Page 22 of The Deepest Lake

After Scarlett walks away, Rose presses K to explain more. That’s when K confides that she is waiting to hear back about a Netflix special, hoping for it, worried it isn’t going to happen, and her agent told her exactly why. Because she is good at making people laugh but she doesn’t know how to make them cry, and that’s what long-form stand-up needs now: a full arc, ups and downs and unexpected twists and turns, with a “dark night of the soul moment” around minute forty.

“I’m too ‘one-note’ my agent says. Drunk people in a club want to laugh till their stomachs hurt. People watching long-form comedy want laughs plus Greek tragedy and a Mozart sonata on top of it.”

The same agent, a friend of Eva Marshall’s agent, wants K to finish the damn memoir, the one she’s already gotten an advance for.

“If Eva can help me find the sad, emotional pieces, I’ll do anything for her.”

“Anything?”

“Give her a kidney, at least,” K says. “Naw, that’s too common. Maybe a lobe of my liver. You know you can lose a piece and it grows back? I just read that in a science magazine. I wonder if Eva would accept my liver.”

She goes quiet for a moment, smiling to herself, and Rose gets the idea this is how someone like K works. Think of something absurd and try to turn it into a story. Experiment, exaggerate, discard. But that’s not how memoir works, right? Rose is still figuring that out. Memoir is about hard truths. Invent or inflate too much, and readers will know. It must be hard to be a comic and memoirist, simultaneously.

“Anyway,” K continues, “that part about Netflix isn’t for public consumption. I don’t want to read that in a tweet two days from now.”

“Lips are sealed. By the way, what does the K in K-Tap stand for?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Rose laughs. “Yes, but I don’t need to know.”

K nods. “I like you already.”

They both seem to be enjoying standing comfortably just where they are, on the edge of the party, toes planted in the thick grass. Oh, it has been so very long for Rose. A party of strangers, without the feeling of being miserable, with no yearning to be back home, no sense of time at all.

Somehow, conversation turns to what they have in common, in addition to an agreement that Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” is incredible and where to find the best pancakes in Chicagoland. Walker Brothers, obviously.

K faces her. “You’re not from Chicago. Why do you keep telling everybody that?”

“North Side.”

“Bullshit. Every place you talk about is Davis Street this and Green Bay Road that. Why don’t you just say you live in Evanston.” K grins. “Or is it worse? You’re hoity-toity. You live in Wilmette. Or kill me: you live in Kenilworth. That’s what you don’t want anyone to know. Own up, Miss Richie Rich.”

Rose feels her momentary sense of calm evaporate. She’d thought her plan to hide in the background was solid. Not only because she used her maiden name, but also because her face never appeared in the major newspaper coverage of Jules’s disappearance. The Chicago Tribune reporter had misidentified Ulyana as Jules’s mom in a prominent photo that spread to other papers before it could be corrected.

Yet it had taken K only minutes to figure out Rose is a North Shore suburbanite. If she could start over, she wouldn’t mention Chicago either—too close. But then again, didn’t the best liars embrace partial truths? A famous quote floats into Rose’s head: If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up infrankness.

“Was the shrimp not fresh?” K asks.

“Sorry?”

“You look queasy all of a sudden.”

“Tipsy more than queasy,” Rose says, searching for a compromise between truth and fiction. “Let’s just say I’m far from rich but I do live in Evanston. Don’t tell, just like I won’t say a word about Netflix. It matters, trust me. I’m not trying to pretend I’m someone else. I’m just . . . lying low.”

With K, there is none of the hugging or hand clasping she has experienced with other women that night. K just turns and gives her a look.

“Lying low. That I understand.”

8

ROSE

——————————

———————

———