Oh! You Pretty Things, Page 21

  “It’s Sanskrit.”

  Donna rolls her eyes. “Not even close, sugarplum. But okay, let’s say it is Sanskrit. What does it mean?”

  “I’ve got to run. I’ll call you later.”

  “I’m going to download one of your Eva’s films.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that, so I retreat into the kitchen and open the fridge to see if there’s a bottle of water I can snag. There’s just a pitcher of murky green tea, a few bottles of Trader Joe’s Chardonnay, and a drawer full of wilting produce from the farmers’ market.

  “Do you need something?” Donna says from the other room.

  “I’m good,” I say, filling a glass from the faucet. “Thirsty.”

  “Should I open some wine?” she says.

  “I have to run.” I set the glass in the sink without taking a sip, and notice a Mickey Fine bag on the countertop, the stapled, white paper torn open at the top.

  Mickey Fine is the twenty-first-century version of Schwab’s Drugstore. It’s packed with pricey lotions and potions and it has a café in the back with an overly solicitous waitress who is a pro at talking you into side dishes and desserts. It’s also one of the only pharmacies in Los Angeles that still delivers. It’s totally a rich person’s store.

  I shoot a glance in Donna’s direction—she’s wrapped up in some tabloid detail of Eva’s life and completely ignoring me—and peer surreptitiously into the bag. There’s a Mason Pearson hairbrush, a box of Roger & Gallet Bois D’Orange soaps, and a white bottle of OxyContin with a yellow label.

  Jesus Christ, she’s so old-school and predictable. When I was a kid, she dabbled with Quaaludes and other prescription drugs. She never tried to hide it from me.

  “I’m having a Valley of the Dolls day,” she’d say.

  I haven’t thought about it much, at least not recently, but I guess I figured that she was done with that stuff sometime in the ’90s, like most people. When am I going to get it through my head that Donna is not most people?

  “I have to jet,” I say, and I beeline for the door with my package before I do something stupid like try to have a conversation about her recreational drug use. It’s so not my business. Or my problem.

  I don’t even bother with the elevator; I just stumble down the staircase, almost going ass over attitude on a slick spot on the third-floor landing. It doesn’t help that I’m carrying a thirty-pound kitchen appliance in a box I can barely wrap my arms around.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, I get about twenty texts from my mother. Her agenda couldn’t be clearer if she projected it from a klieg light like Commissioner Gordon summoning Batman.

  The highlights:

  Really want to bring you your housewarming gift.

  Just noticed. Much in common between Eva and me.

  Big news. SO EXCITING. I have an interview to teach at the Larry Moss Acting Studio in Santa Monica. Fingers crossed!

  She’s clearly done her homework. Eva’s been studying with Larry Moss for years, ever since Milton Katselas croaked and the Beverly Hills Playhouse lost its top-tier ranking.

  Think I met Eva’s mother once. Small world. We should all get together, the 4 of us.

  Lamb chop, why aren’t you answering me?

  I left a little something on your doorstep. Your sweet landlord (lady?) offered to bring it in so it wouldn’t get sun parched. Please let me know you’ve received it.

  There’s a nosegay of yellow dahlias propped up against my front door when I get home after that last text. The frightening thing is that I’ve never given her my new address. I swear, my mother should get residuals every time Single White Female plays on cable.

  I knock on Christian’s door to see if he can provide any insight. He answers wearing a spangled caftan with his limp, newly bleach-blond hair rolled in orange-juice cans.

  “Oh, dear,” he says, waving his freshly manicured nails. “I met Mommie Dearest today. She asked if she could come in to arrange them, but I told her I didn’t have the authority.”

  “You’re sweet,” I say. “I’m sure you’re minimizing the crazy.”

  He places a pearl-nailed hand on my forearm. “We all have mothers.”

  “Thank you,” I say, plucking a lemon leaf from the bouquet, the only greenery I think he’d allow, and tucking it behind his ear. “You are my savior.”

  “We look out for our own here, darling.”

  Which almost makes me cry.

  Forty-four

  My mother and Eva actually do have something in common: their curious and flexible relationship with the truth. Maybe it’s an actor thing. You don’t have to be a successful actor; just declaring it as your major is enough to lump you in the category of profligate truth-stretcher. I’m not sure how Megan missed the memo.

  Part of the problem with Eva is that everyone in her world is at least a little in love with her. For starters, she’s gorgeous. I could pour a bunch of energy into a lyrical description of her masses of chestnut-brown hair, her huge, almond-shaped eyes, her petite and curvy body, but just imagine the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and multiply her by the factor of being rich and famous in Los Angeles, with easy access to the best dermatologists, plastic surgeons, personal trainers, estheticians, and yoga instructors, add a sprinkle of fairy dust, and you have Eva. She’s genetically gifted and geographically blessed, the kind of beautiful that makes men run into telephone poles like a scene from a Three Stooges movie.

  The notion that everyone is in love with Eva goes a long way toward explaining why people put up with her constant lateness, her tendency to forget promises, and her complete disregard for a normal schedule. For example, she thinks nothing of calling at three in the morning because she saw a new mascara or phone accessory that she wants right away.

  Plus, she lies to everyone, all the time. And no one ever—I mean ever—calls her on it. Not the producers when she shows up two hours late, citing car trouble or an accident on La Cienega. Not her yoga instructor, who waits outside the gate for an hour, buzzing the intercom every five minutes.

  “Is the gate still broken?” she asks him. “I am so sorry. Jess told me she got it fixed.”

  I chafe against her passive-aggressive blame, but it’s kind of what I signed up for. And I’m not willing to be the first person to call her out. Seriously, no one is. Certainly not her mother or her sister, who bitch about her with such venom that it hangs in the air like a noxious green cloud, then hurtle through the hallway to greet her with effusive hugs when they hear her at the front door.

  Some of Eva’s lies are innocuous enough: her alarm didn’t go off; she can’t attend the party because she has an early call time; she’d love to make a donation, just get in touch with her business manager. That kind of thing. But there’s another layer, a different kind of lie, which, when pointed in my direction, always ends with me feeling shitty about myself.

  Like, after Eva forgets her script in her trailer, she calls at midnight and asks me to bring it to her house so she can work on it before her call time the following morning. I’m twenty-seven miles from the location shoot in Valencia. It’s a two-hour round-trip. I call back to ask if I can have someone from production e-mail it to her.

  She doesn’t answer. I call back three times over the next half hour and it just rings straight through to voice mail. I have production e-mail the script to me; I print it and drive it to the house. Eva’s bedroom is locked with the deadbolt, so I slide the script under her door in two pieces and drive home, waking up to check my phone every hour to make sure she hasn’t called.

  In the morning, when I bring her protein shake into her darkened bedroom, the script is still by the door, untouched. That afternoon, she realizes I didn’t bring her the original from her trailer, and calls me.

  I’m shopping at Walgreens for her bulk bathroom purchases, my cart filled with dozens of tubes of toothpa
ste, bottles of green Listerine, tampons, squat tubs of Aquaphor.

  “Where did you get that script you brought me?” she says, light and innocent, like she’s just curious.

  I get a prickly chill down my spine, and I pause in the feminine hygiene aisle, pressing the phone to my ear as I fumble in my purse for my headset.

  “I called Bombo and he e-mailed it to me,” I say.

  Bombo is the jocular second second assistant director on the show. I adore him. He was a personal assistant for years, so he understands my job.

  “I told you the script in my trailer had my notes,” Eva says.

  “I . . . didn’t hear that.”

  “I specifically told you.”

  Except she didn’t. I know that. Presumably she knows it too. So what is she lying for? It’s just the two of us on the phone. What’s her endgame?

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Never mind,” she says, disappointment dripping from every syllable.

  Fail.

  Maybe this isn’t my path. Maybe I haven’t found my way. Maybe I’m still wandering in the outer fucking darkness, I don’t know. All I know is that it hurts.

  Eva calls at three in the morning while I’m dreaming that I’m poised on the edge of a shimmering blue Olympic-size swimming pool, in a long line of swimmers dressed in identical black maillots. It’s a race and I’m waiting for the starting bell when the girls around me all suddenly knife into the water and I’m standing there alone.

  I wake up, breathless, and answer the ringing phone. “Hello?”

  “Oh,” Eva says. “I thought I’d get your machine.”

  It’s kind of cute that she speaks in colloquialisms that have fallen out of favor. She calls voice mail “the machine,” the DVR remote “the clicker,” and her treadmill “the walker.” But it’s also one of those actressy affectations, like saying you don’t exercise, or you’re secretly a big dork who plays video games and eats pizza all day. I can’t tell you how many random people have told me that Eva is so normal. It’s adorable. And by adorable, I mean fucking infuriating.

  I know she didn’t think she’d get my “machine,” and I also hear a strained tone in her voice, so I say, “Are you okay?”

  “Actually,” Eva says, “I’m pretty fucking far from okay.”

  She’s paraphrasing Marcellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, which makes me laugh, but then I trail off and she doesn’t say anything and we sit there for a minute.

  “Don’t you hate that?” I say.

  “Hate what?” she says.

  “Uncomfortable silences. Shit, I can’t remember Uma Thurman’s line.”

  “Jess,” she says, aggrieved and patient at the same time. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Pulp Fiction.”

  “Because?”

  “Because you said the thing Marcellus Wallace says to Bruce Willis after he gets ass-raped by Zed in the basement—”

  “Scout’s phone is off,” she says, cutting me off. “And I need her. Can you go over to her house and tell her to call me?”

  “Dude, are you serious? It’s three fifteen and you have to be in Valencia at nine.”

  There’s a crackling, charged silence and I’m about to tell her I’ll do it—because that’s pretty much the first tenet of being a good personal assistant—when she kind of sniffle-squeaks and says, “Dave cheated on me.”

  “Oh, shit,” I say. “What happened?”

  “A Claim Jumper hostess in fucking Tallahassee happened,” she says, then bursts into noisy sobs.

  I try to say all the right things, but I’ve been working for Eva long enough to realize that she has a very fluid definition of fidelity. I mean, Eva was dating Rafe when I started working for her, and a quirkily sexy Adrien Brody lookalike named Bobby, who’d directed her in some straight-to-video rom-com a couple summers prior. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting that when she met Bobby, she was with an A-list stylist who everyone thought was gay. Bobby was with his high school sweetheart who, despite a six-figure investment in the best doctors in Beverly Hills and a standing appointment at the tanning salon, still looked like a crème brûlée in an Alaia dress.

  Bobby got a thickly outlined tattoo that trumpeted TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY EVA across his waxed left shoulder, but Eva had forgotten to mention that in addition to the stylist, she had a string of old accounts and eager new suitors, all of whom she kept on the hook in a steady rotation of clandestine meetings and late-night rendezvous.

  Once the initial bloom of romance withered, Bobby grew increasingly suspicious of Eva. I’d get a dozen phone calls, one after another until I finally answered.

  “What do you mean, she had a fitting?” he’d ask. Or a read-through, or an audition, or a looping session, or whatever excuse she’d proffered.

  “I don’t know,” I’d say, muting my phone keyboard and tapping out a hasty message as I talked. Bobby knows you’re not at Fox. He’s on his way to the house. “She said she’d be home as soon as it was done.”

  “Stall. I’m on my way.” Or “Why are you even talking to him?” Or “Tell him my phone died and I’m out of gas near my therapist’s office.”

  I’d hear her on the phone with him later, saying, “I don’t even know what Jess’s problem is. I told her three times I was going to the movies with Kelly. It’s like she doesn’t even listen.”

  And I understand, I really do. One of the benefits of being a famous actress is that you have a retinue of people to do your dirty work. Housekeepers, gardeners, pool cleaners, sure, but I’m really talking about bodyguards, personal assistants, agents, lawyers, and managers—the people who protect the talent from having to soil their psyches with awkward conversations.

  Do I sound bitter? Envious is closer to the truth.

  Who wouldn’t want a hired shark to negotiate a job contract? Or a brawny hulk to keep people away? Or a me, to explain to the woman at the dry cleaners that it’s a mixture of period blood, Astroglide, and chocolate soy milk on the two-thousand-dollar Daniadown eiderdown comforter so you don’t have to?

  Or to refill your tank when you run out of gas, which starts happening with Eva even more frequently. Somehow, she always manages to imply that it’s my fault, and at first I hated myself for not driving to her house at two in the morning to make sure she had enough gas for an early call. But somewhere along the line it’s just become another irritation. I try to make sure there’s gas in all of her cars, I really do, but she’ll get in a groove, driving either the Cayenne or the G-class, and won’t let me near it.

  “I’m good,” she says one day, when I know she has an early call time out by Magic Mountain, and she’s been driving the same car for a week. “I’ll let you know when I want you to take it.”

  At first I think there’s something shady in the car, so I peer in the tinted windows when I’m getting the mail, but there’s only a heap of empty water bottles and protein-shake cups, a pair of battered, ancient white mukluks from Kitson, and a pile of call sheets and sides from the episode she’s shooting in the hinterlands of Valencia.

  Back in the house, I try to push past her resistance, knowing she must be getting close to empty. “Are you sure you don’t need gas?” I say, keeping my voice neutral and bright.

  She’s sitting on her unmade bed in a Calvin Klein bandeau bra and a pair of black Agent Provocateur Luna briefs, leafing through a W magazine and eating the edamame I brought her from Koi.

  Okay, random confession: the edamame isn’t really from Koi.

  Koi is a celebrity-laden restaurant on La Cienega with overpriced food and a permanent coterie of paparazzi lingering outside hoping to catch Mel Gibson or Dennis Quaid or some other faded yet permanent A-lister doing something sake-infused and regrettable. There’s nothing memorable about it, food-wise, other than the crispy rice batons that taste like delicious forty-dollar tater tots, bu
t someone once told Eva that they have the best edamame in town.

  I quickly learned that I didn’t need to deal with the valet and the paparazzi and the snotty hostess if I had a stash of Koi to-go bags (a one-time $50 tip to a busboy) and the black plastic clamshell containers they use for their takeout orders (Smart and Final, $6.99/pack of 50).

  Boom, done.

  Eva’s edamame actually comes from a hole-in-the-wall in a strip mall down at the bottom of the Laurel Canyon hill in the Valley. She would die if she knew, and something about that makes me a little gleeful.

  In Eva’s bedroom, Amanda, her in-call manicurist, is kneeling at the foot of the bed, massaging extra-virgin coconut oil into Eva’s nonexistent calluses, and she politely averts her eyes when Eva whips her head in my direction.

  “Jess, I’m not a fucking moron,” she says. “When I need you to take care of the car, I’ll let you know.”

  My face flames with humiliation, even though Amanda keeps her gaze focused on an imaginary point on the floor. It’s really bad form to gawp when a fellow underling is being taken to task. Best to paste an un-stare onto your face—which, if you’ve spent any amount of time here, you’ll have perfected.

  I mumble an apology and Eva dismisses me with a pile of dry cleaning and two new pairs of Louboutins that need to go to Pasquale for red rubber soles.

  I drive away seething with resentment, and when I get onto Nichols Canyon, I pull to the side of the road, between an empty lot and a faux-Italianate villa, and grab an empty bottle of Fiji water, which I beat repeatedly on the dashboard as I scream.

  It’s so much cheaper than therapy.

  I wake up the next morning to this text: Car out of gas on Newhall Ranch Road and the 5. Production sent a van for me. Please get it to set by noon. Also Barbara coming to house at 2.

  Barbara is her on-call hair-removal expert, for the record.

  No problem, I text back.

  It is what it is.

  I’ve gotten way off track, here. I do feel bad about this thing with Dave. She’s crying more softly now, and I’m saying whatever.