Cole said, “I still don’t have a bassist.”

Surely this wasn’t how it ended. Not all of this fuss for nothing.

The crowd was hushed.

In the quiet, Jeremy stepped forward. He shook his head, as if in disbelief. Tucked a bit of his blond hair behind his ear.

“Fine, Cole. Fine. I’ll do it.”

For a second, a bare, bare second, I saw Cole’s real smile, and then it dissolved into his show smile. He did a complicated man shake with Jeremy, and then grabbed his hand and held it over his.

“We have a winner!” he shouted.

He leaned close to Jeremy then, speaking quietly, as if it was just between them. But I knew Cole, and I knew he hadn’t forgotten the cameras.

This was what he told us all: “Welcome back, man.”

Credits rolled.

It was a brilliant little piece of TV.

I felt unexpectedly proud of Cole. He had been right, earlier, at least about one thing: He knew what people wanted. It didn’t mean he was going to stay out of trouble, but he was very good at what he did. For one brief, crystal moment, I wished he was here, because in this moment, I could have told him that without any of my usual brittleness.

But he wasn’t. So all I could think was: Isabel, don’t fall in love with him again.

Chapter Thirteen

· cole ·

“Dinner,” I told the phone as I walked back to the apartment. I was holding a nine-dollar orange juice that Baby’s budget had paid for. The sign outside the juice store had said change your future with sunshine in a glass. My future was looking pretty great already, and I couldn’t wait to see what would happen if I added orange juice to it. “That’s the next meal.”

“What?” said Isabel. There was something satisfying, really, about just calling her number and having her pick up.

“Dinner. Next meal. You. Me. What a delicious plan we have.”

“I can’t,” Isabel replied. “I promised my cousin Sofia that I’d go out with her. She’ll become a creepy old lady if I don’t take her out.”

“I like it when you’re noble. You could come to my place,” I said. It was hard to tell if the orange juice was changing my future, because I hadn’t known where I was heading before I started drinking it. “There is room in the shower for three.”

“I am not taking my cousin to your shower for a good time.

What sort of lesson does that teach her? You could come out with us.”

I didn’t know what kind of a person this Sofia was, but I didn’t feel up to small talk. Right now I was basking in the contentment of having done a job well and having earned a damn orange juice. “What sort of music is playing tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“You live in L.A. and you don’t know?” I actually didn’t know who was playing, either, but it felt like something that I would know if I actually lived here.

“I don’t like concerts. People jump around and smell, and the music sounds like crap.”

“I don’t know if I can talk to you if you’re going to be spewing this blasphemy all the time.” I paused to look at a sign that advertised a professional phrenologist. The sign also featured a line drawing of a bald man in profile with stars around his head.

It was hard to understand what the product on offer was. “Have you never been to a concert that you liked?”

“Let me think about it; no, no, I haven’t. Have you ever been to one you actually like? Or do you just think you ought to like them?”

“That’s a ridiculous question,” I replied, although possibly it wasn’t. I hadn’t been to a lot of shows until I was the show, and it turned out that the music industry disapproved of you missing your own concerts, even if you didn’t think they were a good time. “Is Sofia real?”

“What? I don’t even know why she is the way she is. Nothing in her childhood seems to support her level of neuroticism.

Wait. You mean is she a real person? I didn’t invent a cousin to get out of dinner, Cole. I’d just tell you.”

I asked, “Are you going to pick up next time I call you?”

“I did this time, didn’t I?”

“Say yes.”

“Yes. Conditionally yes.”

I finished the orange juice. I was trying to be magnanimous in light of the discovery that tonight wasn’t going to involve Isabel Culpeper’s lips. This juice had changed my future in unpleasant ways. “What conditions?”

“Sometimes you do things like call me forty times a day and leave obscene voicemails and that’s why I don’t pick up.”

“Ridiculous. That doesn’t sound like me. I would never call an even number of times.”

“Also, sometimes you call only because you’re bored and not because you have anything to say, and I don’t want to be some sort of living Internet that you summon to entertain yourself.”

That did sound like me.

“So go home and write your album and then call me in the morning and tell me where we’re going this weekend.”

“I’ll be all alone.”

“We’re all alone, Cole.”

“That’s my little optimist,” I said.

After I hung up, I walked back to the house.

I thought about kissing Isabel in the shower.

I thought about how I had the evening alone in this strange New Age paradise.

I thought about working on the songs for the album.

I thought about calling Sam.

I thought about getting high in the bathroom.

I crossed the yard to the stucco house where Leyla was staying.

The sliding door to the yard stood open.

Inside, it was mostly just a white sofa and a lot of bamboo.

The evening light through the front windows made it look like an elegant eco-car showroom, minus a car. Leyla sat in the middle of the floor performing yoga or meditation. I couldn’t remember if they were actually different things. I thought meditation was the one that didn’t require special pants.

I knocked on the doorjamb.

“Lily. Leyla. Can I talk to you a second about tomorrow?

When we make the world a better place?”

Leyla blanketed me with a heavy-lidded, pacific gaze.

“Oh, you.”

“Yes, me. Funny story: That is also the first thing my mother said to me.”

Leyla didn’t laugh.

“I just thought I ought to let you know,” she said, “because I believe in honesty: I don’t respect your work or anything about your personal sense of life.”

“God. Well. That’s out there now.”

Leyla extended an arm and stretched. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

I wondered if it was some kind of milestone, to be dissed by a hippie. “I wasn’t really reaching for the word good, but okay.

Do you want to play any variations on that note, or was once enough for you?”

She switched arms. Her speed ranged between excruciating and sloth-like. “People are totally expendable to you. They’re just, like, objects.”

“Okay, and?”

“And you are in it for the celebrity, not the music.”

“That is where you’re wrong, my friend,” I told her. “I am in it for the both of those things. Fifty-fifty, at least. Maybe even forty-sixty.”

“Have you even written the album we’re supposed to record in six weeks?”

“Now you’re harshing my buzz.”

It wasn’t even fun to mock someone who couldn’t tell that you were.

Leyla asked, “How do you know you’re not going to hate my playing, too?”

I gave her the Cole St. Clair smile to buy some time.

The thing was, I could audition for new bass players because Jeremy, my old bass player, had been sitting beside me. I could get another bassist because I wasn’t really replacing the old one. Jeremy hadn’t gone, just moved. But the drummer from NARKOTIKA wasn’t living in a house somewhere in the canyons.

He was dead in a hole, dead in a wolf’s body. And if I started thinking about drummers in an are-they-better-than-Victor way, I didn’t think I could handle it. I had stuffed my guilt and my grief into that grave. I’d said sorry to a dead man, and it was over.

Tenuously over.

I said, “I have a plan. Everything’s under control.”

She closed her eyes again. “Control is an illusion. Animals have no delusions of control.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted to be with Isabel and only Isabel so badly that I couldn’t believe I had to spend the evening alone here in this place with just Leyla to look at.

“You’re a hippie freak,” I said. I didn’t care if the cameras heard me.

“There are no hippie animals,” Leyla replied, “because every animal is, by its nature, at one with its surroundings.”

I knocked on the threshold and I stepped back over it into the yard. Desire was still burning in me. “I might fire you tomorrow.”

She didn’t open her eyes. “I am fine with whatever tomorrow brings.”

Which was a ridiculous sentiment. Tomorrow brought exactly what you told it to bring. If you told it nothing, nothing was what you got. I was done with nothing. I wanted something.

No. I wanted everything.

Chapter Fourteen

· isabel ·

It only took about forty-five minutes before Cole called me again. I had just begun the final descent into the House of Ruin.

“I thought about your evening plans,” Cole said, “and I thought, really, they weren’t that great for Sylvia. Sofia? Sofia.”

“I see you know her well. How is it they aren’t great for her?”

I backed the SUV into the driveway. I didn’t look in the mirror.

I had been straight when I started, and if I ran over old ladies, pets, and children, it was their fault. Fair warning.

“How is it — oh, look how you just played right into my reply here. Because they don’t have me in them.”

“And what, exactly, is your great plan that involves you?”

“All plans involving me are great. But this one is a surprise and you should bring Sylv — Sofia and a sweater and maybe some cheese cubes on sticks.”

“I don’t like ta-das.” Already my heartbeat had sped up.

Exactly what I was trying to avoid.

“This isn’t a ta-da. It’s a great plan. Oh, and there will be two other people there. But one of them is like Sofia because life is scary, and the other one is like you. Sort of. Except instead of sarcasm, he has religion.”

“Cole —”

“Don’t forget the cheese.”

An hour later, I stood with Sofia and a bunch of dead people.

Cole’s great plan had involved meeting him at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery beside the memorial of Johnny Ramone.

He — Cole, not Johnny — looked freshly washed and onethousand-times-edible in a plain white T-shirt and very expensive jeans. He had brought two not-dead people: Jeremy and a man who seemed to be named Leon. The latter was old enough to be my father and was dressed in very nice slacks and a neat button-up with the sleeves rolled up. A manager, maybe? Jeremy, meanwhile, looked more hippie and less famous in person.

Sofia was not very happy to be in a cemetery. Neither was Leon. Both were obviously too polite to say it out loud.

I wasn’t bothered because:

· The people here were long dead and beyond anyone’s help · I didn’t know any of them, including Johnny Ramone · It was taking a lot of my brainpower to not imagine when the next opportunity to make out with Cole would be Also, the cemetery was not very creepy. The sun was blazing pink down behind the sky-high palm trees and white mausoleums.

Vaguely mirthful tombstones grew up around pretty lakes.

And there were peacocks. It was hard to be creeped out in the presence of peacocks.

Plus there were several hundred living people sitting on blankets between the graves.

“I’d like to send a card to the flamingo who died to make your coat,” Cole told me, “because it is doing a great job being apparel. I would like to put everything not covered by it in my mouth.”

That was a lot. It was not a very substantial pink jacket (and it was fur, not feathers). His eyes said everything he hadn’t. I wasn’t sure my face hadn’t been saying the same thing back to him.

I was never going to make it out of this evening alive.

“Not in front of the children,” Jeremy said.

Cole handed me his sunglasses. I put them on and looked at him through them. There was not a trace of his showman smile this evening, or possibly these sunglasses had been programmed to edit it out. He just looked . . . handsome, and cheerful, and like he would have sex with me right there.

Help.

But I was the only one around to help me.

He turned his attention to Sofia.

“Is there cheese in that thingy?” he asked her, waving a hand at the picnic basket she held. To this point, she hadn’t said anything, her brain overloaded by the presence of so many other members of her species. Now this was too much, to be asked about the cheese. She stared back at him with round eyes.

“Just sandwiches,” she managed. Then, a little louder, “Different kinds of sandwiches.”

It was not just sandwiches. Because it was Sofia, it was an actual covered basket with a striped picnic blanket tastefully peeking from beneath the lid. It was ready for a magazine spread: Plan your perfect picnic! Just add friends!

“I want a keyboard on my headstone,” Cole remarked, turning his attention to the statue of Johnny Ramone playing an electric guitar. He touched Johnny’s face, which seemed sacrilegious.