Read an Excerpt
In her bedroom there is an eight-by-ten photo in an antique silver frame. In it she is sitting on the front porch of her house, her long legs touching at the knees, her feet angled in, toes together. She is barefoot. She is wearing a blue summer sundress and her shoulders are tanned and naked. Her long hair is ringed around her head, lit up in the sunshine. A halo. She is looking directly towards the camera, holding her head in slender hands, her bony elbows resting on white knees. Awkward and thin, but with a type of gangly beauty that radiates. The stairs below her are dirty white, in need of a coat of paint, chipped and weathered. There are two huge, ornate pillars holding up the front porch roof. She is sitting smack dab in the middle, precisely between both pillars. She is laughing, her mouth open wide, her lips stretched tight across white, straight teeth. She is seventeen years old.
CHAPTER ONE
He has spent the last seven years looking for the big scoop.
Seven years of sitting by his phone waiting for it to ring, biding time, writing articles for Entertainment Magazine, meeting with has-been movie stars in cheap hotels and trying to make it sound complicated. Seven years. Nothing interesting, nothing hot, nothing so different it would knock his socks off. Just the same old. Just lame movies and silly TV sitcoms, porn queens and rock stars, who’s dating who, who’s leaving who, who’s on drugs and who isn’t, whose breasts are real.
When Bruce quit his job at Realty Plus, quit selling houses and condos and country retreats and the occasional mansion to the stars, when he quit to pursue journalism, hoping tohave more time for himself, more money, more independence, more of everything life had to offer, he couldn’t have known how godawful boring the job would be. He thought by now he would be somewhat famous. He thought that he, Bruce Dermott, would be sitting in a sunken hot tub in the living room of his own mansion, sipping cognac and smoking cigars. He’d be looking at the plaques lining his walls, awards for his fine writing style, his honed investigative ability. That’s all he wanted, really, a little appreciation for his hard work. Some money. Some fame. He wanted to be noticed on the street, maybe, questioned on CNN, an expert journalist, because, although every day he’s getting older, he certainly still has the hair for publicity.
Instead, it’s been seven years of quietly typing. Seven years in his two-storey townhouse, sitting at his desk in his small office next to the kitchen which connects to the dining room which meets with his bathroom – no hot tub, no sunken living room – often dreaming of the thrill of closing a housing deal, the thrill of showing a young couple around a mid-sized condo. He dreams of the pleasure he used to get taking his shoes off at the front door and wading through plush carpet around a skylit, balconied, many-windowed mansion. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he showed clients a movie star’s house – Freddie Valentine’s ranch, Susanna Hurster’s condo. He dreams of sitting on a treed terrace while prospective buyers roam the house, flushing toilets, looking in closets, measuring space. But Bruce made a choice and he has to stick with it. The wrong choice, maybe. He didn’t realize the drain, the loneliness, the sheer pain of sitting on his ass for days on end waiting for his editor to call, waiting for the next story to unfold around him. He didn’t believe the other journalists when they told him how crappy the money was and he didn’t realize how much the support payments to his kids would damage his bank account. He’s never met anyone who knows his byline and he’s certainly never seen anyone reading his articles. The occasional person holding an Entertainment Magazine is always scanning the pictures, never reading the words. Lined up at the grocery store, staring at the front page. And, although Bruce’s choice seemed obvious seven years ago, seemed to be the right thing to do to put his life back on track, now he’s pretty sure he should have stayed where he was. Toed the line. Settled in comfortably. But Realty Plus isn’t taking anyone back – he checked last week, walking in off the street, pretending he was just coming in to say hello – and now he has another deadline to meet. He has an interview to write about the teen pop-group sensation, Trash.
What Bruce wants to know is how these underage, blond boys could rise up to be so famous with only one CD out, only one dance song, only one hip-gyrating video. How he can work half his life away and get nowhere and some blond boys can lip-synch a song they didn’t even write and make millions. Bruce often wonders why anything is worth the time and effort any more. He often wonders why life is worth living. It’s not as if he’s ever thought of doing himself in, he wouldn’t even know where to begin, but he does sometimes notice when he steps on the ants littering his sidewalk and he equates them with his measly existence. One small bug, what difference does it make? When he had the children living with him he felt there was a reason for being, he was a father, a husband, but now there is no one and the kids are probably better off without him.
Bruce swallows a large, flat gulp of cream soda, warm now, which has been sitting by his computer for over two hours. He looks at the empty screen, the flashing cursor. He looks at the blank phone. Bruce pulls up the file with the transcript of the interview he did and he scans the lines searching for anything that is intelligible, anything interesting.
