Life in High Def

by Kimberly Cooper Griffin

  Randy, who had walked backward to keep up with the surfer dude, stopped to chase down two women who passed going the other way.

  “I like her because she just doesn’t give a crap. She just moves on. Shit rolls right off her back. A true survivor,” said a young woman sporting several tattoos and piercings, glancing at her companion who vigorously nodded her head and chomped on a wad of gum.

  “She, like, showed me how to not care about what other people think about me, you know? She doesn’t talk about it. Like, it was her business. Not ours. She’s, like, eff the people who want to get all up in her business! And I think that’s, like, super-badass. Totally.”

  “Fuck yeah!” said the first girl, and they did a fist bump as they walked away.

  The camera followed the two girls, zooming in on the tattoos that showed on their lower backs between the top of each of the young women’s low-rise jeans and their short black tee shirts.

  “Those two young women are an example of why I don’t go see her movies anymore,” said a voice off-camera. The camera swung over to a woman holding the hands of two young children. “She takes no responsibility for her actions and she makes her carefree and immoral life seem glamorous. We’re raising a generation of selfish children because of people like her.”

  “Well, there you have it, folks,” said Randy, as the camera came in for a close up on him. When it zoomed in on his face and took the focus off of the ridiculous clothing and strange hat, Randy almost passed as normal. Until he opened his mouth. “It seems that all you have to do is pretend that it didn’t happen. Easy peasy. Just take a lot of drugs and drink like a fish, and chances are you won’t remember it, anyway!”

  And in trademark fashion, Randy Candy laughed at his own terrible joke, the bray of it absorbed into the techno grind as the music played over the credits. Reilly turned the audio all the way down.

  “Wow. That was pretty harsh,” said Drew, curled up against Reilly, tracing a circle on her stomach.

  Reilly stared at the frozen last frame of Randy Candy’s video.

  Had she been wrong in refusing to speak about the accident all this time? Had her silence sent the signal that she just didn’t care, or that she was afraid to take responsibility for her actions? Reilly had spent the last three years feeling just the opposite, and she knew that she would spend the rest of her life feeling that way. The last thing she wanted to do was to gain publicity over it. It wasn’t fair to Matt Traynor, and it wasn’t fair to his family. But if people were getting the wrong impression, thinking that she thought that she was impervious to what she had done, she needed to let them know that wasn’t the case. She wondered how she could make it right without making it about herself.

  I Don’t Think You’re Going to Like It

  REILLY STEPPED INTO THE LITTLE restaurant, and after a short pause to let her eyes adjust to the dimmer light, she spotted the back of a familiar blond head over the top of a booth seat. When she arrived at the table, she tossed her bag and phone onto the cushioned bench and slid in.

  “Hey, Trip. What’s up?” she asked her agent, Michael “Trip” Trippletorn, fighting the urge to muss his perfect hair. Instead, she took a sip of the water that was already waiting for her and held back a smile. She was in a good mood, having just left Drew’s place. They both had late starts for the day, since Drew worked in Santa Barbara that afternoon, and she didn’t have any morning classes scheduled. Even so, Reilly had barely had time for a shower after one last kiss had left them in a sweaty tangle on the already-made bed.

  “Well, hello, Miss Ransome. I’m just fine, thanks for asking. How are you?” teased Trip, flashing his dimpled grin, looking just like the Ken doll Reilly had always thought he resembled.

  “Oh, jeez. Sorry,” laughed Reilly, falling into the easy kidding around that she and Trip had always enjoyed together. “I am delighted that you are fine, Mr. Trippletorn. And I am, in turn, equally fine. Nay! Better than fine. Perhaps exquisite is the better word. Outstanding weather today, is it not? How are the husband and kids?”

  “Paul is doing great. He sends his love and told me to ask you over for dinner some night soon. Lovey and Gerard are doing well. They had mani-pedis at Paws and Claws this morning. I just dropped them back at the house, and they were prancing around like they were the stars of “Terriers and Tiaras” or something,” he said, turning his iPhone around to show her a picture of his identical, perfectly groomed Pomeranians posing with him on the fourth step of a sweeping staircase. “Hey! I was just kidding, but I should run that idea by the studio. “Terriers and Tiaras”. Maybe Jane Lynch will produce it. That’s my idea. Don’t steal it!”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t. So cute! I love the bows,” exclaimed Reilly leaning over to look at the picture. She was a little disgusted by the way Trip allowed them to lick inside of his mouth and surprised that he had taken a picture of it. But to each his own she thought. He loved those dogs as much as he loved his partner of fifteen years, and husband of three. Anyone with that kind of heart was good in her book.

  “I wanted something a little less Dorothy and more Lady Gaga, but they were out of black netting,” he shrugged, as he took a last peek at the photo on his phone display, blew it a kiss, and then pushed a couple of buttons on the display before he spoke into the speaker. “Terriers and Tiaras”. A hybrid reality show that crosses that “Toddlers” horror with “Best in Show”. Try the studio or A&E. They’ll show anything.”

  Reilly raised an eyebrow.

  “Sorry, doll. Gotta move on inspiration. It evaporates if you don’t.”

  Reilly only shrugged. She was used to Trip’s rapid-fire shifts of attention.

  “What’s going on? We have our bi-weekly meeting scheduled for Friday. Not that I don’t love seeing you, but couldn’t this have waited until then, or possibly have been handled over the phone?” she asked.

  They were sitting in their usual spot in the back booth of Scippio’s, an upscale Italian deli a mile away from her house. She put her water down and absently traced the drops of condensation that rolled down the sides of the glass. Trip was like family to her. Her mother had hired him when she landed her first role, and he’d been her agent ever since. She tried not to show how put out she was, but it was her first full day off in a couple of weeks and she had been planning on flopping down on a beach with an umbrella, a non-fat mocha frappe, and a good book. And when Drew got back from Santa Barbara, they had planned a quiet dinner. It was going to be the perfect day. She needed the break from the constant publicity circuit she had been on for the new movie.

  “I have something to show you, and I don’t think you’re going to like it,” said Trip, taking a large manila envelope out of the worn leather bag sitting next to him on the cushioned bench seat.

  “No good conversation ever started out like that,” she said, sitting back, tapping her fingers on the white tablecloth. He pushed the envelope toward her.

  “What is this?” she asked, opening the envelope. It was addressed to both Trip and her, and had been sent to his office on Wilshire. “A book? I don’t understand.”

  Reilly pulled the book out of the envelope and noticed the word REVIEW stamped in red on the sides and cover. The picture on the cover was familiar and when she turned the book right side up, bright anger warmed her face.

  The background picture was the one of her parents and her standing near the Santa Monica pier when she was much younger. A bench that should have been in the shot—THE bench—had been removed somehow with the miracle of digital photography. The original picture, the one with the bench still in it, was hanging on the wall in her parent’s family room. Reilly scanned the rest of the cover. A montage of thumbnail-sized photos that chronicled Reilly’s transformation, from child television star to award winning actress, marched across the top of the cover in a narrow strip. The one in the top right corner was a shot of her accepting her first Academy Award. It was chronologically out of sequence from the rest, and she supposed that it was beca
use she had missed the second award ceremony, which had gone on as planned while she had been sitting on a cold metal bench in a holding cell at the Santa Monica police station.

  “Growing Up Reilly by Melissa Tyler-Ransome” was printed in large letters across the bottom of the cover.

  “Holy fuck!” said Reilly. Holding it up for Trip to see. “What the—?”

  “That’s exactly what I said when I opened it this morning.”

  “She can’t do this. Not without my permission. I told her no.”

  “Apparently she can. It’s her story, Reilly. So, I take it that she didn’t tell you about it?”

  “She told me about it several weeks ago, but I said no. I assumed that she would honor that. Did you know about it before now? Who sent it?”

  “No, I didn’t know about it and I don’t know who sent it. Maybe someone who didn’t want it to be a surprise. What are you going to do about it?”

  “God, I don’t know. I suppose I should talk to my mother about it,” she said, opening the front cover to look at the inside dust jacket. A picture of Reilly when she was four or five took up the bottom third of the page. She remembered that day. She and her parents had gone to a local amusement park called Hee Haw Valley and she was sitting on a burro that was wearing a huge straw hat, his long ears pulled through the brim on either side. Her mother was posing next to her, standing to one side, holding her securely in the saddle. Both of them had long strands of straw sticking out of the corners of their mouths. Her father had brayed like a donkey to get them to laugh as he shot the picture.

  “Good luck with that,” said Trip, and she could tell by the sympathetic look on his face that he suspected it wouldn’t go well. But before she talked to her mom, she was going to read the book. It looked like she would get the reading in that she had planned, although it wouldn’t be the science fiction novel in which she had planned to get lost.

  “She’s the one who’ll need the luck,” she said, tucking the book under her arm as she gathered the rest of her stuff to leave.

  Growing Up Reilly

  REILLY WENT HOME AND SETTLED down under an umbrella by the pool. She didn’t want to be caught in public reading about herself. The book rested in her lap before she got started, and she gazed out over the arroyo behind her house. Although she’d envisioned the day on the beach being soothed by the sound of waves marching across the sand and the briny scent of the ocean on the wind, she had to settle instead for the smells of chlorine and fresh cut grass, which wasn’t that much of a disappointment when she thought about it. She had the sun, a cool breeze, and a great view. All of that, along with a tall glass of iced tea, and she was set.

  She was finished with the book by late afternoon. To her surprise, it was very well written. Between the first draft that she had started and the finished product, it was evident that a good editor had helped Melissa through the revisions. The embarrassing me-me-me point of view that the first draft had been steeped in was gone, and most of the clunky ways that events had been strung together before had been smoothed out. Her mother was a smart and witty woman, and her voice was clear and evident in the final version. And, even as Reilly resented the intrusion into her life and the lack of respect that her mother had demonstrated by going against her wishes in publishing it, Reilly found herself deeply engrossed in the story. She laughed in several parts, grew sad in a few, and even felt the expectation building as the tale unfolded. It was hard to remember that it was her own life that she was reading about.

  When she finished, she closed the book and rested it on her chest while she thought about what she had just read. She had to give it to her mother; she had talent. And to Reilly’s surprise, the entire book was true. Nothing in it had been overly embellished or made up. Her mother had even managed to make the events that had led up to Reilly’s firing of her into a heartfelt saga: the story of a daughter trying to find her own way while the mother has to let go and allow her to figure it out. In a small step showing evolution, Melissa had even referred to Reilly as her gay daughter, a minor adjective, but one that provided the acceptance that Reilly had craved all of her life. She had stared at the word for several moments as the words on the page shimmered through her tears, and she had to wipe her eyes in order to continue reading.

  As the warm wind blew the scent of wisteria and chlorinated water to her, an unexpected sense of understanding dawned on her. Having been an observer to her own life and seeing herself through someone else’s eyes, it made her think that all that she had been—what she had been remembering as a wasted journey—wasn’t as wasted as she had come to see it. Not everything had been a write off. And her mother hadn’t been as inattentive as she had thought. Not really.

  There were some things that her mother had brought up in the book that mystified Reilly, though—the odd, inconsequential moments that her mother had chosen to include when Reilly would have left them out—who cared about Reilly’s angst over the dress she had worn to her first Kid’s Choice Awards? Or what she had eaten for lunch the first day of shooting the television show that had made her famous?

  More confusing, were the moments that her mother had left out. Reilly’s father was a prominent subject in the photos on the dust jacket and in the photo inlays at the center of the book, yet in the book he was mentioned only a handful of times, and never in any detail. Her mother had blasted out the fact that he had once had a young mistress, but she hadn’t gone into any detail about it. It just hung there, just like it had all of Reilly’s childhood. The book was mainly about Melissa and Reilly. Everyone else were just supporting characters. Reilly had to admit that the depiction, at least of her father, was accurate.

  When she got to the end, where Melissa sat down to re-write the manuscript, after having just left the studio where she and Reilly had agreed to go their separate ways, Reilly realized that a very important event had been left out. The accident and Reilly’s subsequent prison stay weren’t even mentioned. Her mother had left out the most defining moment of Reilly’s life. It hadn’t been merely skimmed over. It was missing completely.

  Reilly sat there thinking about the book, and she tried to understand her mother’s motivation for writing it and why she had picked and omitted what she had.

  As her thoughts skittered from place to place, trying to fold together her life and her relationship with her mother, Reilly wondered if she had been harsh in expecting her mother to play a less invested role, when Melissa had woven all of what she was into the fabric of Reilly and her career. It was a difficult rumination for Reilly, because she had to accept that her life and career were important, even while she struggled with the way that it made her feel. Was she inflating her own importance? If she assigned value to what she did with her life, was she a narcissist falling for her own fame? If she minimized her importance to the people in her life, was she not taking her impact on other people’s lives seriously enough? Did she even have a responsibility to acknowledge that?

  Reilly rested an arm over her eyes and tried to settle her thoughts. She was just an actress, for Christ’s sake. She wasn’t a doctor who saved lives, or an activist who fought for them. She memorized words and repeated them in front of a camera. Why should anyone give a crap about her? She was honest enough to accept that a book about her was probably going to be purchased by her enormous fan base, even as she wondered what real importance it held for them. Regardless of all that, she felt that the book should contain her worst moments, too. She didn’t want people to think that she didn’t acknowledge the life that she had extinguished because of her irresponsibility. But she and her mother had never even spoken about it. How could she have written about it?

  Reilly picked up her phone and dialed. The call dropped into her mother’s voicemail and she was both relieved and disappointed.

  “Mom? Call me when you get this, okay? I read your book. It’s very good,” she said, and was about to hang up, when she remembered that it had been several weeks since she had last spoken with her m
other. “And I miss you. Call me.”

  The Morning Show Again

  “HOW ON EARTH DID YOU get me booked on The Morning Show again? I thought that they blacklisted me after the last time.” Reilly’s voice was a loud whisper, and she made sure that they were alone before she hurried toward Trip, whom she had just spotted down the long linoleum-floored hallway behind the show’s studio on Rockefeller Plaza. She was relieved to see her manager, but she grimaced as her black and white Converse squeaked on the heavily waxed floor in her eagerness to meet him. The noise was enormous in the pre-show pause, before caffeine kicked in for the staff and guests, before orders started getting barked by the studio manager, before the frenetic energy that fueled the whole operation could almost be seen in the air. Trip looked fresh, despite having just arrived via cab after catching the red eye from L.A. In contrast, Reilly had just come from makeup, where the studio artist had spent extra time trying to conceal the dark circles beneath her eyes. She blamed Trip’s last minute call the night before, asking if she would appear on the show.

  “How, you ask?” replied Trip, laughing at the greeting from Reilly and acting surprised at Reilly’s question. “Charm, persistence, being outstanding at my job… plus they called me to see if you were available. I was just as surprised as you, to be honest. They nearly begged me to have you when they found out that you were in town. Tristan and Melinda’s people offered you a lot of money to have first interview rights. You’re hot, baby! What can I say? Everybody wants a piece of you.”

  “Whatever,” Reilly said in a whisper as they passed the open door of her hosts’ dressing room. Unlike last time, when she had wanted to stop in and say hello before the broadcast, this time she was a little apprehensive. “I’m sure he’s gonna flay me with his big old Chiclet teeth. I don’t know why I think I deserve it.”