Between You and Me (17 page)

“Kelsey’s bleeding—”

“Get Kel for me.”

I dial Michelle. “Hi, I have Andy for Kelsey.”

“Rambo, Kel.” He listens. “They’re waiting on you . . . no, but it’s gonna cost them if we don’t—okay, then. Good girl.”

“Quiet on set!”

Everyone huddles around the monitors to watch as Kelsey is nauseatingly hoisted atop the ledge and pelted with water from the rain machine used between actual downpours. Her hands jerk to where the harness must be tightest.

“Dial down the rain!” the director shouts, and the rain softens from police hose to
Perfect Storm
. “Lesslessless!” It shifts to a mist. Kelsey blinks the water out of her eyes, gripping with white knuckles at her shoulders. “More! Less! Just rain! Just fuck-me-in-the-rain rain!”

“Still too heavy,” Andy mutters.

“Mmm,” I say, unsure how to weigh in on what the most sex-inducing degree of precipitation for his daughter is.

“There! And . . . action!”

I watch as she shakes her oiled waves out of her unsmudged eyes, droplets snaking down her décolletage. With a seductive look, she reaches out her right hand to nobody. According to the synopsis, this nobody will be a “guy” and “hot” and have “white
Black Swan
wings” and be CGI’d in later. The storyboard depicts this angelic hottie compelling her to run through the streets and up all five hundred and twenty-eight steps, wearing five-inch heels and dragging a ten-foot pink beaded train that could challenge a double-decker bus in a weigh-in. But her eyelashes look ah-mazing!

“Killer Kelsey! She’s killing it!” The director jumps up and cups the frayed rim of his baseball hat. “Got it!”

“He’s got it!”

“Moving on! Next setup in fifteen!”

“Thanks, Logan.” Andy exhales. “We’re good for now.”

I give him a thumbs-up and grab a stale croissant from the decimated tray. Ignoring the ubiquitous NO FOOD INSIDE signs, I surreptitiously pull my sleeve over my hand like when Kelsey and I used to sneak Pop-Tarts into the Cineplex.

“Logan!” Dax comes running toward me. “She’s totally losing it.”
He leads me to the stairs, but doesn’t follow, and it only takes a few steps to see why. The staircase quickly narrows into a spindle all of two feet wide, the tight curve obscuring what’s coming and what’s left behind, the effect dizzying. It feels as if I’m turning in on myself as I step up and up and up.

“Kelsey?” I call, my voice echoing against a labored gasping that I don’t think is my own. I arrive at her train, flowing down the stairs like sparkling Pepto-Bismol.

I turn one more step to find her ashen in the windowless, airless, brightly lit space. I grip the railing and crouch down. “Kelsey?”

Her eyes are unfocused. “I can’t—breathe in here—it’s too—small—”

“She needs a break!” I yell up the stairs to no one as I grab her clammy hands.

I hear Andy’s frustrated voice emitting from some walkie-talkie above us. “Kel, just fucking do like he told you. Now’s not the time.” Something in her eyes, in my fear, in his voice—a memory flashes through my brain like lightning bringing the day back for an instant. Kelsey clutches me in her Pocahontas nightgown. Then it’s gone.

“Kelsey, baby,” Michelle chimes in. “Everyone needs you to keep moving—”

“Get your shit together,” Andy urges over the crackling static.

“We’re depending on you.” Michelle is fervent. “Strong, Kelsey—”

“Oh, God.” Kelsey jerks her hands from mine, and I slap the stone wall for balance. “Tell them to stop. They have to stop.”

We hear the sound of someone jogging up the steps. Aaron’s face appears, tight with concern.

“Look, Kelsey, it’s Aaron. Aaron’s here.” I press myself against the wall to make room. He gathers her in, sliding his palm reassuringly to the back of her neck.

“Kelsey?”

“Momma, stop,” Kelsey pleads into his shirt, her voice breaking.

Afraid I might pass out, I maneuver past them to where the other crew members wait a few stairs above, stripped to the waist and fanning themselves.

“Okay, Kelse? We gonna shoot this thing?” the director asks as
gamely as he had inquired about my interest in a reach-around. Aaron starts to move out of the way.

“Aaron!”

“Right here,” he calls to her from just over the camera guy’s shoulder. “Right here, baby,” he says softly. “Right in my eyes.”

“I have to—ask you . . . ” Her voice shakes. He ducks his head under the camera to her question.

“Quiet on set!”

“Yes.” Aaron’s answer echoes around us.

The last shot they need
to get before sunup is Kelsey running through scattering pigeons toward the cathedral’s front doors. Ostensibly rejuvenated by the open space and solid earth, Kelsey lifts her gown as if it’s not the icy albatross it must surely feel like and dashes again and again and again, all her arm muscles defined.

MTV is filming this final section of filming and E TV,
Extra
,
Hollywood Insider
, and their European equivalents are filming MTV. In my sweat-soaked shirt, I’m chilled to my core and ready to be somewhere that is not here. Not inside here, not outside here, not just to the left of here. Not here. Andy pulls at the bridge of his nose, and Michelle rubs the forearms of his parka. I keep turning to Aaron because he repeatedly opens his mouth to say something but doesn’t.

At long last, the shot is captured, and Kelsey is hustled to her trailer. Michelle steps inside just as the stylist begins cutting her out of the dress.

“Dax?” Michelle lifts Kelsey’s waiting corset from its hanger and motions for him to start blowing out her hair.

He shakes his head. “She’s going to have to rinse it with all that oil.”

“We don’t have time.” As the last stitch is broken my hands go to my mouth at the sight of the scabbing gashes where the harness has sliced her.

“I’ll take a two-minute shower.” Kelsey shakes feeling into her swollen feet. Michelle doesn’t move from in front of the bathroom door. “I can’t feel anything.”

“Then we’re going to have to repancake that mess on your shoulders. Kelsey, are you listening to me?”

“Momma, everyone can wait a few more minutes, or do you want me to get pneumonia, too?” Binky rapidly smears Kelsey’s face in cold cream, wiping the pink gloss off to reveal purple lips.

“Kelsey!” Michelle snaps. “We’re all cold! We all need a shower! Daddy’s getting a migraine. Now, just—” She thrusts the corset at her.
“Come on.”
Binky looks away. The stylist, caught crouched down between them, gathers up the pounds of fabric.

“Okay, Momma,” Kelsey says quietly.

“Thank you.”

“Of course. I’ll see you in the tent.”

Minutes later, her hair topped
with a feather headband to mask the oil, Kelsey hops onto the director’s chair between two posters of mascara tubes. “Brrr, it’s freezing, isn’t it?” She grins at the cameras. Billy Bush gets a last dash of powder.

“Hey, Kelsey!”

“Hey, Billy!”

“So this is a pretty exciting commercial you’ve been shooting here at St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

“Oh, my God, I’m having a blast! So much fun. But there’s another reason I can’t stop smiling.” She strikes a coquetteish pose.

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”

“Billy, I wanted you to be the very first to know.”

“Yes?”

“I’m
engaged!
”

Andy and Michelle turn to Aaron—who looks as stunned as the rest of us.

Part III
 

“Can I get you another?” The Chichester bartender raises his chin to my empty champagne flute. I nod, mouth full from the late dinner I’m making of wasabi peas before I head upstairs to my room. The numbers on the door change, but this L.A. hotel has become my home-away-from-tour-away-from-home since my title was tacitly reclassified from Personal Assistant to Wedding Planner.

For the last three weeks, Kelsey’s been as inflated as she used to be on the Sundays following a trophy win, when it was better to steer clear or spend the day playing Lady-in-Waiting to her Queen. She hadn’t even washed that oil from her hair before she appointed me to oversee the festivities that everyone on the planet wants to discuss—with the minor exception of her parents. (Michelle’s response included the phrase “fool’s errand.”) Andy, however, jumped at the idea of booting me off the American leg of the tour, because he clearly wants to dismiss someone from Kelsey’s corner, and Aaron’s nonnegotiable.

I take another mouthful of peas and look around the bar. From this vantage point of relentless comparison, I’ve come to find L.A. disorienting in its proportions, the women having paid more than I can comprehend to look like crude cartoon caricatures. I wipe my spicy fingers on a cocktail napkin as the producer holding “auditions” in the white leather wing-back returns with his stack of eight-by-tens. If tonight is typical, a stream of nervous beauties will swap out in thirty-minute intervals, their vulnerability palpable. I wonder what his method is. Does he do this on weeknights and then invite the ones who make the cut to his room on Saturdays? Or are “call-backs” at midnight on his penis? I keep forgetting to tell Kelsey about him. But then, given her (time) consuming passion for Aaron, our brief conversations have become limited to linens and flowers. Thinking of linens and flowers, I replay the
voice mail from the other fiancé. “Hey, Logan, it’s Lauren. Just calling to say thank you. Missed you this weekend.” Each sentence comes in a discrete burst, making it sound as if she’s distracted. “The hotel was sick. We were a little crammed in, but the view was amazing. Please thank Kelsey for the spa day. I was sorry we didn’t get to see her—I thought there’d be tickets to her next New York show on the bed when we checked in or something. A backstage pass. Maybe you’re saving that as a wedding present? Anyway, hope you’re having fun. ’Bye.”

“Who did your lips?”

“Excuse me?” I ask the guy who’s just sidled up.

He is not tall. Even in his absurdly thick-soled shoes. He flashes his capped teeth. “They’re choice.”

“Oh, I—um, actually they’re mine.”

“You don’t need to be coy. I’m a plastic surgeon.” He lays down his panty-dropper. “Whatcha drinking?” he asks.

“Thanks, but I just ordered.”

The bartender slides my glass in front of me and asks, “Do you want me to put that on your husband’s tab?”

“Thank you,”
I reply pointedly.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” the surgeon says. “You should wear a ring.” He flips his card to me from his blazer pocket. “I can still get you a deal if you want to do something about your breasts.”

I grab his arm. “This is a
backless
top. And if they’re not made of titanium, they’re not supposed to sit under your chin.” Yeah, don’t think the peas are doing the trick.

I ask to see the bar menu.

“The deviled eggs are awesome,” another male voice says in the vacated space, and I look up with back-off eyes but am met by height and chisel.

“Care to split an order?” I ask gamely to his choppy blond hair, his visibly broken nose. Screw the erstwhile Finn and his symmetry.

“Sounds great.” The guy hops onto the stool like Fred Astaire. “Staying at the hotel or just love the scene?” he asks with a smile, leaning down to rest on his palm.

“Oh, yeah, I have a warm, cozy home just around the corner, but I can’t get enough of watching Bill Maher ogle escorts.”

“Escorts?” he asks, feigning shock. He swivels in their direction. “Are you sure?”

“See, in New York, if you saw a woman dressed like that, with that many rubber parts, you’d be, like, okay, clearly she’s on Craigslist. But here, she could be a model, an aspiring actress, or even a housewife. It’s confusing.”

“Mark,” he says, extending his hand.

“Logan.”

“Sounds like you can’t wait to go home.”

“Yes, home, no, definitely.” I should get one of those. “Actually, I’m just in town for meetings.”

“What kind of meetings?” he asks as the eggs arrive.

“Event planning. Dumb stuff.”

“Shut up.” He playfully pushes my bicep. “That’s what I do.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, corporate event planning. I’m in town doing a big launch for a new desk chair.”