Flavor of the Month

by Olivia Goldsmith

  It took more than a week for Jahne to realize Michael McLain had dropped her. It reminded her a bit of that old punch line: You can’t fire me—I quit! But even if she didn’t call him, she felt she had to do something to exorcise his memory. One afternoon, driving down Wilshire Boulevard, she passed Rancho La Brea and pulled over to the side of the road. One of the stranger juxtapositions of Hollywood was the La Brea Tar Pits, filled with prehistoric slime, sitting there next to the movie and television studios, business towers, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There was symbolism there you didn’t have to reach hard for. Jahne got out of her Miata and walked over to the cyclone fence that surrounded the pits. An appropriate resting place for Michael’s gift, she thought, and took the diamond necklace on the thin gold chain out of her pocket. It was the first piece of jewelry a man had ever given her. She shook her head, and wondered if Michael got a quantity discount.

  But, despite her joke, she was hurt. Not that she had loved Michael, or that they had been committed to one another. She had simply liked him, and she had believed that he had liked her, that he had understood her. Well, she’d been wrong. Now she looked down at the three stars in her palm. She hated the necklace, and, with all the force she could, she threw it into the air. The sun glinted on the diamond for a moment before it hit the viscous black of the pit. She only wished it was Michael, that old dinosaur himself, that she was flinging away. The necklace sank without a trace. Let the archaeologists of the future figure that one out, she thought, and turned back to her car. Then she drove home to prepare for her screen test.

  If Jahne thought that TV had prepared her for movies, that the small screen was like the big one, she found out she was wrong. Makeup, for example, was a whole other reality. Bill Wougle the makeup artist seemed to paint another face over her own for the test. And the lights took more than an hour to adjust. Jahne nervously fondled the few sheets of script she’d been given. They didn’t read like much. It was a fight scene between her and the male lead.

  She was ushered onto the sound stage and was surprised—no, shocked—to see nothing but a fully made-up bed there, under the spotlight. She scanned the space, looking for Sam, and cleared her throat nervously. Was she expected to do this scene in bed? Then, from the corner of her eye, she saw him. Dressed in black, as usual, and striding toward her from behind the cyclorama. He tossed his head, swinging the pony tail from off his shoulder, a movement she remembered as habitual. “Jahne!” he called, in what seemed a cheery voice. She felt anything but. He approached her. She felt his presence moving toward her almost as if a wall of energy were coming at her. She tingled.

  “What’s this?” she asked, nodding at the bed, trying to keep the question casual.

  He smiled. “Jahne, would you mind if I pulled the rug out from under you? You have every right to say no. But I’m not happy with the script I sent you. Not yet, anyway. Instead of lumbering you with it, I thought it might be better if we worked with something that wouldn’t distract me. Something I’m familiar with.” He handed her a script.

  She looked down at the cover. Jack and Jill and Compromise, it read. Despite the incredible brightness of the lights, Jahne felt her vision darken for a moment. “I’m not prepared,” she said, and she felt that it might be the understatement of the nineties.

  “I know. It’s a lot to ask. Will you be a trouper?”

  Quickly, she ran through her options. She could turn him down, but then he would believe her to be afraid of cold readings. And he might just ask her to prepare this for later, or he might decide not to work with her at all. If she said yes, she certainly would know this material better than anyone else. She could probably blow him away with it. But wouldn’t he recognize her, and could she stand to tear her heart out in front of him this way? Could she bear being filmed in the role she’d lost forever? “Give me a minute,” she told him.

  “Of course,” he agreed, and walked her over to a chair in the corner. “Take your time,” he said. “I’ve marked the monologue I would like you to try.”

  She waited until he left, joining the cameraman and boom operator. But she already knew. Of course. It was the “I’ve never been loved” aria. She’d recited it every night and twice on Wednesdays and Sundays for 426 performances. Back then she had thought that she was loved. She had thought that she was loved, at last, by Sam. She had had the strength to deliver it as a wounded bird, but what would she do now? She opened the script. She felt sweat trickle down her scalp and run to the back of her neck. The scars on her breasts began to itch. Her armpits were clammy; Bill’s makeup must be running down her face; what could she do? What would she do?

  Her eyes swept the script, and then the inspiration came. Not pathetic. Angry. Not sad and vulnerable because she’d never been loved, but enraged over it. She scanned the text. It would work. It would work better. She went through it, the whole thing, in her mind. She stood up and strode over to Sam. “I can do this,” she said.

  Jahne pulled the Miata onto the freeway, and released a long, noisy breath. I got it, she thought! I took my first screen test and I blew him away.

  Of course, she couldn’t be sure of anything. But she had taken his monologue, her monologue, and put a whole new spin on it. Instead of the pathetic cry “I’ve never been loved,” it became one of rage. She delivered the whole thing with the passion of anger, of rage at the waste, the unfairness. And when she cried over the last words, they’d been tears of rage.

  The crew had applauded. Jahne knew enough to know how rare that was, and if Jahne still knew Sam at all, she knew when he was interested in working with someone. And Sam was definitely interested in working with her.

  Jahne wanted to be out of the car, physically moving, walking. The waiting for the callback was going to be tough. In the old days, she would have bought herself a good meal, or, better yet, a really sinful cake and some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. But now she couldn’t afford to gain an ounce. Well, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, she thought, and groaned to herself at the silly expression.

  Still, it would make a good release, a nice reward. She pulled her car into the underground parking at the huge shopping center on the west side of Century City. Riding up the escalator to the main floor in the mall, she became aware of the looks and the whispers of people as they were going down. Damn, she thought, I forgot my sunglasses. Well, she’d just have to keep her eyes down. But as she scanned the displays in a store window, a teenage girl and her mother rushed up to her. “Aren’t you Jahne Moore?” the girl asked. “May I have your autograph?” She thrust a crumpled Kleenex and pen out at Jahne, who signed it quickly while eyeing the entrance to the store. She’d better move into it. But, faster than she could get away, another woman came up behind the first two, and said, “Mine, too, Miss Moore?” It took a moment for Jahne to realize, but suddenly a crowd had formed around her. And then, almost in an instant, the crowd grew. “Me next,” someone yelled, and two women began pushing. “Jahne Moore!” someone yelled. “Cara!” yelled another. The crowd pushed. She was being pushed. The space around her disappeared. Then someone actually screamed.

  Jahne fought the panic closing up her throat. Over the tops of the heads of the throng, Jahne noticed a tall, black security guard coming out of the store, and begin to push through the crowd. She felt elbows in her back, and the bodies pressed in around her. Then someone pulled at her hair. There were more screams, and her name was being shouted over and over. She felt as if she were drowning. “This way, Miss Moore,” the guard said when he finally reached her, and extended his hand. Jahne took it, and let the man propel her through the crowd, blindly pushing aside arms holding paper and pens as he pulled her along.

  “Miss Moore, please, for my little girl,” one woman said. Jahne hurriedly took the paper, signed it while she moved, and handed it back in the general direction of the woman. Another hand grabbed at it, but a new voice started screaming, “That’s mine, give that to me.” Jahne caught a glimpse of two
women struggling, and, for the first time, she actually began to fear for her safety.

  “Give me one, Cara! You gave one to that bitch, why not me?” a woman was screeching at her, as the guard pulled on the shop door to open it against the mob.

  “No more autographs today!” the guard shouted.

  “Too good for us, Jahne?” a fat, middle-aged woman shouted. She kept her head down. “Fuck you! We made you, you bitch.” That last remark would have frozen her to the floor if the guard hadn’t given her arm a final tug, pulling her to safety on the other side of the doors, which he then locked behind them. He led her to the back of the store. Jahne, feeling dizzy and almost faint, heard the security guard calling the police on his walkie-talkie, leaving the crowd to swirl behind the glass like aquarium sharks in a feeding frenzy.

  Jahne didn’t have to look in the mirror as she slumped onto the little office sofa. She knew she was pale.

  “Drink this,” a woman in a security uniform said, handing her a cup of water.

  She gulped it, just to do something. But it did make her feel better. “What happened?” she asked.

  “What happened?” the guard repeated. “You’re what happened.”

  “I…I had no idea. I mean, I’ve never seen this before.”

  Two policemen came hurrying into the office from the rear delivery door. “Follow me, Miss Moore,” one of them snapped. “We’ll go out through the trucking bay and drive you to your car. Then we’ll follow you in the squad car until you’re safely home.”

  “Thank you, I can’t tell you how…”

  “Don’t thank me. Just don’t do this again. Next time, bring your own security, like all the others.”

  It was surprisingly difficult for Jahne to get an appointment with Gerald La Brecque. She resented it. Perhaps she was simply getting used to the star treatment she thought she deplored, Jahne told herself grimly as she waited for the man to arrive. Both Michael McLain and someone at Marty’s office had recommended him, but, despite her calls, it had taken almost two weeks to get this home visit. Two weeks during which she had not heard a word from Sam Shields.

  At two-thirty—exactly two-thirty, Jahne noticed—her buzzer rang. Not bad-looking, she thought as she opened the door. Oh, fine, she told herself. How desperate are we? Next we’ll be looking over UPS men and personal trainers as potential dates.

  The audition, seeing Sam, and the mini-riot had unsettled her, no doubt about it. Funny how being mobbed had made her feel lonely. It took the riot to make her believe that she was different now. Special and alone. Then she hadn’t heard from Sam. Could he have recognized her? Could he have simply rejected her performance? For two weeks, she’d been obsessed with the question. No wonder she was looking for love in all the wrong places. She smiled politely at the security consultant.

  But La Brecque really wasn’t bad-looking. Average height, dark, with a neat mustache that looked very soft, although the rest of him looked anything but. He eyed her very directly—his eyes were a strange, very light gray that made them seem almost colorless—and accepted her offer of a seat but not a drink.

  “Sorry about the delay in setting this up, Miss Moore, but we’ve been swamped just now.”

  “That’s all right,” she found herself saying, and meaning it, though she’d resented him two minutes before. He seemed so, well, so very real. God, when was the last time she’d dealt with anyone outside the Industry? she wondered. No time during the last five months. Even her houseboy was an unemployed actor.

  He looked across the coffee table at her. “So,” he began. “Why don’t you brief me on the current situation…?” His sentence trailed off with such a slight inflection that she barely recognized it as a question. It was more of a directive.

  “Well, it’s really an issue of security. I mean, of course it would be or I wouldn’t call you. Security here and when I’m out. I mean, I don’t want a bodyguard or anything. Probably I’m overreacting, but there have been a few…incidents. And fan letters.” It was the letters from prisoners that really bothered her the most. She’d read the first one with compassion and a vague sense of obligation. Then the next. She got so that she could pick them out in the piles, the number at the upper left-hand side, the prison franking instead of a stamp. Some were almost all right, others merely obscene, but the worst were the fifty-page dedications, complete with drawings and/or poetry. Lots of them were worse, but the letters from men in prison really frightened her. “They make me nervous. But it’s probably nothing. Religious nuts, or teenage pranks. You know the sort of thing…”

  But instead of smiling at her reassuringly, he only put his hand to his cheek and rubbed, a sort of assessment movement. “Have you saved them?” he asked.

  For the very briefest moment, she thought he was talking as Sharleen might, in the religious sense. Then, stupidly, she asked, “The letters? No. They’re horrible. Why would I save them?”

  “To save yourself.”

  “Save myself from what?” she asked, fright rising, and with it anger. Jesus! She had waited to see this guy and used up a precious free afternoon to be reassured. Now was he going to try to scare her out of her wits? Is that how he earned his living? By increasing the ever-growing paranoia of the Hollywood crowd? “Are you saying this is a matter for the police?”

  La Brecque rubbed his cheek again. “I’m afraid not. They only intervene after something happens. Before that, it’s up to you, me, and the courts.”

  “But they’re just the usual crank letters. You know.”

  “Well, I don’t, because I haven’t seen them. And probably most of them are. But there are others that are more indicative of possible deranged behavior. And we keep a computerized file of the dangerous ones we know about, try to be aware of their whereabouts. We keep adding to our data base. It’s important to save them.”

  “I get a lot of mail from prisoners. They scare me,” she finally admitted.

  “Well, those are the ones behind bars. It’s the others I worry about. Rebecca Schaeffer. And that sniper shooting of Genny Logan, for example. Right in her living room. That one hasn’t been solved. She wasn’t a client of mine.” He looked around. “If you don’t mind my saying so. Miss Moore, you are being very cavalier about your safety. Anyone could get in here if they wanted to. And you couldn’t stop them if you didn’t want them to.” He paused. “Do you own this place?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because it can’t be secured. Not here in Birdland, and on a public road. They call this part of the Hollywood Hills the Swish Alps. Lots of gays. Nothing wrong with them, but lots of possibility of street hustlers.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “You can move. Buy a place. We’ll move to seal your property tax records so no one can access your home address. And we’ll check out any place that you consider buying to ensure its safety. But you’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But I just rented it!” She’d barely settled in here, was just starting to feel comfortable, plus she had a lease she couldn’t break.

  “Miss Moore, this is really a matter of life and death we’re talking about.”

  Jahne looked at him, expecting a smile at the hyperbole. But there was none. “You ever hear of Robert Bardo?”

  “No.”

  “He walked up to Rebecca Schaeffer’s door. She was starring in a sitcom. Lived in a place a lot like this. Never met Bardo. Didn’t know him. Opened the door. Gave him an autograph. She was nice, pleasant, to him. It wasn’t enough. He came back. He killed her.” Jahne shivered.

  “I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “We’d need quite a bit of information to start.”

  “Such as?”

  “Names of friends, past lovers, any enemies. Professional jealousies, past and current employees, that sort of thing. Relatives, their addresses, current relationships.”

  Jahne felt a moment of panic. Should she disclose her past, or pretend she had none? Tell him about Sam, about Michael, about Michael a
nd Sharleen, about Michael and Lila? Oh, Jesus, her life was becoming unmanageable!

  “Of course,” he told her, “all of this will be totally confidential. There has never, ever been a leak from my organization.”

  “And how much will all this cost?”

  “Quite a lot, I’m afraid. For the time being I’ll put staff on per diem. Then what I’ll do is put together a proposal along with a fee quote. There will be an initial fee, and then a monthly retainer. A year will run in the mid-five figures.”

  She sat there, stunned, and just looked at him. Mid-five figures. Like fifty thousand dollars? She could take care of a lot of Dr. Moore’s patients for that! And buy a few Donna Karan outfits as well. She sighed.

  “It might make it easier if you think of it as part of the cost of doing business,” he said gently. It was the gentleness of his tone, combined with the glint of his wedding band as it rubbed his cheek, that brought tears to her eyes. Because, all at once, she wanted him to rub his hand across her own cheek, to tell her that it would be all right. To take care of her.

  Jahne spent the evening throwing a few things in a bag and calling hotels. She didn’t know what she would do. In the meantime, she called Mai and slept at her house.

  The next day, back to pick up more of her stuff, Jahne was still reeling from La Brecque’s security evaluation. How vulnerable he said she was, how she would have to move to another place, how much it would cost, how she would have to watch her movements in public. It was all so depressing, so limiting.

  And lonely. She almost blushed at remembering how she had reacted to the sight of La Brecque, as if she hadn’t been with a man in years. As if she were desperate. He didn’t catch any of it, of course. Nor the expression on her face when she noticed his wedding ring. At least she hoped not.

  Jahne walked over to her desk, which, now she knew, dangerously exposed her to the sights of possible snipers from outside. She sat at it nonetheless, took out a piece of her new stationery—with her address here, which would be useless now—and began to write to the only friend she felt she had in the world.