Authors: Kerry Reichs
“I do. It’s just—”
“Would you rather look in Malibu?”
Andy blanched at the thought of property costs in Malibu.
“No, no, I like Santa Monica. But I worry . . .”
Summer changed her tactic, scooting up against Andy, and sliding an arm around him. “Baby, don’t worry. You’re a great provider. I know you can take care of everything. You’re a prestigious law partner with a large salary, and in time, you’re going to be a Santa Monica City Council member! I’m so proud of you.”
Andy hesitated. Summer, as usual, was overstating things. But Andy didn’t want her to think he wasn’t a good provider. They hadn’t been married that long, and Summer was young. He wanted to give her what she wanted.
“Besides.” Summer laughed. “We have my income from the station! If we play our cards right, as your political star rises I’ll be right behind you, moving up to anchor!” The gleam in Summer’s eye told Andy this was no casual fantasy. She turned to face him, eyes beseeching. “A power couple needs a power house.”
For a moment he glimpsed a pigtailed girl with dusty sneakers as she read magazines about a glamorous place by the ocean and vowed to get there someday. This reminder of their twelve-year age gap made him feel tender.
“How about if we go look at it again on Sunday?” He relented. “We’ll see if they’ll come down a bit on their asking price. It’s been on the market over a month.” Summer squealed and flung both arms around him. It felt good to be the hero.
As the gates closed behind his car, Andy wished he could satisfy Maryn so easily. The embryo situation was ridiculously tangled. He’d never heard of anyone having to deal with a problem like this. Whenever he tried to read the consent forms, or think about the Problem of the Eggs, his brain skittered away. It was happening now, her call shoved into his mind’s junk closet by thoughts of a cold can of Miller Lite and the growl of his stomach. He wondered what Summer had prepared for dinner. Maybe she’d planned dessert, and he could wait until then to bring it up.
I
put down Julian Wales’s script, heart beating fast, as if I was standing too close to the edge of a cliff. Freya had messengered it over, and I’d torn through it in an hour. I crossed my trailer from the bench to the desk. Three steps, but I needed space. To dull my thumping blood, I dug the current
Pulse
script from my bag. I got the irony.
Pulse
is a hospital drama at the fictional Cedars Hospital in L.A., where doctors, nurses, and patients basically get it on. You know the one. I play the staff psychiatrist. My battered script was a rainbow of colors, red, green, yellow, and pink pages reflecting all the rewrites from first draft to the final version. We were almost done shooting and I knew the episode by heart. There was a lot of hype surrounding this script because it was the show’s 200th episode. In an era of fickle viewers and risk-averse studios, few dramas lasted six seasons, much less nine.
“I can’t believe you’ve hung with
Pulse
for almost a decade,” Freya had said when the script came out. She gracefully placed a sliver of yellowtail sashimi in her mouth. I fumbled my chopsticks, fish flopping in soy sauce as if it was still alive.
“What do you mean?” Her tone surprised me. Role security is rare in my industry, so I counted myself successful.
“Well, darling, you used to do all edgy, independent films. It doesn’t get much darker than
White Lies
. And
Cold Shoulder
? That movie was . . .
magic
. In a creepy sort of way.”
“For the six people who saw it. I was twenty-five when I did
Cold Shoulder
. It’s fine to bare your tits when you’re twenty, not forty.” The cardinal rule of independent films is that the lead actress usually bares her tits.
“Thirty-six,” Freya admonished me with her chopstick. “I don’t understand why you don’t do film anymore.”
“Because it’s inconsistent and it doesn’t pay well. You of all people should be happy with
Pulse
. Your fifteen percent goes a lot further.” A piece of eel slid from my chopstick and landed on my lap. “Freya, why do you bring me here? You know I can’t manage chopsticks. We could’ve met at your office.”
“There is no such thing as bad publicity, darling, even if you’re wearing your lunch.” There were always paparazzi outside Koi. “Right now you’re on the market and you need to be seen. Even the great Julian Wales is not impervious to the power of magazine covers. Now don’t change the subject.”
“No one’s asked.” I answered her earlier question.
“That is not true. You’ve turned down four projects this year. Why did you turn down that script about living on Mars? And don’t make jokes about not wanting to wear a unitard, because you have an excellent rack.”
I felt the moth beating in my chest. “
Pulse
isn’t the most worthy part, but it pays the mortgage. Before Dr. Roxy Page, my pilots were as short lived as the resurgence of bell-bottoms, and less compelling. I’m grateful to be on a successful show.”
Freya laid down her chopsticks in perfect alignment, and faced me. “Dimple. Before your failed television pilots there was a budding film career. You have a craft that’s wasted on
Pulse
. You went to TV for
Six Feet Under
, which was a clever show, but you died after five episodes. Now you’re stalled on the small screen and
Pulse
is no
Six Feet Under
. You turn down so many potential roles it makes me think your confidence has eroded. ”
“I . . . I . . .” I was fishier than my lunch, mouth working, nothing coming out. I collected myself. “You know I had to put my mom in a semiassisted living facility right when the radio fell in my bathtub on
Six Feet Under
. Darkly artful scripts are alluring, but the paychecks are wafer thin, and excitement turns into gut-wrenching anxiety in the wink of an eye when you can’t make your mother’s rent. I’m forty. I can’t do that anymore.”
“Thirty-six. Dimple. You cannot hide behind Roxy until she limps into a retirement home herself. When’s the last time she had sex on air? You’re not Roxy. You still have fire and leading-lady capability. In the wink of an eye, as you say, you could be on top. Don’t let risk aversion keep you from your potential.”
“Forty. I’m forty, Freya.” The word rolled in my mouth like a steel marble, alien and uncomfortable.
She looked at me. “Are you having a crisis?”
I was having a crisis. “I feel old.” I sighed. “Half the cast of
Pulse
takes spring break and I get discounted membership invitations from AARP.”
“It’s a cliché, but age is just a number, Dimple. You can manipulate it as easily as you do on your CV. The older I get the older old is.” Her eyes were sympathetic.
“Not forty,” I said. “Forty is when everything falls apart. Forty is that monumentally unfair age as a woman when you’ve run out of time. You can’t coast along anymore waiting for things to happen. Forty is oh-shit-I’d-better-have-a-401K time.”
“Do you think you’re being a little . . .
cataclysmic
? Since when do you care about forty?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Since I want to have a baby?”
She shrugged, remarkably unfazed. “Sleep on it. Either it will pass, as a hormonal spike associated with your birthday, or it won’t and you’ll find a nice little Haitian.” She elegantly ate some salmon. Apparently, bearing a child didn’t play into Freya’s worldview. “But right now, finish your fish. Put lipstick on that beautiful face. Go to work. If you think about today as the day you have to sort out the rest of your life, you’ll lose your mind. If you think about what you want for dinner, it’s more manageable. Look at the scripts I sent your way. Change will rejuvenate you.”
“Dimple?” A knock at the door called me back to the present. “Hair and makeup is ready for you.”
I popped out of my trailer like a cork. I was dying to talk to Justine. The beauty truck was a minisalon on wheels, white leather swivel stools before large bulb mirrors, countertops cluttered with all manner of tongs, curlers, straighteners, and other hair-torture devices. With the door closed, you forgot it could do sixty on the interstate.
“Good morning, gorgeous! Bring that rope to mama.”
Justine, my hairdresser, was waiting with her usual wide smile. Today her hair was a blunt turquoise bob. Her soundtrack was a-ha’s “Take on Me.”
“Roxy’s in the present today,” I reminded her. The 200th episode had flashed back to how all the characters arrived at Cedars Hospital.
“I know.” Justine sighed. “I’m in mourning. Your eighties looks were so much fun.”
“For you.” Roxy Page’s backstory had involved some hair treatment that required deep-conditioning rinses and Bobby Fischer to unravel.
“You looked as fresh as the cocaine-induced love child of Sonny Crockett and Bananarama. Sit.”
I slid into my chair and Justine threaded her hands through my heavy brown hair.
“Like mink,” she sighed. “If I had this I’d never dye.”
“We’re all going to die.” God, I was morbid today.
“Whatcha got?” She nodded toward the episode outline peeking out from beneath my script. Our Monday routine was to discuss new story lines. Actors were in the dark until they received the new scripts, and were often surprised to discover they were suddenly a lesbian, a serial killer, eloping, cuckolded, dead, or sometimes all of the above in a Very Special Episode.
My frown returned. Freya might have been right. “Roxy is developing an alcohol problem.”
“Oh.”
There weren’t many awkward silences between us, but this was one.
“Arthur was an endearing drunk,” Justine tried. “And they remade it!”
“Stop. I’m one step away from Aunt Sassy.” I sighed.
“No, c’mon,” she protested. “You’re hot.”
“Remember the steamy days?” In my first years on
Pulse
Roxy slept with
everyone
. “The torrid affair with the head of surgery? The seduction of the billionaire Chairman of the Board who I left tattered in a cutthroat divorce? Those were good plots.” Both actors had left the show to become leading men in features.
“That was some good bed hair,” Justine recalled her art. “But I liked Roxy-in-Danger best. The time you were kidnapped by that deranged patient, or the time you were exposed to a rare tropical illness.”
“It was all passion and danger once.” I sighed.
“You had sex with the environmentalist in Episode 904.”
“Those sex scenes were as edgy as bunny slippers. We shared an ice cream sundae first. In an ice cream parlor! No wonder they’re giving me a drinking problem.” Justine giggled. “In the past two years, I’ve only done the bed boogie with well-meaning social workers and earnest cops. And
never
on camera. Where are the bodice-ripping scenes in the on-call room with tormented medical geniuses?”
We both knew the answer. Younger actresses got all the porn. My shrinking story lines centered on heartwarming psychological dramas—saving an abused child; counseling a troubled veteran; and the occasional illegal, but sympathetic, assisted suicide.
“At least you’re having imaginary off-camera sex,” Justine comforted. “Look at Miho.”
Miho was an actress a year or two older than me. Hard to say in Hollywood years. Miho’s character had been crushed by an out-of-control ambulance crashing through the ER, leaving her in a wheelchair. We expected a poignant death scene any script now.
“Miho shouldn’t have slept with the supervising producer then dumped him,” I said. “Do you think I need to worry, Justine?”
She reassured me with the cardinal rule of a long-running series. “You don’t need to worry until they give you a child old enough to talk.”
Sex, intrigue, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, murder, even the occasional return from the dead were all staples of prime-time drama. But if a pregnancy resulted in a living child who wasn’t stolen from the maternity ward or given up for adoption, it was jumping the shark. If it was a precocious black kid between five and ten years old, you might as well start sending out your resumé.
“Alcoholism could be fun! You can disgrace yourself at the office Christmas party and have lots of ill-chosen sex partners.” Justine tried to cheer me.
“We can only hope.” I wasn’t optimistic. Substance abuse wasn’t funny or appealing. No one wanted to watch it, and I didn’t want to parody real pain. The industry was rife with addiction, and I knew its ugly face well. I hoped Roxy would recognize she had a problem after very few scenes at our Brewmeisters. Maybe the writers could throw in an affair with the rehab counselor.
“So I got this script,” I ventured.
Justine perked up. “The movie about the hikers who end up in an Iranian jail?”
“I passed on that.”
“You did?”
“I would’ve had to miss sweeps week.”
“I’m surprised Clyde wouldn’t write you out.”
The producer had been happy to write me out, but I’d been too nervous my absence wouldn’t make a difference and they’d notice.
“Was it that one about living on Mars . . .”
“It’s for Julian Wales’s next movie.” I interrupted her recital of projects I’d turned down. The Mars pilot
had
required bodysuits, for god’s sake. I have a nice figure, but no woman in her forties should wear a unitard. Period. Not to mention that it would be impossible to disguise a pregnancy.
If
I decided to get pregnant.
“What?” Justine yelped, and for a minute I thought I’d said “pregnant” out loud. “Sorry!” The curling iron yanked my hair in her excitement. She released the wave, then spun my stool to face her. “Julian Wales, for real? I can’t believe you’ve been holding out. Everyone’s buzzing about his next project. Is it a big part? In a
movie
movie?”
“It’s the lead.” I felt that dizzying near-the-precipice anxiety again. I took a deep breath. “It’s good,” I admitted. I’d been distracting myself all day from thinking about
how
good it was. Very, very good.
Justine embraced me, stool and all. “That’s a-MA-zing! I’m so excited!”
“I just read the script!” I protested.
Justine gave a little hop. “Julian Wales. God, he’s dreamy. Promise me I get to come visit you on set.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For all I know he sent the script to every actress in Hollywood.” If you got your hopes up, you ended up disappointed.
“
He
sent the script to
you
?” she squealed. “That’s tantamount to offering you the part! I’ve read about him. He’s very intense, and only considers one or two actors for big roles. He spends all this time auditioning his picks in different situations, testing how they react. It goes on for months!” Justine was making me nervous.
“Freya didn’t mention that . . .”
“Then, when you’re in his fold, you’re, like, his go-to gal. He’ll use you in all his films. Like Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.” Justine was oblivious to the flaw in her analogy. I spared a sympathetic thought for Diane Keaton. “Just think of it. You can tell
Pulse
to take their alcoholism and shove it.”
That caused anxiety. “I wouldn’t
quit
.
Pulse
has been very good to me. . . .”