California Dreaming (10 page)
They parted wordlessly, and Anna made her way back toward the house, loving the feel of the cool night air on her skin and the grass again under her bare feet. It was well past midnight and she had every reason to go back to sleep. Or even draw herself a bubble bath to end all bubble baths in the white claw-foot tub in her bathroom. She had every accoutrement she needed. Candles. Vanilla bergamot bubble bath from Bliss. A white Egyptian-cotton robe from the Four Seasons gift shop. She could put on her iPod and relax or text back to the endless voice mails she was sure awaited her. Or at least call Logan. Thinking about him made her smile. That they had lived though a death-defying experience, in every sense of that word, made her feel so connected to him, even though they'd only reconnected just a few weeks ago. That he was so very
right
for her seemed miraculous. They were so much alike.
But. There was something else she needed, even before him, or the bubble bath, or more sleep. As she entered the house, her whole body tingled with an odd feeling of excitement. Purpose, even.
She stopped in the kitchen to make a container of French-press coffee. Black and strong, with fresh-ground beans from Costa Rica. She carried it up to her room, along with one white bone-china cup imported from Tunisia. Then she went straight to her rolltop desk, booted up her white iBook, and opened her draft screenplay—the autobiographical one, about the conservative Upper East Side high school senior who goes out to Los Angeles in the middle of her senior year.
Back in Manhattan, she'd written all of ten pages or so. Barely enough to establish her main character. Not nearly enough to get into the heart of the story.
Now she started to write. And write some more. Her fingers clicked at the keyboard, the coffee went untouched, and she didn't stop until noon the next day, so tired she could barely lift herself out of the chair. And the whole damn thing was done.
Sunday afternoon, 12:38 p.m.
“I
’ve decided I want a maid of honor. And I'd like it to be you. Cammie, you're my oldest friend. Good times and bad. Cool boyfriends and assholes. Dee, no offense,” Sam concluded, turning from Cammie to Dee Young, who held the title of second-oldest friend.
Dee grinned back at Sam, blinking her huge, saucer-shaped blue eyes. “None taken. It should be Cammie. She deserves it,” Dee affirmed in her girlish voice.
“I wouldn't go that far, Dee.” Cammie said dryly. She looked down at the nail tech who was working busily on her pedicure. Sam and Dee were experiencing the same service on either side of her. “Easy on the cuticles,” she cautioned.
It was Sunday morning—well, really early afternoon, since Sam didn't actually do Sunday mornings—and Sam was with Cammie and Dee in her bedroom, which was roughly the size of a small island nation, although better appointed. Each of them sprawled on a white silk chaise lounge brought up from the side of her father's heated swimming pool and arranged them in the center of Sam's floor. Three young women from Fab Feet on the Go provided foot soaks, reflexology massages, and pedicures.
It was a good thing, too. They had a Hollywood wedding to plan—one that would take place in just six days.
When Sam had woken up this morning, she'd felt a flutter of panic that had persisted all the way through her eucalyptus-scented steam shower and home-baked croissant with Kenyan mountain-grown coffee. Actually, it was more than a flutter. It was more like a flock of panicked birds wheeling in her pancreas. Had she really agreed to be married at the end of the week? Had she really agreed to think about skipping USC film school and moving to Paris with Eduardo instead?
Had she really let sixteen precious hours tick off the wedding-planning clock?
The only way to possibly accomplish this affair was to enlist her best friends’ help. But Cammie was totally and thoroughly booked. Overbooked, in fact, running Bye, Bye Love. That left Dee and Anna, in theory. But Anna was recovering from a near-death experience, and Sam hadn't even seen her since she'd crash-landed at LAX.
That left Dee. Dee was a lot of things. Petite. Cute. Amusing. Entertaining. From time to time a bit of a ditz. But a budding wedding planner wasn't one of the nouns or adjectives on the foregoing list.
In a crunch, Sam knew she could pull it off herself, if she had to. But the idea of being responsible for the planning of one's own wedding was humiliating. She glanced around the room, hoping for some jolt of inspiration.
Sam's room was as minimalist as the films she someday wanted to make—focused around a few key details without too much clutter. The centerpiece was her California king bed, which had a clean, silver-poled, roofless canopy. The carpet was white, as were the walls. Adorning the walls were a collection of black-and-white framed movie posters, signed by the producer, the director, and the stars. Among these were
Au Revoir, Les Enfants; Amelie; Breakfast at Tiffany's;
and
Dominick and Eugene
. Her dad's action films were conspicuously absent. Sam caught Audrey Hepburn's eye, looking chic as ever in her black dress and diamond necklace. Holly Golightly, her character in
Tiffany's
, would never plan her own wedding, she was sure. But then again, she might be the type to get married with only a few days’ notice.
“So what do you say, Cammie? Will you be Sam's maid of honor?” Dee prompted, jolting Sam out of her reverie. She realized that Cammie hadn't actually said okay.
Asking Cammie hadn't been an easy choice. Cammie could sometimes be a bigger bitch than just about anyone Sam had ever known. But they'd been best friends for so many years. Longevity counted, and so did loyalty. Especially in this town. She just hoped that neither Dee nor Anna would be insulted.
“Are you kidding?” Cammie downed a glassful of Taittinger champagne and set the empty glass on the carpet beside her. “Of course I'll do it.”
“And you'll still be a bridesmaid,” Sam added to Dee.
“Fantastic.” Dee nodded her small blond head happily. Her bright blue eyes were shining. “I'm psyched. It's not every day that a girl gets to help plan her best friend's wedding
and
receive her high school diploma.”
“It's too bad you didn't have a real graduation,” Cammie pointed out.
“It was fine,” Dee told her. “I finished my GED. After the year I had, I'm lucky to even be able to think straight.”
Sam was glad that Dee had been able to finish all her GED requirements, given that she'd missed so much school when she had a medium-size nervous breakdown on a class trip to Las Vegas back in the spring. She'd ended up on the psychiatric floor at Cedars-Sinai, and then did a good long stay at the Ojai Institute near Santa Barbara, where the doctors figured out what was wrong with her brain chemistry—practically everything—and put her on a regimen of drugs designed to smooth out her manic depression.
Dee was a new person after Ojai. Kinder. Simpler. More coherent. But sometimes, Sam missed loopy, premeds Dee, who never met a countercultural or New Age fad she didn't fall in love with. EST. Kabbalah. Marianne Williamson. Whoever the guru of the moment happened to be. There was no doubt, however, that Dee was a far more stable and functional person after her treatment than before it. More boring, maybe. But more stable.
Sam studied her friends, who seemed to make up a living exercise in contrast.
Cammie could definitely pass as a bona fide Hollywood starlet, with her perfect (if artificially enhanced) breasts, mass of strawberry blond curls, and Pilates-toned figure. This morning, she wore a flirty little Zimmermann sundress and Jennifer Meyer chandelier earrings, even though the extent of their plans was to get pedicures, eat junk food, and maybe watch the
20 Most Extravagant Celebrity Weddings
countdown on E!
Next to Cammie, Dee looked almost mousy, though to call her plain would be a disservice. Her petite figure was
made
for skimpy L.A. fashion, and her shaggy, shoulder-length pale blond hair always looked rock-star perfect, with—near as Sam could tell—little to no effort. She'd come for her pedicure in a wild graphic print dress from Nicolas Ghesquière's new Balenciaga collection.
Sam herself wore a baby blue floral paisley Chloé shift dress, with a scoop neckline and oversize side-slash pockets that took the attention away from her oversize hips.
The nail tech tapped Sam's heel, a signal for her to switch feet. Her toenails had been painted a new dark brown shade called Vamp that was in the process of taking Hollywood by storm. Sam thought she could get away with wearing it one more time before she'd see it on girls from the San Fernando Valley and never be able to go near it again.
“So Dee, now that you're a high school graduate, what are you gonna do with your life?” Cammie had a knack for cutting right to the chase.
Dee smiled beatifically, not at all fazed by the question. “Plan Sam's wedding, duh. After that, who knows? Spend time with Jack.”
“Isn't he going back to Princeton?” Sam asked.
Jack Walker, Dee's boyfriend, was a friend of Ben's from Princeton University, who had come out to Los Angeles for the summer to work in the reality TV department at Fox. Sam thought Jack could be a little condescending, but he seemed like a decent enough guy. At the very least, he made Dee happy.
Dee shrugged. “Oh, it'll work out, I'm sure. If we have to do long distance, we'll do long distance.”
Cammie laughed as her nail tech went to work on some nonexistent calluses on her heel. “Long distance never works. Unless you're married. And even then, only for a few months at a time. It's why Sam has to decide to go to France, or Eduardo has to decide to stay here in Los Angeles. Not that anyone's listening to me,” she added, pulling down on one of, her chandelier earrings with a delicate finger.
Sam sighed and played with one of the pockets of her shift dress. Cammie had a point. She and Eduardo were getting married quickly so they'd be married when he went back to France. She didn't think she was ready to leave Los Angeles. But the idea of not being with her husband during their first year of marriage was even more abhorrent.
“They'll make it work. And so will we,” Dee said pointedly. The early afternoon sunlight was streaming through the eight-foot plate glass windows. It gave her blond hair an angelic glow.
“Your optimism is refreshing,” Cammie quipped. She brushed aside an errant curl as the nail tech switched files.
“I'm not optimistic,” Dee said, shaking her shaggy head. “I'll make it work, like I'm making this wedding work. Tell her what I've done already, Sam.”
Dee looked at Sam with her moon-shaped blue eyes for confirmation. “You're not going to believe it,” Sam noted to Cammie. Dee had taken over as if she were a professional. Since yesterday, she had arranged for a half-dozen designers to send over an array of wedding dresses for Sam's perusal. That would happen later in the afternoon. Sam's dress would be custom-made, of course, but these would give her an idea of what looked good. (She'd considered using the designs that Eduardo had included in the portfolio, but then opted not to. That would mean that he'd seen her dress before she came down the aisle, and while Sam wasn't exactly superstitious, she did believe in making an entrance.)
After the wedding dress designer was chosen, the head seamstress would race with her staff to create her gown so it would be ready on Friday. Sam could only imagine the number of magical elves that would work round the clock. Dee had also made preliminary inquiries of florists, caterers, musicians, wedding cake bakers, and the like.
Sam sighed and watched as her nail tech buffed her new polish. Thinking about what Dee had accomplished on her behalf made her feel guilty. Cammie hadn't done shit, and she was going to be the maid of honor. How unfair was that?
“Hey, would you mind handing me that notebook? And the pen?” Dee asked her nail tech, who was applying a final topcoat of gold polish to her left big toe. She pointed to an open notebook on the white Persian rug.
“Sure.” The nail tech, who sported spiky dark hair and thick eye makeup, handed over the simple black-and-white composition notebook and the gold Cross pen next to it.
“So, let's talk about these gowns,” Dee said, opening the notebook to a dog-eared page and peering at what she'd scrawled. “You're trying a vintage lace Alvina Valenta, a fitted Lazaro with amazing beadwork, a Christos washed silk strapless, fitted under the bust, with an A-line skirt—very figure flattering—and an Ulla-Maija original: it's hand-draped silk satin with a twenty-foot cathedral train.”
“Didn't your boyfriend mock up a bunch of drawings of you in custom-designed gowns?” Cammie asked.
“Fiancé, not boyfriend,” Sam corrected.
“Ah. Yes.” Cammie peered down at her toenails, which were now done in a vermilion shade called Shameless. “Fiancé. So?”
“The drawings were nice. But I don't want Eduardo to see my dress before the wedding. And the bitch Peruvian designer who drew them makes me nervous. I don't want her within three miles of my wedding.” Sam was emphatic.
“Cool. Then go naked,” Cammie quipped. “It's easier, it's hot, and you don't have to worry about anyone else copying you.”
Sam shook her head with a smile. “You're the one who looks hot naked,” she pointed out. “I'm the one who does the wild thing with the lights off. In fact, I'm happiest when there's a power failure and no candles or matches.”
Cammie poured herself some more champagne as the nail tech buffed at another rough spot—how on earth had Cammie gotten a rough spot?—of skin on her opposite heel. “Oh, right. Well, then, you'll want to go with the A-line to hide those hips of yours. I'm just telling you as a friend.”
“That was rude,” Dee said in her breathy little voice.
“I know,” Cammie agreed, sounding not at all bothered by Dee's remark. “It's a sickness. No cure. Oh well.”
For the next ten minutes, the nail techs worked in silence. Finally, the lead tech, who wore a white uniform—her assistants were in black—announced that they were done. All they had to do was pack their traveling valises. “Should we send the bill to the house?”
