At least until I jerked off thinking of her tits in my mouth.
So instead of responding, I closed the Discord app and decided to go see what my nice-smelling roommate was up to. It was close to lunchtime; maybe she wanted scrambled eggs—or a grilled cheese, I was pretty good at those too...
Bzz. Bzz.
I looked down at my phone to see my mom’s barely lined ivory face on the screen. I briefly considered throwing my phone into the snow—then heroically didnotthrow my phone into the snow—and pressedacceptas I sat down at the mixing board.
“Oh good, you answered,” my mother said. “I was worried you’d thrown your phone into the snow.”
“It’s still early in the day.”
It was a video call, so I could see her sitting at the window of her lodge in Aspen with lots of snow-covered mountains behind her. A cup of something green steamed nearby, undoubtedly her morning tea with several expensive tinctures in it. My mother was famous foraging gracefully, whatever that meant, and had given interviews about why she’d skipped lip fillers and Botox in favor of lettingnature take its course. Of course, what she didn’t say was that she approached skincare with a pathological ruthlessness, hadn’t stepped outside without sunscreen once in the sixty-three years of her life, and routinely paid money to lie in a salt cave while swaddled in imported seaweed and muddy towels.
But I understood. It was no easy thing to be Carina Kelly, the darling star of eighties rom-coms and nineties blockbusters, hounded by the paparazzi from the golden age of tabloids into the rowdy era of internet gossip. If macadamia oil and hexapeptide facials made it even a little bit easier to handle, then I didn’t blame her for it.
I did wish, however, that the same grim tenacity that informed her approach to looking young didn’t also apply to her work. She performed relentlessly,constantly, and while she didn’t have an ego about taking smaller roles after aging out of the starlet category, shedidhave a bit of an ego about how hard she worked, and how often. And she believed everyone else should always be doing the same, which meant two things:
Firstly, that a not-insignificant amount of my childhood had happened without my mom around—which wasfine, because I’d had the best nanny in the world, and also because my mother really, really did love me. She did everything she could to keep her shoots as short as possible, or to have me and Nanny close by, or to call every night to tell me she loved me before bedtime, even if she had to hold up a take in order to do it. Unfortunately, that meant herI had to work even when it was hardstance was as unyielding as it was enduring, which led me to my second point...
Carina Kelly was not impressed with my five-year grief sabbatical. As an actor, she didn’t pretend to understand being unable to write, but she did wonder why I didn’t do more to fix it. Why not partner with another songwriter? Why not see a life coach? Why not host theBoy Band Bootcampreboot with Nolan and at least keep myself visible while I was in myfallow period?
And I never had a good answer for her, because I didn’t entirely have good answers for myself.
“I just wanted to check in and see if you’ve changed your mind about coming to Aspen for the holidays,” she was saying now. “I hate spending Christmas apart.”
I didn’t like it either, but the idea of getting on a plane to spend two weeks somewhere I couldn’t brood in peace sounded exhausting.
“I miss you buckets, and Nanny too,” I told her, and I meant it. “But I think I’m starting to germinate some new material, and I really should stay here while things are going well, you know?” That was a lie—I hadn’t germinated shit, even after moving to a probably haunted mansion overlooking a forever-Christmas town, but it seemed like the kind of fib that was really for the benefit of everyone. Myself included, because I was sotiredof trying to explain why my brain had stopped producing Grammy-winning music.
There were only so many ways to tell people that my muse was incredibly, permanently, and very famously dead.
“Hmm,” my mother said, taking a sip of her tea as she watched me through the screen. “Well, I don’t want to interrupt things if you’re finally... feeling up to working.”
I didn’t take the bait; instead I flipped the screen around so she could see the home recording studio. “Look, I’m even in the studio now.” Hopefully that would wrap up this little fabrication of mine.
“That’s great, Isaac,” she said warmly, but of course there was more after that. “Do you have anything for your label to listen to yet?”
Why hadn’t I thrown my phone into the snowbank again? “It’s, ah, embryonic,” I hedged. “Just bits and pieces. Still coming together. Art is a process.”
Even though my camera was now facing the studio, I could still see Mom, so I could see her delicate shoulders lift in a sigh. It’d been a long five years, and so I knew what was coming next.
“I just worry,” she began. “You know, when I moved to LA from Indiana with nothing but a twenty-dollar bill and a bar napkin with a number on it, all I had was my willingness to put in as many hours, auditions, and commercial voiceovers as it took to make my name. But you’ve grown up with so much comfort—I just worry that I didn’t instill enough drive in you. Enough work ethic. That’s the trouble with your generation, you know, is that no one wants to work anymore.”
“Mom, I started working when I was five.”
She scoffed as I turned the camera back around. “Doing bit parts in my friends’ movies, nothing more than a day here or an afternoon there. You didn’t really start working until you decided you wanted to sing, and you were basically an adult by then.”
“I was fourteen. Can’t we count the last five years as part of my deferred childhood?”
“Absolutely not. You need to keep living your life, Scoot.” Scoot was my baby nickname, and this wasn’t playing fair as far as I was concerned, because I could hear in that one fond syllable that she really thought she was doing the best thing for me. That all of this was because she loved me and wanted me to thrive. “Maybe you have plenty of money and some platinum records to show for yourself, but you can’t just be a shadow for the rest of your life, scrolling on your phone and waiting to die.”
“Ouch, Mom.”
“You’re thirty-five. You’re old enough for tough love. And you’re lucky your grandparents aren’t on this call, because they’d say that if you don’t work, you don’t eat—Is that a cat?”
On my screen, I could see green eyes flash behind me and then vanish into a curl of bad disposition and fluff as Mr.Tumnus tucked himself into a ball on top of my mixing board. “Oh. That’s my roommate’s cat. He hates me.”
Carina set down her tea and gave me the same expression one of her characters would give a president who didn’t heed her dire warnings about a restless volcano. “You have a roommate? Since when?”
