I came home one day to find that Verdie had not only cut her hair into little red spikes, shaved off her eyebrows, and covered her front teeth with a gold-and-diamond grill, but that the top of her chest had also been tattooed with an eagle carrying an American flag in its talons.

            “This is too much,” I said. “Finally, it has gone too far.”

            “Calm down, Steve. The tattoo is some special kind of ink that will fade in six weeks; it was too elaborate for them to be able to wash it off every evening. It’s integral to my character.”

            I dropped the groceries onto the countertop—formica, but we planned to change out for granite soon. “What have they done to you?” As she grinned, I ran a thumb over her bumpy, metal teeth.

            “You always say that,” she told me. “You should know by now that I’ll be someone else in just a few weeks. I mean, you used to be the one making me that way.”

            I worked as a writer; in fact, I first met Verdie while creating plotlines for her soap opera. Normally, I would have been more prepared for this makeover—I might even have been able to convince the other writers that her character didn’t need such a drastic transformation of appearance, that Verdie was a fabulous actor who could convey the change using her body as an instrument—all true convictions, because my Verdie was absolutely the best—but I’d quit the writing room a month earlier so that I would have time to finish my novel. Writing was a solitary endeavor, but for TV, they expected five or seven of you to come together and agree on a plotline. It was insanity. That’s why I had decided to return to the true writers’ craft: the novel.

            “Consider this new look lucky,” she said. “I mean, Verdie is getting a lot of attention lately. The audience loves her.”

            I should explain here that my wife is not talking about herself in the third person. Her character’s name is actually Verdie, and her given name is Crystal. But before I was hired on to write for the show, I spent two solid weeks watching every episode of House of Love Afire, staring enthralled as Verdie’s hair and clothes and manner morphed because that was her character’s schtick, and then, after my successful interview, I spent several more weeks writing for the character Verdie, thinking of this woman only as Verdie, before I met her. Then after I met her, well, I found myself on set all the time, as often as I could, doing “research.” Any excuse to be near her, talk to her. We were married a year ago, after dating for ten months, and I’ve never been able to think of my wife under any name other than Verdie.

            “Verdie, honey,” I said, “what will it be next? Will I come home one day to find you a—a—a man?”

            “Any other husband would be excited,” she said. “Getting all these different looks from the same woman.”

            I shrugged. I was forty-four years old. I didn’t need excitement: I needed stability. I needed a comfortable domestic life. That was why, once I’d started working at home, doing the novel thing, I sent our maid away. It was too confusing to have someone else there, someone not a part of the family.

            “At least tell me this,” I said, “are you the same, sweet Verdie? Or is your personality going to match”—I waved a hand to encompass the hardcore look of her—“this?” Verdie without her eyebrows, with her hair like a hundred bees poking their stingers towards the sky, looked dangerous. I didn’t necessarily want to jump into bed with that sharp-beaked eagle tattoo.

            She shrugged. “The writers haven’t told me yet. I sure do miss having you in there. It was so nice to get the inside scoop. To have you close and not here at home doing god knows what.”

            Though I had just hauled in a carload of provisions, we decided to go out to dinner. At the Mediterranean place, we sat on pillows on the floor and ordered hummus.

            “How was your day?” I asked her.

            “ ‘On’ or ‘off’?”

            “ ‘On.’ ”

            “Pretty good. Verdie’s plotlines are really revving up.” As Verdie started to tell me more, a group of twenty-somethings strolled by and stared pop-eyed at my wife—she really did stand out from the blond and boob-jobbed masses of LA. Verdie liked to say that one of the best things about her ever-changing look was that people didn’t bother her for autographs, but deep down, I knew she wanted people to recognize her. Verdie looked disappointed when the kids continued past us, but I was relieved. I’d foreseen that marrying a star would be like this, always holding your breath, waiting for other people to pass judgement on your spouse, but you can never really imagine the extent of your embarrassment until you’re right there in it.

            “Verdie,” I said, to distract her, “don’t you want some falafel?”

            Without eyebrows, her blue eyes faded deeper into the flesh of her face. “You know, sometimes I wonder if you have an ‘on’ and ‘off’ life, too, even though you’re not filming.”

            “What do you mean by that?” I stabbed a cucumber with my fork.
            “Or maybe that everyone has these two different lives. Not just you. But you, for example: there are times when you seem to forget that I’m a real person. I wonder if that means you’re ‘on’ or ‘off.’ ” She smiled, but inwardly, like a secret to herself. “My character loves falafel, but I hate it.”

            “You have the strangest ideas.” The cucumber chilled my back tooth. “I’m distracted, is all. Everyone gets distracted by their work.”

            “Now that you’re home all alone, you shouldn’t be too distracted. How’s the novel?”

            I tramped down my panic and said, “Fine.”

            When we returned, slightly tipsy from the Mediterranean wine, she pushed me up against the wall of the front hall.

            “I love you so much,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what color they make my hair or how many prosthetics they glue to my nose—I’m the same inside, and my insides love you.”

            I grabbed the soft flesh spilling out from the top of her tight jeans and maneuvered her toward the bedroom, where it was dark. I love my wife, but sometimes, especially after she’d just undergone a big change, I want to do it in the dark and imagine her the way she was when we first met: her hair long and silky and black with platinum bangs, the lithe body, the damp-lovely eyes. She looked just the way I had written her, my first big assignment as the new guy. A rush of warmth and power overtook me: this woman was basically my creation.

            “Steve, my god,” Verdie said in the dark, “you see? I knew it. I knew that a new look would turn you on.”

            I kissed her mouth—that part of her always felt the same—to shut her up.

            Over the following week, I gradually stopped startling every early morning when I dragged into the kitchen to find a biker chick wearing my boxer shorts and watching the coffee percolate. Verdie was happy because she was getting a lot of air time. The plot was: an ex-boyfriend had started stalking her, and she had to hide from him, so she got herself a tough-looking disguise.

            “Do you and Howie”—that was the ex-boyfriend’s name—“have any scenes together? Does he touch you?”

            “My disguise is so good”—Verdie twirled happily, showing off her hedgehog hair—“that he walks right past me once and doesn’t even notice.”

            That was a relief. Before Verdie and I got together, I suspected that Howie was vying for her.

            Verdie said, “It’s definitely like they want to keep us apart. You know? I get the feeling that Verdie has been pushed into the realm of untouchables—the realm of old ladies.”

            This concern of hers was ancient news. I said what I always said: “Think about this: now you stand out, and not some random man they throw you in a scene with.”

            “But people want to see sex,” she said. “That’s when they really pay attention, when they stop folding the laundry. That’s what the show’s title is all about.”

            “House of Love Afire? That doesn’t mean sex. It means domestic turmoil.”

            Verdie laughed. “Steve, you’re so dense sometimes. It means sex. It does.”

            The day after this conversation, when we were headed out to dinner at the Afghan place, Verdie insisted on driving.

            “But I always drive,” I said. 

            On the road, she tailgated old men in Lincolns and flashed the high beams until they pulled to the shoulder. At a red light, a guy on a Harley motored up next to Verdie and licked his lips, then rotated his hips suggestively against the leather seat. Strange that that type, aggressively masculine, could be so turned on by this forbidding-looking woman. When Verdie handed the car off to the valet, I stumbled out, relieved that we’d made it.

            Looking over the menu, she said, “Why are we eating this sissy food, anyway?” and then she ordered beer instead of her regular wine and burped, actually burped, right there at the table.

            “Honey,” I said, “was everything okay at work today?”

            “Pretty good.” She nodded. “Verdie got invited to do an initiation ritual with this gang she just sort of ran into out in the desert. I bet it will make a great scene.”

            I nodded, though I would never know. Ever since I’d quit writing for the show, I’d quit watching it, too. It was trash, I could see that now, especially since I was no longer around to elevate it a bit, or as much as you could with a soap opera. “Sounds nice,” I told her and patted her hand. Sometimes Verdie’s dedication to her work overwhelmed her. There was the time that she had to play her own evil twin and would do things like spit on my hamburger or dump over a tray of earrings in her favorite boutique; and the time she had amnesia and would forget to show up to our dinner dates or park her car in the neighbor’s driveway instead of ours. She couldn’t help it, it was all a part of her craft, and because she put up with me, in the old days, raving about my demented writer colleagues, and more recently with me pacing, brooding, silently plotting my novel, I had to accept the way that she worked, too. But sometimes I longed to change her.

            On the drive home, she barreled over a raccoon in the road and said “Yeah!” to the puff of fur rising in the rearview mirror.

            Days, when Verdie was shooting, I sat in front of my computer and wished that we had a cat. If I had a cat sitting on my lap, I would be able to write. But Verdie said that since I had let the maid go without consulting her first, there would be no one to vacuum up all the cat hair.

            So sometimes I clicked the keyboard at random, as fast as I could, to see if chance or fate or whatever might give me some good words to work with. It never did, and I just ended up with a page of gibberish. The window over my desk looked out at the Hollywood hills, all that nature making me nostalgic for a time when things were simpler, when people lived off the land and stayed together no matter what because there was no alternative.

            A few weeks later, when Verdie came home, I said, “Oh god, honey—have you been in an accident?” She looked as if she’d fallen into a garbage truck and tumbled around a bit.

            She laughed, showing veneers that blacked out her incisors, leaving her with rabbity front teeth. Her hair must have been shoulder-length, but it was so tangled that it stuck straight out from her head, and she had a smudge down her chin that looked chunky, like dried minestrone.

            “What do you think?” She twirled, showing off holes in the seat of her dirty mom jeans and more unidentifiable smears on her long-sleeved shirt.

            “Let’s clean you up,” I said, leading the way to our en suite, but Verdie refused.

            “There’s no way that Verdie would have access right now to some double showerheads.”

            “Come on,” I said, “you don’t need to stick that close to fact, do you?”

            “I’m just starting on this path. I need to make sure that I can find it. I need to immerse myself in this Verdie, you know?”

            Because of the perversity of American audiences, Verdie’s new incarnation was a huge hit. Her popularity skyrocketed, and she proudly brought home a printout of her internet ratings, as if showing me a report card.

            “That’s nice,” I told her. “That’s great. You’ve hit your mark. So now it should be time for you to take a shower. I really think that—”

            “Oh,” she said, “you just want to get me naked, don’t you?”

            “No,” I said, with more vehemence than I’d intended.

            “And then what would you do to me, huh? What do I have that you want?” She quit her brassy tone in order to whisper to me, “Pretend like you have crack, okay? You have crack and I don’t have money, but I’d do anything to get it from you. Anything.”

            “Honey,” I said, feeling alarmed, “did you possibly go so far as to… try the crack, maybe? For your role?”

            “Come on.” She was pulling off clothes to reveal a body that had not been washed in days. She said, “Just for one little bump, you can put it in me. One bump!”

            After this, I started to feel grateful that Verdie wanted to bed down on the back patio, which gave her the stiff walk and skinned knees of the crackwhores she’d studied in Venice Beach. This went on for about three weeks, and then she came home looking sexy as hell. It was my worst nightmare.

            She had red hair—a natural-color red—in soft curls down to her shoulders, red eyebrows, a shimmering green dress slit up her thigh, eyes now green, and they had somehow lightened her complexion and dotted a few perfect freckles across her nose.

            “Look at you. Wow,” I said, my heart sinking.

            “Vixen, right?” She laughed. “They’re making Verdie quite the vixen.”

            She wanted to go out to the Mexican place because, I was sure, that’s where all the tall, dark strangers liked to drink tequila.

            As we headed for the car, she held limply to my arm so that I could catch her in case one of her heels sunk into the earth, and every few steps she would stumble against me, pressing her breast into my arm. She smelled like lavender and mint. If I hadn’t been so worried, I would have been incredibly aroused.

            At the restaurant, our regular server brought us a huge basket of salty chips and margaritas right off. But Verdie sent her drink back; she wanted just tequila in a tumbler.

            “They’re making you lose weight again, huh?” I asked.

            “I’m glad about it, too. I hate these things.” She grabbed at the couple of tiny rolls around her stomach, the ones I had gotten used to and started to really like to press my face against.

            Verdie picked up a chip and brushed the salt from it, then pressed it between the folds of her paper napkin. When she was satisfied with the triangle-shaped grease spot left on the napkin, she nibbled at the chip’s corner.

            “What’s the deal?” I said. “How much have they given you of the plot?”

            “Not much.” She nibbled again. “Nothing, really.”

            Those empty words set my imagination on fire: Verdie meets a new boyfriend now that she’s gone back to her femme look, meets a fiancé, even, or goes on a bender and takes ten lovers in a night. Verdie at the center of a gang bang, and afterward, in therapy, she falls in love with her psychologist.

            In real life, the men in the restaurant were all staring at her. Their dark and hooded eyes, just the sort of eyes a woman might fall in love with, glanced from the amber liquid in their glasses to the auburn liquid of my wife’s hair and back again.

            I reached across the table and took her hand, the right one, hoping that she would cover my hand with her left, which would show off the big, canary-yellow diamond on her finger. Though she had picked it out and paid for it herself, it showed that she was mine. But instead she used her left hand to nibble a chip, the same chip that she’d been working on since we sat down.

            “They might be writing in a new character,” she said.

            “Oh? What makes you think that?” I took my hand back and gulped at the margarita.

            “Just because they haven’t for a while, and you know how they like to switch out minors. Keep the fans guessing.”

            “That’s true,” I said. “Well, let me know when you find out who it is. You know I like to keep up on all the ‘on’ gossip.”

            “I know,” she said. “Sometimes I think that’s half the reason you stay with me.” She plastered a hand across her mouth.

            “You didn’t mean that,” I said.

            “I didn’t mean that.”

            Her slip had shocked me, but in a thrilling sort of way. It meant that she worried over my love for her; she fretted that she might not be enough for me. “I want you, Verdie,” I told her.

            She brushed a hand across her forehead, newly unlined and probably sore, and the pass of her hand changed her confused expression back to content.

            After that, we had a pleasant dinner. I ordered a chicken chimichanga and she ordered a volcano salad, where all the vegetables are cut in tall rectangles and then leaned against each other to form a cone. We chatted about what kind of car we should buy next while she stole a bite here and there from my plate. Those delicious rolls around her middle might not vanish so quickly, after all.

            That night in our bedroom, when I unzipped her green dress, I discovered the faintest outline of the eagle tattoo’s widespread wings.

            “It’s almost entirely faded,” she said, tracing a finger over it. “It’s weird, but—I kind of miss my tattoo.”

            “Don’t. It was horrible.”

            “That’s the reason I miss it. You know? People do horrible things to their bodies. Or, their bodies are horrible. Which made the tattoo fit.”

            She understood when I didn’t respond, my Verdie; she let us grapple in the dark instead.

            A week later, a day at the computer: novel, novel, no-vel, no-el was all that I wrote. The Hollywood Hills really are just hills, but from our house, or at least, from the window of my office, they look monstrous. Sometimes I spend the whole eight hours daydreaming about scaling those mountains and all the perils that would befall me if I tried. Verdie and I are not what you would call outdoorsy types.

            When I heard the front door open, I felt rescued from my work. I found Verdie in the breakfast nook wearing very short shorts and sipping from a salty dog. Her whole self glowed.

            I didn’t want to ask, but I knew that she would tell me either way, so I said, “What is it?”

            She pushed one of the little brown boxes that she had started to bring home for our suppers, healthy takeout recommended by the nutritionist on set, toward me. Her two little belly-rolls were down to one.

            “Soy crisp non-pizza,” she said.

            Sitting beside her, I crunched a dinner disc between my teeth and tasted airy dill.

            “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she said, “but this new look has sort of upset me.”

            My heart grew light as our dinner. “Oh?” Maybe she was in agreement with me, maybe she understood my thus-far unvoiced opinion and had told her style manager and the producer and the writers that she did not like her new look, that she demanded something drabber, something more house-wifey and dull.

            “In a good way, though,” she said. “The look shocks me in a good way. I thought that I was getting too old. I worried about it. That the soap figured I was getting too old to have any sort of love interest, and they wanted to give all the juicy stuff to the younger ones. But it’s happened! It finally has.”

            My stomach lurched and I might have heaved had there been anything heavier than soy crisp inside of it.

            “His name is Frederick.” 

            I buried my face in a napkin.

            “And here I thought I was over the hill, but they’ve given me a younger man.” She shivered.

            “Honey,” I said, “don’t you think that you better eat something more substantial? The lack of calories is making you giddy. It’s worrying me. Maybe we should get a maid again, someone to cook for us a little.”

            “I need to stop cheating on my diet now. I can do it, too, since I have a good reason. I bet that I’ll get more air time in the next few months than everyone but Vincent. It’s so exciting.”

            “I bet you will,” I said and then coughed hard on my dinner.

            The next day, sitting in front of my computer, I envisioned a block of ice inside of my head right where my brain should be. That was my writer’s block, and I needed to melt it. Thinking about my failure to write even the first chapter of my novel conjured up a massive and torturous headache. If only Verdie and I could escape all this, get back to nature.

            As soon as Verdie returned from the set that evening, I called her to my office and brought up the idea: fresh air, our blood pumping, the sense of accomplishment.

            Verdie leaned her head back, showing me her delicate throat. “Steve.” She sighed.

            “I mean, have you ever gone on a hike before? I have this feeling that it will be great.”

            “You know I can’t go gallivanting off whenever I feel like it, the way that you can, because I have to make our money. We’ll wait for a break between shootings.”

            I pounded a fist against my keyboard and then said, “Look what you made me do. Somehow that erased the whole day’s work.” I waited for her to apologize, to say that she knew my work was also valuable, but she just rubbed at her eyes and turned away. Her reaction made me suspect that she was getting male validation from somewhere else.  

            I followed her into the en suite, where she was drawing a bath. “What would you do if they told you that you had to have sex, I mean real sex, with this Frederick for the show?”

            “That would never happen.”

            “But in interviews you always say that you would do anything for the veracity of the soap. So what would you do?”

            “I’m not in porn.” She dipped a toe into the tub but didn’t remove her robe.

            “House of Love Afire needs you to have sex with Frederick. What would you do?” I grabbed her arm and shook it. “Go.”

            She kept her eyes off of me. “We might have fake sex. The simulated kind. I’d wear nude panties, roll around under the sheets, and feel basically very embarrassed.”

            “Then what would you do afterward? When he invited you over for a drink?”

            “He’s not a real person to me,” she said. “Are you jealous of a fake person?”

            I grabbed her other arm. “What would you do?”

            “I’d say that I had my husband to get home to. Whom I love very much.”

            When I let go of her, she rubbed at her arms, the soft flesh there. She turned the faucet off just before the tub overflowed.

            I’d behaved badly, so for the next five days, I exerted my will to ignore a nagging fear concerning Verdie’s professional life; it was five days of torture. My time spent on the novel had started to leave me stir crazy. The writer’s block had lifted, but the only thing that I could write was erotica starring a redheaded, green-eyed woman and just-out-of-high-school boys. I watched my fingers in horror as they typed out sentences like, “He lifted her dress to stare at a cherry that had been popped long ago, and the thought of ravishing such an experienced woman left him throbbing” or “She let her soft hair fall into his mouth and she could tell from the starving look in his eyes that he’d never had a woman before.” Then I masturbated right there in my computer chair and felt inordinately empty after, as if the dollop of cum in the tissue had made up half my body weight. Finally, I told Verdie that I wanted to join her onset, which was probably a bad idea, but I had thought about it and the only way to clear my mind was to check out Verdie’s younger boyfriend, Frederick, the asshole my unhinged former coworkers had probably written in for the sole purpose of torturing me.

            “You really want to?” she said. “You haven’t come since…” She didn’t finish the sentence because I hadn’t come to the set since I’d walked away from my job. “Maybe it will be good for you. You used to really like it there. You were happy onset. Remember?”

            I wasn’t sure what she meant by “happy;” maybe just that watching her work had turned me on. The set with its lights, camera, action; the people who would rush my wife with lipsticks every time the director yelled “cut!”; the walls of an imaginary mansion erected in the middle of an airplane hangar; the extras stuffing free donuts into their faces. All of it had felt perfected, as if the set were a miraculous, smooth-running machine, with me the only cog not in its place.

            “Are you happy… now?” she asked. “I’m not mad about the maid anymore. I’m not.”     

            Verdie had conjured up this strange idea that the maid and I had had an affair, and that I’d let the woman go when she’d broken it off with me. The maid and I had maybe chatted occasionally, but where was the harm in that? It irked me that Verdie, who basically whored herself out on people’s TV screens, could not get over my relationship with the ex-maid. I said, “I’m happy. I’m finally doing what I always said that I would.”

            She smiled and those perfect teeth that were so white they looked almost blue at the edges made me ache.

            The next day, I drove Verdie to the set. As we passed the trailhead that led up to the Hollywood sign, I started to ask her to skip work, just that one day, to instead take a hike with me. Maybe everything would turn out all right if she abandoned Frederick onset to make me happy. But I looked at the high heels on her feet and the script in her hand and knew that she would never agree. I hated this idiot Frederick, who had suddenly become more important to my wife than me, simply because he’d been written into her life. I squeezed the steering wheel so that the hard plastic bit into my palm.

            In movieland, when we passed the security booth, a flash of alarm skittered across the agent’s eyes. He waved us through and said it was good to see me again.

            As we drove up to Verdie’s trailer, the director and Christian, the head writer, came marching over to the car.

            “You really can’t be onset,” the director said. “I thought we had made that clear.”

            The sight of his shiny head and shirt unbuttoned one button too far summoned up my rage. Christian sneered at me like I was scum and not the better writer. I jumped out from behind the wheel, stood to my full height, and said, “Get out of my way and let me see the asshole you wrote in who wants to fuck my wife.”

            “Steve!” Verdie sprung out of the car and hurried to join our little triangle as if she expected she would have to stop me from throwing a punch. “What’re you talking about?”

            Christian said, “We should have banned him from the show more… explicitly.”

            Verdie grabbed her director’s arm. “Banned?” Her voice was small, confused.

            “Let’s get out of here, Verdie,” I said. “We’re leaving and we’re never coming back.”

            But Verdie moved so that she was hidden behind the director.

            “You’re listening to him?” I flung my hand towards Christian. “He’s a liar!”

            Christian faked a look of surprise and then spoke to my wife. “You mean, he never told you?” Christian shook his head. “We fired him because he was hindering the progression of the show. You know you’re our star, Crystal, sweetheart, and he wouldn’t write you any good stuff.”

            “I don’t like this aura,” the director said. “Get him out; he’ll ruin the whole day.”

            “What do you mean?” Verdie asked, her face growing pale so that the makeup stood out on her cheeks.

            “Any plotline for you that involved a man, he would excise. He was sabotaging you.”

            Verdie shook her head. “He cut out all my sexy stuff?”

            “It’s not true!” I said. “I wanted you to shine. You’re the best actor here, and you didn’t need some love interest to play off of.”

            Christian, that smug bastard, said, “Everyone needs someone to play off of on a soap. We didn’t want to get between you two’s relationship. But I can’t believe he didn’t tell you.”

            The day had become uncomfortably hot. Everyone looked sweat-shiny and sort of unreal.

            The director said, “He threatened to kill me once when I had you topless. Your back was to the camera, for chrissake.”

            “Don’t worry, Crystal,” Christian said. “It took us a while with Verdie’s plotlines, but now we’re back on track. You’re ready for the stuff today with Frederick?”

            “We can’t do anything,” the director said. “Not with him creating this vortex.”

            Verdie took me by the elbow, but her touch was not tender. “I’ll only be a minute,” she told the director.

            She pushed me back into the car, in the passenger’s seat. As she drove, I rolled up the window so that I could explain it all to her without my words whipping away in the wind. “I love you,” I said, “you’re my everything. It’s not that I’m jealous, it’s really not that, or not more than any other normal man. It’s only that I want you to be you, Verdie, honey, and I know that the real you would listen. It’s hard on me, all your changes. We need to take a hike together. Get away from everyone. It’s them—”

            “I wish you’d stop calling me that.”

            “What?” The road lifted along the gentle curve of a hill, and I felt the rise in my stomach.

            “I got tired of nagging you all the time, every time you said the wrong name. But it was all a symptom. Whoever you think I am, that person isn’t real. You let me believe I was gross and old. Too over-the-hill for any more lovers. But it was your fault.”

            “Hold on a sec. Hold on a sec, here. Let’s talk about you and me.”

            She pressed hard on the accelerator. “I need to get back to the set.”

            “Don’t go back there. It’s toxic, that place. Stay with me.” Each of my short sentences rose slightly in pitch. But Verdie kept her eyes on the road, and I could see that she was determined, so when we were about to pass the trailhead, I said, “Drop me off here.”  

            “Why?”

            I reached for the wheel, like I was about to grab it, but I didn’t have to. She pulled over.

            Out of the car, I stood there, trying to figure out the most impressive way to explain to Verdie what I planned to do, but before I could, she sped off, the force of her U-turn slamming the passenger door. That was all right. She would hear about my feat. The last time that someone climbed the Hollywood sign, three television news helicopters buzzed around him, filming. He was on practically every channel. Sure, they’d been hyping up the fact that he might jump, but maybe scaring Verdie in that way would do her a little good. I turned my back to the road and started up the trail. No one else was around; it was too hot.

            After fantasizing for months about scaling this mountain, the act itself startled me. I hadn’t really prepared: my soft-soled loafers amplified the jab of every sharp rock and stick, and after a half-mile or so, the sun had whisked all the moisture out of me, but I hadn’t brought any water. At some point, the trail seemed to veer away from the Hollywood sign, but I needed to get there fast—I was feeling a little faint—so I made my own path towards it over soft dirt.

            The whole studio would shut down once I made it to the top. They would gather around the television, turn up the volume, and say, hey, isn’t that Verdie’s husband? She’d rush over and see me, a spec standing atop the O, the one after the H, and her heart would seize. When the helicopter zoomed closer, she’d see the sweat on my face, the bramble scratches on my arms, and then they’d get even closer, and she’d notice my love for her, burning, fierce behind my eyes. She’d remember what was important. I’d yell up to the news crew, “Verdie, we don’t need anything but each other! I’ll give up my novel, if you’ll give up the soap.”

            As I limped towards the Hollywood sign, I played the scenario over and over again: I’ll give up, if you’ll give up… it was a good trade, a bargain, for our love. Verdie would take it, of course she would. I knew that woman inside and out, and she’d do anything for me, she’d do this, I felt sure. 

♧

July 21, 2024