Luke was definitely better. For one thing, he stayed. For another, he worked hard. The first album he made for Michael Marquand generated two decently successful singles. They became good friends during the process, and Michael arranged for Luke to be featured on songs with a couple of major rock stars, which bumped him into a higher level of fame and exponentially increased his gigs.
It was around then that Michael decided to move into television producing. The show he cocreated, We’ll Make You a Star, combined a singing contest with an image makeover. While Michael planned to appear on the show as a mentor and judge, he didn’t want to commit to a full-time television job. He needed someone else to work with the contestants on-screen every week. Someone with real musical talent, who could also bring a little sex appeal to the show. Someone likable, but not TV slick. Someone with a hit or two to prove his music credentials but not so huge he was unaffordable. Someone teenage girls could drool over, but who wouldn’t drool back.
And Michael knew just the guy.
Luke agonized for a while over the decision. It meant he’d have a lot less time to write and record music, and that his life would be far more tightly scheduled than he was used to.
On the other hand, he and Mom wanted to have a baby, and Mom was eager for me to go to a private high school. The money would come in handy. Mom was uncertain, but I was totally in favor of his being on TV. (I was thirteen—of course I was.) And what were the odds the show would actually be a hit? Next to nothing, he and Mom assured each other. He’d probably end up working just a few short months for a fair chunk of change. Then life would go back to normal.
So he said yes. And life never went back to normal.
Luke went from mildly respected musician to A-list TV star in less than a year. He started to be recognized everywhere we went, and audiences packed his concerts, which became a lot less frequent—taping We’ll Make You a Star took up a lot of time, as did the ten million events a week the show’s publicist wanted him to make an appearance at.
We’ll Make You a Star was a huge hit, and his agent renegotiated his contract for A Lot of Money.
We moved into our current, much bigger, house the year after that.
“I didn’t sign on for this,” Mom said one night, after she and Luke had gone out for a quiet dinner and emerged from the restaurant to find a mob of screaming teenage girls gathered there, desperate for a glimpse of him. Some of them were sobbing.
“Believe me, I didn’t either,” he said.
The loss of privacy was hard to adjust to.
We got used to the money and the perks much more easily.
Being rich was a big change for all of us. Mom and Luke had both had tough childhoods. In the neighborhood Mom was from, having a baby at seventeen—like she had done—was virtually a rite of passage. But she was smart and scrappy and wanted something better for her daughter, so she had gotten us a tiny apartment in a neighborhood with a good school system, even though it meant she had to share a bed with me every night and had no room of her own.
The only thing Luke ever said about his childhood was that it had been rough, and he didn’t like to think or talk about it. Which was pretty typical of Luke—he preferred to keep things cheerful, even if it meant actively avoiding certain thoughts and subjects. His father was in the military and had moved his family around from army base to army base. Music was Luke’s salvation: alone with his guitar, he could create his own beauty, his own world.
So while we all now lived in an enormous house behind a tall gate and could hire people to wait on us and had closets full of beautiful clothing, well, both Mom and Luke had paid their dues.
And that’s why they deserved a really nice five-year anniversary celebration to make up for that off-the-rack Vegas wedding.
three
Mom said she loved the idea of an anniversary trip, but couldn’t even begin to figure out how to plan it.
“Why don’t you ask George to do it?” Luke suggested. “He’d probably love the extra hours of work.”
George Nussbaum was my mother’s assistant. Sort of. He was also my SAT tutor. Sort of. Basically he did whatever our family asked him to at an hourly rate, while he waited for a better job to come along.
George’s older brother Jonathan worked for Luke—originally as his personal assistant but now as the head of his new TV production company (the last time Luke’s agent negotiated his contract with the show, he scored him a development deal). Jonathan was the oldest of a big family; George was the youngest and, according to Jonathan, the smartest: he was only twenty and had already graduated from Harvard.
At some point over the summer Jonathan had mentioned to Mom that his brother was looking for temporary work to pay the rent while he wrote a TV spec script and tried to get an agent. Jonathan had already bragged about how his brother had gotten perfect SAT scores and gone to Harvard so Mom jumped at the chance to get all that brain power into my life—part of her your life is going to be better than mine plan was for me to go to an Ivy.
Once George started showing up at our house with SAT books, my mom kept discovering other odds and ends he could do for her. I don’t know how much she paid him, but I bet it was pretty generous—her own minimum wage days weren’t that far behind her and now she had plenty of cash to throw around. Because she had once been a waitress, she left ridiculous tips at restaurants: forty, sometimes fifty percent of the bill.
The Nussbaum brothers looked a lot alike: they were both slightly above-average height and thin, with gray-green eyes and brown hair. George had a lot more of that though; Jonathan’s was thinning at the crown, even though he was only in his late twenties. Fortunately for him, he already had a fiancée.
Jonathan was mellow and good-natured, but George was less sunny. He sighed with impatience and rolled his eyes a lot. Of course, it’s possible I brought that out in him: I wasn’t in the mood to be studying over the summer, and I refused to take any of the tutoring seriously.