Pretty

by Jillian Lauren

  Table of Contents

  A PLUME BOOK

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  A PLUME BOOK

  PRETTY

  JILLIAN LAUREN is a writer and performer who grew up in suburban New Jersey. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

  PLUME

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2011

  Copyright © Jillian Lauren, 2011 All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. © 1985 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lauren, Jillian.

  Pretty : a novel / Jillian Lauren. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54370-2

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.A9442275P74 2011

  813’.6—dc22 2011005058

  Set in ITC Esprit Std Book

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  In memory of Sylvia

  There’s a blaze of light in every word

  It doesn’t matter which you heard

  The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

  —Leonard Cohen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Deepest gratitude to Alexandra Machinist and Becky Cole.

  During the writing of this book, both friends and strangers were remarkably supportive and generous. Many thanks to Signe Pike, Leonard Chang, Jim Krusoe, James Russell Packard III, Joe Gratziano, Anne Dailey, Tammy Stoner, Shawna Kenney, Bett Williams, Rachel Resnick, Ivan Sokolov, Sarah Kim, Colin Summers, Nell Scovell, Claire La-Zebnik, Lynn Breedlove, the Writer’s Sunget, Suzanne Luke, Whitney Lee, the Dreskin family, the Shriner family, the Samuels family, Dr. Keely Kolmes, Jerry Stahl, Pamela Ezell, Arthur Avary, Pastors El and Fran Clarke, Joy Clarke, Dr. Reef Karim, and Shannon Reese. Thanks also to Connie, Monica, Linda, and Anival from Moro Beauty Academy.

  I am indebted to Mark Vonnegut for his amazing book The Eden Express and to Milton Rokeach for his visionary The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

  And, always, I am grateful beyond words for my husband, Scott Shriner, who long ago told me that I was a lousy hairdresser and urged me to consider taking this writing thing more seriously.

  One

  How I got here the long version is a longer story than I want to tell. How I got here the short version is the story of a night a year and a half ago. I was with Aaron, who was supposed to be the love of my life.

  “Did I win, baby?” I sang out to Aaron across Raji’s bar, pretending I was more stupid than I actually was. We had landed in L.A. six months before and that was when I really started laying on the dumb routine. I found it advantageous to be underestimated. You have to be careful how you fake it, though, because things like that can stick and before you know it you become what you’re pretending to be.

  Not that I’m some kind of genius but I’m not dull enough to think I lost even when the other guy sunk the eight ball. But I hollered at Aaron anyway because he was deep in redbar-light, sparkle-eyed conversation with a smart, dainty blonde named Madison, for Christ’s sake. Madison. Madison from USC film school no doubt.

  It was a bad night already. Bad even before it got worse. I was pitched sideways with the cheap well liquor and the dope we’d smoked off foils in the bathroom and the lines we’d snorted off Madison’s compact mirror. I had smoked cigarettes dusted with cocaine and was tumbling too fast. I flirted with Aaron’s friends just to piss him off.

  “Hey, Chaaaaaaas.”

  I baited my hook and let my line fly. Chas was such a ridiculous mark, with his wire-rimmed glasses and his oversized-sweater-wearing, women’s-college-going girlfriend. I like to taunt people like Chas because, really, what other power do I have? I have the power to make him think of me when he’s fucking his girlfriend. Chas has all the rest. Chas will graduate from law school and make lots of money and the most I can hope for is that he’ll still vote liberal so that when things get too bad people like me can get a bed at a state-sponsored rehab.

  My mom used to say to me, “Pretty is as pretty does.”

  She’s like the fucking cliché almanac, my mom. But she was pretty, too. Prettier than me even because she wasn’t as tall and broad in the shoulders as I am. I watched her and decided that it wasn’t true. Pretty isn’t what pretty does. Pretty just is. Pretty is pretty and it can get you a few things. And it doesn’t last long so whatever the hell you can get with it while you have it, go ahead and get it.

  So that’
s all I was doing. Just trying to use what I had to wring the last electrical charge out of a night that was fast slipping through my fingers while Aaron turned his face away. When I remember it now I can almost see the red lights glowing in my eyes, the flecks of foam at the corners of my mouth—some animatronic horrible girlfriend monster.

  I hopped up and sat on the edge of the pool table. I swung my legs and pouted.

  “Be my savior, Chas. No one else is volunteering. Tell me. Did I win?”

  I let it run right off the rails; let it get all out of hand. My love for Aaron was so acid it scraped my veins raw. He twinkled his liquid chocolate eyes at some other bitch, waiting a beat before he turned to me after I called out to him. I loved him so hard right then that I wanted him dead is the truth of it.

  I could always see Aaron’s head over the others in the bar. He was an explosion of dreadlocks and gangly limbs. He had an enigmatic not-white-not-black thing going on that inspired strangers to constantly ask him, “What are you?” Which bugged him to no end. I mean, what kind of question is that? He would simply answer, “I’m Aaron.” He was nobody’s easy anything.

  Thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses cemented his face in place, but otherwise he was constant motion, constant, easy, seamless motion. And me, I was a long redhead glowing next to him like some Irish peasant from an old painting. What I thought when he stood behind me with his arms clasped around my waist in front of the full-length mirror was that I was something more glorious than I ever had been before. Someone I didn’t recognize.

  Aaron did love me. But not, I think, like I loved him. Not so that it twisted him ugly and desperate.

  “You Shook Me All Night Long” came on the jukebox and it is a universal law that all strippers must dance whenever that song comes on no matter where they are. And that’s what I was by then—an exotic dancer out at Jet Strip by the airport. I had meant it to be an emergency measure, something to get us by until Aaron could score another gig.

  When I met him, Aaron was playing the horn on tour with Billy Coyote, a pretty well-known jazz guitarist. One humid Thursday in July he had walked into Rusty’s where I worked in Toledo. My real pop was a horn player, too. There’s a lot I can’t remember about him, but I remember hearing him play. I live my life now with two trumpet songs like sad angel voices in my head—Aaron’s and my pop’s. Sometimes I can’t remember anymore whose horn was whose, except that Aaron had a flaw that Billy berated him mercilessly for. He could be tentative with how he finished a phrase. Sometimes when Aaron took the horn from his lips you had the sense of another note hovering somewhere in a parallel universe, a note he could have chosen but didn’t. Not so with my pop. He always hurled himself at the finish line.

  When I first started working at Rusty’s, Rusty had called me into the back office and showed me old pictures she’d kept of my pop. He was tall like me, taller than the other guys on the cramped stage. In my favorite picture, my pop is blowing his heart out in the smoke haze blue spotlight. Wide-collared suit, a lock of greased hair falling in his face, forehead glistening with sweat, eyes closed. I wondered where, in the Toledo I knew, was anyone half as cool. If I met someone as cool as that, I vowed I would follow him wherever he went.

  And then in walked Aaron. When Aaron’s band left Toledo the next morning that was exactly what I did. I climbed into the bus with them. And when I say that pretty can get you a thing or two, that’s what I mean. I mean it can get you a bus ride to the West Coast with a jazz musician who hardly knows you but might already be suspecting that he loves you. We were headed to San Francisco at the end of it all, Aaron had promised me. He told me there was even a church in San Francisco that had canonized John Coltrane. Clearly the place for us. So L.A. was never really the plan, but when we got stranded here and Billy’s ex-girlfriend offered to help me get a job at the club where she worked, Aaron and I both thought it was a good idea. Here’s another thing pretty can get you—it can get you a job. Me being a stripper seemed real jazz to Aaron, kind of picturesque and romantic. That’s how it was in our minds before I started.

  Aaron and I strolled with our fingers intertwined down Hollywood Boulevard to pick out the shoes, while I wondered where the hell San Francisco had gone. Wondered what the hell Pastor Dan would say if he could see me now. Wondered how we had wound up in this desert buying a pair of heels to go hit the airport clubs for work. Wondered how many other girls had thought the very same thing walking into the very same store. I opted for the black shiny ones with the platforms and the long, thin, tapered heels. They’re remarkably durable. You can get most of the scuffs out with alcohol. Dancing was another one of those choices I made that I didn’t know until way later what it really meant.

  By that night at Raji’s a year and some change ago, dancing had shifted from an emergency measure to just being my deal. It was what I did, and I couldn’t remember anymore what I had started out wanting to do. Had I wanted to be a singer? A jazz wife? A California bohemian? I don’t think I wanted to be a drunken stripper. Not that it was so bad, but it wasn’t so good. I mean, what it does to how you look at your real boyfriend. How all that lying all night long and all the laps of all the men can make you kind of angry and how being angry and smiling is a bad habit to get into. You can blow up and do something cruel one night. You can do something stupid that maybe you’ll regret forever and that will ruin the rest of your whole life.

  So “You Shook Me All Night Long” came on the jukebox just as Chas looked at me all starry-eyed, like the dork he was, and said, “Yes. You won.”

  “You’re saying I’m a winner?”

  “You are.”

  “Well, we should celebrate, don’t you think?”

  I held his gaze, got up on the pool table, recently cleared of balls by the game I had won, and handed him my pink heels. He held them away from his body like they were either worth two billion dollars or they were on fire and he couldn’t decide which.

  “Now, don’t get all crazy and go drinking champagne out of those, ’cause I might need to walk home in them if Aaron keeps acting like an ass.”

  I gave him a wink. He was so easy. All Aaron’s friends were jazzmen and phony intellectuals and chatty college girls. I would never fit in with them so I settled for the next best thing and acted the wild one. Sometimes it was true.

  I danced there, my bare feet on the green felt, flipping my hair back, swaying my hips, and leaning with one hand onto the low, swinging lamp. The glowing green platform was the only gash of color floating in a brown bar full of gray smoke. Glasses of one amber liquid or another reflected people’s faces all distorted on their curved surfaces. Wafts of a bad smell you just ignored blew over from the direction of the crowded bathroom.

  Aaron finally walked over and stood in front of me, looking concerned or annoyed or something. Chas left my shoes on the edge of the table and melted into the crowd. Aaron’s forehead creased in the uneven way that it did when he was disturbed. He held his arms out to me like you would to a kid on a high wall, in that way that means jump and I’ll catch you. I kept dancing and he stood there and I see him now like that, his arms extended to me, but he is moving backward away from me, getting smaller and smaller, and I am high above him, higher than the pool table even, and he is falling down a dark well. He held his arms out to me and it stopped me in mid dance move.

  I ended my little performance, put my hands on his shoulders, and jumped off the table into his arms. He lifted me gently down by the waist like I was a ballerina, toes pointed, riding gracefully through the air. When I touched down I clasped my hands behind his neck and stood on his boots with my bare feet. Then, with his edges hugging mine, we danced slow like in an old movie. I don’t know when he learned to dance like that or when I did. I understood that it meant we were starting over.

  But even with the missteps of the evening forgiven, even with a fresh start, I was hungry and falling apart. When I was with Aaron, my molecules vibrated so fast that they flew off their gravitational path. I
split into a thousand humming pieces. I closed my eyes and swam in a black velvet galaxy with no floor beneath me while I braced for my impact with the bottom. I remember thinking: I don’t know if I can live with this.

  We held on to each other for a minute like that, swaying dreamlike in a bubble. The rest of the room went quiet and it was just us. And if I could rewind it, I would rewind it to there.

  I broke the mood and put one leg up around him, grinding on him like he was a customer. I was laughing; I was joking around, but he didn’t think it was funny and he pushed me off.

  “What’s the matter? You want to fuck her?” I asked, meaning Madison.

  “What are you talking about? Why do you always have to ruin shit?”

  We were making a scene, but it was a bar where scenes happened pretty regular. He acted superior, pretending like he was holding it together, but I could tell he was all tilted and too high and too drunk, same as me.

  Aaron was into the drugs but he wasn’t starving hungry need more all the time like I was. He usually kept it a little more in control, but that night he didn’t. That night he was gone.

  “Don’t tell me how to talk, asshole. Maybe you want to talk to your fancy friend over there instead. I’m sure there’s some French fucking film she’s dying to discuss with you. I’m out of here,” I said, fumbling for the keys in my purse, hopping and putting on my shoes as I left. I was always testing him, wanting him to stop me.

  He followed me out the door and we stood on the trashstrewn sidewalk, illuminated by the headlights whizzing by.

  “Give me the keys,” he said. “You can’t drive.”

  “You know who I’m talking about. You want to fuck her, you should do it. I fuck other people. Whoever I want. You don’t own me. You’re not my father. So go ahead.”

  It was a lie. I never touched anyone else if you don’t count work. And you don’t count work. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe to see if I could make him really lose it. Maybe to measure how much he cared by how bad it could get. I was going to tell him later that I had been kidding.