“Jonathan Drazen.”
“Oh…” She put her hands to her mouth. “He also owns the R.O.Q. Club in Santa Monica. So don’t try to work there, either.”
“Did you know he’s gorgeous?”
A voice came from behind me. “Talking about me again?” Darren had shown up, God bless him.
“Jonathan Drazen fired her last night,” Gabby said.
“Who is that?” He sat down, placing his laptop on the table.
“He didn’t do it. Freddie did. Drazen just offered me a severance and referred me to the Stock.”
“And apparently he’s gorgeous.” He raised an eyebrow at me. I shrugged. Darren and I were over each other, but he’d rib me bloody at the slightest sign of weakness. “I haven’t heard you talk like that about a guy in a year and a half. I thought maybe you were still in love with me.” I must have blushed, or my eyes might have given away some hidden spark of feeling, because Darren snapped open his laptop. “Let’s see what kinda wifi I can pick up.”
“I don’t talk like that about men because I prefer celibacy to bullshit.”
Darren tapped away on his laptop. “Jonathan Drazen. Thirty-two. Old man.” He looked at me over the screen.
“Do not underestimate how hot he is. I could barely talk.”
“Earned his money the old-fashioned way.”
“Rich daddy?”
“A long line of them. He makes more in interest than the entire GDP of Burma.” Darren scrolled through some web page or another. He loved the internet like most people loved puppies and babies. “Real estate magnate. His dad was a drunk and lost a chunk of money. Our Jonathan the Third….” He drifted off as he scrolled. “BA from Penn. MBA from Stanford. He brought the business back. Bazillionaire. He’s a real catch if you can tear him away from the four hundred other women he’s getting photographed with.”
“Lalala. Don’t care.”
“Why? It’s not like you’ve had sex in….what?” Darren clicked around, pretending he didn’t care about my answer, but I knew he did.
“Men are bad news,” I said. “They’re a distraction. They make demands.”
“Not all men are Kevin.”
Kevin was my last boyfriend, the one whose control issues had turned me off to men for eighteen months. “Lalala…not talking about Kevin either.” I scraped the bottom of my ice cream cup.
Darren turned his laptop so I could see the screen. “This him?”
Jonathan Drazen stood between a woman and man I didn’t recognize. I scrolled through the gossip page. His Irish good looks were undeniable next to anyone, even movie stars.
“He has been photographed with an awful lot of women,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s been a total fuck-around since his divorce, FYI. If you wanted him, he’d probably be game. All I’m saying.” He crossed his legs and looked out onto Sunset.
Gabby had a faraway look as she watched the cars. “His wife was Jessica Carnes,” Gabby recited as if she was reading a newspaper in her head, “the artist. Drazen married her at his father’s place on Venice Beach. She’s half-sister to Thomas Deacon, the sports agent at APR, who has a baby with Susan Kincaid, the hostess at the Key Club, whose brother plays basketball with Eugene Testarossa. Our dream agent at WDE.”
“One day, Gabster, your obsession with Hollywood interrelationships will pay off.” Darren clicked his laptop closed. “But not today.”
I think one could be at Hotel K, get blindfolded, taken to the Stock, and believe they’d been driven around and dropped in the same place they started: same pool, same chairs, same couches, same music, and same assholes clutching the same drinks and passing off the same tips. What was different was that there was no Freddie. the Stock had Debbie, a tall Asian lady who wore mandarin collar embroidered shirts and black trousers. She knew every superstar from just their face, and they loved her as much as she loved them. She could tell a movie mogul from an actress and sat them where they’d have the most professional friction. She coordinated the waitresses’ tables according to the patron’s taste and coddled the girls until they worked like a machine.
She was the nicest person I’d ever worked for.
“Smile, girl,” Debbie said. I’d been there a week and she knew exactly how many tables I could handle, how fast I was compared to the others, and my strong suit, which appeared to be my magnetic personality. “People look at you,” she said. “They can’t help it. Be smiling.”
It was hard to smile. We’d had three good shows in a row, then Vinny disappeared into thin air. We’d banged on his office door in Thai Town, went to his house in East Hollywood, and called four hundred times. No Vinny. Every gig he had lined up for us fell through. My momentum was slowing and I didn’t like it.
“What’s your freaking problem?” said one dude as he threw a dollar bill and three dimes on my tray. “You need a blast of coke or something?” He’d looked like every other spikey-haired, fake-blonde, Hugo Boss-wearing douchenozzle who namedropped from zero to sixty in three beers. But Debbie had put his name on the ticket, probably as a favor to me. His name was Eugene Testarossa, the one guy at WDE I’d wanted to meet for months. In my depression over stupid Vinny, I hadn’t recognized him.
I stalked toward the bathroom on my break and bumped into a hard chest that smelled of sage green and fog.
“Monica,” Jonathan said. “Hey. Sam told me he hired you.” His green eyes looked down at me and I wanted to break apart under the weight of them. As he looked at me, his face went from amused to concerned. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, just a bad day. Whatever.” I stepped toward the bathroom, but he seemed disinclined to let me go so easily.
“I got your report. Thanks. It was very professional.”
“You assumed a waitress couldn’t put together a sentence?” His glance down told me I’d been a bitch. He didn’t deserve my worst side. I tried to think fast; I didn’t want a barrage of questions about my life right then. “The Dodgers lost and I’m from Echo Park and all, so I got a little down.”
“The Dodgers won tonight.” His pressed lips and bemused eyes told me he understood I was half joking.
I shuffled my feet, feeling like a kid caught lying about kissing behind the gym. “Yeah. Fucking Jesus Renaldo pulling it out in the ninth like that.”
“He’s got five good pitches in him per game.”
“He tends to throw them in the bullpen.”
“Or trying to pick a guy off.” He shook his head. He looked normal just then, not like the guy behind the desk undressing me with his eyes.
“I’m sorry I was such a bitch, just now.”
“I’m used to it.”
“No, you’re not. Come on. People are nice to you all day.”
He shrugged. “You lied about why you were upset. I get to lie about how people treat me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “I have season tickets on the first base line.”
I felt my eyes light up a little, and getting so excited over something someone else had embarrassed me.
“I could bring you sometime,” he said.
“You haven’t seen a Dodger game until you’ve seen it from the bleachers. Six dolla seats, yo.”
He laughed, and I laughed too. Then Debbie showed up at the end of the hall.
“Monica!” she called out, tapping her wrist.
“Shit!” I cried out and ran back to my station, turning to give Jonathan a wave before rounding the corner.
I put on a smile and made myself as intensely personable as I could. I saw Jonathan at the head of the bar, talking to Sam and Debbie, laughing at some joke I couldn’t hear. When I went to the station to pick up my tray, he looked at me and I felt his sight. He was gorgeous, no doubt. I could write songs about that face, those cheekbones, those eyes, that dry scent.