Chapter Six
Elizabeth sat in the library next day, surrounded by Zander’s photo albums and anxiously watching the clock. He breezed in twenty minutes late with a smile so rueful and sweet that she heard herself saying weakly, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll add time onto the end.”
“I can’t be late for the children’s hospital.”
“Oh, of course not, but I have concerns about your schedule.” She picked it up as she spoke, looking for the children’s hospital.
Frowning, he plucked it out of her hands. “This week’s a bitch isn’t it? It’s always this way between tour legs. Next week we’ll do better.”
“Before nine a.m. is always free. We could interview over breakfast.”
“Doc, I’m not a morning person.” Zander stuffed the schedule in his jeans pocket. “This is outdated already, I’ll ask Dimity to print you out another.”
“So about more sess—”
“Shall we start?” he interrupted. “I’d hate to waste any more of our precious time together.” Joining her at the desk, he opened a photo album and looked at her expectantly.
Elizabeth wavered. She could spend the next thirty-eight minutes lobbying for more time or… “Yes, let’s start.”
They worked through the first album. As she’d hoped, it proved a prompt for reminiscences.
Zander had described his childhood as happy and the family photos testified to that. The Freedmans were a striking family, his dad a loose-limbed, fair Texan—here, at the grill; here, balancing the boys on a mean-looking Harley. Zander’s mother appeared less often—probably the family photographer—a slender, dark-haired woman clearly in love with all her boys. Even as an infant, Zander had a lovable rogue grin.
In her normal working environment, Elizabeth stood behind a lectern or sat alone with her files and the only heat was radiated by her overworked laptop. Side by side with Zander she became conscious of a different heat every time his forearm brushed hers as he reached past her to turn pages. His rich voice at her ear sent a prickle of awareness down her spine.
Elizabeth edged her chair away. Maybe his charisma was simply a by-product of his biochemistry, like an electric eel’s? “Where did your musicality come from?” Damn him, he even smelled delicious.
“Dad played guitar, but he couldn’t sing. I think Mom encouraged my singing to drown him out.”
She’d already noticed his tone warmed whenever he spoke of her. “You’re close to your mother.”
“Oh yeah. I make a point of visiting her at least once a year.” A discordant note made her glance sideways. Zander produced a dazzling grin. “Did you have to be good as a preacher’s daughter?”
Again, the term made Elizabeth smile. “My parents were easy going but you’re definitely under closer public scrutiny than other kids.” An understatement; her childhood was a fishbowl. “Either you rebel,” she thought of her sister Marti, “or you try harder to behave.”
“Wild guess. You were good.”
“I was the oldest and I could see my parents had their hands full, ministering to a large parish and raising four kids. I used to pride myself on being the quiet moment in their day. Dad would say, ‘Praise God, we don’t have to worry about you, Elizabeth.’”
“How awful,” he said bluntly. “Receiving kudos for being invisible.”
“What…no!” Startled, she looked at him and fell into the blue. Edged her chair away again. “It wasn’t like that. And there was a kind of self-importance in being good.” She returned her attention to the album and reflected a moment. “The downside was that I had nowhere near as much fun as my siblings did.”
“Have you ever cut loose?” he asked curiously.
“I came into my own when I spent twelve months in the States on a Fulbright scholarship.”
“Went wild did you?”
“Crazy wild.”
“One-night stands?”
“My torrid affairs last longer than that,” she said serenely and flashed him a stern look. “But we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”
He leaned back, hands behind his head. “We’re bonding. Tell me more about your sex life.”
Trying to ignore his impressive biceps, Elizabeth turned another page in the album. “I notice you change the subject when our conversation gets interesting.”
“I could say the same of you.”
She gestured to a photo of him with Devin. “What does your brother make of the new band?”
Zander dug his silver hip flask out of the breast pocket of his denim shirt and took a sip. “Dev would have preferred Rage to die a dignified death. However, he also accepts that dignified isn’t my style. And it goes against the ethos of the band.”
“‘Rage against the dying of the light.’” She’d read that somewhere in her research. A thought occurred to her. “Dylan Thomas wrote the poem for his dying father. Was your choice of band name connected to your own father’s early death?”
“Yeah. Dad was given six months and fought for two-and-a-half years.”
She waited for more, but he pushed the album aside and picked up a different one. “The girl next door was my first love.” He pointed to a pigtailed seven-year-old, smiling bashfully at the camera in a vain attempt to hide her missing front teeth. “Chrissy was the first friend I made in the States. When medical bills forced my parents to sell up and move to a rental we stayed close, even though she wasn’t impressed by the crowd I started running with. She’s probably the only girlfriend I’ve had I can categorically say was in the relationship for me, not my fame or money.”
“How awful,” she sympathized.
“Horrendous,” he agreed. “All those beautiful women using me while I’m just wanting to get to know them as people.”
“I stand corrected, you’re using each other. Do they know that?”
He nodded. “Before we date I say, ‘Darlin, I’m a selfish son of a bitch with a short attention span, but if you’d enjoy a ride on the roller coaster that’s my life, climb aboard. And you can always ease the heartache by selling the story afterward.’ Which reminds me, what are we leaking first? I’m thinking how I lost my virginity.”
Elizabeth said carefully, “I thought we weren’t pandering to prurience in the memoir.”
“Of course not,” he said shocked. “I’m relying on you to edit it into something meaningful.”
Even exasperated, she had to suppress a laugh. “Was the experience meaningful?”
“Not in the slightest,” he said cheerfully, stretching in the chair like a sleek cat. “It was a drunken fumble in a Dairy Queen freezer with an older woman. We both wore our staff caps and uniforms and our aprons kept getting in the way. I’d been trying to save myself for Chrissy, but Tammy had sneaked beer into work and we’d got high—another milestone. I was a day off fourteen and Tammy was seventeen. I was guilt-stricken when I sobered up.”
“Are you making that up?”
He considered. “The regret might be slightly exaggerated.”
Now she did laugh. “I mean a seventeen-year-old being interested in a fourteen-year-old!”
“A small cocky kid with charm wins over an inconsiderate high school jock any day. And don’t be reading euphemisms into small—even if we were in a freezer.”
She could well believe it. He’d been seducing women one way or another since the cradle. “What happened with Chrissy?”
“Next morning I biked to her house to beg forgiveness and then added insult to injury by throwing up over her Dad’s Porsche parked in the driveway. She dumped me.”
“That must have been painful.”
His eyes were guilelessly clear. “To this day, I can’t stand Porsches.”
Elizabeth stood to pour herself a glass of water from a pitcher on the desk. “Your delivery’s so deadpan it’s easy to see why you sometimes garner bad press,” she commented.
Zander shrugged. “Most people are smart enough to understand irony. The rest want to be offended by me, so I oblige.”
She sipped the water, tart from the lemon slices in the pitcher, and looked down at him thoughtfully. “Humor is a shield of sorts?”
“A deflector, like Wonder Woman’s wristbands. Are biographers supposed to sound like shrinks?”
“No idea; my subjects are usually dead, remember? Have you ever seen a therapist?”
“For eighteen years. Dr. Goose, first name Grey.”
She paused mid-sip. “That’s a vodka brand.”
“There’s no fooling you, Doc.” Zander’s watch beeped and he stood. “Gotta go.” As he strolled toward the door, he said casually over one broad shoulder, “Ditch that stuff about Chrissy, no one cares if I had my heart broken.”
“And did you?”
He hesitated. “She was the last link to my old life and I completely fucked it up. But we’re doing phoenix rising stuff, remember?”
After he’d left she glanced down at the desk to the two albums still open. In one shot, Zander was an angelic choirboy, in the other a young arrogant rocker with a “screw you” grin. What had happened in between?
* * *
“If you want to avoid aggravation, stay off the online gossip sites today,” Philippa said a couple days later when Elizabeth walked into the kitchen mid-morning, looking for a snack.
In a slashed black T-shirt over a red lacy bra, her short hair spiked in inky exclamation marks, the housekeeper was contemplating the sprawl of cut flowers and foliage strewn on one of three marble-topped islands.
“You’ve been papped and we’re not talking about the test done by your friendly gynecologist.” Choosing three blue hyacinth stems, she speared them into floral foam at the base of a tall crystal vase.
“Photographed? But I haven’t been anywhere with Zander.” And wasn’t that a sore point. There always seemed to be an excuse why she couldn’t ride along. He was spending the car journey making confidential phone calls; he was taking the opportunity to recalibrate his chakras. “Why don’t you concentrate on the throat chakra today,” she’d suggested this morning as he’d left for yet another appointment more critical than theirs.
He’d turned with an arrested expression. “Excuse me?”
“Throat chakra, responsible for communication and self-expression. Essential for people being interviewed.”
“But you have been out,” Philippa said now. She circled the hyacinths with shorter stemmed green orchids and studied the effect. “Shopping for a bathing suit.”
“Yesterday in the village square.” Elizabeth picked up a perfect white rose and sniffed, but it had no fragrance. “Are you saying someone photographed me thumbing through a rack of swimsuits?”
“What you have to understand is that you’re a new act in Zander’s circus.”
“A pretty dull act. ‘See the biographer shop.’” Discarding the rose, Elizabeth chose a red apple from the fruit bowl.
“Which is why these scum make up their own captions.” The housekeeper selected delicate sprays of baby’s breath and started filling gaps in the arrangement.
“What could they say—that I’m a beanstalk, carrot-topped nerd? I heard it all in first grade.” Elizabeth glanced at her watch and saw 10:56 with a prickle of anxiety. Zander said he’d return by eleven at the latest. Said he’d be all hers then. Pinning him down was like trying to pin water.
Dimity poked her head around the door. “There you are,” she said to Elizabeth, then noticed the apple in her hand. “If you’re comfort eating you must have already seen this?” She waved the entertainment section of the LA Times.
“If you think fruit is comfort food,” Elizabeth retorted, “then you really need to review your diet.”
“She hasn’t seen it yet,” Philippa warned, “and I don’t think she should.”
“I disagree.” Dimity tapped the newspaper against one honed thigh. “Any young…ish woman working closely with Zander needs to develop a thick skin. And this is nothing compared to what they printed about me when I became his PA.”
“What did they print about you?” Elizabeth welcomed the distraction. It was 10:58.
Philippa answered. “They took a close-up of her slightly rounded stomach and suggested she was three months pregnant to Zander. Come to think of it, Dimity, you have dropped a couple of dress sizes since then.”
“It’s the stress of the job,” the PA said defensively. “But maybe Philippa’s right. You don’t need to read this.”
“I have no intention of reading it.” Elizabeth presented her with the apple. “So all those articles I discovered saying you and Zander’s ex were engaged in daily catfights for his affections…?”
“Lies.” Dimity polished the Red Delicious on her white jeans. “Stormy wouldn’t have lasted a day if I’d wanted Zee.”
“They didn’t get on,” Philippa murmured.
“She was a doormat.” Dimity bit into the fruit with strong white teeth. “At Zander’s beck and call twenty-four seven. I’d never let myself be taken for granted like that.”
“So you do take days off,” Elizabeth said. “I’d started to wonder.”
Philippa coughed.
Realizing her faux pas, Elizabeth chose another Red Delicious from the fruit bowl.
“My point is,” Dimity said between chews, “tabloid gossip passes through the colon very quickly. Within twenty-four hours, the photo will disappear from the homepage of all the celebrity spy sites.”
About to take a bite, Elizabeth paused. “Homepages?… No, don’t tell me. I don’t care. When Zander arrives, tell him I’m waiting in the conservatory.”
“You can resist a peek that easy?” Dimity raised a brow.
“Why give it energy? And no one I know is likely to see it.”
“Good attitude.” Philippa applauded.
“I’m looking at the big picture,” Elizabeth replied. “Tapping into my third eye.”
The two women looked at her blankly. Chakras were clearly not discussed in this house. “I have got to stop giving that man the benefit of the doubt,” she muttered as she headed to the garden room. Now it was 11:10. She texted Zander a reminder.
After the library, the conservatory was her favorite room. Mullioned windows soared two stories to curve in a half dome against the house. Potted palms, topiaries and ferns enhanced the effect of a stylized glasshouse while the space was made comfortable with rattan furniture and floral cushions. A rug softened the slab stone floor. Sitting in a fan-backed wicker chair with her laptop, Elizabeth could look out to the jacarandas casting a lacy border of shade around the lawn.
Munching her apple, she returned to transcribing yesterday’s interview.
“You can’t prepare for going from a nobody one day to a somebody overnight.” The huskiness in Zander’s voice always sent a shiver down her spine when she first heard it. “All the doors open, all the ladies willing, meeting your music heroes. It was great to be special again.”
“Again? When had you stopped being special?”
The interesting thing about replaying their recordings was picking up the telling pauses she’d missed first time round. Elizabeth scrawled in her notepad: Dad’s illness pivotal?
“I mean the center of attention again,” Zander finally replied. “I’d backed myself and won. I’d always had self-belief, but approval to a twenty-year-old male is like a fright to a puffer fish. My ego inflated to ridiculous levels.”
“Some say it never came down.”
“It’s healthy, I grant you.”
Her cell chimed a text and she paused the recorder, hoping for a message from Zander. But it was her sister Marti.
Ignore it. I’m telling everyone here to.
She’d become so engrossed in the material it took Elizabeth a moment to remember what it was.
I am ignoring it she responded, amused that her highbrow sister had been trawling gossip sites. Making a mental note to tease Marti later, she restarted the recorder.
“In your wildest dreams did you ever imagine being this successful?”
“None of this was luck. I set out to conquer the world and I did.”
“What drives you now?”
“Conquering it again.”
“Gotcha,” she muttered, making a note. Here was the essence of her subject. Marauder. Viking.
On tape, Zander was still speaking. “Musicians are the Marie Antoinette of the digital revolution. Our songs are pirated the moment they’re released. Bands used to earn their living through album sales, now we rely on touring and merchandise… Listen, we’ll have to pick this up later. I have a meet with Jared.” Rage’s bass player.
“But we have a second hour scheduled.”
“He’s tied up after today and we need to finalize some tour stuff before—”
Elizabeth stopped the recorder before she heard herself begging. No, that was untrue, she had voiced her concerns with unruffled professionalism.
Picking up the apple core she opened a window and hurled it across the lawn.
At which point Zander had assured her earnestly that he shared her worry they were falling behind. But he could see the light at the end of the tunnel if she could be patient a little longer. Their work together topped his priority list; he was totally committed to the project.
So charming, so sincerely apologetic that she ended up feeling like a bitch for laying another burden on his overloaded shoulders.
Something about her sister’s text niggled at her. Elizabeth sent a follow-up message. What do you mean, everyone?
As she waited for a response, she wrote Brother & drugs in her notebook and frowned at her watch. One o’clock.
Her cell chimed, once. Twice.
Saw it on TV news ten minutes ago, replied Marti.
Find someone 2 sue! From her NY agent.
Over the next half hour, incoming texts arrived in a steady stream.
Shame on them!!!
We think you’re perfect as you are.
Do you fancy him?
Haven’t seen it and not going to look she mass-texted in reply and received a second deluge.
No. Don’t!
Good for you :)
Very wise!
Forty-five minutes after assuring Dimity of her willpower, Elizabeth looked.
The photo was grainy, taken through the storefront window. The boutique owner had been a helpful hoverer, quick with a suggestion or second opinion and hauling Elizabeth to the wall-length mirror outside the tiny cubicles for a better view. Somehow she’d been talked into trying on a leopard skin tankini with a plunging halter saved from indecency by a bronze ring holding the two lycra triangles together.
In the photograph, she was frowning over her shoulder into the mirror and pulling the fabric down to cover her butt cheeks.
It wasn’t a bad shot—simply a winter-pale thirty-five-year-old sharing a private moment of insecurity with anyone on the Internet.
Rocker Zander Freedman’s latest biographer, Elizabeth Winston, wonders if her “bum looks big in this” while trying on swimsuits. Is she hoping to catch the eye of her new boss? If so, the redheaded academic needs to do more research. Rage’s frontman dates blond double Ds, not under-endowed PhDs.
She was surprised how much it hurt.