But there is nobody here to answer the fucking question and this is why people have small dogs, why they trap them in their efficient apartments, because sometimes you need another living thing, you need eyes on you, even if the eyes belong to a fucking Pomeranian.
15
THE people who make it in Hollywood throw their new money north, up in the hills where they settle in mansions, where they can look down on everyone. But no matter how big you get, how high your house is, you can’t escape from the rats. Rats climb; they’re mobile. They aren’t bunnies. They don’t have a biological drive to burrow.
Amy is a rat, scrounging, the kind of girl who bats her eyelashes on her first day of work and wants to know where the Alice in Wonderland worth a million dollars is. So of course Amy met Henderson at Soho House. I was wasting my time on Craigslist, at Birds. She got here, she got the fuck out of here, closer to 90210, to Soho House and that wealthy Westside dick she wanted so bad. And no doubt she’s still out there looking for it; that Peter Stark shirt is all ratty by now, but I bet she’s still wearing it.
The traffic is hell and my driver just moved here yesterday so he took Sunset.
“You maybe want to take a left, get on Fountain?” I ask the driver, the kid.
He winces. “I’m really not good with left-hand turns and we have to make one when we get there.”
Even this kid who just fucking moved here has that me me me disease and I let it go. At least I have an in. While the club is private, they do have events that allow common po’ folk like me to stream in. Today, for example, there is an audition for an indie film. The casting call is ridiculous, second person cuntiness:
You are beautiful but you are ugly. You are life but you are death. You are the center and the outskirts. You are a paradox. You are mother and child and you are the reunion. You are TARA.
SAG/Non-SAG
Blondes, bring headshots
The driver turns on his blinker and I get a pit in my stomach. The idea of seeing Amy after all this time is mind-boggling, to think of her, midhunt for rich dick, or possibly here auditioning for this movie, trying to be mother and child. Bite me.
I emerge from my Uber and I do not take off my sunglasses and I move past the security guy and he doesn’t flag me. I am in the elevator. I made it. Three slinky Scandinavian girls pile in with me and they are giggling and they are my ticket so I smile.
“Good morning, ladies.”
The tallest one doesn’t blink. “Are you an actor?”
“No,” I say. “I’m an agent.”
They giggle more. The doors are closing but we are bombarded by two guys who are agents, smug, loud Muppet men.
“I told him to fuck off.”
“You told him to fuck off.”
“I fucking ended that.”
“Before it began.”
“Before it existed.”
“Before it was in the womb.”
“Before it was in my dick,” says the alpha, also in his sunglasses. He nods at the women. “Ladies.”
They explode into giggles. The one who spoke to me looks at him. “Are you an agent too?”
“Not right now, honey,” he says. He looks her up and down, then looks me up and down. He returns his gaze to her. “If this guy is telling you he can make you famous, believe me when I tell you he’s lying. His shoes can’t make anybody famous.”
The elevator doors swing open and we are at another roadblock. There is a meager-eyed man at the desk. He recognizes the two fuckers from the elevator and greets them, deferential. The main one whistles with his fingers.
“Hey, Paco. My shades ever show up?”
The obsequious servant hangs up the phone and apologizes for failing to find the shades, for failing to find the people capable of finding the shades. He apologizes for being on the phone and he apologizes for the stairs being slippery and he apologizes for holding the man back from his meeting and he apologizes again for not having the shades. The sluts in front of me watch the assholes disappear up the marble stairs.
The desk slave sighs and looks at the girls. “Do any of you have a membership?”
“No,” the lead one answers as she shakes her head. “But we have the password for the audition. For the movie.”
He groans. “What is the password?”
“Aniston,” she says.
He waves them on and asks them to take the elevator instead of the stairs. He looks at me. “You’re a guest?”
“I’m a victim,” I say. “My girlfriend is sick with aspirations of becoming an actress, meaning that she left me this morning to come here and audition, which makes me evil for not following her along to support her.”
He laughs. “They’re upstairs in the main hall.”
“Okay if I stop by the bar for a drink first?” I ask.
He nods. “Just say that Ricardo okayed it. I have to admit that I’m sick with aspirations, too,” he whispers, and fakes a cough. “Alto. Dancer. Epic stud.”
I laugh and it feels good to be that guy laughing with the servant as the doors open again and more guests arrive. I leave the blue walls and the art and begin my ascent on the marble stairs.
On the second floor there are lanky beautiful people lounging self-consciously, stomachs sucked in. I go onto the terrace and see all of Los Angeles and it looks good from up here. There are small, clean love seats and small, clean people sitting in them. There are beautiful old novels on small shelves.
This is the path to Amy, I know it, but she isn’t seated at the bar, sipping a mojito, and she isn’t mulling over dessert, and she isn’t marveling at the flowers. I go back inside, where there is a line of doors off a long hallway. I try the first one. It opens, and the lights are out but a woman is sitting in an overstuffed chair facing a monitor. She is barely visible beneath a cashmere blanket and her Beats headphones.
“Hello,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me.
She is bigger than Beck but smaller than Amy and I hate the way my mind puts all girls between those two. I try again. Louder. Hello. Nothing. I step toward the girl and I’m close enough to see the monitor she’s watching so intensely. A girl is auditioning for something on the screen. Ah, so this is the girl in charge of the auditions.
“Hello.”
Still nothing. I step closer and now I see her tanned feet, bare, naked, crossed at the ankles. I see her cotton candy hair and my heart beats faster. I know her. It’s the La Poubelle candy girl who took my water.
Running into the candy girl when I was looking for Amy. This is fate. I touch her shoulder and she sees me. She gasps. There was a study that said all relationship dynamics are determined by the first interaction. Ours is this: me scaring her.
But she is laughing. She gestures for me to sit and I do.
Her toenails and fingernails are painted iPhone white—Amy’s were painted nothing—and her hair is gathered at the top of her head, falling, a ballerina. She shifts and the blanket slips and her legs are honey brown, more buttery soft than Beck’s, tauter, more defined than Amy’s. The girl onscreen finishes reading and the candy girl pulls a yellow legal pad out of her notebook.
She writes: ?
She holds out the pen and I wheel my chair closer and it’s that time before you’ve fucked someone and every single movement is penetrative. My body is all dick. I take the pen. Our fingers don’t touch. Not yet.