Oh! You Pretty Things (24 page)

M
y mother and Eva actually
do
have something in common: their curious and flexible relationship with the truth. Maybe it's an actor thing. You don't have to be a
successful
actor; just declaring it as your major is enough to lump you in the category of profligate truth-stretcher. I'm not sure how Megan missed the memo.

Part of the problem with Eva is that everyone in her world is at least a little in love with her. For starters, she's gorgeous. I could pour a bunch of energy into a lyrical description of her masses of chestnut-brown hair, her huge, almond-shaped eyes, her petite and curvy body, but just imagine the most beautiful woman you've ever seen and multiply her by the factor of being rich and famous in Los Angeles, with easy access to the best dermatologists, plastic surgeons, personal trainers, estheticians, and yoga instructors, add a sprinkle of fairy dust, and you have Eva. She's genetically gifted and geographically blessed, the kind of beautiful that makes men run into telephone poles like a scene from a Three Stooges movie.

The notion that everyone is in love with Eva goes a long way toward explaining why people put up with her constant lateness, her tendency to forget promises, and her complete disregard for a normal schedule. For example, she thinks nothing of calling at three in the morning because she saw a new mascara or phone accessory that she wants right away.

Plus, she lies to everyone, all the time. And no one ever—I mean
ever
—calls her on it. Not the producers when she shows up two hours late, citing car trouble or an accident on La Cienega. Not her yoga instructor, who waits outside the gate for an hour, buzzing the intercom every five minutes.

“Is the gate still broken?” she asks him. “I am so sorry. Jess told me she got it fixed.”

I chafe against her passive-aggressive blame, but it's kind of what I signed up for. And I'm not willing to be the first person to call her out. Seriously, no one is. Certainly not her mother or her sister, who bitch about her with such venom that it hangs in the air like a noxious green cloud, then hurtle through the hallway to greet her with effusive hugs when they hear her at the front door.

Some of Eva's lies are innocuous enough: her alarm didn't go off; she can't attend the party because she has an early call time; she'd
love
to make a donation, just get in touch with her business manager. That kind of thing. But there's another layer, a different kind of lie, which, when pointed in my direction, always ends with me feeling shitty about myself.

Like, after Eva forgets her script in her trailer, she calls at midnight and asks me to bring it to her house so she can work on it before her call time the following morning. I'm twenty-seven miles from the location shoot in Valencia. It's a two-hour round-trip. I call back to ask if I can have someone from production e-mail it to her.

She doesn't answer. I call back three times over the next half hour and it just rings straight through to voice mail. I have production e-mail the script to me; I print it and drive it to the house. Eva's bedroom is locked with the deadbolt, so I slide the script under her door in two pieces and drive home, waking up to check my phone every hour to make sure she hasn't called.

In the morning, when I bring her protein shake into her darkened bedroom, the script is still by the door, untouched. That afternoon, she realizes I didn't bring her the original from her trailer, and calls me.

I'm shopping at Walgreens for her bulk bathroom purchases, my cart filled with dozens of tubes of toothpaste, bottles of green Listerine, tampons, squat tubs of Aquaphor.

“Where did you get that script you brought me?” she says, light and innocent, like she's just curious.

I get a prickly chill down my spine, and I pause in the feminine hygiene aisle, pressing the phone to my ear as I fumble in my purse for my headset.

“I called Bombo and he e-mailed it to me,” I say.

Bombo is the jocular second second assistant director on the show. I adore him. He was a personal assistant for years, so he understands my job.

“I told you the script in my trailer had my notes,” Eva says.

“I . . . didn't hear that.”

“I specifically told you.”

Except she didn't. I know that. Presumably she knows it too. So what is she lying for? It's just the two of us on the phone. What's her endgame?

“Sorry,” I say.

“Never mind,” she says, disappointment dripping from every syllable.

Fail.

Maybe this isn't my path. Maybe I haven't found my way. Maybe I'm still wandering in the outer fucking darkness, I don't know. All I know is that it hurts.

Eva calls at three in the morning while I'm dreaming that I'm poised on the edge of a shimmering blue Olympic-size swimming pool, in a long line of swimmers dressed in identical black maillots. It's a race and I'm waiting for the starting bell when the girls around me all suddenly knife into the water and I'm standing there alone.

I wake up, breathless, and answer the ringing phone. “Hello?”

“Oh,” Eva says. “I thought I'd get your machine.”

It's kind of cute that she speaks in colloquialisms that have fallen out of favor. She calls voice mail “the machine,” the DVR remote “the clicker,” and her treadmill “the walker.” But it's also one of those actressy affectations, like saying you don't exercise, or you're secretly a big dork who plays video games and eats pizza all day. I can't tell you how many random people have told me that Eva is so
normal
. It's adorable. And by adorable, I mean fucking infuriating.

I know she didn't think she'd get my “machine,” and I also hear a strained tone in her voice, so I say, “Are you okay?”

“Actually,” Eva says, “I'm pretty fucking far from okay.”

She's paraphrasing Marcellus Wallace from
Pulp Fiction
, which makes me laugh, but then I trail off and she doesn't say anything and we sit there for a minute.

“Don't you hate that?” I say.

“Hate what?” she says.

“Uncomfortable silences. Shit, I can't remember Uma Thurman's line.”

“Jess,” she says, aggrieved and patient at the same time. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“
Pulp Fiction
.”

“Because?”

“Because you said the thing Marcellus Wallace says to Bruce Willis after he gets ass-raped by Zed in the basement—”

“Scout's phone is off,” she says, cutting me off. “And I need her. Can you go over to her house and tell her to call me?”

“Dude, are you serious? It's three fifteen and you have to be in Valencia at nine.”

There's a crackling, charged silence and I'm about to tell her I'll do it—because that's pretty much the first tenet of being a good personal assistant—when she kind of sniffle-squeaks and says, “Dave cheated on me.”

“Oh, shit,” I say. “What happened?”

“A Claim Jumper hostess in fucking Tallahassee happened,” she says, then bursts into noisy sobs.

I try to say all the right things, but I've been working for Eva long enough to realize that she has a very fluid definition of fidelity. I mean, Eva was dating Rafe when I started working for her, and a quirkily sexy Adrien Brody lookalike named Bobby, who'd directed her in some straight-to-video rom-com a couple summers prior. Oh, wait, I'm forgetting that when she met Bobby, she was with an A-list stylist who everyone thought was gay. Bobby was with his high school sweetheart who, despite a six-figure investment in the best doctors in Beverly Hills and a standing appointment at the tanning salon, still looked like a crème brûlée in an Alaia dress.

Bobby got a thickly outlined tattoo that trumpeted
TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY EVA
across his waxed left shoulder, but Eva had forgotten to mention that in addition to the stylist, she had a string of old accounts and eager new suitors, all of whom she kept on the hook in a steady rotation of clandestine meetings and late-night rendezvous.

Once the initial bloom of romance withered, Bobby grew increasingly suspicious of Eva. I'd get a dozen phone calls, one after another until I finally answered.

“What do you mean, she had a fitting?” he'd ask. Or a read-through, or an audition, or a looping session, or whatever excuse she'd proffered.

“I don't know,” I'd say, muting my phone keyboard and tapping out a hasty message as I talked. Bobby knows you're not at Fox. He's on his way to the house. “She said she'd be home as soon as it was done.”

“Stall. I'm on my way.”
Or “Why are you even talking to him?” Or “Tell him my phone died and I'm out of gas near my therapist's office.”

I'd hear her on the phone with him later, saying, “I don't even know what Jess's problem is. I told her three times I was going to the movies with Kelly. It's like she doesn't even listen.”

And I understand, I really do. One of the benefits of being a famous actress is that you have a retinue of people to do your dirty work. Housekeepers, gardeners, pool cleaners, sure, but I'm really talking about bodyguards, personal assistants, agents, lawyers, and managers—the people who protect
the talent
from having to soil their psyches with awkward conversations.

Do I sound bitter? Envious is closer to the truth.

Who wouldn't want a hired shark to negotiate a job contract? Or a brawny hulk to keep people away? Or a me, to explain to the woman at the dry cleaners that it's a mixture of period blood, Astroglide, and chocolate soy milk on the two-thousand-dollar Daniadown eiderdown comforter so you don't have to?

Or to refill your tank when you run out of gas, which starts happening with Eva even more frequently. Somehow, she always manages to imply that it's my fault, and at first I hated myself for not driving to her house at two in the morning to make sure she had enough gas for an early call. But somewhere along the line it's just become another irritation. I try to make sure there's gas in all of her cars, I really do, but she'll get in a groove, driving either the Cayenne or the G-class, and won't let me near it.

“I'm good,” she says one day, when I know she has an early call time out by Magic Mountain, and she's been driving the same car for a week. “I'll let you know when I want you to take it.”

At first I think there's something shady in the car, so I peer in the tinted windows when I'm getting the mail, but there's only a heap of empty water bottles and protein-shake cups, a pair of battered, ancient white mukluks from Kitson, and a pile of call sheets and sides from the episode she's shooting in the hinterlands of Valencia.

Back in the house, I try to push past her resistance, knowing she must be getting close to empty. “Are you sure you don't need gas?” I say, keeping my voice neutral and bright.

She's sitting on her unmade bed in a Calvin Klein bandeau bra and a pair of black Agent Provocateur Luna briefs, leafing through a
W
magazine and eating the edamame I brought her from Koi.