10
BIRDIE
Birdie tried topretend that Elliot was just another journalist, that this was just another profile. She’d spoken to hundreds of writers over the past decade and knew where to draw the line between revealing too little and revealing just enough, knew how to drop enticing morsels that made for incredible pull quotes but didn’t give too much away about any sort of personal particulars. She knew which reporters she could trust with near honesty and which ones would do anything for a headline.
With Elliot, though, all of Birdie’s normal instincts were muddled. How could she see him clearly when she’d spent her teenage years viewing him through a lust-tinted haze, and she’d spent the back half of her twenties mortified that she’d been yet another one-night stand to add to his ledger? So while he wanted to know everything about Ian, Birdie reminded herself to proceed with caution. Elliot O’Brien could extract bone marrow from her if she wasn’t careful. As it was, Imani was already going to have a nuclear breakdown when she caught wind of Birdie’s plan, so sheneeded to manage Elliot cautiously, needed to give him only enough to capture her brilliantly.
“I met Ian pretty much as soon as I got to New York,” she said now. The radio in the RV was playing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and she wondered if Elliot remembered the time in the carpool when she and Mona would trade off verses. How Mona sang off-key but Birdie could hit all the high notes in nearly a full belt, and Elliot would dissolve into literal tears at how discordant the two of them sounded together. Birdie almost took it as a challenge: to see how hard she could make Elliot laugh, to see if he’d have to pull over on the side of the road to get a grip so they didn’t careen into a telephone pole. Mona was better at the lyrics than she was, so Mona sang the wrong notes and Birdie sang the wrong words, and honestly, the whole thing was a messy delight.
Elliot reached over to the radio and turned the volume down. If he remembered anything, he didn’t betray it, and maybe that was just as well, Birdie thought, since she had just vowed to keep this entirely professional.
“So you were eighteen. I remember when you left. In that maroon Volvo wagon without a functional tailpipe,” he said.
Birdie was surprised that he remembered. That she’d agreed to drive one of her dad’s friend’s cars across the country for four hundred bucks, which got her to New York and helped with rent. Elliot and Mona had stood on the corner waving and cheering as she pulled away, like they were certain that she was going to be a wild success even before Birdie was.
“He was the sous chef at my first job,” she said. “Waitressing. I wasn’t particularly good at it, as you may imagine.”
Elliot looked over from the driver’s side, lingering too long, and the RV wandered into the middle lane before he pulled itback. “I’d think you could be good at anything you really wanted to do,” he said, and Birdie felt her insides lurch. At his sincerity, at his flattery. Goddammit, she was such a sucker for a handsome man who paid her compliments. She unwillingly thought of Kai, and how she took him back so many times, too many times, because he knew exactly how to woo her.
But Ian; Ian had always been exactly who she thought him to be, exactly who he told her he was. She watched the farmlands whoosh past and wondered why she’d lost track of that, how she lost track of it. Maybe Ian sending her a plea for a second chance was just what she needed: a final cleanse to cast off the residue of Kai, whom she hadn’t spoken to in several years but spent too much time thinking about now that his brother was looming large over both her mental health and the headlines. Maybe if she hadn’t been so cavalier with Ian’s devotion, she never would have entangled herself with Kai when they met on set when she was twenty-five: he already a superstar, she the hot new up-and-comer. Maybe she wouldn’t have bumped into Elliot at that premiere party at twenty-seven and taken him home with her, a secret she’d keep from Mona until she died and a mistake that shattered her enough to send her running right back to Kai. Birdie had never thought of herself as a woman who needed a man; that’s who she played on-screen, not who she was in actuality. But the more she filtered through the patterns of her poor choices—how often she’d let Kai back into her life because he pressed her weak spots, how many years she’d pined for Elliot thinking somehow she’d be different for him, not just another warm, naked body added to his well-documented history—the more she considered that she was closer to those parts she played than she realized.
Ian had been a beast in the kitchen when she met him. She’d wandered into Lucky’s, a midtown hot spot catering to executivetypes and with a menu full of ingredients Birdie had never heard of, six days after she landed in New York. She needed a job and had made the mistake of being honest on all her other waitressing applications:no, she had no experience, butyes, she was a hard and eager worker. But in New York City, where customers demanded speed and accuracy in their orders, experience was required. Birdie hadn’t imagined that she couldn’t find gainful employment. She had about a thousand dollars in her bank account, money accrued from graduation, an occasional check from her mother, who now lived north outside Seattle, her Sbarro gig, and the four hundred dollars from driving the Volvo. When she saw the “Help Wanted” sign in the window of Lucky’s, she started with her first lie. It was easier after that, to figure out what people wanted to hear and tell them. She knew she wasn’t all that book smart compared to Andie or Mona or Elliot. But street smart? Birdie liked to think that there was no one wiser.
So she told the manager she’d worked at a pizza place in Central California. Was that even a lie? Not really, she didn’t think.
Ian was working the lunch shift. He interrupted her job interview without an apology, cutting her off mid-sentence to tell the manager that if he didn’t fire the other sous chef, he was quitting. He said it exactly like that, matter-of-fact, no melodrama, just a take-it-or-leave-it option. He wasn’t prototypically handsome: his eyes were about a millimeter too close together; his nose looked like it had been broken in a fistfight. His top teeth were mostly straight but his bottom ones were a mess. His blond hair winged in places it probably wasn’t meant to, and his arms looked like they got a better workout than the rest of him. But his skin was luminous, and those eyes were kind, and Birdie, who had spent her formative years swirling in her own imaginary melodrama—for Elliot, for actual drama class, for high school auditions—foundthis exact combination irresistible. After she’d been hired, she heard that the other sous chef kept making leering comments at the waitresses, and Ian had taken it upon himself to champion their cause, and she was all in. Later, when she finally had it out with Sebastian Carol over his own wandering eyes and hands, she would think of Ian briefly and assume that everyone would laud her like they had him. Yet another thing she’d get wrong.
She lingered by his station for two straight weeks, having clocked out of her shift but finding every excuse to stay. He talked to her as he worked, explaining why he held the knife the way he did, why he blended instead of whisked, why certain spices were too much and certain others were too little. Birdie didn’t have much interest in the food—she’d already been told by one casting director that she could stand to lose some baby fat even though she was presently subsisting on ramen and air—but she had plenty of interest in Ian.
She’d been a virgin when they met. Birdie had forgotten a lot of details over the years about her life before she blew up on a global level, but she hadn’t forgotten that. She lived in that shitty fifth-floor walk-up, and it was a sweltering late-August night, the type where the heat rises and threatens to suffocate you. She brought Ian back to her apartment, and he opened all the windows like that would help, and it did a little. He seemed like he knew things about the world that Birdie didn’t, couldn’t, because the only sort of worldly experience she’d had was in her own imagination. She’d never really traveled; this was the first time she’d been anywhere alone, on her own. She wanted to drink Ian in, eat him whole.
He took her clothes off slowly, keeping the lights on, and she watched his eyes move over every inch of her exposed skin, then ran her own fingers over the tattoo of three stars in the crook ofhis arm, then up his back, which was sinewy from long hours in the kitchen. But his stomach wasn’t defined with a six-pack, and she fell a little bit more in love with him because of that. She remembered now that she thought of Elliot fleetingly when she was completely naked in bed. She’d always envisioned, based on absolutely nothing other than those few lost moments in carpool, one night spent raiding the vending machine with him their senior year, and a brief interrupted moment in the faculty lounge at prom, that she’d be doing this with Elliot. But then Ian asked her if she was okay, and if she wanted to keep going, and her whole body throbbed at how much she wanted him, so she forgot about Elliot and reminded herself that part of acting was living in the moment. So she did. And it was spectacular. And then she found that she rarely thought of Elliot again much at all. At least for a while.
They had pulled over to the side of the highway after Birdie relayed the important parts of the story, omitting the Elliot-specific asides. Elliot wanted to jot some of this down, he said, and while he was focused on his laptop, Birdie scampered to the little bathroom in the back. In their haste to flee Barton, she hadn’t considered the lack of privacy that came with a home on wheels, and she couldn’t exactly just lumber into a rest stop bathroom and not be noticed. The RV it was. She wrestled with the accordion door and found that it didn’t quite close. She tugged harder and the handle made an alarming whine, as if to say,Lady, you get what you get and you don’t get upset, and Birdie was sweating by then. She peered one eye out the not-insignificant crack and saw Elliot’s back toward her, so she sat and peed as quickly as possible, which meant that it felt interminable. Birdie wasn’t shy; she’d gotten used to stripping down in front of wardrobe crews, in front of camera crews, in front of audiences if the scriptrequired it. But that was always for make-believe. With Elliot twenty feet away, she felt significantly more vulnerable than when a script required a side-boob shot and millions of teen boys downloaded a freeze-frame to figuratively tuck under their mattress.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to give Ian a heads-up that we’re coming?” Elliot called, just as she was finishing up. Birdie shoved the door farther ajar and slid through the open space. When she tried to tug the door closed, it refused. She shook it and pulled it and tried to shimmy it, but it was no use. If she wanted even a morsel of privacy in this vehicle, it wasn’t going to come while she was in the bathroom.Wonderful.
“I prefer the element of surprise,” she said, only now taking in the rest of the RV. There were bunk beds in the back that looked like they were better suited for summer camp—thin mattresses, sheets with alien decorations that Mona surely found whimsical, a sad deflated pillow at each head. She hoped that Elliot wasn’t planning to actuallysleephere. Birdie was not some prima donna, okay? But she needed at least three pillows and preferred percale cotton sheets, and almost always required a white-noise machine or at least a fan to lull her into dreamland. She hadn’t even packed her other necessities: her eyeshade, her earplugs, her three-step serum. And second of all (third of all?), was she honestly expected to sleep directly under or directly over Elliot O’Brien? They’d rushed out of the house so quickly that they hadn’t discussed logistics, how this would work, whether (ideally) they could park this thing in a Four Seasons valet lot and retire to housekeeping and room service.
Elliot noticed her assessing, recalibrating.
“Do you like to be on top or bottom?” he called, and when she turned an unnatural hue reserved for the deepest of sunburns, hejumped to his feet and took a few long steps toward her. “Sorry,sorry. Jesus. I meant...” He swallowed. “I meant the beds.”
Birdie thought that she must be losing her mind. Was she the only one of them who thought that they wouldn’t make it one night under such circumstances?
She chastised herself. Sex for Elliot wasn’t any grand revelation. She’d known this before she brought him back to her Tribeca loft. She’d just assumed that she’d be the exception to the dozens of women who came before her. And for the hours between when she left the premiere and the ones when he walked out, she’d never felt more like herself.
“You can’t be serious that we’re sleeping in this thing,” Birdie said. “San Francisco is full of nice hotels, you know.” She thought of her favorite one in Union Square. They’d bring her egg whites and a fruit smoothie in the morning, and maybe she could book a massage, and certainly, the suite on the top floor with those jacuzzi jets sounded like her idea of nirvana right now. Or a different type of nirvana than she’d just been imagining with Elliot.
He shrugged. “You told me you’re in charge. So you’re in charge. I just worry that—”
Birdie pushed past him. “You don’t worry, you write. And no, to answer your question, I don’t want to tell Ian that I’m coming. The surprise makes it feel more romantic.”
“Bird, you realize this isn’t an actual rom-com, correct?” He slipped into the bathroom, which gave her a blessed moment to compose herself. Of course she knew this wasn’t an actual rom-com! Elliot was business,allbusiness, and it was good to be reminded all the same.
Birdie clutched the driver’s seat of the RV, plopped down, and felt calmer about the sleeping arrangements, what with her doublingdown on her own professionalism and Elliot out of her eyesight in the bathroom. He’d left the key in the ignition, so she turned the engine over. “I don’t need you telling me how to dictate my comeback,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ve taken advice from everyone for the past decade, and it’s been a disaster.”
“Not quite a disaster,” he shouted back, and then she heard his footsteps heading toward her, her heart thumping louder in time with each one. “You’re not exactly hurting, if we’re being honest—highest salary in the industry, schedule booked for the next year.”
