Oh! You Pretty Things, Page 7

  “I am so on that,” I say.

  “I don’t need you on it. I’m on it.”

  “You’re throwing yourself a party?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  She hits the perfect note of feigned innocence, like it hasn’t occurred to her that this might be a little desperate. I mean, I’d never throw myself a party. That’s just sad and lonely. Not like lying in your bed on Saturday afternoon, judging your friend for wanting to have a good time.

  “Absolutely nothing,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. “Because I want you to cook. Let’s have lunch on Wednesday and we can talk about it.”

  “Okay, but it has to be fast and cheap,” I say.

  “Swingers, one o’clock, see you there,” she says.

  Fourteen

  The Santa Monica Swingers is a carbon copy of the Hollywood original, at 70 percent scale. Real estate, yo. The food used to be California comfort and now it’s all kale and quinoa with a side of soyrizo. I’m making it sound worse than it is, but you’d have to tie me down to get me to eat soyrizo.

  We sit at a booth and order from a waitress in ripped fishnets and booty shorts who looks like she’s driving straight to a Derby Dolls practice after her shift ends. There’s a good crowd for a Wednesday afternoon, a mix of tattooed bartender types with skinny arms and train-conductor facial hair and out-of-work actor types with artful bedheads and faint-orange Mystic tans. The girls are the same, minus the facial hair.

  “Tell me again why we’re here,” I say.

  “What?” Scout says, frowning. “I like the tofu chilaquiles.”

  “Ugh, your taste in food,” I say. “Okay, speaking of cooking, let’s talk about your party. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Antiques to photograph?”

  “Yeah, well, they’re not getting any younger,” I tell her. “Plus, I have to be back at the house by four to meet the dog groomer and car detailer.”

  “Wait,” she says. “Is that one person? How many people is that?”

  “Two.”

  “So the same guy doesn’t do both?”

  “I wish. If they both show up while I’m not there, it’ll be a catastrophe.”

  “Because Tyler can’t handle a dog groomer and car detailer?”

  “Celebrities are like gas,” I tell her, sharing my most recent revelation.

  “Bloated?” she asks, as the food comes. “Sulfuric?”

  “They expand to fit their space.”

  Tyler used to be perfectly capable of corralling vendors, but now that he’s had me for a few weeks, he’s grown incapable of even the simplest tasks. He called me at two in the morning last Monday to ask where we keep the string.

  “What string?” I said, groggily.

  “You know, like to tie up a package or whatever.”

  “I . . . I ’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think we have any.”

  “Oh,” he said, and we sat in silence for a moment. I could hear Zelda tick-ticking across the hardwood floor.

  “Can it wait until morning?” I said.

  Tyler sighed. “I guess.”

  I stopped at 7-Eleven on my way in and bought the only string they had, one of those old-timey white balls covered in plastic wrap. I set it on the counter with his coffee and foam cups.

  “What’s this?” he said, peering at it like it was a meteor that had landed in the kitchen.

  “It’s string,” I said. “To tie a package or whatever.”

  “Right,” he said, and wandered away.

  His nonchalance pissed me off, until he abruptly changed gears and called me into his studio, where he serenaded me with an acoustic piano version of the new song he’s been writing for a very hush-hush indie movie. The combination of talent and secrecy was like catnip.

  “So what’s the bigger plan?” Scout asks, chewing thoughtfully. “Cooking school?”

  “I can’t believe you remember that.” I mentioned it one time, when we were lying on the grass in front of the boardwalk in southern Venice, sharing a boba tea. “That’s not in the cards. It’s sixty grand for CIA. And I’d learn more just working in a restaurant.”

  “So do that.”

  I toy with my vegan Cobb salad. I’m a good cook, but I don’t think I have what it takes to do it for a living. “A commercial kitchen’s too loud and shouty until I know what I’m doing.”

  “Eva’s looking for a cook,” Scout says, like she just remembered.

  “Really?” I cover a twitch of excitement. A cooking job for a celebrity is the best of both worlds, combining my skill and my obsession. “She is?”

  “Well, a personal assistant who cooks. She’s been looking for a while and, uh . . . I might’ve mentioned that you’re working for Tyler.”

  “You might have?” I say.

  She stabs a chunk of veggie sausage and forks it into her mouth. “I’ve wanted to get you two together forever.”

  “Me and Eva Carlton?”

  “Yeah, except she’d never hire an assistant who didn’t already work in the business—I mean, unless it was a friend. But now you’ve spent a couple weeks with Tyler, you’ve clearly got all the prerequisites under your belt.”

  I laugh, but it comes out like a seal bark. “Two weeks working for a B-list composer is ‘all the prerequisites’?”

  “Sure,” Scout says. “For a friend of a friend.”

  “That’s kind of awesome. But, um, I’m already working.”

  “And Eva is already . . . Eva.”

  This is true. Eva is Eva. Tyler is merely Tyler. I cannot deny the fact of this, though I take umbrage at myself for the thought, suddenly feeling defensive of Tyler. He’s an uber-successful composer. Sure, that’s no almost-A-list celebrity, but it’s pretty awesome.

  “And Eva has boundaries,” Scout continues. “She doesn’t need a wife, she just needs someone to bring food to set when she’s working.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  Good question. What’s making me nervous about this? Not just the feeling that I’d be bailing on Tyler. “Uh . . . the last thing I need is to work for your best friend, who, by the way, I’ve never even met. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

  “A recipe, ha.”

  “I’m a comic genius,” I say. “Can we just talk about your party?”

  “That’s the thing,” Scout says. “Eva’s going to pay for it, so she wants you to do vegan.”

  “She’s coming? So it’s not just your party, it’s my audition?”

  “Nope, not about you,” Scout says. “I was thinking a whole Mediterranean thing, kind of macrobiotic, like M Café.”

  “I don’t do macro,” I tell her. “Get your miso and spelt cakes somewhere else.”

  “It doesn’t have to be full-on macro. How about hummus and falafel? It is my birthday.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” I say.

  But the truth is, I’m flattered. And I like the idea of cooking for Eva Carlton, even if there’s no way I’m going to bail on Tyler. Also, I kill at Mediterranean food.

  “Yeah, okay,” I say. “I’m in.”

  Fifteen

  Turns out when Scout said Eva was going to pay for her party, she meant Eva was going to contribute. That’s the only explanation for the envelope Scout slipped under my door last night, which contained just under five hundred bucks.

  Come on. I mean, a dinner party for ten, maybe. But Scout’s invited everyone she knows to this thing. She does that. At first—I mean, after we got over the hump of our unfortunate first impression—I thought she had the biggest family on the planet, because every time she’d bring someone into the Date Palm she’d introduce him as her brother. After the third time, I figured that she’s one of those guys’ girls who doesn’t have a lot of fema
le friends. But she does it with both genders. Everyone is family.

  I’m not in a position to be critical; I don’t have a lot of friends, period. But Scout’s mom is dead and she doesn’t have any siblings, so everyone’s my brother this, my sister that.

  Anyway, she invited fifty people, and with less than five hundred dollars, it’s pretty clear we’re not going to be toasting with Eva-funded Cristal. By the time I get out of Costco—don’t judge, they have an excellent cheese department—I’ve already spent two hundred dollars of my own money. For once, I don’t care. This really isn’t about me: Scout deserves better than a ten-dollar-a-head party.

  Maybe I’m a bad daughter, maybe I’m a curmudgeonly friend and a resentful employee, but I know how to cater a party—and I want Scout to shine on her birthday.

  Before I dropped out of high school, a team of career-aptitude experts handed out Scantron answer sheets and put up a slide presentation where we had to pick between two statements about ourselves:

  I never leave others in doubt about where my opinions lie. or

  Very few people know what I am really thinking.

  On the whole, I am satisfied with my life. or

  I am always searching for new possibilities.

  In hindsight, I’m not convinced they weren’t Scientologists. They shared a few students’ results with the whole assembly—the exciting ones, like pilot or artist. But my only occupational suggestions were dental hygienist and tax assessor.

  I’ve been thinking about that a lot as my thirtieth birthday nears. Everyone I know does something. I just do other people’s things. Except for cooking. My cooking belongs to me.

  My grandmother’s idea of a fancy meal was lasagna with hamburger meat and two jars of Ragu. My mother only made one dish, which she called “Irish lamb stew.” It was lamb stew with a can of Guinness. She made it to impress new boyfriends, and I still can’t smell a lamb chop without getting a mental montage of greasy dishes piled in the sink and me in front of a television, picking at my cuticles and wondering when she was going to come out of the bedroom. When we ate alone, she’d just set a can of tuna on the table and we’d hack at it with forks.

  One of my first roommates was a hostess at an Italian restaurant on Pico. The chef used to pinch her ass and try to coax her into the walk-in refrigerator, and once he sent her home with five pounds of veal shanks. I was afraid to ask why. I bought a copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook and made osso buco, following the recipe as carefully as if I were making a hydrogen bomb using canned tomatoes and a bottle of cheap white wine.

  I’d never gotten along with my roommate, but that night, she poured wine in my glass and laughed at all my stories. For once, I was the star.

  I read that cookbook from cover to cover, at my job behind a battered metal desk at a body shop specializing in low-riders. When I realized no one was paying attention to American Chopper and Monster Garage on the ancient television bolted to the wall, I switched it to the Food Network, where I devoured Rachael Ray, Emeril Lagasse, and the Barefoot Contessa as they whisked and pureed. I expected a lot of disgruntled cholos, but they just sprawled on the stuffing-sprung sofa, eyes glazed as a smiling Ina Garten dumped forty cloves of garlic into a Le Creuset Dutch oven.

  When my roommate came home the next week with half a case of frozen chicken breasts and a three-pound box of shriveled white mushrooms, I made coq au vin. She called some friends and we had an impromptu party, ten of us crowding cross-legged on the floor around our flea-market coffee table.

  After dinner, everyone raised their glasses in a toast.

  “To Jess,” my roommate said, her smile wine-stained and broad.

  “To Jess,” her friends echoed, and we clinked our mismatched glasses across the flickering tealights and the coffee cups filled with the flowers I’d plucked from the neighbor’s front lawn.

  Sixteen

  I’m still thinking of a dozen things I need to buy as I slog the grocery bags for Scout’s party into the rickety elevator at my apartment. At least it’s working for once, and I don’t have to brave the deathtrap stairs. I unpack everything in the kitchen, and open a bottle of the cheap red I bought in quantity. Yikes. Almost undrinkable. I add brandy, oranges, and limes to my mental list. That shit needs a sangria overhaul.

  “Thanks, Eva,” I say, taking a swig. “Way to foist it onto the little people.”

  I still need Bread and Cie baguettes, kalamata olives and feta from Papa Christo’s—and a cake from Sweet Lady Jane to tie a ribbon on Scout’s birthday triumph. I’m another two hundred in, and I haven’t even bought beer. I can ply the girls and gay men with sangria, but Scout’s got some biker-y, ex-con pals who’d sooner light their pubes on fire than be caught drinking alcohol with fruit in it.

  I open the drawer where I’ve stashed Megan’s Hawaiian windfall, then close it again without taking any. Megan and Scout never really hit it off. They’re polite to each other, and Megan barely notices how Scout answers Megan’s small-talky questions with the cadence of a teenager. She probably wouldn’t even care, but somehow using her money to fund Scout’s party feels wrong.

  I’ll figure something else out.

  The next day, I’m standing in the produce section at Gelson’s, filling a giant paper bag with fresh mangoes, which are currently the only thing Tyler wants for breakfast and lunch, when the “something else” hits me.

  I’m in a grocery store. A really good one. I’m in a really good grocery store where I have a charge account.

  And what’s a couple hundred dollars to Tyler? The monthly food bill hovers around two grand, from what I’ve seen. Tyler won’t notice. His dog has an eleven-hundred-dollar collar. So I load a couple cases of Stone Pale Ale into the cart with only the tiniest of twinges. I continue through the aisles, choosing Tyler’s usual supplies and adding all the party extras I need. At the checkout counter, I lose my nerve—or maybe I just remember the expression on his face when he sipped my coffee—and I tell the girl to put the party stuff on my card instead of the account.

  On the drive back to Tyler’s, I’m torn between hating myself for running up my credit-card bill—which I already can’t pay—and for almost charging the party supplies to Tyler. I’m falling into a weird Hollywood sense of entitlement, even though I’m a bottom-feeder. But by the time I’m lugging my party supplies up my worn, slippery stairs, I’ve gotten over my pity party and I’m patting myself on the back for taking the high road. Yay, me.

  Seventeen

  At some point, I realize that Tyler doesn’t leave his property. I mean, not ever. First I figure out that the only person driving his cars is me, even though he insists otherwise. Then it dawns on me that he never takes Zelda past the mailbox, even though he talks about walking her all the time.

  I’m a big fan of quirky personality traits, but Tyler’s behavior is beyond that. I’m sure it has its own DSM-5 code. Not that I can’t handle his agoraphobia, but all the subterfuge around it makes me edgy and stressed.

  My anxiety isn’t helped by the fact that I keep running into the brick wall of Tyler’s small-scale celebrity. I mean, he’s a hot ticket in a certain inner circle, but it’s a limited crowd. I keep finding myself sidling into his office to sheepishly explain that I’ve failed at getting comp tickets to The Book of Mormon for his brother and sister-in-law or scheduling a facial at Tracie Martyn for his mother. It’s embarrassing.

  The problem is there’s a chasm between Tyler’s current status and the perks he enjoyed in the years following his Oscar win. Tracie Martyn is booked solid for the next twelve weeks, and I can’t even get the publicist from Book of Mormon to return my call.

  I teeter between berating myself for being a failure and aggrievedly questioning the benefits of working for a celebrity who nobody knows, but all that evaporates when Tyler tells me we’re going shopping. Together.

  Our destination is the flagship Ral
ph Lauren store on Rodeo Drive. They know Tyler there, and the manager lets us come after closing time to shop in seclusion. Sure, there’s a drawn-out scene getting Tyler out of the house and into the limo he’s arranged, but the driver’s unflappable bonhomie tips me to the fact that this isn’t the first time he’s experienced it. This is more like it.

  The Ralph Lauren store is meticulously arranged with artful tableaus of estate-sale antiques to create a luxurious shopping experience that falls somewhere between a British colonial veranda and a billionaire’s dude-ranch living room. Tyler greets the staff with effusive handshakes and hugs, and if you didn’t know that it took forty minutes for us to get out of the driveway, you’d never glean it from Tyler’s demeanor. He’s wearing his requisite Levi’s and unlaced Timberlands and, in a nod to our host, a perfectly worn-in, vintage Ralph Lauren car coat with a brown corduroy collar. He has a pair of Oliver Peoples sunglasses threaded through his shirt collar and an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks for all the world like a man who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

  Ostensibly, we’re going to shop the newest clothing collection, but Tyler’s already told me that they bring a trunk show to the house at the start of every season. I’m not sure what we’re doing here—not that I care, because Tyler finally left the house—but I suspect that Tyler wants to get his mitts on the display pieces, the one-of-a-kind stuff that’s not for sale. In Hollywood, “not for sale” is just a euphemism for really, really expensive.

  “Hey, man,” Tyler says to the manager. “What’s going on?”

  The manager gives Tyler an awkward head hug, his blue RL blazer straining across his gangly back. To a casual observer, the manager looks like the socially awkward one, but I’ve lived here long enough to know that he’s a land shark in a worsted-wool coat. I can practically see cartoon dollar signs gleaming in his big black pupils. It’s immediately clear to me that the currency for this transaction is cash, not celebrity.