Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

Aaron’s head was smudged with soot. “It’ll all work out,” he said. I turned and looked down at the small marina where six, seven boats were moored; our blue-pink spear was by far the largest. “We could always just sail the hell out of here,” I said, and we retreated, smiling, to the coolness of the house they had bricked in under a pair of especially flammable pine trees. While Aaron started frying some goat meat in a heavy cast-iron pan he’d pulled out of a kitchen cabinet, I rinsed the scent of charred bark out of my hair in the shower and imagined, for the first time, what it would be like to stay with him forever, start a family together — could I imagine something like that? How would it be to do it without from now on; I fantasized about walking into the kitchen with my hair wrapped in a towel and saying to Aaron: “Honey, I love you, how about we forget those stupid condoms?”

My office door opened, and from the impatient squeak of the hinges I could guess who was on the other side. “Joy — five minutes?” Rusty’s smile tickled me between my shoulder blades. I clicked away Aaron’s website but did not take my eyes off the monitor. It was the end of the day, and I wanted to be getting home. When he started counting backward from five I turned around. Holding on to the doorknob, Rusty leaned into Room 203 (we’d never bothered to unscrew the red-painted metal hotel room numbers), and said: “Been crying?”

“Not since I was born. Why?”

“Two things.” He walked over to the small conference table, pulled one of the heavy chairs into the middle of the room and sat down. Just like me, he crossed his left leg over the right one, but reconsidered, and planted his cowboy boots firmly on the carpeting a few feet apart. “First: why don’t you do that interview.”

“Oh?” I gathered my hair, twisted it into a knot, and pulled a rubber band around it. “If I feel like it, you mean.”

“If you feel like it, I mean. Anyway, you’ve earned it. I’d do it myself, but I think you deserve it. And of course you feel like it.”

The very opposite of feeling like it coursed through my nerves, a pre-programmed aversion to showing my hand, to being asked things by someone whose job it is to infringe on my privacy.

“Do you think I can mention the Barracks?”

“Difficult not to. Besides, it’s for the magazine. Before they’ve printed the thing even Belfast will know about it.”

“What if they pick the newsworthy bit out?”

“The New York Times ? They won’t. Too local. They’d sooner ditch an entire issue than publish a West Coast news item. What they’re interested in is the phenomenon, the lifestyle, the success.”

“Are they coming here? I mean, to Coldwater?”

“That girl’s gonna be sitting in this very chair tomorrow morning at ten.”

“What’s her name?”

Rusty looked at me, concentrated, stuck two fingers in the air. “Double name. Wait a sec … Mary Jo something.”

“And the other thing?”

He got up and walked over to a side window. He slid open the window sash, smeared thick with blue paint, and stuck his head outside, giving me a view of the worn-out seat of his jeans. Rusty must have read somewhere that a “founder,” a genuine dot-com guy, should dress as casually as possible. (“Do I have a suit ?” he said when I first broached the subject. “Yeah, my birthday suit.” He did have one suit, a weird cobalt-blue thing with cactuses embroidered on it, a suit made especially for him by somebody named Nudie. “Who’s Nudie?” “Don’t you know? Nudie . Nudie Cohn. Hank Williams’s Tailor. Nudie made Elvis’s gold suit. Gram Parsons’s Marijuana suit. She doesn’t know who Nudie is.”) And I have to admit: it worked. If Rusty and I went to an advertiser together, me in Gucci or the like and he as a freewheeler in one of his artistic shirts, we complemented each other and exuded just the right combination of anarchy and business sense. Now he belched. He brought his head back inside and went over to his chair. “I want to start filming in the Barracks in two weeks,” he said. “Should be possible.”

That was typical Rusty: he’d dig in his heels for months on end, procrastinate, run up against hurdles, then the about-face and, finally, overshoot his target.

“Are you kidding? No way. There’s not even electricity.”

“Then we’ll improvise. Emergency generators. You just watch. And that journalist’s name is Harland. That’s her name. Mary Jo Harland.”

I typed in the name on Google, 162,000 hits in twenty-four hundredths of a second, and the first was her own website. “She writes for the New Yorker ,” I said. “And for Granta .”

“Great,” Rusty said, “I’m going right out to not buy them and then I’m going to not read them.”

“Is she pro or con, do you think?”

“Joy — we’re gonna get shit either way. With your Barracks. Who do you think PR had on the line this morning? Louis Theroux.”

A strange vibration high in my windpipe told me I should not do that interview: don’t do it, why should you. Just as I was about to say that to Rusty, my telephone rang. An inside line. “Theroux’s an asshole,” I said, and switched the phone to speaker. “Hi, Steve.”

Rusty made a gagging gesture. He had something against Steve, said he was “dry shite.” I had snatched him away from Google, where he had obviously done good work for human resources.

“Joy,” his voice echoed metallically through the room. “I’m just calling to say that Kristin called me to say you’re scheduled for Wednesday, June 11th.”

Rusty smiled and nodded at me.

“Why doesn’t Kristin call me herself?” I asked. Yesterday at the Gold Digger, Kristin Rose took me aside and said that Isis had psychological problems, nervous tension, identity crisis, God knows what, and would be out of the running for at least a month, and would I consider filling in now and then. “You’re my last resort, sweetie. And you’re so good .” What irritated me was that I still hadn’t answered and now Steve was on the line. Kristin was a director about my age and was there when Rusty had scouted me, and she’d started right in with that sweetie stuff. Her strategic friendliness worked wonders on Rusty.

“Because I need to know if I can book you for the usual fee,” Steve answered.

“Have I said yes yet? Who’s it with?”

“With, um … just a sec.” Steve coughed, which the speaker translated into an ear-splitting grate. I wondered if he could tell he was being amplified.

“It’s for girlslapgirl. Bobbi …”

“Bobbi Red,” I offered.

“I think so, yeah,” Steve said.

Rusty nodded wildly and gave a double thumbs-up. “Steven!” he shouted.

For a moment, only a hum. And then: “Rusty?”

“Steve — she’ll do it, man. You should see her face. Joy’s crazy about Bobbi.” He sent me a warm smile. He was right, I was crazy about Bobbi.

“Steven,” he continued, “as long as we’re talking: have you drawn up that contract for Vince?”

“Almost,” Steve said. “I mean: it’s nearly done. In fact, I was just waiting for your answer. About my salary suggestion.”

“Just make it seven,” Rusty said. “Sweeten it up with secondary conditions.”

“In Cleveland he got a percentage,” Steve said.

“Sales?”

“Uh … profit. Half a per cent.”

Rusty looked at me, I shook my head. “It’s a deal, Steve,” he said. “Print it out, send it off. Yeah? Do it. Bye, Steve.”

He got up without putting back the chair, and leaned in the doorframe with his hand on the doorknob again. “OK, what are you up to?” I said after I hung up.