Rainbowland VII – Identity Crisis

A fantasy that takes place somewhere over the rainbow,
in one of many possible realities involving Katharine McPhee,
her McPhamily, McPhriends and McPhans

Author’s Note: In this story, the Entourage universe is real.
Well, as real as Rainbowland is anyway.

"You miserable sonofabitch!" I yelled, slamming my fists down onto my thighs so hard it hurt. "Damn! Can’t you ever mind your own business?" I pushed my chair back from the computer, still staring hard at the screen.

"Who are you talking to?" Katharine asked from the doorway.

I turned to face her. "Nobody. The computer. Oh, all right, Duncan Donitz. That creep."

"Sweetie, you know you should never read his blog. It does bad, bad things to your blood pressure, and then I have to do God knows what to get you calm again." She gave me a big sweet smile. "Not that I mind, of course. I just hate to see you so upset."

"He doesn’t bother you at all?"

"I learned a long time ago to read as little of that stuff as possible. I figure somebody will tell me if I absolutely have to know something, and aside from that, well, I don’t need to be doing what you’re doing. Talking to yourself. Cussing at the computer. Going crazy. Stuff like that." She walked in and sat down on my lap, a bit sideways, with one arm around my neck. "Now what did he say this time?"

"You really don’t want to know," I said, and I kind of meant it.

"Yes I do. Well, I don’t really care what he thinks, I just want to know what got to you so bad."

"Chapter whatever it is in his never-ending vendetta against you, or us, or whatever it is that he’s been doing ever since Idol."

"Critterbaby, he doesn’t have a thing against me," she said, sounding very composed and reasonable. "I’m just…material. I’m something to write about. I suppose we should be glad he’s talking about me. God help us all when nobody’s interested anymore."

"That’s not the point," I said, halfway afraid that maybe it was.

"Then what is?"

"He doesn’t just report doings, he makes stuff up. He takes half truths and spins whole stories around them. Then he insists he’s never printed anything that wasn’t true, or that anyone could prove wasn’t true. I think he even said once that he’d give it all up if anyone could catch him in an outright untruth."

"Maybe he really doesn’t print anything that’s not true."

"Oh yeah," I fumed, "like saying you were sneaking out on secret dates with Ryan Seacrest?"

She took my face between both hands and forced me to pucker, then leaned over and kissed me. "As I recall, he didn’t actually quite say that." Before I could start spluttering, she continued. "He made it into a question, like ‘Is Katharine dating Idol host?’ He’s very clever about how he words things."

"Well, hell, can I help it if everybody thinks I look like Ryan Seacrest?"

"You do," she said, and that made me madder than ever. "Only I think you’re cuter. Maybe that’s why I always liked Ryan. D’you suppose?"

"You liked Ryan, huh?"

"Well, sure. We’ve always kinda been buddies."

I could tell she was baiting me, but I didn’t care. Donitz’ columns always stirred me up to the point where I was a hair away from putting a fist through something. I reached for the mouse.

"What are you doing?"

"Shutting this thing down."

"No, don’t! I want to see what he was writing about me."

"No, you don’t."

She put one hand over mine and gave me a very determined look. "Critter, if it’s that bad somebody will tell me, so you may as well let me find out now."

"Oh, stop being so reasonable when I’m all pissed off. And I get to say I told you so. And I have to confess one thing. It’s kind of about me. Well, both of us, but--"

"Run it back up to the top so I can read." I did as I was told. Katharine leaned forward, squinting at the screen, then stood up. "Baby, will you go get my glasses? If I’m going to get as upset as you were, I want to make sure I read it right."

"Sure," I said.

I got about as far as the door when I heard "That miserable sonofabitch!"

"What did I tell ya?" I said, grinning in spite of myself. "Still want your glasses or have you had enough?"

She looked over her shoulder at me. "No, not nearly. I’m reading every word of this." Then she swiveled the chair around to face me. "Okay, just tell me this much. Did I get this right? Is he actually telling the whole world that Pookie is not our child? Can he do that? I mean, can he just say things like that?" She stopped, frowned, seemed about to go on and then just sat there with her mouth open as though waiting for words that would not come.

I walked back into the room and playfully pushed her mouth shut with two fingers. "Gonna catch some flies if you’re not careful, Sweets. But now you see what I was reacting to. Technically, he’s just saying she’s not MY child. Or, well, he’s implying that she might not be."

"That is just not fair," she said, and I’d swear I saw a few tears forming in the corners of her eyes. "You’re not in show business. I’m the public figure in the family, not you. People may talk crap about me, but it just kinda goes with the territory. The only thing they ought to be able to judge you for is if you’re operating on a dog and he winds up with his nose and tail sewed together or something."

"I don’t think fair is a concept with him. Besides, that’s what I get for falling in love with a celebrity."

She stood and wrapped her arms around me. "Am I worth it?"

"You’ve gotta be kidding me," I said, squeezing her as tight as I could. But over her shoulder I could still see that loathesome headline: "KitKat’s Candyman Not Sweet Enough?" and even worse, a picture of the Huntington Reproductive Center, which thanks to Duncan Donitz, the whole world knew as a place that does a lot of work with infertile couples seeking in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. And worse yet, the couple walking out the front door looked an awful lot like us.

                                                                    **********

So where should I start? I guess the logical place is with that manifestation of current pop culture known as the celebrity blogger, the vilest among whom is without doubt our nemesis Duncan Donitz. No, of course that’s not his real name. He was born Duncan Renaldo, but as my dad informed me, that was also the name of early TV’s original Cisco Kid, and lest anyone have a memory long enough to dredge that up, Duncan required a new handle. My father is sometimes a treasure trove of knowledge and would make a wonderful Jeopardy contestant if they had a category for totally useless information that comes in handy at times no one would ever suspect. There had also once been an Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been some kind of bigwig in the Nazi war machine, so the surname was probably something more than the worst pun ever.

Being ridiculous evidently had nothing to do with anything. These days as long as you got yourself noticed, that was all that was required. If the name stuck in people’s minds, it was good. And anything was better than managing a fast food restaurant, playing the saxophone in a second rate local jazz band, and envying everyone with a star on the Walk of Fame. Somewhere in there, young Duncan discovered that he had a way with words and absolutely no compunction about using them in any combination that would draw attention to himself. He seemed to think of himself as both a musician and a journalist but unfortunately resembled Elton John more than Peter Jennings.

The phrase meteoric rise could have been coined precisely for him. But then hot air always rises, doesn’t it. Law of physics or something. Somewhere along the way he had singled Katharine out for attention. I never had enough time to spend online to notice him, but my friend Tommy Lowengard, along with my then ten-year-old son Ajay, more than made up for that and gradually introduced me to the wonderful world of online fandom. And blogging. Our friend Duncan blogged simply under his name, which had lost the German Admiral’s umlaut for ease of typing. Duncandonitz.com, I soon learned, was a word to be feared among the rising stars of Hollywood show business.

At first he’d been relatively kind to Katharine, albeit a bit fixated on her physical attributes to the point where I wondered if he watched American Idol with the sound turned off. He contended that if more people had done that, she’d have won handily. I didn’t mind that he’d been the first to come up with pictures of the infamous yellow dress incident. After all, the raunchy follow-up posts weren’t really his fault. They were just his readers, or so I rationalized. Then came the Ryan Seacrest stuff. By Top Three week Katharine’s nerves were shot, and her judgement along with them. That was when someone caught us in the coffee shop and sent him the photo. It was a lousy picture because Katharine’s hair was obscuring her face and I was turned sideways, but sure enough, the printed version did look a hell of a lot like Seacrest. Katharine had simply refused to reply, leaving Ryan to defend himself, which he could do with a lot more sincerity.

He was also the one who broke the story about our day at the beach during the first few weeks of the Idol Tour. Before the fact, we’d had no idea her doctor ordered absence was going to cause such a foofaraw, and the trappings of celebrity were still new to both of us, so we made no special attempt to hide. If you follow Katharine around with a camera long enough, sooner or later she’ll do something you have to get a picture of. It might be dorky, athletic, or just something that highlights her incredible beauty in a new way, but there will be a moment you’ll need to capture on film or spend the rest of your life cursing yourself for being an idiot. Shortly thereafter, Donitz announced "This Kat Loves The Water!" and he really had far too much fun with those bikini shots.

Luckily there’d been only one picture that showed my son Ajay, who had accompanied us to the beach, because I had no desire to have his face splashed all over the Internet. If he had been any more recognizable than he was, a lot of our problems might have been solved early, because I would have wrung Donitz’ neck.

As it was, I had given in to a mad urge to contact him and state my opinion of the whole thing. I should never have done that, because it irritated him and started giving him ideas. When she broke her foot on tour, he was on that like a duck on a bug before anything could even happen. Would she quit the tour? She obviously preferred to be home frolicking in the surf with her boyfriend or posing for glamour shots for this or that magazine.

Now that really honked me off. She never missed a day after the initial three weeks, even if she had to hobble around the stage in a bulky, awkward walking cast. And I told him so. Right in the comment section of his blog. Under my own name. There had been a time when SoCal Animal Care Centers was doing its own Internet advertising, and one of the gimmicks was a section of the website called Ask Dr. Chris. I’d been a little wary of the whole thing at first, but finally I came to accept the fact that little kids seemed to like my on-line persona and grown-up ladies occasionally took to him as well. An interesting period in my life, that. But the website seemed to work. It gave us a presence, a voice, and a face. And a name that could be stolen. I never really found out by.whom but I had a strong suspicion.

Maybe I just didn’t understand the concept of fanning in general, but the more I learned about it the more amazed I was. My friend Tommy Lowengard, my dad, and Ajay filled me in on everything they knew. assuring me that this was the equivalent of jumping into the deep end of the pool, because Idol fans were frequently rabid. Dad was a vintage TV freak and aside from his collection of I Love Lucy and You Bet Your Life, probably had a tape or DVD of every movie Fred Astaire had ever lifted a foot in. The night he heard Katharine sing Someone To Watch Over Me, he told me if I didn’t marry her, he would. I refrained from asking him what he intended to do with my stepmother. Tommy was fretting and chafing in the position of sales and advertising manager for a local newspaper because he wanted to be his own boss. And he was totally fascinated by show business. He didn’t want to be in the spotlight but thought it might be interesting to direct the careers of people who were.

We’d all been somewhat amused when one of Katharine’s fellow Idols had been embarrassed by someone posting at the official American Idol site claiming to be his girlfriend. There had been nights when the three of us, linked into an IM chat, would look for what mischief she’d stirred up lately and then laugh about it. There was really no way I could have kept Ajay out of it, and I saw no reason to let him find out everything he knew from his contemporaries. I wanted to monitor the inevitable. So we not only worked out at the same karate academy, we also occasionally shared jokes about things he wouldn’t have been legally able to see at the movies.

The intense level of fanning hardly let up when Idol Five finished. I was amazed how much time you could actually spend in front of a computer screen just listening to people "talk." Sometimes we Three Musketeers would find a fan site to monitor while we IM chatted intermittently. One night a couple of regulars called KatzNumOneCaliFan and McHotstuff had been innocently providing information about some of the local theater Katharine had done right before Idol when all of a sudden another voice added slyly that she’d had more going on at the NoHo Arts Center than just playing Isabella Linton to Robert Landolfi’s Heathcliff during her run in Wuthering Heights.

"Where do they get those names?" Tommy had typed, and I could almost hear him snickering.

"Who knows. Let’s just follow this for awhile," I’d said. Then I noticed the latest poster’s name. He was calling himself Dr. Chris. "What the hell?" I typed furiously to Tommy. "Who is that? How can he use my name?"

"It’s not your name on this board," he replied. "You aren’t logged in, you’re just reading. If you tried to register under that name, you couldn’t."

"But he’s impersonating me!"

"It would appear so."

"Well what would he want to do that for?"

"Wait and see," Tommy said reasonably. "Maybe we’ll find out."

The other posters were not quite as nonplussed as I was, but they were certainly wary. "Who are you?" NumOne asked bluntly.

"You see my name," he wrote back cryptically.

"You got a last name?" McHotstuff asked.

In a few seconds came the reply: All it said was "E-I-E-I-O."

Everyone in the forum started nagging at him for details. He, or she, hung back, teased, made little half statements accompanied by a lot of emoticons, started writing in minuscule type, saying he was afraid a mod might see his post and suspend him. "Now what?" I typed in angry frustration. "It looks like Munchkinspeak."

"Select and copy into your Write Mail. It’s right at the top of your screen, isn’t it?" Tommy typed back. "Should look fairly normal."

"I’m on it," I said, pecking away and swearing under my breath. "He says they were both typecast as sweet young thing and bully because that’s what Robert Landolfi does to his women in real life. What in bloody hell is that all about?"

"Back later," Ajay said. True to his word, he checked back in a few minutes. "According to the imdb, Landolfi’s actually got the cops after him for beating the dickens out of his girlfriend, and it’s not the first time."

"What?! Where did you find that?"

"I told you. The Internet Movie Database. They’ve got the goods on everybody. Forty million hits a month!" Ajay said exuberantly.

"You know too damn much," I muttered, realizing that I was typing everything I was thinking.

Then the de facto leader of the little online group we were watching, one DyingOfTheLight, said "This came up briefly ages ago and we sort of mutually decided to let it fade. Too many rumors about her as it is."

But Dr. Chris didn’t seem to want to let it die. "You can google it and find out that he’s definitely on those lists of people who have passed courses and cleared out their psyches, or whatever they do. They make it all public. Her name’s there too. All you have to do is know where to look. They’re all scum. They had no right to make her name public."

"I’d never say anything like that!" I typed. "Not in a public forum anyway. That’s not me."

"Yeah, but they don’t know that," Tommy answered. "Besides, you do have a temper. You got on that blogger’s butt once before."

"That was different," I insisted. "That was personal, between me and him."

"You made it public," Tommy persisted. "You called him out in his own blog."

There followed a very open discussion about who the interloper might be, and of course he joined in periodically to defend himself. Finally he asked what he’d have to do to make them believe him. Someone suggested providing some information that only I, or he, would know. Then before they had time to answer, he said "How about this?" and gave them the address of Katharine’s parents’ house. I didn’t know about them, but I was impressed. I was also horrified. For a few moments I just sat there with my hands dangling above the keyboard, fingers waggling, wishing I could join in the discussion but not knowing how.

"There’s a little thing that says Register at the top of the page," Tommy suggested. "You could always give them another name and jump in the fray."

"Dammit, I want my own name!" I said, realizing instantly how stupid and childish I sounded.

"Sorry, Buddy, he’s hijacked it," Tommy said.

My stomach suddenly felt a little queasy. I’d heard of Robert Landolfi, a Broadway actor who had made a few movies but never actually reached stellar heights. He was a tall, rangy Italian with a rich baritone voice and commanding stage presence, and I could see how he could easily have swept a young girl off her feet. He was everything she wanted to be, or close enough. I’d been off chasing a Nordic Ice Princess lawyer who loved riding horses and beating the pants off male lawyers in court, and Katharine was cleansing her body and soul and being taken in by a bad tempered jerk who liked to take out his frustrations on the closest woman. She had once told me about the night he was supposedly widely favored to win a Tony for his Heathcliff, but didn’t, so he excused himself, found the nearest washroom, and smashed his fist through a mirror. I just didn’t know he ever did that sort of thing to other living beings as well. His reputation for being temperamental and difficult may have been why he’d wound up playing Heathcliff in a 99-seat off-Broadway theater—3,000 miles off.

And Katharine had spent several months of her young life madly in love with him, revering him for his talent and his accomplishments, wanting nothing more than to be like him, or, failing that, to just be with him for as long as he’d allow it. After taking my own little side jaunt to various Internet sources to read about him, I thought I was going to be sick, and this was months, years even after the fact.

So we checked in obsessively every night there for a time, the Three Musketeers wanting to defend our queen but not knowing how. It seemed best to stay out of the game, even though the urge to jump in and challenge this pretender, this thief, was almost overwhelming. We tried to think of a way to look for clues to his identity as he played with the regulars on the board, plying them with bits of information that would sometimes almost make sense. Sometimes he would say something so salacious that I was reminded of the girl who liked to discuss her Idol lover’s dimensions and proclivities. I wished there was some way to send about 10,000 volts over the telephone lines and blast him into a French fry.

Then he gave himself away. It was Tommy who spotted it. "He even sounds like you," he said. "No wonder he’s stringing them along. They’re suspicious of him, but he’s good."

"What do you mean, he sounds like me?"

"Well, for one thing, he keeps saying bloody this and that. That’s not a very common expression on this side of the pond. Where’d you ever get that from anyway?"

"My dad says it. Don’t ask me where he picked it up because I haven’t a clue. So how would this character know I say that?"

"Maybe it’s something he says too," Ajay supplied. "What if it’s just one of those unexpected coincidences? Wait a minute." Before long he was back on the IM. "I just looked at a bunch of old blogs real quick, and you know who just loves to use that word?"

"Don’t tell me. Does his name start with D?"

"Both of ‘em," my son said triumphantly.

"Well that sneaky little sonofa—"

"Go down and pound on the weight bag, Dad. I don’t want my favorite parental unit to wind up in jail," Ajay said.

"Yeah, it’s time the kid was in bed," Tommy said. "We’ll all talk about what to do next tomorrow, okay?"

Eventually I simply left a comment on Donitz’ blog telling him that Thou Shalt Not Steal was considered a very serious breach of etiquette in some circles, especially where names and reputations were concerned. It might have sounded a little cryptic to an outsider, but I was sure he’d read it and had no doubt what I was talking about. I reminded him that when I’d qualified for my first degree Black Belt, I’d smashed through four one-inch pine boards with my fist, a feat I hoped never to have to repeat, but I didn’t tell him that. And I signed it Dr. Chris.

And that was the last my doppelganger was heard from, as far as I know. But I don’t think the king of the celebrity bloggers ever forgave me for threatening him. In fact I was probably the author of a lot of my own problems in that respect, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

I never told Katharine about him. I guess it all just felt a little creepy to me, and I was afraid it would to her as well.

Actually just talking about Robert Landolfi made me uneasy. There had been a night when I’d been channel surfing and come across a PBS broadcast that looked like a good break from anything I’d seen for awhile. Katharine had been in the kitchen experimenting with spaghetti sauce but soon reappeared in the living room when I changed channels. "What’s that?" she said, sounding a little like someone who had just discovered an unidentifiable substance on the floor and narrowly missed stepping in it.

"Believe it or not, I occasionally watch something other than martial arts movies," I said. "This is actually pretty good."

"I know," she said, "I was in that show. Well, not that one, a local version, if you recall."

"Oh, that’s right. You were."

Two youngsters were standing on what appeared to be a high hill, silhouetted against the sky, singing a spirited and teasing duet in which he claimed that his father had been a Chinese emperor and his mother a Hindu queen, and he’d been stolen from them as a child and brought to England. She laughed at his fanciful tale and sang back to him that she was the queen of the moors, and he was now her servant who should fill her arms with heather to prove his devotion. Wuthering Heights was another of the guilty pleasures I’d been introduced to by my stepmother, who was a barracuda in the courtroom but a total weepy romantic when it came to her favorite books, movies and music. I respected one side of her and loved the other.

"You realize this is the version Robert filmed for Great Performances, don’t you?"

"Oh. Broadway Bob’s in this?"

"Yes, he is. You really want to watch it?" She waved a big wooden stirring spoon at me. Here, in her own home, playing around at cooking in her own kitchen, wearing baggy sweats and not a spot of makeup, she looked like the girl next door, and not someone who had just recently been the latest big screen Bond girl. True, she’d only been around long enough to sing one song in a jazz club and then get killed, but hey, Bond was a legend, and she had looked and sounded fantastic.

Don’t ask what demon got ahold of me then. "Yeah. I think I do want to," I said. "I can be mature enough to watch this. Unless you don’t want to."

"I’m over it," she said, then of course had to sing the line. "Actually this show’s got some of the most beautiful music in it you’ll ever hear."

"And voices?" I said. What an idiot. How far was I going to push this?

She let out a sigh. "Yes. Voices. He has one of those voices. When they switch over to the grown-up version of Cathy and Heathcliff you’ll see. I’m going to turn this sauce down to simmer and set the timer. Then I’m coming in to watch with you."

When we were curled up together on the couch, it felt really silly that I should harbor such a dislike for a man I’d actually never even met. He was a two-dimensional figure standing maybe a foot high on a little electronic screen, listening to his Catherine sing to him of her unhappy marriage to another man. "We are as different as frost from fire, you and I are the same."

"Did you feel that way about him?" I asked suddenly. "That you were the same? Same world, same dream, same life?"

"As compared to what? Critter, you have to pick everything apart to see how it works. I don’t. I just accept things. See, when you tell me you love me, I accept it. And I expect the same thing from you. Tell me something. What did you like to do when you were a little kid? What were your favorite games? What was fun?"

"I built models. I made plastic dinosaur skeletons. I took stuff apart and put it back together again."

"Of course you did. And you still do. I liked to play hide and seek and go on Easter egg hunts. I loved surprises. And I really really loved performing for people. We’re just different. But that’s okay. I already have me, I don’t need somebody just like me."

"You have a funny way of putting things together," I said, but what she said made me smile.

"That’s my line," she said.

Just when I was starting to feel better, Robert Landolfi stepped onto the screen and sang the wildly romantic part of Heathcliff the gypsy orphan turned gentleman like it was the role he was born to play. His resonant baritone even gave me goosebumps.

"Tell me something," Katharine whispered, as though she were afraid to disturb my enjoyment of the performance. "I’ve had other boyfriends. Why is he the one that sets you off?"

"That’s a stupid question."

"Oh, now I’m stupid."

"Sorry, bad way to put it. But you know why." She stubbornly refused to say anything so I had to answer myself. "He was the only one that mattered. He was the one who really got under your skin. You think Kevin and Alex, and Frick and Frack from Boston are gonna keep me awake nights?"

"That was Frank and Frank. God knows how I managed to date two guys with the same name at the same time, and then I introduce my roommate to one of them and she says ‘Oh, which one are you?’ I could have killed her."

"But I’m right."

She took a deep breath. "Yes. You’re right. He got to me. Bigtime. Just like Jenna got to you. She was the one who sent you straight to the bottle when she left. You didn’t do that for anybody else, did you?"

"No, I didn’t." Jenna had been so much like one half of my stepmother, whom I adored, that I had naively assumed the other half must have been in there somewhere as well. Blonde, blue eyed, and every bit as tall as me, Jenna was the model of controlled passion in the courtroom and every man’s dream of uncontrolled passion when there was no one around but us. But she was never totally there. Just enough to keep me hooked. And when she left, it was suddenly and forever. I hate unsolved mysteries and missing pieces and had vowed that there would be no more Nordic Ice Queens for me. Give me someone a little younger, softer, and less driven, or at least driven in a different direction. "You know what drove me the craziest?" I asked, and went right on talking because of course I didn’t expect an answer. "I was never quite sure why she left and she wouldn’t tell me. Sometimes I think she just got tired of me. And tired of trying to make me fit into her world when I just didn’t."

In agony over the knowledge that the woman he fairly worshipped was now married to another, the television Heathcliff stormed, "If he loved you with all the power of his soul for his entire lifetime he could not love you as much as I do in a single day!" I think I was looking at Katharine so hard that she felt it and turned her head toward me.

"That’s a great line," I said. "I couldn’t possibly improve on it."

"Yes you could," she said. "Maybe not with words." We seemed to just slowly drift toward each other until our lips met in what might have been the softest, sweetest kiss we had ever exchanged. In fact it seemed almost out of synch with the blazing passion emanating from the TV and what you might have thought would be a driving need to somehow claim her for mine, given the circumstances. But for whatever reason, it felt far less like combustion than like melting and flowing together, forming an indistinguishable whole, if only for a few moments.

We came slowly back to awareness of the television in time to see one of literature’s most famous and powerful death scenes, as Catherine dies in Heathcliff’s arms and he sings his tortured "I cannot live without my life, I cannot die without my soul!" and begs his Cathy to haunt him so that he will not have to live without her.

I was actually glad when the stove timer went off because I was afraid I was going to do something really strange like start crying. "I’ll get it," I said, glad of the excuse. "I’m a little more dressed than you are."

"It’s so nice finally having my own place," Katharine said, "because I’d have a heck of a time explaining to my mother why my bra had disappeared."

"Your mother would know."

"And she wouldn’t worry about it at all if she knew I’d been with you. She likes you. I think if we ever broke up she’d get mad at me."

"Now why would you say that?" I said, a little snappish. "Something going on I don’t know about?"

"No! Not on my part anyway." She crossed her arms across herself as though suddenly embarrassed.

"Excuse me, I won’t look," I said, walking into the kitchen.

"I was just making a joke," she said, sounding a little exasperated and a little hurt. "When you get that kind of edge in your voice, you sound like a different person. I’m not sure I want that guy to look at me."

"Hey, this stuff tastes pretty good," I said from the kitchen. I was beginning to feel like a jerk and thought maybe I could change the subject.

"Don’t sound so surprised. I can actually cook a little bit." She held up two fingers a half inch apart. "A very little bit. Chris? Can I say one more thing about him and then never talk about him again?"

"That might be a good thing for both of us to do, or not do," I said, shifting pots around and putting the pasta on to boil.

"Bob never had pets," she said. "Robert, I should say. Everybody always called him Robert. Except you. You and your Broadway Bob stuff. Anyway, all he ever had was fish. And he’d forget to feed them. And they’d die. I was always finding dead fish floating in the tank, and I thought it was gross and cruel and just unnecessary. And when I’d say anything he’d just look at me like I was nuts. ‘They’re just fish,’ he’d say. Just fish. That should have told me something right there. In fact I think it did. Your pets are your friends. To him they were just decorations."

I thought briefly about the cats that ruled the roost at my parents’ house: Carmen, the sweet Maine Coon queen; Odin, her feisty but lovable son; and big old one-eyed Lucky, the ugliest black cat in the world. I’d found the first two wandering around in the yard scavenging for food. Lucky had come into the clinic half dead after being scraped up from the side of a freeway. I’d rebuilt him to the point where we referred to him as The Bionic Cat and then, having invested that much in him with no owner in evidence, kept him myself. "They’re not just friends, they’re family members," I said. "Now get your buns in here and help with the salad."

"Hang on," Katharine said, sounding strangely muffled. I looked in but she had disappeared behind the couch. In a few seconds an arm protruded up into the air waving a bra. "Now I won’t have to flop while I chop."

"Gross," I said, grinning in spite of myself. "Like you’d have that problem. C’mon, I’m even less of a cook than you are. I need all the help I can get."

She got herself put together and joined me in the kitchen. "See, we got through that okay, didn’t we?" she said, hugging me from behind. "Turn around, let’s get all our smoochin’ done now, because between that sauce and the garlic bread, we’re both gonna get pretty lethal."

A moment later, with my head still buried in her hair so I didn’t have to look her in the face, I said, "Can I spoil the moment one more time?"

"You mean with something worse than garlic breath?"

"Much. And I promise this is my last question about him ever."

"It better be."

"What really happened with you and him? I know you make bad jokes about how he dumped you, but—"

"You want details?"

"No, no, just—"

She tried to pull away from me but I wouldn’t let her so she just leaned back far enough to look at me. "I’ve never been quite sure. I think he just got tired of me."

"Hell of a thing to have in common, isn’t it?" I said.

"Yeah," she said. "But you know what? My spaghetti sauce is going to make up for everything. It’s the one thing I’ve really figured out how to cook. Don’tcha just love Italian? Food! I mean food. Don’t you start with me again."

"Actually this is my Irish year," I said. And then we really did leave it at that.

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