Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance (7 page)

I feel the stove. “Well, um, a lot longer than I thought if we can’t get this thing to heat up. I thought you turned it on?”

“I did,” he insists. “Hold on. Let me check the pilot light.” He fiddles with a few things, switches a knob, and suddenly the heat flows. “See? All set.”

“The consummate handyman. Thanks.”

While our late lunch cooks, we give ourselves a tour of the rest of the house.

Fielding says, “Six bedrooms, three baths—not bad for a boy from—what do you like to say?—the armpit of the Midwest?”

Away from the show’s hustle and the glare of paparazzi, my quick summary of Fielding’s roots sounds mean. “I do say that, don’t I?” My voice is small, apologetic.

“You do, but that’s just because you’ve never been.”

Fielding heads up the stone staircase, follows it as it curves around into a master suite that would be perfect if it weren’t filled with floor-to-ceiling boxes and furniture covered with tarps.

“Where are we supposed to sleep?” I ask.

Fielding reverts right back to his on-set persona and echoes Jonah’s ever-earnest voice. “Gee, Jenna, I thought you’d sort it out for us!”

Just hearing the change in his tone sets off my professional buttons, and instead of asking him more about Cincinnati or anything else in his background, I shoot right back with my optimistic Jenna voice. “Of course, Jonah! You can depend on me to get the job done! Together, we’ll sort it out!” I spit this last part out before I bolt down the stairs to check on the tomatoes.

8
WHO ARE YOU?

Aaron-Fielding

I really feel like I could stay here forever. The sea, the fresh fruit and vegetables … All I really need is the right person to share it with.

Sadly, that person is not the person who is here right now. I don’t think.

I slept for twelve hours the first night, then went into town and picked up some supplies—cereal, soy milk, and a big enough stack of books to keep me reading for at least a week. We’re miles from the nearest place to buy a TV and video games, which is probably just as well—I kind of like being unplugged.

Well, almost unplugged. I dug into the Rug Sucker machine and retrieved my phone. I could have gotten Charlie’s out, too, but then I would have had to listen to her on the phone constantly, and it would have stressed me out. Probably I’m a terrible person.

But I did want to talk to Mom and Dad, just so they wouldn’t worry about me being missing.

“Hello, sweetie,” Mom says. “How are you doing? Where are you, anyway?” I hear a lot of noise in the background.

“I’m hiding out at a beach house. Where are you?”

“At a gymnastics meet, of course. Where else would I be?” I feel this little pang—Mom has moved on from being my stage mom to being my sister’s gymnastics mom because I’m supposed to be all grown up, or close enough to pass.

“I don’t know. How’s everybody taking the news of my alleged gayness?”

“Honestly, honey, nobody’s that surprised.” I could tell Mom to insist on my heterosexuality to everyone, but that would look desperate, and, anyway, I don’t really care.

“So what else is going on at—?”

“Listen, honey, I’ve gotta go. They’re calling your sister’s group to the beam. Call me soon—love you!”

“I love you, too,” I say, but I don’t know if she’s listening or not.

When I get back to the house, Charlie starts in on me as soon as I get in the door. “You know, you have to leave me a note when you leave the house. I swear to God, if you leave me stuck here, I’ll hunt you down wherever you are and—” More colorful, expletive-laden details follow.

“Why would I leave you stuck here?” I ask as I put the grocery bags down on the counter.

“Because you hate me! Because you know I’m in hell here—no phone, no Internet, completely isolated from the outside world. And my only way out would be to walk into town and hang around waiting for a ride and get recognized and get photographed in clothes that cause me to
play against type
, which is not what I need right now, okay?”

“Chuck,” I say, which is probably a mistake, because she hates that. “I don’t hate you. I mean, you know that, right? It’s not like you don’t get on my nerves, but I really don’t hate you.”

“And yet here you are calling me Chuck, which you know I hate. So if you don’t hate me, why are you being such a dick to me?”

She makes a good point. I rake my hands through my product-free hair. “I dunno. I think it’s like a bad habit or something.”

“Well, maybe you should take up smoking or something,” Charlie says, “because you being a dick is getting kind of old.”

I busy myself putting groceries away. “You know as well as I do that smoking is specifically prohibited by our contract. I think that’s paragraph twelve.”

“Okay, then how about you pick your nose? I mean, that’s a bad habit.” Charlie sees the bag of kiwi fruit I’ve just pulled out and grabs one. “Love these, by the way.”

“I know,” I say. Her dressing room hasn’t been without kiwi fruit as long as I’ve known her. “But the thing about nose picking is, I mean, what do you do with the boogers? Because I can’t, like, wipe them on my pants, and the flick is such a high-risk maneuver. You never know if it’s going to go where you want it to go or just stay on the end of your finger—”

“I always just drop mine into my costar’s lattes,” Charlie says, smiling now for real.

“Hey! You told me that was a flavor shot!”

We both start laughing, and I put the rest of the groceries away.

“You know who bought the groceries today with the credit card with his own name on it?” I say after a minute. “Aaron Littleton, that’s who.”

“Who the hell is Aaron Littleton?” Charlie asks.

“He’s me. Or, anyway, he’s who I used to be. He’s who I think I’m going to be again. I was thirteen when Mom picked my stage name, and I hate it. Fielding. I mean, it’s not a name. It’s a verb. Fielding. My name is a gerund. It’s what American League designated hitters don’t get to do.”

A strange expression flits across Charlie’s face, but it quickly goes away, replaced by the angry face she’s had on pretty much ever since we got here. “Well, great,
Aaron
, I’m really glad you’re finding yourself. But, you know, I already knew who I was, and despite the fact that I had to hang out with you, I liked who I was. Now I’m nobody.”

“There’s a pair of us,” I say, trying to recapture what I thought was the relaxed good feeling between us that has somehow just evaporated.

“Emily Dickinson? Really? Do you want to shut yourself up in your house for, like, a decade? Actually, you know what? You probably do. But I don’t. And you haven’t given me a choice. God, you are so selfish!” she yells at me and stomps up the stairs. I stare at the empty staircase for a minute. I understand why she storms away when I say something mean, but right now I really have no idea what I did. Maybe she accused me of hating her because she actually hates me.

I write a note and put it on the table: “I’m taking a book down to the beach to read. I would not abandon you here. But if you want to leave, here are the keys.” I place the keys to the Kolodny Brothers Rug Suckers van atop the note and take a book down to the beach.

It’s a really good book. It’s a mystery about a private eye who’s hired to solve a case he’s not really supposed to solve. He gets pushed around by a variety of powerful people, only a pawn in their game. I identify.

Hours pass, and I head inside and find the note and the keys gone. I’m not really surprised. She probably wants to play the clueless girlfriend wronged by my deception. I think she’ll be able to sell that—I snuck around behind her back, she never knew about my secret life … She can go on some daytime talk show and cry about how I made a fool of her. It’s a pretty good idea. Well, good for her.

I spend some time wandering around the house. The paint is peeling. The floor under the first-floor toilet is sagging. Somebody’s probably going to crash through there into the basement while they’re on the can. I hope it’s not me. Though it does mean a trip to the bathroom is riskier and more exciting than usual. I might even say “extreme.”

“I’m Fielding Withers,” I say in my best sports announcer voice, “and welcome to X-treme crapping!”

“Well,” Charlie’s voice says, “I see I’m not the only one who gets bored around here.”

I emerge from the bathroom and find Charlie standing there. This is surprising enough. What’s doubly surprising is that she is dressed in the Rug Suckers coveralls and holding a can of paint in one hand and a big paper bag that says CARPINTERIA HARDWARE in the other.

“Anyway, I thought you were Aaron now,” she says.

“Uh. Yeah. I, uh—I thought you were going to go on some TV show and cry about how I’d deceived you.”

Charlie places her bags on the floor and begins pulling out painting supplies—a roller, a pan, and a plastic drop cloth emerge one by one.

“You think I’d throw you under the bus like that just to save my career?” she finally replies.

“Well. I mean, it’d kind of be the smart move.”

Charlie sighs. “You really need to read the celebrity magazines more often. In light of the fake script thing, it would be hard for me to say I’m in on one deception and not on the other. Me as the victim is going to be a tough sell since I was
alone
at the farmer’s market with the fake script.”

“I would say I’m sorry, but that would be insincere.”

“Oh, I know. And you’re so real, so small-town—or should I say so Littleton, so above the petty deceptions of us morally bankrupt Hollywood types.”

“Littleton! Like it! Okay, I’ll give you points for the name thing, but, you know, we really need to get this straight. Cincinnati is not Los Angeles, but it’s not a small town. It’s a major Midwestern city with a population of over three hundred thousand. So whenever you’re getting snotty about how I’m morally superior because of my small-town roots, let’s just be clear and say that I am so real, so small-
city
. Four years of this crap. You know how many millions of people don’t live on either coast?”

“You’ve obviously forgotten our concert tour of the CD departments of various Valu-Marts in the Midwest and South.”

“Oh, yeah. That was kind of fun!”

Charlie spends a long moment looking at me, then picks up her paint cans. “Yeah. Like dental surgery is kind of fun. Whatever. I spent the morning measuring rooms—did you know a dollar bill is six inches long? Makes a handy little ruler in a pinch—and I’m going to paint this afternoon.”

“You’re going to paint.”

“Yes!” she says, grabbing her stuff and heading up the stairs. “I may be stuck in the middle of nowhere, but I’m not going to sleep in a room with peeling paint.”

“What have you ever painted before?” I yell up the stairs to her.

“How hard could it possibly be?” she yells back. And then she’s gone.

I don’t see her again until dinner, which I cook.

“I’m going for a run,” she announces when she comes downstairs. “I’ll just grab something later.”

I look at my vegetable stew and couscous. It’s colorful, and yet it looks kind of sad now. I eat it while reading.

Charlie returns from her run before dark, takes a long shower, and roots around in the kitchen, apparently not interested in eating my couscous. Her loss. It was pretty good, even if I didn’t have enough cayenne to make a decent hot sauce.

The next morning, I am awakened by stomping sounds. I stagger out into the hallway, and there is Charlie, looking fit and sweaty and cute as hell with her ponytail and other interesting parts bobbing up and down as she runs up and down the stairs.

“What the hell are you doing?” I croak out.

“I’m running the stairs!” she says.

“Yeah. Why?”

She pauses, jogging in place. With great effort, I focus on her eyes, which are not bouncing up and down. “Listen Fiel—
Aaron
. If that is your name. I’m not like you. I can’t do nothing all day. I can’t do nothing pretty much ever. I have to keep busy or I go insane. I’ve been on the go since I was two. And I have to exercise on the small chance that anyone ever wants to photograph me in a bikini again. So I’m running the stairs. Good for the glutes.”

And down she goes.

We give each other space for the next day or two. I’m kind of afraid I’m going to say something that sets her off again, and she is, I guess, still mad at me. I read more than one book per day, I take naps, I ignore the trades, Perez Hilton, and TMZ, and I don’t care about any of it.

Charlie keeps busy, painting three rooms. After the first two, she figured out that she should put tape on the ceiling to avoid getting paint on it when she paints the walls. Even with splotches of paint on the ceiling, though, the rooms are very much improved. She’s picked colors that are bright and vibrant, which fits her personality—well, the vibrant part anyway—and the rooms she’s painted look warm, inviting, and fun.

On the evening of the third day, she graces me with her presence at dinner, a pasta dish I’ve made with garden vegetables and a can of chickpeas I got at the store in town. Tentatively, she takes a bite. “Whoa. This is really good,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say. “Hey, the rooms look great, by the way. You’ve really warmed up the place.”

“Thank you,” she says. We don’t say anything for a minute, but it doesn’t seem like she’s thinking angry, resentful thoughts; she’s just eating in silence.

Well, I’m not thinking angry, resentful thoughts, and I actually have no idea what Charlie is thinking. What I eventually start thinking is that I wouldn’t mind doing this for a while. With Charlie, I mean. It’s nice to be alone, but it’s also nice to be able to talk to another human being once in a while. There’s something comforting about the knowledge that someone else is doing something in the house. Maybe I like Charlie better when I don’t have to see her all the time. Is that mean? I could probably say the same thing for just about anybody—certainly my parents.