“See?” he says. “That’s vanillin you’re smelling. And some lactones that give it a kinda oakey scent.”
Yunakov, the prop master, gives me a wink. “It’s wine, dude,” he says. “I’ve been drinking Ossley’s product all week. It’s fine.”
I cautiously draw a small amount of the liquid across my tongue. It tastes more or less like red table wine. Not brilliant, but perfectly acceptable.
“Not bad,” I say. “Much improved.” I pass the glass to the set dresser to my right.
“See?” Ossley says. “It normally takes months to produce a wine of that quality, and my reactant did it in twenty minutes. Imagine what would happen to the wine industry if every winery could produce grand cru in twenty minutes?”
The set dresser sips, then smacks her lips critically. “This is hardly grand cru,” she says.
“It’s early days,” Ossley says. “In another couple years, I’ll be serving up something that you won’t be able to tell from Haut-Brion.”
She raises an eyebrow. “How do you account for terroir?” she asks.
Ossley laughs. “Terroir isn’t a mystical thing. Terroir doesn’t happen because your ancestors wore wooden shoes and prayed to Saint Valery. It’s just chemistry. Give me a chemical analysis, and I can probably duplicate the result.”
There follows an earnest discussion on terroir and debourbage and encépagement, and I return to my beer. I like my plonk just fine, but I’m not fanatic enough about wine to care about the fiddly details.
The bong goes round one more time, and then I decide it’s time to go to bed. Yunakov’s room is on the ground floor of the resort, so I leave by hopping over the balcony rail onto the walk beyond, and then I lope over toward my cabana.
The sea glitters in starlight. Tropical flowers sway pale in the breeze. The beach is an opalescent shimmer.
If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m back in paradise, which is to say Southern California.
I turn the corner and jump as I hear a shriek. It’s one of the hotel waiters carrying a room-service tray. The bottles and dishes give a leap, and I lunge to get them all settled before something crashes. Eventually the waiter and I get everything sorted out.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Makin,” the waiter says. “I didn’t see you coming.”
The resort is in Quintana Roo, so the waiter is Mayan and maybe five feet tall, with a broad face and beaky nose and an anxious smile. I look down at him.
“That’s all right,” I say. “Have a good evening.”
I’m not entirely unused to hearing people scream when I turn up unexpectedly, which is why I’m an unlikely movie star.
I was a cute, big-headed kid actor when I was young, and when all America invited me into their living rooms as the star of the sitcom Family Tree. But when I grew, I grew tall, and my head kept growing after my body stopped. It’s a condition called pedomorphosis—my head is freakishly large, and my features have retained the proportions of an infant, with a snub nose, a vast forehead, and unusually large eyes.
At the moment I look even more sinister than is usual for me since for my morally ambiguous part I’ve shaved my balding head and have grown a goatee. I look like someone you really don’t want to see looming around the corner on a dark night.
My appearance explains why my career collapsed after I stopped being cute, and why I struggled to find work for more than a decade until I was rescued by an unlikely savior—a game designer named Dagmar Shaw, who employed me as the star of a production called Escape to Earth that was broadcast over the Internet. I played Roheen, who was sort of an alien and sort of an angel. Escape to Earth was an enormous hit, and so was the sequel. I’m in negotiation with Dagmar now for more Roheen projects, but in the meantime I’m trying to expand my celebrity by starring in a feature.
My freakish face guarantees that I’ll never be the star of a romantic comedy, and also that I can be accepted fairly readily as a villain—during the years I was scuffling for work, I played heavies more than anything else. So in Desperation Reef, I’m playing a villainous character who finds redemption and turns into a good guy.
Even if I nail the part, even if I’m absolutely brilliant, it’s still unclear whether people will pay to see my weird head blown up to the size of a theater screen. After all, my only successes have been in smaller formats.
Thinking about these uncertainties, I walk to my cabana. It’s a white-plastered building with a tall, peaked Mayan roof of palm-leaf thatch, all oozing local color. I open the door, and I see that Loni Rowe has arrived before me. She’s hunched in an armchair drinking some of my orange juice and thumbing text into her handheld, but when she sees me arrive, she puts her phone away and stands.
“Hi,” she says. “There was a camera drone overhead, so I thought I’d come to your cabana and give them something to write about.”
She’s a pale redhead who hides from the sun, and when she’s on-screen she has to slather on the makeup to hide all her freckles. She has large brilliant teeth accentuated by a minor overbite, and a lush figure that has won her admirers all over the world. There’s a popular poster of Loni that’s sold millions, and it’s hard to picture the room of any adolescent American male without a view of Loni’s cleavage in it somewhere.
Loni is an ambitious young actress, and she has a part in the movie as the mistress of a drug lord. She’s also my girlfriend—or actually, my Official Tabloid Girlfriend, good for headlines guaranteed to keep our names in the public eye.
Even though our affaire is mostly for publicity purposes, we have in fact had sex now and then. The teenagers who go to sleep every night staring at Loni’s poster will be disappointed to learn the experience was pleasant enough, but nothing special. There is no passion in our relationship because both of us are far more passionate about our careers. But Loni and I are friends, even given that we’re using each other, and I imagine we’ll remain friends even after we’ve both gone on to other tabloid romances.
Loni, you will remember, is the hottie who stole me from my previous tabloid girlfriend, Ella Swift. Ella is a much bigger star than Loni, and snagging me was quite a coup for Loni. It boosted her profile enormously.
Both tabloid romances were dreamed up by my agent, Bruce Kravitz of PanCosmos Talent Associates back in Beverly Hills. Desperation Reef is a near-complete PCTA package—Bruce represents most of the talent and the writer who drafted the first script—a script I’ve never seen from a writer I’ve never met—as well as the other writer who rewrote the script and created the first ending, and the other other writer who wrote the second ending, the one that everyone hates but which will probably be used anyway.
Bruce also represents Ella Swift, and he put us together as tabloid lovers to generate headlines for us during a period when neither of us had anything in the theaters to remind viewers that we existed. For reasons best known to herself, Ella wanted to conceal the fact that she is a lesbian and in the middle of a passionate relationship with her hairdresser.
I have no idea why Ella wants to stay in the closet because to me the thought of her with other women makes her even more exotic and interesting; but I had no one else in my life right then and played along. So we were seen at premieres, parties, charity events, and the odd Lakers game, and I slept at her Malibu house two or three nights a week—in a guest bedroom, while she shared the master suite with the hairdresser.