The Sex Was Great But... (12 page)

I
haven't slept properly for the last two nights. Being in love has been more detrimental to my sleep patterns than sharing a sofa with a nutter and a wannabe porn star. In the end I usually go for a swim, hoping that a few laps under the stars will relax me, although deep down I am always hoping that Holly will hear me and come down. But she doesn't.

I mean, the sex is still great and all, but…

Tomorrow night is the finale, and after that I guess I won't see her again. Part of me is relieved, but the other part of me has to push this thought from my mind in order to get through the day.

I'm back in the dentist's chair, awaiting my caps. My face is pumped full to bursting with Novocain and Nancy is driving me up the wall talking. By the time the dentist, Nancy, Dinny, Nile and their kind are finished with me, my own mum probably won't recognize me. I thought of writing to her, or even sending her a postcard, a big tourist-spot hi from L.A.—the city that sleeps. But what would I say?

Mum has never been big on dentists. Dentists and doctors are like church and grandparents—something that happens to kids who didn't eat their lentils.

“Are you happy with the color, Mr. Monroe?” the dentist asks, holding a mirror up so that I can see the cap he's just put on. I grunt in the affirmative at the glow-in-the-dark white cap. Maybe it just looks that white against the contrasting brown of my own teeth. I mean, I was dreading the haircut, but that turned out okay. Maybe it will be the same with my teeth? Well, that's what I'm telling myself.

My haircut is a cross between a Hoxton Fin and the curly mop I already had. Secretly I concede that it makes me look more alive, but I don't admit this to Holly. I tell her I hate it. Well, I did hate it when I first saw it, all covered in hair gunk, also, I was still angry about the Nile thing.

As Nancy and the dentist study my mouth, I close my
eyes and watch reruns of my time with Holly, and I think about how I love the way she doesn't mind if her hair gets mussed up. Most of all I love the freckle under her arm that no one else has ever noticed—I feel like it's a part of her that's totally mine.

Our arguments all started over Nile, this idiot that Nancy employed to give me an acting lesson. The guy was doing my head in and so I had Joseph kick him out. Holly and I laughed ourselves sick about what a jerk he was, and in that moment I felt really connected to her. It was the first time outside of the poolhouse that I felt we were equal. Like she was my actual girlfriend. All the rest of the time we've had Nancy and the specter of my makeover hanging over us.

“Now, if this doesn't give you a ring of confidence, Leo, nothing will.” Nancy makes my high school mathematics teacher seem like a kitten. She talks a lot about conflict, but she's not been in the least bit conflicted when it comes to controlling me—right down to my underwear, which is now Calvin Klein briefs—yes, briefs! I am dying of embarrassment every time I put them on.

“By the time we're done here the shoes and clothing should have arrived,” she announces, as if this is something I'm excited about. I hear the snap as she closes her Palm Pilot.

“Any more Novocain there, Doc?” I ask—well at least I would ask if I didn't have a mouth full of cotton wool and rubber hosing. As it is I grunt and close my eyes and picture Holly again.

Nancy starts chatting away to the dentist about her own dental hygiene issues. The woman never shuts up.
Sometimes when I'm alone with Holly I mimic her and sometimes Holly laughs. On my second day I defaced these posters of positive image affirmations Nancy had put up on the wall of my poolhouse and I was shocked that Holly defended Nancy. Then again, I always defend Kev.

My life has changed so much these last two weeks I'm not even sure I'd know what to say to my mum now. Nothing I want to say would sound right on a postcard. The scariest thing is, I'm used to it all. I'm used to the view, the twinkling lights of Tinsel Town. I'm used to passing celebrities on the street.

Last night at a bar with Nancy and Holly, drinking my Virgin Mary, I found myself talking to Ben Stiller—okay, so we were only discussing the pistachio nuts, but later on I couldn't believe who was sitting at the table next to me. Johnny (Rotten) Lydon. My mum will get a real kick out of that, even though she'll throw a fit that I didn't get his autograph. Holly glared at me for even looking at him.

I've even grown used to the daily filming of my metamorphosis from down and outer (Holly's term) to Ideal Hollywood Man.

When it comes down to it, the only thing I'm not used to is the sex with Holly, and I'm not going to write that to my mum. We're close, but not that close. Most girls, you sleep with them a few times and after that you're just doing it to be polite. But with Holly the sex is better every time—in direct contrast to my relationship with her, which seems to deteriorate with every moment we carry on like we aren't lovers.

Even Nancy, who spends almost every waking moment
with us, doesn't seem to have a clue what's going on. I wonder if this is because I am that good at secrecy. Or is it because no one would ever suspect that a girl like Holly would even look twice at a guy like me?

Apart from laughing about Nile, it seems as if what we share with one another in the poolhouse at night is taking place in a parallel universe: a universe where a hopeless nobody and a celebrity can fall in love and be together.

Her world is distorted by her image, and her image is distorted by her world in equal proportion. She's given me a bunch of videos of her show. I've watched them in the poolhouse, mesmerized by the television persona of the woman I love. The first time I saw her laughing with celebrities I was overcome with pride, but after a while I grew to loathe the show and all it stood for. It isn't Holly—she's funny and cute—it's the show.

MakeMeOver
is rooted in a myth of intimacy with Holly and the stars she's made over. The implication being that without Holly and the
MakeMeOver
team your life will end up in the toilet, just like the careers of the schmucks who are getting the makeovers.

The root to happiness is image. For Holly, quality of life begins and ends with image: the right color coordination, the right hairstyle, the right shoes can revolutionize the world. Something as basic as correctly applied makeup can win you that dream job. Nancy and Holly are exploiting a nation's fear of failure-by-image. I am the latest stooge in Holly and Nancy's morality tale and the moral of this story is, Beauty is skin-deep. Image rules. Scratch below the surface and none of it means anything, including me.

The thing is though, Holly seems to hate her life. She's
paranoid—not just about me, but about any aspect of her life getting out. Even her love of white chocolate is a dirty secret that needs hiding. For all their money and success, celebrities live their lives in the shadows, terrified of the flashbulbs of hidden cameras. Whenever we go anywhere we have to enter by a side door, and she's always wearing dark glasses.

“It's like you spend your life trying to become well known, and now you go through dark alleys in sunglasses to avoid being recognized,” I commented once when we were talking easily with one another.

“And?” she'd snapped. “You think that the irony is lost on me?”

She told me that she sometimes dreams that she's on a treadmill she can't get off. She had the dream when she was staying in the poolhouse one night, and started flailing her arms all over the place. After she slugged me one in the face I woke her up, and she told me about the treadmill dream as she lay in my arms and I stroked her long toffee-colored hair.

I asked her why she couldn't get off the treadmill, but she didn't have an answer because she'd already fallen asleep again. “I think I could fall in love with you, Holly Klein,” I whispered as I drifted off into my own dreams, which increasingly featured her. She's the only girl I've ever slept with who didn't turn away from me to fall asleep.

Girls go on in magazines about guys turning away after sex, but in my experience they're the worst offenders. Holly falls asleep in my arms the way people do in movies. It's the best thing about our poolhouse relationship—well, maybe not the best, but definitely up there. The worst is the way she's always gone before I wake up. I open my eyes
and she's gone, and it's like she's never been there at all. Like I dreamed the whole thing.

She's scrupulous about removing any evidence of her ever having been in the poolhouse, too—apart from one time when she left her bra! She never even leaves an indent on my futon where she's been lying—just her smell; that's all that remains. Sometimes I roll over and snort her pillow like it's a line of coke.

I don't know the name of the perfume she wears, but whatever it is I'd do anything for a bottle of it. I love her smell all the more because she can't take it with her when she goes. It's the only part of herself she can't take back, the only part of her that refuses to conspire against what we share together in the night. The smell of her hair on the pillow, the faint trace of the scent of her body on my futon—that's how I know that the nights are real.

I suspect that after she leaves me she runs into the house and calls her weasel of a therapist, Wilhelm. Her “shrink-head,” as Conchita calls him. I'm sure she tells him all about her night-time cavorting with “the street person,” as she insists on referring to me. She's probably receiving loads of overpriced intensive emotional therapy about me.

When she refers to the nights we spend together making love, she always refers to them as “incidents.” As in—“Let's draw a line under the incident, Leo. Leave it behind us.” It makes it sound like our lovemaking is a crime we've committed while not of sound mind, and now she wants to draw a chalk line around the corpse and have her lawyer deal with it.

Sometimes when Holly is pissing me off, I close off my
brain to what she's saying and think back to the last time she was in my arms—a slide show of her going down on me, me going down on her, the two of us on the brink of orgasm, the two of us kissing, her sleeping in my arms. It's the only way I can get through the days, because it's only in the dark of night that she treats me as an equal.

Nancy and I are at one on the Wilhelm issue, although she assures me that Holly will tire of him soon—“She always dumps her therapists—just likes she dumps her agents, just like she dumps her men. Holly doesn't do commitment.” Actually, this doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.

“That's the lot, then, Mr. Monroe. Would you like to take a look?”

I take the mirror with a fair degree of trepidation and face up to the new me staring back.

I
'm starting to question things I shouldn't; things about my life that I may not have liked but I just accepted. Actually, I'm starting to question everything.

“What are we doing this for?” I asked at dinner in the L.A. Garden of Eden, Les Deaux Café, last night, with Leo and Nancy. It had taken me forever to get ready. I was traumatized by the choice between the Earl jeans or the Juicy Couture jeans. I plumped for the Earls, but it wasn't an easy choice and even now I wasn't certain it was the right one.

Nancy rolled her eyes. “Because we're hungry, darh-ling,” she drawled in her OTT fake English accent.

I rolled my eyes back at her. “I don't mean that. I mean
this—this whole lifestyle image thing we're doing.” Then I tagged on “darh-ling” to annoy her.

Nancy looked perfect in her clam-colored Dianna Vreeland classic wraparound dress. She epitomized chic and, unlike me, Nancy was never, ever creased. “What do you mean, lifestyle image thing? That's what we do—we
are
image.”

“But why? Why do we care so much?”

“Can we order now, please?” Nancy asked testily, signaling the end to my ennui.

“I think Holly's asked a good question,” Leo interjected.

“When someone says, ‘that's a good question' it's because they don't have a good answer,” she quipped. “Can we order now?”

I gave Leo a look of solidarity and ordered the swordfish, and then we went over the labels that we'd opted to dress Leo in for the final interview.

I'll admit I'm having doubts. Not just funny, niggling-feeling-in-the-back-of-my-mind doubts, but the I-can't-breathe sort of doubts about Leo and the makeover. I spent the whole morning doing laps in the pool, trying to relax, but it didn't work.

Tomorrow night is the finale. Visibly, Leo is almost ready. His skin is the color of honey, and his new haircut (despite what he says) looks great. A selection of shoes and suits is being delivered today, and tomorrow morning he's going to Rodeo Drive to Armani for the final fitting of his tux. Now all we have to do is get the network psyched about it. With my mother's show due to air in a few weeks we're relying on this makeover to save us more than ever.

Nancy has absolutely no doubts that we'll pull the whole
thing off, but then Nancy doesn't do doubts. Nancy is driven by certainties, whereas I am ruled by doubts. I think I was always this way. Even when I first crash-landed in Hollywood I had doubts. I was running from something (my mother) rather than to something (fame and success).

Since I received the news that my mother has a show, which is going to be aired at the same time as mine, incidents from my childhood—all the wounds I'd been working to close for years—have opened up. I guess when I came here I figured the way to truly bury her was to throw myself into my work and become a household name. I'm not saying I didn't want celebrity and money; it's just that they were a bonus rather than the goal.

Well, that's what countless gurus and therapists have told me, anyway. Even Wilhelm says, “You are a refugee of your past! On the run from your mother!”

Only now my persecutor has found me. She's in the compound. I can hear her bullying voice in my head at night.

I had one therapist who tried to get me to work through all my childhood baggage by taking a more compassionate view of my mother. “Try referring to her as ‘Mom' instead of ‘my mother,'” she advised.

My mother—Mom—whatever you call her—was and is a total bitch. I remember my first date. I was fifteen, about to go out with one of the cutest boys in class, and I asked her how I looked. She lifted her head out of her gin glass and looked me up and down with those cruel eyes of hers. I hated her eyes because they were always looking at me for something that wasn't there. She surprised me by smiling that night, though.

“Is it okay?” I asked hopefully, almost believing she approved. “Do you really think I look nice?”

She didn't say anything for a bit. She took a deep drag on one of those long thin cigarettes she used to smoke and said, “I'll tell you what you want to hear. You look ‘nice.'” She made the word sound like rotten meat. I waited for the inevitable. She was still smiling. “Sure you look nice—like a great big fat nice whore.” She laughed so hard she snorted.

It was the smile that hurt the most—the chance that she was actually going to say something supportive. That was the part that cut me up. But I'm over my mother now. Really. Plenty of people have mother problems—just read any of the papers or any magazine. Hollywood is full of them. My mother might be a nightmare, but I'm not the only one. It's practically a celebrity disease.

Nancy faxed me an interview that my mother had given to some trashy paper about how she had fought and won a battle with alcoholism and how she'd tried to make amends to all the people she had harmed. Leo read it first and tore it up. He was furious that Nancy even agreed to let the office fax it over.

To be fair, Nancy had tried to keep it from me. “You're gonna slit your wrists when you read this darh-ling!” she'd warned in her fake accent. But I didn't feel like slitting my wrists. It kind of made me laugh, especially the part where she rated presenting a show in the same time-slot as mine as “making amends.”

I laughed so hard I had to take a Valium.

But I'm not as upset about my mother as I've been making out to the people around me. I was devastated about her show at first, sure, but now I only think about it to stop
myself thinking about Leo. I refused to go to the dentist with him today, even though he begged me to. He says he's worried that he's going to end up looking like those poncy guys in the magazines we showed him. I know he thinks I'm being distant and a bitch, but what am I expected to do? Whatever feelings I might have for him, it's not as if we could ever be part of one another's worlds…is it?

I've had my share of secrets, but as far as men are concerned I've always told Nancy
everything.
I've had a therapist to minister to my emotions and psychoses since I signed my first deal. I've always told all about the men I date. I don't even talk to Wilhelm about Leo, though.
Especially
not Wilhelm. All I talk about to Wilhelm is my mother and how I feel undermined. I don't think he's listening to anything I say lately anyway. He's got a hot new book deal and he's been ranting about the emotional revolution a lot lately. Like Nancy, Leo doesn't trust Wilhelm.

The weirdest thing is that Nancy hasn't worked out there is something going on between Leo and me. I thought she of all people would see through me. After all, she's always conducted my love life like it was her own in the past.

Recently she's been talking a lot about Ted. Apparently he called her up and asked a lot of questions about me. She's started calling him “dear Ted” now, instead of “that bastard Ted.” She thinks he's still in love with me and is virtually urging me to forgive him. Like, excuse me, but the guy gave personal secrets about me to a trashy newspaper and I'm meant to trust him again because his career has picked up recently?

“Yes,” said Nancy. “It's business, not personal.”

That's why Leo and I have no future; even the personal is business in this town.

I finish my swim and start towel-drying my hair as I head inside. I would normally go into the poolhouse to dry myself, but I don't go in there now. Not in daylight. It smells of Leo, and thinking about Leo makes my stomach knot up. I feel terrible every time I think about him and what we've been doing. I really don't know what's come over me, embarking on this affair and—worse—not being able to end it.

“Hey, Holly, our star is back!” Nancy calls. “Come and check out the new teeth.”

I wander out to find Leo looking more like a prisoner of war than a star. He's got that sort of rubber face you get when you visit the dentist, and I want to hold him.

“Okay, so smile—let's see what we're getting for our money,” I say, all upbeat and L.A., before I realize how insensitive I'm being, mentioning the money the show's spent on his teeth. Nice one, Holly. I was only joking, trying to lighten things up, but I can tell by the look in Leo's eyes that it came out wrong. “Just joking,” I say, knowing the damage is already done. He isn't smiling.

“Well, are you going to show her!” Nancy urges in her Dick Van Dyke voice. “She's the one paying, remember?”

I feel so sorry for Leo, with his Novocain face and the hurt in his eyes. I know it can't be easy for him. I mean, it's not as if he asked for this makeover: we bullied him into it to save our show. I give his arm a squeeze. “Must have hurt a lot, huh? I hate those needles.”

“No problem,” he says, and then he smiles and I go bright red, feeling more ashamed of myself than I thought I ever could. He looks absurd.

“Wow!” I exclaim. “You look amazing. I mean handsome.”
If your idea of handsome includes plastic teeth,
I almost say. Seriously, what have I done? What have I done?

The worst of it is, Leo seems to trust me. “You think?” he asks hopefully.

“Definitely,” Nancy and I say at once. I have to stop myself screaming, How can you believe anything the shallowest woman in North America tells you, you schmuck?

Poor Leo. He didn't even know what a schmuck was before he met me, and in less than two weeks I've turned him into one. I'm so relieved by the distraction of Conchita walking in that I want to hug her.

“Conchita, have Mr. Leo's clothes and shoes arrived?” I ask brightly.

“What happen to you Mr. Leo?” she asks.
Is that a look of horror on her face?

“The dentist,” he explains, and he turns to me for reassurance.

I nod supportively, my eyes begging him to hit me, but he doesn't even look angry. He seems to believe all my reassurances, and then he smiles and I want to slap myself across the face.

“Ooooh, Mr. Leo, you look handsome,” Conchita coos and, bless her, she really means it. I have never valued her more than at that moment. Leo gives her a hug and I suddenly feel like a stranger in my own house. “You the most handsome star in Hollywood, Mr. Leo,” she says, and gives him a big motherly kiss.

“And you are the sexiest leading lady, Conchita,” Leo declares, swinging my housekeeper around the kitchen like she weighs less than an enchilada. I know it's ridiculous, but
I suddenly feel a violent surge of jealousy that Conchita can hug Leo in public.

Nancy claps her hands and declares that we should have champagne to celebrate. My face is burning. I am afraid of what I am about to lose now that Leo's makeover is all but over. I am a bitch. I don't want Leo, but I don't want to lose him either.

I break up the party by asking Conchita again whether Mr. Leo's clothes and shoes have arrived yet. “We can't think of drinking champagne now, Nancy,” I snap. “Wayne is coming to shoot Leo's final interview and we need to make sure the clothes are right.”

Leo, sensing my stress, puts Conchita down. She pats her apron and smiles at him coquettishly.

“Conchita, have Mr. Leo's things arrived?” I repeat.

“Yes Miss Holly, Mr. Leo's things are all laid out in the guest suite.”

“Fine. Shall we attend to your wardrobe, then?” I ask.
I sound like a prison warden.

Leo salutes me and we all march upstairs. He's thinking I'm an image-Nazi. I am thinking he's right.

Dozens of boxes of shoes and a rack of suits await our selection and Nancy goes straight into business mode, all thoughts of champagne forgotten as she flicks the lids off shoeboxes and pulls out the shoes. I pick up a beautiful pair of British-made Oxfords.

“I suppose they're okay,” Leo concedes, sitting on the bed and taking off his shoes to try them on.

“Check these out,” cries Nancy, laughing as she holds up a pair of black-tasseled shoes from Italy.

“Not on your life,” says Leo, his eyes and Nancy's locked
in mutual loathing of the absurd shoes. I feel excluded by their look, jealous that they are sharing something I can never share with Leo—open friendliness.

I can't seem to help myself as I am gripped by an overwhelming urge to hit the two of them. I hear the words tumble out of my mouth. “Why not?”

“Come off it, Holls!” Nancy says. “You're not serious. We don't like these shoes.”

“Don't we?” I challenge.

Nancy looks at me weirdly. She knows something is not right. She's suspicious, and if I back out of my love for the ridiculous shoes she'll know.

Leo's green eyes pierce into me, daring me to confront my own betrayal. I'm fucking with his head and I can't stop myself. I don't want to stop myself. “I think these are perfect,” I decree. I am being a monster, my sense of proportion and reality distorted by what I can't have. Years of therapy gave me this ability to psychoanalyze myself. The only thing I don't know is whether I'm doing this because Leo doesn't want anything I have to give him or whether it's because he does and I can't afford to give it, but I make him try on the stupid tasseled shoes anyway.

“But I look like a tosser in these,” he pleads. And he does look like a tosser—whatever a tosser is. It sounds pretty grim anyway.

“You look handsome,” I tell him as I press the intercom. “Conchita,” I call, “could you come upstairs to the guest-room, please? Conchita will love them,” I assure him.

Which, of course, she does.

I hate myself.