Seeing Stars (37 page)

“When did you tell her that?”

“Hell, I don’t know—two weeks ago, maybe. Two and a half.”

Mimi heard her light up again, and then she heard ice cubes clink in a glass. “Do you know about her cutting?” Mimi asked.

“What do you mean, like skipping school? But she’s not even
in
—”

“She cuts herself. With a razor blade.”

“Where?”

Mimi had finally gotten her attention: a maimed girl was a devalued girl. “Inside her upper arms, from what I’ve seen.”

“Well, thank goodness. I mean, nobody can see that, right?”

“Did you know about this?”

“I might have seen a little mark or two,” Denise said evasively. “Last time she was here. Like she doesn’t get enough attention already. It won’t scar, will it? Because trust me, that child is going to need every bit of her looks while she’s young. You get older and then you’ve got nothing.”

“She’s a good actor. She’s got that. If she’ll straighten out again and focus.”

“Well, I really don’t see what you want
me
to do. You know, we pay you an awful damn lot of money to take care of her.”

Mimi flipped her pen to the back of her desk. It fell over the edge and hit Tina Marie on the head. The little dog gave her an aggrieved look. Mimi closed her eyes briefly. “I’m her manager, not her nanny. You pay me to manage her career, not—” Mimi heard a click on the line: call-waiting.

“Well, my God,
finally
—” Denise said, and then Mimi heard dead air.

Crap.

Mimi sat at her desk, her hand still on the phone, and tried to remember what Denise Addison looked like. They’d met only once, during Mimi’s trip to Houston. Just that once, in three years. She had Allison’s long, spare build, only in Denise it had hardened into the stringy muscles and tendons that aging women developed when they weighed too little and lived too hard. On Denise, Allison’s beautiful features were stark, and her hair had been dry, overprocessed, and hanging in a single lusterless hank halfway down her back. There’d been a tattoo up behind one ear that at first glimpse appeared to be an insect bite or a canker. What had it been? The scales of justice, Mimi thought, astrological sign of Libra—as though cosmic issues hung in the balance, to be decided by this trashy woman who had never been to Los Angeles, never watched Allison on set, never attended a showcase or celebrated an achievement. Admittedly, Mimi had never pressed her to do any of those things. Had it been false pride or a simple recognition of the truth to think that Mimi, though childless, made a better mother? Mimi could still vividly picture Allison as Mimi had first seen her. She’d been luminous, the way some young girls were just before they learned the free-market value of beauty.

Mimi closed her eyes. In their first year together, Allison had loved fixing Mimi glasses of Hawaiian Punch, and as she was pouring she’d sometimes whisper under her breath. Mimi had finally asked her about it and Allison had told her, very casually, that she was reciting the ratio of pineapple rum, 7Up, and Hawaiian Punch that went into a cocktail called Hawaiian Death that her mother had taught Allison to mix. Evidently Denise had thought it was hysterical to use Allison as a bartender when she and her girlfriends got together. She said she also knew the recipes for black Russians, white Russians, strawberry daiquiris, frozen margaritas, and something called Blood of the Innocent.

Tina Marie, always attuned to Mimi’s moods, hopped up into her lap, circled twice, and settled. Mimi scratched the bony noggin and labored over what to do. Certainly it would be a mistake to send Allison home to Denise, but it was obvious that something needed to be done.

The phone rang but Mimi let it go to voice mail. It rang three more times, but Mimi ignored it, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes. Half an hour later, resolved, she packed up Tina Marie, turned out the lights, locked the studio doors behind her, and walked through the stunning late-afternoon heat to her car. Tina Marie minced over to pee near her favorite bush and then they cranked up the car’s feeble air-conditioning and headed for home.

A
LLISON HAD A BAD FEELING
. M
IMI HAD NEVER REFUSED TO
take her phone calls before. She stripped off all her clothes, got rid of her makeup, put on an old pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and flip-flops. With her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail and her face bare, she looked closer to twelve than fourteen. She was sitting at the dining room table, where she had a clear view of the front door, and Hillary was sitting across from her. Hillary was talking, but Allison was concentrating on listening for Mimi’s car.

Hillary said, “She must be mad at you. You must have done something.”

“Shut up.”

“
Did
you do something?”

“Just shut
up
.”

Hillary picked at some old nail polish on her thumb. “I could give you a manicure, if you want. You haven’t tried that new color you bought yet.”

Allison didn’t say a word.

“She’s probably just returning phone calls and stuff. Or maybe she’s talking to one of the casting directors,” Hillary said helpfully. “I mean, maybe something wonderful is happening.”

Allison laid her forehead on her folded arms. Half an hour ago Bethany Rabinowitz had called and said neither of them had booked Carlyle.

The one thing Allison was certain of was that nothing wonderful was happening.

Chapter Twenty-two

T
HE LITTLE CHILI PEPPER CHARM HAD BEEN IN
Q
UINN’S
pocket for so long, he had created a sensory memory of it, seeing it by feel alone. It warmed him, somehow, to have the charm with him.

He walked by Los Burritos every single day now. The little Hispanic girl was there Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. She always smiled for her customers, which he liked. It wasn’t that easy to smile at strangers and mean it. You had to open up, take risks, expose yourself to injury. But he was learning from her; he was trying to smile at people, too, and mean it, which was a struggle after so many years of holding people off, keeping them away. He even did that with Quatro, despite their growing friendship. Friends were risky; friends could turn. Friends didn’t necessarily like you or take care with you; sometimes they only wanted to know you in case you got famous or met someone famous that they might like to know, too. Quatro wasn’t like that, though. He fed Quinn excellent food at their dinners out, and he listened when Quinn talked about his auditions and working with Evelyn and how he thought he was getting someplace in his acting that he’d never reached before, a place so deep you didn’t even need words. And, at least so far, Quatro listened; and if he didn’t understand what Quinn was talking about, he did an excellent job of faking it.

If Quatro was his friend, Quinn thought he might be a little bit in love with Evelyn Flynn. Not in
that way
, of course, because man she was old; but still, he was in love. He knew she would leave him one day; he just hoped that day wouldn’t be soon. Unlike Quatro, Evelyn was a cold, hard person, but even so Quinn sensed that she cared about him and about bringing him along in a way that Mimi never had. She could be cruel if he didn’t do what she thought he should, though. “Go there, for Christ’s sake!” she’d screamed at him once. “You’re standing on the goddamn doorstep. Go! What are you waiting for?” But here was his problem: if he stepped all the way through the door, he knew he’d leave her on the other side and be alone.

These two people, Quatro and Evelyn Flynn, were his life-lines. He almost never saw anyone else now except in acting class or at auditions; he’d even started staying away from the apartment if Jasper or Baby-Sue were there, because if they didn’t see him, they couldn’t kick him out, which he was sure they were getting ready to do. He used his time to walk by Los Burritos and look for the Hispanic girl.

But you can hold off doom for only so long. At the beginning of the third week of March, Jasper ambushed Quinn in the kitchen, saying, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry about this, but we’re giving up the apartment.”

Quinn’s heart sank. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Jasper shook his head sadly, thrust his hands deep in his pockets. “Baby-Sue and me, we’re not making it, man. We’re calling it quits. We gave notice today. We’ve got the place for one more month, but if you find a new place sooner, you can just go and we’ll forget the rest of the rent. Okay, guy?”

And what was there to say but okay?

Where was he supposed to go? He was sixteen and a half. No one was going to rent a place to an unemancipated minor. And that was
if
he could find a place he could afford on four or five hundred dollars a month, which of course he couldn’t, not in LA. He was pretty sure Nelson wasn’t going to cough up more, though. The latest word from Seattle was that his company was going through tough times, might even be laying him off.

So Quinn had a month. He could ask Quatro if he knew anyone looking for a roommate, but he doubted that anyone Quatro’s age would want a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old roommate, and anyway he wasn’t sure he could handle living with a gay guy. Hearing Baby-Sue and Jasper screwing in the middle of the night was one thing, but hearing two guys doing it was something else.

One month.

He put on a leather jacket he’d picked up in a thrift store—it was actually cool outside, plus he liked the fact that the jacket smelled like somebody’s father—and left the apartment. He was halfway to Los Burritos when his cell went off in his pocket. He was going to let it ring, but then he saw it was Evelyn.

“Come to my office,” she said. She did that: she didn’t ask, she commanded. She didn’t say why, and he’d learned not to ask.

“When?”

“Where are you now?”

“Santa Monica and Havenhurst.”

“Four thirty,” she said. Her office was a mile and a half away. No one ever asked how he was going to get someplace. “Can you make it?”

“Sure,” he said. What the hell—he was already walking.

W
HEN HE GOT TO
E
VELYN’S THERE WERE FOUR OR FIVE
eight-year-olds in the waiting room, plus their mothers or nannies or whoever. He’d heard she was casting a spinoff of the American Girl movies for one of the cable channels. She never talked about her work; he knew everything from reading the breakdowns. Baby-Sue was still able to pull up Breakdown Services on Mimi’s account so she could see what was being cast. Jasper and Baby-Sue were always sitting around in the kitchen with their laptops open back-to-back, submitting themselves, and Mimi probably didn’t even know.

The little girls looked him over for about a fraction of a second and then went back to their Game Boys and video iPods and text messages. One by one Evelyn called them in and gave each one about a minute before turning them loose again. One kid came out crying. Evelyn could be a total asshole.

When the last girl went out—after Quinn had been sitting there for about twenty minutes, which had at least given him enough time to stop sweating—Evelyn followed, turning off the lights, locking the glass front door, and pulling a full-length blind to cover it. She didn’t say a word to him, just did her stuff and then indicated with her head that he should follow her back into her office. She pulled a set of sides from her desk drawer and handed them to him. They were from some stage play Quinn didn’t recognize. She gave him the first line, and he was supposed to do his in Buddy’s character. He tried, but he wasn’t feeling it. He was feeling like Quinn, and that was no good.

CHET
: Why would you ask me to help you rob someone? I mean, why the fuck would I say yes to something like that? Come on—would you, if you were me?

MARTIN
: Yeah, man. I would. I’d do it to help you.

CHET
: You’re crazy.

“Start over,” Evelyn said.

Quinn shook out his hands and flapped the script around for a minute to try to loosen up.

CHET
: Why would you ask me to help you rob someone? I mean, why the fuck would I say yes to something like that? Come on—would you, if you were me?

MARTIN
: Yeah, man. I would. I’d do it to help you.

CHET
: You’re crazy.

“Stop, stop. God,” Evelyn said, dropping her copy of the scene onto her desk blotter.

Quinn hung his head.

She leaned back against her desk, crossed her arms, crossed one foot over the other, and waggled it. “So what’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

She raised an eyebrow.

He looked at her, looked away. “I have to find a new place to live.”

“What do you mean?”

“The people I’ve been staying with gave notice. So I have to find someplace else to live.” His voice actually caught in his throat. He hated the way he sounded, like some whiny little kid. He cleared his throat and shrugged.

To his surprise Evelyn softened, looked at him longer than you were really supposed to look at people, like she had x-ray eyes. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, shrugged, looked at the floor, and she said, “I’m sorry,” as though she really meant it

“Yeah,” he said.

She went around and dug in a desk drawer, pulled out a leather book, licked a fingertip, and flipped the pages. When she’d found what she was looking for, she wrote a name and phone number on a Post-it and handed it to him stuck on the end of her finger. “When we’re done here, call him.”

“Who is he?”

“A friend. He has a studio behind his house. It’s a long shot, but he might be willing to let you stay there.”

“Okay,” Quinn said, sticking the piece of paper in his pocket. He cleared his throat, blinked hard a couple of times. He’d never lived alone before.

“If it doesn’t work out, let me know.”

He nodded. She pursed her lips, nodded back firmly, and said, “Can we work now? Because I talked to Joel Sherman this morning. He’ll be holding a final callback round tomorrow with six kids, three Buddys, three Carlyles, and then the top four will audition with Gus Van Sant a week from Friday.”

He could hear his heartbeat in his ears. “Am I—?”

“Yup.” And she cracked the tiniest smile.

“Oh,” he said, but it sounded more like a sigh. “Thank you.”

She smiled for real this time. “Congratulations.”

“Don’t say that yet. It’ll only mean something if he casts me.”

“Honey, it means something just to get this far.”

It was the first thing she’d ever said to him that wasn’t true. They both knew that getting this far meant absolutely nothing unless you booked it.

W
HEN
Q
UINN LEFT
E
VELYN’S OFFICE HE WENT TO THE
Paramount commissary, which looked just like a food court in a mall except that people were all dressed up as doctors, soldiers, beach babes, motocross racers, and old-time ladies in hoop skirts and bonnets, and pulled out the phone number of the guy Evelyn had told him about. Ben—his name was Ben. With his heart pounding he called the number and a guy picked up on the third ring.

“Oh, yeah,” the guy said. “Evelyn just told me you’d be calling. You’re the kid who needs a place to live, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, here’s the problem, though. I’m going to be moving someone in back there in about a month and a half, soon as he gets back from shooting in Bucharest. They’re supposed to wrap in four weeks, but you know that’s probably not going to happen, so call it five or six. Even so.”

“Yeah,” said Quinn. “The thing is, I’ll be okay where I am now for another three or four weeks. It’s for after that.”

“Oh. So that won’t work,” Ben said, and he sounded like he was sorry.

“No,” Quinn said. “But anyway, you know. Thanks.”

To distract himself—hell, to keep from crying—he bought himself a Coke and an ice cream sandwich. Once he’d finished them and felt like he had pulled himself together, he called Evelyn and told her what the guy had said.

“Okay,” she said and got off the phone. It was almost worse than if she hadn’t offered to help in the first place. He guessed he was on his own again. He threw away his trash and headed for home. Only then did he really think about the fact that he was still in the running for Buddy. A one out of three shot. What had he been thinking of, moping around about stupid Jasper and Baby-Sue? He had a whole month to find a place to live. Something would come through. He’d walk by Los Burritos and see if the Hispanic girl was still working, even though it was pretty late, eight o’clock. At least it would give him something to look forward to during the long walk back.

E
VELYN SHUT DOWN HER OFFICE RIGHT AFTER
Q
UINN LEFT
and put her things in good order. She was fastidious in her professional as well as her personal habits, feeling that clutter was a wasteful time-sink—in a lifetime, how many hours would you throw away, searching for things you could have located very handily if only you’d had a system? She knew she had a reputation for making lightning-fast casting decisions, but it was only because she had done her homework. She knew the kids she’d be seeing, she didn’t waste her time seeing people she knew were never going to work out, and she could spot the standout, the rare gem, at a thousand paces.

Thus Quinn Reilly.

Evelyn was working him like a thoroughbred racehorse, leaning and firming up his acting chops, honing Buddy with the precision of a master craftsman. And what was happening before her eyes—not that she’d tell Quinn this—was an extraordinary transformation. He’d arrived on her doorstep with all the drive and all the talent she needed in an actor in whom she planned to invest time—and she rarely invested her time—but with blunt edges and sloppy habits, going for the cheap emotions, the guaranteed attention-getters, instead of digging for subtlety and nuance. Now, seven weeks after they’d started working together, Quinn had honed his acting skills into a thing of beauty. She had never known an actor who slipped into character with such ease, which was ironic given the hair-trigger personality of Quinn himself.

If Gus Van Sant, with whom Evelyn had never worked (though of course she knew him; she knew everyone), was truly willing to gamble on an unknown actor, Quinn would bring everything he needed to the table. Everything. And she’d already told this to Joel Sherman, who’d given her his promise that he’d get Quinn in front of Van Sant no matter what. She’d believed Quinn was ready, but now there was this damned housing thing, which had obviously brought him down. Evelyn, at that age, had been a coddled day student at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, learning to be a young woman of accomplishment and grace.

Very few people in LA knew, because she made a religion of keeping her private life private, that Evelyn had a son. He’d been born thirty-three years ago with severe cerebral palsy that included mental retardation, and she’d committed him to an institution outside of Fresno when he was five. Never married—the father was a man of no consequence—Evelyn had had to put in ridiculously long and unpredictable hours even then, though she’d been a talent agent in those days, not a casting director. It had been a wrenching decision, though an absolutely necessary one (though of course her mother had disagreed). Evelyn saw him only occasionally. Though the caregivers at the facility assured her he knew who she was, she doubted it. He would look at her dully, drooling onto a diaper fastened around his neck like a bib, when she laid out the visit’s gifts—chocolates, a new picture book, a bouquet of exquisitely expensive flowers—on the tray fitted to his wheelchair. She had no idea whatsoever what to talk about, or whether to talk to him at all. Sometimes she wheeled him onto the facility’s lawn and let the Canada geese settle all around him, lured by a small bag of breadcrumbs she always brought along. The birds, unlike Evelyn, clearly made him happy. He’d kick and moan in guttural enthusiasm as she put a small handful of breadcrumbs into his spastic fist and helped him turn the hand over and sprinkle them as far from his chair as was possible, which was to say within inches of the wheels. The birds would gather around him in a honking crescendo, and Evelyn and Bruce—that was his name, Bruce—would watch them eat. It was always a tremendous relief when the visit ended and she could climb into the sanctuary of her beloved Mercedes and return to her life. Over the years she had visited less and less often. The nurses had finally admitted that Bruce was often agitated after her visits, and it was hard for her to find the time.