A Stranger Like You

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE - THE PREMISE

  Chapter 1 - LOS ANGELES, 2005

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  PART TWO - SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART THREE - POINT OF VIEW

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART FOUR - HOPES AND DREAMS

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART FIVE - FINALE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE

  The Doctor’s Wife

  Somebody Else’s Daughter

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Elizabeth Brundage, 2010

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Brundage, Elizabeth.

  A stranger like you : a novel / Elizabeth Brundage. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19033-3

  1. Women executives—Fiction. 2. Motion picture industry—Fiction. 3. Screenwriters—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R84S77 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2010003979

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  FOR SCOTT

  How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. . . .

  You can never go home again.

  —JAMES AGEE, A Death in the Family

  For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

  —ALBERT CAMUS , The Stranger

  GREED LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; BETRAYAL LEADS TO SEPARATION; LUST LEADS TO OBSESSION; ADULTERY LEADS TO DIVORCE; POVERTY LEADS TO ISOLATION; TRICKERY LEADS TO DECEPTION; DECEPTION LEADS TO CHAOS; LOVE LEADS TO HAPPINESS; AVARICE LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; COMPASSION LEADS TO RESOLUTION; WAR LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; OBSESSION LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO REVELATION; EDUCATION LEADS TO PROSPERITY; EDUCATION LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT; KNOWLEDGE LEADS TO PROSPERITY; INDULGENCE LEADS TO DECADENCE; DECADENCE LEADS TO RUIN; GREED LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; BETRAYAL LEADS TO SEPARATION; LUST LEADS TO OBSESSION; ADULTERY LEADS TO DIVORCE; POVERTY LEADS TO ISOLATION; TRICKERY LEADS TO DECEPTION; DECEPTION LEADS TO CHAOS; LOVE LEADS TO HAPPINESS; AVARICE LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; COMPASSION LEADS TO RESOLUTION; WAR LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; OBSESSION LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO REVELATION; EDUCATION LEADS TO PROSPERITY; EDUCATION LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT; KNOWLEDGE LEADS TO PROSPERITY; INDULGENCE LEADS TO DECADENCE; DECADENCE LEADS TO RUIN; GREED LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; BETRAYAL LEADS TO SEPARATION; LUST LEADS TO OBSESSION; ADULTERY LEADS TO DIVORCE; POVERTY LEADS TO ISOLATION; TRICKERY LEADS TO DECEPTION; DECEPTION LEADS TO CHAOS; LOVE LEADS TO HAPPINESS; AVARICE LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; COMPASSION LEADS TO RESOLUTION; WAR LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; OBSESSION LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO REVELATION; EDUCATION LEADS TO PROSPERITY; EDUCATION LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT; KNOWLEDGE LEADS TO PROSPERITY; INDULGENCE LEADS TO DECADENCE; DECADENCE LEADS TO RUIN; GREED LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; BETRAYAL LEADS TO SEPARATION; LUST LEADS TO OBSESSION; ADULTERY LEADS TO DIVORCE; POVERTY LEADS TO ISOLATION; TRICKERY LEADS TO DECEPTION; DECEPTION LEADS TO CHAOS; LOVE LEADS TO HAPPINESS; AVARICE LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; COMPASSION LEADS TO RESOLUTION; WAR LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; OBSESSION LEADS TO DESTRUCTION; INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO REVELATION; EDUCATION LEADS TO PROSPERITY; EDUCATION LEADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT; KNOWLEDGE LEADS TO PROSPERITY; INDULGENCE LEADS TO DECADENCE; DECADENCE LEADS TO RUIN

  PART ONE

  THE PREMISE

  1

  LOS ANGELES, 2005

  He had been watching her for days. Methodically, he’d researched her background on the Internet. She’d been raised in New Jersey and had gone to Yale—according to Variety she was on the fast track and Harold Unger, her boss at Gladiator Films, was paying her six figures for it.

  Surprisingly, Hedda Chase was not attractive. A photograph revealed the calamity of her looks, a gangly, unsmiling woman in somber clothing, with a bent nose that should have been fixed and a distracting little mole on her cheek that beckoned a dermatologist. It was a face you might have seen in a history book, chronicling some anonymous woman’s plight in the Dust Bowl, and Hugh could only assume that, in a town like Hollywood, where most of the women insisted on being perfect, her indifference to her appearance was deliberate and may have accounted for the attitude she exuded, a kind of forlorn complacency. She lived in a bungalow in Los Feliz, on Lomita Avenue. It was a one-story Spanish-style cottage, circa 1920s, hidden behind tall hedges, with a single garage in the rear. A small toolshed supplied an ideal hiding place, and it was from inside its sweltering quarters that he’d witnessed her for the first time. At half past six on a Wednesday evening in late spring a vintage blue BMW pulled into the driveway and parked in the garage, its flanks buffed to a shine. Chase emerged from the dark garage into the golden haze of sunset, pulling her sunglasses onto her head. She was talking to someone on a cell phone, a stack of scripts under her arm. Just the sight of her made him sweat. In truth, Hugh was accustomed to feeling inferior around certain women, his wife being one of the few exceptions—it was something he’d been working on with his therapist. Even his boss at Equitable Life, a consummate barracuda, liked to remind him of hi
s pitiable status on the corporate food chain. As Chase passed the shed, he caught a whiff of her perfume, a jackhammer jasmine, and felt the prickly little hairs on his neck go stiff. She paused in the driveway, listening with contempt to whoever was on the other end of the conversation. She was dressed in a droopy ensemble, a scarf tied around her head in a failed attempt at bohemian flair. It was no outfit for a studio executive, he thought. A plane flew overhead, roaring over the orange rooftops. She shut the phone irritably and went up the steps of the small porch, unlocked the door and disappeared inside. A light came on in the foyer and then another in what he predicted was her bedroom.

  It was almost dark. Through the small window of the shed he could see the last of the sun sinking into the brown horizon. The air began to cool. A car pulled into the adjacent garage and a moment later a man emerged, Chase’s neighbor, and disappeared inside the house next door. The air smelled good, someone grilling a steak. Hugh slid out of the shed and walked down the concrete driveway. A shoulder-high cement wall ran along the edge of the property, over which Hugh could see the neighboring yards, the lights just coming on in windows, a trio of children being called indoors for supper. It seemed like Hedda Chase lived a nearly ideal life, he thought idly, one that he would intentionally disrupt, just as she had disrupted his.

  He grabbed a metal green chair, the sort of chair his grandmother would put out on her porch in summertime, and brought it around to the side of the house where the lights from the kitchen window streamed out onto the driveway. He climbed up onto it, wobbly as a surfer, and looked inside. There she stood at the sink—they were facing each other, the thin glass of the window between them—opening a jar of herring. Gingerly, as if involved in a scientific experiment, she forked the fish onto a cracker, hors d’oeuvres style, and ate it then took a glass from the cupboard and filled it with vodka. Sipping her drink, she turned on the radio. The phone rang and she answered it, frowning. He heard her say: “No, Mother! I’ve told you before, I can’t do that. I can’t and I won’t.”

  Another plane flew overhead, so low he could nearly make out its passengers. It was exceptionally loud. Peering up through the leafy branches of an avocado tree he concluded that Chase’s home was under the flight path of LAX. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t help appreciating the irony of the situation.

  A car pulled up out front and a moment later a man entered the house and came into the kitchen. They kissed unhurriedly. The man was tall, with hunched shoulders and an oppressed demeanor. He wore a long leather coat with bulging pockets and carried two camera bags, which he gently set down onto the floor. He removed a disc from his pocket and slid it into her DVD player. Images filled the flat-screen TV on the wall. They stood there looking at it. The film appeared to be a documentary. Street people milled about a parking lot. A bearded man in a woman’s pink raincoat was pulling an empty refrigerator box, straining with the effort. Closeups on his unruly beard, his vigorous squint.

  Hedda handed the man a drink and Hugh heard her say, “You’re brilliant, Tom. Congratulations.” They toasted each other and drank their drinks and within seconds they were kissing again, stumbling out of the room in the direction of her bedroom. Hugh stepped down from the chair—he wasn’t a pervert. He’d parked his car down the block, a rented Taurus. It sat waiting for him in the darkness. He walked along the crooked sidewalk. The air carried fragments of deciduous noise. In the car, he sat in the silence. Thoughts of his wife, Marion, floated through his head. An hour or so passed. And then he saw them coming out of the house.

  The man drove an old Ford Bronco. It was mustard-colored, in perfect condition, the sort of jeep you could drive in the desert. Everyone drove a splendid car in Los Angeles. People were on the move, going places. They had interesting lives, they’d been lucky. He thought of Marion, driving around in her new Subaru with her little bag of wool beside her on the seat, the woolly shape like a beloved pet.

  Hugh decided to follow them. The Bronco was dirty, mud-splattered, covered with bumper stickers about kite surfing. Hugh didn’t know anything about kite surfing, but it conjured in his mind images of men in wetsuits on the beach. They stopped at a light. Two cars behind, he watched their heads moving through the windshield of the convertible in between. A car pulled up in the lane beside him, full of rowdy Mexican girls wearing masks of Marilyn Monroe. The masks were strange, they frightened him, and he was relieved when the light changed and the cars began to move. The Bronco turned up Laurel Canyon and wound up to a plateau. The street was lined with Spanish-style houses with orange roofs. They pulled over on a high ridge overlooking the lights of the city. Parked cars lined the curb below a party in one of the houses. The house seemed to be embedded in rock, spilling over with purple flowers, bougainvillea they called it. The Bronco slid into a tight spot and the couple got out and climbed the long narrow walkway up to the brightly lit house. People roamed in and out. Some were carrying drinks or bottles of beer. Hugh found a spot down the street and got out and walked to the party smoking a cigarette. There didn’t seem to be any point in rushing or feeling nervous. He felt a pang of longing for his wife. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone out together. On weekends, they mostly stayed at home. She’d sit at the kitchen table playing solitaire while he practiced piano. Playing the piano was the single thing he did particularly well and it pleased Marion to hear it, but he thought of his ability as a skill more than a talent, the result of years of diligent practice. The piano in their living room had been his mother’s and whenever he played it he imagined her sitting there beside him on the bench, nodding her head thoughtfully the way she’d done when he was a boy, the cross she wore around her neck swinging gently as she moved.

  He flicked his cigarette and climbed the stairs. The house was crowded, music simmered inside the dimly lit rooms; Coltrane. Chase abandoned her boyfriend, who sulked on the sidelines making calls on his cell phone while she meandered through the living room, kissing people on both cheeks, laughing, squawking, throwing her head back with a kind of self-possessed joy. He had to admit she was something to watch. She was like a version of Tweety Bird, the yellow feathers of her hair, the hooked nose, her birdlike stature, and yet there was nothing timid about her. She had a certain power, an edge that cut into you and made you want to be cut. It wasn’t beauty that made them look; rather it was her lack of it, the indifferent eyes, the dissatisfied pout. As he watched her it came to him that her entire demeanor, down to the slightest off-putting glance, was designed to inspire doubt and awe in her underlings, losers like him who ended up working for people like her.

  “Hello, there,” a woman said, touching his shoulder. “What a nice surprise.”

  He turned around. “Hello.”

  “You don’t remember me.” She was short and compact, with freckles and pushy little breasts. Obviously, she had him confused with someone else.

  “Of course I do.”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine. It’s good to see you.”

  Squinting as if in pain she said, “Forgive me. I’m terrible with names.”

  “Hugh. Hugh Waters.”

  “Ida Kent, hello again.” She shook his hand; hers was warm and damp.

  “I’m trying to remember where we met,” he said, trying not to look at her breasts.

  “Something at the Writer’s Guild,” she ventured. “Although I haven’t gone to anything in a while.”

  “Working on anything good?”

  “Of course not. But I’m getting paid, which is apparently all that matters.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “God bless indecisive directors.” She raised her glass. “Uncertainty can be very lucrative—of course nothing I write ever gets made. I suppose my work has become a very tedious habit,” she said dramatically. “What about you?”

  “I’m writing something on spec,” he said, because he’d heard other writers say it and it sounded good. “A thriller.”

  “Nice,” she said. “I lo
ve a good thriller.”

  The little group in the center of the room burst into laughter. It was the exclusive sort of laughter he remembered from his youth, the kind that made his stomach churn. Hedda Chase seemed to be at the center of it, her arms around a man in a white linen suit and fisherman’s sandals. Meanwhile, the man who had come to her house was standing off to himself, talking on a cell phone.

  Ida said, “That’s Hedda Chase, from Gladiator—do you know her?”

  “Yes,” Hugh said. “I know her very well.”

  “Bruno is such an asshole.” She nodded at the man in the white suit. “I don’t know why I came, I can’t stand him.”

  “Nor can I,” he agreed.

  “I got so screwed by him.”

  “Join the club.”

  She looked at him, her forehead tight. “I just wish things were different, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Some of the things that happen,” she said. “It’s just not right.”

  “I know.” He held up his empty glass. “Do you want another?”

  “I would, thanks.”

  He took her empty glass and tried to find the bar. It was loud, hot. The music stopped and a moment later something else came on, sitars and drums. Hugh overheard someone saying it was the sound track for Bruno’s new movie. Parties with insurance people were much different, he thought. Hugh and Marion would sit politely on somebody’s sofa, sipping weak martinis and saying very little to anyone, and on the ride home they said even less to each other. At home, they’d undress in their dim bedroom to the nightly chorus of the neighborhood dogs. It occurred to Hugh that back home he was different—a different sort of person—and people thought of him differently. They probably thought he was boring, a real nerd. At this party, people looked at him with curiosity, as if they were wondering who he was or what he did or what he’d done, and, because there was always the possibility that he was someone important—more important, perhaps, than a few of the other guests, in fact—they smiled at him with interest, as if knowing him might be good for them. He felt pumped up; he filled his lungs with the good, sweet air of possibility, for that was what they all shared in this place, the thrilling idea that, under the right circumstances, anything was possible—it kept people going, it kept you in the game, whether you had the goods or not, and it was what most of the people in this town subsisted on.