Trent shot four rolls of film of me under the waterfall, barely pausing to reload his camera. Chin down, now look at me, no, not like that, only with your eyes, yes, perfect, hold it. Shake your hair. Now push it back with your left hand. Turn just your head toward me.
I was freezing and the skin on my fingertips was wrinkled but I didn’t care because Trent was telling me in several languages that I was beautiful. Bellissima, belle fille. Krasivaya, dusha-devitsa.
“Good, great,” he said. “Now, lose the top.”
I ducked my head. “I don’t know.”
“Baby,” he said. “French Vogue is gonna shit when they see these. You look like a movie star on the beach at St. Tropez.”
So I took my top off and he shot me under the waterfall until my toes went numb. Then he set his camera aside, and stepped into the steaming Jacuzzi. “Come here. You must be freezing.”
I swam underwater to the stairs, then padded across the teak deck toward the steam from the Jacuzzi.
“Here.” He uncapped an amber bottle and shook a white, oblong pill into his hand. “Take this.”
“What is it?”
“It’ll warm you up.”
He passed me the champagne bottle and I put the pill on my tongue then filled my mouth with so much champagne that I’d had to gulp it down.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, like he had all the time in the world.
“I guess at that point,” Eva says, “he did. So, then what happened?”
“I remember walking down a long hall on a shaggy white rug that ran all the way down to a set of lacquered double doors, like the entrance to a restaurant. I said it felt like walking on baby animals, which made Trent laugh, and then he hugged me from behind. He was shirtless from the pool, and his chest hair felt like a pot scrubber.”
Eva wrinkles her nose and twists her perfect lips into a moue of distaste. “I do not like where this is going, at all,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s everything you’d think,” I say. “So, the next thing I remember, I woke up in this puffy white bed. For about one second everything felt okay. There was moonlight coming through the drapes around an open sliding-glass door. I could hear the waves outside. The room was spinning, but not too bad.”
I look at the full-length mirror, across Eva’s bedroom, the two of us reflected back with our heads so close it looks like they’re touching.
“Oh, God,” Eva says. “This is killing me.”
“And he was lying right there and then we started kissing. I mean, it wasn’t awful, just the kissing, but his tongue felt wrong. Too wet. Too big. He tasted like mustard. He was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand, from the champagne and the pill and whatever. I tried to get up, but he just rolled me how he wanted me and said, ‘Don’t cry, cherie. I’m not going to hurt you.’”
I shrug. “Which was, of course, a giant lie. You can figure out the rest. It was as gross as you would expect, and then it was over and he drove me home.”
“Ew, it’s like Roman Polanski.”
“Not really,” I say. “I mean, at least he didn’t fuck me in the ass.”
“It’s so disgusting,” Eva says, her voice sharp. “Every fucking high school kids from the AV squad who gets plugs, laser hair removal, and a production deal needs to fuck it out with pubescent aspiring starlets until the wheels fall off the fucking bus.”
“Yeah, but—that’s not the damage.”
“Then what is?”
A silence spreads across Eva’s bedroom, until I say, “When I told my mother.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is the same as the one for opportunity.”
Eva’s lips narrow.
“She said, ‘What’s behind door number two for a girl like you?’”
I lie back on the bed and look at Eva’s beamed ceiling.
Eva crawls up into my lap and rests her head on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
And I’m crying, but it’s not a twisty-faced, anguished kind of cry. It’s more like my eyeballs are leaking. My heart feels like that commercial with stop-motion photography, the one where the peony goes from bud to bloom in seven seconds.
Thirty-three
One thing about falling in love with a celebrity is that they’re so Google-able. Before my first day working for Eva, I knew all about her dating history: the one-named A-list pop star, the dozens of actors who courted her, the brief marriage to a teenage heartthrob when she was nineteen. I knew her original hair color, the names of her brothers and sisters, and the (fake) Sanskrit meaning of her unfortunately placed back tattoo that looks like a paisley bruise. Though months later, I learned that the unwieldy art was a cover-up for the name of that heartthrob first husband, inked just above her perfect ass in looping, cursive script.
Of course, I never mention the things I learn from Google-stalking Eva. I just hold them close.
The only person I could tell about my shameful behavior is Megan, and we keep missing each other. I had to tell her about Donna hijacking the apartment in a phone message, for fuck’s sake. Her texted response was perfectly Megan: Boof, I will crush her head with a cinder block if you want, but honestly, who cares? Let her have it. I hope she finds joy there. Hahahahaha, j/k.
Thirty-four
Does anyone ever think they have bad taste? My guess is no. That’s the only way to explain fanny packs, garden gnomes—which, admittedly, have a certain post-Amélie ironic appeal—and Spandex.
Eva has not one, but two, interior designers, but that hasn’t stopped her from buying a pair of bent twig rocking chairs, currently the only furniture in her living room, and a molded resin wall sculpture—intended for a garden but displayed above her walk-in fireplace—of fat-cheeked bas relief cherubs draped in diaper togas, clutching bows and quivers of pointed arrows. Bad taste in home décor is Eva’s only visible flaw, and it makes me feel protective, almost maternal.
The number one interior designer, Bella, is Eva’s ex-boyfriend’s mother. She is sixtyish and British—although, oddly, her son is not. Bella is mostly gracious and very jolie laide in her cap of silver hair and her tea-length floral dresses. She strides through rooms, tsking and measuring, followed by a retinue of fresh-faced interns who huddle and whisper. In other circumstances, I’d find her intimidating, but I just worked for a man with seriously honed tastes, so when she starts pontificating about how desperately this room needs a sisal rug—because, God knows, we couldn’t possibly consider an Aubusson for this client—I get testy.
“Eva’s not interested in sisal or an Aubusson,” I tell her, though I have no idea what Eva likes. “You’re going to have to get on board with her style.”
“Really?” Bella regards me with sudden interest. “And what are your thoughts on floor coverings?”
“A sea-grass rug with a serged edge, not bound, in this room. I wouldn’t bother doing anything to the floors, because I’d take the rug to a nine-inch border all through here.” I gesture to the wide rectangle of the living room. “Upstairs, I’d rip out that faux-terra-cotta tile and bring the wide-plank hardwood through the hallways. There’s no reason to fuck with the original floors in the bedrooms—though I’m not a fan of peg-and-groove—because they’re authentic to the period of the house, although I’d refinish them to match whatever happens in the common areas.”
Bella shoos off a hovering intern with her ringed hand. “Interesting. What else?”
“I’d leave the subway tile in the master bath, but I’d rip out that heinous Jacuzzi and put in something porcelain and curvy. And I’d take a sledgehammer to the glass brick separating the dressing room from the closet.”
“What about this?” she says, gesturing to the rickety dining table that Scout gave Eva when she moved in,
an “heirloom” from her own childhood.
I hesitate for a moment. Part of me wants to defend the table, out of loyalty to Scout. But a bigger part needs to spare Eva from any future embarrassment—and that thing, while adorable in a garage sale kind of way, is not what Bella has in mind.
“Donate it to Out of the Closet,” I say. “Or it goes out on recycling day.”
Bella laughs. “Well, aren’t you a treasure!”
A sick feeling coils in my stomach at this betrayal of Scout, but Eva texts me later that night: What did you say to Bella? You’re the first assistant she hasn’t wanted to murder. You’re awesome.
I read the final two words seven times. I am glowing.
Another text arrives: Meet her at Country Floors on Melrose tomorrow at 11. We love her. Don’t talk about Jeremy.
Jeremy is Bella’s son. He was an assistant director on a Lifetime movie Eva shot a few years ago, but it was so bad it never even made it to air. You could say the same about her relationship with Jeremy. Their brief fling didn’t survive the duration of the location shoot, but Eva held on to Bella afterward. Bella is one of the most sought-after decorators in Los Angeles, and Eva’s not the kind of girl to let a failed romance stand in the way of a potential six-page spread in InStyle.
Jeremy is currently engaged to a doe-eyed starlet, but that doesn’t stop him from leaving Eva long, sexually charged voice-mail messages on a regular basis. I cringe when I transcribe them for her daily update, which is a written accounting of the messages on her second-most-recent cell-phone number. The people calling it don’t know that Eva has moved on to a new, more exclusive contact number, so they say the most intimate and inappropriate things, which I dutifully take down verbatim and present to her daily in a manila folder.
The good news about Eva’s edict for me to meet Bella tomorrow is that it gives me the morning off. I’m thinking about this while I’m lying in bed, and I do something that’s been on my mind for the past couple weeks.
I text Kirk.
I have a big bucks meeting at Country Floors tomorrow for my new boss. Still want to cook for you. Breakfast instead? Urth at 10? I’ll buy.
I check my phone a dozen times before I fall asleep but there’s no response. Whatever. It was just a whim.
I wake up to two texts from Kirk.
Who’s gone all uptown on me?
And then:
Love to. See you at Urth at 10.
I dial Megan immediately. It goes to voice mail, but instead of leaving a blathering message, I fire off a rapid succession of texts.
Boof, I feel like we broke up and we’re enacting the no-contact rule. You suck.
I have many important things to tell you ABOUT MY LOVE LIFE, but I’m not telling you shit until I’m looking at your face.
Then, later, when she still doesn’t answer:
Don’t beg, it’s unseemly.
I really miss her.
Thirty-five
Country Floors is an insanely priced tile showroom on Melrose. And of course, Kirk gets the reference. We’re not so very different, Kirk and I, with our jobs that grease the wheels of celebrity fabulousness. And yet, there’s something about him I shy away from. Maybe I’d rather live vicariously through Eva—and even Megan—than settle for my own life. Except this is my life now. Finally.
Of course, it’s not like Kirk made any offers to sweep me off my feet.
Still, I’m up at sunrise, jerking into wakefulness while most of the people in the building have just sluiced off their pancake makeup and are moisturizing their aging knees and elbows. Or whatever drag queens do at five in the morning. Honestly, I have no idea.
I paw through my clothing choices and decide on black, boot-cut fitted pants and a kitten-soft, long-sleeved T-shirt that I snagged during one of the round-robin returns to the Ralph Lauren store when I worked for Tyler. It’s good. Sleek, sexy, but not trying too hard. Trying too hard is the biggest offense a girl can commit in this town.
I stroll into Urth at the perfectly serviceable time of 10:10 A.M. and find a dozen boys and girls in line, including Avril Lavigne in a giant hoodie and her Frankenstein-y husband, who can’t decide what they want and are having a bit of a standoff with an exasperated barista.
Kirk is sitting by the window in a patch of sunlight, the table already littered with glasses and plates: a big green bottle of Pellegrino with two squat glasses flanking it, juicy chunks of lime glistening between shards of ice; a glass of pulpy, red blood-orange juice; a couple dog-bowl-size lattes; a pecan sticky bun as big as my head; and—this is the part where I fall a little bit in love—a plate with a few different pieces of pie, including the crazy, mile-high pumpkin pie that is an Urth Caffe signature, as fluffy as a layer cake. How can you not fall in love with a man who orders three kinds of pie for a coffee date? I mean, especially in L.A., but I’m pretty sure it would hold true in Anchorage, Alaska, or Marrakech, Morocco. A three-pie breakfast date is a hands-down, global winner.
Normally when I find myself patronizing Urth, it’s for Eva’s decaf chai almond-milk latte or one of their off-menu juices—pomegranate, celery, and ginger is her usual combo. When I succumb to their insane pastry case, it’s in a shameful, surreptitious, to-go kind of way. I’ll plow through a lemon bar or a cup of double-dark hot chocolate in my car on the sly as I wait for the long red lights to turn green in crosstown traffic.
But Kirk has created a banquet for us in a place where people look at you funny if you ask for your salad dressing any way but on the side.
I slide into the chair and pick up an oversize latte. “You read my mind.”
“I didn’t,” he says, clinking his bowl with mine. “It’s all completely selfish.”
“Except for the part where I said I was paying.”
“Did you?” he says innocently. Except then he smiles and says, “I’m happier if you still owe me a meal.”
I’m afraid I’m blushing, so I lower my face to sip my coffee. It’s a perfect Urth Spanish latte: one part condensed milk, two parts espresso, a layer of thick milk foam. I know, I know, I’m veering into Tyler territory, but seriously, it’s like drinking a bucket of sex.
“Wow,” Kirk says, watching my face. “You like your coffee.”
“I’m easy to please.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” I say. “Well, no. Actually, fuck, I don’t know. I don’t ever know what I want until I get it.”
“We’ll do an experiment,” he says. He loads a forkful of pumpkin pie and offers it to me.
For a moment, I hesitate. Are we really going to do this? Pie-based public flirting? Part of me wants to say something snotty and superior, but the rest of me wants the pie. And the flirting.
I take a bite, then swoon as the layers of cream and sugar and nutmeg hit my tongue. “Yeah, I’m easy.”
“The product of three generations in Hollywood,” he says.
I’m way too flattered that he remembers all the crap I say. I’m still afraid that I’ll start blushing, so I grab my fork and inspect the pies. There’s a chunk of something with whipped-cream topping that I can’t identify. Banana cream? Coconut? Doesn’t matter. He had me at pastry.
“Three failed generations,” I say. “But that’s boring. How about you? Where are you from?”
“Guess.”
“San Diego,” I say. “You’re a military brat.”
“Columbus, Ohio,” he tells me. “My mom’s an accountant, my dad’s a schoolteacher.”
“Wow. Now, that is middle America.”
I’m not sure what I mean, but he doesn’t take offense. He tells me about his family. He’s the youngest of four kids, and the only one who left Ohio. His sisters are both married, both with two kids. He doesn’t tell me that each has one boy and one girl, but that’s how I see them. His brother works at the corporate headquarters of White Castle and pro
bably coaches Little League.
“Did you have golden retrievers growing up?” I ask. “A lemonade stand?”
He laughs. “Well, that’s how I tell it.”
“But the truth is different?”
“It’s too early for the truth. I’m trying to impress you.”
Which is sweet enough that I feel an inappropriate flush creeping through my torso and across the gossamer fabric of my favorite La Perla bra, which I hand-washed in the sink last night so I could wear it as my stealthy first-date armor.
“You make everything sound so . . . intentional.”
“Isn’t it?” he says.
“God, no. With me, it’s all impulse and overreaction.”
He laughs again. “Yeah, well, that’s why you’re such a—”
“I’m such a what?” I interrupt.
“You’re so going to take this the wrong way.”
“Still waiting.”
He takes a sip of his twelve-dollar orange juice. “You know what’s a weird phrase?”
“Right now? I’m thinking ‘that’s why you’re such a . . .’ is pretty weird.”
“‘Flight risk.’ That’s a weird phrase.”
I frown. “Like a criminal you’re afraid is going to run away?”
“Yeah, because when you hear ‘flight risk,’ you picture someone all skittish and furtive and—” He gropes for the word. “Nefarious.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, not sure I’m liking where this is going.
“But it’s not ‘escape risk’ or ‘fugitive risk,’ it’s flight risk. Like you might suddenly sprout wings and take to the sky.”
“That’s me? I’m a flight risk?”
“Such a flight risk,” he says.
Then he asks about my job, and when I stonewall he tells me about his. It turns out that he owns Fleurs et Diables, and he’s thinking about expanding. He asks my advice about building on his home service versus opening a nursery, he asks about shop fronts and neighborhoods and he listens to my answers. Apparently he took “third-generation Hollywood” to heart—good thing it’s true—and he gets opinions out of me that I didn’t know I had.