Oh! You Pretty Things (9 page)

T
urns out when Scout said Eva was going to pay for her party, she meant Eva was going to
contribute
. That's the only explanation for the envelope Scout slipped under my door last night, which contained just under five hundred bucks.

Come on. I mean, a dinner party for ten, maybe. But Scout's invited everyone she knows to this thing. She does that. At first—I mean, after we got over the hump of our unfortunate first impression—I thought she had the biggest family on the planet, because every time she'd bring someone into the Date Palm she'd introduce him as her brother. After the third time, I figured that she's one of those guys' girls who doesn't have a lot of female friends. But she does it with both genders. Everyone is family.

I'm not in a position to be critical; I don't have a lot of friends, period. But Scout's mom is dead and she doesn't have any siblings, so everyone's my brother this, my sister that.

Anyway, she invited fifty people, and with less than five hundred dollars, it's pretty clear we're not going to be toasting with Eva-funded Cristal. By the time I get out of Costco—don't judge, they have an excellent cheese department—I've already spent two hundred dollars of my own money. For once, I don't care. This really
isn't
about me: Scout deserves better than a ten-dollar-a-head party.

Maybe I'm a bad daughter, maybe I'm a curmudgeonly friend and a resentful employee, but I
know
how to cater a party—and I want Scout to shine on her birthday.

Before I dropped out of high school, a team of career-aptitude experts handed out Scantron answer sheets and put up a slide presentation where we had to pick between two statements about ourselves:

I never leave others in doubt about where my opinions lie
. or

Very few people know what I am really thinking
.

On the whole, I am satisfied with my life
. or

I am always searching for new possibilities
.

In hindsight, I'm not convinced they weren't Scientologists. They shared a few students' results with the whole assembly—the exciting ones, like pilot or artist. But my only occupational suggestions were dental hygienist and tax assessor.

I've been thinking about that a lot as my thirtieth birthday nears. Everyone I know
does
something. I just do other people's things. Except for cooking. My cooking belongs to me.

My grandmother's idea of a fancy meal was lasagna with hamburger meat and two jars of Ragu. My mother only made one dish, which she called “Irish lamb stew.” It was lamb stew with a can of Guinness. She made it to impress new boyfriends, and I still can't smell a lamb chop without getting a mental montage of greasy dishes piled in the sink and me in front of a television, picking at my cuticles and wondering when she was going to come out of the bedroom. When we ate alone, she'd just set a can of tuna on the table and we'd hack at it with forks.

One of my first roommates was a hostess at an Italian restaurant on Pico. The chef used to pinch her ass and try to coax her into the walk-in refrigerator, and once he sent her home with five pounds of veal shanks. I was afraid to ask why. I bought a copy of
The Silver Palate Cookbook
and made osso buco, following the recipe as carefully as if I were making a hydrogen bomb using canned tomatoes and a bottle of cheap white wine.

I'd never gotten along with my roommate, but that night, she poured wine in my glass and laughed at all my stories. For once, I was the star.

I read that cookbook from cover to cover, at my job behind a battered metal desk at a body shop specializing in low-riders. When I realized no one was paying attention to
American Chopper
and
Monster Garage
on the ancient television bolted to the wall, I switched it to the Food Network, where I devoured Rachael Ray, Emeril Lagasse, and the Barefoot Contessa as they whisked and pureed. I expected a lot of disgruntled
cholos
, but they just sprawled on the stuffing-sprung sofa, eyes glazed as a smiling Ina Garten dumped forty cloves of garlic into a Le Creuset Dutch oven.

When my roommate came home the next week with half a case of frozen chicken breasts and a three-pound box of shriveled white mushrooms, I made coq au vin. She called some friends and we had an impromptu party, ten of us crowding cross-legged on the floor around our flea-market coffee table.

After dinner, everyone raised their glasses in a toast.

“To Jess,” my roommate said, her smile wine-stained and broad.

“To Jess,” her friends echoed, and we clinked our mismatched glasses across the flickering tealights and the coffee cups filled with the flowers I'd plucked from the neighbor's front lawn.

I
'm still thinking of a dozen things I need to buy as I slog the grocery bags for Scout's party into the rickety elevator at my apartment. At least it's working for once, and I don't have to brave the deathtrap stairs. I unpack everything in the kitchen, and open a bottle of the cheap red I bought in quantity.
Yikes
. Almost undrinkable. I add brandy, oranges, and limes to my mental list. That shit needs a sangria overhaul.

“Thanks, Eva,” I say, taking a swig. “Way to foist it onto the little people.”

I still need Bread and Cie baguettes, kalamata olives and feta from Papa Christo's—and a cake from Sweet Lady Jane to tie a ribbon on Scout's birthday triumph. I'm another two hundred in, and I haven't even bought beer. I can ply the girls and gay men with sangria, but Scout's got some biker-y, ex-con pals who'd sooner light their pubes on fire than be caught drinking alcohol with fruit in it.

I open the drawer where I've stashed Megan's Hawaiian windfall, then close it again without taking any. Megan and Scout never really hit it off. They're polite to each other, and Megan barely notices how Scout answers Megan's small-talky questions with the cadence of a teenager. She probably wouldn't even care, but somehow using her money to fund Scout's party feels wrong.

I'll figure something else out.

The next day, I'm standing in the produce section at Gelson's, filling a giant paper bag with fresh mangoes, which are currently the only thing Tyler wants for breakfast and lunch, when the “something else” hits me.

I'm in a grocery store. A really good one. I'm in a really good grocery store where I have a charge account.

And what's a couple hundred dollars to Tyler? The monthly food bill hovers around two grand, from what I've seen. Tyler won't notice. His dog has an eleven-hundred-dollar collar. So I load a couple cases of Stone Pale Ale into the cart with only the tiniest of twinges. I continue through the aisles, choosing Tyler's usual supplies and adding all the party extras I need. At the checkout counter, I lose my nerve—or maybe I just remember the expression on his face when he sipped my coffee—and I tell the girl to put the party stuff on my card instead of the account.

On the drive back to Tyler's, I'm torn between hating myself for running up my credit-card bill—which I already can't pay—and for almost charging the party supplies to Tyler. I'm falling into a weird Hollywood sense of entitlement, even though I'm a bottom-feeder. But by the time I'm lugging my party supplies up my worn, slippery stairs, I've gotten over my pity party and I'm patting myself on the back for taking the high road. Yay, me.

A
t some point, I realize that Tyler doesn't leave his property. I mean, not ever. First I figure out that the only person driving his cars is me, even though he insists otherwise. Then it dawns on me that he never takes Zelda past the mailbox, even though he talks about walking her all the time.

I'm a big fan of quirky personality traits, but Tyler's behavior is beyond that. I'm sure it has its own
DSM-5
code. Not that I can't handle his agoraphobia, but all the subterfuge around it makes me edgy and stressed.

My anxiety isn't helped by the fact that I keep running into the brick wall of Tyler's small-scale celebrity. I mean, he's a hot ticket in a certain inner circle, but it's a limited crowd. I keep finding myself sidling into his office to sheepishly explain that I've failed at getting comp tickets to
The Book of Mormon
for his brother and sister-in-law or scheduling a facial at Tracie Martyn for his mother. It's embarrassing.

The problem is there's a chasm between Tyler's current status and the perks he enjoyed in the years following his Oscar win. Tracie Martyn is booked solid for the next twelve weeks, and I can't even get the publicist from
Book of Mormon
to return my call.

I teeter between berating myself for being a failure and aggrievedly questioning the benefits of working for a celebrity who nobody knows, but all that evaporates when Tyler tells me we're going shopping. Together.

Our destination is the flagship Ralph Lauren store on Rodeo Drive. They know Tyler there, and the manager lets us come after closing time to shop in seclusion. Sure, there's a drawn-out scene getting Tyler out of the house and into the limo he's arranged, but the driver's unflappable bonhomie tips me to the fact that this isn't the first time he's experienced it. This is more like it.

The Ralph Lauren store is meticulously arranged with artful tableaus of estate-sale antiques to create a luxurious shopping experience that falls somewhere between a British colonial veranda and a billionaire's dude-ranch living room. Tyler greets the staff with effusive handshakes and hugs, and if you didn't know that it took forty minutes for us to get out of the driveway, you'd never glean it from Tyler's demeanor. He's wearing his requisite Levi's and unlaced Timberlands and, in a nod to our host, a perfectly worn-in, vintage Ralph Lauren car coat with a brown corduroy collar. He has a pair of Oliver Peoples sunglasses threaded through his shirt collar and an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth. He looks for all the world like a man who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Ostensibly, we're going to shop the newest clothing collection, but Tyler's already told me that they bring a trunk show to the house at the start of every season. I'm not sure what we're doing here—not that I care, because Tyler finally left the house—but I suspect that Tyler wants to get his mitts on the display pieces, the one-of-a-kind stuff that's not for sale. In Hollywood, “not for sale” is just a euphemism for really, really expensive.

“Hey, man,” Tyler says to the manager. “What's going on?”

The manager gives Tyler an awkward head hug, his blue RL blazer straining across his gangly back. To a casual observer, the manager looks like the socially awkward one, but I've lived here long enough to know that he's a land shark in a worsted-wool coat. I can practically see cartoon dollar signs gleaming in his big black pupils. It's immediately clear to me that the currency for this transaction is cash, not celebrity.

“Come on in,” he says. “We've been waiting for you.”

There's a whisper of irritation in his voice, which I'm guessing means that our tardy arrival will end up costing extra—a lot extra—somewhere down the line.

Tyler does a perfunctory lap of the men's department, loading my arms with cashmere sweaters and long-sleeved cotton T-shirts he already owns by the dozen. He has a brief flirtation in the full-length mirror with a wool skeet jacket that looks like a saddle blanket, then diverts to have an animated conversation with the bespoke tailor about the differences between Purple Label and Black Label suiting.

Finally, on our way to the dressing room, he spies a target.

“Hey, when'd you get these?” he asks, gesturing idly toward a pair of perfectly dilapidated leather club chairs in the dressing-room vestibule.

“Those old things? I think Ralph had them sent out from the ranch.” His voice is an award-winning performance of casual disinterest.

Oh, Jesus. Ca-fucking-ching.

Forty-five minutes and six thousand dollars in wool and cashmere later, we're headed west on Wilshire in a cocoon of tissue-stuffed shopping bags and tinted windows.

Tyler is finally smoking his cigarette and I'm playing a game with myself where I try to figure out what's going back to the store tomorrow. I'm guessing most of it, but that's okay; I'm going to have to talk to the manager in person about the chairs anyway. Not a word has been mentioned since Tyler first saw them, but I know it's coming.

Sure enough, the next morning there's a pile of clothing on the ottoman in Tyler's living room, hangtags fluttering in the ocean breeze coming in through the French doors to the deck. I can tell from the height of the stack that it's every single piece he brought home yesterday.

I give Zelda a treat, then find Tyler, smoking and cheerful, in his Aeron chair in the studio.

“Hi, Jessie.” He pushes his bulbous headphones back on his head to partially expose the ear closest to me. “I need you to run a few things back to Ralph Lauren.”

“Sure. No problem.”

Tyler blows a smoke ring and looks back to the tiny monitor wedged between the Casio keyboard and his elaborate computer equipment on the fourteenth-century Italian farm table. I hear the bloopity-bleep of the piece of coded film he's working on as it rewinds. A gorgeous A-list actress, made movie-star-dowdy in a pink waitress uniform and black cat-eye glasses, moonwalks backward to reseat herself on a park bench next to her costar.

“And you know what?” he says. “See if they'll consider selling those beat-up old chairs in the men's dressing room. They'd look great in the sunroom.”

An hour later, I'm waddling around the sales floor after the Ralph Lauren manager, trying to “convince” him to sell the chairs while clutching the bags of decoy purchases I need to return.

“Not for sale,” he says cheerfully.

“C'mon, please?” I sound beggy and rushed, which is not going to help my cause. “At least give me a number.”

He straightens a stack of folded sweaters. “Not for sale. The customers love them.”

I look toward the dressing room. There's a duck-lipped lady in a child-size pink Polo shirt perched on one of the chairs, a fluffy white dog clamped under her arm and a Louis Vuitton dog carrier open on her lap.

“If he has to call you himself,” I say, “I'll lose my job.”

I can tell from his appraising stare that he knows this is patently untrue, but I paste on a mask of earnest concern and wait it out. It's part of the dance.

He busies himself with the arm placement of a headless mannequin perched in a saucy pose atop a leather-inlaid mahogany table. I try to burn a hole in the side of his wispy-haired head with my laser focus while he makes a pretend show of considering my predicament, all pursed lips and head cocking. A blonde in a blue silk bias-cut dress materializes and stands on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, pitching her whisper perfectly so everyone within twenty feet hears that Sharon Stone is in the women's department.

“Four thousand,” the manager calls over his shoulder as he trots off. “Twenty-four-hour memo or you own them.”

“Fine,” I yell back, and a bubble of accomplishment fizzes up into my chest.

He turns at the end of the aisle, hand poised like a model on the burled wood column that bifurcates the men's and women's selling floors.

“Four
each
,” he says, then whirls off to air-kiss Sharon.