“Like have your act together,” Fred went on. “You’re throwing one of the most important charity events of the season, and you’ve got the Pink fucking Panther doing security.”
He was still peeved about our table at dinner, which included a couple of bobbleheads from Fox News, their spouses, and a California marijuana magnate. Fred claimed he was fine sitting at a Nobody Table, as long as the people were good conversation, but well before the tenderloin arrived we understood the chatter was to be a root canal without anesthesia. My sister called twice, and I was almost bored enough to answer. Thankfully, the food came and the conversation dwindled. Now that I attended dinners like this, I always tried to think of the farms this food came from before I put it in my mouth, certain no one else in the room ever did.
Images of the Golden State were projected on walls and in holograms above our heads. Bouquets of California poppies adorned every surface. The charity event was expected to raise close to $100 million for the rebuilding of Los Angeles, with some of that money going to goad developers to build low-income housing and the rest earmarked for the restoration of famed institutions and landmarks: the Hollywood sign, Griffith Observatory, and the vanquished Getty Museum, now a pile of ash and rubble with more than half its collection incinerated. For all its precautions, including a million-dollar sprinkler system, the heat, flames, and smoke of the El Demonio-Los Angeles Complex Fire had overwhelmed the Getty’s defenses.
On entering the event space, each attendee was met by a series of enormous photographs: twin fire tornadoes drilling through the Hollywood Hills, a truck vacuumed up into the vortex. A bobcat and other wildlife fleeing down a mountainside. A Tesla melted into a freeway, the shape of the vehicle barely recognizable except the badge. All the images had been taken by a heat-resistant drone piloted by an artist in Berlin.
Tragedy transmogrified into an A-list gala. Hollywood royalty, from washed legends to impish teen stars, decorated the party, while senators and CEOs clinked martini glasses and traded encrypted messages on their phones, watches, and glasses. Fred needed to be there for the sheer volume of business being done by the slightly boozed wealth circulating. Talk of who’d lost homes in the blaze (Lachlan Murdoch, LeBron James, and Shonda Rhimes, but with Bel-Air incinerated, who hadn’t?). Waiters delivered tray after tray of cocktails, and I caught a tall Black woman in a matte-black tuxedo, her hair done in a swooping bouffant with her skull shaved on the sides. Her smooth brown eyes were embedded in deep blue eyeshadow, and for a moment I was so struck by her beauty I thought I’d made a mortifying mistake, and she was a guest instead of a waiter.
“Hi,” I said neutrally.
“Can I get you something?” she asked, and I breathed heavy relief.
“Just a plain old Negroni.”
She smiled and walked off.
“I’m too tense,” I told Fred.
“Pshaw,” he said, somehow already with a drink, sliding a maraschino cherry off the plastic toothpick with his teeth. His eyes cased the room. “You’re stunning. What’s to worry about?”
“Who are you looking for?” I asked, slipping my arm around his waist and rubbing the tip of my nose into his soft beard, tasting those thin whiskers briefly. Since leaving Palacio-Wimpel, the PR firm he’d founded that made him his first “mid-minor” fortune, most of his time was spent on the lookout for investors. He turned to kiss my lips carefully because he knew of the lipstick’s pairing with my earrings. Pink lipstick and rose gold achieved a delicate, detailed look that I didn’t want smeared by his inability to keep his mouth off mine.
“Not sure yet. Norm Nate is here model hunting, but he’ll be in Venice. Are you actually anxious?”
“No, I’m fine. I’d just like to get you home.”
He smiled and kissed me again, softly on the side of my mouth.
“Nothing would make me happier. Let’s give it one hour, huh?”
The waitress found me to deliver my drink, and we circulated.
California congressman and supreme dud Warren Hamby asked Fred what he thought about the plight of the Washington Nationals, while his blinking wife complimented my gown and earrings. Goldman’s top trader, Noah Hosch, caught Fred’s elbow, hastily filling his ear with news of the crisis in China (apparently the government was in dire straits as strikes crippled the mines where his firm had made sizable investments in rare earth minerals). Gombo Bolorchuluun, the golfing sensation, held forth for a gaggle of mostly blond women, including our Fox News tablemates from earlier. I recognized top talent from the law firm DLA Piper speaking with Renaissance CEO Rory Baumgart (the “alt-right Ted Turner” as he was known). I could see the rest of the room bending to avoid him, but you couldn’t kick a billionaire out of a charity event. A Fierce Blue Fire’s director, Rekia Reynolds, looked like a starlet in traditional African dress, while her partner, Tom Levine, wore a simple white tuxedo. In a sign of the times, they were speaking to none other than the president of the Sustainable Future Coalition, Emii Li Song, and I felt a small swell of pride. Three years earlier, the SFC had been sure FBF was going to replay the French Revolution in the role of the sans-culottes, and now they were rubbing elbows at the same party. With this less antagonistic posture toward industry, I was sure they’d start seeing better results. Emii’s eyes met mine from across the room, and we exchanged smiles. I’d been an ally in goading the SFC to replace Tom Duncan-Michaels with a woman of color, and as the legislation inched closer, they finally submitted. “Sister Power,” I’d told her at the time, and I mouthed these words to her now. Her mouth spread in an uncharacteristic grin, and she winked at me before returning to her conversation. I thought of Kate Morris then, which I didn’t do much anymore now that she was gone from the limelight. It turned out she didn’t need as much help as we’d thought, mostly kneecapping herself. However, I held a complicated portfolio of emotions from that effort. I almost missed her. Though she didn’t know it, we’d been playing a chess game, and it almost made me wistful that I’d won so easily.
I heard his voice before I saw him, and I was stunned by a surge of déjà vu. I saw the past and future at once. It was only then I remembered that his voice sounded different in person. Lighter, cleaner. The Pastor wore a tuxedo so perfectly tailored it had the lines of a sports car. Slicked-back hair, skin flawless, surely from an expensive chemical peel, hand tucked casually in a pocket while the other moved fluidly for a crowd of spectators listening to him talk. I moved closer to do the same.
“President Randall is failing to beat back this challenge, but if you look at what the RNC did—they’re shielding her. She’s going to come away with more delegates even though she lost Iowa, and New Hampshire was basically a coin flip.” Half the crowd appeared as rapt as the people who bought his “Bibles” while the other half stood on their toes as if ready to interject. He wouldn’t allow it. “Now you can say that Braden’s an inappropriate candidate, that you can’t let her get the nomination, but there are consequences to bottling up the popular will like this. Especially with the illegal refugee situation.”
It was almost more eerie to hear him sounding off about politics, to hear what a calm, reasonable presence he was in person. Since the LA fire he’d been all over his new TV network and Slapdish worlde, replaying his prediction that Hollywood would burn. I knew because my mom was one of those people who believed he was a prophet.
“You endorse the religious registry,” a man accused him. “You said everyone in the country should have to enter their religion in a government database. You know what that reminds me of—”