I remembered what Cole had said when I’d first seen the list that Baby had made for him. She wants me to look like a disaster.
“Did you really think all those people on my shows collapsed and went crazy?” Baby asked. “That I did that? Nobody’s that good. No, they all knew what the world wanted.”
“They were fake?” I said, and hated the look Baby gave me, like she couldn’t believe how innocent I was. Of course I knew that reality television wasn’t real.
“They were curated,” corrected Baby. “They gave the viewers what the viewers wanted.”
Cole said, voice empty, “And the world likes us better falling down.”
Baby shrugged one shoulder as if this were an unchangeable fact. “Not real destruction, though. Do you know what’s bad TV? Someone passed out on a floor, drooling. Rock stars vomiting.
Being too drunk to go to the studio. If I got a real disaster, I’d have no show. You ever seen an addict? Shitty work ethic.”
It was so the opposite of how I’d expected this dinner to go that I couldn’t quite comprehend it. On the one hand, what she said made complete sense. But on the other hand, I’d seen three topless girls in Cole’s apartment the night before.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Then why the half-naked girls, if not to tempt him?”
Baby said, “Tempt? Look at this —” She pointed to the two of us. I wasn’t sure what she was trying to indicate. Proximity, maybe. “Tempt? I saw those fangirls wandering around and simply pointed them in the right direction. I figured Cole had enough of a brain on him to make it into a good scene. I don’t cut and paste my shows to make drama. I just . . . line up the edges. Put people in situations and film what happens.”
Cole said, “But I’ve been making situations.”
“Not big enough,” Baby countered. “So I just throw in some variables when it occurs to me. Have I tried to trick you? Did you find drugs in the bathroom to tempt you? Beers in the fridge? Have I done anything to pull you off the wagon?”
Cole frowned. “The musicians. The ones I fired. That one is dead. Chuck.”
A ghost of something fluttered over Baby’s face. “Chip.”
“Yeah, well, Jeremy told me he was dead. And the other kid was into shit. That seems pretty — engineered.”
He hadn’t told me this. I wondered if that was because he hadn’t known what to do with the information yet or if it was because he hadn’t wanted me to know.
“They were disasters,” Baby admitted. “You can’t really predict someone’s crisis point, but you can guess. I figured Chip would work his way into the hospital during some gig. And that you’d have a giant shouting match with Dennis over you being clean now, and maybe someone would get hit. I don’t mind hiring real disasters for scenery pieces.”
“Does that mean Leyla has skeletons?” Cole demanded.
Baby laughed. “No. You’re just supposed to hate her.”
“Well done.”
“I did my research. Isabel, you’re still looking unhappy.”
I wasn’t unhappy, but I was suspicious. The other meltdowns had been so complete. So convincing. Was it just because I was like the rest of the American public, so ready to believe that a disaster was never truly cured? Or was it because I was just so ready to believe that Cole in particular wasn’t cured? “So, you’re not the enemy.”
“Isabel,” Baby said, “I’m not in this to get sued. If there’s something that ruins my heroes, it’s something they’ve done to themselves. I told you. I just put my people in situations. What they do with that situation is up to them. If there’s an enemy, it’s inside them.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything about Los Angeles was a cover for something else. The ugly masqueraded as pretty, and it turned out that now the pretty pretended to be ugly. I wondered if there was anything in this entire world that was real.
“So, you want me to try harder,” Cole said finally. “You want the show. The Cole St. Clair show.”
“I know you know how to do it,” Baby said. “I did my research, like I said.”
“Does it have to be down?” he asked. A little wistfully, if you knew him.
“Make it good. That’s all I care about. Ah —”
A different young woman stood at the table. She looked, if possible, slightly less welcoming than the last girl. She demanded, in a very unwaitress-y way, “What do you want?”
I dragged the menu toward me. “I —”
She shook her head. She was looking at Cole. “What do you want here?”
His expression was still puzzled. “She can order for me.”
Her gaze shot to me. Then back to him. “You’re here for food?”
Now his face cleared. “Oh. Oh, now I see. Yes. Food. This is her favorite restaurant. I like the look of those round ones in the photo.” With his index finger, he made little circles around the bloodless photo of the California roll on the front. Baby watched everything attentively.
The girl looked eight degrees more unfriendly, and then she vanished.
I turned to Cole. “You’ve been here before?”
Cole sounded a little bewildered. “When I said I thought I’d been here before, I didn’t mean here. Like, this place. I guess it could have been. They must have recognized me. Maybe they think it was . . . like before.”
Like before. Meaning that before, he would walk into a place and they would remember that he was a guy who wanted some coc**ne with his entrée? I felt sick. I couldn’t even blame anyone but myself. I knew exactly who Cole had been before I met him.
Baby, however, just kept wearing that same private smile.
And why shouldn’t she — Cole was only demonstrating his pedigree.
The host was back. Hovering behind him was the girl with the dyed hair.
“You are Cole St. Clair?” asked the host.
Cole nodded his head. Just one little jerk. He was all certainty and arrogance now, completely back in his public persona.
He had become too large for his side of the booth; he’d turned this restaurant into a backdrop for his personality. This was what the rest of the world got from him.
“We told you before to never come back.”
Cole cocked his head. “Back?”
“We tell you that you were not welcome here anymore. Not you or your other friend, either. You ruined everything. I don’t forget your face after that.”