Oh! You Pretty Things (19 page)

Trent clinked the open bottle against my wineglass and we both drank before heading inside.

Everything was fine. Trent showed me to a bathroom near the front door with white hydrangeas in a mirrored silver vase and a stack of fluffy white hand towels in a silver basket. I ran a brush through my hair and slicked on some lip gloss. My eyes were shiny and wide-open, like I was surprised about something. I took my pink bikini from my purse and slipped it on under my dress.

The swimming pool was spectacular, a black-bottomed kidney shape with a Jacuzzi and a tumbled-rock waterfall down at the deep end. There were twinkle lights in all the trees.

Trent had a flash attachment for his camera, a big, round disk with a little bulb at the center that sizzled and popped every time he clicked the shutter.

I perched on a wrought-iron lounge chair and pulled my dress over my knees, looking up into the big, black eye of his camera lens.

“Beautiful,” he said.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

“Lie back and put your hands behind your head. Like that. That's great.”

Pop.

“Move your dress up higher on your legs. Fantastic.”

Pop. Pop.

Then I was in the swimming pool, my dress billowing around me and the lights from the bottom of the pool shining through the white stripes gone sheer in the water.

“Perfect,” he said.

Pop.

He wrapped me in a big, white towel. “Take off that dress and I'll get some shots of you under the waterfall. You look amazing.”

He topped off my champagne and I was shy about stripping down to my pink bikini, even though I'd worn it to the beach and the swimming pool at SMC all summer. It felt different in the dark, with champagne and cigarettes. What if he looked at me and realized he'd made some horrible mistake?

“Are we gonna do this, beautiful?” Trent said.

Trent shot four rolls of film of me under the waterfall, barely pausing to reload his camera.
Chin down, now look at me, no, not like that, only with your eyes, yes, perfect, hold it. Shake your hair. Now push it back with your left hand. Turn just your head toward me.

I was freezing and the skin on my fingertips was wrinkled but I didn't care because Trent was telling me in several languages that I was beautiful.
Bellissima, belle fille
.
Krasivaya, dusha-devitsa
.

“Good, great,” he said. “Now, lose the top.”

I ducked my head. “I don't know.”

“Baby,” he said. “French
Vogue
is gonna shit when they see these. You look like a movie star on the beach at St. Tropez.”

So I took my top off and he shot me under the waterfall until my toes went numb. Then he set his camera aside, and stepped into the steaming Jacuzzi. “Come here. You must be freezing.”

I swam underwater to the stairs, then padded across the teak deck toward the steam from the Jacuzzi.

“Here.” He uncapped an amber bottle and shook a white, oblong pill into his hand. “Take this.”

“What is it?”

“It'll warm you up.”

He passed me the champagne bottle and I put the pill on my tongue then filled my mouth with so much champagne that I'd had to gulp it down.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, like he had all the time in the world.

“I guess at that point,” Eva says, “he did. So, then what happened?”

“I remember walking down a long hall on a shaggy white rug that ran all the way down to a set of lacquered double doors, like the entrance to a restaurant. I said it felt like walking on baby animals, which made Trent laugh, and then he hugged me from behind. He was shirtless from the pool, and his chest hair felt like a pot scrubber.”

Eva wrinkles her nose and twists her perfect lips into a moue of distaste. “I do not like where this is going, at all,” she says.

“Yeah, it's everything you'd think,” I say. “So, the next thing I remember, I woke up in this puffy white bed. For about one second everything felt okay. There was moonlight coming through the drapes around an open sliding-glass door. I could hear the waves outside. The room was spinning, but not too bad.”

I look at the full-length mirror, across Eva's bedroom, the two of us reflected back with our heads so close it looks like they're touching.

“Oh, God,” Eva says. “This is killing me.”

“And he was lying right there and then we started kissing. I mean, it wasn't awful, just the kissing, but his tongue felt wrong. Too wet. Too big. He tasted like mustard. He was talking to me, but I couldn't understand, from the champagne and the pill and whatever. I tried to get up, but he just rolled me how he wanted me and said, ‘Don't cry, cherie. I'm not going to hurt you.'”

I shrug. “Which was, of course, a giant lie. You can figure out the rest. It was as gross as you would expect, and then it was over and he drove me home.”

“Ew, it's like Roman Polanski.”

“Not really,” I say. “I mean, at least he didn't fuck me in the ass.”

“It's so disgusting,” Eva says, her voice sharp. “Every fucking high school kids from the AV squad who gets plugs, laser hair removal, and a production deal needs to fuck it out with pubescent aspiring starlets until the wheels fall off the fucking bus.”

“Yeah, but—that's not the damage.”

“Then what is?”

A silence spreads across Eva's bedroom, until I say, “When I told my mother.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that the Chinese word for ‘crisis' is the same as the one for opportunity.”

Eva's lips narrow.

“She said, ‘What's behind door number two for a girl like you?'”

I lie back on the bed and look at Eva's beamed ceiling.

“She said, ‘One day, you'll thank me.'”

Eva crawls up into my lap and rests her head on my shoulder. “I'm so sorry,” she says.

And I'm crying, but it's not a twisty-faced, anguished kind of cry. It's more like my eyeballs are leaking. My heart feels like that commercial with stop-motion photography, the one where the peony goes from bud to bloom in seven seconds.

O
ne thing about falling in love with a celebrity is that they're so Google-able. Before my first day working for Eva, I knew all about her dating history: the one-named A-list pop star, the dozens of actors who courted her, the brief marriage to a teenage heartthrob when she was nineteen. I knew her original hair color, the names of her brothers and sisters, and the (fake) Sanskrit meaning of her unfortunately placed back tattoo that looks like a paisley bruise. Though months later, I learned that the unwieldy art was a cover-up for the name of that heartthrob first husband, inked just above her perfect ass in looping, cursive script.

Of course, I never mention the things I learn from Google-stalking Eva. I just hold them close.

The only person I could tell about my shameful behavior is Megan, and we keep missing each other. I had to tell her about Donna hijacking the apartment in a phone message, for fuck's sake. Her texted response was perfectly Megan:
Boof, I will crush her head with a cinder block if you want, but honestly, who cares? Let her have it. I hope she finds joy there. Hahahahaha, j/k.

D
oes anyone ever think they have bad taste? My guess is no. That's the only way to explain fanny packs, garden gnomes—which, admittedly, have a certain post-
Amélie
ironic appeal—and Spandex.

Eva has not one, but two, interior designers, but that hasn't stopped her from buying a pair of bent twig rocking chairs, currently the only furniture in her living room, and a molded resin wall sculpture—intended for a garden but displayed above her walk-in fireplace—of fat-cheeked bas relief cherubs draped in diaper togas, clutching bows and quivers of pointed arrows. Bad taste in home décor is Eva's only visible flaw, and it makes me feel protective, almost maternal.

The number one interior designer, Bella, is Eva's ex-boyfriend's mother. She is sixtyish and British—although, oddly, her son is not. Bella is mostly gracious and very
jolie laide
in her cap of silver hair and her tea-length floral dresses. She strides through rooms, tsking and measuring, followed by a retinue of fresh-faced interns who huddle and whisper. In other circumstances, I'd find her intimidating, but I just worked for a man with seriously honed tastes, so when she starts pontificating about how desperately this room needs a sisal rug—
because
,
God knows
,
we couldn't possibly consider an Aubusson for this client
—I get testy.

“Eva's not interested in sisal or an Aubusson,” I tell her, though I have no idea what Eva likes. “You're going to have to get on board with her style.”

“Really?” Bella regards me with sudden interest. “And what are
your
thoughts on floor coverings?”

“A sea-grass rug with a serged edge, not bound, in this room. I wouldn't bother doing anything to the floors, because I'd take the rug to a nine-inch border all through here.” I gesture to the wide rectangle of the living room. “Upstairs, I'd rip out that faux-terra-cotta tile and bring the wide-plank hardwood through the hallways. There's no reason to fuck with the original floors in the bedrooms—though I'm not a fan of peg-and-groove—because they're authentic to the period of the house, although I'd refinish them to match whatever happens in the common areas.”

Bella shoos off a hovering intern with her ringed hand. “Interesting. What else?”

“I'd leave the subway tile in the master bath, but I'd rip out that heinous Jacuzzi and put in something porcelain and curvy. And I'd take a sledgehammer to the glass brick separating the dressing room from the closet.”

“What about this?” she says, gesturing to the rickety dining table that Scout gave Eva when she moved in, an “heirloom” from her own childhood.

I hesitate for a moment. Part of me wants to defend the table, out of loyalty to Scout. But a bigger part needs to spare Eva from any future embarrassment—and that thing, while adorable in a garage sale kind of way, is not what Bella has in mind.

“Donate it to Out of the Closet,” I say. “Or it goes out on recycling day.”

Bella laughs. “Well, aren't you a treasure!”

A sick feeling coils in my stomach at this betrayal of Scout, but Eva texts me later that night:
What did you say to Bella? You're the first assistant she hasn't wanted to murder. You're awesome.

I read the final two words seven times. I am glowing.

Another text arrives:
Meet her at Country Floors on Melrose tomorrow at 11. We love her. Don't talk about Jeremy.

Jeremy is Bella's son. He was an assistant director on a Lifetime movie Eva shot a few years ago, but it was so bad it never even made it to air. You could say the same about her relationship with Jeremy. Their brief fling didn't survive the duration of the location shoot, but Eva held on to Bella afterward. Bella is one of the most sought-after decorators in Los Angeles, and Eva's not the kind of girl to let a failed romance stand in the way of a potential six-page spread in
InStyle
.

Jeremy is currently engaged to a doe-eyed starlet, but that doesn't stop him from leaving Eva long, sexually charged voice-mail messages on a regular basis. I cringe when I transcribe them for her
daily update
, which is a written accounting of the messages on her second-most-recent cell-phone number. The people calling it don't know that Eva has moved on to a new, more exclusive contact number, so they say the most intimate and inappropriate things, which I dutifully take down verbatim and present to her daily in a manila folder.

The good news about Eva's edict for me to meet Bella tomorrow is that it gives me the morning off. I'm thinking about this while I'm lying in bed, and I do something that's been on my mind for the past couple weeks.

I text Kirk.

I have a big bucks meeting at Country Floors tomorrow for my new boss. Still want to cook for you. Breakfast instead? Urth at 10? I'll buy.

I check my phone a dozen times before I fall asleep but there's no response. Whatever. It was just a whim.

I wake up to two texts from Kirk.

Who's gone all uptown on me?

And then:

Love to. See you at Urth at 10.

I dial Megan immediately. It goes to voice mail, but instead of leaving a blathering message, I fire off a rapid succession of texts.

Boof, I feel like we broke up and we're enacting the no-contact rule. You suck.

I have many important things to tell you ABOUT MY LOVE LIFE, but I'm not telling you shit until I'm looking at your face.

Then, later, when she still doesn't answer:

Don't beg, it's unseemly.

I really miss her.