Oh! You Pretty Things (26 page)

E
ven though Dr. Brian Lee—Eva's potential new gynecologist—looks like a reject from an early '90s Benetton ad in his pumpkin chinos and his untucked white oxford button-down, he's all business when he sits across from me in his sprawling office. “So,” he says, flipping through my paperwork with a manicured hand. “What brings you to my little slice of heaven today?”

“I'm the stunt vagina,” I say, and there's a flash of suppressed laughter in his eyes as he opens the manila folder on his expansive glass desktop.

“Go on,” he says.

“I work for Eva Carlton. She sent me in as the advance team.”

He laughs, showing a mouthful of perfect veneers.

“Great teeth,” I say, violating another major rule in Hollywood: don't acknowledge the beautiful work that's been done. “Dr. Sands? Dorfman?”

“Oh,” he says, shrugging. “Just good genes.”

“So that's how it's going to be,” I say. “I like it. No one wants her vaginal rejuvenation splashed all over Page Six with accompanying photos.”

“Is that a big worry for you?”

“If you mean ‘you' in a
royal we
kind of way, then yes.”

“I assure you, my office protocol about the dissemination of information is completely solid. Now.” He flips the first page of my written history. “You've been sexually active since . . .”

“Since I was fourteen,” I say.

“STDs?”

“Not that I know of.”

“One pregnancy, no children. And that was when?”

“Fifteen.”

“Oh.” A pause. “I'm sorry.”

“It was a million years ago,” I say.

Then, out of nowhere, I feel myself tearing up.

“It's okay,” he says. “Take your time.”

I wipe my eyes. “I'm done. Next question?”

T
he next Thursday morning, my job is to get to Eva's early, deliver her shake to her bedroom, then prepare the gym for her workout. The gym is a mess. Eva let her creepy uncle renovate it after her mother begged nonstop for a month. I don't think he was even a contractor. He took a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit, tore down one wall, then disappeared. One of the downsides of fame is that everyone crawls out of the woodwork with their hand out.

I'm in the kitchen, dumping protein powder, cold-pressed apple juice from Pressed Juicery, and fifteen supplements into the blender when her manager starts blowing up all the phones in a sudden need to reach Eva now, now,
now
.

First the manager's receptionist calls, then her secretary, then her executive assistant, with me delivering the same message:
Sorry, she's not available.
Eva told me to answer her phone whenever I'm in the house, but also instructed me to never—ever!—divulge any personal information about her to anyone.

I'd arrived twenty minutes earlier, buzzing myself into the iron-gated compound with my personal code. Everyone who works for Eva has their own, like a fingerprint, so she can track our comings and goings. It's one of the things that Daniel LoCicero, arrogant security consultant to the stars, recommended after Eva's encounter with a crazy stalker who loved her feet so much that he wrote her passionate letters about how he wanted to keep them in a box on his mantel.

There are different types of fans—soap, prime-time, movie—and Eva has them all. Soap opera fans are particularly rabid, even the “normal” ones. I'm putting normal in quotes, because is there anything normal about a grown woman who waits outside the guard gate at a studio waving a sign that reads
EVA, I LOVE Y
OU FOREVER
?

She once did a film with a couple A-list actors, on the level of, say, Mark Wahlberg and Robert De Niro. She played the young one's wife, which consisted of her acting charmingly exasperated and writhing around on his lap in her underpants with her hair in Lolita-esque pigtails. Some fans only know her from that film, and we tend to run into them in restaurants and airports. Maybe that's just where they have enough time to ramp up to an approach. They're usually harmless, whispering and snapping furtive photos, chirping like birds, then taking flight at the first sign of her annoyance.

I think it's because movies are an event, in a theater on a giant screen with the action occurring in a single, larger-than-life, two-hour period. There's a distance built into movie star fans' admiration. Movie stars are giant gods.

With television fans, it's different. They
know
their quarry, their prey. They watch a show on a screen that renders the stars smaller than they are—and trapped in their living rooms, to boot. Plus, fans of serial shows tend to get seriously invested. They call the actor by the name of the character and refer to a story line as though it's something the actor actually did. These encounters happen in malls, grocery stores, coffee shops, anywhere there's a crowd. It's one of the many reasons Eva sends me to most of those places alone.

“Hey, Belinda, why'd you do that to Stetson? He loves you, girl, and you're breaking his heart. You need to go stand by your man, you know what I'm saying?”

How do you even respond to that?

Ex-cons are the worst. During my third month with Eva, I spotted a tattooed ex-con beelining toward her as we were waiting in line for a veggie dog from Pink's. She'd been at a charity event where there was a Pink's truck, and everyone freaked out about how good it was. She spent the next three days waffling about whether she wanted me to bring her more.

Finally, she caved and I drove down the hill and got her a couple. But when I brought them back, still warm, they weren't right.

“I wanted that red onion stuff they put on top,” she said.

“I asked, but they didn't know what I was talking about.”

She heaved a sigh, then brightened. “I'm dying to get out of here. Let's just go down there.”

“Really?”

“My treat,” she said. “You know you want to. C'mon, I'll drive.”

At Pink's, the line was blissfully short. We got to the front without incident, until the high school girls behind us—who didn't have the slightest idea who Eva was—overheard her veggie-dog order and wanted them too. Veggie dogs are an off-menu item, and they won't dig them out unless you're at least a tiny blip on the Hollywood radar screen. Which, of course, makes them that much more desirable.

On the bright side, they don't taste good. Keeping them off the menu is like a public service.

Anyway, that's when I saw the prison dude cutting in Eva's direction. There's a gleam in the eye of a TV fan that is easy to spot once you've seen it a few times, an unlikely mix of apprehension, excitement, and entitlement.

Prison Dude had skulls tattooed across his freckled biceps, and there was a rapey-looking white van parked nearby. My pulse spiked and I intercepted him. Okay, so it turned out he was the CEO of a graphic-design company and he asked, very politely, for Eva's autograph for his mother. But the fear was real, and so are the letters talking about people chopping off her feet, so I can't complain about the personal gate-code thing. I'm still struck, sometimes, that Eva trusts
me
.

Anyway, I'm still tossing supplements into the blender when the executive assistant finally transfers me to speak directly with Eva's manager. And she says that the subcontractors who Eva's jerkoff uncle hired to redo the floors never got paid.

“Really?” I say. “This is why you're calling nine times in a row at seven in the morning?”

As far as I can tell, it would be alarming news if Eva's uncle
hadn't
stiffed them.

“Just relay the message,” she tells me.

So, at exactly eight, I creep into Eva's bedroom with her shake and a vitally unimportant message, and, oh, look, she's having sex.

Here's my question: if you
know
your assistant will arrive at 8:00
A.M.
and she's never, not once, been even a microsecond late, wouldn't you make it a point to, I don't know, not be having balls-out, naked, full-frontal intercourse?

Yet, on this specific day, when I unlock the door with my Medeco key, balancing the Sonne shake in one hand and the most recent pink-paged sides from the production company in the other, outlining the changes to her manuscript for her shoot tomorrow, and with a stack of the magazines she denies reading—
National Enquirer
and
Star
and
OK!
and
People
and
Us
and
InStyle
—under my arms with the sheaf of messages I transcribed from the extra phone number, the voice mail she uses for people she's never going to interact with, I find Eva and some boy stacked on the bed in a tangle of smooth limbs.

The boy's back is broad and V-shaped, a hooded cobra spread across Eva's slim torso. They're as motionless as Renaissance statues.

Renaissance statues of people fucking.

I freeze. I wait for the sound of breath, a bead of sweat trickling down a muscled arm. Nothing. We are an Annie Leibovitz photograph.

And I'm trapped in a loop: I must deliver the shake to the bedside table, but I must not remain in the room, I must deliver the shake to the bedside table, but I must not remain in the room.

Finally, I whisper, “I brought your shake,” and I set it on the table and turn and scamper away.

In the kitchen, it hits me: that back is familiar. Maybe I've seen it on TV, maybe in a music video or a superhero movie, but I
know
that back. For some reason, almost recognizing the back makes everything worse. I lean against the cool silver fridge and take a big, disgusting sip of the dregs of Eva's mud-shake from the VitaMix.

A
knock wakes me at seven thirty a few mornings later. I crawl from my bed, looking exactly as bedraggled as you'd imagine, and when I open the door I find Kirk smiling at me, holding two venti Starbucks cups.

“I thought you were an early-morning-hike sort of girl,” he says.

“Muh,” I croak.

He extends a cup. “Triple-shot, bone dry, nonfat cappuccino?”

Holy shit. He remembers a drink I bought in Starbucks months ago. Tyler's drink, but still. Big points for trying.

“Thanks,” I say as I take it from his outstretched hand. It's heavy, way too milk-laden to have ever passed muster with Tyler.

“I, uh, came by to check the hydrangea,” he says, smiling.

I take a sip of the tepid drink. “Still alive. That Miracle-Gro is the shit.”

“And . . .” He looks at his coffee, then my face, then behind me into my apartment. “Uh.”

“What?”

“There's something else I've been meaning to give you.”

And very slowly, like he's afraid I'm going to shy away, he touches my chin and tilts my head upward. He gives me a soft, sweet, almost-chaste kiss. I feel his lips move into a smile on mine, and then I'm smiling back.

“There,” he says, straightening.

Of course, a chorus of voices in my head threaten to drown out the sweetness of the moment.
Oh, Jesus, my breath
.
My face is probably as shiny as a headlight
.
Holy fuck I just kissed Kirk
.
Uh-oh. Cinnamon and peat moss. Delicious.

“Well, come in.” I open the door wide and lead him into my relatively clean little space. “Let me just . . .” I pull the duvet up over my rumpled sheets and toss a pile of tabloid mags under the nightstand. “Here, sit.”

Kirk sits on the edge of the bed and there's something really cute about his obvious discomfort at being in my apartment, which is really just a glorified bedroom, and finding himself perched on my bed with me in my pajamas.

“Your place is cute,” he says, taking in the wrought-iron bed and the wall of random, unframed oil paintings of dogs I've been collecting from garage sales for years.

I sit beside him, both of us with our feet on the floor like we're shy teenagers, and we sit in companionable silence for a long moment, slurping our coffees.

Which, of course, is when Eva texts:
Where are you? I have an audition in Burbank at 9:30 and I desperately need one of your magical protein elixirs! Want to take you shopping after. Can you come nownownow?

On my way
, I text back, and tell Kirk, “She just booked an early audition.”

He looks crestfallen. “Well, give me a call when you've got the time.”

That's what happens when you're a personal assistant—your life gets absorbed into the bigger, shinier life of your boss. For me, right now, that's a perfect fit. There's nothing that I'm not willing to drop on a moment's notice in service of Eva's needs. I'm a big, dry sponge absorbing everything she pours onto me.

“We'll figure something out,” I tell Kirk, but I'm not sure if either of us believes me.