We’re so engaged in the conversation that I barely notice the yoga sylph sitting four inches from us, dressed head-to-toe in Lululemon, flicking her cat-eyed gaze at Kirk. I barely notice her interest in his voice and his laugh, and I barely notice her dismissive shrug when she inspects me. I barely feel a happy flicker of triumph.
Then Kirk says, “How solid is your eleven A.M. call time? Can you come with me to Pasadena?”
“What? Now?”
“Yeah. You know where Hortus Nursery used to be? There’s a lot for sale. I want you to look at it.”
That’s when my phone bleeps. It’s Eva: Got a call from Soap Opera Digest this morning. There are paparazzi photos of me and Dave and they’re not good. I’m a mess. Don’t care about Bella and Country Floors. Can you come here ASAP? I need a friend.
The weird thing about fame, I’m slowly learning, is that it doesn’t always protect you from the peccadillos of human relationships. In fact, it tends to exacerbate them.
“I can’t,” I tell Kirk. “I have to go.”
“Already?” he says. “What’s up?”
I hesitate. Dave is Eva’s co-star boyfriend, but she’s got at least two other high-profile boys on the side. I don’t know what I can say, so I mumble, “Eva’s having a thing.”
What I don’t say is, a friend. She needs a friend. Me. I’m her friend. I’m friends with Eva Carlton.
“No problem,” he says. “It was good to see you, Jess.”
I forget to say good-bye. I forget to pay for breakfast. I blink twice and I’m gunning my beater Mazda uphill toward Eva’s house. She needs me. I blush at my assumption. But there it is. So not pretty. The truth is that by the time I hit the front door, I’ve forgotten Kirk completely.
Thirty-six
Megan finally crawls out of her honeymoon suite and calls me. I feel like I’ve left her a thousand messages over the past few days, but as much as I want to be petulant, I’m just glad to hear her voice. “Boof,” I say. “I thought you were dead.”
“Sorry. We went to Telluride and I left my fucking phone at the house.”
“Total technology fail,” I say, even though I’m only 42 percent sure she’s telling the truth. I mean, Megan’s not a pathological liar or anything, but she’ll stretch the truth to spare my feelings, and if she’s been too lazy or blissed-out to call me back, I know better than to take it personally. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me everything,” she says, and I can hear the whir and click of a lighter, the crackle of burning tobacco, and her smooth exhale.
“I’m having a moment about Kirk. He took me to breakfast this morning and I bailed on him because Eva was having tabloid drama, and—”
“Hold on, hold on. Imma let you finish, but can we talk for one second about those pics? I mean, what is happening there?”
“Some asshole up the hill must’ve let a photographer into their yard. That’s the only way you could get pictures by her pool, even with a long lens.”
“Of that guy’s hairy butt crack.”
“That’s her boyfriend. Well, her ‘alleged’ boyfriend. There are some side dishes being served around here, but I’m not privy to the details.”
“Already bored with her,” Megan says. “Back to Kirk, please.”
“I don’t know. We had this amazing breakfast. He ordered three kinds of pie at Urth. Then Eva called and I dropped everything to go to her and now I feel like an asshole.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Boof. You went to do your job, not to—what did you call it?—pick up a side dish. And boys like to chase. It’s in their Cro-Magnon brain stems.”
“They like to chase you,” I say. “But it’s not that. I feel like an asshole because I was . . . y’know.”
“Eating three kinds of pie?”
“Excited about Eva wanting me to commiserate with her. I sound so gross, Boof. Tell me I’m not gross.”
“You’re not gross. You’re human. Maybe a little more codependent than the average bear. But I can’t really talk.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m the asshole who’s getting on a plane to follow her boyfriend to Vancouver tomorrow. He’s doing a cameo for the new Judd Apatow movie.”
I smile at the phone. “Next thing you know, you’re wearing a dirndl and baking cookies while he’s watching the Super Bowl.”
“Ouch,” Megan says. “I promise, promise, promise that we’ll get together as soon as I get back.”
“You’re kind of overselling it with the triple promise.”
“And I want updates on the Kirk front,” she says. “I’m guessing he’ll be asking for a replay within the next twenty hours.”
“A replay?” I say. “You’re already adopting sports vernacular. You know you have to throw a Silpat liner on that cookie sheet before you start scooping your perfect little dough balls onto it, right?”
“I’m hanging up. I miss you.”
“I miss you too, Boof.”
Thirty-seven
Eva and I have a loose relationship about money. When I started working for her, she asked me what I needed to make. The way she described her schedule sounded like there’d be plenty of days when she wouldn’t need me at all. It was basically a part-time job. So I pulled a number out of my ass: eight hundred bucks a week.
For hanging around with Eva Carlton? People pay ten times that for her to spend a couple hours at their daughter’s bat mitzvah.
Eva sipped her caffeine-free peppermint tea and offered me a thousand a week. Fifty-two grand a year. Maybe I’d failed at marriage and sucked as a barista, but goddammit, at least I’d be able to pay my rent.
Of course, it’s impossible to keep track of my hours because there’s such a permeable line between my job and our friendship. Like, sometimes Eva calls in the morning when she’s not working and says, “Let’s do Runyon.”
Ten years ago it was a great place to break a sweat and take in the view of the city. Now it’s like being on Robertson Boulevard, but with exponentially more dog shit and the possibility of stepping on a rattlesnake. At least the paparazzi are much lower-key, though they’re always there, hoping for the money shot of Angelina Jolie or Reese Witherspoon pulling her yoga pants out of her camel toe.
The only time I voluntarily do Runyon is early in the morning, when the fog curls around the eucalyptus trees like smoke and the vermin are still sleeping in their holes. But Eva doesn’t do mornings. Her days off usually start at around eleven.
I never say no when she calls, of course. Mostly because I like being seen with her, but I also feel like it’s part of my job. What’s flattering is that she thinks of these outings as a thing we’re doing as friends. Of course, this means she won’t think anything of asking me to work for the next seven days straight if she has shit she wants done, but that’s a small price to pay. Certainly smaller than joining her at the sugar spray tan place that makes me look like an Oompa Loompa with vitiligo, even when she gets me the extra exfoliant thing that smells like Lemon Pledge and Clorox.
Eva lives in a Tudor-style house at the top of Nichols Canyon that she bought with the money from her first show. Two million dollars, and it still needs work. It’s three stories, turreted and bricked on the outside and sprawling and Mediterranean on the inside, with dec
orative half-timbered walls and terra-cotta floors. Everything in Los Angeles is a mutant hybrid. A nineteenth-century architect ghost peers through the leaded windows and weeps into his flounced cuff.
The only room that’s fully furnished is Eva’s bedroom: king bed swathed in Frette linens; a double wide, full-length mirror leaning in the corner; a scarred wooden dresser she’s had since she was a waitress, drawers always askew and spilling wispy panties and bras.
The other three bedrooms serve as closets for her ever-expanding wardrobe. She has a habit of acquiring bags of clothing on memo. She also somehow acquired four tiny dogs—two dachshunds, a Chihuahua, and a bulgy-eyed mutt. They’re all named Rosebud, but on the first day, when I made the requisite sled comment, Eva looked so blank that I just pretended I hadn’t said anything at all.
None of the Rosebuds are housebroken, so one of my daily duties is to patrol the house for dog shit. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, but the floors are all a deep chocolate brown not dissimilar to the color of at least two of the Rosebuds’ shit piles.
Also, Eva is in the habit of disrobing as soon as she walks in the front door, leaving a trail of clothing from door to kitchen, kitchen to bathroom, bathroom to bedroom. Ditto for her post-workout routine. As soon as she hops off the elliptical—in a room she calls “the gym” although it’s really just a walled-off former garage—she peels off her sweaty sports bra and Lycra yoga pants and drapes them across the iron railings that line the three stories of stairs from the ground floor to her bedroom.
The Rosebuds go crazy over her damp-crotched underwear, gnawing out the cotton linings and leaving their thread-laden poop all over the place. Every time I walk into the house it’s like walking across the Uzbekistan–Tajikistan border circa 2004, but instead of losing a limb I end up with a flip-flop full of dog shit and underwear bits.
However, for every tenth shit-flop, there’s a Willy Wonka golden ticket into a magical world.
One random morning, Eva sleepily appears in the kitchen doorway and tells me to take the day off because she’s treating me to a body scrub/body care combo at Beverly Hot Springs. Of course, she neglects to mention that it’s a wet treatment, and the woman who’s giving me the treatment is also practically naked, in a black lace bra and matching panties.
At first I think the woman is fucking with me, but it’s a quirk of not only that Korean spa but every one I’ve ever been to since. The distinctive thing about Beverly Hot Springs, aside from their faux-rock grotto, is that they’re more of a celebrity draw than Nobu Malibu on a Saturday night. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The décor is still an alarming cross between the break room at a Korean barbecue restaurant and the famously sperm-encrusted Jacuzzi at the Playboy Mansion.
Supposedly their water—Beverly Hot Springs’s, not the Playboy Mansion’s—comes from an artesian well, the only one in L.A., originally tapped by a wealthy oil baron in 1910. That’s exactly the kind of marketing that appeals to the celebrity mind-set: something rare enough that it’s difficult to obtain. There are a hundred Korean spas in the three-mile radius of the part of Hollywood called Koreatown, but Beverly Hot Springs is the only one where you’re likely to see Liv Tyler with her perfect tits bobbing in the rarefied alkaline water.
Which is exactly what happens when Eva and I take our first trip there together a few weeks later. I’m trying to play it cool, but I can barely contain myself. Of course, before you start imaging porntacular scenes of Eva and Liv and the underwear ladies, I should mention that the women who do the body scrubs—all of whom have adopted uber-American names from decades past, like Rita and Helen—are well over forty. And they’re on their feet all day, slinging buckets of water, so if you’re picturing every Asian woman in every film Quentin Tarantino ever made, or even Tila Tequila, you’re completely off base.
We’re running late, so we quickly change out of our street clothes and trot into the grotto, wrapped in the tiny, coarse towels they dole out at the front desk.
And there’s Liv in the steaming water, hair piled in a sloppy bun on top of her perfect head. She’s used the stretchy cord attached to her locker key as a ponytail holder, and the large brass key is dangling from her topknot like a Christmas ornament.
Eva grabs my arm with both of her hands and gestures minutely with her head.
“I know,” I say, and Eva leans in to mouth an almost silent scream in my ear. I don’t care how inured you are to the idea of celebrity, Liv Tyler naked in a steamy grotto is too awesome to ignore. We pause at the steps to the large, rock-encrusted hot pool. Liv is five feet away, sitting on the smooth stone ledge, submerged in the bubbling water up to her delicate collarbone.
Eva drapes her towel over the metal bar at the top of the pool stairs, an oddly utilitarian touch in all this steam and rock and nakedness. She pauses for a moment and everyone in the room, including Liv and me, take in the splendor of her body: her skin taut and creamy, her proportions perfect, her breasts lush and teardrop-shaped, her ass full and high above lean, sculpted thighs.
I get a really good look at the tattoo Scout told me about, the sloppy purple-and-black monstrosity. Jesus, it’s big, like the size of a baseball, which might be less tragic on a supermodel, but Eva isn’t even five-foot-three and her hips are smaller than my waist. It looks like a giant bruise and I’m not going to lie, there’s something about the unsightly self-inflicted flaw that makes me love Eva a little more. And helps me get comfortable with dropping my own towel.
We file past Liv, who catches Eva’s eye and gives a subtle nod, which Eva returns. Liv’s gaze skates over me then flickers away, pausing for an instant on the two scripts with their bright red CAA covers that I’m holding at shoulder level to protect from the water and steam. They are members of a club I don’t belong to, but before I have time to contemplate exactly how that makes me feel, a wrinkled Korean woman in droopy black lace underpants whisks Liv to the back room, which is where the brutally invasive scrubbing happens.
Eva and I watch with fascination as Liv Tyler’s naked ass sways away from us. It’s pink from the water and creased by the uneven blocks of the stone ledge she’s been sitting on.
“Dude,” Eva whispers. “Liv Tyler.”
“Dude,” I whisper back. “I know.”
“Are you kidding me?” Eva says. “Her body is sick.”
I glance at the remaining women in the pool, a couple mid-forties women who are not being subtle about their interest in Eva, and a skinny blond girl reading a giant hardback copy of Infinite Jest and twirling a strand of hair in the manicured fingers of her free hand.
“Three o’clock,” I murmur, flicking my eyes to indicate the nosy women.
“What’s at three o’clock?” Eva says, not quietly.
“I’m noon,” I say, even lower. “One o’clock, two o’clock, and three o’clock is very interested in what you’re doing.”
I give another eye flick and Eva slowly turns her torso toward the women, then snaps her head at the last instant. It’s a dramatic Did-you-need-something-ladies? maneuver, and the women avert their eyes and fall silent.
“Impressive,” I murmur.
Eva slides down in the water and closes her eyes, resting her head on the stone lip of the pool. “It’s my squid ink,” she says, and it takes me a second to realize she’s talking about defense mechanisms. It’s a snappy little rejoinder that catches me off guard after the three-o’clock debacle. I honestly can’t figure out how much of Eva’s wide-eyed ignorance is deliberate.
I close my eyes too, and listen to the hum of the women chatting in Korean in the scrub room. There’s a strict no-talking policy at Beverly Hot Springs, fiercely enforced by the most decrepit of the underwe
ar ladies, who rides herd on the room from a white plastic chair by the cold pool, shushing anyone who dares raise their voice above a whisper. The rule doesn’t apply to the employees, who chat nonstop while they’re administering their special scrubby torture, and when Eva’s lady comes to collect her, she and Eva squeal with delight and carry on about how long it’s been in a mixture of broken English and Eva’s overly loud compensatory lack of Korean.
The white chair patrol just nods, but the blond girl chuffs in irritation, and I realize that she’s a model I’ve seen on billboards. I smile and shrug, but she doesn’t acknowledge me.
Hollywood is full of rules that apply to some of the people all of the time, some of the people some of the time, and some of the people none of the time. I sink deeper in the water and wallow in the knowledge that I’ve possibly moved up a notch.
Thirty-eight
When I was twelve, I got a scholarship to the Eastcove School. Donna was so overjoyed, you’d have thought I’d gotten into Harvard Law. Eastcove is—or at least was—a luxurious dumping ground for celebrity offspring, plus a smattering of working teen actors whose parents wanted to maintain the illusion that they were giving their kids a normal life.
I went to school with a couple kids you’d still recognize, working child actors who shilled for pudding cups and board games. Twelve-year-olds with charismatic gapped teeth and freckled noses who made more from one national commercial than their parents made in an entire year. It completely skews the balance of power, when your kid out-earns you in a single afternoon, just by welling up with tears because no one got pet insurance for poor Buster. It makes things awkward when little Jimmy wants to have his thirteenth birthday party at the Peninsula, goddammit, and he doesn’t give a shit that they have a twenty-five-thousand-dollar catering minimum for a Saturday night, and no, Mom and Dad, you can’t invite your friends from the old days, because that would be completely humiliating.