Joy Moore Excerpt from Untitled Joint Memoir
Joy Moore
EXCERPT FROM UNTITLED JOINT MEMOIR WITH BENNY ABBOTT
Nine Months Ago
The online posts held steady throughout the holidays, with photos of me in restaurants, in grocery stores, on drives with Xander in his MG.
You know that tingle of self-consciousness you get when you’re being watched?
I felt it constantly. My stalker—by this point I too had adopted the word—was nowhere and everywhere.
We documented, blocked, and reported, and he unfailingly returned.
What worried us most was his unwavering focus.
I was so consumed by these thoughts I almost didn’t hear what Benny said as he sat down for an early January recording. “You’re—I’m sorry, what? What did you say?”
Benny glanced over at Xander, who was standing in the doorway to our bedroom. “Luna and I are getting a divorce.”
“B-but you were working things out. We just got your Christmas card.” They looked so cute, grinning in their ugly sweaters beside the caption “These sweaters look better when we wear them together.” I’d had pangs of jealousy for days. “And you said … you said no San Francisco.”
Benny reached for our lucky statue, but instead of rubbing its head, he picked it up and cradled it in his lap. Pressing his thumbs to Fonzie’s, he said, “It’s not about that.”
“Then what is it?”
“A lot of things. The fighting, the baby stuff.” The baby stuff. My heart tugged as he shrugged miserably. “When it all came down, we couldn’t find enough reasons to stay married.”
“Oh, Benny.” I went around the desk and hugged him tight. The scent of his shampoo hit me with an olfactory wallop, and I realized how long it had been since we’d last touched. “I’m so sorry.”
He looked to Xander, perhaps expecting a similar offering of sympathy, but Xander only frowned.
JANUARY AND FEbrUARY sucked. Benny moped.
Luna wasn’t answering my texts. Xander was in such a foul mood, I found myself hiding from him whenever we were alone.
Taking naps even when I didn’t need them.
I was desperate to leave the house, but I couldn’t leave the house without being followed by my invisible stalker, and so I channeled my energy toward my best friend, needling him, begging him to open up.
The more I prodded, the more he pushed me away.
“You’re making things weird,” Xander said.
“If he’s not ready to talk, he’s not ready to talk. Wait for him to come to you first.”
But I wasn’t going to fall for that again.
And so, in March, I did two things.
First, I brought Benny out to view a house a few blocks away.
He might not have been ready, but I reasoned he’d never be ready.
He needed the push, and I needed him nearby, and to my great relief he decided to give Mount Washington a try.
Now Benny would be within walking distance. 1,528 steps for him, 1,600 for me.
Second, I suggested we add an employee to the mix. Someone to serve as buffer in the room when things got tense. Not that I said this, not in so many words.
What I said to Xander was, “You need an assistant.”
He grinned smugly into the mirror as he plucked an errant hair. “I think I’ve got this covered.”
“Not with grooming. A proper assistant. A producer.” As our sole non-talent executive producer, he managed our researchers, merch distributors, social media specialists, webmaster, ad partners, lawyers, PR reps, accountants, and god knew who and what else.
All remotely. “You’re stretched thin. You know it, I know it.
We need someone in the office. Someone who can intuit what you need, right when you need it. We should’ve done it ages ago, really.”
He stared at my reflection.
“You work so hard,” I said, rubbing his back.
He returned the tweezers to his vanity case and removed a jar of face cream. I watched him apply a dab to each cheek, hope draining with each passing second as he spread the moisturizer with gentle upward strokes. “Okay.”
“Okay?” It was too easy. “Seriously?”
“It’s actually perfect timing.”
“It is?”
He nodded, meeting my eyes through the mirror. “My sister is looking for a job.”
Enter Mallory.
HOW TO DESCRIBE Mallory. Mallory is sensible.
She’s quiet, and beautiful, and detail-oriented.
Her wife, Quinn, makes delicious cupcakes.
And for reasons unbeknownst to me, she was willing to move four hundred miles in order to take this job.
At first I worried I’d overreached. What if it didn’t work out?
But it did. The mood lifted with a fourth person in the room.
Xander began to uncoil, one spring at a time, and as a result Benny and I did too.
Admin became—if not pleasant, then almost pleasant?
Xander smiled more often, took meetings across town.
He even let me get a puppy. A perfect squishy-faced beagle mutt I immediately fell head over tails in love with.
Benny rescued his brother so as to have a furry companion in his new home, and we named both of them after Happy Days characters.
They had a playdate every time we recorded, Richie and Potsie tumbling around like drunken old men, chewing everything in sight.
“They’re just like you,” Benny said one day when Potsie collapsed mid-step into a nap.
I kissed Potsie’s nose. “I’ve always felt a kinship to puppies.”
Were Mallory and the pups the answer to all of our problems? No. But I think back on these months with wistful nostalgia, in part because they coincided with our excitement surrounding the Big Deal.
In May, we started talks for a major distribution deal—one-week exclusives to all-new content before going wide to other platforms. The potential windfall was mind-boggling, life-changing, and completely unwarranted.
In no way did we deserve it, but did we want it?
Yes. Thing is, these were just “talks.” Negotiations were slow, and there were no guarantees.
And so, to amp up our “wow” factor, Benny and I agreed to write a memoir.
Various agents and editors had floated the idea since our tour, and we’d always politely declined.
What could we possibly say that hadn’t already been said?
A book delineating our “inspirational path to success” was overkill.
I think it perfectly encapsulates our hopeful mindset this past spring that our answer changed. “Sure,” we said. “Why not?”
In my head, it would be a romantic, speedy affair. Sign the publishing contract one day, make a flashy announcement, sign the distribution deal the next. Boom, security for life. Soon all of our problems would disappear.
“DID YOU SEE this email?” Benny said in July when we were catching up on admin after recording one afternoon.
I glanced over at Mallory. True to form, she was wearing a tank top and joggers, platinum-blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
Headphones on, she appeared lost in thought, likely still troubleshooting audio glitches from that day’s recording.
Xander was out of the office. Another meeting with the lawyers. “Which one?” I asked.
He turned his laptop around to show me. The heading read: “WARNING: TOXIC INGREDIENTS IN SHAKE AWAKE PRODUCTS.” It was addressed to both of us. I rolled my chair over and we read the email side by side.
To Everyone at TSMSYL,
PLEASE NOTE: the Shake Awake products you’ve been advertising are making people sick. Their protein powder is NOT safe to eat in its current form. Regular use will result in toxin poisoning: FEVER, NAUSEA, LIVER FAILURE, AND MORE. Please DO NOT CONSUME, and please STOP endorsing this product.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen
Benny and I exchanged frowns. Shake Awake was an all-day-energy breakfast shake start-up we’d recently gifted with ad space.
Usually, because our CPM (cost per thousand listens) is pricey, we end up partnering with larger, more established corporations, but when TSMSYL became financially secure, Xander proposed we begin donating the occasional mid-roll ad to fledgling companies in need of assistance.
After years of gambling on equity investments, he knew intimately how hard it was for new businesses to get off the ground.
These thirty-second or one-minute plugs were a simple way to give back, now that we had a platform.
A surprisingly generous suggestion, I thought.
Benny agreed, and so we went along with it whenever a reasonable opportunity arose.
Last time, it was a start-up making wearable air purifiers.
Before that, a company selling full-color night-vision goggles.
Both products that could theoretically save a life.
As for Shake Awake, the partnership arose because of my sleep disorder.
Who better than a person with narcolepsy to promote an all-day-energy drink?
“Scam or real?” I asked.
“No idea.” Benny pulled up a browser and searched “Shake Awake protein powder toxin poisoning.” No results came up. Next try: “Shake Awake illness.” Again, nothing. I tested a few combinations of my own and reached the same outcome. There were no articles. There hadn’t been a recall.
“Have you tried their shakes?” I asked.
He shook his head. I hadn’t either, apart from the initial taste test. They weren’t gross; they just weren’t my thing. I preferred to eat my breakfast rather than drink it.
“Scam, I guess.” I turned to Benny. We were, I realized then, sitting very close.
“Hey,” he said.
I looked at him as if for the first time.
We’d been so busy the past few months. While our memoir pitch had generated a flurry of excited interest from the major imprints, culminating in a generous pre-empt, we hadn’t yet finalized the contract and thus couldn’t make any announcements.
Negotiations with Apex Plus were dragging on.
Xander’s coils were tightening again. And Benny and I never saw each other outside recording days.
I’d begged him to move to Mount Washington, and yet somehow we were still operating on opposite sides of a one-sided mirror.
I knew he was in there and he knew I was in there but we couldn’t see each other.
Suddenly, I was desperate to break through the facade.
“Hey.” I squeezed his knee. “Did you drive or walk?”
“Drove. It was hot.” Sheepishly, he added, “Richie’s paws are sensitive.”
“Blaming the dog.” I stood. “Take me to your place. I want to see what you’ve done with the Zen Den.”
Mallory lifted her head with interest.
“Yeah?” Benny asked. “Really?”
He’d been coy about his renovations since hiring his contractor.
I tried to convince myself that this was why I hadn’t visited his house in months—so he could do a “big reveal” when it was ready.
But we both knew this wasn’t the only reason, and the fact that he was surprised by my suggestion filled me with sadness.
We could do better. “Yes, I’m sure. Let’s go. ”
I ducked down to avoid the stalker as we traveled over the hill, and didn’t come back up until we were safely inside Benny’s garage.
“You have so much furniture,” I said, turning a circle in his living room, which was no longer an empty bachelor pad but a mid-century dream home. “You have accent chairs. And vases. Benny, you have a vase.” I held up a gray earthenware urn with a dropped jaw.
“Sarah,” he said with a shrug.
Another tug of guilt. It should’ve been me. “All right.” I gestured toward the back doors. “Let’s see it.”
He scratched his beard. “Remember, it’s not done yet. We still have some painting to do, and none of the chairs have arrived yet. And some of the trim is still miss—”
“Oh my god, Benny, just show it to me.”
He did.
It took my breath away.
There was no way this was the same dim, musty outbuilding he bought five months earlier.
It was light-filled, and cozy, and utterly peaceful.
This whole time he’d continued referring to it as a shed, but there was nothing shedlike about it anymore.
I wanted to live in there. I wanted to nap on the ridiculously soft sofa and wake to the view of the jagged LA skyline.
I wanted to bask in the glow of the skylights, and record podcasts with Benny at the fancy walnut desk in the center of the room.
I circled the space, hand on chest, speechless.
“You like it?” He was watching me from the open door.
“I think…” I shook my head with awe. “I think that if you were ever reincarnated as a building, it would look like this.”
“That’s … not how reincarnation works.”
I laughed. “I’m saying I love it.”
He was clearly pleased. But just as quickly as it arrived, his smile faded, and his green eyes clouded over. He stepped back outside and pressed his hands to the porch railing.
“Hey,” I said, following him out. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head.
I waited. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.
“Do you?”
I wasn’t sure what “it” we were referring to—Luna?
The stairwell of the Fox Theatre? The months of distance between us?
Did I want to talk about the sleep hallucinations I’d been having about my stalker?
That he’d broken in, a faceless shadow in the corner as I lay paralyzed in bed?
That lately it was only ever upon waking to find my barky little watchdog sleeping peacefully at my feet that I could convince myself I was safe?
There were so very many things to choose from.
“No.” Without letting myself overthink it, I said, “I just want a hug.”
He didn’t have to be asked twice. He wrapped his arms around me, and I flattened my cheek on his chest, smelling his Benny smell, listening to his heart thump.
I didn’t want to let go. He pressed his face into my hair and gently kissed the top of my head, and I held the air inside my lungs until I felt I would burst. For what felt like forever, we swayed back and forth in the heat, in the shade of his perfect little porch.
“I should go,” I eventually managed.
Benny nodded as if he’d expected as much, and drove me home.
That night, a picture of Benny kissing the top of my head in front of the newly rebuilt Zen Den appeared online.