PULLING TO THE SIDE OF THE CANYON ROAD and hoping no one careened around the blind curve, Nadine Harvey flipped through her Thomas Guide, the indispensable atlas of Los Angeles’s roadway maze. Her car faced someone’s pretentious paparazzi-blocking stucco wall in a neighborhood populated by low-ranking celebrities pretending they were regular people. Locating her destination on the page’s dizzying grid, she put her ancient Datsun in reverse, backed up just enough to avoid tumbling down the ravine, and eased past a road sign nearly hidden by a prickly pear cactus as big as a horse.
Gaia Earth, the plant-care service where she’d been working since barely graduating from UCLA, had moved her from corporate clients to private homes last week. Someone had quit, and she’d inherited their list. The first entry on her route today read Davis, C, with a Studio City address. After a turn onto a cul-de-sac at the top of another steep hill, she parked in a modest driveway in front of a smallish house. Someone inside was playing electric guitar, working on a repeated series of chords and then a riff that they tried several times over. Nadine prepared herself for a scowling teenaged boy hunched over an instrument too expensive for his talent. He was good, though: the riff blazed. She took her equipment from the trunk and rang the doorbell.
The spicy smell of patchouli blasted her as the door opened. No longer muffled by the door, the guitar wailed and wailed again. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses stood stone-faced, blocking Nadine’s view of the room behind her.
Nadine clearly had to make the first move.
She gestured to the logo on her shirt and realized for the first time what a stupid name it was. Gaia meant earth. Earth Earth.
“I’m here for the plants?”
“Where’s Josh?”
Nadine shrugged. She had no idea where Josh was.
“Take your boots off so you don’t track dirt into the house.”
Nadine obliged, crossing one ankle over her standing leg and untying her work boot, sliding off her sock, placing them carefully on the fiber doormat, then repeating the process with the other leg. A yoga asana. A household like this in a neighborhood like this would expect yoga. She was fine with gardening barefooted, if that was what they wanted.
Nadine followed the woman into the living room, where the only light came in shafts of perfect Los Angeles–ness from the sliding-glass doors with a glimpse of a swimming pool. The guitar player wasn’t a sullen teen but a praying mantis of a man casually fingering his instrument. He didn’t look up. As she passed the white leather couch, Nadine nearly clocked her watering can into a balding, plump man sunk into the cushions.
From the depths of the darkness, a woman’s voice, a Boston accent. “Can you please have Josh go through the yard next time, Shelley? Jesus Christ, we’re working here.”
Nadine swiveled toward the oddly familiar voice, seeking a face. All she saw at first were bare feet propped on an armrest. Whoever was speaking was either too tired or too exalted to sit up and show their face. Famous people were everywhere in Los Angeles, and there was an art to not provoking them. Sort of like wildlife.
The feet hit the floor, and a head of curly blond hair pivoted up. The voice belonged to a scowling woman.
Nadine did what she absolutely was not supposed to do when face to face with a celebrity. She gaped.
Davis, C was Celeste of Celeste and the Heart’s Desire.
She was tiny, almost kitten-like. Short was the word. Up close and pissed off, there was no hint of that electrifying grin from the poster Nadine had worshipped in high school, then carefully taped above her bed in her college dorm.
Humiliated, Nadine closed her mouth and calculated how quickly she could run back to her car and bang a U-turn escape in the narrow street.
“Go on outside,” Shelley said. “Obviously, since you’re from the plant company, you can suss out where the plants are.” She waved vaguely toward the outdoors. “The water spigot is by the pool.” Shelley slid the glass doors open. The heat hit Nadine like a punch after the cool of the house. The door hissed behind her as it closed.
True enough, the bird-of-paradise plants were weak-kneed, their sap congealing along the wall. The leggy, scrawny roses were further proof that Josh, whoever he was, had done a half-assed job.
Nadine’s tasks were muscle memory. As she worked, the proximity to Celeste—the actual Celeste—pulled like suction. She stayed as close as she could to the sliding-glass doors, surreptitiously watching Celeste pacing and gesturing. The praying mantis with the guitar nodded, played faster. The guy on the couch crossed his arms over his chest. She watched Celeste go to the piano, play a few chords. Her blond curls covered her face as she shook her head, displeased. They were working on a song. Nadine couldn’t hear her over the splatting water from the garden hose, but Celeste’s voice zinged in her blood.
They looked like exotic fish in a tank. Nadine took her clippers to an overgrown bougainvillea. Brilliant fuchsia flowers rained down as she cut away deadwood.
Snip. At sixteen, Nadine had listened to “Blossom Queen” countless times, riveted by this woman’s uncanny ability to know, to really know, everything she was feeling. Little blossom blooms alone in the night, Celeste sang.
She’d heard Celeste interviewed on a radio show, praising a concert crowd as “wicked good.” She pronounced it “wicket.” When the DJ, some loudmouthed shock jock, teased Celeste for her accent, Nadine had bristled. She sounds like me.
Rolling Stone had called her the Oracle. Nadine, her adoration vindicated, showed the article to her two best friends. Vera shrugged and offered that Celeste was okay. Caroline, never one to stand out, said the same.
Snip. But there was her giant hit, “Doll Named Body.” Even Vera conceded that “Doll” rocked pretty hard. They didn’t have the money or the gumption to take a bus up to Boston when Celeste opened for Badge at the Orpheum. Instead, Nadine and Vera and Caroline screamed the song into hairbrush microphones, strutting their stuff around Vera’s bedroom. Nadine had imagined herself as Celeste then, unafraid, unbreakable, legs splayed open across that impossible car, a fuck-you kind of joy pinned forever on that poster. If they ever met, they’d be instant friends. Celeste would embrace her, those jangly bracelets ringing like chimes before she adorned her with that signature blossom crown. She probably smelled like flowers.
Celeste would intuitively know that Nadine was the kind of person who’d stuck with her for the second and third albums. They were different from that first one, no question, but they were better. More complex lyrically, and if Celeste wanted to branch out into playing organ on “Sittin’ and Waitin’” on the second album, In Flight, or had someone playing what the liner notes for “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet” called tabla drums, then more power to her.
Nadine felt so strongly about this that she’d gotten into an argument about it at a party senior year in college. By the next day, she only remembered the hazy pot smoke, the ragged sense of a party gone on too long, and a guy in a battered armchair in an off-campus apartment somewhere south of Westwood making fun of her when she pulled Celeste’s Family Portrait from a stack and lifted the needle from the crackling, popping dead space at the end of the Dire Straits record.
Insulted, Nadine had pointed out the obvious. He was the one who owned the record. The party-giver, annoyed, claimed that she’d pulled it from his trade-ins pile.
And now she was ten feet from Celeste herself, and cut flowers were wilting at Nadine’s feet.
After she finished every possible plant-related task, the only thing left to do was leave. As much as she wanted to get a close look at Celeste again, to breathe her air and absorb her molecules, Celeste had been less than pleased that she or Josh or any faceless plant nanny had come through the house. And she was muddy and more than a little sweaty. She walked the perimeter of the small backyard. A tall wooden privacy fence but no gate. Good for keeping people away but hard to let a person out.
Shouldering her bag of tools, Nadine hosed the dirt from her muddy feet. As her wet footprints evaporated behind her on hot concrete, Nadine slid the glass doors open and prayed for invisibility.
Her pupils sought light in the dark living room. She kept her head down as she passed the couch. Two shapes, Celeste and the plump man. Near the fireplace, the guitar player and his amp. “Sorry,” Nadine muttered, holding her watering can close.
“What are you doing?” Shelley swept in from the kitchen. “You heard her, you need to go through the yard.”
Nadine stopped. Her eyes had adjusted. Shelley was red-faced, indignant, as if she’d caught Nadine in thievery. Celeste and her coterie grew silent, watching the entertainment. Today’s show? Plant nanny performs heinous act.
Skin prickling, Nadine confronted Shelley.
“I couldn’t find the gate,” she said.
Silence, then a glorious laugh from the couch. Nadine turned, stunned. She had made Celeste laugh.
“She’s right,” Celeste said. The leather squeaked as she rose to her feet. “It’s a trick gate. The woodworker did it that way so people couldn’t sneak in.”
Nadine gripped her canvas bag.
“And apparently,” Celeste continued, “so that people can’t find their way out if certain other people don’t show them how.”
Nadine, habituated to avoiding confrontation, shrank.
The front door banged open, slamming into the wall, and a man called out, “Oh shit, sorry!” Shelley rushed to him, relieving him of the piles of clothing in his arms. Nadine, invisible again, waited for the route to the door to clear. The man, dragging a wheeled suitcase, sang out, “fittin’ time!”
Nadine winced. She had watched Gone with the Wind on television, bug-eyed at the cruelty and high drama of the old South. And here was a man in eyeliner and an olive-green nylon Members Only jacket making a joke out of a line of dialogue from the film. She was the only person who noticed, and he didn’t care.
“Time to call it,” the guitarist said. Nadine stepped back as he unplugged his instrument, put it in the case lying open on the floor, and snapped it shut. The plump man relocated to an uncomfortable-looking sculptural chair and began to sort papers in his aluminum briefcase. The guitarist lugged his amp and instrument to the door. The wardrobe man arranged clothing over the back and arms of the couch. Shelley whirled through the room, straightening up, clearing bottles and ashtrays from the table.
Celeste did nothing. Nadine bolted for the open front door.
In the driveway, she jammed her tools into her trunk. Someone—Shelley?—had placed her boots and socks neatly by her car. Wiping her hands on her shorts, she lamented the end of her disappointing encounter with Celeste. Shelley would call Gaia Earth and ask for someone else, a person who could figure out mysterious gates, who didn’t track mud in the house or gape at the rock star thrumming like a quasar in the half-darkness.
Shit. Shelley needed to sign the work order. Nadine put on her socks and boots, took the clipboard from her bag, and let herself into the house as the wardrobe guy had, which apparently riled Shelley less than ringing the bell.
Celeste stood in the middle of the room draped in carrot-colored fabric and wire and spangles. The wardrobe man arranged a god-awful orange beaded headdress in her hair. The plump man, arms crossed at his chest, appraised Celeste and the outfit.
Celeste, immobilized by the getup, bobbed her chin ever so slightly at Nadine.
“Hey, fish-face, what d’ya think of the look?” She smiled sweetly, but her eyes were frantic.
Celeste looked like a cross between a Popsicle and the Statue of Liberty. The spangles on the sheer drapery barely obscured her nipples and pubic hair.
“You don’t like it,” Celeste said. She sounded genuinely troubled.
Nadine blushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just doesn’t look like you.” The Celeste we know, she wanted to add. The Oracle. The woman who wrote the songs that shook Nadine to her soul.
No one spoke; not the wardrobe man, not Shelley, not the plump man leafing through his leather Filofax. She’d broken some cryptic rule of the celebrity chain of command, and now everyone but Celeste was suddenly even busier pretending she wasn’t there. Nadine rubbed her eyes. She should just disappear.
Shelley signed the work order and began to hustle Nadine toward the door.
“I’m just telling the truth,” Nadine muttered to the paper in her hand. Her stomach roiled. She was long out of practice with honesty.
“I appreciate that,” Celeste said.
Nadine glanced up at her. The wardrobe man was back to tugging and arranging. The plump man had found what he was looking for in his little book and had gone to another room to make a phone call.
Celeste smiled, for real this time.
Stunned, Nadine smiled back.
Excerpted from The World to See by Jessica Handler, forthcoming from Regal House in 2026.
Jessica Handler is author of the forthcoming novel The World to See (Regal House); The Magnetic Girl (Hub City), winner of the Southern Book Prize; the memoir Invisible Sisters (Georgia); and the craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss (St. Martin’s Griffin).
Photo by John Bogna on Unsplash
