Oh! You Pretty Things, Page 22

  “How did you hear about it?” I say, during one of her snuffling pauses.

  “The fucking bitch from Soap Opera Digest who pretends to be my friend called me,” she says, then pauses. “Oh! Wait. That’s Scout, calling me back.”

  And she’s gone, to talk through her trauma with Scout. Which is fine. Honestly, it is. I kind of suck at being the shoulder to cry on.

  Forty-five

  I blame you for this,” I tell Megan.

  We’re sitting at a rickety table at Doughboys, both slurping French onion soup, which is the only permissible way in L.A. to eat a raft of bread smothered in cheese. It’s soup.

  “How do you figure?” she says, twisting a string of melted Swiss cheese around her finger and pulling it off with her teeth.

  “You were anti-Tyler from the beginning, and you know how much stock I put in your opinion. Now I’ve—as Donna would say—jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” she says, laughing as she tears a hunk of crusty baguette. “You couldn’t get out of there fast enough when you thought Eva wanted you.”

  “Hey, now,” I say. “I’m the one holding the rain stick. It’s my turn to bitch.”

  “Right, my bad. Carry on.”

  “She runs out of gas, like, once a week. And what’s worse is that a considerable part of my job is running interference between the four boys who think they’re thisclose to getting her to say ‘I do.’”

  “That’s not good,” Megan says.

  “I know,” I say. “And I’m totally not exaggerating.”

  “Oh, I believe you about the redundancy,” she says. “JJ has three assistants. One for the house, one on set, and one free floater. It’s embarrassing.”

  “It’s a good thing he’s cute.”

  “Yeah, I guess I should be glad he’s not stringing along four side dishes.” She sets her bread aside. “But I’m starting to worry this isn’t going to end well for you.”

  “I just like complaining. It’s still a pretty awesome job.”

  “Just remember that we teach people how to treat us.”

  “Thanks, Deepak,” I say. “Which reminds me, I read that the Dalai Lama asked a private-jet company to comp him for a trip.”

  “What’s your point?” Megan says, scooping up a last mouthful of cheese before tossing her napkin into the bowl.

  “My point is, even the Dalai Lama has a Hollywood sense of entitlement. And he looks like a turtle.”

  Forty-six

  A few weeks later, I step into the kitchen, toting bags of ginger tea and umeboshi plums, and surprise Eva in flagrante confesso with her masseuse, Nikki.

  Eva doesn’t let just anyone massage her since a bad experience in Telluride when the masseuse called her by her character name for ninety minutes, then sold a story to the tabloids about her cover-up tattoo. Now she has Nikki.

  Nikki looks like a Barbie doll. Not in an impossible boob-to-waist-ratio way—she’s actually a few pounds overweight, by Hollywood standards—but she wears an awful lot of pink, most of it angora, and her eyes are always layered in sparkly pink and pale-blue shadow. And she talks in a baby voice that rivals Marilyn Monroe singing a birthday ballad to John F. Kennedy. She’s mesmerizing.

  She and Eva have really upped the game on their friendship lately. It’s causing major friction with Scout, and I’m getting daily calls where Scout demands to know Eva’s whereabouts, then gets passive-aggressive when I tell her I don’t know.

  “That’s weird. I always knew where Eva was when I was her assistant,” she says in the same affected voice that Eva uses when she’s feigning ignorance about something that she’s irked about.

  Actually, Eva’s much better at it than Scout. I figure I only catch it with Eva about 60 percent of the time and the rest I’m as blissfully ignorant as she’s pretending to be. Scout’s not exactly subtle. It’s one of the things I like about her.

  Here’s the thing: Eva and Nikki went to South Africa together last month, and Scout was pissed that Eva didn’t invite her. Frankly, I was pissed she didn’t invite me, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Eva wanted to take a friend who could also give her daily massages. Being between Scout and Eva is worse than missing the trip, though. Now Scout’s either being all weird with me or blurting out confessions about how much she resents Eva, and Eva’s either ignoring the friction completely or dropping casual asides about how disappointed she is with Scout, which I have to stuff into some dark place in my gut and forget.

  Eva’s trip to Africa was a whirlwind decision after her spiritual adviser told her that Clytemnestra—the ancient alien being she channels by the hour—said there was a powerful lesson for her to learn by taking care of the children. This reading happened to coincide with a rerun on OWN about the school Oprah built in South Africa, and the next thing I knew I was grinding the American Express Platinum concierge to get a free first-class companion ticket so Nikki could go along “for good energy.”

  Eva went all “of the people” while she was there. She tossed her cell phone into a nest of cobras at Kruger National Park—at least, that’s what she said in the e-mail she dictated to the concierge at the Saxon, where she was staying, at fifteen-hundred-dollars a night for a junior suite villa. I’m guessing she didn’t get anywhere near within throwing distance of a cobra. It’s more likely that she had the bath butler take the phone away to put in the hotel safe when he came in to draw her nightly milk-and-honey soak.

  Okay, yeah, I’m still a little pissed about being excluded, but also Eva is currently in a filmmaker stage and it’s exhausting. In the short time I’ve worked for her, she’s ricocheted through several pet projects—a memoir; a clothing line; a photography book of her famous friends, naked; and, now, documentary films.

  She had me buy her a four-thousand-dollar camera from Samy’s on Fairfax and when she got back from South Africa, she had forty-two hours of footage of herself tromping through shantytowns and orphanages in her Rag & Bone cargo pants, looking concerned and beautiful with her hair cascading down her back in shiny waves. There are a thousand pictures of Eva sitting in the dirt and making rope bracelets for wide-eyed African orphans who manage to convey both shyness and a clamorous need. That part of it is heartbreaking, especially when I think about what the money she spent could have done for any of the orphanages she visited.

  She had her lashes done before she left and her eyes are dark-fringed and expressive when she raises them to the camera, speaking volumes about her character’s—I mean her—anguish over the squalid poverty she’s ameliorating via documentation. To be fair, there are fifteen minutes of footage of a bedraggled Nikki gamely perched on an upturned trash can in the middle of what appears to be a town dump. Her blond hair hangs in clumps, her white cotton T-shirt is smeared with dirt, and crescent moons of sweat seep from her armpits.

  Off-camera, Eva asks questions like “How do you feel seeing all this suffering firsthand?” and Nikki fake-smiles her way through answers that are peppered with trite clichés about the universe never giving us more than we can handle.

  Forty-seven

  Eva and Nikki are curled on the bentwood settee in the kitchen, having an animated conversation that abruptly stops when I walk in, like a needle scratching across the record of their pink angora intimacy.

  “Hey, dudes,” I say, setting the bags onto the tile counter.

  “Hiiiiiii,” Nikki baby-whispers.

  “Did you get my umeboshi?” Eva asks.

  I wave the plastic container of bloated pink fruit in her direction. “Right here.”

  “You rule,” she says, and turns back to Nikki expectantly.

  Nikki looks uncomfortable, like I just walked in on her changing her tampon or something. There’s a long, hideous silence.

  “Am I interrupting something?” I ask, which i
s the worst possible question to ask when you’re actually interrupting something.

  “No, no,” Nikki baby-whispers.

  “Don’t mind me,” I say. “I’ll be out of your way in a sec.”

  I’m unpacking agave syrup and pomegranates as fast as I can, but I know I’ve taken an assistant-size shit directly onto the bowl of cornflakes of their pre-massage girlfest.

  “Oh, Jesus, what?” I finally blurt out.

  Eva and Nikki exchange a meaningful look.

  “You can tell her,” Eva says, and I immediately think they’re going to say that Nikki’s taking my job, because that’s exactly how narcissistic I roll.

  Nikki nods pinkly, and Eva tells me, “Nikki has a new suitor.”

  That may sound forced, but Eva loves the word “suitor.” It’s rubbed off on me, too. She also loves the word “haberdashery,” which she uses in place of “clusterfuck.” “It’s a haberdashery,” she’ll say, when nothing is going right. So far, I’ve managed to resist using that one myself.

  “Okay,” I say. “Um, congratulations?”

  They share a smile and Nikki gushes, “I’ve been seeing one of my clients.”

  “Who?” I ask, and there’s so much buildup that at this point if it’s not Bill Clinton or Brad Pitt, I’m going to be severely disappointed.

  Eva smiles like she just ate a canary and names a megacelebrity who has fallen into a tangle of drugs and weight fluctuations over the past decade.

  “Wow, really?” I say. “That’s kind of epic.”

  They welcome me into their fluffy circle as Nikki continues the story, which involves late-night massage sessions that turn into sex that turn into him on the phone with his assistant at three in the morning ordering hot dogs from Pink’s, and Nikki not knowing whether she should bill him for her massages.

  “Fuck yes, you should,” I say.

  “He’s so sweet,” she says, eyes misted over with glitter and delusion.

  “Dude, he kicks you out when he’s done. Does the assistant even bring you a chili cheese?”

  “Ohh.” She shudders. “I don’t eat meat.”

  “Right,” I say. “So that’s a no.”

  The silence returns. Thicker than ever.

  “We’re going to go upstairs,” Eva eventually tells me. “Can you make me a tea?”

  I am so bad at the whole “girl talk” thing. Really, I’m like a cartoon. And I don’t ever learn.

  Example: a few weeks later, Eva meets a new boy at the Newsroom Cafe. She comes home and tells me, “He looks like a poet.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask. “Narcissistic and poor?”

  She doesn’t laugh.

  Example: Scout and I are standing outside the Friday-night AA meeting on Rodeo Drive, fielding questions that inquiring sober boys always want answered. Eva was sober for a while when she first got to Hollywood. It’s not a secret; she talks about it in interviews all the time.

  “Hey, where’s E?” asks the nightlife impresario she dated for a while.

  “Working, I think,” Scout says.

  One by one, boys float into our orbit, make their inquiries, and are sent away with no pertinent information. It’s easy. In the car on the way to get coffee at Swingers, we laugh about it.

  “Boys are so transparent,” I say.

  “I know, right?” Scout checks her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Where is that hooker, anyway? She told me she was meeting us. I’ve left her, like, three messages today.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I say. “I thought she was coming.”

  I think I sound pretty nonchalant, though I know perfectly well that Eva had no intention of coming to the meeting, that she’s getting a massage at the house and then having dinner with her agent.

  Scout eyes me. “Why are you doing that right now?”

  “What?” I ask, but I know what she means.

  “Why are you stonewalling me? Dude, she’s my best friend.”

  So awkward. “I know, it’s weird. But she asked me to keep all the work stuff separate.”

  “Jess,” Scout says, sounding like someone trying to have a conversation with a toddler. “She doesn’t mean me.”

  “Oh, I know,” I say, but of course she does mean Scout. She specifically said Scout.

  It feels fake and uncomfortable and, if I’m telling the truth, kind of powerful.

  Forty-eight

  Even though Dr. Brian Lee—Eva’s potential new gynecologist—looks like a reject from an early ’90s Benetton ad in his pumpkin chinos and his untucked white oxford button-down, he’s all business when he sits across from me in his sprawling office. “So,” he says, flipping through my paperwork with a manicured hand. “What brings you to my little slice of heaven today?”

  “I’m the stunt vagina,” I say, and there’s a flash of suppressed laughter in his eyes as he opens the manila folder on his expansive glass desktop.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “I work for Eva Carlton. She sent me in as the advance team.”

  He laughs, showing a mouthful of perfect veneers.

  “Great teeth,” I say, violating another major rule in Hollywood: don’t acknowledge the beautiful work that’s been done. “Dr. Sands? Dorfman?”

  “Oh,” he says, shrugging. “Just good genes.”

  “So that’s how it’s going to be,” I say. “I like it. No one wants her vaginal rejuvenation splashed all over Page Six with accompanying photos.”

  “Is that a big worry for you?”

  “If you mean ‘you’ in a royal we kind of way, then yes.”

  “I assure you, my office protocol about the dissemination of information is completely solid. Now.” He flips the first page of my written history. “You’ve been sexually active since . . .”

  “Since I was fourteen,” I say.

  “STDs?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “One pregnancy, no children. And that was when?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a million years ago,” I say.

  Then, out of nowhere, I feel myself tearing up.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Take your time.”

  I wipe my eyes. “I’m done. Next question?”

  Forty-nine

  The next Thursday morning, my job is to get to Eva’s early, deliver her shake to her bedroom, then prepare the gym for her workout. The gym is a mess. Eva let her creepy uncle renovate it after her mother begged nonstop for a month. I don’t think he was even a contractor. He took a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit, tore down one wall, then disappeared. One of the downsides of fame is that everyone crawls out of the woodwork with their hand out.

  I’m in the kitchen, dumping protein powder, cold-pressed apple juice from Pressed Juicery, and fifteen supplements into the blender when her manager starts blowing up all the phones in a sudden need to reach Eva now, now, now.

  First the manager’s receptionist calls, then her secretary, then her executive assistant, with me delivering the same message: Sorry, she’s not available. Eva told me to answer her phone whenever I’m in the house, but also instructed me to never—ever!—divulge any personal information about her to anyone.

  I’d arrived twenty minutes earlier, buzzing myself into the iron-gated compound with my personal code. Everyone who works for Eva has their own, like a fingerprint, so she can track our comings and goings. It’s one of the things that Daniel LoCicero, arrogant security consultant to the stars, recommended after Eva’s encounter with a crazy stalker who loved her feet so much that he wrote her passionate letters about how he wanted to keep them in a box on his mantel.

  There are different types of fans—soap, prime-time, movie—and Eva has them all. Soap opera fans are particularly rabid, even the “normal�
�� ones. I’m putting normal in quotes, because is there anything normal about a grown woman who waits outside the guard gate at a studio waving a sign that reads EVA, I LOVE YOU FOREVER?

  She once did a film with a couple A-list actors, on the level of, say, Mark Wahlberg and Robert De Niro. She played the young one’s wife, which consisted of her acting charmingly exasperated and writhing around on his lap in her underpants with her hair in Lolita-esque pigtails. Some fans only know her from that film, and we tend to run into them in restaurants and airports. Maybe that’s just where they have enough time to ramp up to an approach. They’re usually harmless, whispering and snapping furtive photos, chirping like birds, then taking flight at the first sign of her annoyance.

  I think it’s because movies are an event, in a theater on a giant screen with the action occurring in a single, larger-than-life, two-hour period. There’s a distance built into movie star fans’ admiration. Movie stars are giant gods.

  With television fans, it’s different. They know their quarry, their prey. They watch a show on a screen that renders the stars smaller than they are—and trapped in their living rooms, to boot. Plus, fans of serial shows tend to get seriously invested. They call the actor by the name of the character and refer to a story line as though it’s something the actor actually did. These encounters happen in malls, grocery stores, coffee shops, anywhere there’s a crowd. It’s one of the many reasons Eva sends me to most of those places alone.

  “Hey, Belinda, why’d you do that to Stetson? He loves you, girl, and you’re breaking his heart. You need to go stand by your man, you know what I’m saying?”

  How do you even respond to that?

  Ex-cons are the worst. During my third month with Eva, I spotted a tattooed ex-con beelining toward her as we were waiting in line for a veggie dog from Pink’s. She’d been at a charity event where there was a Pink’s truck, and everyone freaked out about how good it was. She spent the next three days waffling about whether she wanted me to bring her more.