Seeing Stars (17 page)

“I think you should be saying something to comfort me.”

“Get out of the business.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“Isn’t it? I guess it only works on people who are pretty far gone,” said Vee. “There was an acting kid in Buster’s tai chi class who decided to quit and go home, except he was testing for a black belt so it meant they had to stay in Burbank for an extra three days. To this day I’m sure if his mother had had a scalpel or even a reasonably stiff piece of paper she’d have slit her own wrists right there in the dojo or whatever by the time those extra days were up.”

“Really? So what happened to them?”

“They went back to Minnesota and no one’s ever heard from them again. She’s probably putting up a tuna hot dish and her kid—what was his name, Larry, only they insisted everyone call him Lawrence—is smoking pot all day in some provincial little high school where the state fair is the biggest deal of the year. Maybe he’s raising hogs.” Ruth could hear Vee draw on her cigarette, reflecting. “Hey, you just don’t know,” she said, though Ruth hadn’t said anything to challenge her. “Maybe 4H is everything it’s supposed to be. Maybe winning blue ribbons for your swine is the ultimate thrill. Maybe our kids would be a lot better off if they were up to their ankles in manure and slopping out the barn, only nobody told us.”

Ruth shuddered. “God forbid.”

“Okay, but am I taking your mind off your troubles?”

“Yes.”

“Well then. Tonight when you crawl into bed, count swine.”

“Okay,” said Ruth.

“Love ya, babe,” said Vee.

R
UTH WAS CARRYING CLEAN LAUNDRY BACK TO THE APARTMENT
when Hugh got back. She handed him the basket and dug out her keys to let them in. It seemed silly to have locked the door when she was only crossing the courtyard, but there had been several thefts recently. “So how was it?”

“I don’t know,” Hugh said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Were the kids there? Was the teacher? Sometimes they don’t show up on time, which I think is very inconsiderate, given what we’re paying them, because the classes always
end
right on time.”

“No, the teacher was there. Midge something. Strange guy.”

“Smidge. He was very famous when he was younger.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“That’s because you didn’t watch TV. I used to see him all the time.” Ruth’s parents had been much more relaxed than Hugh’s. As a result, Hugh could name a million book titles and authors, and Ruth could hum the jingles for nearly every household product marketed in the ten years or so before she’d gone off to college.

“So how does she seem to you?” Ruth tried to make the question sound offhand.

“Mimi?”

“Bethy.”

“Oh. Bubbly, I guess,” Hugh said. “A little manic.”

“She’s glad you’re here. She wants you to be as enthusiastic as she is.”

“I’m enthusiastic,” Hugh protested.

Ruth took her time, shook out a pair of Bethy’s jeans, and then folded a T-shirt that had a picture of a playing-card joker on the front with little bells stitched to its hat. To keep it from being distracting during auditions they’d had to carefully bend every bell to remove the ball-bearing that made it tinkle. “The thing is, it’s different down here. She wants you to see that for yourself, because she figures once you do, you’ll be as nuts about it as she is.”

“Is she nuts?”

“Yes. She is. You should see her on the days she has auditions. We run her lines and she has to choose exactly the right clothes and she does MapQuest because you know me and directions—”

“She does seem to have that part down,” Hugh allowed.

“And by the time we get there she’s right in character and she stays that way even when we have to wait an hour, which happens more often than you’d think it would. Not like a dental office.”

“But she’s getting turned down.”

“All the time,” Ruth agreed.

“And you think that’s a good idea? Doesn’t that bother her? She’s thirteen. She’s a teenager, and everyone knows that even the most even-natured kids auger in.”

“So you want to take away her one gift, the thing that makes her special? You know what she’d be if you did that? She’d be the kid who’s bullied because she’s a good, nice girl whose socials skills, let’s face it, are developing a little bit late. It’s like
Lord of the Flies
out there, honey. Is that what you want for her?”

“Of course it’s not what I want for her, but I think you’re being a little simplistic—”

“Oh no, I’m not,” said Ruth darkly. “Believe me, I’m not. She’s a good girl with talent that can bring the world to her doorstep.”

“And is that what she wants—to have the world at her doorstep? Or is that what
you
want?”

Ruth shook out a pair of her pants with a report like a gunshot. “You think I’m doing this for
me
?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, let me tell you something,” Ruth said. “I’m giving up
everything
to make this possible for her. I sleep in a terrible bed in a crappy little apartment with bugs”—that wasn’t actually true, but her blood was up—“and crime and a pool like a petri dish, and you think this is what
I
want?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Yes, I think this is what you want. I think you want her to stand out from everyone else.”

“This is what
she
wants. Just watch her!”

“Maybe she thinks she wants this only because you’re so gaga about it. Maybe she thinks she wants it only because she hasn’t tried anything else,” Hugh said evenly. “If she could try being in a courtroom maybe she’d want to be a lawyer. Maybe she’d want to be a doctor.”

“She doesn’t want to be a doctor,” Ruth said.

“I’m just
saying
.”

“I know what you’re saying. What
I’m
saying is, we’re giving her the opportunity of a lifetime but you don’t want to spend the money.”

“It’s not about the money,” Hugh cried. “Why is everybody saying I don’t want to spend money? Have I ever said I don’t want to spend money? I haven’t.”

“No,” Ruth conceded.

“So let’s stop talking about the goddamn money. What I don’t want is to have my family living down here when I’m up there. For the record.”

“So it’s about you.”

“It’s
not
about me. But as a matter of fact, I don’t like the idea that this might last for years. I miss you. That’s the main thing. Slap me for it, but I’m a family man. I miss you and I miss Bethy.”

Ruth softened and deflated. “I know you do.”

W
HEN THEY GOT TO THE STUDIO
, B
ETHANY WAS WAITING
in the greenroom with a couple of other girls. Her face was flushed, and it looked as though she’d been crying. Reba and Hillary had their arms around her and were whispering something to her protectively.

“She’s pretty upset,” Hillary said importantly when she saw Ruth.

She and Reba stood back so Ruth could get to her. “Why?”

Across the room Allison was folding a sweater elaborately and putting it into the giant Coach tote she carried with her everywhere, as though she might at any minute be transported to the wilderness for, say, years. “Allison?” Ruth said.

“It was
improv
. You’re not supposed to take it personally.”

“Take what personally?”

“She called me a loser,” Bethany said miserably. “She called me a loser and a baby.”

Ruth bridled. “Why would you say those things?”

“It was a
scene
!” Allison shrieked, and her voice quavered slightly. “Okay? Jeez! You’re supposed to keep it separate. Haven’t you ever done improv before?”

“As a matter of fact, she’s taken several classes,” Ruth said. “She knows what improv is.”

“Smidge made them scene partners,” Hillary explained officiously, “and then he told them they were best friends who were jealous of each other because one of them won some stupid award in a math class, as though
that’s
ever going to happen.”

“Yeah,” Allison spit out, “and she was the one who won the award, of course, because she’s so smart and she knows a lot of big words, and because Daddy’s a dentist and she has you guys just wrapped around her little fingers like she’s perfect.”

“She isn’t perfect,” Ruth said. “But weren’t you supposed to be characters and not yourselves?”

“Yes,” Bethany said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand and then wiping the back of her hand on her jeans.

“Whatever,” Allison said. She pulled a tube of lipstick and a little mirror out of her bag and applied the lipstick with a show of bravado, except that Ruth noticed her hands were shaking.

“Sometimes we forget to draw the line,” said Smidge Robinson, who had emerged from the classroom unnoticed. The knot of girls parted and he put his arm around Bethy’s shoulder, touched his head to her head. “We need to toughen up, right? We talked about that in there, about how actors are tough, tough people, even though we’re marshmallows inside. And that’s what lets us do anything our character needs us to do, even if it’s ugly, because it’s our
character
doing it, not us. Right? So we’re going to work really hard on that, aren’t we?”

Bethy nodded and took a deep breath. Smidge gave her shoulders a squeeze and released her. “Kids,” he said ruefully to Ruth and Hugh. “They’re at a tough age. They’re not even going to be civilized until they’re twenty.”

Bethy walked a couple of steps to where Allison was sitting on the sofa filing her nails impassively. Bethy sat right down next to her, so her shoulder touched Allison’s, and Ruth saw Allison stiffen almost imperceptibly. She thought, not for the first time, that there was a certain feral quality about the girl.
They have this room that they call the guest room even when Allison is back there living in it,
Bethany had said.
So she lives at Mimi’s.

Bethy was saying, “I’ll do better the next time. I’m really sorry.”

Allison took a tissue from her Coach bag and held it under her eye. Ruth was startled to realize that she was fighting to not cry. Smidge was gone. Except for Reba and Hillary, the other children had trailed out, leaving only Bethany and the Orphans, who had nowhere else to go until Mimi was ready to leave. From what Ruth had observed, that was likely to be hours from now. “Hey,” she said impulsively. “Who wants a burger?”

“We do!” said fat Reba and little Hillary in a chorus.

“I do!” shouted Bethy.

“Honey?” Ruth asked Allison, who still seemed subdued.

“Okay,” said Allison.

“All right, then. Go tell Mimi and get your stuff and we’ll meet you at the car,” Ruth said.

Hugh just looked at her and shook his head. “What have you done?” he said.

“In what sense?”

And he spread his arms wide, taking in the girls and the room and conceivably the city itself and then he walked out the door.

November–December 2006

T
he thing about Hollywood is, it’s no different from heroin or gambling or crack cocaine, except in Hollywood the high is adrenaline. Every day’s a crap shoot, a spinning wheel of possibility. Actors get up every morning hungry to score. And sometimes—sometimes—they do. Not often, but enough to feed the craving, to keep them crawling out of bed aching for the big break, the moments they’ll look back to when they’re asked when exactly their lives changed forever.

And at any given moment there are ten thousand stunned and hopeful actors driving down the LA freeways, and every one of them is believing exactly the same thing: that the big break is coming just as surely as sunrise.

—
VEE VELMAN

Chapter Ten

A
NGIE AND
L
AUREL
B
UEHL SAT SIDE BY SIDE ON UNYIELDING
plastic chairs in the Urgent Care on Olive, holding hands at six thirty in the morning. It wasn’t Angie who’d brought them there—thank God, it wasn’t Angie—but Laurel. The girl had been awake since two
A.M.
, with a rising fever and back pain. She’d been peeing every ten or fifteen minutes until, by four forty-five, she told Angie it felt less like she was urinating than like she was passing acid. At six o’clock she was no longer able to pass urine at all, and now she was sitting beside Angie in the Urgent Care with her legs squeezed tight together, making a low moaning noise and rocking.

A nurse came out finally—
finally!
—and called Laurel into the clinic. Laurel reached out her hand to Angie. She had dark wells under her eyes, which were filling with tears. They were not from pain, Angie knew, though Laurel was clearly in agony; they were for the producers’ session she would now almost certainly miss, for a role in a feature film. Angie took a deep, strengthening breath and followed the nurse and Laurel into an examination room.

The nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Laurel’s arm, inflated it, then released it, scribbled a number, raised her eyebrows, inflated the cuff again, and took another reading.

“Whoa,” she said to Angie.

“She’s in pain,” Angie said.

“I’ll say,” said the nurse. “I’m going to have the doctor come right in, okay? Can you lie back, sweetie?”

“I don’t think so,” Laurel said. “I can’t pee, either, and I really really have to.”

“Hold on,” said the nurse. “Just hold on, okay?”

Once the nurse was gone, clicking the door ever so quietly behind her, Laurel started moaning. Angie cleared her throat, went to Laurel’s side, grasped her hand firmly, and said, “Breathe.” There had been nights when Laurel had said that to her, and it had helped. “
Breathe.
”

Laurel drew her knees up to her chest. Angie could hear her teeth grind together. The examining room door opened and a male doctor came in with the nurse, went straight to Laurel—peeling a stethoscope from around his neck as he walked—and said, “Well, well. What do we have, here?”

“Oh,” Laurel sobbed, “I
hurt
.”

“I’m sure you do, darlin’,” said the doctor. Angie found herself thinking, bizarrely, that he’d been perfectly cast. Gray hair whitening at the temples, chiseled features, gray eyes. Not blocky like Dillard, but more like a man who’d made fitness a lifelong religion.
So
LA.

“Let’s roll you over,” he told Laurel. “I need to get a gander at those kidneys.”

The nurse and the doctor rolled Laurel onto her side and the doctor pressed gently. “Ow, ow, ow.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” the doctor said.

They rolled Laurel onto her back. Her face had no color, Angie noticed; none whatsoever. The doctor palpated her abdomen. “We’ll do some blood work,” he said, “but it’s not going to tell us anything we don’t already know.”

Angie raised her eyebrows:
So?

“Big-time urinary tract infection,” the doctor said. “And it’s backed up into her kidneys. When did she start showing symptoms?”

“Two, two fifteen,” Angie said.

“We don’t usually see these come on so fast.”

“It’s probably been brewing for a day, at least, and she never said anything. She has a high pain threshold,” Angie said.

“I’ll say,” said the doctor.

“Let’s call ahead,” he said to the nurse. “Let them know she’s coming.”

“What do you mean?” Angie asked. “Call ahead where?”

“I’m sending her up to St. John’s Hospital. She needs to be catheterized, and she needs IV antibiotics. This is pretty far along.”

Laurel gave a little shriek. “No! No no no! I’m going to producers today. At ten o’clock.”

“Not today, you’re not,” said the doctor.

“Yes! Yes, today! I have to! It’s a
Spielberg
film! Just give me something. You can give me something and then I’ll be fine.”

Angie stepped over to the exam table, brushing past the doctor to stand by Laurel’s shoulder. “Stop it,” she said firmly.

“
Ohhhh.
”

“Stop.”

Laurel brought it down to a whimper.

“Better,” said Angie.

“I have snot in my ear,” said Laurel.

“I know, honey,” Angie said gently. “Now, you listen to me. We’re going to the hospital and they’re going to pump you full of painkillers and antibiotics and a drug called Pyridium that will make you pee in Technicolor—which I know because I’ve been on it—and you’re going to feel much much better.”

“
When?
”

Angie looked at the doctor, who shrugged and held up one, then two fingers:
Tomorrow or the next day.
“If we start right now,” he said.

“Soon,” said Angie.

The doctor headed for the examining room door. “All right, I’m going to go let them know to expect her.”

Angie went out with him and said very softly and very firmly, “Tell them to knock her out the minute they get her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know my daughter. They’re going to have to knock her out if they’re going to keep her, because otherwise she’ll go to that callback even if it means crawling up Barham Boulevard on her knees in a hospital gown.”

The doctor shook his head.

“I know,” said Angie. “But do it anyway.”

A
N HOUR LATER
L
AUREL WAS ENSCONCED IN A HOSPITAL
room and wobbly-headed from a merciful morphine infusion. Angie listened quite calmly to the soft, mewing sound Laurel was now making; a nearly happy and certainly musical sound, which made Angie wonder, and not for the first time, if she should get Laurel enrolled in voice lessons again, as well as an intensive voice-over workshop. She should ask Mimi. She’d heard from more than one mom in an audition waiting room that voice work paid very well.

“Mom,” Laurel said, yawning hugely. “I’m so sleepy.”

“Good,” Angie said.

“Am I better? Because I might feel better.” She flipped the bed sheet aside and looked at a catheter draped over her leg into a collecting bag hanging beside the bed. Angie could see, though Laurel could not, that the urine was a dark rust color. Blood.

“Yes, you’re better,” Angie told her.

“Really?”

“No, but you will be in just a couple more hours. In the meantime they’ve given you some morphine.”

“What if I’m not better, though?”

“I’ve already asked Mimi to reschedule. If they liked you enough, they will. And if they didn’t, you wouldn’t have booked it anyway.”

“I wasn’t really thinking of that.”

“No?” Angie smoothed Laurel’s damp hair off her forehead.

“What if it isn’t just an infection?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

She and Laurel locked eyes briefly, and then Laurel looked away.

“Cancer?” Angie said. “Do you mean what if it’s cancer?”

“Yes,” Laurel whispered.

“Oh, honey.” Angie pressed Laurel’s hand hard, hard enough for her platinum wedding ring to bite into her finger. “
I’m
the one with cancer.
I
am, not you.”

“But what if—”

“
Not
what if. Cancer is not contagious. All you have is an infection that women get all the time—
all the time
. And it doesn’t mean a thing, except you’ll feel like God stomped all over you for a couple days, and from now on you’ll be more careful about cleaning yourself after you poop.”

“Really?” The relief in Laurel’s eyes was heartbreaking.

“Really.”

Laurel closed her eyes and said dreamily, “That’s good.”

T
WO HOURS LATER
A
NGIE SAT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE
vinyl visitor’s chair beside Laurel’s hospital bed, holding her hand lightly and watching her sleep. Laurel had finally, thoroughly conked out an hour ago. Angie traced the faint blue veins on the back of her daughter’s hand, admired the young, pale, flawless skin, the delicate, pearly color of a body at one with itself. Ever since Angie’s first round of chemo last summer, her own hands had become terribly dry, with rough and splitting cuticles and nails that chipped like mica. It was as though, to slake itself, the cancer had appropriated everything, all of her.

That was Angie and Laurel’s secret: Angie Buehl was dying.
Slowly
, mind you, slowly. But she was dying. She had chronic myelogenous leukemia, a usually but not always slow-burning form of leukemia that would eventually do her in, though no one could say when. They didn’t talk about it much, because really, what was there to say? You could devote your remaining time to the business of dying, or you could say screw it and not give it the satisfaction of besting you until the very end—or that’s how Angie chose to look at it, anyway, so Laurel looked at it that way, too.

As an act of love and knowing he’d be devastated by the news, they had decided back in Georgia not to tell Dillard, not yet, anyway. When Laurel went with her to chemo they’d told Dillard they were going on trips out of town so Laurel could take a modeling class in Atlanta; thankfully, Angie’s hair loss hadn’t been total and Angie had simply told Dillard it was female trouble, something to do with a hormone imbalance. Sweet man, he’d believed her. Over the interminable drip of the IVs they’d agreed that if they were going to launch Laurel’s career in TV and movies while Angie was still alive and able to help, they had to start
now
. So when the chemo was over they’d told Dillard that Laurel had been invited to Hollywood to take part in a talent competition for young actors and, if she won, she’d be given a manager and invited to stay. Dillard hadn’t questioned it, as Angie had known he wouldn’t. He was like that: a good, busy, simple man who worked hard, believed what he was told, loved with ferocity, and made a surprisingly good and satisfying living standing over a vat of boiling peanuts all day, talking to men and women just like him.

Laurel shifted her legs restlessly under the light hospital blanket and moaned. Angie checked the pee bag. The urine was clearer, though brilliantly hued from the Pyridium. She smiled; Laurel would get a kick out of seeing the colors of sunrise in her toilet bowl. Despite her starlet exterior, she was a plain-Jane girl. She talked comfortably about bodily functions, farted freely if it was just her and Angie (
Well, goodness!
she’d say.
Excuse me!
), and liked to hold babies whenever anyone would let her.

And so they’d come to Hollywood with a steely resolve. Had this kidney infection been even somewhat less fast-moving, Angie knew for a fact that they’d have made the producers’ session this morning. Time was their enemy; all they had were now and very soon. Angie knew it was going to be hard—unspeakably hard—for Laurel to be without her. Angie’s own mother had died of an aneurism when she was just twelve, and her life had been like nuclear winter until she’d met Dillard when she was eighteen. Plus she and Laurel had always been unusually close. Laurel had been a compliant, happy baby, given to shrieks of delight and a tendency to giggle in her sleep. She’d loved beauty pageants and sparkles and sequins and little boots and high kicks. A natural, the pageant directors and judges all said; a child to watch. She knew people made fun of pageant girls and their mothers, but in Angie’s opinion that was just small-minded. Look at Laurel’s poise; look at her drive and focus. She was one of the girls who was going to make it: Angie knew that without a doubt. And she’d have earned every mile she gained as surely as if she’d walked there over hot coals.

Once they’d arrived in Hollywood, they’d called Dillard to say that Laurel had won the competition, she’d
won
! Then they’d applied themselves with singular purpose to the business of establishing Laurel as an A-list actor. They studied every set of sides together, going over and over them until they both admitted dreaming about them in their sleep. But the point was, Laurel was always exquisitely well-prepared, and this, they believed, was critical, especially in light of Mimi’s mantra, to which they fully subscribed:
Luck is being prepared when the opportunity arises.
“Lord,” Laurel had prayed aloud more than once in Angie’s presence, “let me be the living proof.”

Now, though, Angie knew something that Laurel did not: after only the briefest reprieve, the cancer was on the move again. Bruises were massing on her arms and legs like storm clouds; sometimes at night she could actually
feel
the cancer cells at work, boring like worms through her bone marrow. She’d have to go back on chemo soon; she had already set up an appointment with an oncologist at UCLA. She intended to lie about it, telling Laurel she was just going in for some routine psychological counseling. In the meantime she was careful to wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants, and to change privately. If Laurel suspected anything she wasn’t letting on, and that was fine with Angie. The girl was under enough pressure.

Mimi Roberts had initially resisted taking Laurel on as a client because of the girl’s age and regional specificity, but she was prepared to milk her now. Just in the last month she’d booked a national commercial for JCPenney, and another for the California Avocado Commission. She also had a callback later in the week for a costar role on
Desperate Housewives
, which could very well be the breakthrough into theatrical work that they were all waiting for.

Laurel Buehl was so hot she was on fire, and Mimi knew it.