Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“Anderson, Nell!” The photographers are calling at us like we are cattle to be herded. A stern-looking publicist, who appears to be about twenty-four and takes her job about a thousand times too seriously, pops up out of nowhere and flares her hand. They’re not talking to the press! She whisks us through the media circus, stopping to pose us in front of the Humane Society banner once we’re through the bulk of the melee.

“Nell!” Someone catcalls to me from the end of the press line, and Anderson and I turn simultaneously to see Paige Connor furiously waving at us.

“Don’t take her bait,” Anderson says, refocusing, still smiling for the cameras.

But it’s too late. This time, I am acting on instinct, trusting my gut. Whatever she wants, whatever she is looking to uncover, let her bring her worst and show it to me. I may not remember much about where I came from, but slowly I am remembering who I am. And I’m not one to let some tabloid reporter beat me in a street fight.

“Hi, Paige,” I say. “What’s up?”

In an instant, Anderson is beside me. “You don’t have to talk to her.”

“Whatever our history is, Anderson,” Paige says, “this actually doesn’t concern you.”

I look at him, and he shrugs, and I know that they slept together years ago, and he most likely treated her as he has so many other women in the past, and, by god, bless him for proving my theory. Old dog. New tricks. Impossible.

“You have two minutes,” the publicist snaps at Paige before intently staring at her clipboard and muttering something indistinguishable into her cell phone.

“As you know, we’ve been covering your story,” Paige says.

“As I do know, you’ve been covering my story.” I lower my voice to a bass tone, mocking her with her gravitas that—hello! look around you!—is entirely ridiculous for the pomp and circumstance of this event. I can feel the whiskey coasting freely inside of me. Just that one glass has already wormed its way completely through. The backs of my knees throb, my blood pulsing like it’s attempting to launch a mutiny through my skin.

“Well, as you know, I’ve been covering your story,” she tuts.

“And as you know, I do know, so can we move on? Or are you looking for an exclusive scoop that you know I know you know.”

She flushes at this, but her beady, determined eyes stay focused. She reminds me of a character from that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie I watched a few weeks back with Peter: a terminator, lasering her targets, then blam! I giggle at the idea, and turn to share as much with Anderson when Paige pulls me back.

“I can see that you don’t take the media seriously, though he should have told you otherwise.” She gestures to Anderson, who rolls his eyes and reaches for my elbow, ready to whisk me away and be done with it.

“I do take some media seriously,” I say. “Jamie Reardon. I take him seriously. He’s proven to be aboveboard, so I take him very seriously.”

“Ah.” She laughs at this. “Okay. But however you see it, I’m about to break a front-page story. A career-changer. A life-changer. None of this child’s play ‘Randy Andy’ stuff that we’ve been doing on him.”

“And what is that?” I ask. Anderson steps forward like he needs to protect me, like he can intuit the dismemberment that is about to unfurl. I splay my arm against his gut, hitting his abdomen, warding him off.

“About your marriage,” she says, checkmating me in a game I probably don’t understand well enough to be playing in the first place. “About your husband and the woman he claimed he loved, and how he never told you the truth but how she told Jamie, and Jamie told me, and now I’m about to tell the world.”

By the time the limo drops us off at my apartment twenty minutes later, after Anderson made sweaty apologies to the publicists, and after he agreed to a hefty donation from his next paycheck, I have inhaled two more glasses of whiskey—enough, Anderson notes dryly but not unsympathetically, for a person of my weight and tolerance to sink like an anchor. Rory, along with Samantha, who flew in earlier from Hong Kong and looks like she has jousted with jet lag and lost, are waiting in the lobby of my building—on the ride home, Anderson had insisted on calling them. No one speaks as the elevator ascends to the apartment, though I can see the two of them, my sister and my best friend, locking eyes, trying to telepathically assess how best to deal with the grenade explosion.

“One of you better start talking, and by talking, I mean, like, yesterday,” I say, once the door has slammed shut. Anderson makes himself useful by pouring glasses of merlot.

From the couch, Samantha starts, then stutters, so Rory waves her hand and says, “Look. We didn’t know how to handle this. No one did. There’s no rule book here.”

“Is that supposed to be some sort of explanation? Some sort of goddamn screwed-up rationalization as to why you didn’t tell me that my husband was fucking another woman for a year?” Tiny shards of spit fly out of my mouth.

Paige Connor had unceremoniously dumped the details on me just before Anderson grabbed me by the waist and physically removed me from the premises. She, ever so smugly, rattled off that it hadn’t been a one-off, a one-night stand. That Peter and Ginger had been sleeping together for a good year, and that he left me—for her—to move in with her, to create a life with her, to love her in a way that he didn’t love me. He had told me all of this before I kicked him out the first time. He had told me all of this and still, no one had told me any of it when it really mattered. When I couldn’t know it for myself. He came back two months later, filled to the gills with despair at the absurdity of his decision—that of course he didn’t love her! That he was such a goddamn idiot to love her! That he would do anything to find a way to make me forgive him.

This is what Ginger had told Jamie, and this is what Jamie had told Paige. In confidence. With the idea that Page Six would run a small teaser, and he would then run the ratings-grabbing interview with Ginger on American Profiles. But even a scoop can be scooped, and Jamie isn’t quite the pro he thought himself to be. Paige trumped even that.

Twenty minutes later, I don’t even know where to pinpoint my rage: at Jamie, at Rory, at Samantha, at my mother, at Peter. The list is too long to contemplate.

“It’s not supposed to be a rationalization,” Samantha says quietly now. “We just didn’t know what to do. All of us wanted to give you a second chance, and even if we didn’t like it—didn’t like that Peter got absolved of his behavior—we also didn’t not like it enough to ruin that second chance.”

“That’s bullshit,” I say.

“I tried to warn you at the gallery that night,” Rory says, because, of course, she always has a goddamn defense.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I say. Anderson places a glass of wine in the pass-through, and I drink too much, too quickly, my larynx burning as it goes down.

“I tried to make Peter stay behind, to let Anderson take you home, to, you know, give you some warning that I didn’t approve.”

“ That is your way of letting me know that my husband was cheating on me for a year? By acting like a bitch and bossing people around?” I am yelling now, wishing so very much that I could forget this moment, this part of my life, too. It’s so much easier when it’s all just a whitewash. Also wishing that the newer me could be blunted toward this rage in the first place. But she can’t, she isn’t, and I’m right back to where I started. “Because that’s, like, every day of the week for you, Rory!”