AXEL

When I got back to Mal’s that night he was pacing back and forth in his living room like an angry panther in a cage.

“You doing all right, big guy?” I asked as I went to the fridge to get a beer. Beer would usually improve his mood.

“Call Christina and tell her I’m not going,” he said.

I stuck my head into the living room from the kitchen. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not going where?”

“Back to England.” He ground his teeth and looked straight up at the ceiling.

“Are you being deported or something …?”

“Call Christina,” he repeated, and then disappeared into his bedroom and slammed the door.

I opened a beer for myself and sat on the couch to dial Christina’s number. Her chirpy voice mail answered. “You have reached Pempengco Productions! Beep!” Yes, she actually said beep.

I hung up and dialed again. This time she picked up. “Axel, thank goodness. Sorry to make you wait but I’m in New York and the best thing just happened. Pack a bag. You’re going on an overnight trip to London.”

“Is this what Mal’s knickers are in a twist over? Why are we going to London?”

“You remember that movie?”

I took a swig of beer and leaned back, trying to think of what she meant. “You’ve got to be more specific, Chris.”

“Remember when you were recording in New York and that producer was hanging around, and us talking about putting a song on a movie soundtrack?”

“Oh, that movie. I thought the song they took was just filler music, though, not like a huge deal?”

“Well, that’s true, not like you did the theme song, but that’s beside the point. The point is that we have a last-minute chance for you to be at the premiere in London. Big red carpet thing, huge glitz, giant after-party, and the absolute perfect chance for me to grab Rothschild by the balls.”

“Talk dirty to me, baby,” I joked. Actually, I loved Christina’s tough mouth and her bulldog personality: that was why she was such a good manager. But I could see why Mal was in a bit of a tizzy. He’d sworn he was never going home again. “You said pack a bag. You mean right now, this second?”

“The shuttle is coming to get you in a little while, so yeah, you better get moving.”

I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees, the phone in one hand, the beer in the other. “When you said ‘last-minute’ you weren’t kidding. Are we going to perform?”

“Only in the sense of you need to make an impression. It’s only you and Mal going.”

“Why not all five of us?”

“Because I couldn’t get all five of you on the guest list.”

“And you’re sure it’s worth flying halfway around the world to shake Errold Rothschild’s hand?”

She made a noise that was half-laugh, half-pig snort. “The point isn’t for you to shake his hand. It’s to have your photo on his desk, on his phone, everywhere the next morning.”

“And we’ll be there how long?”

“By the time you land you’ll have to go right to the premiere pretty much. You fly back Saturday night.”

I groaned. Not only would the jet lag be brutal, but it would mean canceling my tea date with Ricki. “Mal doesn’t want to go,” I mentioned.

“Mal will do it,” Christina said. “When you tell him this could be the thing that puts another half million into the band kitty.”

“You really think this deal will be worth that much?”

“Net,” she emphasized. “He has to go because he’s the British one and they’ll love that. And you have to go because you’re the face of the band, Ax.”

I sighed. “I know.”

“You don’t want to go, either?” Her voice scaled up in pitch. “You know how hard this was to pull off!”

“No, no, don’t be like that, Chris. I’m psyched to go. I’m just not psyched for such a long flight for such a short trip.”

“If you want I could try to book us a couple more days there—”

“No, no, we really need to keep up momentum working on the new material,” I said, cringing a little as I said it. I was only half-lying: we did need to keep up momentum. But in truth what I was thinking about was how this was a terrible time to be away from Ricki. She was vulnerable right now and I hated, absolutely hated, having to cancel on her. Something told me that was not going to work out well.

“I’ll be meeting you in London, but I’m not going to the premiere. I’m depending on you to make this work.”

“What do you mean by ‘make this work’?”

“I mean, you know, land yourself in every newspaper in Great Britain. Or at least all the trades. You know that saying? It’s true: a picture is worth a million bucks.”

That wasn’t the saying, but I didn’t try to correct her. I started packing a bag while she blathered on more details about the flight and where to pick up our boarding passes. Then I hung up and went to try to convince Mal of everything she had told me.

I knocked on his door.

“Come,” he barked.

I opened the door to find him zipping shut a small suitcase on the foot of his bed. Apparently he’d either heard everything or otherwise convinced himself to go. “Limo’s on the way,” I said.

“I guess we’ll sleep on the plane.”

And maybe it’ll keep me from fretting about Ricki. I tried to call her but it went right to voice mail and I figured she had already gone to sleep. By the time she got up, we’d be halfway there. I texted her instead so she’d see when she got up. While I was doing that, Mal drank the rest of my beer and then I threw some of my best “bad boy” clothes into a bag.

On the flight I started writing the lyrics to a song about flying and fortune and fame, but it was probably too much of a cliché to use. It was that or write about how all I wanted to do was hold her tight and keep the world at bay. Mal didn’t criticize, though. He also didn’t ask how she and I were getting along. I’m pretty sure from the lyrics I was writing, he could tell.

RICKI

The next morning I turned on my phone as I was finishing breakfast with Gwen before getting ready to go to work. In came a frantic-looking text from Axel that began in ALL CAPS:

SO SORRY FLYING TO LONDON VERY SUDDEN AAAAAAH—Will tell you all about it when we get back. I’ll be in the air by the time you get this. Last-minute publicity appearance. I promise I’ll bring you some English tea to make up for breaking our date. Sorry sorry sorry.

So that was the first thing that went wrong that morning, although I felt pretty mellow about it given how good I felt about his visit the previous night.

The next thing was at the office. I’d barely gotten to my desk when I was summoned to David Meyers’s office. That could only be something very good or very bad, I thought.

He asked me to close the door behind me and I half-wondered if this was going to be another chance for a guy to hit on me. But no, he was all business.

“Ricki, I don’t want you to think I don’t like you or the work you do. Understand this isn’t personal in any way. I consider you a part of my team and I’m actually very protective of my people.”

I nodded, wondering what he was working up to.

“I want you to stop beating the ‘more movies for women’ drum.”

“What? Why?”

“Like I said, don’t misunderstand me, but you’re new here, you’re still learning our corporate culture. There’s concern that if we are too overt in our diversity campaigns we’ll alienate our core audience.”

Had he shown my proposal to some of the higher-ups? “By ‘core audience’ do you mean paying ticket buyers or stockholders and executives?”

“Well, I think at the heart of it is that our stockholders and executives think of themselves as people who love movies. And they assume that the audience will feel the same.”

I tried to keep my tone even and reasonable. “They do realize, though, that they’re men? And that half the people in this country … aren’t?”

“Oh, I know, and they know. This isn’t a sexist thing, Ricki.”

Like hell it’s not … I thought. But I tried to think back over what was just said. “So, wait, you’re not telling me we shouldn’t develop movies for women; you’re just telling me don’t … make such a big deal about it?”

He sagged in his chair and I couldn’t tell if it was from relief that I’d gotten his message or disappointment that I hadn’t, until he said, “Yes, essentially. I don’t want you taking a lot of heat from above and I want you to have time to grow and accomplish what you want. So the message for now is back down a little, try to fit in, and wait for your moment. I think you’ll have an easier time if you champion certain projects, perhaps, rather than make it seem like you have a political agenda.”

While I understood everything he was saying, and I appreciated him having my back with upper management, it felt like he hadn’t really listened to anything I’d said in our previous meetings or in the memos I had sent. “Mr. Meyers—”

“David, please.”

“David. I don’t mean it as a political thing, unless you want to call it capitalist. It’s just good moneymaking sense to capture the money out of the neglected portion of the market.”

“Is that what they teach these days at Ivy League business schools?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” I took a calming breath. “Okay, yes, if I weren’t a woman it wouldn’t seem political. I get that. You know what I think? If Steven Spielberg or David Geffen stood up and said, ‘hey, I had an epiphany about how we can make more money! Stop driving women away and court their dollars instead!’ the whole industry would applaud. But they aren’t saying it, and I am.”

He nodded. “I know. I get it. I get you. But I’m saying back off for a while. Lie low. You’re still on the bottom rung of the ladder here, remember? You’re going to make a tremendous mark on this industry. You are. I’m asking you to be patient, though, and be a team player, and relax, all right? Just chill out on the political stuff. Or,” he corrected himself, “what could be taken as political even if it’s not politically motivated. Understand?”

“I understand.” I understood he wanted me to sit down and shut up. It was pretty obvious to me that if I were a young male executive I’d be expected to grab the bull by the horns. But because I was a woman I was supposed to be a “team player.” I realized as I made my way back to my office that Meyers had never actually said he was getting static from up above about me. He had never told me he passed my proposal upstairs so I had to assume that this was him fearing the reaction he might get if he did. He hadn’t even tried.

David Meyers had been a perfect gentleman and yet somehow I was more disappointed about him than I had been about Conrad Schmitt trying to get me to bend over.

They say things come in threes, right? Well, the third bad thing that happened that day wasn’t to me, but I took it personally anyway. I texted Gwen at midday to ask if she’d even been seen by the casting director yet and got back a very angry-looking reply:

Seen? Seen?! I don’t think they even looked up from their doodling or crossword puzzles or whatever the $%#&$ they were doing while I was up there!

I don’t know how she could stand being subjected to that. But she wanted to act, she wanted to do it, and if that was what she wanted to do, I wanted to be there to support her. I called her right back.

“You know what you need?”

“What?” Her voice sounded thick, like she’d been crying.

“Consolation sushi. Sakura is friends with the chef at this place with private rooms. Let me see if she’s free.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Gwen said. “I need to learn to thicken my skin.”

“Well, until you do, I swear, this guy can mend broken hearts with fish, he’s that good.” Plus Sakura had lots of experience with auditions. Maybe she’d have some advice. “Have Riggs pick me up on the way and I’ll get my car tomorrow.”

“Oh, all right. I’ll get myself together. Thanks, Rick’.”

So the day wasn’t a total loss, since we had an excellent girls’ night out, and Gwen and Sarah got to know each other better, which was a good thing because I had a feeling I was going to need all the emotional support I could get pretty soon.

I hadn’t realized how soon, though, until Gwen reminded me in the car on the way home that Dad was coming out of rehab.

“What, tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow,” she said, leaning back against the car’s back seat and stretching. “Have you talked to him at all?”

“Of course not. I thought we weren’t allowed to talk to him when he was in there.”

“Well, once a week, you can. We could even visit, but you know he wouldn’t want that. He wouldn’t want the photos in the paper.”

“Are you sure? Gwen, did you read the interview he did for TTT?”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I kind of think maybe he didn’t know he was being interviewed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think he was drunk and rambling and someone wrote it down. There’s a female byline on the story. Maybe he didn’t even think she was a reporter.”

“Hm. I don’t know if that’s a case for a suit or not.” I sighed. “And if the horse has left the barn already, suing them would only make even more people pay attention. There’s no way to win this media game.”

She shrugged. “Did you ever think maybe it would be better to just … not care?”

“Do you seriously want to be splashed all over like Paris Hilton?”

“Well, I don’t mean make a sex tape or do anything insanely stupid, but you know, when I have a boyfriend and I go out for a drink why should I care if some housewife in Phoenix, Arizona, sees it on the cover of a tabloid magazine?”

“Gwen, you should care more than me, probably, if you’re trying to get acting gigs.”

“Be serious, Ricki. They don’t care if I can act. All most of them care about is whether I’m skinny enough and blond enough, and the more famous my name is, the better in that regard.”

“There’s a difference between famous and infamous.”

“I’d be infamous for being seen in public holding hands with a guy? I think that would just prove my name value. If it’ll sell magazines, it’ll sell tickets.”

I frowned. “Have you forgotten that we actually have something that will make us instantly infamous forever? The dungeon in the basement?”

“Or maybe it will make us infamous for five minutes and then everyone will get over it because BDSM is so mainstream now?” she suggested.

“Dream on. People are more uptight about sex than ever. That’s why TTT made such a big deal about Mom’s death. Not because they care about her. Because she might have died in a sensationalist way, because of the kinky sex implication.”

“Okay, but let’s approach this rationally. What are we afraid of? We’re afraid of our private lives being exposed. Why? Because we’re afraid of being judged? Okay, but who cares what the people who would judge us think?”

“The people who would be paying you for your marketability and the people who would be paying me not to be a PR liability.” I sat up straight suddenly, as I put two and two together. That was what my boss had told me today, basically. Don’t be a PR liability. Was it a coincidence that this talk came right after I’d taken a day off work to hide at home because of the article about Mom’s death? I was sure that wasn’t a coincidence. For that matter, was the way Gwen was dismissed today because of that? I couldn’t tell, but I couldn’t rule it out, either. “The media doesn’t care if it ruins your life or even if what they say is true. They especially don’t care about ruining your life if they’ve lied.”

“Yes, but what if they’re not even lying? What if it’s the truth? There is a dungeon in our basement.”

“And that’s why the dungeon has to remain a secret.”

Gwen sighed. “I suppose.”

* * *

The locksmith came in the morning, and I hovered around while he changed the lock to the office and gave me two copies of the key, and he changed the combination on the safe. I hoped Schmitt was trustworthy and that I was just being paranoid, but better safe than sorry.

I kept waiting for Dad to show up while Paul and I took the opportunity to look through what was in that safe. I’d given it all a cursory look right after the will had been read, but this was the first time in the two months since then that I had a chance to look in greater depth. Deeds, the titles to various vehicles, other official papers, bonds, the annual reports of the winery … most of it wasn’t terribly surprising.

Then I came to the folder that had the clippings about Mom’s death. I thought I’d had it in my desk upstairs but I guess Grandpa Cy must have taken it back at some point.

Under that was another manila folder with a carbon copy of an old typescript that at first glance looked like papers of incorporation. But I realized, aha, these were The Governor’s Club bylaws. I kept them where they were. That reminded me again about Dad.

“Paul, do you know what the arrangements are for getting Dad home today?”

“Your sister sent Riggs in the car to pick him up,” he said from somewhere above me.

I looked up to find him standing on a chair, dusting the top of the eagle’s head. “What are you doing? You don’t have to do that.”

“Housekeeping never does this thing,” he said, as if it bothered him. “You can see the dust in the carved grooves of the feathers.”

“Paul, seriously, don’t bother. Just leave Rachel a note about it.”

He climbed down looking chastised. He was the same age as me but somehow always seemed younger, maybe because he had a clean-shaven, boyish look to him, his hair cut short but with a little cowlick aided by gel at the front, and skinny jeans that showed his sometimes colorful socks. “Why did you keep it, anyway?”

“The eagle? I don’t know if you noticed but it’s bolted to a steel support column.”

He ducked around one curving wing to look. “So it is. That’s odd.”

“Maybe that makes it earthquake-safe?” The office was the only upstairs room where a steel beam was exposed. “Otherwise it could topple and kill someone.”

Paul made a non-committal noise at that.

“Hey, why are you here on a Saturday, anyway?”

“Because the locksmith was coming today?”

“Yes, but I could’ve handled that without you.”

“And your father,” he went on, coming over to help me sort through the folders I’d moved from the safe to the top of my desk. He took one to the other side of the desk and stood there, starting to page through. “I didn’t think you should be on your own today.”

“You are sweet, but you are an assistant, not a babysitter.”

“A personal assistant,” he said with a little emphasis as he turned over a page. “Ricki. You know this job has nothing like regular hours.”

“Maybe for Grandpa Cy it didn’t, but, you know, you could have weekends off if you wanted to see your family. Or a boyfriend.”

He clucked his tongue. “The last thing you need is to be worrying that some gossipy queen is in my pants trying to find out everything about the Hamilton clan.” Then his breath caught and I looked to see what he’d found.

The folder had photographs in it. Although it was upside down to me, I could see the top one was a black and white shot of the eagle statue, clearly taken in a bar or nightclub, with a naked man. His wrists were locked in the claws of the statue and there was something blurry crossing his figure. I came around to Paul’s side and from there I could see it was a man in black leather swinging a flogger. The blur was the flogger’s tails.

Paul looked over his shoulder at the statue. “Well. I never realized.”

“Realized what?”

“ ‘Eagle’ is historically a name given to gay leather bars,” he said. “I’ve never been in one but, you know. You hear stories.”

I picked up the folder and looked through the other photos there. Several of them were of Grandpa Cy with various people, posing like they were on vacation. In one or two he and the woman with him looked startled and annoyed. I recognized that expression: the “paparazzi got me” look. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the photos. None of them were my grandmother.

And not all of them were women. “Paul?”

“Yes?” He was standing by, very pointedly not craning his neck to look at the photos.

“Did my grandfather—how does the expression go—swing both ways?”

Paul waited a moment before giving his answer. “By the time he hired me, Ricki, he didn’t swing at all, you know.”

“Does that mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to speculate?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll speculate that your grandfather was enough of a sexual explorer that a little thing like his partner’s gender would probably not have stopped him from having a good time.”

I flipped back to the picture of the two gay men and the eagle. “Wait a second …” I showed him the picture. “Do you think that’s him?”

“That guy doesn’t look anything like him.”

“Not the one with the flogger. The guy being flogged.”

“Oh! You know, it’s really hard to tell from the back.” He shrugged. “And I’m not just saying that. Ricki, I have no idea who that is. But I do wonder if there are other historical photos of the statue. It looks like a public place. I wonder if it was at the New York Eagle or Chicago or what?”

He sat down at the computer to start an image search while I continued looking through the folder of photos, hoping to find another one from that same session, maybe one that showed the face of the man being flogged.

“Oh,” Paul said, and then I saw him quickly blank the screen and then turn toward me with his hands on his knees.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Should I move these items back into the safe now?”

“Paul, that was the worst job you could do of convincing me not to look at whatever you just saw. What was it, animal cruelty photos?”

“Um.” He looked a little crushed. “Just tabloid … stuff.”

My heart sank. More? I wondered if there were photos of Dad coming out of the rehab clinic or what. Well, I could look now or I could wait until later. Either way it would still be there.

I shooed him aside and brought the screen back to life.

And found myself staring at a full-color photo of Axel—his shoulder tattoo starkly obvious in his shirtless state—bending a woman back with one fist in her hair, one hand hitching her leg up on his hip so he could kiss her neck or collarbone. The headline blared: POP STARS AXEL HAWKE AND SUN-LEE CAUGHT IN THE ACT!

For half a second my breath caught and I wondered if they had made a sex tape or something crazy like that. But I could see the dateline and first sentence of the article: it was from a movie premiere in London. I turned away from the screen. “Sensationalist clickbait,” I said, but my voice was shaking a little. Hadn’t Sun-Lee been flirting with him at the Grammy after-party? I tried to remember. Was the photo from today, or was it from some earlier event?

Stop it, Ricki, just stop, I told myself. The news sites pick sensationalistic stuff on purpose. Maybe it has zero basis in reality.

“I’ll check it out,” Paul said, rolling back into place in the computer chair. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

He didn’t sound sure, though.

He was kissing her on the neck! I shook my head to clear it. It’s just a photo, I told myself. Photos can lie. It doesn’t prove anything.

But that was the thing. Photos could have a kind of truth of their own. That’s why the paparazzi existed.

I tried to put it out of my mind and go back to looking through the photos that my grandfather, or someone, had found worthy of locking away in a safe. I remained standing at the edge of my desk, flipping the photos over, one after the other, as if as soon as I got to the end of the collection, I would walk back over to the safe and put them back. There weren’t that many more. Most of them would have seemed completely innocent if you only saw one of them, but piled together like this, all these ones of my grandfather with different people, it made you wonder.

And then my breath caught. An artful photo, done with dramatic lighting from underneath, showed a woman in complicated ropes suspended from the eagle statue, some of the ropes leading through the eagle’s beak, some through the ring on its chest, and some around the claws. Ropes crisscrossed her torso and the thigh of her bent leg.

My mother. I could see more rope wound around her neck.

I wasn’t sure when I sat down. I had a vague memory of Paul helping me, but maybe I made that up later when I realized I was in the chair, the photo in my hand. I’d stared at it so long the image had started to burn into my eyes, so even when I closed them a purple and red negative swam behind my eyelids. Paul was nowhere to be seen. The safe was closed and everything else that we’d removed from it must have been back inside. The office door was closed.

My mother looked radiant in the photo. She wasn’t even naked: she was wearing what could have been a dark bathing suit or body suit, making the light-colored ropes crisscrossing it stand out. She had a wide smile on the face, her arms outstretched and palms up like a dancer or circus acrobat. She looked like she was flying.

There was a knock on the door. I went to open it, assuming it was Paul coming back, and found myself completely unprepared to see the basset-hound face of my father. I froze and so did he. It was too late for me to put on a chipper mask for myself, or even to hide the photograph I was carrying. The combination of seeing Axel and then my mother captured on film like that had been a one-two punch that left me reeling. I looked at the picture in my hand, then at him, a cresting wave of painful emotion filling my eyes with tears and making them sting.

“Oh, baby. I’m so sorry,” he said, which meant nothing really but it was enough to send that wave crashing down to drown me. I fell into his arms, rage-crying with helplessness.