CHAPTER 5
Brett
“Garbage?” Arch holds up a copy of Business Plan Writing for Dummies that’s seen some things.
I reach for the tome and clutch it to my chest. “Never,” I say, stroking its yellow-and-black cover with inflated sentimentality. “I can never throw this out.”
“Holding on to it until you finally read it?” Kelly quips, tying off a garbage bag in my kitchen.
“Hey,” I say, placing the book tenderly in the keep pile, “I don’t have to move, you know.”
“Then who are you planning to film with?” Kelly purses her lips at me, sassily, before heading toward the garbage room down the hall.
“Who are you planning on filming with?” I call after her, lamely. The door rebounds off the dead bolt, seeming a little bit stunned.
Arch looks up at me from the floor, where she’s seated cross-legged, surrounded by old mail, DVDs, power cords, and Happy Belated Birthday cards from my dad and Susan. Her dark hair hangs over her shoulder in a long braid, and she worms it around her finger with a small, private smile. Arch is an only child and thereby endlessly amused by the ways in which Kelly is able to so easily irritate me.
“Well, that you can trash.” I toe an old copy of She’s with Him: A Novel by Stephanie Simmons. People promises on the cover: The sexiest beach read you can pack in your beach bag right now. Stephanie hated that her books were reduced to summer reads. They were smarter than that, exploring the nuances between working-class and white-collar blackness, and how they manifested in a romantic relationship. The New York Times did not agree. They passed on reviewing all three in the series, which chronicled the passionate-bordering-on-abusive relationship between a seventeen-year-old prep school girl and a seventeen-year-old rising football star from the wrong side of the tracks. Think Fifty Shades of Grey with black characters and writing that won’t impair your IQ.
“Can I read it?” Layla asks, emerging from the bedroom wearing a pair of my earrings.
“When you’re thirty-five,” I tell her.
Arch flips open the book. “But she signed it,” she says. Her lips trace the inscription, silently. She is still a moment, then looks up at me strangely.
“What does it say?” I ask, crouching down next to her to read it. To the love of my life Sorry, Vince! She dated it 3.21.15. “Whoa,” I say, wholly unprepared for the burning tightness in my throat, that feeling like you’re gurgling your heart. I can’t believe that just two years separates that inscription and the news Lisa delivered yesterday.
“You’re going to hate this,” Lisa had said over the phone, a smile in her voice.
Stephanie, back from her book tour, had a private prod meeting with Lisa. Morocco isn’t going to work for her either. The World Health Organization has issued a Zika warning for North Africa and, well, she’ll let all of us do with that what we will.
I had to squeeze the phone tighter to keep it from sliding out of my damp hand. “She’s pregnant?” For as long as I’ve known Stephanie, she has been adamant: Kids are for women with no other path to glory.
“She and Vince are talking about it.”
“Oh, come the fuck on!”
“We will still film you going to Morocco,” Lisa said, suddenly on speaker. I could hear her fingers playing the keyboard. I could feel her retreating, as though my spray of emotions had repelled her to the other side of the battlefield.
“It’s not the same if I go alone,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. Lisa has a freeze response to emotion. “You know that.” If I go alone, the trip and all the Imazighen women who deserve visibility will be reduced to one, maybe two, segments within a single episode. They will be treated as filler, between a scene of Stephanie and Vince pretending like they still have sex and Lauren ordering a third glass of wine at lunch.
“Look.” Lisa sighed. “They all think you got your turn last year with the L.A. trip. It’s someone else’s opportunity.”
“The L.A. trip?” I repeated, incredulous. “That trip was for the group. It was for the show. It had nothing to do with SPOKE.”
“I know.”
“When we went to Paris, it was for Stephanie’s book. When we went to the Hamptons, it was for Jen’s juice stand. When we went to Anguilla, it was for Hayley’s—”
“Hang on a sec?”
I was taken off speaker, and a muffled conversation between Lisa and nobody had ensued.
“Brett, I have to take this. It’s the network.”
“Sure.” I know a get me the fuck off this call maneuver when I’m the target of one.
“It will work out,” Lisa said. But then she stopped typing. “Or maybe you should talk to Stephanie. She’s convinced them not to film with you.”
I could feel my pulse in the button of my jeans. There is only one reason Stephanie would do such a thing, and it’s not something our viewers would easily forgive.
I didn’t try to talk to her. I couldn’t. But there was someone else who would listen to me, who could possibly help, and so I called her and asked if we could meet anywhere, anytime, but soon.
“She was kidding,” I say to Arch, who is still staring up at me, suspiciously, her red fingernail underlining Stephanie’s inscription. To the love of my life.
“Then why are you blushing?” Arch asks, a salient point.
I take the book from her hands and carry it the few steps into the kitchen, chucking it into the recycle bin. I notice the garbage bag where we’re dumping the contents of old condiments, horseradish and mustard, sriracha and grape jam, just as Kelly returns from the trash room. I see an opportunity to distract Arch from thinking whatever it is she is thinking that is making her look at me like that, and smash the open bag in Kelly’s face.
“Brett!” she shrieks, doubling over with a hysterical retch. Layla shares my wounding laugh. Kelly is so precious sometimes. Kelly recovers and snatches a handful of my hair, dragging me left-ear-side down to the floor.
“Uncle!” I cry, the pain in my scalp ice-cold. “Uncle!” But when Kelly lets go—idiot, she knows we don’t fight fair—I kick her in the shin so hard Arch moans in secondhand agony. Kelly crumples to the floor with a guttural sound, but it is just a fake out so she can spring on top of me, sending me onto my back, pinning my torso between her knees.
“I’m sorry!” I scream more than I laugh. Kelly is red-faced and breathing hard. “Oh, God, no! I’m so sorry!” Kelly leans over me, lips pursed, a line of spit stretching, lengthening, dangling inches from my face. “Layla!” I twist my head left and right. “Help me!”
“Stop it!” Layla cries. “Stop, Mom! Stop!” She looks around for something to throw at Kelly, landing on a rolled-together pair of socks in the laundry bin. Bop! They bounce off the back of Kelly’s head, and it’s as though a switch has been flipped. Kelly swings upright, the trail of spit attaching to her chin.
“I don’t like when you guys do that,” Layla says, sounding near tears. Arch scrambles to her feet, standing behind Layla and slicing a hand under her chin, making furious eyes at both of us—cut it out.
“Oh, we were just fooling around,” Kelly assures Layla, wincing as she stands. She flicks her eyes at me—my turn to corroborate.
“We’re not actually hurt, Layls!” I say, though the tender tempo of my scalp and the way Kelly is putting her weight on her left leg suggest otherwise. I glance at the clock on the microwave. “Eek! I have to meet Miss Greenberg soon. Layls, want to help me pick out my outfit? She’s making us go somewhere fancy.” I offer her my hand. She leaves me hanging for a few moments, mad at me for scaring her. “Please?” I stick out my lower lip. With a sigh, Layla threads her long fingers through mine and we head into my room. Kelly’s room, now.
Yvette Greenberg is seated between an old-school finance guy and a Texan blonde in the golden tomb of Bemelmans, wearing wide, lightweight black pants, a white suiting vest, and red glasses, which she removes when she sees me to declare how happy I look. She licks her thumb to remove the lipstick mark on my left cheek, and for a moment, my mom isn’t dead.
The bartender removes the silver triple-dish server from the bar top. “We’ll replenish this and transfer to your table, Miss Greenberg.”
Yvette mouths, Thank you, Tommy.
“I can’t believe I got you all the way up here,” Yvette says, sitting across from me and fluttering a few elegant fingers at the pianist over my shoulder. He purrs her name into the mic and she drapes her arm over the back of her chair with a laugh when light applause follows. The moment feels like it’s mine too. It is the better accomplishment to be Yvette Linden Greenberg but a close second is to be in her company.
Yvette cups a hand around the side of her mouth. “And to think these fuckers wouldn’t serve me in the eighties.”
“Stop.”
“That’s why I’m a regular here now. You don’t flee the places that discriminate against you, darling one. You occupy them.” She leans back, melding into her seat, an unabashed spill of linen and resistance. “President Mandela told me that.”
“You sure it wasn’t Lennon?”
Yvette laughs, delighted that I’m impressed. And that’s reason one of twenty-seven hundred that I love her. She doesn’t play humble, the way most women have been brainwashed to do. I once told her in an email that I was lucky to have her in my life and she flipped the fuck out at me and lost all ability to punctuate. YOU ARE NOT LUCKY BRETT!!!! YOU ARE TALENTED AND BRILLIANT AND STRONG AND I SEEK OUT TALENTED BRILLIANT STRONG WOMEN AND THATS WHY IM IN YOUR LIFE. I was so moved I printed it out and tacked it behind my computer at SPOKE HQ.
The waiter appears, hand on his gut, asking what he can get for me. I point to Yvette’s glass, and Yvette holds up two fingers. “Tanqueray and tonic.”
The pianist starts in on Paul McCartney and Yvette leans forward on her elbows. “How have you been?” She reaches for my hand, the lines around her gray eyes long and thin, winging out like whiskers. It makes her look like she is always smiling, despite the more indelicate grooves between her brows, the heavy slabs of skin lumbering her eyes. The effect is that of someone who has seen a lot but remains cautiously optimistic about the state of humanity. Yvette rose to fame when she posed as a stewardess in the seventies, chronicling the abject sexism and misogyny that came with the line of work for Esquire. She also happens to have cheekbones for days, and was deemed the foxy femi-nazi by the New York Post. She’s inaccurately held up as a symbol of the women’s movement when Yvette is a crusader for intersectional activism, fighting oppression in all its forms: racial, sexual, religious, gendered, and on and on. She protested apartheid in South Africa and hosted the first women-only Seder in New York City. She coproduced an Oscar-winning documentary about the constitutional violations of the death penalty and founded a nonprofit for at-risk LGBTQ youth. She advised the 2005 MTA strike and she once seriously looked into adopting me. If aliens invade our planet one day, I would hold up Yvette as an example of why they should spare the human race.
My smile is lovestruck. “I have some news.”
Yvette sucks in a giddy breath. “Tell me.”
I pause for effect. “We’re moving in together.”
“Oh!” Yvette cries. “Oh, I knew it. I knew it as soon as I met her. She’s special, Brett. And you’re special.” She puts her hand to her plump cheekbone, as though an exciting thought just occurred to her. “Do you think you’ll get married?”
“Yvette. Pump the brakes, please.”
“Why? You should get married. Everyone thinks I’m anti-marriage because I never did it, but I just never found the right person. Or maybe,” she strokes the underside of her chin, coquettishly, “I just found too many right people.”
I laugh. Yvette’s roster reads like the guest list for Studio 54 in its heyday. “You’ve had a lot of fun.”
“I’m still having a lot of fun. Maybe the most fun I’ve ever had.” The song ends and Yvette booms, “Play ‘Satisfaction’! I need some Mick in my life!” I nearly miss her wink.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I would never lie to you, my darling one.”
“No,” I say, “I believe you. I just need you to shut up before I spontaneously combust with jealousy.”
“In any case,” Yvette says, “it’s probably better you hold off. If you get engaged Jesse would only try to commodify it for the show. She’d probably talk you into some god-awful spinoff.” She puffs, full of disdain.
“That’s something to consider,” I murmur, noncommittally.
Our drinks arrive, frothy on top with extra lime juice, just the way Yvette makes them at home. We meet our glasses in the center of the table. “To the best medicine there is.” Yvette does not mean gin. Sometimes I wonder if Jen’s frigidity is a rebellion against her mother’s resounding sex positivity.
Yvette tips her drink to her lips and laughs. “My daughter would die of embarrassment if I ever said such a thing in front of her. Speaking of. I heard you saw her recently.” Her eyebrows slump together. They really only express in two directions: together or apart, concerned or conserving energy. Nothing surprises her enough to raise them anymore, though I could tell her some things.
“She looks really healthy,” I tell Yvette, earnestly. It’s a complicated dance, to be friends with the mother of a woman neither of us likes very much. My party line is this: I respect Jen but not necessarily the message her business sends to women, a hugely more forgiving position than Yvette has taken. If anything, my friendship with Yvette is predicated on her disappointment in her daughter’s chosen profession and the positive spin I put on it. I remind her how impressive it is that Jen helms a multimillion-dollar company, that the investors have not felt the need to bring in a seasoned single Y chromosome to oil the machine. “That’s a big deal, Yvette. Something to be really proud of,” I’m always telling her, and sometimes I wonder if Yvette is even putting on her contempt a little bit. To force me to find things I admire about Jen.
“She’s doing really well,” Yvette says. “Professionally, that is. I just worry about her. I know she wants to find someone, to get married, and to have children. It feels like the show has steered her away from all of that.”
The pianist holds the final key of “Tupelo Honey” and Yvette claps bossily, so that others put down their drinks and follow her lead. My heart races the applause as I ready myself to say what I came here to say. “Yvette, this is awkward. But I think Jen is trying to sabotage me.”
Yvette appears truly stricken on my behalf. “Sabotage you?”
My eyes get a little teary because for a moment, I consider telling her everything. The truth. If anyone could understand it, it might be her.
Yvette’s gentle gray eyes get even gentler. “Darling girl! What is it?”
I immediately change my mind. I cannot take the risk that Yvette may never look at me like this again, may never call me darling girl. “It has to do with the show.”
Yvette makes a tickled noise that means What now. Yvette was once signed on as a recurring character, but she politely recused herself when Lisa became the showrunner in season two, the season our principles went down and our ratings went up. She’s concerned we are contributing to a culture that paints female friendships as catty, conniving, and deceitful, rather than bucking that stereotype, as was the show’s original intention. I hear that but unfortunately, no one is interested in watching a bunch of women get along. Jesse says it’s our burden as the first feminist reality show to make the show palatable to the unwashed masses. She says it’s no different than what I’ve done with SPOKE: helping third-world women by charging first-world women twenty-seven dollars to listen to Lady Gaga and pedal nowhere. Maybe one day we will live in a world that will binge on five independently successful women doing nothing but building each other up. Until then, we have to occasionally knock each other down.
“You know I told you that this year it was my turn to plan the trip,” I say, “and that I wanted to take everyone to Morocco and introduce them to the women who are getting so much out of the bikes.”
“It’s wonderful,” Yvette rests a cocktail straw next to the base of her glass, “when the show gets to be what it is.”
“Except it’s not happening anymore.”
“I don’t understand,” Yvette says, lifting one hand in her confusion. “Why not?”
I give her the streamlined version: I had a falling-out with Stephanie, and the others seem to have chosen sides—her side—and now we may not be going to Morocco after all. I feel completely cheated out of a trip and unsupported by the other women when all I’ve ever done is support them, and worse, like I’ve misled my investors. I sold them on SPOKE getting a lot of airtime this season and now I’m worried they’re going to feel duped.
“Here’s what I think,” Yvette says when I’ve finished my ramble. “First, breathe. Breathe. Take a deep breath and remember that whether or not the show gives Morocco the full treatment, it has no bearing on all the good you will do there.”
Yvette pauses, and I realize she actually wants me to breathe. I take a deep inhale and look at her expectantly. She doesn’t say anything so I take another.
“That being said,” Yvette continues, appeased, “I don’t believe in just sitting aside and letting others trample all over you. Stephanie has done a brave thing in telling her story, and I appreciate all she is doing to help women who have experienced similar traumas, but that does not make her beyond reproach. She is a very commanding personality and I don’t think she always uses that power for good. Nearly all women can stand adversity, but if you want to test someone’s character, give her power. Lincoln said that.”
“You knew Lincoln too?”
“I’m that old, yes. And he was a great man.” She draws her hands a foot apart, scrutinizes the distance, and adds another inch. “The greatest.”
“Yvette!” I laugh.
“Good. See? You’re laughing. Not dying.” Her head traces the pattern of the music as she thinks for a moment. “I think you and my daughter need a face-to-face. No Lauren. No Stephanie. No Jesse and please God, no Lisa.” Yvette grimaces. “I know you and Jen haven’t always gotten along but Jen knows what it’s like to have a lot to lose. I think you could appeal to her.”
That was an odd thing to say—Jen knows what it’s like to have a lot to lose—but I don’t dig. I’ve already asked too much of her. “I feel like she’ll never agree to meet me,” I say.
Yvette hmmms, holding up her finger when she’s got something. “How about this? We’ll be at the house next week. Why don’t you come out for the night? It will be peaceful. Private. You haven’t even seen the remodel yet.”
Jen and Yvette’s 1880s whaler’s cottage underwent an extensive face-lift this spring. I hear the East Hampton town council is none too pleased about it, which must mean it’s spectacular.
“Huh.” I consider. “I guess I could fold some work into it. You know we’re doing this temporary yoga studio in Montauk and they’re building out the old hardware store.”
“Make it about work, don’t make it about work, just come, Brett. You don’t need an excuse to stay with me. You’re family.”
Yvette swipes her knuckle against my cheek, affectionately. Would she still love me like a daughter if she knew the truth? I lower my chin and take a lengthy pull from my cocktail straw. She would. I’m sure of it. It’s not that bad, what happened.
Or is that just the Tanqueray, telling stories?