Change of Scene: A 100 Page Novella (6 page)

“Maybe she’s just busy with work.”

Greer gave both men a long accusing stare. “So, am I the last one to know just what kind of work it is she’s been doing recently?”

“She made us swear not to tell,” Luis said. “She was afraid you’d freak out.”

“Of course I freaked out! She’s giving phone sex.”

“Intimacy counseling,” Sean corrected. “It’s totally harmless. And it’s fabulous money. Did she tell you she’s thinking of buying her place?”

“No,” Greer said. “She just said she’s performing a valuable service. In her mind, it’s just another acting gig. She’s in total denial. Just keep an eye on her, will you? I’m really worried about her.”

“We will,” Sean promised, crossing his heart with a slice of pineapple and pepperoni.

*

Greer was on day ten of her self-imposed house arrest. Ten days’ worth of mostly untouched pizza boxes and takeout containers littered the polished hardwood floors around the bedroom in her studio apartment. Dirty clothes overflowed from the hamper, because going down to the first-floor laundry room meant leaving the apartment, which she wasn’t about to do.

Leaving the apartment meant running into her neighbors—neighbors such as Teresa, who was a script supervisor for a Fox reality show, or Malcolm, who built sets on the Universal lot, or even creepy Joe, who worked craft services at Paramount.

Nearly all her neighbors were in the business, and all of them, in fact all of L.A., knew about the spectacular way her career as a location manager had literally gone up in flames.

Her laptop stood open on the rumpled bedcovers with ten days of unanswered e-mails piling up. Her phone was dead, so she wasn’t receiving calls or texts.

“Off the grid,” Greer muttered. She took a sip from the last bottle of wine she’d found squirreled away in the now-empty liquor cabinet. Some Two-Buck Chuck—a birthday present from Dearie that still had the scratch-and-sniff teddy bear stickers her grandmother had affixed to the label.

“I am off the friggin’ grid,” she repeated, upturning the bottle for one last drop of sub-par cabernet.

Of course this was not technically true, since she still had Internet and cable—at least until the end of the month. After that, who knew? Her work had dried up just as quickly as her liquor supply.

She heard the ring of the doorbell, which startled her so badly she dropped the wine bottle, which promptly shattered all over the floor.

“Go away,” Greer hollered. “I don’t need any more pizza or pad thai. I’m off the grid.”

Someone rang the doorbell again.

“I mean it,” she called out, trying to sound menacing. “Go the hell away. I’ve got a dog in here. A vicious, uh, vicious, Doberman. He’ll rip out your throat.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t have a dog and we both know it. Greer, dammit, it’s me,” the voice called back. “Open the door.”

“Me who?” She knew exactly who was at the door.

“CeeJay me, goddamn it.”

She wavered. CeeJay was her best friend, her only friend, come to think of it, now that she’d destroyed her career, which, after all, was her life.

But no. She didn’t want CeeJay’s pity.

“Go away,” she said, her voice softer. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

“I’m not going away, and you know it,” CeeJay called back. “Now open this door immediately. A crowd is gathering out here.”

Barefoot, she stepped off the bed, and immediately a shard of glass dug into the heel of her foot.

“Shit!” Greer howled. She stepped sideways, landing squarely on another piece of glass.

“Ow, ow, ow.”

CeeJay banged on the door. “I am not leaving here until I see you—face-to-face.”

Greer sighed and limped slowly to the door.

She cracked the door open six inches and stuck her head out. “See? I’m alive. But I’m not currently receiving visitors.” She was about to slam the door, but CeeJay wedged her foot inside and shoved the door open with one thrust of her bony hip, sending Greer sprawling backward onto the floor.

CeeJay gazed around the room, taking in the overflowing trash, the miniscule kitchen counter littered with empty beer cans, liquor and wine bottles and dirty dishes, the unmade bed, and the now blood-streaked floor.

“What the hell has been going on here? Are you having animal sacrifices?”

“I cut my foot,” Greer said, leaning back on her elbows and extending her feet for inspection. “And it’s all your fault.”

CeeJay stuck her largish Italian nose into the air and sniffed. “It smells like a dive bar in here. And it’s only ten in the morning.”

“I had a few friends in last night. I was just starting to clean up when you barged in. I was so startled I dropped a wine bottle,” Greer said.

“Likely story.” CeeJay reached down and gingerly touched a strand of Greer’s lank hair. She frowned at the dark circles under her friend’s eyes, the faded, shrunken Mickey Mouse tank top, and the plaid cotton pajama pants that rode loosely around Greer’s hips.

“Pathetic. Just pathetic.”

CeeJay, of course, was fresh as a daisy. A month ago, she’d been sporting a pink Mohawk. But now her hair was shoulder-length and platinum blond with what was, for her, a conservative streak of neon green down the left side of her face. She wore a sleeveless, bright blue crop top that exposed her pierced navel, tight white jeans, and gold-studded white sandals with a six-inch wedge heel. Her makeup was flawless, and a large vinyl Trader Joe’s tote bag was slung over her shoulder.

“How do you do that?” Greer asked, sinking down onto the sofa.

CeeJay was in the kitchen, dumping bottles and cans into a trash bag to clear a space on the counter. She began unloading the shopping bag’s contents; bottled water, fresh fruit, almond milk, and a huge bunch of leafy green kale.

“Do what?” she asked, rinsing off strawberries and blueberries.

“You know. Show up at ten a.m. looking like a cover girl for
Elle
magazine. Grow your hair ten inches in a month. Skin that looks like a baby’s butt. Bambi eyelashes. Like that.”

CeeJay pulled the cap off the bottle of almond milk and poured it into the blender on the countertop. She added the berries, chunks of banana, and torn kale leaves.

“The hair and lashes are extensions. I drink sixty-four ounces of water a day, take Vitamin E, no hard liquor, well, some tequila, SPF eighty sunblock, weekly microdermabrasion. I use my own private label foundation and lipstick. C’mon, Greer. This is what I do for a living. If I walked around all day looking like you do…” She shrugged. “I’d be out of work. Like you. Now. I don’t suppose you happen to have any chia seeds?”

Greer made a gagging noise.

“Acai berries?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” CeeJay flipped the switch on the blender, poured the contents into the only clean glass she could find, and presented it to Greer.

Greer looked dubiously at the lumpy green sludge in the glass. “Looks like sewage.”

“If it were sewage it would still be healthier than whatever you’ve been consuming for the last week or so,” CeeJay said, again thrusting the glass in her face. Greer pushed it away.

“Don’t make me call your mother.”

With a sigh, Greer took the glass and sipped. She grimaced, then drank it down.

“Satisfied?”

“It’s a start,” CeeJay said. “Now, you go hit the shower. And while you’re getting cleaned up, I’ll shovel this dump out.”

“I don’t need to clean up,” Greer said. “I’m off the grid.”

“Oh. You’re a survivalist now? If so, this is a pretty high-priced cave you’re hiding out in.”

Greer sat back on the sofa with a mutinous expression.

“I know what you’re doing, but it’s no good. I am not leaving this apartment. Until the end of the month, that is. When I take up residency in my Explorer, down by the river.”

CeeJay’s expression softened. “Are things really that bad? I thought you had some money put away for a rainy day.”

“I took some bad investment advice.”

“What about Lise? Could she help you out?”

“Lise talks a good game, but she hasn’t really worked in, like, forever. You’ve seen her place over there in Villa Encantada—I don’t even want to know what her rent must run.”

“I could loan you some money. Until your next job.”

“There is no next job,” Greer said. “Hank Reitz made sure of that. Everybody in town knows about my colossal fuckup in Paso Robles. Old Man Miller is suing the studio, the studio is suing Hank Reitz. The only good news is that nobody’s suing me, because they know I don’t have any money.”

“The fire wasn’t your fault,” CeeJay said. “Everybody in town knows Dave Walker is a pyromaniac. Those special-effects guys get their rocks off that way. It’s totally a sexual thing.”

“Thanks, Dr. Freud. But it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. I was the location manager. I should have made damn sure nobody lit a match without the right permits, no matter what Hank or Dave wanted. More importantly, I never should have believed Garland Miller owned that ranch. The guy was a total skeev. I should have gone down to the courthouse and checked the tax records. I’ve done it hundreds of time before—why didn’t I do it this time?”

“Because you had a director breathing down your neck, changing his mind at the last minute, like they all do. Because the shoot was way behind schedule, like it always is. Maybe you did screw up a little. But there’s plenty of blame to go around, and it shouldn’t all be on you.”

“It
is
on me,” Greer said. “It’s
all
on me. I’m through in this town. I had two more features tentatively lined up after
Moondancing.
But now that’s all dried up. Other plans have been made. Other scouts have been hired. And none of them are named Greer Hennessey.”

“Not all the work has dried up,” CeeJay said. “I happen to know of an upcoming project, being shot by the town’s hottest young producer-slash-director.”

“Are we talking about Mr. X? Your new squeeze?”

“Maybe. Now get yourself showered, and I’ll tell you all about it once you’re presentable.”

“No. Like I said, I appreciate it, but I don’t want your charity. I don’t want a pity job. I promise I’ll shower and take out the trash and eat my vitamins, if you’ll just go away and leave me alone.”

“Not happening,” CeeJay said. “This is not a pity job. It’s a great project, with a major studio, and he really, really wants to talk to you about it.”

“
Right
,” Greer said. “Like I’m the only location manager in town. Come on, CeeJay. Get real, Mr. X never heard of me before. What he wants is you. And you happen to have a screwup best friend who, right now, can’t even get arrested.”

CeeJay didn’t answer. She took Greer’s discarded glass into the kitchen and rinsed it out in the sink. She went to the door, paused, and turned to deliver the exit speech she’d known she’d have to deliver.

“I’ll go. You stay here and wallow in self-pity. Let the dirty laundry pile up. Get yourself half a dozen stray cats and start hoarding empty tin cans to add to the hermit ambience. You want to continue your self-destructive bullshit? Be my guest.”

“Thanks, I will,” Greer shot back.

“I’m going.” CeeJay opened the door.

“See ya.”

CeeJay slammed the door and stomped down the hallway, her footsteps echoing in the high-ceilinged stucco space. She went out to the street and stood by her car. She waited five minutes.

The French doors opened. Greer stepped gingerly onto the tiny patio and looked over at her waiting friend.

“Are you gonna just stand there? Or are you gonna get your ass in here and do something about my hair?”

CHAPTER 6

The next day, Greer considered the stack of bills, unopened junk mail, sale circulars, and back copies of the entertainment trade journals. Living off the grid, she’d deliberately ignored the outside world, but now that CeeJay was forcibly hauling her back to reality, maybe she should catch up. The lead story in
Variety
was about a rumored studio merger. She was tempted to leaf through to see if there were any new accounts of the calamitous events at Paso Robles. But no. Not going there, she told herself.

She stuffed the mail and the papers into a trash bag, then deliberately dumped coffee grounds, a carton of rancid yogurt, and the remains of a stale bagel smeared with peanut butter atop the papers before knotting the bag and taking it downstairs to the Dumpster.

Greer was at the stair landing—the halfway point on her exciting journey to the Dumpster, when she heard her phone dinging. She set the bag of trash down and stared at the text message from CeeJay.

“X wants to meet u and talk about project ASAP. What’s ur sked?”

Greer didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Her schedule?

Her fingers trembled as she typed a reply.

“How’s right now? Tomorrow? Day after? I got nuthin’.”

Outside, she stood for a moment, blinking in the blinding sunlight and blistering heat. When had she last been outside? Just as she was hefting the garbage into the Dumpster, her phone dinged again. She stayed in the shadow of the reeking steel bin, breathing through her mouth as she read CeeJay’s text.

“Cool. X flying back from East Coast 2nite. Meet @ end of week.”

“Yes!” She broke into the crazed little jig that she thought of as her happy dance. X wanted to meet her. He had a job. A project. If she could hang on a little longer, her luck would change. A job would turn up.
.

Coming back from the Dumpster, she encountered her downstairs neighbor Kevin loading suitcases into a rust bucket Pontiac. Kevin was tan and buff, and wore his usual too-tight gym shorts, a rakish smile, and not much more. They’d met the previous year when he moved into the building. He claimed to be an actor. She wasn’t positive, but she suspected most of his work was clothing optional.

“Greer! How ya doing?” He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was checking her out. Kevin checked out every woman under the age of eighty.

He ran a fingertip down her forearm and leered. “I love that outfit on you. Totally hot. Prada?”

She took a step backward and glanced down at her ensemble—a pair of bleach-spattered cutoff yoga shorts and an old Goo Goo Dolls concert T-shirt.