Seeing Stars (14 page)

Normally Quinn hated that question, but it was okay now. He shrugged. “Maybe.
ER
.
Grey’s Anatomy
.
Cold Case
. A couple of Disney sitcoms when I was younger. Like that.”

“I’d better watch for you, so when you get famous I can say I cut your hair.”

Quinn didn’t say anything. He hated when people said that, because usually they were just patronizing you.

“You think I’m just saying that, but I’m not,” said the stylist.

“Do you do many actors?” Quinn had meant cut their hair, not
do
them. He blushed, but the stylist just went on cutting.

“Sure. Everyone in LA’s an actor, right?”

“Yeah.”

“If you mean actors you’ve heard of, only a couple.” He named them, and Quinn had heard of them. One had been a regular on an N
BC
sitcom that had been canceled after one season; another hosted a reality show.

“It’s hard,” Quinn said, and then he flushed again. “Breaking in, I mean.”

The stylist nodded and snipped, stopping occasionally to weave his fingers through Quinn’s hair and shake it.

“Do you act at all?” Quinn asked. It was a dumb question, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. It wasn’t like you could say,
I hope you work in this hair salon forever so I can come here sometimes and have you put your hands in my hair,
even though that was what he was thinking.

“Me?” The stylist smiled at Quinn in the mirror. “No.”

“Yeah,” said Quinn.

The stylist put his scissors back in their holster, shook out Quinn’s hair again, and examined it in the mirror. Quinn thought that was funny, that his head was
right there
, and the stylist still looked at it in the mirror. It was like directors watching scenes on the monitors when they were happening live right in front of them. “Okay?” the stylist said, cocking his head one way and then the other, examining Quinn’s hair critically.

“Sure,” said Quinn, because he didn’t really give a shit what it looked like.

“Do you want me to blow you?”

“What?”

The stylist looked amused and, Quinn thought, just the slightest bit sly, mutely holding up and shaking a hair dryer he’d taken out of a drawer. Then he spent five minutes blowing Quinn’s hair all over the place. By the time he was done, it looked like Quinn had been caught in a storm. The stylist took some paste out of a jar, rubbed it between his fingers, and then picked through Quinn’s hair, singling out and positioning pieces over his eyes, examining his handiwork critically in the mirror. When he was done he handed Quinn a small mirror and turned his chair so Quinn could see the back of his head, though Quinn had no idea what he was supposed to do, so the stylist had to position the hand mirror and then point Quinn out to himself in the reflection. Quinn nodded, trying to look serious and appreciative.

“Marc Jacobs,” said the stylist, satisfied. He holstered his comb. “You could be right up there on that billboard on Highland.” One of the other stylists stopped walking by and looked Quinn over. “Absolutely,” he said, before going on to the back of the salon. Quinn figured they probably tag-teamed each other like that all the time to make their clients feel like they were something special when really they were just people sitting in a chair wearing a weird nylon cape and hoping a haircut would change their lives. He’d never seen a haircut, on himself or anybody, that did that.

He started to get out of the chair, figuring they were done, but the stylist put a hand on his arm—
No, wait
—and brought out a big, soft brush and whisked the back of Quinn’s neck and his face. It felt like a whisper would feel if a whisper had weight, and Quinn must have closed his eyes because he felt rather than saw the stylist’s hands at his neck, gently unsnapping the nylon cape and flicking it away like a matador. Quinn didn’t want it to be over. He wished they could just start again, the whole thing, from the minute he’d walked in the door; but the stylist was already sweeping Quinn’s hair off the floor into a dustpan. They were done.

“You can pay up front, okay?” the stylist said when Quinn hesitated. “And when you’re going to be on TV, let me know, because I’d love to see you.”

“Yeah,” said Quinn uncertainly. “Okay.” The stylist didn’t look like he meant
see you
, in a datelike way. He gave Quinn a smile and went to the back of the salon to empty the dustpan. Quinn paid for the full price of a haircut at the reception counter and stepped out of the salon into the stagnant Los Angeles afternoon.

I
N
S
EATTLE, THE AIR WAS SO CLEAN AND CLEAR SOME DAYS
it hurt.

When Quinn was twelve and a half and still living there, he’d been outside messing around with his bicycle when he overheard through an open window his stepfather, Nelson, saying to his mother, “Jesus, Mona, can’t you do something?” Nelson was a real estate developer. He built strip malls around Bothell, as though that’s what the world needed, another goddamn strip mall. Quinn’s half brother, Rory, who’d grown into a chubby, happy, endlessly cheerful boy loved by everyone in his T-ball league, fit in with them way better than Quinn ever had.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, honey, but he’s, you know,
light
,” Nelson had said. “He’s going to start bringing home boyfriends sooner or later, and what effect is that going to have on Rory? The kid’s impressionable.”

“He’s not gay, Nelson.”

“Oh, come on. What kind of kid wants to spend all day wearing costumes and reciting poetry?”

“It’s Shakespeare.”

“It’s gay.”

His mom had sighed, because what could she say? Quinn sang to himself; he tried out martial arts moves on the furniture; he had great difficulty staying in his chair all the way through a meal.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she’d said. “What do you want? You want me to put an ad in the paper and say,
Kid needs new home?
You can’t just get rid of him because he isn’t working out.”

“Yeah,” Nelson said disconsolately.

Quinn had no friends; even the kids and parents at the Young Actors Are We neighborhood theater program tended to steer clear of him. The other kids acted for fun, but Quinn acted like he was running for his life. While it was widely acknowledged that he was immensely talented, it was also true that he had a certain unnerving intensity about him. Still, the hours he spent at the theater program had been the happiest he’d ever known. But no one had any good ideas for his parents or for him, not even the people who ran Young Actors Are We, so they went on the way they always had, knowing a train wreck lay ahead.

And then, like an act of God, his mother spotted an ad in the paper:

LA talent manager offering intensive two-day workshop on Acting for the Camera for young actors ages 11 to 18. Call for details.

So Quinn’s mother had called and Mimi Roberts had answered and a month later Quinn was on his way south, alone, for a young actors’ boot camp. He’d looked around the studio, with its wall of headshots and Post-its declaring success—
Kellogg’s! Burger King!
—and knew that at last he was in a place that spoke his language. Even for LA he was still on the outer edge of the rim, but what had been liabilities of character in Seattle were suddenly greatly in demand: fearlessness; a willingness, even a need, to do or say anything; an unpredictability and courage in creating and endowing characters. He wasn’t acting; he was in a never-ending delirium of
being
. And that made him believable. Believability was Hollywood’s Holy Grail, the most sought-after quality in an actor, and despite all the classes and methods and exercises, you either had it or you didn’t.

Quinn had it.

He had been in LA for less than two weeks when he booked his first commercial, and right after that he’d landed a costar role on
CSI
.

From zero to sixty in fourteen days.

“My husband can’t even be around him anymore,” Quinn’s mother had admitted to Mimi on the first day of the workshop in Seattle. She didn’t think he could hear them, but he could. She’d poured herself a cup of coffee from an air pot in the lobby of the Comfort Inn where Mimi always held her workshops, and over her scalding cup she’d looked Mimi right in the eye and said, “I love him—don’t think that I don’t love him. I just don’t know what to
do
with him.”

So Mimi had offered them a solution: send him to her and she’d put him to work. With his abilities, it was virtually a guarantee. That had been almost four years ago, before Mimi had Allison or any of her other current clients-in-residence, just a mopey fifteen-year-old girl who was already outgrowing the minimal talent she’d once shown, and a fourteen-year-old boy named Duncan, whom Mimi had re-christened Dunham—
Dunham
—in hopes that it would make him sound hip and well-heeled instead of like baked goods. Ten months after Quinn arrived, both of them were gone and Quinn was working like crazy: on commercials, in industrials, in the occasional theatrical costar role. He booked his first guest star eight months later, playing a hemophiliac on
ER
.

And it was odd—inexplicable, really—but on sets, as no place else, Quinn became calm. His blood slowed down in his veins; his thoughts came home like pigeons to roost. Ritalin was supposed to have that same effect, but it didn’t. He didn’t know why. Maybe he wasn’t
AD
HD enough; maybe he was
too
AD
HD, and his neural system overrode the stuff, kicked into high gear when the drug made it put up a fight. Who knew? Who cared? All Quinn knew was that acting was the one thing he knew how to do better than almost anyone. Every new script was like Christmas morning. He approached every role, every scene, with perfect serenity and confidence, even if the character and action were crazy. Acting allowed him to feel and to see through the eyes of someone who got it right, where Quinn on his own always seemed to get it wrong.

And the thing was, he was a good kid. He was polite. He was nice to Mimi’s other clients, even the bratty ones. He did chores around the house without complaining, and when he bounced off the walls Mimi just told him to either dial it down or take out the old push mower and mow the lawn.

At first his family flew him back to Seattle for a weekend once every two months, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and some of the summer. Mimi hung on to him for the rest of the summer because it was feature film season and she got him cast in small indies. Small roles, unknown movies, but with directors who were on the To Watch list. And with every role he landed, his acting got a little bit better. Now he hardly ever went home. He didn’t even have a room there anymore. Nelson had turned it into a home office and fly-tying hobby room, installing a futon where his old bed had been. They all pretended he was so extremely busy in LA that it was hard for him to find the time to come home more often. At least at Mimi’s he was productive and safe. It wasn’t the greatest arrangement in the world, but it worked. At least it had until he’d pinched that stupid kid’s nipples. Right after that Mimi had made him move out, said she didn’t feel it was a good idea anymore to have him around younger children until he’d sorted some things out.

What the
fuck
did that mean?

It had been improv!

IT HAD BEEN IMPROV!
He’d screamed that at Mimi and then he’d started sobbing—he couldn’t help it and couldn’t stop—and she’d just looked at him with her doughy moon face and said softly, “I don’t have any choice.”

Which was bullshit.
Bullshit.

He knew Mimi had talked with his mom about sending him home. He knew because he’d picked up the extension in the kitchen. He’d lifted the phone very, very quietly in time to hear his mother say, “I’m sorry, but it just wouldn’t work out.”

It.
It
meant him, Quinn. People said stuff like that about the pool man, about the gardener. They didn’t say it about their own kid. Not that he’d have wanted to go back to Seattle. But he’d have liked to be given the choice; he’d have liked to have the
illusion
, at least, that his family loved him and treasured him and counted the days until his next visit home.

Yeah, right.

Chapter Nine

H
UGH’S
A
LASKA
A
IRLINES FLIGHT A WEEK LATER WAS HALF
an hour behind schedule, overbooked, and full of very large men, one of whom was sitting much too close to him, wheezing. The stewardess—
flight attendant
; he knew, he knew—was on the cabin mike giving some cheesy come-on about an Alaska Airlines MasterCard promotion, like
that
was going to make a difference in how he felt about being stuck out here on the tarmac. Their in-flight snack, he’d seen in the galley as they’d boarded, was a piddly-ass envelope of pretzels the size of plug nickels, as though the whole damned bag and all of its contents had been downsized along with the crappy economy.

Or maybe it was just him.

He’d done one extraction, two root canals, five routine examinations, and several fillings today, and he was in no mood to be jacked around by an industry that was, frankly, doing a piss-poor job of moving the country’s human cargo around, and for way too much money. He’d let Ruth talk him into this flight into Burbank—the Bob Hope Airport, for Christ’s sake; what was next, the Howdy Doody Freeway?—even though it meant he’d had to creep away from his practice an hour early like someone slipping out the back door on a bad date, clutching the carry-on he’d packed last night. He’d parked in the economy lot and ridden the shuttle and checked in at the kiosks where no one even talked to you if you weren’t checking baggage, which who needed to for this two-day conjugal visit; and he’d taken off his shoes and emptied his pockets—now there was a metaphor—and removed his watch and metal-framed glasses, and handed over his boarding pass and driver’s license and allowed himself to be wanded by two crappily paid TSA employees in fake law-enforcement polyester uniforms. He’d answered their questions about his flammables and gels and lotions while fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to scream to anyone within earshot that he was going against his will to visit the wife and daughter he loved as much as life itself and who had lost their minds in Hollywood, California.

Admittedly, he was a tad keyed up.

No small man himself, he struggled to keep his knee from resting against the fat knee of the fat man beside him—their hips having already melded beneath the armrest—when they were asked at last to fasten their seat belts and make sure their luggage was stowed in the overhead bins or underneath the seat in front of them and to turn off all cell phones and any other electronic devices that might interfere with the airplane’s navigation because they’d been cleared for departure.

Once airborne, Hugh washed down his gnat-size pretzels with the canned tomato juice he seemed to drink only on airplanes, and thought about what he could say to Bethany that would be honest and supportive. That he loved her, she knew. That he wanted to see all of her dreams come true, she also knew. But this wasn’t the way; this was madness. She wasn’t even fully a
person
yet, let alone an adult, but she was making decisions—Ruth was letting her make decisions—that would affect her for the rest of her life. Never mind what she was missing academically; by being homeschooled she would also never star in her high school plays or know the teamsmanship of volleyball—not that Bethy was an athlete by any means, but she
could
be—and proms and pep rallies and gossip sessions in study hall and in the cafeteria. Before Mimi Roberts hove into view like Satan incarnate they’d planned on sending Bethy to the Bush School. They’d talked and talked and
talked
about the broad foundation a private school of its caliber could give her, a platform from which to spring into a good East Coast college—Amherst, Dartmouth, Tufts, Wesleyan. And after that she’d be able to choose anything.

“Sure,” Ruth had remarked the other night, in an increasingly familiar and bitter refrain. “You’re not down here. You don’t see what I do. Kids are making career moves at four years old, jockeying for position by the time they can read. And it matters. You can be over the hill in this business at seven, washed up by the time you’re in braces. That’s the thing of it, Hugh; there’s no time. She’s already late.”

How, he wanted to know, could a child be washed up at anything before she’d even conquered geometry? Weren’t those hypertalented child performers just freaks who, a hundred years ago, would have been traveling the vaudeville circuit? You couldn’t convince him this was healthy. No one could. He had eyes; he could see. In the endless stream of new headshots Ruth kept sending him—my God, the
money
—Bethy looked less and less like his daughter, and more and more like someone he’d never met and wouldn’t necessarily like if he did. The smile was a bit too wide, the eyes a bit too disingenuous, the
lipstick
. And what about the hair? Goy hair, that’s what they’d given her, and though he’d never say so out loud, it diminished her. She looked like she was trying to catch up to pert and chiseled blondes in a race she couldn’t possibly win. And it wasn’t that he wanted his child to be labeled a Jew. In truth he was somewhat ambivalent about being a Jew himself—certainly he was realistic enough to know that it wasn’t always an asset. No, he just wanted her to be herself, exactly the way she’d always been, funny and unself-conscious, strong and upright, and if that included looking like the Jew that she was, so be it. That was her identity, as much a part of her as her fingerprints. If Anne Frank were alive today, would she spend five hundred dollars on hair-straightening so she could land a one-line part on some stupid TV sitcom? He thought not.

He loved his family. He longed for his family. He wanted what was best for them. Ruth thought he was being selfish when he said he wanted them home, and it was true that the way he was living now felt like punishment, but he would have endured it gladly if he’d thought it was important, or even healthy. But Ruthie didn’t want to hear that. She had a powerful will and a death grip on denial. Right now Bethy could fall into a pit of vipers and Ruth would call it an opportunity to demonstrate her fear-management skills.

Hugh peeled his knee off the knee of his seatmate yet again and watched parched brown hills pass beneath the plane. Soon the head flight attendant told them they should secure their tray tables and return their seat backs to a fully upright and locked position; and if those on the right-hand side of the plane looked out the window they would see the world-famous Hollywood sign as they made their final descent into hell.

R
UTH SPOTTED
H
UGH FIRST
. H
E CAME OUT OF THE TERMINAL
and into the outdoor baggage claim area in a thicket of businessmen and Paris Hilton look-alikes wearing shoes from which you could fall to your death. Hugh hadn’t seen them yet—he seemed to be trying to extricate himself from a tangle of wheeled carry-ons—and Ruth was stunned by his appearance. He was visibly sweating and his hair was sticking up in the back and his skin tone was gray. Had he always looked like this, and she’d just gotten used to it? Her mind’s-eye view of Bethany was always a year or so out of date…. Anyway the moment passed as Hugh caught sight of Bethany. His face lit up and he was, once more, just Hugh.

Bethany squealed, sprinted to him, and threw her arms around his neck. He dropped his carry-on, wrapped his arms around her, lifted her a few inches off the ground, closed his eyes, and breathed her in. “How’s my sweetie-girl?”

“Daddy, we have so much to show you!”

With Bethy clinging to his right arm and his carry-on slung around behind him, Hugh put his left arm around Ruth and gave her a hug. They walked awkwardly, all three of them locked together that way, until Bethy caught her arm on the strap of Hugh’s carry-on bag and he lost his balance and veered into Ruth and they came apart.

Once they were in the car, Hugh said he was starving, so Ruth and Bethany, in a spirit of hyperfestivity, agreed that they
had
to take him to Bob’s Big Boy immediately, even before they off-loaded his suitcase at the apartment. Hugh had been here just once before, when Ruth and Bethy first moved into their little apartment. He’d stayed for only a day, and they hadn’t spent any of it sightseeing, unless you counted the inside of Mimi Roberts’s studio as a sight.

“Daddy,” Bethany said from the backseat, “you’re just going to love it here so much. We need to take him to the Disney building, Mom, so he can see the seven dwarfs holding up the roof, and there’s an iron fence around it that has these
things
—”

“Finials,” said Ruth.

“—that are shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. And there’s this older Disney building, too—it’s where they do animation—and part of it is shaped like a huge wizard’s hat, blue with stars, right, Mom, like from
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
?”

“Right,” said Ruth, and smiled at Hugh:
Do you see how much she loves it here?

“Oh, and tomorrow we should take him to Poquito Mas—it’s a restaurant near us and they have this sign, Daddy, that if you see someone famous you should respect their privacy because taking their picture is rude. Mom and I like to eat there sometimes. We haven’t seen anyone famous, but we probably will soon.”

Ruth made a turn onto Alameda. Below the overpass, evening traffic clogged the 134. Ruth indicated the mess down there with a slight inclination of her chin. Hugh looked down and shook his head. Bethy just kept on talking.

“And we really want you to see where I audition, Daddy, even though we probably won’t be able to go in because if it’s on a studio lot you have to have permission, and you can only get permission from your agent or manager, and Mimi said she’d get us on a list only if I was really auditioning for something, and you hardly ever do, on a Saturday.”

Ruth could see in the rearview mirror that Bethany’s coloring was high, her eyes sparkling. She looked at Hugh, looked in the mirror at Bethy, looked back at Hugh:
How can you think this isn’t worth doing? Look at her!
She couldn’t judge Hugh’s frame of mind, though. He seemed subdued. She felt a pang of guilt: he’d been back there in Seattle, alone and in the damp, while she and Bethy had been down here in LA having the time of their lives. She said to Bethany, “Honey, let’s give Daddy a minute or two of quiet, okay?”

“Okay.” Bethany subsided momentarily. “Oh! But Daddy, guess who we saw at Starbucks the other day? You’ll never guess.” Then she paused to let him guess. He couldn’t.

“Nicole Richie! She was right there in front of Mom. She looked just like herself, too—I mean, she wasn’t all made up and stuff and she was just wearing these old jeans and carrying a huge purse like you could carry a whole computer in, except then this
dog
pops out, I think it was a teacup Yorkie, lots of people have them here—”

“
Breathe,
” said Ruth.

“—and anyway, she looked just like a real person, but it was definitely Nicole Richie. We saw Kyra Sedgwick pulling out of the parking lot one time at Ralphs, too. She was driving this regular old car. What was it, Mom?”

Ruth just raised her eyebrows in the rearview mirror. Bethany had recently started asking gratuitous questions just to sound grown-up. Ruth felt the faint but distinct call of a headache coming on.

“Whatever,” Bethy said. “The thing is, you never know who you might see. I mean, you can be just standing in line at Sav-On or wherever, and
boom
, right behind you there’s Will Smith. It’s
so
exciting.”

Bethany sat forward and said to Hugh, “How come you aren’t saying anything? Are you tired?”

“I’m fine,” Hugh said.

“You don’t seem fine. You aren’t saying anything. Neither of you is saying anything.”

“I was listening, honey,” Hugh said. “But you weren’t leaving a whole lot of extra leg room in the conversation. So I was listening. I’m still listening.”

Bethany chewed a nail. “You don’t even really want us here, do you?”

“Did I say that? I didn’t hear me say that.”

“Well, you don’t. I know you don’t,” said Bethany.

And then they were at Bob’s, where the weekly Friday evening gathering of classic cars was well under way in the parking lot. Luckily the wait inside was brief and they were seated at one of Ruth and Bethany’s favorite booths near the front of the restaurant, where they could watch people come in. Their waiter was the shy Hispanic man who never showed any sign of remembering them, except that Ruth was sure he did because she made a point of always making eye contact with him and saying “please” and “thank you,” which she doubted most other people did. She had the absurd urge to introduce Hugh, so he’d know she wasn’t some sad woman adrift in a sea of single, fat, middle-aged women.

While they ate their burgers—Bethy had
insisted
they all get burgers—Ruth and Hugh made small talk about what one of his dental hygienists had named her new baby and how the annual pumpkin pyramid in front of the Queen Anne Albertsons had been destroyed by a nighttime vandal, spreading orange gore from the Halloween massacre on streets and sidewalks for blocks around. Hugh said the Neighborhood Watch committee thought it had a credible lead, and the police said they hoped to arrest a suspect by Monday; and Ruth said, “Well, sure,” and then Hugh turned to Bethy and asked whether hearing about home made her want to go back.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Ah,” said Hugh.

“Why?”

“I just thought it might.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” Bethany said emphatically, and she made a production of sucking up the dregs of her milk shake, and then Ruth caught the eye of their gentle waiter and asked for the check. For some reason, as he set the slip down on the table in front of her, Ruth touched his hand and held it there for just a minute. He looked at her, alarmed, and she managed to smile as though all she’d meant was to say thank you when she didn’t really know
why
she’d done it, hadn’t planned to do it at all.

H
UGH, STRUGGLING TO PULL HIS WALLET OUT OF HIS
pants pocket, hadn’t even seen the waiter put the bill on the table. Out of the blue he was recalling the phone conversation he’d had with his mother a couple of days earlier, when he’d mentioned that he would be coming down to LA for the weekend. The exact words he’d used were, “I’ll be leaving for a couple of days. I have some things to talk over with Ruth.”