At that point, she wasn’t quite broke yet, but on the cusp of eviction anyway. The landlord wanted her out, her neighbors too, though she’d been so out of it, she could only partly recall the episodes that explained why. Had she managed to apologize to them, for any of it, or had she only dreamed that she had in drugged slumbers? Either way, they didn’t want to hear it.
Carl had called a few times in those weeks. Early on, she picked up, choosing occasions when she was pleasantly buzzed rather than wasted to do so. She dodged his questions about her new job and steered their conversations toward a common love, books, especially the ancient ones. In the fourth and last of the calls, they talked about ancient history — Herodotus — for at least twenty minutes. It confirmed what she’d suspected, that he was marvelously well read in just the things she found most captivating.
She stopped picking up after that. She didn’t care, or want to care, about what was happening with the case, with the one assaulting the whores. Talking to Carl made that harder. She didn’t care to know about the other girls either, even Mariela. Nothing that really mattered bound them together. She wasn’t interested in false connections. The only person she’d actually talked to with any fondness or frequency in Halsley lately was the Palestinian running the corner liquor store. She thought he had a good heart.
And then there was Carl, of course. That only gave her another reason not to answer. She didn’t want to tell him about the drinking or have to lie to him about it either. But he kept circling back to it. When they’d spoken last, he’d asked about her drinking with a kind of curious concern that seemed to reach beyond his job. He didn’t ask about anything else that way, not books, not even the case itself. It felt personal, and she was glad he asked but gladder not to answer. It wasn’t his problem that booze had overcome her since her brother moved out, or that her parents refused to send any more money. (Was that Reed’s doing? She hated to think so but felt it must be true.)
She also knew from their conversations, from what she’d said about the ancients, about pictures and profiles, the past and the future, that she’d won some bit of respect from Carl, this transparently educated man slumming it as an agent. She didn’t want to give any of it back. She liked the gentle arrogance of his manner, actually, and the way she could put it under pressure from angles he didn’t expect.
At that moment, though, she was in no position to do that. Things were too hard, that’s why she’d moved out so suddenly. Maybe she would call him when she could stand, or else when she could barely crawl, things had gotten so bad. Not now.
Instead she focused on the light she lacked, that all of the East did, Bethesda too. Four days later, after her usual taper from vodka down to wine, she gave up the apartment — she wasn’t leaving much behind, really — and for the second time in three years landed on a college friend’s couch in Los Angeles. Jen had been a lot less scattered that first time, she knew this from the way her friend carefully observed her now.
Staying there kept Jen from returning to liquor, though, and in any case it took her only a little over a week to find a new home, in the San Fernando Valley, on a tip from a porn actress whose tits she’d sucked for a pittance back in Halsley. A group of girls all shared a huge house with a talent agent, Frank C., who was influential enough to guarantee a steady stream of work for them.
For the moment, Jen had the room to herself; another girl had left that week, for unexplained reasons. The other bed, also a queen, rested against the far wall and was made up primly in a bright red quilt with thick pillows in yellow cases resting on top of it. She hoped the bed would stay just that way, empty and pretty, at least for a while, until she settled in. Everything was gorgeous.
“Jen!” came the muffled yell from a man three floors down.
“Okay,” she replied, in a voice she knew would not carry back to him. She was still in her underwear. In the third drawer of the dresser, nestled in a bed of socks and pajama bottoms, she found the only things she was careful to bring with her from Halsley: a row of plastic orange bottles, some of which had sat unopened for weeks during the last vodka binge. She took two pills from the leftmost; one pill from the second; skipped two bottles, irrelevant for the moment; took one from the next; skipped another — relevant, but too strong for the early afternoon — and tapped out two more tiny ones from the rightmost. She’d drunk nothing stronger than wine the past two weeks and the meds were a part of that story, though they did cloud her mind in a different way.
“Jen!”
“Okay,” she replied with more urgency but no more volume. She pulled two hangers down off the garment rack next to the bed: very fine white fishnets that she sheathed her legs with, and a stretch dress that clamped around her, making a bra mostly unnecessary.
Through the hole left in the rack by the clothes she’d taken down, she looked into a mirror. It threw back only a generic California tart. She’d seen girls like this in Venice Beach at dusk, just after landing at LAX. Later, as she got acquainted with her new state, she would find other species of the genus in Malibu and Newport and Laguna.
Her face was already painted, pink dashes along the cheekbones fading to a feathery white further down, near the jaw. She tied her hair back in a ponytail. Her eyebrows were carefully shaped, black, narrow, and short, and the lashes around her eyes were conspicuously false. The chests of many of the girls in the house were as well, though her own, so far, was not. It was generous, given her size. She was a wispy one, uncommonly small-made. They’d had to size down the stockings.
Before the man could fire off her name again she stepped into the hall, shoeless. Downstairs they’d have all sorts of heels and boots.
“Honey, come down now,” he said. “We need to see how we want this to work.”
“Okay,” she said. Finally her voice was loud enough, and traveling through few enough barriers, to reach him, Frank.
From another door a blonde emerged, short, small breasted, and holding a pair of blue pumps by the heels.
“Jeff’s putting me in this scene too!” Amanda said. “Just more fun. Frank tell you about it?”
Jen bobbed her head vaguely. Amanda took her arm and trotted down the spiral staircase with her in tow. Her hand slipped from Jen’s biceps to her forearm to her hand as the distance between them grew. She stopped and waited for Jen to catch up. “What else are you listing, besides boy-girl? Three-way? You want to work your way up, though, to the crazier stuff. Double-vag, things like that. That’s what Liz and Annie tell me anyway. It keeps directors coming back. Once you’ve given it all away, it’s harder getting hired. So you want to stretch it out, like a strip tease.”
Jeff, the director, had four small DV cameras set up in the vast cube of a living room. It opened onto a patio of a nameless shape and a pool so large the Olympics immediately came to Jen’s mind. No one was outside past the glass, just that crisp, directionless light hanging above the shallow hills the pool melted into. Their hardy greens and browns were flat and even and without shimmer.
There were several flat-roofed mansions in pastel pink, and one in stark maritime blue, probably looking much like the one she was looking out from, she guessed, though she’d never observed one of them like this, from a distance, from inside another. How long she would stay here she couldn’t say, but it looked like a perfect beginning.
Frank met them at the base of the stairs, shoeless like her, but in Nantucket shorts. Thin white frames with rhomboid lenses sat on his pulpy nose, and his orange-toned skin looked thick and chafed. “So, these girls are new,” he said, looking at them but talking to Jeff, who was squatting in the middle of the living room, fingertips spread wide for balance, examining the angles. The furniture was modular: segments of white leather, some backed, some not, that could be freely reconfigured.