Oh! You Pretty Things (8 page)

Take Robbie, my ex-husband. Robbie basically bridged the gap from my wayward adolescence into my mid-twenties, a desolate period where I knocked around making ends meet with temp jobs and bad dinner dates with older men. I met Robbie after I'd crawled my way up from an assistant manager position at a gym in Venice, where my primary duty was to distribute shipments of gray-market Italian steroids, to a gig I really enjoyed at a boutique online travel agency for people too wealthy or aspirational to have their assistants bother with the details.

Robbie was a partner in a smallish record label called Death/Friends. “Record executive” sounds glamorous, but he spent most days crunching numbers and, every few months, hopping on a plane to follow a tour. I arranged his travel for months before we met in person. After I got him a suite at the Majestic in Cannes, four days before the start of the MIDEC music conference—a feat of uncanny skill—he sent a huge basket of white hydrangeas and roses, with a FedExed note in what turned out to be his own handwriting.

You are spectacular
, it read.

And in that moment, the scent of flowers perfuming the air around my tan burlap cubicle, I believed him.

In the weeks that followed, Robbie needed a lot of travel arranging. He started asking for his itineraries to be delivered to his office, by me specifically, and he always timed it so he could take me to lunch. Never anywhere fancy—Phillipe's for French dip, or one of the nameless places on Olvera Street for enchiladas and beer. I told him things I'd never told anyone. I even told him about Trent Whitford.

He told me about his marriage to a Korean woman he'd met in Seoul, about their two young children and the fact that they hadn't had sex since his daughter was born. We spent a week in New York, a crazy montage of whirling autumn leaves and brown paper cones filled with roasted chestnuts and an abbreviated
Pretty Woman
moment where I tried on clothing in a SoHo boutique. We chased a lost dog in Central Park, then took a cab to Brooklyn to find its frantic owner, who plied us with lumpy, hand-crocheted hats that we wore nonstop for the rest of the trip.

When we returned to Los Angeles, Robbie came clean to his wife. We moved into his partner's beach apartment, where I'd pack him gourmet lunches with ingredients we shopped for together at the Bristol Farms on Rosecrans. He sent me a case of professionally cellared 1973 René Lalou champagne after we had it at Patina and I said it tasted like sex and flowers.

Seon-Yeong and the kids moved to San Francisco to be closer to her family, and Robbie asked me to marry him, cracking open a tiny velvet box at the Ivy, just two days after his divorce was finalized.

Of course I said yes.

We postponed a honeymoon in favor of setting up our new life in San Francisco to be near his kids. Suddenly, I was a suburban housewife and part-time stepmom.

The only thing I knew about being a stepmom was what I'd learned from Gloria, who, of course, wasn't my stepmother, but it seemed like a good enough place to start. I read bedtime stories and created elaborate craft projects involving glue sticks and construction paper, pipe cleaners and googly eyes. I cooked child-friendly meals from scratch: spaghetti with hand-rolled pasta and tender, melting meatballs with three kinds of ground meat (veal, pork, and beef) and slow-simmered sauce with San Marzano tomatoes and fresh herbs; macaroni and cheese with a velvety béchamel with freshly grated nutmeg and four cheeses—Gruyère, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Fontina, and Vermont white cheddar; French toast with thick-cut slices of challah bread, stuffed with cream cheese and Bonne Maman strawberry preserves and dunked in a rich cream-and-egg bath perfumed with Madagascar vanilla and freshly grated orange zest.

Seon-Yeong didn't hide the fact that she wanted Robbie back. He scoffed for the first few months. He scoffed for almost a year. Then I started catching glimpses of the truth behind his sea-green eyes: I'd been a mistake.

Our parting was amicable enough; the only hiccup came when the mediator paused with her pen above the box on the dissolution form about money. Since Robbie had sold his shares in the record company after we'd married, there was a huge amount of joint property and we hadn't even thought about a prenup.

“You're not taking anything?” the mediator asked me. “I'm not even sure the judge will sign this.”

I'm nobody's idea of a martyr, but that money wasn't mine. I didn't want to punish Robbie, and I'd never seen him as a career move. What I wanted—what I needed—was something of my own: a job, a dream, one moment that was for nobody else but me. Or maybe all I'd wanted was approval. Maybe I would've said yes to anyone who told me I was spectacular.

So good-bye, Robbie. Good-bye, tiny, unhappy children. Snip. Cleanly excised from my life like they never existed.

I
'm lying in bed on Saturday watching
The Real Housewives of Orange County
, slightly hungover from the bottle of Valpolicella I plowed through the night before, when I feel a reality-TV shame spiral coming on. I mute the TV and call Scout, hoping to ward it off.

She answers on the second ring. “What are you doing?”

“Reading back issues of
The
New Yorker
and giving myself a pedicure.”

“No, seriously.”

“Googling ex-boyfriends and drinking jasmine tea,” I say. “Writing a condolence note to Lisa Rinna about her lips.”

“Wow,” Scout says. “And you found time to call
me
?”

“I'm about to cross over to the dark side of the moon.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she says. “And I can't wait for you to tell me. But first, let's talk about my birthday party.”

Well, shit. I can recite the phone numbers of every landline of all thirteen apartments Donna lived in when I was a kid, and I can't remember my friend's birthday? I suck.

“I am so on that,” I say.

“I don't need you on it. I'm on it.”

“You're throwing yourself a party?”

“What's wrong with that?”

She hits the perfect note of feigned innocence, like it hasn't occurred to her that this might be a little desperate. I mean, I'd never throw myself a party. That's just sad and lonely. Not like lying in your bed on Saturday afternoon, judging your friend for wanting to have a good time.

“Absolutely nothing,” I say.

“Good,” she says. “Because I want you to cook. Let's have lunch on Wednesday and we can talk about it.”

“Okay, but it has to be fast and cheap,” I say.

“Swingers, one o'clock, see you there,” she says.

T
he Santa Monica Swingers is a carbon copy of the Hollywood original, at 70 percent scale. Real estate, yo. The food used to be California comfort and now it's all kale and quinoa with a side of soyrizo. I'm making it sound worse than it is, but you'd have to tie me down to get me to eat soyrizo.

We sit at a booth and order from a waitress in ripped fishnets and booty shorts who looks like she's driving straight to a Derby Dolls practice after her shift ends. There's a good crowd for a Wednesday afternoon, a mix of tattooed bartender types with skinny arms and train-conductor facial hair and out-of-work actor types with artful bedheads and faint-orange Mystic tans. The girls are the same, minus the facial hair.

“Tell me again why we're here,” I say.

“What?” Scout says, frowning. “I like the tofu chilaquiles.”

“Ugh, your taste in food,” I say. “Okay, speaking of cooking, let's talk about your party. I don't have a lot of time.”

“Antiques to photograph?”

“Yeah, well, they're not getting any younger,” I tell her. “Plus, I have to be back at the house by four to meet the dog groomer and car detailer.”

“Wait,” she says. “Is that one person? How many people is that?”

“Two.”

“So the same guy doesn't do both?”

“I wish. If they both show up while I'm not there, it'll be a catastrophe.”

“Because Tyler can't handle a dog groomer and car detailer?”

“Celebrities are like gas,” I tell her, sharing my most recent revelation.

“Bloated?” she asks, as the food comes. “Sulfuric?”

“They expand to fit their space.”

Tyler used to be perfectly capable of corralling vendors, but now that he's had me for a few weeks, he's grown incapable of even the simplest tasks. He called me at two in the morning last Monday to ask where we keep the string.

“What string?” I said, groggily.

“You know, like to tie up a package or whatever.”

“I . . . I 'm not sure,” I said. “I don't think we have any.”

“Oh,” he said, and we sat in silence for a moment. I could hear Zelda tick-ticking across the hardwood floor.

“Can it wait until morning?” I said.

Tyler sighed. “I guess.”

I stopped at 7-Eleven on my way in and bought the only string they had, one of those old-timey white balls covered in plastic wrap. I set it on the counter with his coffee and foam cups.

“What's this?” he said, peering at it like it was a meteor that had landed in the kitchen.

“It's string,” I said. “To tie a package or whatever.”

“Right,” he said, and wandered away.

His nonchalance pissed me off, until he abruptly changed gears and called me into his studio, where he serenaded me with an acoustic piano version of the new song he's been writing for a very hush-hush indie movie. The combination of talent and secrecy was like catnip.

“So what's the bigger plan?” Scout asks, chewing thoughtfully. “Cooking school?”

“I can't believe you remember that.” I mentioned it
one
time, when we were lying on the grass in front of the boardwalk in southern Venice, sharing a boba tea. “That's not in the cards. It's sixty grand for CIA. And I'd learn more just working in a restaurant.”

“So do that.”

I toy with my vegan Cobb salad. I'm a good cook, but I don't think I have what it takes to do it for a living. “A commercial kitchen's too loud and shouty until I know what I'm doing.”

“Eva's looking for a cook,” Scout says, like she just remembered.

“Really?” I cover a twitch of excitement. A cooking job for a celebrity is the best of both worlds, combining my skill and my obsession. “She is?”

“Well, a personal assistant who cooks. She's been looking for a while and, uh . . . I might've mentioned that you're working for Tyler.”

“You
might
have?” I say.

She stabs a chunk of veggie sausage and forks it into her mouth. “I've wanted to get you two together forever.”

“Me and Eva
Carlton
?”

“Yeah, except she'd never hire an assistant who didn't already work in the business—I mean, unless it was a friend. But now you've spent a couple weeks with Tyler, you've clearly got all the prerequisites under your belt.”

I laugh, but it comes out like a seal bark. “Two weeks working for a B-list composer is ‘all the prerequisites'?”

“Sure,” Scout says. “For a friend of a friend.”

“That's kind of awesome. But, um, I'm already working.”

“And Eva is already . . . Eva.”

This is true. Eva is
Eva
. Tyler is merely Tyler. I cannot deny the fact of this, though I take umbrage at myself for the thought, suddenly feeling defensive of Tyler. He's an uber-successful composer. Sure, that's no almost-A-list celebrity, but it's pretty awesome.

“And Eva has boundaries,” Scout continues. “She doesn't need a wife, she just needs someone to bring food to set when she's working.”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Why not?”

Good question. What's making me nervous about this? Not just the feeling that I'd be bailing on Tyler. “Uh . . . the last thing I need is to work for your best friend, who, by the way, I've never even met. It's a recipe for disaster.”

“A recipe, ha.”

“I'm a comic genius,” I say. “Can we just talk about your party?”

“That's the thing,” Scout says. “Eva's going to pay for it, so she wants you to do vegan.”

“She's coming? So it's not just your party, it's my audition?”

“Nope, not about you,” Scout says. “I was thinking a whole Mediterranean thing, kind of macrobiotic, like M Café.”

“I don't do macro,” I tell her. “Get your miso and spelt cakes somewhere else.”

“It doesn't have to be full-on macro. How about hummus and falafel? It
is
my birthday.”

“You're incorrigible,” I say.

But the truth is, I'm flattered. And I like the idea of cooking for Eva Carlton, even if there's no way I'm going to bail on Tyler. Also, I kill at Mediterranean food.

“Yeah, okay,” I say. “I'm in.”