Oh! You Pretty Things (17 page)

I
play the message again, and feel both a scary jolt of pure joy and a pang of homesickness for Megan. I want to call her in from the other room and make her listen to the message two or three or ten times. I want to pop a bottle of morning champagne and watch
House Hunters International
with her.

I think about calling her all the time, but the cell reception at JJ's house—sorry,
JJ and Megan's
house—is atrocious, which is ridiculous since there are more celebrities per square inch on that street than on the back lot at Sony during pilot season.

Still, I know if I pull the fire alarm and admit everything, she'll be up my ass so fast I'll need stitches. There's some comfort in that. I even rehearse the message: “So are you guys fucking on JJ's Hastens bed and drinking a bottle of Cristal? My mom is killing me, but I got a job with Eva Carlton, and it's bringing me back to life. Give me a call when you have a sec!”

But I don't call Megan. She's so caught up in . . . whatever you get caught up in when you move in with your hot new boyfriend in his fairy-tale castle in the Hollywood Hills, and are, I don't know, ordering delivery from Il Covo and getting a pedicure in your new walk-in closet.

I know she'd want me to call, but something in me resists. Let her enjoy her slice of paradise without being dragged back down to my level. Which is pretty low: I don't even return Eva's call immediately. I want to bask in the glorious possibility before the brutal reality slaps me in the face again.

Instead, I creep into the kitchen to reread the note Megan left on the counter:
Boof, I miss you already.

She also left all her kitchen stuff. I mean, why wouldn't she? Why take a rusty Jack LaLanne juicer and a box of mismatched pots and pans to what is surely a Cordon Bleu kitchen at JJ's house? It doesn't matter. The last thing I want to do is cook while my mother's here. Or even eat. The whole house smells like her, a combination of the cheap Chenin Blanc she drinks when she has to buy her own alcohol and her expensive perfume, Calèche, which she's worn since I was a baby.

They say that the sense of smell is the most powerful trigger of memory, and my happy apartment is now a Willy Wonka tunnel ride into my fractured childhood.

My phone rings. I've already given Eva Lorde's “Royals” for a ringtone. Holy shit. It's her.

“Hello?” I say, like I have no idea who's on the other end.

“Jess?” Eva says. “It's Eva.”

Not a manager, not an agent. Eva herself. “Hi! Hello. Hi. Yes.” I'm the stuttering fat kid who accidentally bumped into the head cheerleader in the cafeteria line.

She laughs. “So are you going to come work for me?”

“You know what?” I say. “I totally am.”

After we hang up, I stand in the kitchen, motionless, for a long moment. I open the refrigerator and stare at the empty shelf where Megan kept the celebratory reserves.

Everything changes.

T
he next Wednesday, I'm standing in Scout's minuscule kitchen at seven in the morning, cooking six dishes to drop at Eva's house, both in the antiquated oven and on the greasy, temperamental stovetop.

I'm not at home because my mother's perfume gives me nightmares, endless labyrinths of Calèche-scented flowers beckoning like giant Venus flytraps. I woke up sweaty in my dark, empty room two mornings in a row, then packed a bag and fled to Scout's. Just until I find a new apartment.

Which will be easier if I don't get fired, because I've completely overextended myself. Almost everything I'm cooking is completely outside my comfort zone because Eva is vegan. Well, she's Hollywood vegan, which means she'll eat feta cheese and goat-milk Parmesan, but not cheddar or Swiss or Gouda.

“My old chef used to make me these amazing crackers, and goat-milk Parmesan was the only ingredient,” she told me. “I've been dreaming about them for weeks. But it has to be goat milk; it can't be cow. Oz will freak.”

Oz is Eva's celebrity nutritionist. She had his office e-mail me the ingredient list for her protein shakes and it's thirty items long. His receptionist called to make sure I received the file and she sounded like Joan Cusack's character in
Working Girl.

I shouldn't have been intimidated, but I was. She sounds like she'd fly out here and kick my ass if I don't remember that Eva needs an extra 5,000 IU of vitamin D when she works more than two nights in a row. I'd asked why, and the receptionist asked, in a nasal, icy voice, exactly where I'd gotten my culinary training, again?

“Oh, shit,” I said. “That's Eva on the other line. Thanks!”

I hung up before she could ask anything else. I bet she knows where to get goat-milk Parmesan cheese, the whore.

I leave two messages for Eva's manager, Melanie—we haven't talked since she ditched out at the Ivy—but she never calls back. Finally, I just buy sheep's milk Romano from Bay Cities on Lincoln and I'm hoping for the best. Of course I Googled it, but the real in-the-know stuff in L.A. is never online. I'm sure there's some grizzled old dude in Rolling Hills who makes five hundred pounds of the stuff a year, and you have to get on a waiting list behind Beyoncé's chef and the guy who buys for Mozza, and that's
if
someone recommended you.

I'm totally up for the job, but I'm flying blind right now, because Eva is easing me into things. She was effusively vague about the details of the job on the phone, and the sum total of my personal-assistant duties so far has been making a couple phone calls to people who want to shower her with free crap (Juicy Couture, no thank you; Alice + Olivia, yes, please), and running meals up to her house from restaurants that don't deliver.

She's paying me a thousand dollars a week and using me for only two hours a day. I spend most of my time looking for a cheap studio apartment in Hollywood.

Then yesterday Eva asked if I could make her some meals so she'll have something to eat when she gets home from the night shoots she's on all week. I offered to cook at her house, of course, but she sweetly stonewalled me. I think she's waiting to make sure I'm not going to take pictures of her laundry hamper and sell them to
Star
magazine.

It's fine with me, except I can't cook at home because of Donna. I
have
no home because of Donna; if she's there, home isn't. But that doesn't really matter. It's past time to walk away from the apartment. Megan's gone.

So, I'm about to be homeless and if Eva wants my food after next week, she might have to be satisfied with stuff I cook over a beach bonfire. I can barely even cover a security deposit.

Then I hand my rental application to the manager of a twelve-unit building in Hollywood, populated entirely by drag queens, and he squeals when he reads what I've written under “Current Employment.”

“You work for Eva Carlton?” His eyes light up like he just heard about a sale on size-12 women's shoes at Nordstrom. “I called in sick when my TiVo broke and she was supposed to marry Jason.”

I have no idea what he's talking about, but I smile and nod as he breezes past the security deposit and the fact that I haven't had an apartment in my own name in years, and that there's a tiny problem with my Visa bill, which I haven't paid more than the minimum on since the divorce. Good thing my affiliation with Eva is distracting the manager—who, by the way, is receiving me in his tiny studio, next door to the one I hope to claim, wearing a black Fernando Sánchez silk dressing gown with a burgundy rolled collar, his thin brown hair scraped into a bun on top of his angular head.

I bet he looks amazing in sequins and heels.

His accent is a cross between Marlene Dietrich and the ebulliently gay Carson Kressley. I'm a little scared of him, but his enthusiasm for Eva is infectious and I sign a one-year lease at nine hundred dollars a month. The apartment is tiny, but the kitchen is retro and tile and has a big window—and he'll let me move in immediately.

There's something magical about Eva, and it's rubbing off on me.

T
he elevator at my old place isn't working, so I drag a giant stack of folded moving boxes up the dilapidated stairs. I pause outside my door and listen. All is quiet. I slide my key into the lock and the door swings open into the dim entryway. The first thing I notice is the absence of Donna smell. In fact, there's a distinct aroma of floor wax and orange peels.
What the fuck?

I flick on the light in the long, narrow hallway, which illuminates a scene I can barely parse. The floors are burnished to a dark sheen and there's a beautifully worn Oriental rug in the living room with a faded brown velvet ottoman smack in the middle. A wide, wooden tray sits on the end table with a handful of glass candles alight and guttering. There's a stippled milk-glass vase on the kitchen counter with a profusion of lavender blooms cascading from its narrow neck.

I repeat:
What the fuck?

“Hello?” I say, into the empty room.

I cross the living room and peer through the open door of Megan's old bedroom. The walls are freshly painted a buttery, sandy ochre and there's a queen-size bed with white-and-tan patterned linens, including a flounced bed skirt of crumpled saffron linen. It looks like a page from a Pottery Barn catalogue.

I whirl around to double-check I haven't accidentally wandered into someone else's apartment. But no. My room is completely untouched, down to unmade bed and the desiccated pear core on my nightstand. I'm in a parallel universe.

I'm still standing there gawking when I hear the front door open.

“
Hel-lo
,” my mother singsongs, heading into the kitchen with an armload of Whole Foods bags, a pineapple top and a wine bottle protruding from the recycled brown paper. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” I say, shooting for a measured tone and utterly failing. “I live here, for starters.”

“Really?” She sets her bags on the countertop and regards me coolly. “Because last I checked, you'd pretty much abandoned ship.”

“Yeah, about that,” I say, grateful for the transition, however awkward. “I found an apartment.”

Donna springs into animated enthusiasm. “You did? That's so great, buttercup. Where? Tell me
everything
.”

Everything? Is she kidding? I don't even want to tell her the zip code. “I'm just here to pack my shit. And to remind you that you need to be out in a couple of days.”

I'm waiting for the screaming to start, but instead she opens the refrigerator and plucks a half-empty bottle of white wine from the door, her nails clacking against the door handle as it shuts, just forcefully enough to tip me that she's having a feeling.

“Would you like a drink?” she says, taking two of Megan's Riedel wineglasses from the cupboard.

The outward lack of a reaction to my bombshell makes me edgy. “Would I like a drink from
my
refrigerator?”

She uncorks the bottle and fills her glass. She takes a sip, then pulls a bunch of scallions and a bag of gluten-free crackers from the bag. “Are you still eating gluten?”

“Those are Megan's favorite wineglasses,” I tell her, my voice quavering. “In fact, this is Megan's favorite apartment, and did you hear me? You have to leave.”

“Oh, I've made other arrangements.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” she says. “I talked to those nice landlords of yours.”

“The landlords?” I repeat. “You talked to the landlords?”

“They're so sweet,” she says. “It seems there was some unsavory business about the lease not being in your name, but I've worked that all out.”

“What does that mean?”

“I took over the lease from that girl you and Megan were ‘housesitting'
for. What do you think of the new walls in my bedroom? It's called sandalwood.”

I don't say anything. I can't. Star constellations explode like fireworks in my peripheral vision.

“Or tell me about
your
new place,” she says, into the silence.

“You're kidding, right?”

“Now you're just being difficult,” she says. “It's ugly. And you know what else?”

“Here it comes,” I say. “Let me guess: ‘I sacrificed everything for you'?”

Donna rolls her eyes theatrically and takes a big sip of her wine.

“No? How about ‘You had everything handed to you on a silver platter, and you dumped it in the trash bin'? Or is it the old chestnut about how you got screwed by the network in fucking 1922, when you were seven years old, and you should still—”

Donna raises a hand in my direction as if she's warding off evil spirits. “Just stop,” she says wearily. “For someone who's so fucking smart, you're acting like an idiot,” and the resignation in her voice makes me cringe. She's still my mother, after all. “Everything I've done, I did to take care of you. Of you, of Gloria . . . and now Emily. Don't you get that?”

“To take care of me? To take care of—” Now I'm the one who's yelling. “I don't give a fuck about Emily. She's another fucking fabrication in your lizard brain. Screw Emily. Let her die already.”

“She's falling apart.” Donna crumples into a faux-leopard-upholstered Louis IV chair I've never seen before. “One T-cell at a time. All she wants is to connect with her kid before it's too late.”

It's not like I ever bought into the existence of Emily, but now I'm utterly confident she's a figment, because Donna has taken it completely over the top. She doesn't have enough empathy to care this much about anyone other than herself. It's a rookie manipulation mistake, and, frankly, I'm a little surprised at her.

I stand there for a minute, listening to myself breathe too heavily. Then I say, “And is there one good reason why Emily's kid might want to connect with her?”

“Because they're family.”

“Family,” I say, “is not a fucking excuse.”

“Never mind,” Donna says, burying her face beneath her perfectly manicured hands. “Just go.”

“Not a problem,” I say, though there's something sitting so heavily in my chest that it feels like I've swallowed an anvil.

I drag my moving boxes into my room and slam the door, hard, behind me. Because I'm twenty-nine. Going on nine. I pack all my stuff, my head throbbing and my jaw clenched.

“So you're leaving?” she calls through the closed door, five minutes later. “The room will be free?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Let me know if you need any help, buttercup.”

Like nothing happened. Which pretty much encapsulates my drama with Donna, right there in one interaction.