were in escrow. He had his reasons for doing this, of course.
Xander always had his reasons. He knew I wouldn’t come around in time and didn’t want to lose the house.
It was too special, what with its arched windows and doors, its painted tiles and exposed beams. Though what set it apart, in his eye, was its privacy.
A metal fence encircled the entire property, with trees and bougainvillea shielding the view to the 3,100-square-foot home.
The only visible neighbors were those directly to our east, a former judge and her partner.
IT WAS AROUND this time, just after our move in late July of last year, that we became aware of our superfan.
He called himself TSMSYL_Number_One_Fan, and I only say “he” because he listed pronouns in his bio.
We had no idea who he was, and at first, we didn’t care.
“Joy Moore in the wild,” he posted, along with a photo of me walking hand in hand with Xander near our new home.
Odd, we thought, that he happened to be in Mount Washington at the same time.
Why hadn’t he introduced himself if he was our self-proclaimed biggest fan?
Was he the young man who picked up my sunglasses when I dropped them outside the community center?
Or the man who smiled at us near the elementary school?
Perhaps he was shy. Probably he was harmless.
Only, that was just the beginning. Two days later, there was a long zoom shot of me repainting our curb number. Then one of me and Xander getting in the car. Then a flurry at the grocery on Figueroa Street. The next day, a wide-angle shot outside the nearest pharmacy.
Almost as quickly as it began, there was a photo every time I left the house.
Did I look for him? Of course. We all did.
This was different from the fan engagement we were used to.
His anonymity gave us the heebie-jeebies, as did the fact that I was his primary subject.
Though Xander made the occasional appearance, Benny rarely did.
It was, for all intents and purposes, the Joy Moore edition of “Stars—They’re Just Like Us! ”
We asked around as to what could be done, and the long and short of it was: not much.
We blocked him. He returned an hour later with a new but similar name.
We blocked him again. Same story. You get the picture.
As a result, I stopped going out casually.
Xander grew more protective by the day, never leaving my side.
By October, I started to feel like I was back in the terrarium, only I wasn’t pressing my hands to the glass.
I wanted to be left alone. By everything and everyone.
Including Xander.
Especially Xander.