American Girls (24 page)

The movie wound up being about a married couple. The wife was supposed to be my sister after her face got messed up, which you don't learn until the end is something that the husband did to her. You don't really see the husband much; he's mostly a voice that whispers in the air, which you think must be a ghost or a serial killer, but it's not, instead it's this actor who didn't show up until the last weeks of shooting.

“It will be like Cassavetes,” Roger said. “
A Woman Under the Influence
. You think the whole time that she is crazy, wandering around like this, but she is being crushed, ground down by this man.”

There were three parts to the film, these haunted scenes where the ghost version of my sister visits murder sites in Los Angeles, scenes where the broken-nose version of my sister tries to live a kind of regular life but can't quite hold it together, and then scenes with the new actor, the husband, where you see that the marriage, or whatever it is, is the real horror.

The final scene of the film takes place in a car, outside the old 10050 Cielo Drive, and the husband is whaling on my sister, really letting her have it. He's berating her for the way she cooks pasta, for how she keeps her mouth open when she breathes, stuff you shouldn't even notice or care about. Then he starts in on how she looks, that she's getting older, that the only thing anyone will ever love about her is her face, and that her face is starting to wrinkle and fade. And while he's giving her this part of the speech, my sister, who's a good actress, but not that good, starts to shake, really shake. And then, I don't know how it happened, but her nose started to bleed. I think she was trying so hard not to cry that it must have unloosed something, and the blood came down her face and looked so sad and horrible that I forgot that it was a movie, I couldn't look anymore. I waited for Roger to say, “Cut,” to make it stop, but he was transfixed. The cameras moved in closer. My sister closed her eyes, and her movie-husband whispered, with perfect cruelty, “I don't feel sorry for you, bitch.” It was the last thing that Susan Atkins had allegedly said to Sharon Tate, word for word, as she was pleading for her life.

Had it been anyone other than Roger, I probably would have thought it was a cool idea. Before the scene began, he explained to the actors that people walked around locking their doors and looking over their shoulders, mindful of the too-close footstep in the parking garage, the abandoned house with broken windows, the stranger in the shadows. But he had an epiphany part of the way through filming: he had been wrong in his original concept. The real danger wasn't violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting—the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn't been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors.

“Which is not to say that you have not helped me,” he said, nodding to me at the end of his speech. “You and these Manson girls, you are my inspiration. This is the incarnation.”

The final scene was the first one that my sister had filmed since the splint had come off her nose. Where her nose had been perfect before, it had the slightest tilt toward the top now. She'd fix it later, I was sure of that, but for the moment it made her face more beautiful, it had the openness of a butterfly asking the world to be gentle to its first unfolding wings. She didn't know that I was watching her while she got ready to shoot, the extra time she spent looking at herself in the mirror. I could feel the tears, the ones that didn't come until the cameras rolled, mixed with blood. They weren't pretend.

You would have thought Roger had just finished filming
Citizen Kane,
the way he clapped after he said “Cut.”

“You are more beautiful,” he said, holding a towel to my sister's nose while she continued to cry. “You have made something real. So real.”

My sister was inconsolable. Maybe it was the place, something in the air that remained. They may have built a new house, reseeded the yard, put fifty years or even a hundred between the address and its history. It didn't matter. Even in the warm late afternoon, maybe especially at a time like that, when it seemed like nothing savage could ever happen in such a quiet and beautiful space, the hillside still felt haunted.

“It doesn't even look like my face anymore,” she finally said.

She was right, but it wasn't just the nose. My sister was scared. Her face was her fortune, and it looked different. Better, I thought, but not the same.

The actor was on his phone, calling his agent. He didn't seem terribly moved by any of it.

“I cannot ask you to forgive me again,” Roger said. “And still I ask.”

“It doesn't matter. It can't be fixed.”

“I think you look better.” I finally worked up the courage to say it, not just because I wanted her to feel better, but because it was true.

She had stopped crying and was looking at her face again in the makeup mirror she kept in her bag.

“It looks like a piece of modern freaking art. A fun-house mirror would be kinder.”

“It really doesn't.”

“This better be huge at Sundance,” she said to Roger, and he nodded vigorously.

“Enormous,” he said. “We have tapped into the collective unconscious of America. Its violence. I would break my own nose if I could take it back, but the film, it is beautiful. It is something more than it would have been. You have truly suffered for your art.”

Please, I thought, please let her say yes. Please let him have to break his nose.

“You don't have to be such a drama queen,” Delia said. “Plain old queen is bad enough.” She winked at me, and just like that, she was back.

“I'm out,” her movie-husband said, and we all shook hands and did a round of air-kisses and he was off to the next romantic comedy.

“We should celebrate,” Roger said. “It is our wrap day, your last week in Los Angeles, Anna?”

“It is,” I said. “I have to finish a paper.”

“Papers are for next week. Tonight we toast.”

“I don't want to toast. I
can't
toast.”

“Relax,” Delia said. “We'll go somewhere low-key. I think I need beer goggles to get used to my face. Maybe after a few drinks I'll look good to me again.”

“You would seriously have to kill yourself if you were actually ugly, wouldn't you?”

“God, Anna, to hear you talk, you'd think I was the vainest person in the world. Did you see how I looked in that last shot?”

“Great acting,” Roger interrupted, “takes great humility.”

So it was going to be that kind of a night. I'd hoped they would drop me with Dex so that I could meet Jeremy for the
Chips Ahoy!
wrap party. The party started in three hours, so as long as Delia stayed sober enough to drive, or got drunk enough that I could sneak off, there was still hope.

Roger drove us to a tiki bar in Silver Lake, a hipster neighborhood that was near his home. I expected the place to be empty, but there were at least fifteen or twenty people, some working alone on computers, others sipping late-afternoon cocktails.

“I am a regular,” Roger said. “Do not order alcohol and we will be fine.”

The waitress who took our order was heavily tattooed, with black bangs and long, straight hair. She knew Roger and half smiled when he introduced me as a writer for his next movie.

“Make sure he pays you, kid,” she said, winking like we were old pals.

“I miss this place,” Delia said after her second scotch and soda. “Is it wrong if I just drink scotch?” She trailed her finger over the water beading on the side of the glass. Her eyes were still puffy from crying, and she hadn't reapplied her makeup. “Have they rotated the music? I hope not. I never get over this way. You'd think I would, but it always feels like forever in the car. But I miss the jukebox. I hope they haven't changed everything up. I'm going to go play something.”

I sat next to Roger, who watched Delia cross the room to the jukebox. My phone chirped a message from Jeremy: “C U in 30, buttercup?” I was bronzing the screen.

Delia came back as Johnny Cash started singing “I Still Miss Someone
.
” My mom loved Johnny Cash, would play his music anytime we surrendered media control. She and Lynette didn't listen to music as much now, except for kids' stuff, and the song reminded me of the summers when Delia was still at home, when my mom and dad were still together. Delia was softly singing along and looking at Roger, sharing some moment from their horror show of a love affair. It made me feel more lonely and more sad that she was singing to Roger, when it should have been Dex, or me, or anyone else.

And then one of those things happened that I would have paid a million dollars not to have seen, that I will spend at least the next three summers trying to forget. Roger leaned across the table and kissed my sister. French-kissed her, and not like someone who was even kind of, sort of confused about his sexuality. And while I am no expert on kissing, there was no unseeing that in her boozed-out stupidity, she kissed him back.

“You can't do that,” I said. “What are you doing? Stop it. Both of you. Stop!”

I truly believe they had forgotten I was there.

“That was harmless,” Delia said, avoiding my eyes. Roger looked about as sorry as a dog rolling in shit.

“It was not harmless. You would never do that in front of Dex. Why are you screwing your life up? Dex loves you.”

He'd never said so, and neither had she, not around me, at any rate, but I knew that it was true. And if my lunatic sister had the sense God gave an ant, she would have loved him back. But it looked like she didn't, and didn't again. I thought that I knew what it was like to hate my sister, but I had been playing around. This was the real thing.

“What is it you would have me do with my life? Get married and have kids and give up on my dreams?” She chugged her scotch and gestured for another.

“What are you talking about? Who said anything about any of that? I don't care if you have zero or a million babies. I just want you not to make out with your ex-boyfriend. Are you going to lie to Dex now?”

Delia flipped her hand in the air, waving me off like what I'd said was the droning of some pesky insect she needed to squash. Forget her stalker, I was ready to cause some trouble of my own. I moved her scotch in my direction. She reached across the table and yanked it back. Roger seemed to think it was all hilarious. I was ready to let him have it as well.

“Or should I say, keep lying to him? No wonder that producer has some porno zombie leaving slut-mail on your front door. I'd
love
to see the kind of movie you made with him. I guess the only big surprise is that the rest of LA hasn't figured out your address.”

And the way Roger quit smiling and fast, I knew she hadn't told him, either. Forget sister fights, this was going to be a sister war.

“Roger, go get me a drink,” she said, pointing at the bar. “Now.”

“Yeah, Roger, go get her a drink. You might want to wash your mouth out. She is the spokesperson for herpes, if you hadn't heard.”

If we had been in a high school cafeteria, they would have been clearing tables and giving us room to rumble.

Delia lowered her voice and narrowed her eyes. “Have you been going through my things?”

“No.”

“So.” She leaned in closer. “What is it that you think you know?”

“I know that the red car came from that producer's house, and if it was from an actress, then you must have beat her out for some kind of role.”

She pointed at an imaginary pile of my clothes, at some suitcase she was hallucinating. Like this was improv class and not her actual life.

“The minute we get home, you can start packing. I should have known, once a thief, always a thief. Do I need to check my credit card as well?”

“What is
wrong
with you, Delia? What if that guy decides to have you murdered?”

“You don't know the whole story,” she said, scanning the bar to see if Roger was coming back with her drink. “You don't know anything, really. It's not him, it's his wife, okay? She thinks something happened between us that didn't, and I'm trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. She's unbalanced, but not dangerous. He says she's medicated and seeing someone about her issues. He even forwarded me an apology that she wrote during one of her therapy sessions the other day. Did you find that on my computer?”

“An apology? Why are you talking to her?”

She ran her finger in the bottom of her glass and licked the dregs off her fingertip.

“She thinks I'm the reason her awful fraud of a husband can't stand her, that we had some kind of passionate affair.”

“Did you?”

“Hardly.”

“You're lying. Once a liar, always a liar.”

For a minute, I thought she was going to haul off and slap me.

Her hand flinched and came down hard on the table.

“I'm not lying. You want the truth? The truth is, it's none of your business. He promised me a role in a film, a
real
film, and the film isn't even going to come out. What happened was immaterial. It was before Dex and I started dating, if you're putting together a timeline for the rest of your inquest. I have no idea how his wife found out; she must have found something he was shooting and come to the wrong conclusion. Whoever knows what goes on up there? I didn't even know he had a wife at the time—he said they were divorced, so if there's a liar in the equation, it's not me. Maybe, in your universe, that makes all of us disgusting people, but you know what, you just made my universe your universe. So maybe you should shut up and stay out of other people's lives.”