Birds of California(51)
Fiona nods, smiling sweetly. “I was,” she admits.
The waitress doesn’t react. “My brother had a poster of you in his room,” she muses instead. “The trashy one, with the nudity and the lizard?”
Fiona keeps smiling, shaking her head. “I don’t know it,” she says.
The waitress frowns, confused, then evidently decides she’s not interested in pursuing this conversation. “Acai bowl, bacon, and eggs,” she repeats, glancing down at her notepad, then shuffles grumpily away.
Once she’s gone Sam raises his eyebrows across the table. “That happen to you a lot?”
Fiona shakes her head. “Oh, that was nothing,” she says, scooping her hair into a knot and securing it without the benefit of an elastic. “Sometimes they’re rude.”
Sam takes a sip of his coconut latte. “I have to ask,” he says. “The thing with the lizard.”
Fiona brightens. “Oh, I love that poster!” she says immediately, clapping her hands like a delighted child on Christmas morning. “It came out exactly how I wanted it. It was my artistic vision from the very beginning. Actually, if you ever visit my family home you’ll see a life-size version of it framed above the fireplace with one of those special museum spotlights on it, so we can all behold it with appropriate reverence every time we walk in the—”
“Okay,” Sam says, holding his palms out in surrender. He knew it was a mistake to ask. “Okay. Point taken.”
Fiona is quiet for a moment, like she’s debating how much she wants to tell him. Finally she sighs, sitting back in her chair and wrapping her hands around her coffee mug. She has delicate-looking hands, Fiona does, like maybe they’re the one part of her body she hasn’t been able to properly disguise.
“They told me Annie Leibovitz was going to shoot it,” she says, her voice so quiet Sam has to lean across the table to hear her. “And it was going to be this hugely artistic thing with birds—like a play on ballerinas, Swan Lake, whatever.” She makes a face. “There was a point when I was trying to start over, you know. There was a point when I was trying to get people to take me seriously again.”
“Okay,” Sam replies, feeling a little bit sick. “So what happened?”
“Well, in case you’ve never seen it yourself, Samuel, I can tell you it was not an artistic fucking ballerina picture with swans shot by Annie Leibovitz.” Fiona shrugs violently, her whole body suddenly made of angles. “I showed up on the day and they said she had a conflict. And then something happened with the swans—like, they didn’t die or anything, they were just unavailable that day, probably they were booked for the wedding of, like, an actual famous person, but then it turned out that one of the lighting assistants was also, like, a reptile guy.” She sighs. “You see where this is going.”
Sam does. Listening to her tell it reminds him of sitting through a horror movie, watching some skinny blond ingenue creep down a darkened hallway to meet her inevitable demise. Shouting Don’t do it and knowing full well she can’t hear him. “Yeah.”
“I could have said no,” she points out, running her thumb around the lip of her mug. She isn’t quite meeting his eye. “I should have said no, which you’ll notice was sort of a recurring theme in my life back then, but I just thought—hell, all these people are already here, I’m the one who got myself into this, so. I did it. I grit my teeth and I went somewhere else in my head and I did it. And now for the rest of my life, when people hear my name, that’s what they’re going to think of.”
Sam opens his mouth to tell her that’s not true, then shuts it again. She’s probably right—it is true, at least a little. A past like Fiona’s isn’t the kind of thing people tend to forget. He glances over her shoulder instead of meeting her eyes, trying to ignore the sneaking suspicion that being out here with her is the worst thing he could possibly be doing for his career and his reputation and wishing, not for the first time, that he wasn’t the kind of person who cares about things like that. He is that kind of person, though; he always has been, and the truth is he’s not sure how much longer he’s going to be able to pretend otherwise.
Thankfully the waitress returns with their plates just then, setting them down without fanfare and stalking off again. “You forgot to tell her she’s the woman of your dreams,” Fiona observes mildly.
“I didn’t forget anything,” Sam tells her. “Eat your eggs.”
Fiona needs to get a birthday present for her sister, so after breakfast they duck into a little shop a few doors down, the kind of place that’s full of crystals and leather bracelets and those little felt pennants girls like with slogans about coffee and feminism. It smells like patchouli and citrus, a little like Fiona herself. “Which?” she asks, holding up two gold necklaces, each of them strung with a bead no bigger than his thumbnail. “Jade or tigereye?”
Sam sifts his hand through a basket of tiny enamel pins shaped like avocados. “Tigereye,” he decides, though he doesn’t actually know which one is which. He just likes the way it sounds when she says it.
Fiona pays for the necklace, plus one of the avocado pins and a card with a cartoon of an ostrich wearing a party hat. They’re walking back to the car when Sam’s phone dings with a text from Erin. Just filed that giant-ass Vanity Fair piece, she reports. Taking myself to drunk lunch if you want to meet up?