There was an old, plastic takeout bag on the kitchen counter. He picked it up and crammed the filthy newspapers into it before taking it out to one of the trashcans. It was quieter in the backyard, so he sat on the wall and lit a cigarette.
Jay was never any kind of housekeeper. In fact, when he was in the throes of depression and abuse he had let his first house, the one he had owned in Florida, go to hell, and it was starting to feel that way in this house, too. This house was infinitely more depressing. Florida had meant promise to him; it had meant success. His house had been roomy, open and airy, facing one of the many lakes in an exclusive, gated community. It had shone white, inside and out, and he had loved that house. He had loved his life then; it had been the peak of his career, the most success he’d ever tasted. He missed his house, his life; sometimes he even missed the girlfriend he had then, because she was so beautiful and lovely and they were having fun and flying high together. She had gleamed, too, and had fitted to him in ways that Sarah simply didn’t.
His life wasn’t like that now. Right now nothing fitted. This house, this house that stood tall behind him, it represented the downside of his life. It was smaller, darker, something that he had settled for after looking at house after house after house, and rejecting most of them. Small. California, for such a big state, just seemed so small to him. Small and enclosed. There was no sky.
It confused him some days, because he hadn’t felt that way about it when he first moved to California. That promise, that burgeoning feeling that he had felt in Florida had tarnished, but it was a starting over point again; a fresh start in a new and unfamiliar place with Sarah as his tour guide. They had enjoyed the newness of the experience, his being the more uncharted of the two for the fact that Sarah had been born and lived in the area all her life. She had taken him in hand in so many ways, introducing him to people she knew, places she went, her friends, her family, her perspective. He had participated in it all, drunk on love, or so he thought, because he wanted something to be drunk on and alcohol was no longer an option. They had wandered hand-in-hand through movie premiers and concert events. They had taken small trips. They had played at finding and decorating the house. They had planned their marriage.
Jay was at a loss to pinpoint exactly when the appeal of it all had worn off; it had been a gradual happening that crawled up his spine and lodged in the back of his head, where it wormed through his brain until his eyes opened one day to find that he was unhappy where he had thought he had been happy. It was that simple. It was that complicated.
The throbbing baseline of the music inside the house stopped. It meant he could go back inside and not have his ears hurt from the sound level. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. His mind tried to go through the list of things that had to be done for the wedding that were still outstanding, and figure out if any of those things had to be done today. He hoped not, because he wasn’t intending on staying around today. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he wasn’t going to spend the day looking at china patterns, or being fitted for something, or picking something out. Knowing that he wasn’t going to be cooperative put an edge on the day that was already sharply honed by lack of sleep. His exhaustion was acute, making everything clear.
Meeting Annie again had brought something into vivid relief. He didn’t like the way things were turning out. Rehab, and the second chance it had given him, seemed light years away from the present. Annie, her tiny, ethereal form, that otherworldly quality she had, it had reminded him of that second chance, and he wanted that feeling once more, that feeling that everything was fresh and new; that life still held promise.
The back door slid open and three dogs came lumbering out into the yard. Daisy, Tank and Byrd. Daisy and Byrd were falling over themselves as they shot out onto the grass, barking and grabbing at each other like the hounds they were as they tumbled toward him. Tank was almost picking his way through the seared lawn, snuffling at bugs and chewing at anything he could root out. Jay watched them as they worked their way toward him, and petted them, grabbed them by the ruffs when they greeted him. Their coats were dingy, with an oily quality to them.
“Stinky dogs, stinky dogs,” Jay chanted to them, but they only licked his face, leaving trails of doggy breath in their wake.
“Where did you go?” Sarah asked him. She came walking across the lawn with her acrylic nails tapping out a tattoo on the coffee cup in her hand, loud enough for him to hear from a distance. Her thin, dark hair hung lank around her face, damp from her workout.
“Went down for some coffee and doughnuts.”
“You shouldn’t be eating that stuff.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. He ground out his smoke on the wall and immediately lit another. He waited for Sarah to make a comment about that, too, but she didn’t.
“Are you up for the day, or are you going back to bed?”
“I’m up and out,” he replied, and watched the frown grow on her face. “I have a shrink appointment and two meetings today,” he lied. He had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do today. In fact, if Sarah hadn’t brought up sleeping he would have probably crawled into bed for a while, but the mere fact that she did made him contrary.
“We’re supposed to be doing some pre-production thing for VH1 tomorrow, so you have to clear your calendar for that.”
“Umhmm.”
“It’s early, and…”
“I KNOW,” he barked.
“I just want you to get some SLEEP,” she barked back at him.
Jay felt an argument coming on, the argument about his sleeping habits of late, and while a part of him would be more than happy to shout directly into Sarah’s face and tell her to screw herself, a larger part didn’t want to be confrontational at all. He stood, stretched, and looked out at the view before him. There was the steep drop into the yard below, but if he looked beyond that it was all tree tops straight out to the shoreline. This was paradise. Why did it feel more like hell? He looked back at Sarah, her face in a squint; mean. She looked mean to him.
“Yeah, well, I want some freakin’ sleep, too,” he told her. He looked at his watch. “I have to go. Can you take the dogs and get them cleaned or something? They stink. I had to throw out a pile of shitty newspapers when I got in, too. Can’t you smell that when they do that? Weren’t you gonna take them to obedience school?”
Sarah said nothing, just looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. That look was often on her face these days, but it didn’t move him the way it could when they first moved in together. Of course back then, when it was all new and exciting, Sarah rarely looked at him that way; they had been pleased with each other. She had been proud of his accomplishments with his rehab program, proud of the way he had finished up a tour while trying to deal with the myriad pressures of counseling and meetings scheduled on the road, of adoring fans, and of angry venue managers, coworkers and crew members who rightfully blamed him for the stopgap in work his problems had caused. She had been proud to be ‘his girl’, and he had been just as proud to have her at his side.
Jay jammed his fists in his pockets and left the yard without saying anything more. He didn’t look back, he didn’t have to; he was intimate with the postures Sarah adopted with every mood. Right now it was that incessant clicking of her nails on that cup that told him she was sitting where he’d left her. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound faded as he walked across the narrow lawn and his mind’s eye showed her to be sitting there, following him with her eyes, those close set brown eyes that accused and blamed now, instead of filling up with that pride that seemed long gone.
The house still smelled when he went inside. He didn’t bother closing the door behind him, if anything it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let the place air out. In the kitchen, he debated on whether to pour himself a coffee to go, and decided against it. There, on the refrigerator, was a large piece of paper to remind them that they would be working with VH1 over the next few days, and that the cleaning people would be coming to the house tomorrow to scrub everything, because a film crew would be there the following day to do a shoot for People magazine and In Style. The wedding. The trappings of a celebrity wedding.
It was getting out of control.
Two of his band mates had married within the past three years, and neither wedding had been the media event his was developing into. Not that he usually minded the media, he didn’t, and he didn’t feel the need for privacy and secrecy that some of his friends did, but this just didn’t seem to be the right time, at least as for him. What he used to welcome seemed invasive. He was willing to take a lot of blame for the wedding snowballing into something he could no longer handle. He had pursued the publicity in the beginning and given his consent for so much of what was transpiring, never once foreseeing that he would not sustain the fervor he began with. He just wished that Sarah felt the same, but she didn’t. In fact, she was arranging for even more coverage than they had initially agreed to, like this VH1 event; it wasn’t supposed to happen. VH1 was going to do a simple interview for a series on celebrity weddings. Now there was the interview and an excursion to some lingerie shops in Los Angeles so they could pick out wedding night attire. It was a complete fabrication of their lives, because he never wore anything to bed, and Sarah didn’t wear much of anything herself, unless she was concerned about her breasts sagging and got into the occasional routine of wearing a bra to sleep in.
His eyes caught the motion of Sarah moving through the yard and back toward the house. He had to leave, if he didn’t he would end up getting into the verbal sparring he was trying hard to avoid. For a quick moment he bent his head and rested it on the refrigerator door. It was sticky, too, like the table was, like the counter was, like the floor was. Like everything in the entire house was.
“Jay?” Sarah’s voice cut through his thoughts. She had come in through a side door instead of through the kitchen. It was time to leave. He shot out the front door, never answering her call to him, moving as swiftly and silently as he could. He got into his car and backed out of the driveway, getting a last glimpse of Sarah as he drove past the front of the house.
He didn’t know where he was going, had no idea what he would do to fill his day. There was a momentary twinge, a few seconds of regret. Maybe he should have stayed home and taken care of the dogs himself; taken them to the groomer or even hosed them off in the yard. Maybe he should have done something around the house to make it more habitable. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how to clean up the messes that were there, he simply preferred that someone else do it, and that someone else was either the cleaning people, or Sarah. That seemed fair to him. After all, he was footing the bills.
The car made its way through the winding roads down to the Pacific Coast Highway. The PCH. He’d been driving it for more than a year now, and he liked it, enjoyed the way it twisted and meandered around the hills and cliffs of coastal California. At a stoplight, Jay looked north and south, trying to decide which direction to go in. His car made the decision for him, lurching into the light traffic, and taking him directly back to where his travels had taken him just an hour or so before. The car parked itself in a spot not far from where he had parked before, but this time when he cut the engine he sat there and didn’t go anywhere. From where he was parked he had a clear view of the courtyard that was three quarters surrounded by shops. The iron tables were filled with people now, people having a leisurely cup of tea or coffee, tearing into the muffins and doughnuts and bagels while they watched the other people or read papers and magazines. There were even some paparazzi there getting a jump on celebrity sightings, their cameras hanging visibly around their necks as they sipped their drinks and waited.
It gave Jay reason to pause, and the pause gave him reason to think.
He wasn’t down there for coffee; he could have had coffee at home. He knew that the car didn’t have a mind of its own, either, and that it had been his choice to bring himself back to the coffee shop, to the courtyard. He understood that it wasn’t the coffee shop that drew him, too. It was “The Rising Phoenix”. It was Annie. Annie Driscoll. Her last name popped into his head from thin air. Annie Driscoll.
“Annie Driscoll,” he said to her, having slipped into her shop and spied her behind the counter taking inventory of a container of smooth, black stones. She looked up from her task and smiled at him, the silvery blond fall of her hair rippling like a waterfall as she moved her head.
“Robbie Simmons…” she began, but he came closer to her, leaned on the glass counter top and looked down at the selection of Tarot cards and balls of crystal nestled on satin cloth.
“Jay. Jay McLean,” he corrected her.
“Jay,” she repeated, making it sound unsure, almost like a question.
“James.”
She looked at him, cocked her head to the side, and reached out thin fingers to graze his cheek.
“Jamie.” So Jamie it was.
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© 2004 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2004 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
