Authors: Kerry Reichs
“To mental health.” He quoted Roxy’s catch phrase. I hear it every time I go out. Strangers feel intimate with television actors, like we’re old pals. I find it smug, but LaMimi gave this guy a hall pass. I angled my legs toward him.
“I’m Dimple.”
“Keith.” We shook. “Bad day?”
“Happy hour took its time.”
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up, that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.” I speculated how young he really was. Twenty-five? Twenty-nine?
“It takes only one to get me drunk,” I said. “The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the fifth or the sixth.” There’s an art to seduction, and it starts with suggestive words.
Drunk
suggests
drunken behavior,
which evokes
promiscuous choices
. He responded immediately.
“Bartender!” He gestured. “Five more!”
“Stop!” I batted his hand. Seduction stage two: unnecessary casual contact.
“I’m a big fan, Dr. Page.” No matter how they tried to play it, even the coolest cat would eventually cave in to his need to discuss my job.
“Thanks.”
“So tell me.” Conspiratorial. “Did you have
anything
on in that houseboat scene?”
“The radio.” I smiled over my glass.
Over our second drink (my third), Keith had me laughing. By the next, I decided he was mature for his age. When another arrived, I protested.
“I have to go.” Was it really nine o’clock?
“You said that last time,” Keith dismissed. “You owe me a question!”
We’d been playing a game. God, he was attractive. I nodded.
He leered. “What do you wear to bed?”
“L’eau d’Issey.” I named my perfume.
It sank in. “I’d like to see that.”
I didn’t pause long. “Perhaps you’d better call a cab.”
I woke with a terrible taste in my mouth. My brain groped. Pickle juice and whiskey. My stomach revolted and I leaped for the bathroom, but the nausea subsided, leaving me limp against the sink. I was naked and cold but I didn’t care.
I pressed a washcloth to my face and it felt stupendous, but the pounding didn’t abate. The face in the mirror had yesterday’s mascara smeared on her cheeks, hair wild. Everything looked blurry—my eyes were puffy and my brain was throbbing. The mirror showed a wild tangle of white sheets on the bed behind me. It was empty now, but it had been very occupied last night.
I filled a water glass, gulping down cool liquid. I’d look for Advil in a minute. Right now I enjoyed having my eyes closed. Images from the night before flooded back.
Oh god. My eyes flew open.
Keith’s face close to mine, my chin stinging from his end-of-day stubble, panting and grasping. “Do I need protection?” Breath stopping for a beat.
Oh god
.
“No. I’m okay.”
Oh god.
“What were you thinking?” I railed at the mirror. “He was young and foolish!” I was a horrible person because I took advantage of him with an answer that was neither a lie nor the truth.
I’m okay
is not the same as
I’m on birth control
. I was an insane person because I didn’t know what the hell I wanted and I was playing with fire. I was an idiot because I had rolled the dice.
“I’m a fucked person because I could be pregnant,” I said out loud.
Adrenaline nearly exploded my pounding head.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod.
What had I done?
When I got my period a week later, it was like an obscene phone call from nature. I didn’t know if I was distressed, or perversely pleased to be singled out. I laughed. Then I cried.
My Latvian side had refused to splurge $14 on a pregnancy test on the grounds that I would know for free if I waited, but now I wondered if I’d wanted to stretch out the possibility. I sat on the toilet listening to the heavy breathing of my biological clock asking,
Do you feel lucky
? It was like stumbling across my impending death in a compact mirror. The inevitability was never absent, but was held in abeyance by hubris and daffodils and sunny days. But once in a while a startling claw slipped out of your lingerie drawer or medicine cabinet, a pebble in your shoe, a whiff of body odor, mortality, always there, always in charge.
I saw two stark images in the blood-stained Rorschach of my panties. One, I didn’t know if I felt relief or sorrow. Two, I’d thought of nothing but having a baby since the night with Keith—every nibble, every sip of nonalcoholic beverage, every swipe of the mascara wand, I’d been thinking,
Baby, maybe
.
J
ulian, it’s Eva Lytton calling, to discuss Daisy Carmichael and
Cora
. I understand from Daisy that you surprised her with karaoke last week. Can you give me a call at your earliest convenience?”
Eva thumbed off her Bluetooth with impatience as she navigated the MINI onto the 110 freeway toward Pasadena. A month had passed on the
Cora
project. She wasn’t used to having her phone calls unreturned. In fact, she wasn’t used to leaving messages. People answered when Eva called.
On cue, the phone rang.
“Eva? Penny Marshall.”
“Penny! What’s up?”
“I went back to the studio on
Rainy Season
, and they’re prepared to offer Daisy three million plus five percent net.”
“Penny,” Eva chastised. “Really? You know Daisy couldn’t consider it for under three and a half million plus five percent gross.”
“Eva, my hands are tied. It’s the studio. I can’t budge.”
“Penny, I know the studio, and we can save ourselves the trouble of my making some calls over there if you look down at your notes. I’m betting there’s a range with $3 million at the bottom, and the top somewhere around $3.8 million. We’re willing to settle below that top number, if you’ll work with me.”
“Maybe we can meet that number, but then I can only offer three percent net.”
“Net points are monkey points—with Hollywood accounting, no movie ever shows net profit. We couldn’t accept anything other than gross.”
“There is absolutely no way we can offer three percent gross.”
“We’d settle for two percent.”
“One.”
“Let me check with my client.” Eva was elated. This was better than she’d hoped. “But we’d expect a generous rider for Daisy’s comfort requests.”
Penny laughed. “Lord save me from gold faucets that run French mineral water! I can see why you’re already a force in the industry. At your age I was Laverne De Fazio.”
“You were a star. I’m more into behind-the-scenes action.”
“Well, you’re the star maker for young actresses. You know what directors want before we do.” Forecasting was Eva’s job, and she was uncannily good at it.
“I love my work,” was all Eva said.
“We’ll get along like milk and Pepsi,” Penny answered. “Get back to me on that one percent.”
Eva was euphoric. The deal was done. Daisy was wrong about Eva’s shelf life and Julian Wales could screw himself. She was
good
.
Her good feeling lasted until she saw the Kenneth Village exit off Highway 5, and had died completely by the time she pulled into the driveway off Bruce. The tension and guilt twins settled into their usual places between her shoulder blades. Glendale gave her a rash.
Curtains twitched in the Spanish ranch house, and Eva grabbed the expensive champagne and shiny, gift-wrapped box. The front door was already opening.
“Hello, Mother.” Eva kissed her cheek. “Happy birthday!”
“Eva!” Her mother’s smile was placid. “Come in.”
“How’s your day been?” Eva asked as they settled at the kitchen table. Eva hated it and its dated glass top with an emotion disproportionate for an inanimate object. They’d never owned a kitchen table when she was growing up.
“We eat where we like,” Cyn had proclaimed, throwing a batik scarf over a packing box. “Fit for royalty.”
“Very pleasant,” her mother said. “Timothy and Julia made me pancakes for breakfast, and Jim took me to lunch at the club. We’re all going to Macaroni Grill for dinner, with the Bern-steins. Join us?”
Eva’s heart clogged up her throat. “I can’t,” she managed. “Work.”
When Eva was nine, Burt Reynolds had brought a chimpanzee to Cynthia’s birthday party, hosted in a scarlet tent on Lee Majors’s lawn.
“All right then.” Her mother’s smile didn’t waver. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable in the living room?”
“This is fine.” Eva hated the sectional sofa and wall-to-wall carpeting more than the kitchen table. “I brought champagne!” Her pitch was too chirpy. “Let’s be naughty girls and have some before supper.” Suddenly she was Nora Helmer?
“How lovely of you, Eva.” The smile didn’t waver. “I’m so sorry that I can’t.” She gestured toward the prescription bottles crowding the windowsill. “Dr. Albright says no alcohol.”
Eva felt queasy, as she always did, when a gesture exposed the irregular, pale scars on her mother’s wrists.
“Mmmmmm, darling, this is your best yet.” Cyn smiled over the rim. “My daughter makes the best dirty martini in all of L.A.!” she shouted to the crowd.
“I’m next, short stuff.” Ryan O’Neal winked, holding out his glass.
“Ladies first!” Farrah Fawcett’s smile was toothy as she elbowed in.
“Drinks for everyone!” Cyn twirled, elegant hands graceful overhead, not spilling a drop from her stemmed glass
.
“No matter.” Eva shrugged. “Open your gift.” She pushed the gold-foil-wrapped box toward her mother.
“It’s so beautiful I don’t want to open it!” Cynthia concentrated on pulling the bows and slitting the tape as if it was heart surgery. Eva took deep breaths.
When Cynthia revealed the opal pendant, she said, “Eva, it’s lovely,” exactly the same way she said “Macaroni Grill.”
“You can wear it tonight.” Eva fastened the chain around her mother’s neck.
“How do I look?”
“Beautiful.” Eva’s voice was husky.
“Just beautiful? Come, you must do better than that!” Cyn demanded as she spun before Eva in a red evening gown.
“Stunning, glorious, enchanting, divine!” With each word young Eva jumped on the bed.
“That’s better! Now help me pick out a necklace. Something big and shiny!”
Eva had to stop. She was making herself ill with memories that did no good. She hated her mother doped up like she was behind a layer of glue. But the alternative was much worse.
“How are Timothy and Julia doing in school?” Eva changed the topic to her stepsiblings. She would not calculate how soon she could leave.
Eva stayed as the light faded, stayed as the twins came home and hugged her excitedly, stayed as Jim returned from work, stayed until no one would accuse her of being a bad daughter, of hating her mother.
When she left, she waved, smiling her face off as she reversed down the driveway. She controlled her speed to a Kenneth Village community-safe twenty-five miles per hour, coming to a full stop at the corner sign before turning out of sight of the family, still waving from the front step. She drove several blocks before she stopped, blindly parking and drawing ragged breaths.
The identahouses, the glass-topped coffee tables and sectional sofas, the Mr. Frostees on the corners, the cactus landscaping all closed in on her. Her past was ripped away, and she had no idea who she was. She needed something to bring herself back to Eva Lytton. She punched numbers on her phone.
“It’s Julian. Leave a message.”
She thumped the steering wheel. Really?
She called Sawyer. They’d seen each other often in the past few weeks.
“Hiya, hot stuff.” His smile came over the line.
“I’m in Glendale. There’s a Chili’s, an Olive Garden, and a Red Lobster all within three blocks of my vehicle.”
“I’m in disbelief.”
“I’ve had a terrible day.”
“The Valley will do that to a hardened, urban-dwelling sophisticate of the Santa Monica metropolis.”
Eva didn’t want banter. “My mom’s bipolar.”
He was quiet. “That’s hard.”
“I swear she was never depressed growing up, just delightfully manic. She got postpartum after the twins were born, and the depression never went away.” Eva didn’t care if Sawyer was scared off, if he was mentally reviewing her own actions for warning signs. “I left my fun, lively mother to start college, and when I came home she’d been replaced by a stranger.”
“Did something happen today?”
“It’s her birthday.” Eva swallowed.
“Come over.”
Eva’s heart jumped. She hadn’t been to Sawyer’s.
“Do you have a sectional?”
“Hell no. I have a giant leather man-cave sofa, extra deep.”
It took Eva an hour and a half to get to Culver City, but she was impressed nonetheless by the chicken stir-fry steaming on the candlelit table.
“Coat,” he said, and she let him slip it off. “Shoes.” She kicked them off herself. “Wine.” He handed her a glass.
“I brought champagne.” Eva held up the bottle, and suddenly she was crying.
Sawyer led her to the sofa without a word, pulling her onto his lap. He stroked her hair and let her cry. Eva couldn’t stop, though she desperately wanted to. She couldn’t enjoy the cry, because she thought about herself doing it, and mentally raced ahead to seeing herself afterward, talking about what a good cry that had been. If Eva was riding a bike enjoyably on a sunny day, she couldn’t wait until it was over so she could have ridden a bike enjoyably on a sunny day.
“This sofa really is deep.” Eva sniffed.
“I’m a lot of guy,” Sawyer said. “Are you hungry now?”
Eva nodded.
“How about we have a little picnic right here and skip the dining room?”
Tears welled again. “What if I can’t enjoy the picnic because I’m rushing through it so I can have enjoyed the picnic when it’s over?”
Sawyer didn’t act as if her question was bizarre. “People rush to dessert because they don’t want to miss the dessert. You don’t have to rush with me. I’m not going anywhere.”
Eva eyed him through wet lashes, and sniffed. “How do I know?”
Sawyer gave a devilish grin. “Because we’re going to have dessert first.”
He kissed her hard, pulling her beneath him. She kissed him back fiercely, gripping his shoulders and wrapping her legs around him.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, unbuttoning her shirt.
“I like deep couches,” Eva managed, threading her fingers in his shaggy hair and pulling his mouth back to hers. Their embrace intensified.
“Is this okay?” Sawyer paused.
“Oh, yes.”
Eva urged him on with her body. They contorted to shed clothes without breaking their kiss. When he entered her, Eva arched against him thrust for thrust. Sawyer feverishly kissed her neck and shoulders, murmuring “Eva . . . Eva . . .”
Yes
, thought Eva,
I am
, as she gasped from his penetration, feeling herself in every nerve ending.
“Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his father did,” Eva panted before Sawyer again covered her mouth with his and there was no time for talk.