Chloe threw herself fully into their relationship, proving from the very start that she was willing to focus all her time and energy on Mike, which made them a good match, because Mike was also willing to focus all his time and energy on the very same person: Mike Barker. Pretty soon, Chloe was coming around to Nicky looking to pick up extra shifts, because Mike needed new headshots, or because Mike was wanting to take a highly recommended class with an eighties sitcom star, or because Mike had decided he wanted to rent a sporty convertible for an audition with an A-list director, or—
“Why can’t he pick up extra shifts himself if he’s the one that needs whatever?” Nicky would ask her every time. This was a rhetorical question, a game he played, so that he would have gossip for me when we came together at night. The truth was if anyone was going to get extra shifts, he preferred to give them to her. Chloe, being such a sincere doormat, turned out to be a very good waitress, whereas Mike spent too much time laughing and joking with the tourists, charming them out of bigger tips, instead of upselling them with more alcohol and desserts that they didn’t need.
Chloe always replied to Nicky’s questions with an impassioned defense. “You don’t understand. It’s hard for actors in this town. He’s had a very hard life and now he’s trying to make his dreams come true.” Once she even said, “He’s not lucky like you.”
And, let me tell you, she only said that once, because it got Nicky so mad, he actually told his best waitress that no, she couldn’t have her damn extra shift.
“Like me opening up a successful restaurant at the age of twenty-five was just something I walked into. Like shit got handed to me like she handing shit to that actor,” he complained while I turned down the bed at his Baldwin Hills house. Then he stared out the window and breathed out through his nostrils for a while.
He didn’t say, “Fuck that bitch.” But I could tell he was thinking it.
Mike broke up with Chloe about seven months after he moved in with her. He said her “mommy act” wasn’t sexy, and left her for a model with a luxury condo on the Westside. Some men were like that. They couldn’t just leave you, they had to stomp all over your self-esteem on the way out.
Nicky was almost gleefully smug after it all went down. Every weekend he asked Chloe if she wanted extra shifts, even though I had told him that he needed to stop on several occasions. After he got tired of that, he started pointing out to Chloe that he was working for his money, not being given it, whenever he passed by her. He kept this up for a good three weeks, but then Chloe began dating Wade, the horn player in the trio that accompanied me on weekends.
She was wild about him, too. He had his own money, so she attached herself to him in other ways. The man couldn’t sit down for a second without her fetching a drink for him from the bar. During our twice-a-week afternoon rehearsals, she brought him lunch. Lovely sandwiches with the crusts cut off and bursting with deli meat. At first it was cute. The other guys in the band laughed and said they were jealous. But when she kept on showing up in a new, pretty dress for every dang rehearsal, it got weird. Nobody laughed when she came in anymore. They just sat there, watching the exchange in silence, until she left, leaving a trail of cheap perfume behind her.
At one point, even I, in all my constructed, nonjudging cool, told her that she needed to calm the eff down.
“But I can’t, Davie. Love makes me crazy. I’m actually okay with being alone in between. It’s kind of fun. I go to the movies with my girlfriends. I take my voice lessons, and I think my life is pretty good. But then I see a guy, and my nose opens, and he’s all I can think about. I dream about Wade every night, even the nights when he’s lying right there beside me. When I’m in the post office line, I’m thinking about things I can do to make his life easier. I breathe that man. And I swear to you there is nothing I can do about it.”
She explained this to me like a terminal cancer patient explains their condition for the thousandth time. As if this was the hard science of her life, which I was in no position to deny.
Wade got another gig at another club and then quietly broke up with her in the alley behind Nicky’s about twenty minutes before we were set to open.