“Except you.” She crosses the room to plant a sage-smoked kiss on the top of my head. “You’re welcome to stay, but I have to get dressed. Weston’s taking me to Baja Cantina.”
“Virgin margaritas,” I say.
Scout turns in the doorway and regards me with a tolerant look. “The point you’re missing,” she says gently, “is that you’re all growed up. If your mom’s raining on your parade, deal with it.”
Ouch. “Can’t I just pay you to deal with it for me?”
“Sure, but I don’t take postdated checks.”
“Can I pay you in chewing gum and French kisses?”
“Only if you want to marry me,” she says.
“I totally want to marry you,” I say. “I’ll even turn a blind eye to your biker lovers.”
Scout laughs again. “You know you can stay here. I mean, you might have to fight for couch space with Tank, but those tattoos were just a prison thing. He’s totally not a white supremacist.”
“I hate you,” I say.
“I hate you, too,” she says, disappearing into her closet. “But keep it in mind.” Her voice is muffled by the sound of wooden hangers clattering onto her bed. “And remember, it’s your house, not hers.”
Yeah, your mouth says.
“I’ve got a really bad idea,” I tell her.
“You mean another really bad idea.”
“Do you think Eva was serious about the job?”
The clatter of hangers stops, and she appears in the door.
“I know, it’s the worst idea ever,” I say.
“Are you kidding? She’s been waiting for you to call.”
Hope blooms in my chest. “I’ve been waiting for her to call.”
“Idiot,” she says. “I’ll text you her number.”
“You really think she’s been waiting?”
“I know she has,” Scout says, then Weston wanders in and she can’t see me anymore.
My phone buzzes with a text when I’m still on the stairs, but it’s not from Scout. It’s from JJ.
Help me. You’re my only hope. It’s our two-week anniversary. Where am I taking Megan? Something special. This is big.
Really, you fucker? You want romantic advice from me after you snatched Megan away to New Guyland?
Montage in Laguna Beach, I text him. Soft pretzels with Dijon, popcorn with truffle salt, and champagne on the balcony. I think for a second, then add: She is the best thing in your life.
A few minutes later, I’m unlocking my bike from the metal pole in front of Scout’s when my phone buzzes again. Jesus, now what, JJ?
But it’s from Kirk.
Thinking of you. Call me if you want to talk.
And I do. I do want to talk to him. But the whole thing’s more than I can wrap my mind around right now.
Then the text comes. From Scout. With Eva’s phone number.
I shade the screen with my hand and look at the numbers. I’m no longer two degrees of separation from Eva Carlton. I’m one. I have her personal phone number on my personal phone.
When I get home, the lights are on, but the rooms are empty. The kitchen is a disaster and there’s a blanket—no, wait, that’s my duvet—spread out on the living-room floor. There’s a pile of sodden bath towels on the floor of the bathroom, and an upended bottle of my Peter Thomas Roth conditioner in the sink.
I don’t care. I can’t stop smiling. I call Eva and leave a chirpy, enthusiastic message on her voice mail, then sit at the kitchen table and wait for the call.
Flash forward: twenty-four hours later, and the call still hasn’t come. The reality of my mother in my house slaps me in the face at every turn. Her damp, neon-pink thong underwear drying on the shower rod; a pile of Gauloises cigarette butts in a Jade Wolf coffee cup on the living-room floor; the opened pile of mail sitting on the kitchen counter. I don’t even know how she got the mailbox key. It’s yogurt time.
When I step into the kitchen the next morning, my mother’s standing there with a full face of makeup and her purse on her shoulder, sipping coffee from a juice glass, because all the cups are dirty and piled in the sink.
“Hello, lamb chop,” she says. “It’s so good that you’re getting plenty of beauty sleep now that you’re not working.”
I glance at the clock over the stovetop. It’s 7:15.
“You’re kidding, right?” I say, dumping the sludgy contents of the least-dirty mug into the trash. “Why are you even awake?”
“Rick and I are going to the farmers’ market,” she says. “You should come. It would do you good to get out in the world.”
I rinse the mug. “I’d love to, but I’ve got shit to do.”
“What could be more important than spending the morning with me?” she says coquettishly.
“Spare me, Donna. Let’s not pretend that you’re here for any other reason than you incinerated another living situation and I’m your goddamn safety net.”
My hands are quivering as I toss the mug into the sink, where it crashes into a stack of Megan’s white IKEA plates.
“Darling, no,” my mother says, wrapping her arms around me in a fragrant hug, her moist skin cool and slightly sticky against mine.
I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy holds out the football. I know she’s going to snatch it away as soon as I come in for the kick, but right now it feels good to let her hold me and stroke my hair.
“Is everything okay?” she says. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m tired,” I say in a quavering voice.
“Oh, sparkle pie,” she says, and I burst into noisy tears that immediately devolve into even noisier hiccups.
And then, God help me, I tell her the truth about waiting for Eva’s call. Jesus, such an amateur maneuver. I blame it on Megan’s absence.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, sniffling and wiping my eyes. I step back and steel myself against her. “The bottom line is, I quit my job. I have no income. We’re going to have to leave the apartment.” I mean, it’s not like I’m not going to forgive her in exchange for a little sympathy and a stupid hug.
“Leave here?” She gestures toward the living room doubtfully. “This apartment?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sooner rather than later.”
“We can’t leave. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Believe me, I’m aware of that.”
She gives an offhand shrug. “You’ll figure something out.”
“This is not my problem,” I snap, a flush of anger in my cheeks. “Don’t you make this my problem. I’ll figure something out? Yeah, I used to have a lot figured out. A job, a roommate, a fucking life.”
“And that’s my fault? I gave up everything to raise you.”
My heart starts pounding like I’m jacked on street speed. I mean, I’ve never actually been jacked on street speed, but I’ve seen Crank, with a sweaty, adrenaline-filled Jason Statham, so, same thing. “You’re kidding, right? You couldn’t have done less to raise me if you were dead.”
I pivot on my heel, cross to my doorway, and yell, “There’s nothing to discuss.”
Slamming the door evokes every conversation we’ve had in the past ten years, and when I try to click the lock into place it spins around without engaging, like a giant metaphor for our whole relationship.
The next morning, there are three messages on my voice mail. The first is a hang-up from my mother, her throaty breathing a giveaway before the line goes silent and the automated voice says, “End of message.”
Erase.
Then JJ says, “She is. You’re right. I’m not going to fuck this up.”
Erase.
“I’m leaving for a location shoot—” It’s Eva, her voice instantl
y recognizable through the traffic noise in the background. “San Francisco the day after tomorrow. I know it’s late . . .” A horn blast obscures her words. “. . . from the production company and I’ll bonus you more if . . . one I want.”
Save.
Twenty-nine
I play the message again, and feel both a scary jolt of pure joy and a pang of homesickness for Megan. I want to call her in from the other room and make her listen to the message two or three or ten times. I want to pop a bottle of morning champagne and watch House Hunters International with her.
I think about calling her all the time, but the cell reception at JJ’s house—sorry, JJ and Megan’s house—is atrocious, which is ridiculous since there are more celebrities per square inch on that street than on the back lot at Sony during pilot season.
Still, I know if I pull the fire alarm and admit everything, she’ll be up my ass so fast I’ll need stitches. There’s some comfort in that. I even rehearse the message: “So are you guys fucking on JJ’s Hastens bed and drinking a bottle of Cristal? My mom is killing me, but I got a job with Eva Carlton, and it’s bringing me back to life. Give me a call when you have a sec!”
But I don’t call Megan. She’s so caught up in . . . whatever you get caught up in when you move in with your hot new boyfriend in his fairy-tale castle in the Hollywood Hills, and are, I don’t know, ordering delivery from Il Covo and getting a pedicure in your new walk-in closet.
I know she’d want me to call, but something in me resists. Let her enjoy her slice of paradise without being dragged back down to my level. Which is pretty low: I don’t even return Eva’s call immediately. I want to bask in the glorious possibility before the brutal reality slaps me in the face again.
Instead, I creep into the kitchen to reread the note Megan left on the counter: Boof, I miss you already.
She also left all her kitchen stuff. I mean, why wouldn’t she? Why take a rusty Jack LaLanne juicer and a box of mismatched pots and pans to what is surely a Cordon Bleu kitchen at JJ’s house? It doesn’t matter. The last thing I want to do is cook while my mother’s here. Or even eat. The whole house smells like her, a combination of the cheap Chenin Blanc she drinks when she has to buy her own alcohol and her expensive perfume, Calèche, which she’s worn since I was a baby.
They say that the sense of smell is the most powerful trigger of memory, and my happy apartment is now a Willy Wonka tunnel ride into my fractured childhood.
My phone rings. I’ve already given Eva Lorde’s “Royals” for a ringtone. Holy shit. It’s her.
“Hello?” I say, like I have no idea who’s on the other end.
“Jess?” Eva says. “It’s Eva.”
Not a manager, not an agent. Eva herself. “Hi! Hello. Hi. Yes.” I’m the stuttering fat kid who accidentally bumped into the head cheerleader in the cafeteria line.
She laughs. “So are you going to come work for me?”
“You know what?” I say. “I totally am.”
After we hang up, I stand in the kitchen, motionless, for a long moment. I open the refrigerator and stare at the empty shelf where Megan kept the celebratory reserves.
Everything changes.
Thirty
The next Wednesday, I’m standing in Scout’s minuscule kitchen at seven in the morning, cooking six dishes to drop at Eva’s house, both in the antiquated oven and on the greasy, temperamental stovetop.
I’m not at home because my mother’s perfume gives me nightmares, endless labyrinths of Calèche-scented flowers beckoning like giant Venus flytraps. I woke up sweaty in my dark, empty room two mornings in a row, then packed a bag and fled to Scout’s. Just until I find a new apartment.
“My old chef used to make me these amazing crackers, and goat-milk Parmesan was the only ingredient,” she told me. “I’ve been dreaming about them for weeks. But it has to be goat milk; it can’t be cow. Oz will freak.”
Oz is Eva’s celebrity nutritionist. She had his office e-mail me the ingredient list for her protein shakes and it’s thirty items long. His receptionist called to make sure I received the file and she sounded like Joan Cusack’s character in Working Girl.
I shouldn’t have been intimidated, but I was. She sounds like she’d fly out here and kick my ass if I don’t remember that Eva needs an extra 5,000 IU of vitamin D when she works more than two nights in a row. I’d asked why, and the receptionist asked, in a nasal, icy voice, exactly where I’d gotten my culinary training, again?
“Oh, shit,” I said. “That’s Eva on the other line. Thanks!”
I hung up before she could ask anything else. I bet she knows where to get goat-milk Parmesan cheese, the whore.
I leave two messages for Eva’s manager, Melanie—we haven’t talked since she ditched out at the Ivy—but she never calls back. Finally, I just buy sheep’s milk Romano from Bay Cities on Lincoln and I’m hoping for the best. Of course I Googled it, but the real in-the-know stuff in L.A. is never online. I’m sure there’s some grizzled old dude in Rolling Hills who makes five hundred pounds of the stuff a year, and you have to get on a waiting list behind Beyoncé’s chef and the guy who buys for Mozza, and that’s if someone recommended you.
I’m totally up for the job, but I’m flying blind right now, because Eva is easing me into things. She was effusively vague about the details of the job on the phone, and the sum total of my personal-assistant duties so far has been making a couple phone calls to people who want to shower her with free crap (Juicy Couture, no thank you; Alice + Olivia, yes, please), and running meals up to her house from restaurants that don’t deliver.
She’s paying me a thousand dollars a week and using me for only two hours a day. I spend most of my time looking for a cheap studio apartment in Hollywood.
Then yesterday Eva asked if I could make her some meals so she’ll have something to eat when she gets home from the night shoots she’s on all week. I offered to cook at her house, of course, but she sweetly stonewalled me. I think she’s waiting to make sure I’m not going to take pictures of her laundry hamper and sell them to Star magazine.
It’s fine with me, except I can’t cook at home because of Donna. I have no home because of Donna; if she’s there, home isn’t. But that doesn’t really matter. It’s past time to walk away from the apartment. Megan’s gone.
So, I’m about to be homeless and if Eva wants my food after next week, she might have to be satisfied with stuff I cook over a beach bonfire. I can barely even cover a security deposit.
Then I hand my rental application to the manager of a twelve-unit building in Hollywood, populated entirely by drag queens, and he squeals when he reads what I’ve written under “Current Employment.”
“You work for Eva Carlton?” His eyes light up like he just heard about a sale on size-12 women’s shoes at Nordstrom. “I called in sick when my TiVo broke and she was supposed to marry Jason.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I smile and nod as he breezes past the security deposit and the fact that I haven’t had an apartment in my own name in years, and that there’s a tiny problem with my Visa bill, which I haven’t paid more than the minimum on since the divorce. Good thing my affiliation with Eva is distracting the manager—who, by the way, is receiving me in his tiny studio, next door to the one I hope to claim, wearing a black Fernando Sánchez silk dressing gown with a burgundy rolled collar, his thin brown hair scraped into a bun on top of his angular head.
I bet he looks amazing in sequins and heels.
His accent is a cross between Marlene Dietrich and the ebulliently gay Carson Kressley. I’m a little scar
ed of him, but his enthusiasm for Eva is infectious and I sign a one-year lease at nine hundred dollars a month. The apartment is tiny, but the kitchen is retro and tile and has a big window—and he’ll let me move in immediately.
There’s something magical about Eva, and it’s rubbing off on me.
Thirty-one
The elevator at my old place isn’t working, so I drag a giant stack of folded moving boxes up the dilapidated stairs. I pause outside my door and listen. All is quiet. I slide my key into the lock and the door swings open into the dim entryway. The first thing I notice is the absence of Donna smell. In fact, there’s a distinct aroma of floor wax and orange peels. What the fuck?
I flick on the light in the long, narrow hallway, which illuminates a scene I can barely parse. The floors are burnished to a dark sheen and there’s a beautifully worn Oriental rug in the living room with a faded brown velvet ottoman smack in the middle. A wide, wooden tray sits on the end table with a handful of glass candles alight and guttering. There’s a stippled milk-glass vase on the kitchen counter with a profusion of lavender blooms cascading from its narrow neck.
I repeat: What the fuck?
“Hello?” I say, into the empty room.
I cross the living room and peer through the open door of Megan’s old bedroom. The walls are freshly painted a buttery, sandy ochre and there’s a queen-size bed with white-and-tan patterned linens, including a flounced bed skirt of crumpled saffron linen. It looks like a page from a Pottery Barn catalogue.
I whirl around to double-check I haven’t accidentally wandered into someone else’s apartment. But no. My room is completely untouched, down to unmade bed and the desiccated pear core on my nightstand. I’m in a parallel universe.
I’m still standing there gawking when I hear the front door open.
“Hel-lo,” my mother singsongs, heading into the kitchen with an armload of Whole Foods bags, a pineapple top and a wine bottle protruding from the recycled brown paper. “What are you doing here?”