The House On Willow Street (14 page)

What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.

The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.

Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.

The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.

“You’re lucky to be getting this much,” Melissa had said with customary frankness. “I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the best-selling ‘I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side,’ they’ll make their money back and then some.”

“I’ll never write
that
story,” said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.

“
Never
won’t pay the bills, honey,” Melissa pointed out. “Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.”

Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.

It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring—just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: “
I’m dating Jethro’s ex.
”

Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last
night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.

It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: “We need a little vacation, babe.”

He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr. Chan’s takeout menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.

Neither of them had money for a “little vacation.” Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: “Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,” he liked to say.

He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.

Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a “civilian” job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.

Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety percent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.

A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.

Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.

She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.

Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping overenthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.

“I don’t think you liked the show,” he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.

“I loved it,” said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.

“Honey,” she told Mick now, “New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.”

He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.

“Okay,” he said. “You want boiled or fried rice?”

Manhattan had once been Suki’s favorite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that
anything
was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there—in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.

She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when
Women and Their Wars
was on the best-seller lists, and
while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.

Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from the airplane window, she knew that another love affair was over. New York had moved on without her. Younger people with clear, unbroken hearts now stalked the glittering city. Strangely, this made her feel older than any line on her face did.

Her appointment with the publisher was at two and she was meeting her agent, Melissa, for lunch beforehand.

“I’ll order something for us in my office, Suki. I’ve got a West Coast conference call at twelve. We won’t have time to go out,” Melissa informed her when it was all being set up.

Suki knew what that meant: the Suki Richardson account made so little money, taking her out to lunch was no longer financially viable.

The old Suki would have raged about being treated badly.

The new Suki said “fine.”

She had a long way to go to become the goliath she’d once been, if she could ever get back there.

When the adrenaline was flowing, Suki felt a match for anybody: when she’d been on television all the time, when boys in Avalon had lusted after her, when she was Kyle Richardson’s wife, when she was with Jethro . . . But for herself,
in
herself, she didn’t know the last time she’d felt truly confident. That scared her like nothing else. If she could no longer fight, what would become of her?

The offices of Carr and Lowenstein had once occupied half of a suitably grand brownstone, but when they’d joined forces with a theatrical agency, they’d all moved into a glass tower. Suki spent the time in the elevator on the way to the forty-fifth floor fighting vertigo, a feeling which worsened when she stepped into the sheeny lobby, which was all reflective surfaces, to emphasize how high up they were. The reception had just-big-enough olive trees in planters in every corner and the silvery-green walls were massed with photos of the agency’s most famous and highest-earning clients.

In the Jethro days, he told her the record company people put photos of TradeWind on every wall of their office and played their latest album whenever they visited.

“Flipped the switch to play another band as soon as we left, man!” pointed out Stas, the band’s lead guitarist.

“Sure did,” agreed Jethro, unconcerned. “That’s business, nothing personal.”

Suki saw no photos of herself on the walls of Carr and Lowenstein. Not even an itty-bitty one. And it did feel personal.

The receptionist, a
Cosmo
-girl vision dressed in nude shades with Lincoln Park After Dark nails, didn’t bother to feign a polite smile as she took Suki’s name and told her to wait. The receptionist knew everything. Who was on the up, who was on the way down.

No picture on the wall and no smiles from
Cosmo
-girl. It all told a story.

Suki sat on a couch and felt the panic rise. Her career was over. She was broke. There was nowhere left to go and the most dangerous man in the dirty biography business wanted to write about her and the Richardson family. Suki didn’t want all the mistakes she’d made in her life turned
into trash-biography horror. It would destroy any credibility she’d got left.

The terror which had been building since Eric Gold first told her that Redmond Suarez wanted to write the book exploded fully into Suki’s body.

“Which way is the women’s room?” she asked
Cosmo
-girl.

“Straight down the hall and second left,” said the girl with barely a flicker in Suki’s direction.

Tess would have introduced herself and made the girl smile, Suki thought. Tess was beautiful and yet she’d had that gift of being able to stop other women from hating her. Suki had never mastered it. Men loved her, women were wary of her.

Why was she thinking about Tess so much? It had to be all the worry over the book and how it all linked up. The past, Avalon, all the things she’d tried to forget, all the secrets.

In the women’s room, she locked herself in a stall, put down the toilet seat lid and sat. A Xanax for nerves, some Tylenol for the headache that was rumbling at the base of her skull and one of her prescription antacids to quell the bile that seemed to rise so easily these days. She washed it all down with her bottle of water. That all these ailments were stress-related didn’t pass her by, but Suki knew there was no easy fix when it came to stress. She was broke, so that stress wasn’t going away anytime soon. And the book . . .

The women’s room door slammed and Suki got up, flushed the loo loudly to imply she wasn’t in there doing cocaine—which she would have been, back in the day—and came out.

She slicked on some lip gloss and walked back up the hall as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
Act as if
, she thought.

Melissa Lowenstein was a tall, striking woman who favored tailored pantsuits worn with a single large piece of costume jewelry. Today’s was a striking orange Perspex brooch on one lapel.

“Suki, great to see you,” she said, shaking hands.

Melissa didn’t go in for continental air kissing. “Gives some men the wrong idea,” she’d told Suki once. “Kissing can make them think it’s fine to put a hand on your butt. Kissing blurs all the rules. So I keep it simple. No kissing anyone, no touching—and no messing if they overstep that line.”