by Rachel Cline
“But still, nothing that disqualifies him from being a good producer.”
“Well, he’s been getting the script to the right people—that’s all I care about. I wasn’t sure it was ready to go out to actors, but he writes these incredible ass-kissing, name-dropping cover letters. ‘The role of Bunny combines the toughness of Streep’s Sophie with the vulnerability of Monroe in Some Like It Hot.’ Shit like that.”
“Wow,” said Annabeth. “What happened to Elisabeth Shue?”
“Oh, she was never right for it,” said Laura, and then listed all the actresses they were now considering, as well as some character actors to play the part of the Sasha, the club owner. “Simpson reminds me a little bit of my liar, but I guess that’s inevitable,” said Laura, rerouting Annabeth’s train of thought.
“Your liar?”
“This guy I used to work for, Jon Golden.”
Annabeth knew the name—he was a producer of some renown. “I didn’t know you worked for him.”
“Yeah, for almost two years. I was, like, twenty-two. Some months I got paid, other months, no such luck.”
“Is that why you call him ‘my liar’?” asked Annabeth.
“That and everything else. He lied about every deal he ever made: how much the budget was, who’d agreed to be in it, when it would start…he made his living by lying.”
“You called him that to his face?”
“Oh, totally. He thought it was hilarious.”
“And Simpson reminds you of him? That doesn’t sound good.”
“Well, it is what it is. He’s a producer,” said Laura. And then she remembered to ask Annabeth if she could pick up their mail and water their plants while they were in Santa Barbara over Thanksgiving.
The interior of Laura and Greg’s house didn’t quite correspond to its Spanish exterior and Old Hollywood location in Annabeth’s eyes, but the general tenor of the decor made sense for Laura: spare, clean, modern. Watering the plants took five minutes so, afterward, she sat on the leather couch and leafed through a copy of Vanity Fair, sat at the dining table and tried to forget the Bronsteins’ Thanksgiving dinner the night before, stood at the back door and wondered how much Laura and Greg paid the gardener to trim the impossibly steep but grassy lawn, and, finally, made her way upstairs. There was no reason for her to do so—no plants up there she’d been told to tend to, and she was not entirely comfortable about entering the private precincts of Laura’s domain—but the ride home was so long, it seemed reasonable to wait until the sun would no longer be directly in her eyes while driving.
It had really been too soon for Annabeth to spend Thanksgiving with David’s family. Seeing him surrounded by people who had known him since childhood, she discovered that she was woefully ignorant about his past. For one thing, he’d apparently gone through a major ceramics phase in college—the house was full of bowls, plates, and mugs he had “thrown” himself. This information just plain gave her the creeps. She also found out that, until very recently, David, his sister, his parents, his father’s two brothers, and their families had spent two weeks skiing up at Mammoth every winter, where they owned a condo. When she’d asked him why he’d stopped going, he’d said he hadn’t been able to get the time off from the library. She could tell he was lying, but not why or how much. She’d ultimately gotten through the evening by drinking a great deal and attaching herself to David’s sister’s loserish single friend, a woman named Mona who did something administrative at the L.A. Philharmonic. But even Mona didn’t seem very interested in Annabeth’s work. And without that as a conversational fallback, Annabeth had started to feel pretty loserish herself. Everyone the Bronsteins knew seemed to be a brainiac of some kind (law professor, research scientist), or at any rate they all had professions that required advanced degrees: David’s sister was an architect, and her husband a gastroenterologist. It was uncanny to find two dozen people who lived in Los Angeles and had no interest in the movie business, but there they were.
In Laura’s bedroom, Annabeth opened the his and hers side-by-side closets. This wasn’t really snooping because, she told herself, her intent was not prurient. What sex toys they might own or whether or not Laura padded her bra were not the information she was after, and she already knew what Laura’s wardrobe looked like. The closets contained shirts, pants, and a smattering of dressier pieces hung on neatly spaced hangers—some in garment bags. T-shirts, jeans, and sweaters in a very limited palette (gray, black, white, occasionally olive green or navy blue) were folded and piled neatly on open shelves. They must spend almost as much on dry cleaning as she did on rent, Annabeth calculated. What did it cost to live like this? Greg was from what she presumed was a wealthy family back East (how else could he afford to be a painter?). She knew he had gone to a fancy New York prep school, anyway. But she knew very little about Laura’s family. The night tables and bookshelves offered a surprising dearth of mementos—no framed photos, no collections or keepsakes—and even the bedside books seemed neutral. On what seemed to be Greg’s side of the bed there was a book of essays by the neurologist Oliver Sacks; on Laura’s, a Dorothy Sayers novel. Both seemed equally unlikely to have been read.
Stymied in her effort to find any clues to the inner Laura but not yet ready to leave, Annabeth decided to take a shower in the extraordinary glass box she had spotted in the master bath. Its six fierce nozzles sprayed her head, chest, and hips, and once wet she helped herself to the extraordinarily silky French shower gel and salon-only brand of shampoo. She even picked up and examined the pumice stone, although she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the thing. Upon turning off the Hydra-headed shower, however, Annabeth encountered an unforeseen problem: how to dry herself without leaving behind evidence in the form of a used towel. She stood dripping in the stall for almost a minute while she mentally composed elements of a plausible explanation—she’d been stuck in traffic, the AC in her car had died, she was on her way out to dinner from Laura’s. (As though Laura would have begrudged her a few tablespoonfuls of bath products and the five cents’ worth of laundry detergent it would cost to remove Annabeth’s cooties from one of a dozen pima cotton bath sheets! But Annabeth’s sense of having transgressed was stronger than any logic.)
Ultimately, she decided to air-dry by walking naked around the master suite. The afternoon sun was hot enough to make quick work of this. In passing, she saw herself in the mirror on the closet door—a bright lozenge of sunlight made her white skin luminous next to the chocolate brown of the bedroom walls. She turned her back and cast a look over her shoulder at her reflected image. The sight made her feel sexy and strong. For a few seconds, she even lay down on the king-sized bed, picturing the white bedspread’s raised pattern becoming imprinted on her back and thighs. She was tempted to masturbate but didn’t dare. Getting up to dress, she caught a faint trace of Laura’s perfume. She’d never gotten around to asking what it was called. Now she could find out for herself.
Returning to the bathroom, she looked for a supplementary medicine cabinet—she had already found the one over the sink to contain only dental floss, aspirin, and similar essentials. Where were the prescription meds, the tampons, the beauty secrets? At last, she realized that the full-length mirror in the bathroom was, in fact, a spring-loaded door. The cabinet behind it was also full-length—it contained an astounding trove of products; here was the mother lode.
The shelves at eye level appeared to hold the bulk of Laura’s frequently used cosmetics. There was a jar of the five-hundred-dollar face cream Annabeth had read about in a magazine at the dentist’s office. Beside that was a fluted glass flacon of Laura’s perfume, a brand Annabeth had never seen before, French. She’d lifted the bottle to smell the nozzle—she hadn’t yet even decided to try a spritz—when the sound of the mail falling through the slot downstairs startled her and she dropped the tiny bottle on the bathroom’s stone floor, where it shattered.
She gazed in frozen terror at the mess of broken glass and amber liquid as the smel
l of orange blossoms, sandalwood, and something else—cork?—overtook the room. There were tiny shards of glass glittering across the tops of her pale bare feet. Ultimately, she was forced to use one of the fancy towels to make a walkway for herself, which meant she had to do a load of laundry in addition to cleaning up the mess, and then drive to Beverly Hills to find more of the mysterious perfume. Barneys, the third store she visited, was the only one that carried it. By the time she’d acquired the replacement bottle (for eighty-five dollars, not counting all that valet parking at the stores!) she felt exhausted almost to the point of tears. Then, back in Laura’s bathroom, she realized that to complete the illusion she would have to empty the atomizer to the previous level. She sprayed a fair amount of fragrance into the backyard, but at a certain point she had to admit defeat and leave the too-full bottle where she had found its predecessor so many hours before.
Asleep in her Venice bedroom that night, Annabeth had another version of her elephant-and-sewing-machine dream. This time, she was wearing the elephant hide and the sewing machine was running on its own, furiously. She woke up terrified that it would sew her. The dreamed machine was not the beige Pfaff she’d grown up with; it had a distinctive matte green finish, like an old Burroughs adding machine.
“A Singer?” David asked her, stroking her hair. “A siren, sucking you in?”
“I don’t think so.” Annabeth wondered if her dream could possibly be that cleverly encoded. She doubted it. “My dreams aren’t that literary.”
“It’s not literary, it’s just how they work sometimes. Haven’t you ever had one like that? Where it all turned out to be an anagram or something?”
“No, have you?”
“I used to have one about a bee that was gathering cocaine instead of pollen. It drove me crazy for months. Then one day I realized that cocaine with a B was Cobain.”
“So what did that mean?”
He looked sheepish for a moment, and Annabeth decided not to press him.
“Well, my elephant hide isn’t an anagram, I know that much.”
What is it hiding then? David wanted to ask, but Annabeth obviously wasn’t interested in wordplay. And that was terribly disappointing.
10
Annabeth wore Laura’s blazer the night they met for dinner at Kate Mantilini. It was dressier than her usual attire, but by wearing it she felt she was somehow protecting herself from inquiries about the missing/replaced bottle of fragrance. Remember, it said, you trust me, you like me, you even gave me this jacket.
Laura had come straight from an advance screening of Interview with the Vampire, and the first thing she said was “If anyone ever talks me into casting Tom Cruise, shoot me in the heart with a silver bullet.” It was a line she’d been working on the whole way over, but her offhand delivery convinced Annabeth that it was a spontaneous quip. Annabeth had not seen the movie, but she didn’t question that a day would come when Laura Katz would be in a position to say no to one of the two or three most powerful actors in Hollywood. When they were seated Annabeth asked how Laura’s Thanksgiving had been.
“Oh, God, didn’t I tell you?” said Laura, which of course she hadn’t. “It was hellish! My mother booked us all into this little inn up in a canyon that was supposedly haunted, or holy, or some shit. The woman at the desk was, like, The whole compound was sacred to the Chumash.” Laura paused and smiled to herself. “Remember It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature?”
Annabeth didn’t remember, but she smiled in an ambiguous way, just to keep Laura talking. She had never heard Laura mention a mother before and had for some reason assumed that her parents were dead.
“Anyway, our room smelled like a dead animal, there were doilies every six inches, and Greg got cramps from the organic vegetarian slop they served us for dinner. We left at two A.M. and checked into the Biltmore. We were very proud of ourselves.”
“You had Thanksgiving dinner at the hippie place?”
“No, at my uncle’s house in Montecito. Anyway, when I got back here I looked up those Chumash Indians, and guess what? They were bloodthirsty marauders. They’d practically extinguished themselves by the time Junípero Serra got there.”
Laura pronounced the Franciscan monk’s name in an elaborate, trilled, and whispered Spanish that implied mastery of the language. Annabeth worried that she wouldn’t have begun to know where to “look up” the Chumash Indians. She didn’t even know in what century Junípero Serra had “got there.” If she did wind up working on Trouble Doll, Laura would expect her to know all these things that she didn’t. She drank her second martini much too quickly.
When the entrées were served, Laura changed the subject. “So, I know why I don’t usually go home for the holidays,” she said to Annabeth. “What’s your excuse?”
“Well, you know, it’s a long haul to a cold place…”
“And?”
“And there’s not much I would really call ‘home’ back in Duluth.”
“Your parents are divorced?”
It was not the kind of question Annabeth had expected to answer, although she was flattered by Laura’s interest. “Sort of,” she said.
“Sort of?”
And so she told Laura some more—quite a bit more, as it turned out. She was drunk. She wrote down as much as she could remember when she got home because after dinner, while they were standing on Wilshire Boulevard waiting for the valets to return with their cars, Laura had asked Annabeth a funny question: “Hey, can I use any of that stuff?”
“What stuff?” said Annabeth, which seemed slightly friendlier than “What do you mean, use?”
“Well, like the thing about the basement might work in that scene where—well, no, you haven’t read the new pages—”
“You mean in Trouble Doll?” Annabeth felt a charge—fear?
Laura smiled and shrugged vaguely, meaning “So can I?” or maybe “Where’s the harm?” Then she looked out into the street for the valet and, after another moment, back at Annabeth. “Never mind. You’re obviously not comfortable.”
“It’s just…I don’t know,” Annabeth began.
“That jacket looks great on you, by the way,” said Laura, but the way she said it sounded as though maybe it didn’t—or that Laura wanted her to wonder if it didn’t. Was she supposed to offer to give it back now?
David was at KCRW when she got home that night and Annabeth was glad to be alone. She got out the spiral notebook where she sometimes recorded her dreams and wrote:
When I was about ten, I started reading Nancy Drew books and pretending I was a detective. There were two games I made up. In one, I would hide “clues” that I could put together into some kind of story. Stupid stuff could be clues: a bottle cap, a sock, a pencil—the point was that they were hidden and then the game was to explain why. Did a man in too much of a hurry to put on his second sock stop here? Did he hide the pencil in the fear that later it would be found and dusted for fingerprints?
My other game was looking for the secret staircases in our house. It was old and there were always noises that I couldn’t explain, so I decided there had to be some hidden passageways. In retrospect, I was looking for a secret hiding place for myself, I think: where I could play without Jeff making fun of me, or hide when Mom and Dad were fighting. (Did I really once hear her call him a fag? That’s what I told Laura. I can’t imagine that word coming out of her mouth, but I also kind of remember it.) Anyway, eventually I found my spot—it wasn’t actually hidden; it was just the alcove in the basement that was out of sight of the stairs. I should have realized it wasn’t exactly a secret because there was a cot there, and a little radio, and a lamp. I guess it was where my dad had to sleep when he was on the outs with my mother.
After I first “found” the place (it had been there all along, of course, but at some point I guess I decided to make it A Discovery), I planted some clues, and then I didn’t go back for a while. I was going to wait long enough so that I would forget about my last visit and discover the c
lues anew. And maybe the weather got nice enough to play outside. Anyway, one afternoon I finally went back down there and at first I thought the radio was on, because I thought I heard a voice. I decided that Russian spies were listening for coded transmissions from Moscow. But when I got to the place in the shelves where I could spy through them, I saw my brother jerking off. I’d never seen an erect penis before and I’d certainly never seen that haunted and slightly maniacal expression on Jeff’s face. He was about fifteen, I guess.
Eventually I must have managed to forget about that—or maybe I was old enough to also be curious about getting another look, or maybe no time passed and I went back the next day. I remember rain, or maybe even sleet—I could hear it on the metal cellar doors—and I went to the alcove and turned on the little lamp and the radio and began to set up shop on the bed. Who knows what was I going to do? Maybe just read my latest Nancy Drew. But as I sat there I noticed a nasty smell and, sleuth that I was, started to look for its source. It didn’t take long. There was a dead raccoon in the far corner, near the water heater.
Again, I didn’t tell anyone, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how the raccoon had gotten there, how it must have been trapped and no one heard it and it starved to death right there in our basement. As though a raccoon would not be able to get out the same way it got in, and—I now realize—as though a creature could starve to death in that house, whimper and cry and scratch and thrash, and no one would ever know. When I finally went back to the basement room again, everything was different. The mattress was folded in half on the cot. It looked so final. Like an army cot after the soldier is killed. That was the thing that ended the game for me. It seemed like a place where I might disappear, too.