* * *
After Elsie leaves, she calls Henry again.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” Paris tells him. “I’m sorry, I know that puts you in a bad spot.”
“I can handle it,” Henry says, but she detects more anxiety in his voice than there was earlier. “The staff all support you. A few members have asked me questions because of the arrest video, but I’ve been reminding everyone that an arrest isn’t the same thing as being charged.”
“I doubt most people will understand the difference. But thank you.”
They say their goodbyes again and hang up.
He’s a good man, that Henry Chu, and Paris knows how lucky she is to have him as her business partner and studio manager. Ten years ago, he walked into Ocean Breath for the first time, stressed and exhausted from a programming job at Amazon that was driving up his blood pressure. She was still in the Fremont neighborhood then, in a tiny studio on the second level of a low-rise commercial building that housed a bead store, a private investigator’s office, and a psychic who only worked on Fridays. Henry took to yoga like a fish to water, and he practiced five days a week. After a few months, noticing that Paris was struggling to attract new members, Henry suggested she do a Groupon, and Ocean Breath’s clientele began to grow.
He eventually left Amazon with a generous severance package. When the studio’s booking system crashed, he offered to come in as a partner and build her a better one. Paris jumped at the opportunity to bring him on board. It took a huge load off the studio’s finances and allowed Paris more time to teach. They then moved Ocean Breath to its current location, a gorgeous space near Whole Foods, which attracted an entirely different level of clientele.
The new location is where she met Jimmy. At least that’s the story they agreed to tell people. Nobody questioned it, because nobody cared. Retired comedian marries yoga instructor? Not exactly Entertainment Tonight–worthy. Jimmy hadn’t been considered “relevant” for a while, which was just fine with Paris.
And then Zoe fucked it all up.
Somewhere along the way, Jimmy’s longtime personal assistant had started acting more like his manager. Zoe had worked for him in Los Angeles for years, and when Jimmy finally decided to leave the industry for good, she helped him sell both his California properties and find a new house in his hometown of Seattle. She was only supposed to stick around for a few weeks to get him settled, but Zoe never went back to LA. She just … stayed. And so Jimmy kept her on the payroll. She answered his phone, managed his website, and handled all his emails and fan mail. She scheduled the house cleaners and repairs, paid the utility bills, and took his car in for maintenance. She also did the grocery shopping, ran his errands, and even took out the garbage and recycling every week.
When Paris met Jimmy, Zoe was at the house maybe two days a week. But ever since Quan first reached out, she’d been at the house nearly every damn day, coming and going as she pleased, leaving her granola bars in the cupboards and her kombucha in the fridge and driving Paris absolutely nuts.
“You gotta ease up on the kid,” Jimmy said, when Paris complained about the assistant’s constant presence. “She does all the shit that I don’t want to do. If I could pay her to go to the dentist for me, trust me, I would. And you think I know anything about this streaming shit? I need her.”
Zoe isn’t a kid. She’s thirty-five. And she wanted Jimmy’s comeback to happen even more than he did. All Jimmy wanted was to tell jokes again; it was Zoe who took it next-level. Quan released his first comedy special in more than a decade a couple of months back. It did so well, they asked for a third, even though the second show wasn’t scheduled to stream for another month. Jimmy didn’t want to do a third. But Zoe did, and she was pushing for him to sign off on the contract.
“How much material do you think you have?” Zoe had asked Jimmy a few days ago.
The three of them were in the kitchen. Paris was leaving for Vancouver soon and hoping to have a quiet lunch with her husband before the long drive. But Zoe was still talking to her boss at the kitchen table as Paris reheated leftovers on the stove. Pork adobo, Jimmy’s favorite.
“Right now, enough for half, maybe two-thirds of a show,” Jimmy answered.
“Can you stretch it to an hour?”
“Not if you want it to be funny.”
“That’s fine,” Zoe said. “We’ve got time. I can tell them you’ll be ready to film a third in, say, six months? You could do it in Las Vegas. The Venetian is interested, but MGM wants you pretty bad. I think it should be the Venetian, since it was built where the Sands used to be.”