Oh! You Pretty Things Read online

  Sometimes you have to close one door before another opens.

  Slam.

  The thing is, I’m not very good at unemployment. At this point, I’ve been in bed for three days, surfing Facebook and Twitter and watching reruns of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and House Hunters International, in addition to my steady gossip-blog diet. Once in a while, under the cover of darkness, I skulk across the street to get frozen yogurt, dressed in a pair of stretched-out gray sweatpants and the Sex Pistols T-shirt I’ve been sleeping in. And I haven’t heard a peep out of Kenner. I have his number, but it feels too desperate to call.

  Pretty much the only contact I have with the outside world is the guy behind the frozen-yogurt counter. He never says a word, just nods and grunts when I order, then bags my quarts of chocolate malt and old-fashioned vanilla—and, occasionally, a quart of tropical fruit that tastes like ipecac syrup, because I tell myself it has more Vitamin C. I’m invisible to him, which is fine with me. The last thing I want is to be seen.

  Megan’s been in San Diego for a week, shooting episodes of a new network show featuring impossibly hot lady cops who keep finding themselves in investigations involving lingerie or swimsuits. If she were here, she’d bring a salad bowl full of popcorn into my bed and tell me everything is going to be all right with the sort of sincerity only a working actress can muster.

  A working actress is an anomaly in L.A. Everyone is some kind of model-actress-whatever, but when you drill down, waitress-barista–sex worker turns out to be more accurate. Not Megan. She’s gorgeous, but not in a starlet way. She’s a brunette, first of all, and she’s curvy like a pinup model, not wafer-thin with pneumatic tits and lips, which is de rigueur in L.A. She’s kind of a tomboy Dita Von Teese, if that oxymoron makes any sense. Her looks can skew toward either blueblood or girl-next-door, and once she has a few drinks in her, she becomes a bawdy, size-2 truck driver—yeah, that’s curvy in Los Angeles—so of course I fell in love with her the moment I met her.

  And after I read my mother’s latest texts, I need her. But I can’t call when she’s on an audition. She’ll turn off her phone while she’s actually in the room, but I don’t want to break her concentration if she’s still sitting in some endless holding pen full of the pneumatically-titted.

  Donna’s texts are a cavalcade of bad news.

  The first one says, SweetP? RU there?

  The second one says, Emily’s not in good shape. I’m agonized. Really must see you.

  And by “must see you,” she means must see my money. Also, for what it’s worth, I’m patently aware that there is no Emily. There’s never an Emily. You know how little kids create imaginary playmates and then blame broken cookie jars and dead goldfish on them? Well, Donna never outgrew that phase. She’s a master at diverting uncomfortable truths or unpopular opinions to the mouths of her nonexistent friends. (“I was talking to my friend Cecelia, and she noticed you’re looking a little chubby, hon,” or, “I would love to come to your spelling bee, but I have to go to court with my friend Rachel that day.”) It’s one of the many forms of Kabuki theater I grew up with—smooth, bland masks that kept us from having to have real conversations. At this point, it’s just par for the course.

  The third text says, I’m planning the L.A. trip now. Hope the old clunker can make it over the Grapevine. xoxo

  I start sweating damp, sticky circles under my arms. Is she really coming? Where’s she going to stay? Not here. She’s probably lying about that, too. She’s probably just threatening to visit so I’ll send her money. Gaaah.

  I scrape out the dregs of a quart of strawberry frozen yogurt like maybe there’s a golden ticket at the bottom, then set the empty on my cluttered nightstand. If Megan doesn’t come home soon, I’m going to weigh three hundred pounds. Maybe I can join the circus. Better than living with Donna.

  My only other option is calling Kenner. He scrawled his number on a Date Palm napkin after my unfortunate instant resignation with Pete.

  “Call me in a couple of days,” he’d said while I’d fought back tears and tugged at my bike lock. “I’ll talk to my old boss.”

  “Prada guy will never hire me.”

  He looked at his shoes and sighed. “They’re Rick Owens. And seriously, you’d be perfect.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because you have the skin of a rhinoceros and the soul of a rose.”

  I stared in astonishment.

  “Stella Adler,” he explained.

  Believe me, I knew the provenance of the quote. Donna said it every time I came in crying from the playground. “You’re better than those assholes,” she’d say of whichever girl had hurt my feelings with some imperceptible slight. “You have the skin of a rhinoceros and the soul of a rose.” For the longest time, I thought she’d made it up. Turned out it’s a pretentious trope from the Actors Studio. I wasn’t really surprised. Also? I have the least rhinoceros-y skin on the planet. I guess she meant it in an aspirational way.

  Kenner had slipped the napkin into my hand with an agonizing pity smile. “Seriously. Call me. He won an Oscar!”

  An Oscar is major, even if you’re not into that kind of thing. Although, of course, everyone’s into exactly that kind of thing. Which is why I’m in my room eyeing the napkin with Kenner’s number when I hear a key scrape in the door.

  A spark of hope ignites in my chest. Megan’s home. I hear her swearing under her breath and jiggling our sticky lock.

  If you’re feeling generous, you could call our apartment bohemian. It’s on the fourth floor of an old five-story Masonic lodge in Baja Santa Monica. Santa Monica is divided into two areas. First there’s the flats, or what we jokingly call Norte, where the real-estate price tags start in the multimillions and Montana Avenue teems with Stokke and Bugaboo strollers pushed by underpaid Filipina nannies while the slim-again mothers sift through lingerie at Only Hearts or grab a Pilates mat class at YogaWorks.

  Then there’s where we live, Baja Santa Monica, on the cusp of Venice. Sure, we’ve got an Urth Caffe and some celebrities tucked into the walk-streets by the beach, but Baja Santa Monica is low-key, and our rent-controlled apartment would make a Montana Avenue mommy wrinkle her sculpted nose in disdain. There are drunk sorority girls puking and shrieking in the alley outside O’Brien’s Pub every Friday and Saturday night, and a contingent of moderately aggressive homeless people form a gauntlet between our building and the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf a block down.

  But there are definite pluses, such as rent control, which means we pay only $612 each for our minuscule two-bedroom/one-bath apartment, a price seriously unheard-of in this or any other livable part of the city. And we’re three blocks off the beach, so when the rest of the city is sweltering during our long, subtropical summers, we’ve got a morning marine layer that lets the beach kittens add a layer of Planet Blue cashmere over their James Perse sundresses.

  Megan scored the apartment from the makeup artist on her last movie, who took a job doing fetish porn in Japan. Megan paid her five grand in cash to walk away. Technically the lease is still in her name, and we send our checks to a PO box every month, plus an extra two hundred bucks cash, which Megan always pays. It’s the vig. So far, we haven’t gotten an eviction notice, but I squint at the front door every time I come home. Megan says we have nothing to worry about, but do we really think that a fetish porn star would hesitate to screw us?

  Megan chooses to live modestly, in a cheap apartment with a cheaper roommate. She could afford better—hell, she could treat herself like a celebrity instead of an actress and blow through her savings in a year. But she would never. That’s her greatest fear: waking up one day with no work, no money, and no prospects.

  My greatest fear is that she’ll wake up one day and realize that she can do better than a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood with a shitty roommate. Or at the very least, that she can live in a building with a w
orking elevator.

  “Are you here, Boof?” Megan drops what sounds like a steamer trunk on the wood floor in the living room.

  “In my room,” I call out, which should give you some idea of the acoustics in our rent-controlled sliver of the L.A. dream.

  A moment later, she flops beside me on the unmade bed and kicks her slip-on Keds onto the floor. “What is going on in here? It smells like ass, and you’re sitting in the dark.”

  “That’s not ass,” I tell her. “That’s dried tropical-fruit yogurt.”

  “Classy,” she says, yanking on the blinds to let the afternoon summer sun flood in.

  My room doesn’t look that bad. Well, sure, there’s the mound of yogurt containers and a couple piles of dirty laundry, but nothing to expose the horrible facts that I quit my job, my mother is threatening to descend on us like a plague of crazy, and I’m the biggest twenty-nine-year-old loser west of the 405.

  “I quit my job,” I say. “And I am the biggest loser west of the 405.” No point in avoiding the obvious.

  Megan plucks an American Spirit from the pack on the table. Her hazel eyes are sparkling like it’s the best news she’s heard all week.

  “I need fire,” she says.

  I toss her the pink My Little Pony disposable Bic that I swiped from Pete at the Date Palm. Maybe I should feel guilty, but honestly, I was doing his ironic hipster ass a favor.

  I’m this close to mentioning that if I don’t pay off Donna—which is what I’m convinced all those texts are about—she’ll slither onto our couch and poison our lives. But I can’t. What if Megan offers to front the money? I don’t mind mooching a little, but the whole actress-as-friend thing is tricky. There’s such a fine line between friend and entourage.

  “You’re so dramatic,” Megan says. “We’re young, white, and living the Hollywood dream.”

  “That’s you, Boof. I’m feeling more fat, jobless, and broke right now, frankly.”

  Megan exhales a stream of smoke. “I hated that Date Palm job for you. You need to cook, not cashier.”

  “Now I’m not doing either,” I say. Cooking is another one of those jobs where looks don’t matter—in any other city on the planet. But here, even a scullery job at a hip restaurant feels like going on a casting call for a commercial. They want head shots. Seriously, head shots.

  “Well, I want to care about your crappy job loss, but it’s a big win for me because I just booked a Gary Scott Thompson pilot.”

  I look at her blankly.

  “I’m shooting in Maui for six weeks,” she explains. “I want you to come with.”

  “As what?” I scoff, as if I’m not already throwing sunscreen into a suitcase.

  Megan kicks her bare feet into the air. “Whatever. Are you hearing me? Maui.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “I bet I can get you paid.”

  “Really?”

  “Gary Scott Thompson,” she says, and unleashes her smile.

  I’m not entirely clear who Gary Scott Thompson is, but her enthusiasm is infectious. And this would solve all my problems.

  “Gary Scott fucking Thompson!” I say. “I’m in! Is it time for bubbles?”

  Megan always keeps a couple bottles of good champagne in the fridge. It’s her philosophy that we should always be able to celebrate good news at a moment’s notice. I tend more toward the notion that we should always be able to drown our sorrows, which kind of illuminates the basic—and major—difference between us.

  “Boof, please,” she says. “That’s not even a real question.”

  I should explain the Boof thing. We picked it up six years ago, when a drunk guy in an unfortunate mesh shirt sidled up outside the restaurant—the now defunct Guys and Dolls—where Megan and I were waiting for her car from valet. We barely knew each other then. I’d been dating Robbie—my ex-husband—for a few months, and she’d just started dating his business partner, a shady guy who wouldn’t last long in any of our lives. The boys had gone to the SXSW music festival and we were making the best of being left behind. We were both a little tipsy, not so much from the bottle of wine we’d shared but from our mutual delight that we were getting along so well.

  “You’re the girl from Jade Wolf!” the guy said, fumbling with his iPhone for the inevitable picture request.

  Megan gave him a hundred-watt fan smile. “You must be one of the three people in the US who watched it.”

  “Areyoukiddingme?” He threw an arm around her shoulders, then peered at me. “Are you somebody too?”

  “This is Jess,” Megan said, slipping gracefully from his sweaty clutch after he’d clicked the picture. “She’s my girlfriend.”

  “You mean, like, girlfriend girlfriend? You boof girls?”

  Megan grabbed my hand and led me away toward her Jeep, which was idling at the curb. “Thanks for watching Jade Wolf.”

  It was a weird L.A. bonding moment, and we’ve called each other Boof ever since.

  “There’s only a bottle of Krug in here,” I yell after rummaging through the fridge.

  I peer around the corner, where I can just glimpse Megan’s face hanging upside down from the side of my bed.

  “Then we better use the good glasses,” she says, blowing one smoke ring through another, like it’s no big deal that we’re cracking a two-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne at three in the afternoon.

  The truth is, Megan doesn’t get recognized that often when we’re out in L.A. Despite working steadily, she’s not even C-list famous. She was a theater major at UCLA when she was a teenager and she studied at the Marcel Marceau Mime School in Paris one summer. She said it was all “now you’re in a box,” “now you’re climbing out of a well,” while the teachers told her in French that she had to stop eating cheese or she’d get even fatter than a size 2.

  She came home determined to change her major to something practical when she got cast from a student showcase in a gross-out torture horror film. She never looked back. She still talks wistfully about wanting to do theater, but she’s a Hollywood workhorse. She auditions constantly, and when the jobs come in she takes them and when they don’t she taps into savings.

  She just shrugged when Jade Wolf only ran in the United States for twenty episodes, which shafted her out of syndication money. She shops at vintage stores and Target, not Fred Segal and Planet Blue, and she still drives the Jeep she paid cash for after her first big payday.

  She’s the most well-balanced actress I’ve ever met, which explains why, when she comes in my room the next day and tells me that the pilot is on hold, I’m the only one who freaks out.

  “Fuck, seriously?” I can’t keep the creeping note of panic out of my voice. “What happened? Don’t you have a contract? Fuck!”

  “Boof, it’s not a big deal.”

  “It’s Maui!”

  “Do you even like Maui?” She has a point. Even though I grew up in L.A., I’m not built for the heat. My pale skin reddens and freckles without ever approaching a tan, and humidity makes my hair look fungal.

  “I like that it’s not here,” I say, thinking about Donna’s texts. “Just tell me one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who the fuck is Gary Scott Thompson?”

  She laughs, which makes me happy, and I tell myself that this isn’t the end of the world. Who wants to spend six weeks in Hawaii? Not me. Sunburn city.

  I finally break down and call Kenner. I mean, maybe the composer’s not someone you’d have heard of unless you’re a studio musician, but surely he’s a big-enough name that I can let my unfortunate denouement at the Date Palm fade like the end credits after a straight-to-cable movie. The anticlimactic result is that I get his voice mail and leave a babbling message that rivals Jon Favreau’s excruciating scene in Swingers when he has an entire relationship arc on the machine of a girl he met in a bar. Li
ke most things, it’s much funnier when it’s happening on the big screen and not in your bedroom.

  Five

  When I get home from my yogurt run the next day, there’s a missed call from Kenner. I stand there for a long moment, my quart of nonfat salted caramel melting, and curse myself for leaving my phone behind during my four-hundred-yard dash across the street. It’s always the way, right? You light a cigarette and the bus comes. But before I can call him back, my phone beeps with a voice-mail message.

  “Jess, hey, it’s Kenner. Uh, from the Date Palm. So I talked to my boss’s manager. Well, you know, my ex-boss.” He laughs, a nervous squawk that sounds like a jungle bird. “He wants to meet you. I . . . It’s a little weird, because he told me to just have you come to the house. His name is Tyler Montaigne and he lives in Santa Monica Canyon. Can you go there tomorrow at ten A.M. sharp?” He gives me the address. “You can’t miss it. There’s a nine-foot hedgerow surrounding it and a Brian Murphy glass arch by the front gate . . . Ooh, which reminds me: Tyler absolutely hates it, so don’t mention it.”

  I wait all of eleven seconds before I text him back. Thank you thank you. I owe you. Big. Xoxo.

  I arrive for the interview on my beater Trek hybrid bike, huffing and puffing up the hill from the Pacific Coast Highway, with Range Rovers and Humvees zooming past my elbow. I wait in the street for a minute to compose myself, straddling my bike and breathing in the salt air and eucalyptus, then smooth down my cargo pants and the Petit Bateau T-shirt I bought on credit at Planet Blue yesterday. First impressions are important.

  And Tyler is definitely making a good first impression on me. The outside of the house is very beachy chic. The paint on the eaves of the unassuming cottage peels in a fetching fashion and climbing roses bloom in hand-painted Italian pots, each one lined with checkerboard-patterned moss in shades of vibrant green. I park my bike in the open carport beside a shiny black Carrera and another sleek-looking car—a vintage Mercedes, I think—sheathed in a green canvas cover.