Seeing Stars (28 page)

After he went outside she looked at her back in a mirror and found on her lower back an abrasion the size of a fist, weeping clear liquid. She left her wet bathing suit where it was on the cabana floor, walked into the house stark naked, and went straight to her bathroom, where she filled her Waterpik—she’d always had excellent dental hygiene—with water too hot to touch. She brought the thing into the shower with her and inserted the Waterpik nozzle into her vagina as far as it would go. She hadn’t been able to feel the heat until it was dripping down her legs like blood.

She’d stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out, and when it did she sat naked on the bathroom’s fluffy pink, little-girl rug, sucking on her knee until, by accident, her eyes lit on the disposable razor she used in the shower to shave her legs and underarms. She crawled over and picked it up. There were ten perfectly round bruises on her arms, five on each from Chet’s fingers. She held the double blade so it connected two of the bruises and pressed the razor home. Two thin lines of blood welled up like tears.

She was on a plane back to LA two days later, with five one-hundred-dollar bills zipped into a new Coach bag that had been left on top of her suitcase. Inside there was a note, written in script like barbed wire, that said, “Remember.” Every month after that she got another five hundred dollars in cash in the mail. She made a point of spending every last penny. Once she gave a fifty-dollar bill to the homeless man who lived in a freeway cloverleaf and panhandled near Mimi’s studio, but usually she spent it on whatever. The day after she got back, she bought a box cutter at Kmart and cut four intersecting lines into her left arm: tic tac toe. You win.

Allison wandered out of Ruth’s bedroom and into Bethany’s. The girl had a ton of stuff. Books, books, books, paintings on the walls instead of posters, a nice TV, and all these Starbucks teddy bears in different outfits. Bethany had told her she had every Starbucks bear that was ever sold in Seattle, and that meant about six a year since she was eight. She had so many, she said, that a lot of them were in plastic totes in the garage. Allison picked up one that was dressed in bunny pajamas, bunny slippers, and a hood with bunny ears. It must have been an Easter bear. She kissed it on the lips, put its stubby arms around her neck, then put it back on Bethany’s bed and wandered out to the kitchen. The kitchen was her favorite room, with nice windows, cheerful yellow walls with white trim, and a generally homey feel. From there she drifted into the dining room and over to the sideboard that held the oak box full of silverware. The inside of the box was lined with thick, metallic-smelling, plum-colored flannel, which, according to Ruth, kept the silver from tarnishing. Allison picked up a serving spoon, looked at her reflection in the bowl, and stuck out her tongue. When she heard Ruth’s car crunching in the driveway she slipped the spoon into her pocket, closed up the box, and met Ruth at the door to see if she needed any help with the groceries.

I
T WAS ALWAYS HARD ON
M
IMI WHEN
A
LLISON WAS AWAY,
though she’d never tell Allison that. During the two weeks the girl had been in Seattle and then Houston for Christmas, the house had echoed; even Tina Marie had been abnormally clingy. Not that Mimi was at the house much, but still, you had to sleep some time, and the greenroom couch at the studio was too soft and too lumpy, though if she’d been twenty years younger, she probably wouldn’t have cared. Now it just made her sciatica kick up, so she worked through the evening, buttoned the place up, and drove home at the DUI hour, when all the drunks, drug users, and belligerents came out. This she knew from experience. In the past she had had too much to drink herself on more than a few occasions after a client blew a network mix-and-match, underperformed for the role of a lifetime, or choked on what should have been a cakewalk of a guest-star audition for a casting director who was a fan. That’s when the bottle of wine came out of the beat-to-shit credenza she had picked up, like many of her other furnishings, at a swap meet in Tarzana, along with the juice glass with the picture of Tweety Bird on it that had been given to her by one of her little six-year-olds however many years ago. The first glass of cheap chianti was always bitter, but the wine mellowed over the next three or four glasses until she could drink it like fruit juice.

M
IMI PICKED
A
LLISON UP AT
LAX. S
HE’D BEEN CIRCLING
the airport for an hour, she said, with Tina Marie barking in the backseat every time a plane flew over. She gave Allison a quick hug after Allison hoisted her suitcase into the trunk and hopped into the front seat.

“So?” Mimi said. “Did you have a good time in Seattle?”

Allison nodded. “They have a cute house. Small, you know, but cozy. They don’t have expensive furniture and stuff, though, which is weird since he’s a dentist and he probably makes a ton of money. But it was the kind of house where you could eat in the living room and put your feet up. We went bowling, and we shopped, and it was Hanukkah, so we lit candles and played with these little tops and stuff. Oh, and we saw a couple of movies, except at the end we were the only ones clapping. I guess people don’t clap at the movies unless you’re in LA. Hugh—he said I should call him that, not Dr. Rabinowitz—was in a really good mood the whole time. You could tell because he made us waffles and pancakes. He’s probably really lonely when they’re gone.”

“And Houston?”

Allison shrugged and looked out the window. “They gave me a pair of diamond studs and some Jean Paul Gaultier perfume.” She stuck out her wrist so Mimi could smell it. “Mostly they were never around, though. They had all these Christmas parties to go to, but Chet made me stay home because I’m underage. Like that counts if you’re at a party in someone’s
house
. I guess the bubble over the pool broke, so no swimming. They had this Wii thing, so I played that.”

Mimi nodded. “Did you download the sides?”

Allison patted the side of her Coach tote. “I printed them this morning so I could work on them on the plane. Oh, and guess who was in first class? Jessica Alba. She was with some guy, I can’t remember his name, but you could tell he wanted everyone to see him with her. He’d make eye contact with everyone he could as they went by. I didn’t look at him, just because he wanted me to so much.” She fished a compact out of her bag. “She’s pretty.”

“Who?”

Allison rolled her eyes. “Jessica
Alba
. Her skin’s not that great, though.” She pulled down the car visor and opened the compact so she could powder her nose. “She had a zit right here.” She touched a place on her chin. “You could tell she’d tried to cover it up, but you could see it anyway.” She put the compact away and settled the tote on the floor by her feet. “So what’s new at the house?”

Mimi shrugged. “It’s been pretty quiet. Tina Marie ate a shoe, we found a mouse in the kitchen. Little things. Nothing interesting.”

“Whose?”

“What?”

“Whose
shoe
?” Allison turned and shook her finger at the little dog in the backseat. “If it was mine, I’ll be
so mad
.” Tina Marie straightened her narrow shoulders and looked out the car window dismissively. She was riding in the doggie booster seat that Allison and Mimi had bought for her after reading an article on dog auto safety, and she clearly considered it an assault on her dignity.

Mimi answered for her. “Not yours. Reba’s or Hillary’s, and it was only a Croc flip-flop. I’ve told those girls how many times that anything chewy is fair game.”

“Oh, whew. Did anyone book anything?”

“Perry booked an Alpha-Bits commercial.” Perry was one of Mimi’s few African American clients, a four-year-old with a smile like an angel. “He’s booking everything right now.”

“Sure, because he’s cute,” Allison said. “Nobody else?”

“No.”

“Good.”

When they got home Allison climbed out of the car, freed a haughty Tina Marie from the loathsome booster seat, and wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. Mimi took her tote. Allison was glad to be home; she danced into the front hall and turned to Mimi, her eyes twinkling. “So did you miss me?”

“Of course I missed you,” Mimi said.

“Oh, good. Me too,” said Allison, looking around the house and hugging herself. “Let’s order out—Chinese. Please? Can we? My treat.”

“It’s just us,” Mimi said. “Hillary and Reba won’t get back until the day after tomorrow.”

“Then bring it on, dog,” said Allison in her gangsta voice. She pulled a takeout menu from a drawer in the kitchen, tucked the phone receiver between her shoulder and her ear, and ordered without even asking Mimi what she wanted, because Mimi always wanted the same thing: double happiness chicken and potstickers. For herself Allison ordered lo mein with pea pods and shrimp, and an order of pork fried rice to share.

“Did you TiVo
Ghost Whisperer
?” Allison asked Mimi while they were waiting for the delivery. It was one of their favorite shows, and neither one of them thought Jennifer Love Hewitt was fat; she just had big boobs, which Allison, for one, envied. The guides at the Universal Studios theme park said you could see her Rollerblading around the lot at lunch sometimes, and that she always waved at the trams full of tourists. “Did you remember?”

Mimi had remembered.

When the food finally arrived they paused the TV while Allison paid. She tipped the delivery guy eight dollars because he was cute and he always blushed when she answered the door. The first time he ever delivered to them he included a headshot of himself and a résumé with the food order. A lot of delivery people did that. You never knew whose house you were going to; the worst that could happen was it got thrown away, but that wouldn’t matter if you made even one decent contact.

They watched the rest of their show while they ate. Mimi pointed out that she used to manage one of the guest stars, a good-looking guy in his twenties with a nice smile. “He always overacted,” she said. “It used to just drive me crazy. Someone must have finally gotten through to him, though. That or he’s just finally growing up.”

“Hey!” Allison said, suddenly leaning forward and pointing at the TV. “Look, that’s right off Lankershim. Remember when we got stuck in traffic because they had that whole detour set up, and we thought it was for
CSI
? I bet it was this.”

When the show was over they put all the trash together and Allison stashed away the extra soy sauce and an extra pair of chopsticks, which she used to put her hair up sometimes when she washed her face. Mimi said she was going to take a bath, so Allison dragged her suitcase back to her room and unpacked. She hadn’t worn a lot of what she’d brought, so it was all still neatly folded.

And underneath it all, carefully nested in one of her socks, was a single silver spoon.

January 2007

I
n Hollywood, the sheer number of celebrities makes you a celebrity, too, if only by proxy. You spend, because they do: on clothes you won’t wear, on handbags and hair extensions and waxing and toning and being, in general, ready—for your moment, your ascension, your destiny. And it’s not the destiny you already know, because that one can’t possibly be all you were meant for; no, it’s your other destiny, the one for which you’ve been preparing for years, the one where you wave to the crowds and shop on Rodeo Drive even for your socks and cigarettes; the destiny where your car windows are tinted to lend you some privacy you won’t really want until the thrill of recognition wears off and you no longer walk down a street watching for people to catch sight of you, elbow the next person over, and whisper your name. Cell phone pictures of you fly through the air like angels, and you graciously stop to sign your name on cocktail napkins and T-shirts; for this, you carry a Sharpie with you at all times. You are prepared because you’ve practiced; you have perfected your public smile and gracious, musical, lilting laugh as you protest, over and over, “I’m no different than you, you know,” when the thing you love the very most is that you are. You pull your fame around you like a cloak that you wear to restaurants like Nobu, where you lunch now with your celebrity friends because your old friends couldn’t possibly understand anymore what it’s like to be you.

—
VEE VELMAN

Chapter Seventeen

T
WO OR THREE TIMES NOW
, Q
UINN HAD DREAMED ABOUT
hands. Disembodied hands that stroked him lovingly—his arms, his legs, his back, his head. Especially his head. He didn’t think they were Quatro’s hands, but he couldn’t tell for sure, since he didn’t really know what the stylist’s hands looked like, only the way they’d felt. This stroking wasn’t sexual; it was almost parental, or at least what he imagined parental hands felt like, since in reality his mom had a tendency to slap rather than stroke. In his dreams he was unconcerned with how long the hands would stay because he just seemed to know that they’d be there as long as he wanted them to be, maybe forever.

He hadn’t been back to the hair salon or the Laundromat in a couple of weeks. Though he passed the salon every day, he didn’t look in—he struggled not to look in—but just went by at a normal walking pace, which he figured was slow enough for Quatro to spot him, if he was looking, and come to the door before Quinn reached the end of the block. He hadn’t come out, so Quinn assumed he either wasn’t looking or didn’t care or both. Fuck him.

And anyway, he was busy. Last week he had gone to a mix-and-match and then on to network for
Bradford Place
, the babysitter pilot. Then Mimi had gotten a call from Evelyn Flynn with the news that the network had decided they wanted the babysitter to be a girl: too many sponsors had thought there was something creepy about a seventeen-year-old boy who chose to spend his time looking after little kids. Quinn was bummed and Mimi was bummed, too. Though the show was a total piece of crap, Mimi had negotiated a deal that would have paid him twenty thousand dollars a week for a twenty-two-week season—and, much more important, it would have launched him, been his ticket at last to the party that was episodic TV.

But Evelyn Flynn had given him something even as she was taking something else away, because in the same phone call to Mimi, the casting director had offered to coach Quinn on the lead role of Buddy in
After
, the feature film that Bethany and Allison had auditioned for before Thanksgiving. It was highly irregular for a casting director to act as a coach, and even more so when she wasn’t even casting the project.

When Quinn called her, as she’d asked him to do, she told him to print out a full script for the feature film, read it through, put it away, think about it, read it again, and then come see her on the Paramount lot this coming Saturday. Evelyn Flynn was old and a little scary, but she was also a goddess, at least in Hollywood. He didn’t know why she was taking an interest in him, but he also didn’t care. Whatever her reason, Buddy was a lead in a Gus Van Sant film, and Quinn would kill, literally
kill
, to get it.

So he’d gone over and over the script and was now walking onto the Paramount Studios lot with the script in hand. Being here on a weekend felt different from being on the lot during the week. Many of the soundstages were still working, but the suits—the accountants, the executives, the salespeople—were all at home in Toluca Lake or the West Hollywood Hills or wherever, pretending to have a home life. It was peaceful, almost like being in school on the weekends, at least from what he remembered—he hadn’t been in a real school since he’d come to LA.

“Well,” Evelyn Flynn said when he came into the darkened outer office. “It’s Quinn, is it?” She said it like she hadn’t been expecting him, but how could that be? He’d called ahead and left a message. He might be sloppy with the rest of his life, but he was very careful when it came to talking to people who could make a difference in his career.

“Is this okay?” he said.

“It’s what I told you to do, isn’t it?” She walked behind him to close and lock the door, saying, “It’s Saturday. I don’t normally see anyone on Saturdays, ever. I also don’t answer my phone or my e-mails. You let your guard down and this business will eat you alive.”

She didn’t volunteer the reason she was breaking her own protocol for Quinn, and he wasn’t about to ask. He didn’t want to jinx anything.

She led him into her office, but instead of sitting behind the desk, she sat on the couch, patting the other seat cushion to indicate he should sit beside her. He sat.

“Now tell me about Buddy,” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Couldn’t I just show you?” He wasn’t big on developing a whole character biography, giving a character a favorite color and a horoscope sign and crap like that, the way some of his acting teachers had wanted him to. He usually just got that stuff intuitively as he went along.

She narrowed her eyes at him for a minute and then said, “Fair enough.” She stood up and retrieved a copy of the screenplay from her desk blotter. “We’ll do the audition scene—at least, it’s what Carlyle auditioned with, so I’m guessing Joel Sherman will have you do the same one.” She picked up her script. “Page ten.”

He knew exactly which one it was, even before he got there. It was where Buddy and Carlyle are talking about the candy machine at the hospital. He’d read it so many times he was already off-book.

“Do you want me to start?” she asked him.
She
asked
him
. How weird was that? He nodded.

They ran the scene.

BUDDY

I’m not buyin’ it.

CARLYLE

What do you mean, you’re not buying it? It’s the truth!

BUDDY

Yeah? So where’s your wand?

CARLYLE

(with infinite weariness)

Buddy. That’s only in Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a book.

BUDDY

So show me something. If you were a real witch you’d be making something happen!

CARLYLE

(sweetly)

I am. I’m making us argue.

BUDDY

Oh, for God’s sake.

CARLYLE

So, okay. Do you remember before, when Nana left her dentures in a glass and the next morning they were blue?

BUDDY

Yeah.

CARLYLE

That was me.

BUDDY

That was food coloring!

CARLYLE

Then why didn’t it wear off for six days?

BUDDY
laughs.

CARLYLE
(cont’d)

You know, we should really be nicer to her, now that she’s living here and everything.

BUDDY

Aw, c’mon on. We’re nice to her.

(a beat)

A witch, huh? So can witches go back and fix stuff that’s already happened?

CARLYLE

Like what?

BUDDY

You know. Mom.

CARLYLE

No one can keep someone from dying, Buddy. Only God.

BUDDY

Yeah, well, to hell with God.

(a long beat)

Do you think she knew I wasn’t there? When she, you know—

CARLYLE

I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.

BUDDY

(bitterly)

I do. I think the last thing she ever thought about me was that I was down the hall beating the shit out of a candy machine. When all those Mars bars and M&Ms and crap came flying out it was like I won the goddamn jackpot, honest to God. By the time it stopped, you couldn’t even see my shoes. I looked like a fucking Easter basket.

CARLYLE

Everyone understood.

BUDDY

Not her. If she had, she’d have waited five more minutes. Five stinkin’ minutes and I would’ve been back. I would’ve been there. Why didn’t she wait for me?

CARLYLE

I think maybe she just couldn’t anymore. You know how when you’ve been hanging off the monkey bars for a long time your arms get so tired and suddenly you weigh a hundred thousand pounds and you just have to let go? I think that’s what happened to her.

BUDDY

She fell off the monkey bars.

CARLYLE

Yeah.

BUDDY

And that’s supposed to make me feel better?

(visibly pulling himself together)

Some magician you are.

CARLYLE

Witch. And I never said I could make you feel better.

BUDDY

So how come you are a witch, anyway?

CARLYLE

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m not strong enough to break a candy machine.

BUDDY

Nah, you’re strong. You’re like her. You remind me of her.

CARLYLE

I do?

BUDDY

Yeah.

(a beat)

Except she would’ve used yellow.

CARLYLE
just looks at him, not getting it.

On the dentures. Then everyone would have thought Nana had liver failure. She drinks, you know—she drinks a lot. I’ve seen her.

CARLYLE

That’s orange juice.

BUDDY

That’s vodka.

CARLYLE

She misses Mom too, you know. Sometimes she cries at night.

BUDDY

He’s heard her, too.

Yeah.

(a long beat)