Susan decided to cut it off there. I'm going to leave, Susan said. The airline's going to fly me to Los Angeles.
Susan paused and looked at Don with a question that came to her just then. Did you ever meet Chris?
He's an asshole.
Susan laughed. Yeah, well, you're pretty well right on that score. But there's nobody can trash a hotel room as well as he can.
Susan blew Don a kiss and then paused in front of Marilyn. She shrugged, turned around and left. It hadn't been the triumphant touch fest she'd hoped for, but not much in life ever was.
Three hours later she was back in Los Angeles; four hours later she was in Chris's house, alone; Chris was in South America. The house on Prestwick had been emptied after the crash, her things sold or given away.
In just a year, the city Susan had known was gone. Larry Mortimer had quit managing Steel Mountain weeks after Susan's crash. He'd divorced Jenna and was living with Amber in Pasadena, producing CD-ROM games for preteens. She called and left a message that she was back, and he drove over to visit her, cutting through the gaggle of press people on the street.
Sue? Sue! It's me, Larry open up.
Larry Susan opened the door and was stilled as always by Larry's resemblance to Eugene. But this time she'd known Eugene the man, and Larry was a pale match for Eugene's quirky, arty crustiness. Larry was just another Hollywood manager unit. Susan found herself trying to mask the flood of emotion she was feeling for Eugene. Larry mistook this for Susan's pleasure at seeing him and came toward her in a slightly seductive manner. Susan in turn gave him the most sisterly of hugs. He asked how she was feeling and they exchanged small talk.
How's Amber?
Pregnant. The show dropped her because they didn't want to fit it into the script.
Well, congratulations. You finally left Jenna, huh?
Oh, you know.
No, I don't know. Forget it. How's the band? Chris?
The band , replied Larry, is in physical, moral, creative and financial chaos. But then I've moved away from rock-and-roll management. Too many aneurysms every day. Susan and Larry had migrated to the kitchen, where Larry poked around the fridge for something to eat. Neither was hungry, but it was a ritual they'd developed years before to squelch awkward moments. They talked some more about the comings and goings of various old acquaintances.
I checked, but there's no hope in hell of you getting any, how shall we say, back wages, from the Steel Mountain Corporation. There's nothing there to pay you with. And by the way, you'll have to do a photo-op with Chris and sign some divorce papers. I can make it a one-stop deal. He's back from Caracas on Monday.
Adam Norwitz is supposed to be managing my life these days.
Adam's become a bigger fish since you were here. Two pilots he was connected with got picked up.
Life's so rich, isn't it, Larry?
Snippy, snippy. Larry found a can of house-brand cola. He looked at it, paused, and asked Susan, Can this stuff go bad?
Susan shrugged and said, Go nuts. Live dangerously.
Larry opened it, poured two glasses, they toasted her return and he soon left. An hour later Dreama came over. She was deeply lonely, without a focus and was only too eager to enter the new family fold. She was given instructions to meet Randy and Eugene Junior at the airport. Randy by then had officially changed his name from Montarelli to Hexum. He and the baby moved in with Dreama that night, and would hunt for a Brady Bunch house the next day. It was all Susan could do not to abandon all her plans, run to Dreama's and inhale Eugene Junior's sweet baby smell.
Public interest in Susan's reappearance, at first blazing, died down to near nothing. Susan did nothing to encourage publicity, and at first Adam saw this as a clever device to jack up her price for an exclusive interview. But Susan rested firm, and Adam had a hard time forgiving her for blowing the chance to sell at the peak of public interest.
Susan was able to rent her old Cape Cod house from the Steel Mountain Corporation, who'd bought it after the plane crash. It was eight minutes from Eugene Junior. She landed Randy a job in a music PR office as an assistant. He used this money to rent the agreed-upon house in the Valley. The Cape Cod house existed almost purely as an elaborate ruse to deflect any possible public awareness away from Eugene Junior. Susan was still trying to think of the lowest-profile manner possible of taking Eugene public, but finding a solution was proving difficult, as any solution meant a media deluge.
Susan slept in her Cape Cod house at night. Otherwise it was useful only as a shell for her answering machine. It received calls, almost all from Adam Norwitz, to inform Susan of offers for the rights to tell-all cable network dramatizations of her life. These were offers she had to refuse because she publicly stood by her amnesia story, and technically she had no real story to tell. The only other calls were psychiatrists from around the world specializing in memory retrieval who had obtained her number on the sly. (I know it's bad form to sneak in the back door like this, but I think I can help you out, Susan Colgate.)
Christ, Randy, these losers think that ambushing me on my private line somehow predisposes me to like them. Whatta buncha lepers.
Randy agreed. His job had given him a small measure of media savvy. His office handled what press remained for Steel Mountain, and he brought back reports that the band's five members had succumbed to road fatigue, catastrophic drug use, hepatitis C, assault-and-battery lawsuits, and musical irrelevance.
My days are only a little bit starfucky. Mostly they're spent photocopying legal documents and fetching arcane health-food products from halfway across town. Starfucky's more fun.
Susan was cutting melon wedges into zigzag shapes for a barbecue at the Brady house. Steel Mountain's really over now, isn't it?
I don't want to be disloyal they pay the bills, said Randy, but how much more energy is it worth to make five grizzled Liverpudlians with teeth like melting sugar crystals look like sexual and moral outlaws for kids maybe two decades younger than themselves? It's obscene past a point.
How's Chris doing? Susan asked. She and Chris rarely spoke.
My boss claims he has a few brain cells left.
He was the brains of the group.
But
But what?
I don't know if it's the drugs or the album sales or the closet but
What? Is he hitting on you?
No. Susan, I'm just an assistant, not like an agent or someone. But I hear his memory's like cheesecloth.
Coke.
He can afford it?
Five weeks later Chris was jailed in Nagoya, having been caught with a picket fence of coke lines beneath his nostrils during a police raid of an after-hours club. Three grams of coke were found in his jacket pocket and the Japanese correctional system threw the key to his cell down the well. Randy caught the news on CNN on a Thursday morning shortly after his return. Within days what remained of Steel Mountain's infrastructure was dismantled, and its legal bills were staggering. Susan had until the month's end to vacate the Cape Cod decoy house. Randy lost his job and his back pay and took on another PR gig at half of his previous salary. The baby was sick a few times, and Susan squeaked him through the pay-as-you-go medical system by disguising Dreama as a Canadian tourist flashing a wad of bills that were actually the remains of Randy's savings. Dreama kicked in her numerology money, but it only went so far. There were taxes. Rent. Groceries. Phone. Dog food for Camper and Willy.
In the midst of this, Randy enrolled in a screenwriting night school course. He came to realize that his life's narrative arc was, like that of most everybody else in the world, cruelly and pitilessly dictated by the most mundane of financial straps and, in Randy's particular case, a troglodyte goon from a collection agency who showed up at his offices during a sales meeting, demanding either payment or return of the TV set.