Love or Money
by Betty Plotnick
October, 2001






It felt like the janitors got to go home before she did. It felt like the headset had left a permanent impression, a raw dent just above her ear the width of a popsicle stick. It felt like the dead of winter outside, and it felt like after everything they'd done, they hadn't done anything.

"Do you think we do anything?" Willa murmured. She couldn't imagine that they were being driven back to anyplace remotely warm or well-lit or comfortable or restful. It felt like they were riding in a hearse. It felt like more than just the concert was over.

Christina didn't have a quick answer, which felt...weird. Christina always had something to say for herself. "I think we do too much."

"I mean for someone besides ourselves."

Johnnie had said, The more of the responsibility for this you girls take on yourselves, the more clear it will be how much clout you have now. You should be involved at every level, that's very important. JC had said, It's going to be the experience of a lifetime. A chance to have all these artists together all at once -- man, this just never happens, this comes along once. Lance had said, So, charity work. You're going to have to do something; fundraiser? Concert? What do you have in mind?

Britney had said, We should do Washington. Everybody else is doing New York. We should do Washington, they'll really appreciate us. Plus, we can book it easier, I bet. Washington is better.

Christina had said, Well, we were waiting for a special occasion to get on stage with Destiny's Child. This looks special to me.

"I mean," Willa repeated, looking out at the grey-tinted streets of Washington at four in the morning, "is it ever not about us?"

"I'm sorry," Christina said, very quietly. She almost never said that. "About your premiere."

"It doesn't matter."

"You worked your ass off on that movie. You deserve a real party."

"Yeah, because I don't have enough. That's a real tragedy, isn't it? I don't have enough."

"And you never will," Christina predicted moodily. She was tracing something on her window with a fingernail -- red, with a white stripe painted down the middle. "We're the ones who get to the top, Wills. The ones who always need more."

She had three houses. She had a production company, a nightclub, a scholarship endowment. She'd toured with Prince, Justin Timberlake, TLC. She'd done shows at the Grammys, the MVAs, the Super Bowl, and Saturday Night Live. Her second album -- she'd been nineteen, eighteen when she wrote most of the songs on it, and parts of "Digital Getdown" were leftover bits and pieces of things she'd done when she was younger than that -- sold 2.4 million copies in less than a week, and the only album in the world with first-week numbers that came close to that was her third. She had a trophy case in her basement. She'd only performed in stadiums on her last tour. She'd had HBO specials and DVDs and an ad deal with Verizon. She was twenty-one years old, with more wealth than even Lance knew what she should do with, more fanmail every day than she could read in a month, and enough fucking clout to put in a phone call to almost anyone on the face of the earth and stand a better-than-even chance of having it returned -- and she was the least famous member of the group.

What did it mean to need more? What kind of a person could have all that, and yet not enough?

They'd flown out of New York that morning, just three hours earlier. They were in Britney's limousine, and even though the backseat had a radio that was a separate entity from the radio in the front, they rolled down that dividing glass and all listened to the same station with the volume turned up -- Willa, Britney, Christina, Felicia, Lonnie, Andrew the brand-new driver that none of them knew yet. They all looked back and forth at each other, hoping that someone would say something that would be enough.

"What's the one biggest thing," she whispered, resting her forehead on the window, twisting the bracelet made of rose crystal chunks the size of marbles on her wrist, "that you want but you can't have?"

"Who cares about the big things? We think about things like that all the time. What's the littlest, most insignificant thing that should never in a million years bother you, except that it always does?"

She turned to look at Christina. Tiny, almost elfin, with her designer nails and her mass of frost- blonde hair extensions and the diamond in her nose glinting in the green light from the clock display. Christina, who was so stoic in interviews, with her delicate, whispery voice and her deadpan humor, and who always, always knew what you were thinking.

"The way the photographers always make me bend my knees just a little so I don't look so much taller than you two. And then I have to stand that way for an hour. Because God forbid we aren't symmetrical."

Christina's full, rust-red lips curved briefly in a smile. "I like that one. Very petty."

"What about you?" It felt greatly daring. Christina was impossible to prod, impossible to direct. She was the immovable object, and Willa, unfortunately, was not an irresistible force.

"I wanted," she said, without any hesitation at all, "to do the fucking show in New York."

Six weeks ago, in a different limousine, they'd all listened to the radio together. Felicia, with her ever-present day planner lying open and forgotten across her knees, cried in silent shock. Amiable Lonnie, always unruffled, with his arms as thick around as Christina's whole body, lifted his hand over and over, in the exact same mechanical motion, to wipe his eyes. Britney cried in great, broken sobs, complete with wet, sinusy sounds, which was how Britney always cried, like a little girl lost in a department store. Willa was too stunned to make a sound. She couldn't cry, and couldn't even imagine that this was true; no matter how many times she heard it described, for once her writer's mind couldn't match words and images to each other.

Christina's eyes had been red and puffy, and somehow thick, like she was wearing Coke-bottle contact lenses. She put her hands on Britney's back, drawing her down to rest her tear-slick cheek on the purple plaid of Christina's capri pants, losing one hand in her hair and saying, "Stop it, Brit. Don't you dare make me cry."

None of it was real at the time. Willa went home and plugged in her half-drained cellphone, made all the calls to her family and her label and the people at A Happy Place, but later on she wouldn't remember any of the conversations. Chris left a message on her voicemail while the line was tied up -- the club was fine, he was fine, he probably wouldn't be reachable for a while. She watched the news, and put the images away in her memory forever. It started to get dark outside, and she was still sitting on her couch, aware that she should get up and turn on a light, but somehow still not doing it.

She heard Lance's voice, his accent almost as heavy as Britney's; Lance sounded more Southern when he was agitated, while Britney just never could manage, however many voice coaches she had, to sound anything else. "Fuck!" he said, automatically hitting the overhead light as he came from the kitchen into the living room. He had the cordless phone in his hand.

"Are you okay?"

"I can't reach -- I'm trying to get Joey on the phone."

"Joey," she repeated, knowing that she should know who that meant. She knew a lot of Joes, Josephs, Joeys. She knew an awful lot of people.

"Fatone. JC's friend, Chris Kirkpatrick's friend? You've met him a bunch of times."

"Oh, yeah." She did remember, a little. A big guy, with a beard. She'd been surprised to learn that he was younger than Chris, younger than JC, even. He was a good dancer, with a contagious laugh, and pretty, slightly sad eyes.

"He lives in New York," Lance was muttering, and Willa got the vague impression that Lance wasn't talking so much to her as he was just talking to keep himself calm. "Joey and his wife. His daughter."

"In Manhattan?" Her voice broke saying it.

After a slight hesitation, Lance said, "No. In Brooklyn. But Kelly -- Joey's wife, Kelly -- is a secretary; I think she works in Manhattan. You can't get a fucking line into New York for love or money today!" That must be hard for Lance, Willa thought to herself, not totally unkindly. All that money, and still no way to get what he wants.

He sat down with her, and they watched more news, and Willa cried on his shoulder, and they sat there even longer. The phone rang after eleven, and now the cordless battery was drained, too, so they let the answering machine pick it up rather than moving. Everything's okay, JC's voice said, and he sounded jumpy and paranoid, as if he were saying something heretical and dangerous. I think I've talked to everyone I ever met. Everybody accounted for. Wills, Lance, are you there? Okay, well.... I'm going to be at Justin's. Come over, if you want.

"Do you want to go?" Lance asked her.

"You can go," she said. It was obvious from the way he wasn't looking at her that he wanted to. "Go." Mostly, all she wanted was to go to bed.

Exactly the way she felt tonight. Six weeks later, nonstop action, so much work, with the benefit concert vying for time in her schedule along with the movie premiere, and Willa felt exactly the same way: tired, detached, disbelieving, and small. Tonight, there was probably another party going on at Justin's, in his hotel suite this time instead of his house, and tonight, again, she didn't want to be there.

"I don't weigh enough to give blood," Christina said suddenly.

"They actually have a lot of blood. I don't think that matters so much."

"You don't understand."

Willa didn't know quite what that meant, but she didn't care, either. "I'm not exactly stupid, you know."

"And you didn't grow up there."

That was strange; Willa realized that New York didn't exist in her geography of childhood. There was Florida, of course, with its white-sand beaches and its amusement parks and endless suburbs, the Florida of her own childhood. There was the Deep South, which seemed to Willa like a Disney attraction come to life, a vast, undifferentiated chunk of land to her immediate west from whence came high school sports and gospel music and barbeque sauce, an America that seemed both innocent and decadent and was soundtracked in her mind with the voices of her innocent, decadent friends -- Justin, Britney, Lance. Everything else felt like a place that other people lived: musicians lived in L.A., fans in the heartland, and New York was just an endless party, where the rich and the hip, the creative and the aimless crossed paths, setting off thermonuclear reactions that fed the everlasting New York nightlife in a strange kind of neon photosynthesis. It wasn't a child's world.

"I know it doesn't matter," Christina was saying in quiet defeat. "I just wonder what does."


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