Oh! You Pretty Things (4 page)

“Are you here, Boof?” Megan drops what sounds like a steamer trunk on the wood floor in the living room.

“In my room,” I call out, which should give you some idea of the acoustics in our rent-controlled sliver of the L.A. dream.

A moment later, she flops beside me on the unmade bed and kicks her slip-on Keds onto the floor. “What is going on in here? It smells like ass, and you're sitting in the dark.”

“That's not ass,” I tell her. “That's dried tropical-fruit yogurt.”

“Classy,” she says, yanking on the blinds to let the afternoon summer sun flood in.

My room doesn't look that bad. Well, sure, there's the mound of yogurt containers and a couple piles of dirty laundry, but nothing to expose the horrible facts that I quit my job, my mother is threatening to descend on us like a plague of crazy, and I'm the biggest twenty-nine-year-old loser west of the 405.

“I quit my job,” I say. “And I am the biggest loser west of the 405.” No point in avoiding the obvious.

Megan plucks an American Spirit from the pack on the table. Her hazel eyes are sparkling like it's the best news she's heard all week.

“I need fire,” she says.

I toss her the pink My Little Pony disposable Bic that I swiped from Pete at the Date Palm. Maybe I should feel guilty, but honestly, I was doing his ironic hipster ass a favor.

I'm this close to mentioning that if I don't pay off Donna—which is what I'm convinced all those texts are about—she'll slither onto our couch and poison our lives. But I can't. What if Megan offers to front the money? I don't mind mooching a little, but the whole actress-as-friend thing is tricky. There's such a fine line between friend and entourage.

“You're so dramatic,” Megan says. “We're young, white, and living the Hollywood dream.”

“That's you, Boof. I'm feeling more fat, jobless, and broke right now, frankly.”

Megan exhales a stream of smoke. “I hated that Date Palm job for you. You need to cook, not cashier.”

“Now I'm not doing either,” I say. Cooking is another one of those jobs where looks don't matter—in any other city on the planet. But here, even a scullery job at a hip restaurant feels like going on a casting call for a commercial. They want head shots. Seriously, head shots.

“Well, I want to care about your crappy job loss, but it's a big win for me because I just booked a Gary Scott Thompson pilot.”

I look at her blankly.

“I'm shooting in Maui for six weeks,” she explains. “I want you to come with.”

“As what?” I scoff, as if I'm not already throwing sunscreen into a suitcase.

Megan kicks her bare feet into the air. “Whatever. Are you hearing me?
Maui
.”

“I don't know . . .”

“I bet I can get you paid.”

“Really?”

“Gary Scott Thompson,” she says, and unleashes her smile.

I'm not entirely clear who Gary Scott Thompson is, but her enthusiasm is infectious. And this would solve all my problems.

“Gary Scott fucking Thompson!” I say. “I'm in! Is it time for bubbles?”

Megan always keeps a couple bottles of good champagne in the fridge. It's her philosophy that we should always be able to celebrate good news at a moment's notice. I tend more toward the notion that we should always be able to drown our sorrows, which kind of illuminates the basic—and major—difference between us.

“Boof, please,” she says. “That's not even a real question.”

I should explain the Boof thing. We picked it up six years ago, when a drunk guy in an unfortunate mesh shirt sidled up outside the restaurant—the now defunct Guys and Dolls—where Megan and I were waiting for her car from valet. We barely knew each other then. I'd been dating Robbie—my ex-husband—for a few months, and she'd just started dating his business partner, a shady guy who wouldn't last long in any of our lives. The boys had gone to the SXSW music festival and we were making the best of being left behind. We were both a little tipsy, not so much from the bottle of wine we'd shared but from our mutual delight that we were getting along so well.

“You're the girl from
Jade Wolf!”
the guy said, fumbling with his iPhone for the inevitable picture request.

Megan gave him a hundred-watt fan smile. “You must be one of the three people in the US who watched it.”

“Areyoukiddingme?” He threw an arm around her shoulders, then peered at me. “Are you somebody too?”

“This is Jess,” Megan said, slipping gracefully from his sweaty clutch after he'd clicked the picture. “She's my girlfriend.”

“You mean, like,
girlfriend
girlfriend? You boof girls?”

Megan grabbed my hand and led me away toward her Jeep, which was idling at the curb. “Thanks for watching
Jade Wolf
.”

It was a weird L.A. bonding moment, and we've called each other Boof ever since.

“There's only a bottle of Krug in here,” I yell after rummaging through the fridge.

I peer around the corner, where I can just glimpse Megan's face hanging upside down from the side of my bed.

“Then we better use the good glasses,” she says, blowing one smoke ring through another, like it's no big deal that we're cracking a two-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne at three in the afternoon.

The truth is, Megan doesn't get recognized that often when we're out in L.A. Despite working steadily, she's not even C-list famous. She was a theater major at UCLA when she was a teenager and she studied at the Marcel Marceau Mime School in Paris one summer. She said it was all “now you're in a box,” “now you're climbing out of a well,” while the teachers told her in French that she had to stop eating cheese or she'd get even fatter than a size 2.

She came home determined to change her major to something practical when she got cast from a student showcase in a gross-out torture horror film. She never looked back. She still talks wistfully about wanting to do theater, but she's a Hollywood workhorse. She auditions constantly, and when the jobs come in she takes them and when they don't she taps into savings.

She just shrugged when
Jade Wolf
only ran in the United States for twenty episodes, which shafted her out of syndication money. She shops at vintage stores and Target, not Fred Segal and Planet Blue, and she still drives the Jeep she paid cash for after her first big payday.

She's the most well-balanced actress I've ever met, which explains why, when she comes in my room the next day and tells me that the pilot is on hold, I'm the only one who freaks out.

“Fuck, seriously?” I can't keep the creeping note of panic out of my voice. “What happened? Don't you have a contract? Fuck!”

“Boof, it's not a big deal.”

“It's Maui!”

“Do you even like Maui?” She has a point. Even though I grew up in L.A., I'm not built for the heat. My pale skin reddens and freckles without ever approaching a tan, and humidity makes my hair look fungal.

“I like that it's not
here
,” I say, thinking about Donna's texts. “Just tell me one thing.”

“What's that?”

“Who the fuck is Gary Scott Thompson?”

She laughs, which makes me happy, and I tell myself that this isn't the end of the world. Who wants to spend six weeks in Hawaii? Not me. Sunburn city.

I finally break down and call Kenner. I mean, maybe the composer's not someone you'd have heard of unless you're a studio musician, but surely he's a big-enough name that I can let my unfortunate denouement at the Date Palm fade like the end credits after a straight-to-cable movie. The anticlimactic result is that I get his voice mail and leave a babbling message that rivals Jon Favreau's excruciating scene in
Swingers
when he has an entire relationship arc on the machine of a girl he met in a bar. Like most things, it's much funnier when it's happening on the big screen and not in your bedroom.

W
hen I get home from my yogurt run the next day, there's a missed call from Kenner. I stand there for a long moment, my quart of nonfat salted caramel melting, and curse myself for leaving my phone behind during my four-hundred-yard dash across the street. It's always the way, right? You light a cigarette and the bus comes. But before I can call him back, my phone beeps with a voice-mail message.

“Jess, hey, it's Kenner. Uh, from the Date Palm. So I talked to my boss's manager. Well, you know, my ex-boss.” He laughs, a nervous squawk that sounds like a jungle bird. “He wants to meet you. I . . . It's a little weird, because he told me to just have you come to the house. His name is Tyler Montaigne and he lives in Santa Monica Canyon. Can you go there tomorrow at ten
A.M.
sharp?” He gives me the address. “You can't miss it. There's a nine-foot hedgerow surrounding it and a Brian Murphy glass arch by the front gate . . . Ooh, which reminds me: Tyler absolutely hates it, so don't mention it.”

I wait all of eleven seconds before I text him back.
Thank you thank you. I owe you. Big. Xoxo
.

I arrive for the interview on my beater Trek hybrid bike, huffing and puffing up the hill from the Pacific Coast Highway, with Range Rovers and Humvees zooming past my elbow. I wait in the street for a minute to compose myself, straddling my bike and breathing in the salt air and eucalyptus, then smooth down my cargo pants and the Petit Bateau T-shirt I bought on credit at Planet Blue yesterday. First impressions are important.

And Tyler is definitely making a good first impression on me. The outside of the house is very beachy chic. The paint on the eaves of the unassuming cottage peels in a fetching fashion and climbing roses bloom in hand-painted Italian pots, each one lined with checkerboard-patterned moss in shades of vibrant green. I park my bike in the open carport beside a shiny black Carrera and another sleek-looking car—a vintage Mercedes, I think—sheathed in a green canvas cover.

Tyler answers the door wearing perfectly rumpled Levi's and unlaced Timberland boots. He's on the short side, maybe five-foot-nine, but he's smooth-skinned and lean, long muscles evident under a fitted white thermal that looks soft and perfectly worn in. His sleek blue Weimaraner snuffles a greeting, then reclaims her position on the leather sofa. There's a full ashtray on top of the art books piled on an oversize zebra-skin ottoman.

The whole vibe is exquisite. And Tyler's not bad to look at either.

We sit on his deck and talk about the job in an offhand kind of way. He sounds like a perfectly normal guy who just needs a hand during a busy period, and I sound like a perfectly normal girl who just moved back to her hometown after a divorce. Just a shitload of normal all the way around.

He doesn't mention his Oscar. I don't mention that I searched online and saw that he won two Grammys, too, and an Emmy for Outstanding Musical Composition for a Series. He's laid-back and confident and too good to be true.

I'm not surprised when, at the end of the interview, he gazes out over the treetops and looks a little shifty. Here it comes. He wonders if I'd mind dressing like Betty Boop and calling him “Herr Doktor.”

He says, “Uh, Jess?”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Sometimes, um, when I hire a new person?”

You want to see how they look in a ball gag?

“Yeah?” I say.

He takes a breath. “They're in a bit of money trouble. So if you need an advance against wages, now's the time to say so.”

I take a deep, hopefully inaudible breath and force myself to exhale noiselessly. “Nope. I mean, I'm not here under the auspices of altruism or anything, but I'm solid.”

“Great,” he says with an even-toothed, glowing smile I wouldn't even question for its pearly authenticity if I hadn't spied the overflowing ashtray on his ottoman.

“Unfortunately,” he continues, “I have a whole committee for this shit, but I really dig you. Let me make some calls and I'll definitely be in touch. I mean, soon.”

“Perfect,” I say, and I rub the dog's soft, inquisitive snout as I shoulder my bag and head for the door.