Laura shrugged. “She’s coping the best she can,” she said. “She was up in Oregon with us while we were working on the new group’s CD, helping out. We didn’t really need her up there—truthfully, they didn’t really even need me up there—but it seemed like she needed to get out of LA for a while.”
“The entertainment media were saying that you and she were getting it on,” Neesh said. “Please tell me that shit is true.”
Laura shook her head. “No truth to it at all,” she said. “Just entertainment media innuendo.”
“That’s too bad,” Neesh said. “She’s quite the piece. What about them stories about her and that female pilot?”
“Nothing to that either,” Laura said, fighting to keep looking Neesh in the eye as she lied to her. She knew she was a terrible liar and hated doing it, but that was not any of Neesh’s business and it was not her place to decide who should know Celia’s secrets.
Neesh nodded, seemingly buying the lie. “A pity,” she said. “But understandable. I saw that picture of the pilot she was supposed to be getting it on with. A little masculine looking for my tastes.”
“Suzie is cool,” Laura said. “And she’s not as butch looking as that picture suggests.”
Another nod. “What about those other stories?” Neesh asked. “The ones about you and the groupies out on tour. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—just say no comment—but the thought of you having a bunch of slutty bitches come to your hotel room to eat you out is really fuckin’ hot, Teach.”
Laura smiled. It was her place to decide who to share her personal information with, and Neesh was a friend who would understand and be discrete with the information. “Yeah,” she said. “That happened. Not quite as much as they suggested, but with fair regularity.”
“Goddamn!” Neesh said, clearly aroused by the admission. “You have got to tell me about this. How does it work? You just go pull some slut from the audience, or what?”
And so, Laura explained the intricacies of how a traveling musician hooked up with a lesbian groupie out on the road. She made a point to explain the unbreakable, set-in-stone rule about how you never kiss a groupie. Neesh listened quite attentively, and her own nipples got hard as she heard the tale.
“And Jake knows about all this?” she asked.
“He knows,” she assured her. “It’s part of our deal.”
“Girlfriend,” Neesh said, “I really do envy you on this matter.”
“Being able to do that kept me from going crazy with lust out on the road and maybe being tempted to try something with the opposite sex. Jake would definitely not approve of that. Neither would I.”
She nodded. “Not that that keeps the fucking media from speculating about it,” she said bitterly.
“Yeah,” Laura sighed. “I know what you mean.”
What she meant was the latest unsubstantiated rumor being passed around about the little bundle in Laura’s belly. Shortly after the appointment with Dr. Vargo in which it was confirmed that Laura was pregnant, she and Jake released a statement through Pauline announcing the particulars of the situation in as sterile and straightforward and, most of all, briefly a manner as possible. Most of the entertainment media printed and aired the announcement as written the next day. After that, the speculation and rumormongering began.
Though, as Pauline had assured them, no tabloid, newspaper, or entertainment show dared publish anything about the underage transvestite story since it was provably refutable and would thus open them up to libel and slander charges (though the offending email continued to circulate and the story continued to be passed far and wide by word of mouth), the stories about her pregnancy were a completely different monster. The first had been that Laura had conceived via artificial insemination because Jake had become sterile from all the drugs he had taken over the years and all the STDs he had contracted. The next had been that she had conceived accidentally as a result of birth control failure just before an orgy the couple attended (it was taken as a given in the entertainment press that Jake and Laura regularly attended orgies) and they were unsure who the father even was. And now, the latest rumor that had appeared first in the American Watcher, and then the LA Times and on Entertainment Reports, was that they knew exactly who the father was: Gordon Paladay, known to the world as Bigg G, who was a regular visitor to the Kingsley’s clifftop house in San Luis Obispo county according to the locals (G had only been there one time, Neesh still had not been there at all). The idea that Jake was actually the father of little Ziggy and that the two of them had actually wanted to create her was never even suggested. And, since there was no way to prove that reporters filing these stories or presenting them on television knew that the rumors were untrue, there was nothing the Kingsleys or the Paladays could do except to declare the story the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard when their agents were contacted for comment on the matter.
“Where do they even come up with shit like that?” Neesh asked. “Do a group of them just sit down and make things up, or what?”
“No, that would be unethical journalism,” Laura said angrily. “Instead, they go find someone on the street, someone who does not even know us on anything more than a superficial level, and ask them their opinion on the matter. God only knows who came up with the artificial insemination story, or the orgy story, but Jake and I are pretty sure it was some of the locals in Oceano that fed them the story about Gordon being the father.”
“Yeah?” Neesh said. “What makes you think that?”
“Jake’s become friendly with some of the sheriff’s deputies that work in our area,” she said. “He donates money to their causes and he goes down to their bar on Friday nights to play guitar for them, sing for them, and drink beer with them. They told him that there were some reporters from the Watcher sniffing around last week, talking to a bunch of the locals, asking them about us and what sorts of things we did here in town. It was right after that that the story first popped up in the Watcher.”
“Assholes,” Neesh spat. “Why would you want to live among people like that?”
“We don’t live among them,” Laura said. “We live on a cliff that is miles away from any other house. Oceano is just the nearest town to where we are, the place we do our grocery shopping and fuel up our cars and things like that. We’ve never done anything to those people, have never been anything but polite and kind to them, Jake contributes a considerable amount of money to their high school music program and their libraries, and they respond to that by spreading lies and speculation about us.” She shrugged. “It’s frustrating, but it’s the price we have to pay to live where we do and be the people that we are. I love our house and I’m willing to pay that price. Besides, it doesn’t really matter where we live. The same thing used to happen when we lived in LA. Our neighbors would talk about us and the papers would print it. At least in Oceano we are isolated and secure. The reporters cannot actually approach us at our home.”
“I suppose there is something to be said for that,” Neesh allowed. “It just makes me angry. These assholes are printing and airing that my husband is fucking another man’s wife and got her pregnant and there is nothing we can do about it.”
“It’s the life we choose,” Laura said with a sigh.
“Yeah,” Neesh said bitterly. “The life we choose.”
Upstairs, Jake and Gordon had just finished burning the joint and were feeling pretty good. Jake sat with his Fender acoustic on his lap and Gordon sat behind his electric piano. So far, neither of them had played a single note. Instead, they were talking, doing much the same as their better halves and catching up on what had been going on in each other’s lives.