I hadn’t read her as well as I thought either, because she was, in fact, sentimental. She missed her family and called her mother every few days and I’d hear her crying sometimes, but she swore that she didn’t want to go back. This was it, the center of the world—Los Angeles de los Estados Unidos. The land of myth and money and movie stars. We had shade to go with our sun. Manicured lawns, clear water shooting out of fountains and golf-course sprinklers. Polite dark-skinned men in white suits parking fancy cars. Starving people were mostly out of sight in the places we visited. I had a swimming pool, four bedrooms, a dishwasher, a lawn service, a housekeeper who came three mornings a week and made our lunches and dinners if I wanted her to. I bought Elsa clothes and shoes and had her hair trimmed at a good salon. In her loneliness, she was nonetheless dazzled. She was still saying that she loved me.
My housekeeper, Lucía, was from Guatemala, and I paid her pretty well. She and Elsa didn’t talk to each other very much; Lucía had liked Lisette too, who often gave her perfectly fine castoffs from her wardrobe. Elsa wanted to know what she earned. “Fifteen an hour,” I said. “Plus an extra two-hundred and fifty a month for health insurance.”
“That’s so much,” she said. “The kitchen is still dirty when she leaves, and she turned your chones blue last week.”
I didn’t care about the underwear. I had dozens of pairs, and Lucía was very embarrassed and apologetic when she showed them to me. “She’s never done that before,” I said.
“She takes advantage. She brings food home with her. Did you know that?”
“I told her she could. It’s really not a big deal, Elsa. She’s worked here for three years and I’ve never had a problem with her. Some people I know have gone through ten housekeepers in eight months.”
“You’re too nice to her.”
“No, I’m only being fair.” Lucía was loyal, reliable, and had four kids back in Guatemala that her older sister had stayed behind to help take care of. Neither woman had a husband anymore. One had died in a farming accident; the other had walked out.
I suspected that Elsa was jealous of my bond with Lucía, innocent as it was, but I didn’t want to cast Lucía into the street, despite wanting Elsa in my bed each night, her slender, warm body pressed against my hairier, fatter, older one. I’d forget then about the steak knife, the tearful phone calls, the age and class differences, the future with its inevitable violent collisions. Other times, I’d look at her and realize that I couldn’t possibly be what she wanted.
“Do you know Brad and Angelina?” she’d ask. “GeorgeClooneyJuliaRobertsJenniferAnistonNicolasCageStevenSpielberg AdamSandlerBenAffleckMattDamonJenniferGarnerScarlettJohanssonSalmaHayekClintEastwood?”
The list went on, long, tiresome, unsurprising. I did know some of them, not very well, but we had worked together. I could have said quite a few things about a number of actors, but I didn’t. I was jealous. I would be fifty in three years and she would be twenty-four. The birth date on her Mexican identity card showed that she was twenty-one; she had only added two years to her age when we met. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t make much of a difference. She was over eighteen.
A month went by. I took her out whenever I had the time, to the beach, to the shops, to the studio that employed me, where Elsa hoped George Clooney or some other big star would be hanging around in the halls, waiting to sign an autograph for her, one she would send to her mother and her friends, though she suspected that her little brother would try to sell it on eBay, as he apparently had done with a few of the things her mother cherished in the house.
Aside from a couple of short visits to the studio, I avoided most of my industry friends, anyone who might have been a rival for Elsa’s affections. But almost as bad as my jealous paranoia was the morning when I caught her and Lucía arguing, their Spanish so rapid that I could only make out that they were fighting about the kitchen floor, Lucía’s face closed, her mouth a grim line of reproach. “Please,” I said to Elsa. “The floor’s fine.”
Both women turned on me, one furious, the other red-faced and tight-lipped. “It’s dirty. I can see dirt everywhere,” Elsa snapped.
I looked down but didn’t see anything. “Please don’t make trouble, Elsa.”
“You’re not my father,” she said.
Lucía said nothing and turned back to the carrots she was peeling.
“I know that, but I really wish you wouldn’t fight with Lucía.”
“You are so blind,” Elsa hissed before stalking out of the room.
My face had gone hot, as much from embarrassment as anger, and Lucía still wasn’t saying anything. Her shoulders were hunched, her head tilted at a mulish angle.
“I’m sorry about that, Lucía,” I said quietly. “I’ll do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
She glanced at me, her face unreadable. “None of my business,” she said, lowering her eyes. “No apology, Mr. Tonelli.”
I had to go back on location the next day, and it was almost a relief. I took Elsa with me, and as we drove to Las Vegas for my next job, Schmitt’s Alibi, I tried to tell her as gently as I could that I was disappointed in the way she had treated Lucía. I hadn’t slept much the night before, my thoughts fixated on the scene in the kitchen, and how subsequently Elsa ignored me all afternoon. She didn’t speak to me until dinner, when she said that I’d embarrassed her, made her look like a fool, even though it was Lucía’s fault that my house was such a pigsty.
But the house wasn’t dirty. She was only making trouble, as far as I could tell, and I didn’t understand why.
“She’s not a bad person,” I said. “Her life isn’t easy. Her family is far away and she can’t come and go from Guatemala like I could if I wanted to.”
“You’re too nice. No one ever helped me when I got yelled at by customers.”
Before her great-aunt’s booth at the ceramics market, she’d worked in a clothing store. She’d told me more than once that it had been awful. Sometimes men would come on to her, and their jealous wives would tell the manager that it was she who’d flirted with them. Eventually she was fired, accused of shoplifting, but she swore that she hadn’t stolen a thing.
“I pay Lucía’s salary,” I said, “and unless you want to start paying it, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave her alone.”
“Fine,” she said, hands clenched in her lap. She stared out the window at the blinding desert where nothing but scrub grew.
“Please don’t be like that. I don’t want to fight.”
She snorted. “Yes, you do.”
“You’ll like Vegas,” I said.
She didn’t reply, and it wasn’t until we were standing at the hotel reception desk that she spoke to me again. “You’re right,” she said. “It is nice here.” She did not apologize for the way she’d treated Lucía, but I let it go. I was tired. We would be away for several weeks and I wanted us to get along.
We stayed with the rest of the crew at a Tuscan-themed place just off the Strip. The actors were lodged in a block of rooms at the Flamingo, except for the two who owned condos in town. My workday was ten to twelve hours on some days, eighteen to twenty on others. The film’s star, the guy playing the title character, Carlton Schmitt, was a big-haired, loud, alcoholic thirty-year-old named Barclay Dunston. His real name was Matt Dusseldorfer, but he’d been convinced by an agent years earlier that he’d never make it with such a clunky name. Not surprisingly, Elsa was captivated by the possibility of meeting Dunston, but for the first week, I didn’t bring her to the set—we had an explosion to stage, a car chase, two sex scenes with only the director, the actors, and the essential crew allowed in.
I knew that Dunston had his hands full with a wife, a baby, and probably a girlfriend or two, but that didn’t really matter. Nothing was sacred. Some of those guys slept with a dozen different women a week, probably more. It was part of the whole gold-dusted deal—fame, ungodly amounts of money, endless pussy. It could go on like that unti
l they died, and for some of the most famous actors, I’m sure it did.
“I won’t bother no one on the set,” she begged. “I promise.”
“Anyone,” I said. “‘I won’t bother anyone.’”
“Anyone, no one, no everyone,” she said. “The casinos are so boring. I never win and people blow their smoke in my face. Lo odio. Let me come with you. Please, please, please.”
Unless I was close by, she was too shy to talk to anyone on the set. For the first few days, she shrank into the corners, trying not to trip on all the cords. But then the director, a scrawny Welshman named Kel Williams, who ate uppers three meals a day and spoke with a lisp when he got riled up, spotted her and said that he wanted her in the nightclub scene we were shooting later in the day. She didn’t even glance in my direction before she went to the wardrobe trailer, where she was decorated in silver platform boots and a black minidress by the wardrobe mistress.
When I saw her come out in that dress, more heart-stopping than the five-million-dollar female lead, my first desperate thought was that she wasn’t in love with me, and in a year or two, she would have forgotten me.
“You like my dress?” she whispered, passing me on her way to the floor where the other extras were already being ordered around.
I managed to smile. “You’re the most beautiful woman here.”
“Really?” It looked like she might cry.
I could feel myself sweating. “You’re gorgeous, Elsa. You know that.”
“I’m so happy,” she said, her voice trembling. “My life is finally here.”
The assistant director was watching us and motioned for Elsa to hurry it up. I stood back, my heart seizing. Okay, I thought. Okay okay. Let go. Adios.
I found a grip I had known for several years and took a pale blue pill that he sold me for ten bucks. He had a lot of pills but didn’t advertise. Like me, he’d worked in the industry for a long time. He knew that word traveled no matter what, and that it was best for everyone if it traveled quietly.
“Is she your girlfriend?” he asked when he slipped me the pill. “The one in the silver boots?”
I nodded.
“Where’d you find her?”
“In Mexico.”
“Jesus,” he said, his brown eyes a little glassy. “If she’s got a cousin or a sister, let me know.”
The pill softened the ache in my gut, straightened out my head, calmed the stupid bloody fist in my chest that was the source of so many of my problems. In twenty minutes, I was a better, happier man. I could probably have watched Barclay or Kel grope Elsa for an hour and not have felt like someone was punching me repeatedly in the stomach.
I don’t think Barclay really noticed her though. He was too worried about how he would look in the scene, and if he was saying his lines like an automaton. His wife was also in town to keep an eye on him, coming and going on the set as if she were the governor of Nevada. I didn’t see Kel do much of anything to Elsa either, aside from leer at her and call her sweetheart and put his bony hands on her hips and ass to show her where and how to stand, but he did this with a number of the other girls in the scene, including the lead, Kate Walters, a blonde-haired, born-and-bred Hollywood sweetheart who hated Barclay Dunston and looked like she wanted to murder someone after finishing their two closed-set sex scenes, which had required both her and Barclay to be completely naked, one of the shoots taking almost seven hours to get right.
The big stars might make a pile of money, but sometimes they earn it. What they do on camera, as many as fifty or sixty times before the director is satisfied, can be excruciating. Some of the things I’ve seen them do for a shoot—hauling bundles of bricks back and forth across a sweltering parking lot all afternoon or hanging upside down while someone sprayed them in the face with a garden hose for five hours—I would have walked off the set from after three takes. But the best actors will do it over and over, like well-programmed machines, their bodies not responding in any obvious way to discomfort or exhaustion. When the cameras roll, they become almost supernatural. They’ll look at you and not recognize who you are, despite working with you for ten years. They probably wouldn’t recognize their own name if their mother showed up and shouted it at them a dozen times.
“Was I good?” Elsa asked after we wrapped and she’d changed back into her own clothes. She was all adrenaline, not having eaten in at least eight hours. She hadn’t said a word during the scene, had only swung her hips and jiggled her ass and made sure not to look at Barclay and Kate as they danced and pretended to fall in love at first sight. This was the opening scene—movies rarely ever shoot in sequence, which often surprises people when I tell them.
“You were terrible,” I said.
She was crestfallen. “What?”
“I’m kidding. You did a great job.”
“You’re so mean,” she cried. “I hate you! Why did you say that? It’s not funny.”
“I’m sorry. It was a joke.”
She hit my arm hard and wouldn’t talk to me on the way back to the hotel. The blue pill had worn off and my tongue felt swollen. I had a headache too, not having eaten in several hours either.
“Let’s order room service,” I said.
“I want to go out. Aren’t there parties? Not everyone goes home and does nothing.”
“People are tired after fifteen hours on the set, Elsa. Of course they go home. We can go out tomorrow. I have to be back at work again in six hours. We’re doing a sunrise shoot.”
She shook her head, grimacing. I still felt lacerated from the sight of her in the nightclub scene, of everyone’s eyes on her. “I want to go out tonight,” she said, her voice rising toward tears and hysteria.
It was almost ten. We weren’t going anywhere. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I promise. I need at least five hours of sleep or I’ll be worthless.”
She went into the bathroom and slammed the door. I heard the water running after a few seconds and picked up the phone and ordered two steaks medium-rare and two baked potatoes, a bottle of champagne and a couple of pieces of chocolate cake. In her current mood, she would pick at her food, if she touched it at all, and I would end up eating half her plate. I was about fifteen pounds overweight and wasn’t supposed to eat red meat or butter or sour cream. My father had died of a heart attack at fifty-one. His father had had the same bad luck at forty-eight. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the grip’s pills either, but I didn’t do it very often.
After a few minutes, I heard her voice. She was on her cell phone, one I had given her with the account charged for calls to Mexico. From her tone, it sounded like she was talking to her mother. I stood by the door and listened to her say that she was going to be a movie star, the director loved her, she might soon have enough money to bring over her mother and two younger siblings and buy a house in Hollywood or Pasadena. It wasn’t hard to understand her; she had said these things before, but without the same conviction. I heard my name once, and she said that I was the same—lo mismo que siempre, then another few words I didn’t catch.
I knocked once but she ignored me. I wanted to wash my face; it felt gritty and hot, as if sand were lodged in the lines around my eyes and mouth. I knocked again and she paused before saying that there were a lot of very pretty girls on the set, but she might have been the prettiest. “Sí, es posible, Mamá,” she said.
She didn’t deserve them, but I didn’t want the night to be a complete bust, so I called down to the concierge’s desk and ordered some roses, paying quite a bit to have them delivered with dinner. When room service showed up fifteen minutes later, she was still in the tub. I knocked a third time and told her that it was time to eat, but she didn’t come out for ten more minutes. By then it was eleven and I needed to go to bed soon but wasn’t looking forward to doing it on a full stomach. I could tell that I would probably have to take another one of the grip’s pills in the morning.
She finally emerged from the bathroom in her lavender robe, hair slicked back from her flawless f
ace. The robe was short, barely covering her ass. I wanted her despite how tired I felt but she wouldn’t look at me until she spotted the roses, her face instantly softening. “For me?” she asked, her cheeks flushed.
“Congratulations on your first shoot in America.”
She came over and kissed me, pressing close, feeling my erection against her stomach. In a second we were on the bed and I opened her robe and pulled down my shorts and didn’t stop, her warm, elastic wetness taking me in, my eyes damp with grief and lust. I buried my face in her hair, smelled her warm, clean scent, and knew that I adored her in spite of her prejudices and ignorance and selfishness. I also knew that she couldn’t possibly love me.
Right afterward, I fell asleep, sweaty and sticky but too exhausted to do anything about it, my half-eaten dinner congealing on the tray. When I woke, all the lights were off. I squinted at the clock by the bedside, suddenly panicked that I was late for work, but its red face glowed 3:17, and I saw then that Elsa wasn’t next to me. I called her name but she wasn’t in the room. The hall was empty too, a jaundiced light shining on its yawning vacancy. She had taken her handbag, her phone, her new spring coat purchased from Saks just a few days before we left California. One piece of cake on our dinner tray was missing, nothing else. I could smell her perfume and knew that she must not have left too long ago.
When the crowds thin after one or two in the morning, Vegas’s Strip looks barren, postapocalyptic, despite the uninterrupted line of hotels and tourist traps, the casinos still lit as if for primetime. The Luxor, the enormous Egyptian pyramid next to the gaudy Excalibur castle, is probably the most strange and otherworldly of the big casinos in deep night, my skin prickling as I passed it, knowing that I wouldn’t find her because she was in a hotel suite with someone else, Barclay or one of the other flashy, idiotic young actors who couldn’t yet utter a line without smirking, her skimpy clothes in a pile on his floor, her nervous laugh silenced when he kissed her with his thick, ugly tongue. I wanted to shout at her that when a woman gets into bed with a famous man, she’s fucking his fame, not the man and his average body. There is no real connection, no love or respect or sympathy. She’s fucking nothing but an idea and it won’t last beyond the time it takes him to roll onto his stomach and fall asleep. My eyes were blurry as I drove back and forth, my pulse leaping the two times I saw a woman with long dark hair, but it wasn’t her. The few people on the street sometimes glanced toward my car as I glared out at them, two drunk guys in jeans and L.A. Dodgers jerseys laughing and giving me the finger as I passed. I understood why some of us turn into murderous animals, why O. J. and the Columbine kids had done those cruel, depraved things.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 6