The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (6 page)

Sharon had brought my five suitcases up to my room. I freaked out that she’d thrown all my clothes in the laundry, including the jeans with Albert Derrick Valentino’s email address in them, but the suitcases were still filled. I took the piece of paper out and stuck it in the jeans I was wearing.

I started to play Zenon, but it wasn’t as fun without other people in the next room, even if they’re not paying attention. It’s nice to know other people are near you at least while you’re playing games. It’s best when Walter’s in the room with you, but he had the rest of the day off in his bungalow and said he was going to grab a shit-ton of shut-eye, brother, we were all getting worked to the goddamn bone on this tour. Walter finished high school though he talks like he didn’t, but besides nonstrategy decisions, he’s probably one of our smartest staff.

A new stack of tabloids and glossies Jane wanted me to study was next to my bed, right near this photo on my bedside table of me and Jane when I was about seven or eight that a friend of hers took. It’s a nice photo, with her sitting on one end of the seesaw in the park near our apartment in St. Louis and me all the way up on the other end, but Jane doesn’t want it out in a hallway because she has an ugly perm and about ten pounds more chub.

You have to give the glossies enough access so they’re grateful but not too much or they think they can walk all over you with a character assassination. Jane’s savvy at adjusting the level. My picture was only in one of them. It was an onstage shot during the Houston show, and the
headline was J
ONNY
H
EATS
U
P
H
OUSTON
! with a capsule description of my tour. That show was one of my worst so far, actually, but the glossies never review your performance unless you bombed so bad it becomes a media story.

I took that issue and one of the tabloids into my bathroom and locked the door and turned on the fan for sound. There wasn’t any regular moisturizer, since my dermatologist doesn’t want me messing with lotions and maybe causing acne, but on the sink was a bottle of the SPF 50 sunscreen Jane makes me slather on. I sat on the toilet and turned in the tabloid to a photo spread headlined F
IT AND
O
VER
40!—T
HESE
O
LDER
S
TARS
S
TILL
L
OOK
L
IKE
S
TARLETS
! It was candids of a bunch of actresses in bathing suits and workout clothes. I got hard and rubbed with the lotion and touched myself to a photo of an actress with red hair doing yoga outside and bending over, and in one hand held the glossy picture of me onstage next to her. After about five minutes both arms got tired, so I packed the glossy in one of my suitcases. It wasn’t going to happen yet, but I could feel myself getting closer, sort of like what I think the inside of our teakettle is like just before it boils the water for Jane’s laxative tea. I bet within a year I’ll be able to do it, way before I’ve had ten thousand hours of practice.

I got in bed to take a nap, but I couldn’t fall asleep. First, I was looking at my stomach. A little chub folded up at the bottom even when I was lying on my back, and way more if I sat up. And when I bent my legs, right above my knees the skin pooched out. Maybe it was muscle, but even if it was, no one else would be able to tell.

The only way to find out if the fan-forum messages were really from my father or if someone just knew his full name would be to email him and see how he answered, which would mean setting up an email account different from the one I use for Nadine since Jane had access to it. I couldn’t do it from Jane’s computer, and there wasn’t any other way to get on the Internet in the house. If she found out, she’d make sure I never got another chance.

I closed my eyes, but I kept seeing his name in my head like it was on the screen:

Albert Derrick Valentino

And I imagined what he might look like, sort of like when the police try to figure out what a missing kid looks like years later. All I could come up with was a combination of me and Jane, like if me and her had a baby and he was born already in his forties.

Even though I was so tired, I knew I couldn’t fall asleep, so I took one over-the-counter sleeping pill from the bathroom and got drowsy, and I woke up a couple hours later. Sometimes you wake up, especially in a hotel or something, and for a second you’re not sure where you are, or which direction you’re facing in your bed. With me, sometimes it’s like I forget I live in L.A. and I think I’m still back at our apartment in St. Louis and that I’m in the small bed there and I expect the walls to be closer and my bed against the one window with my Cardinals team-picture poster over my head, and instead I open my eyes and the other wall is like twenty feet away and my huge bed is in the middle of the room and there are all these photos on the walls of me with other celebs.

I took the elevator downstairs and asked Sharon to make me a cup of coffee. She always makes the same joke: “Black, like your women, Mr. Jonny,” and I don’t take it with milk but I say, “Ebony
and
ivory, Sharon,” because everyone makes fun of that song, but Rog told me it was Paul McCartney’s longest number-one Billboard hit after “Hey Jude,” so the joke’s on them.

I asked how Gerald was doing. She hasn’t seen him in four years. They got engaged over Skype. She smiled super-wide and whispered, “I’ve saved enough that I think I can go back this summer.”

“For a vacation?”

“No, for good.”

“Like, to live there?”

“Yes. But don’t tell your mother yet, okay?”

“What about your job here?” I asked.

“I know.” She made this clucking sound. “I’ll miss you a lot.”

“Are you gonna work in someone else’s house there?”

“Maybe,” she said. “They have a lot of hotels I can work in, too. Right on the beach.”

I remembered a line from a crap romantic comedy I’d seen on pay-per-view in New Orleans, and said, “So, you’re gonna leave me for him? Just like that, after two years together?” except I did it with a smile to show I was joking, and then I fake-cried and improvised some new lines like, “You’re gonna leave me, I always knew it, you never loved me, I can’t believe you’re gonna leave me all alone.”

She knew I was messing around, but she got kind of serious with a gentle smile now and said, “You can always visit me, Mr. Jonny. Gerald’s got a couch you can stay on.”

I stopped fake-crying and said, “That’s okay, I can just stay at one of the hotels you’ll work at.”

Her smile went away a little and she said I could and my coffee was ready and she had to finish up some cleaning upstairs.

Jane was ending her exercise in our gym. She probably did a light routine on the elliptical, because our trainer wasn’t there today, and when she’s on her own she wimps out and does like fifteen minutes at low intensity, not enough for cardio benefits and way below what you need for serious fat burning.

She came in with a water bottle and in her sweaty workout clothes and told me our food was waiting for us in the living room. Our chef, Peter, was also off today, so Jane had ordered in salads. When we sat on the couch, she said, “There’ll be a lot of tempting junk food at the party tonight. What do we say to temptation?”

I said, “Temptation is for the weak,” and she gave me a high five and turned on the TV and we watched celeb news on E! and the networks while we ate. Jane flipped through the folder Stacy gave her. In the middle she said, “These idiots in creative are all the same. They’re only looking out for their own careers, not yours. Never forget that. No one else cares as much about your career as I do. If your sales tank, they can move on and get another client. I won’t get another son.”

She kept reading until one of the shows said that Tyler Beats was announcing his Asian tour for next fall. Her head popped up from the folder when the woman said the words
Tyler Beats
. “That’s what we have to do next,” Jane said. “The real money is in Asia.”

“I thought that’s why we’re doing the Internet live-stream concert, to grab Asian viewers,” I said.

“Yes, so we can get enough of a critical mass there to justify a tour. Once you do that, you’re set. They have stronger brand loyalty.”

A car commercial came on, and Jane’s eyes stayed on the screen, but I could tell her mind was somewhere else. She said, “You have more natural talent than Tyler Beats. But he works harder than anyone else.”

“I work hard, too.” Jane doesn’t watch most of my sessions with Rog, when I sing myself hoarse or dance till I get blisters or analyze songs for hours.

“Not like Tyler,” she said. “The top person is never simply the most talented, or the smartest, or the best looking. They sacrifice anything in their lives that might hold them back.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant anything in particular, and if I brought up Zenon as an example, she might say, Yeah, you have to cut that out. So I shut up while we finished the show and our salads. Jane said she was showering and the car service was picking us up in an hour to take us to the party. I asked why we had to take the car service, since they always make us wait when we want to leave, and she said, “You know I hate driving at night.” It’s true that Jane’s a safe driver and she doesn’t like driving at night and I wasn’t even allowed in the front seat until this year, but I knew it was so she could drink, and she never drives with me in the car when she’s had any alcohol.

“Can Walter come and drive us?”

“It sends the wrong message.” She sighed like she was tired of talking about it and tired in general. I moved behind the couch and gave her a neck rub. She closed her eyes and made a few
mmm
sounds, and after a minute said, “You’re the best at that, baby,” and stood and kissed the top of my head and ran her hands through my hair. “I’m so happy when we get to hang out like this, just you and me. I miss this on tour, when we’re running around in a million directions with a million people around us.”

“Maybe we could find time to do it more on tour,” I said as she
walked away. We hung out together a lot more on our first national tour. Jane’s been busier this one.

She paused, but her pauses are like pausing the game in Zenon, where the music keeps playing. Jane’s never not thinking. “Sure, that’d be nice,” she said and smiled at me. She left to shower and I watched TV on the couch but I really thought about Tyler. Like, did he work twice as hard as me, and is that what it took to get where he was, and would I want to do that? What if it meant sleeping two less hours a night and not playing Zenon but only practicing and extending my tours and reducing gaps between shows and never eating anything bad for me?

And though I wouldn’t say it to Jane, in my mind I was like, No, don’t make me. I don’t even know how I could do that. I’m already working the hardest I can without departing the realm.

Jane always takes a year getting ready. I knocked on her door and told her the car service was waiting outside, and she opened it and said, “They get paid for their time.” She was in her lingerie and had two dresses on her bed, a red one and a blue one, and asked me which I liked more, and I said the blue one, so she put it on and asked me to zip her up. “Do you think my stomach’s getting fat?” she asked.

It
was
a little fatter than pretour, with some wobbly jelly chub over her gut. We went through a women’s glossy a few months ago that ID’d problem zones. I didn’t say anything, but Jane’s were Belly Bulge, Bat Wings, and Muffin Top. She didn’t have Turkey Neck, Armpit Fat, Thighscrapers, Cankles, or Back Fat. She thought she had Mom Butt, but she doesn’t.

I went, “No, not at all.”

In the ride over she told me who she thought was going to be at the party. I didn’t know their names, but I knew who they worked for, and most of them were at top-shelf movie and TV companies and agencies. For a second I wondered if maybe my father had been waiting for me to return to L.A. and he might show up, but that was stupid for a million reasons.

Jane hadn’t stopped talking. “We still have to find the right vehicle for you,” she said.

“How about a Ferrari?” I said.

She smiled and pinched my cheek and said, “Maybe you
could
do comedy.” That kind of joke was like my Victor joke to Nadine, though. You smile, but you don’t laugh. Like a song you hum along with but don’t tap your feet to.

The party was in Calabasas, and we got lucky with traffic, so it took about forty-five minutes. The house was behind a security gate like ours, and when Jane had trouble with the guard and her name on the guest list, she pressed down the window all the way, and he let us in.

We drove around the half-circle driveway past all the parked cars of the guests and up to a typical Calabasas mansion, with stone columns in the front and a huge set of double doors like a castle, and the house was white and light pink the way Jane likes her salmon cooked. There were torches along the walkway to the door and balloons and banners saying
HAPPY 12TH BIRTHDAY MATTHEW
! Jane checked her makeup once more in her compact mirror and knocked.

A woman with the kind of long skinny arms Jane is always trying to get—she calls them
flamingo arms
even though they’re really like flamingo legs—and who didn’t spray-tan and had straightened black hair that was a definite dye job answered it with a glass of wine in her hand. She smiled at Jane and said, “Hello!” and then saw me and her smile became real. “Hi, welcome! I’m Matthew’s mother, Linda.”

People who know better never say my name when they first meet me, but they try not to act like they
don’t
know me, either. It’s the fans who slobber all over you, and sometimes other celebs pretend they don’t recognize you. It’s always the male movie stars or rock stars who act like they’re too cool, but I can tell when they’re faking it and are secretly excited to meet me, since they’re pretending not to be impressed. When someone actually doesn’t care, like politicians who meet me for photo ops and don’t hardly know who I am, they have to pretend to
be
impressed. That’s how you know who’s more famous, whichever one of you is more excited to meet the other. It helps that I don’t really know a lot of older actors, but they all know me, besides the ones who are
seriously
old and culturally irrelevant. Jane says most male movie stars have career peaks from about twenty-five
to forty-five, but a male pop star can start earlier and also probably ends quicker unless he’s really savvy. Women’s careers in both are over by the time they’re thirty, which is why they all suddenly get interested in having kids then. Once you have a kid, you’re basically saying, Fuck you, career, except if you’re the type of parent who doesn’t really care about his kid anyway.