The Second Assistant (24 page)

“Ciao, then,” Lolita said, and leaned back in her chair in a bored-already way.

“So,” Luke said.

“So.” I nodded. Glued to the spot.

“So see you around, then.”

“Sure thing.” I tried to sound casual, but I was racked with awkwardness and didn’t really want to move away. His shirt was too compelling. I liked standing three feet away from him. It felt good, and I didn’t know when, if ever, I’d see him again. “Bye, then.”

“Bye.”

“Oh, and, hey, Elizabeth?” he said as I threw a polite smile at Lolita, who had picked up her cell phone in protest at our tedious conversation. “Can I ask your advice on something?”

“Of course,” I replied with barely concealed delight. He looked down at Lolita, who was like a ship in full sail as she discussed the new Dior collection, doubtless with a fellow teen who was lounging on a pink marabou bedspread in another part of town while a rock star sucked her pretty toes. Then, when he was confident that she wasn’t listening, he moved closer to me.

“I just wondered whether . . .”

Go on, go on, ask me for a date. I’m not proud. I don’t mind whether you blatantly two-time me. I don’t mind whether I’m just your Wednesday movie-theater date and she’s your Saturday night out at Nobu. I have a crush on you, and it’s not going away, so just ask.

“Yes?” I nuzzled closer to Luke, close enough to smell his sun-warm, shower-fresh hair.

“Well, I was wondering what your favorite shoe shop in L.A. was?” he said as Lolita laughed like a blocked drain into her cell phone.

“My favorite shoe shop?” I repeated, never dreaming that his illicit words could sound so sweet. “Well, I think it’s probably Jimmy Choo,” I told him. I’d never actually been in, and I certainly didn’t own a pair,
but every time I drove past the shimmering storefront on Cañon, my heart skipped a beat. Behind that plate glass, magical things happened. Of that I had no doubt. “They’re so incredibly gorgeous.”

“Great,” he said. “It’s Scarlett’s birthday next week, and I haven’t a clue what to get her.”

“Scarlett?” I was in the dark for only a split second before the lurid fluorescent light of truth dawned. Scarlett was Lolita. It was her birthday, and he was going to buy her a pair of Jimmy Choos. “Oh, sure, Scarlett.” I covered my tracks more expertly than a world-class jewel thief. “Well, she’s going to love them. She really will.”

“You’ve been incredibly helpful, Elizabeth, thanks. I meant to ask my assistant, but I was a little . . .”

“Ashamed?” I nodded sympathetically.

“Ashamed?” Luke frowned.

“Understandably,” I added.

“Understandably ashamed to ask my assistant which shoes to buy for Scarlett?” He was puzzled.

“Well,
I’m
pretty open-minded, but I can completely sympathize with why you wouldn’t want your assistant to know. I mean, it doesn’t look great in a professional environment, really, does it?” I had said before I could stop myself.

“What doesn’t?” Luke was now looking a little concerned. “I’m not following you.”

“Well, Scarlett. She’s young.”

“She’s eighteen,” he said matter-of-factly. God, he was even more unconscionable than I’d imagined.

“Right, well, I hope she likes her Jimmy Choos. And I’ll see you around.” I lifted my purse higher onto my shoulder and was about to leave when he caught my arm.

“Elizabeth, am I missing something here?” he asked me very directly and with his hand still lightly holding my wrist.

“God, no! I mean, of course not. It’s none of my business who you date. And she’s over the age of consent, so what’s to be mad about?” I said, wondering how this surreal ordeal had actually begun and simply wishing that it would end and I hadn’t become embroiled in a debate about underage girls and shoe shops with the only man in the world I actually wanted to hold hands with. Apart from the obvious
Clooney-and-company list. Then I remembered that it was all Alexa’s fault. And that she was probably melting in the sun waiting for me. I had to get out of here.

“You thought that Scarlett was my date?” All of a sudden the concern was rinsed off Luke’s face and replaced with a look of sheer delight. At the same moment, Scarlett jumped off the line with Merry Toes and caught what Luke had just said.

“She thought that I was your date?” Scarlett snorted contemptuously.

“You did not?” Luke was unable to wipe the grin from his face.

“Oh, that’s hilarious,” Scarlett added without so much as raising a smile.

“She’s not your girlfriend, then?” I was now camouflaged perfectly against the bright pink terra-cotta patio, and I could feel the embarrassment flooding my face.

“Scarlett’s my half sister,” Luke said, and gave me a friendly, forgiving pat. Which was enormously generous of him, since I’d just insinuated that he was practically a pedophile. But it didn’t serve to make me feel any better.

“Well, that’s great news. For you,” I said. “And I’m really sorry. My mistake. See you around. Sometime.” And then I did what I was becoming all too good at—I left Luke Lloyd looking astonished and possibly even a little alarmed that girls like me weren’t receiving the drugs they needed to function in society. Then I went home with Alexa and cut out a picture of him at a benefit from the
Hollywood Reporter
and slipped it into my diary, where it remained unlooked at, because every time I so much as thought about Luke Lloyd from that moment forward, I had to sing at the top of my lungs to drown out the horrible memory of that afternoon.

When you’re in love with a married man, you shouldn’t wear mascara.

—Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik
The Apartment

I
picked at my fishnet stockings and contemplated my feather duster as I sat enveloped in the plush gunmetal gray suede seats of Lara’s Range Rover. I felt a certain dread about the evening that lay before me. It was Halloween, and I was wearing a French maid’s costume. Lara was smoking like someone on death row and playing some suicidal anthem by Linkin Park, and much as I wanted to get out and make friends and have fun like you’re supposed to in your twenties, I didn’t exactly have a great feeling about tonight. My sense of unease wasn’t helped by Lara’s death-wish driving. She had mounted several curbs, skipped numerous red lights, tried her hardest to kill a coyote that had been ambling across the street, and was now driving with one arm—interestingly, not her cigarette arm—out the window. She was distracted to the point of being catatonic, and so I also knew that once we arrived at the party, I’d be lucky to get an introduction to the host before she swanned off in a blue haze and left me looking like a gate-crasher. Still, an invitation’s an invitation, and I wasn’t ungrateful—simply nervous.

I started to realize that Lara’s excessive headbanging while she drove down Santa Monica was more like flagellation than fun. She had
dark circles under her eyes and more makeup than was required even for her risen-from-the-dead, recapitated Marie Antoinette costume. When the song ended, I turned down the volume for a brief second.

“Lara, are you okay?”

She didn’t even look at me when she answered, which was just as well, given how bad her driving was when she was supposedly concentrating. “Of course I’m okay, why?”

I shouldn’t have bothered asking. Though Lara and I seemed to be making new inroads to friendship, there still seemed to be a barrier as long as the Great Wall of China between us.

“No reason, you just look a little tired.”

Lara shrugged her shoulders noncommittally. “I’ve been trying to get my novel done, and it’s doing my head in a bit. I think I really need to just let off some steam. Go a bit crazy. Thanks for coming with me tonight, Elizabeth. I really needed the company.”

“Anytime,” I said, and meant it as we pulled up to a beautiful Spanish hacienda that seemed to go on for a lifetime. Apparently the party venue had been changed due to the enthusiastic RSVP list. The house was nestled just below Runyon Canyon. We parked the car and walked through the open gates, with the requisite men in black checking the guest list. This was apparently
the
Halloween party to be at this year. It was supposed to be harder to get into than Trey Parker’s—so no pressure to be cool, then. I gulped nervously.

We climbed up the steps toward the door, with Lara practically pushing me from behind. I was struck deaf and dumb by the magnificent excess of it all. It was like being in a haunted house without ever having paid the dollar or passed through the curtain. Steam was rising from the front lawn, making an eerie fog formation at the door, and the sound of wind whistling was coming from every direction. Gravestones of the current heads of studios were littered across the lawn, and I was certain I saw something skeletal move in the distance behind the willow tree. Lara looked annoyed as she pulled a bit of cobweb from her Marie Antoinette wig.

“A bit over the top. For fuck’s sake,” she snarled as the door creaked open.

“Come on, don’t you think it’s great?” By the death look she delivered, I assumed that the answer was no.

The door swung open, and I looked around hoping to meet and
thank our host for having us, but it seemed the door had opened on its own accord. I shivered slightly as we entered the cavernous hallway. Though the house was almost completely devoid of furniture, with faux cobwebs dangling from every surface, it struck me that it felt less like a haunted house and more like a living, breathing mausoleum to long-gone Hollywood glamour. Every element of the house was gigantic, starting with the slabs of sandstone that covered the foyer floor leading up to the
Sunset Boulevard
staircase. I did consider for a moment what might be buried beneath those enormous pieces of rock.

“Lara, whose house is this?”

“I have no idea, but it’s amazing. I think it was Bette Davis’s house, or maybe Myrna Loy. One of the guys is a set decorator, and I think he just finished escrow last week.”

I learned later from an in-the-know guest that no one had lived here for years and that they were going to gut the entire place and restore it to its original beauty. But at the moment it was perfect for a Halloween party, and the addition of six-by-eight-foot waxworks of naked cadavers in various stages of dissection that hung from the wall made me shuffle closer to Lara. I could hear voices coming from somewhere in the distance, but the lights were so low and the black draping so heavy I couldn’t really discern the direction. I felt something touch my ankle, and then a head came flying out of the pitch black, stopping an inch from my face. I screamed so loud that I could have given Janet Leigh a serious run for her money in the casting of
Psycho
. It was a severed head dripping with fake blood. It bobbed in front of me, and I heard laughter coming from down the hall. Maybe Hollywood wasn’t the best place to attend a Halloween party. They took it a bit seriously for my liking. I glanced over at Lara and had a brief moment of concern. She was no longer to my left but was clutching me around the waist like a little girl.

“Lara, are you okay?”

She looked up at the bobbing head and blinked her big eyes in wonderment. “God, it looks so real! Sick, twisted makeup artists must have been at this all day.” She let go of me and stood up laughing at herself. “Jesus, am I on edge or what?”

I was tempted to agree with her but just smiled instead as she straightened her wig. The wig was sensational. A good two feet high with a birdcage built in. The red guillotine mark across her neck and
her alabaster skin were finished off with eighteenth-century garb borrowed from a costume-designer friend. In the dark corridor, Lara looked hauntingly ghostly, immeasurably cool, and amazingly sad.

When we finally made it, with lunch still in our stomachs, to the back of the house, the party was in full swing. Pink champagne was cascading down ice sculptures, and perfectly catered hors d’oeuvres, mostly in the shape of severed fingers, were being carried around by the killer from
Scream
. I snatched up a piggy in the blanket from one of the many hooded figures carrying trays and forgot to say thank you. Much to my surprise, all the guests had gone overboard on their costumes. This wasn’t in keeping with the West Coast Casual look that was said to dominate most parties in this town. Ordinarily you couldn’t get the L.A. crowd to lose their flip-flops, but tonight that low-key cool seemed to have been cast to the howling Halloween winds as movie stars and hip indie directors who were ordinarily too groovy to dress up were done up as Frankenstein and Dracula, with so much fake blood and so many severed limbs that I started to feel queasy. Clearly it was a cathartic experience for them. I just felt like a low-rent amateur in my French maid’s outfit.

Luckily, an hour later, with my feather duster stolen by an overenthusiastic bumblebee and a knight in shining armor’s having snagged my fishnets with his chain mail, I was looking more like a cheap Sunset hooker who’d been bashed about. Which was at least a little more horrific in theme. I’d already done a quick tour through the party, hoping to trip over Luke Lloyd, but recognizing my own mother in this crowd would have been a tricky task. Besides which, the people here tonight weren’t exactly the glossy Hollywood pack; they were way cooler. But I still had to keep my lip gloss applied and be vigilant, because I just didn’t think I could handle another accidental fiasco of a meeting in some public venue; those were starting to really get under my skin. The annoying thing was that he seemed so nice. So genuine. But then I’d just have to keep reminding myself that he was about as genuine as the Incredible Hulk who was serving the tuna sashimi.

As predicted, Lara had introduced me to several people and then been swept away on a tide of greetings and ghouls, leaving me to become involved in a conversation with a makeup artist, who was dressed as Marilyn Monroe after the overdose, about her breast implants. She was extolling the benefits of soybean oil over saline and the new
protective coating on the silicone bag. Then, as I surreptitiously glanced at my watch to see whether she could possibly make this treatise last a whole hour, I noticed that she kept fixating on my own cleavage in its Victoria’s Secret push-up bra. She clocked my look of concern.

“I’m sorry to stare, but who did your breasts? They’re so natural. I mean, look at the gentle curve.”

And before I knew it, she had both her hands on my tits and was squeezing them like I was a prize Holstein cow competing at the county fair.

“Donny, come over here and feel these.” She smiled reassuringly as her platinum wig slipped a little in all the excitement. “Don’t worry, Donny’s my husband.” Well, that made it all okay, then.

Donny was there in a heartbeat, and his wife took his hand and placed it on my breast. I recognized Donny immediately. Possibly because he was wearing Michael Jackson’s clothes but had taken off his creepy rubber postsurgery-Michael mask, so I got to see the real Donny. Who, despite his slightly ravaged skin and failing hairline, was still the undisputed heartthrob of my teen years. He used to be one of those delicate, New Romantic heroes of the eighties, without a chest hair in sight and with every lock on his head gelled as carefully as a Michelangelo sculpture. If I recalled correctly, he’d been a one-hit wonder discovered on
Star Search.
I’d have to call my parents in the morning and see if they could find the signed poster of him that used to hang on my bedroom wall.

“Amazing job.” Donny looked and groped, and then his other hand joined in the party. I was frozen to the spot. I didn’t want to seem like a prude or too tightly wound, but I soon realized that this was obviously one of their parlor tricks, and if I didn’t put an end to this now, after another cocktail I might find myself adding a bit of spice to their conjugal bed. Even though I was all for experience, and when I was fourteen would have traded in my roller skates to have Donny manhandle me and take me home, wiggy Marilyn wife or no wiggy Marilyn wife, I was considerably older now, Donny was considerably less attractive, and I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with them anyway, even if I’d wanted to. So I smiled amiably and removed their wandering hands from my breasts.

“Lovely to meet you both.” I stood up. “They’re real, by the way,” I added. Which was mercifully all the shock factor that was required to
leave them speechless and give me enough time to escape through the creaking gate to the terraced poolside, where the epicenter of the party suddenly seemed to have shifted.

I stepped out onto the patio and found myself in the middle of a milling crowd staring up toward the roof of the house. They were discussing some crazy girl who was walking on the roof. They were speculating as to whether she was the pièce de résistance in the entertainment or if she was for real. I looked up at the cloudy night sky and saw silhouetted against it an eighteenth-century updo, and even though I hadn’t seen Lara in an hour or so, I was pretty sure I recognized that wig even from three stories down.

I turned to the vampire standing next to me. “How long has she been up there?”

“About ten minutes. She keeps yelling something about always having wanted to dive into a pool from a rooftop. I hope her wig’s pinned tightly, though.”

“Jesus Christ, has anybody gone upstairs to try to get her down?” I said in a panic.

He looked at me like I’d just arrived from Uranus. “
I
didn’t give her the drugs. What do you want
me
to do?”

I bolted back into the house and sprinted as fast as I could to the grand staircase. I took three steps at a time until I reached the top floor. There were many doors, so I threw them each wide open as I called out Lara’s name, hoping to find the window she’d used to climb onto the roof. Then I realized that there was another staircase leading to the attic. The light was on, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I could see Lara through a small open window, prancing around and laughing in her full skirts on the badly damaged tile roof. It looked precarious from here, and I was still a good twenty yards away. I stopped running and began a calm walk in case I startled her.

“Lara. It’s Elizabeth,” I called out as gently as I could, and edged toward the window. “Lara, what are you doing up there? Do you mind coming off the roof for a second?”

Lara swung around at such a speed that her left foot slipped. But she righted herself quickly, just as I was about to dive out to catch her.

“Elizabeth, is that you? You’ve got to come out on the roof. It’s so fun. You can see the Hollywood sign—it’s amazing!”

“Okay, honey, I’m coming. Just give me a second.” I climbed up onto
the window ledge and sat with my bottom firmly planted on the inside of the window frame. I smiled bravely at Lara.

“That’s right, just come out and join me. My God, we’re having some fun tonight. We’re going to forget everything and have a fresh beginning. That’s why I’m going to jump into that pool down there. A new start, a spiritual rebirth.”

I held on and looked down at the pool. It was a speck of shimmering blue in the concrete landscape. I knew all about the lure of a swimming pool at a party, but thankfully mine had just been a subconscious bid for professional suicide. Lara’s just might end up as the real thing if she jumped.