And then the whammy, no doubt Last Night’s crowning glory. On the right-hand side of the page was a full-bleed photo that may as well have been the size of a billboard. The time read 6:18 A.M. And it featured the girl, wearing the exact same drab blue dress from a few hours earlier, walking out of a poolside bungalow room. Her hair was disastrously mussed and she looked every bit the part of a morning-after cliché. She clutched her bag to her chest as though protecting herself from the surprise of the flashbulb, and her eyes were wide, shocked, but there was something else there, too. Pride? Accomplishment? Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t shame.
Brooke couldn’t keep from examining each photo with the care of a scientist studying a specimen, looking for clues and signs and patterns. It took a few more sickening minutes, but after staring intently at the last photo, Brooke knew what bothered her the most. The girl wasn’t a famous actress or supermodel or pop star, at least not as far as Brooke could tell. She looked ordinary. She had limp, slightly too-long reddish-brown hair, a nondescript blue dress, and a figure so unmemorable—so stunningly average—that it almost took Brooke’s breath away when she realized: the girl sort of looked like her. From the extra five pounds to the inexpertly applied eye makeup to not-quite-right sandals (the heels just a little too clunky for a night out and the leather just slightly too worn), Julian’s Chateau fling and Brooke could have been sisters. And, almost most distressing of all, Brooke was fairly certain she would be considered the more attractive one.
It was all too weird. If your husband was going to cheat on you with some stranger he met at a Hollywood hotel, couldn’t he at least have the self-respect to choose someone hot? Or, at the very least, someone plastic and cheesy? Where were the huge fake boobs and the skintight skinny jeans? The airbrushed spray tan and the five-hundred-dollar highlights? How’d she even get into the Chateau? Brooke wondered. Maybe a famous musician couldn’t always score a Giselle-level model, but couldn’t he at least have found someone who looked better than his own wife? Brooke tossed the magazine aside in disgust. It was easier to focus on the absurdity of your husband cheating on you with a less attractive version of yourself than it was to acknowledge the actual cheating part.
“You okay?” Her mother’s voice surprised her. Mrs. Greene was leaning in the doorway, her face wearing the same pained expression as before.
“You were right,” Brooke said. “Those would not have been fun to see on the Amtrak train home tomorrow.”
“I’m so sorry, honey. I know it must seem impossible right now, but I think you have to hear Julian out.”
Brooke snorted. “You mean listen to something like, ‘Honey, I technically could’ve come home and spent that night with you, but instead I got wasted and hooked up with your less attractive twin sister? Oh, and I just happened to get photographed doing it?” Brooke could hear the anger in her voice, the dripping sarcasm, and was surprised she didn’t feel like crying.
Mrs. Greene sighed and joined her on the bed. “I don’t know, sweetheart. He certainly needs to do better than that. But let’s be clear on one thing: that tramp is no twin of yours. She’s just some pathetic girl who threw herself at your husband. You outshine her in every imaginable way.”
The sound of Julian’s single, “For the Lost,” rang out from the other room. Brooke’s mother looked at her questioningly.
“It’s my ringtone,” Brooke said, pulling herself up. “I downloaded it a few weeks ago. Now I can spend the night trying to figure out how to make it go away.”
She located her phone in the guest bedroom and saw it was Julian calling. She wanted to screen him but couldn’t.
“Hey,” she said, assuming the same position on this bed.
“Brooke! My god, I’ve been panicked. Why weren’t you answering my calls? I didn’t even know if you made it home or not.”
“I’m not at home, I’m at my mom’s.”
She thought she heard a muffled curse and then he said, “Your mom’s? I thought you said you were going home?”
“Yeah, well, that was my plan until Nola informed me that our apartment was under siege.”
“Brooke?” She heard a horn honking in the background. “Goddammit, we almost just got rear-ended. Dude, what’s up with that guy behind us?”
Then, to her: “Brooke? Sorry. I almost died there.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Brooke . . .”
“Yes?”
There was a pause before he said, “Please hear me out.”
There was another moment of silence. She knew he was waiting for her to say something about the pictures, but she couldn’t give him the satisfaction. Which, incidentally, was upsetting in its own way. How sad was it to be playing such juvenile don’t-show-your-feelings games with your own husband.
“Brooke, I—” He stopped and coughed. “I, uh, I can’t even imagine how hard it was to look at those pictures. How absolutely, utterly horrible it must have been . . .”
Her hand gripped the phone so tightly she was afraid she might break it, but she couldn’t make herself say anything. All of a sudden, her throat had seized shut and the tears began streaming down her face.
“And when all those vile media people asked all those questions last night on the red carpet . . .” He coughed again and Brooke wondered if he was choked up or just getting a cold. “It was brutal for me, and I can only imagine how hellish it was for you, and—”
He stopped talking, clearly waiting for her to say something, to save him from himself, but she couldn’t formulate a sentence through the silent tears.
They sat there for an entire minute, maybe two, before he said, “Baby, are you crying? Oh, Rook, I’m so, so sorry.”
“I’ve seen the pictures,” she whispered, and then paused. She knew she had to ask, but a part of her kept thinking it was better not to know.
“Brooke, they look so much worse than the reality.”
“Did you spend the night with that woman?” she asked. Her mouth felt like it was coated in wool.
“It wasn’t like that.”
Silence. The quiet on the phone almost felt alive. She waited and prayed for him to say that it was all a huge misunderstanding, a setup, a media manipulation. Instead, he said nothing.
“Well, okay then,” she heard herself say. “That pretty much explains it.” Her last two words were choked, muffled.
“No! Brooke, I . . . I did not have sex with that girl. I swear to you.”
“She was leaving your room at six in the morning.”
“I’m telling you, Brooke, we did not have sex.” He sounded miserable, his voice pleading.
And then she finally understood. “So you didn’t actually have sex with her, but something else happened, right?”
“Brooke . . .”
“I need to know what happened, Julian.” She wanted to throw up at the horror of having this conversation with her husband, this weirdly horrible version of “what base did you get to?”
“There was the removal of clothes, but after that, we just passed out. Nothing happened, I swear to you, Brooke.”
The removal of clothes. It was such an odd way to phrase it. So distant. She felt the bile rise in her throat at the mental picture of Julian lying naked in bed with someone else.
“Brooke? Are you still there?”
She knew he was talking, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She moved the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen; a picture of Julian with his face pressed against Walter’s stared back at her.
She sat on the bed for another ten seconds, maybe twenty, looking at Julian’s picture and listening to the rise and fall of his voice. She took a deep breath, brought the microphone panel to her lips, and said, “Julian, I’m hanging up. Please don’t call me back. I want to be alone.” Before she could lose her nerve, she turned off the phone, pulled the battery out, and stashed them both separately in the night table drawer. There would be no more talking that night.
15
“ARE you sure you don’t want us to come in, even for a few minutes?” Michelle asked, eyeing the row of SUVs with tinted windows that lined the block outside Brooke’s building entrance.
“I’m positive,” Brooke answered, trying to sound definitive. The two-hour car ride from her mother’s place to New York with her brother and Michelle had given her more than enough time to bring them up to date on the Julian situation, and they’d arrived in Manhattan just as they started asking the sorts of questions about Julian that she wasn’t prepared to answer.
“Why don’t we just help you get in the front door?” Randy asked. “I’ve always wanted to punch a paparazzo.”
She gritted her teeth and smiled. “Thanks, guys, but I can handle this. They’ve probably been sitting here since the Grammys and I don’t think they’re leaving any time soon.”
Randy and Michelle exchanged a skeptical look so Brooke pressed on. “I’m serious, you two. You have another three hours minimum and it’s getting late, so you better get going. I’ll walk down the block, ignore them when they jump out of the cars, and keep my head high. I won’t even say ‘no comment.’”
Randy and Michelle were on their way to a wedding in the Berkshires and planned to arrive a day or two early for their first trip without the baby. Brooke sneaked another look at Michelle’s impressively tight belly and shook her head in wonderment. It was nothing short of a miracle, especially since pregnancy had replaced her formerly trim, compact body with a short, stocky figure with zero delineation between her chest and waist or waist and thighs. Brooke thought it would be years before Michelle would regain her figure, but only four months after Ella’s birth she looked better than ever.
“Well, all right . . .” Randy said, raising his eyebrows. He asked Michelle if she wanted to run into Brooke’s apartment and use the bathroom.
Brooke slumped. She was dying for a few minutes to herself before Nola arrived and round two of the inquisition began.
“No, I’m good,” Michelle answered, and Brooke exhaled. “If traffic’s going to be that bad, we should probably get going. You sure you’re going to be okay?”
Brooke smiled widely and leaned into the passenger seat to hug Michelle. “I promise. I’m more than fine. Please just focus on sleeping and drinking as much as possible, okay?”
“We are at risk of sleeping straight through this wedding,” Randy mumbled, leaning out through the driver’s window to accept Brooke’s kiss.
There was an explosion of flashbulbs close by. The man taking pictures from across the street had obviously spotted them before anyone else, despite Randy parking nearly an entire block from the entrance. He was wearing a navy hoodie and khakis and didn’t appear to be making the least bit of effort to disguise his intentions.
“Wow, he was all over that, wasn’t he? Didn’t waste a second,” her brother said, leaning out the window to get a better look at the guy.
“I’ve actually seen him before. Guaranteed you’ll see a pic online in the next four hours of us kissing with some sort of caption like ‘Jilted Wife Wastes No Time Taking New Lover,’” she said.
“Will they mention I’m your brother?”
“Most definitely not. Or the fact that your wife is sitting next to you in the car. There’s actually a distinct possibility they’ll call it a threesome.”
Randy smiled, a sad one. “Sucks, Brooke. I’m sorry. About everything.”
Brooke squeezed his arm. “Stop worrying about me. Go enjoy your trip!”
“Call if you need anything, okay?”
“Will do,” she said with more fake cheer than she would have thought possible. “Drive safely!” She stood and waved until they turned the corner, then beelined for the front door. She barely made it ten feet when the other photographers—no doubt tipped off by the earlier flashbulbs—seemed to fly right out of the various SUVs and convene in a loud, flapping group directly outside the door of her building.
“Brooke! Why didn’t you go to any after-parties with Julian?”
“Brooke! Did you throw Julian out?”
“Did you know your husband was having an affair?”
“Why hasn’t your husband come home yet?”
Good question, Brooke thought to herself. That makes two of us wondering the exact same thing. They shouted and shoved cameras in her face, but she refused to make eye contact with any of them. Feigning a calmness she didn’t feel at all, she first unlocked the outer door, pulled it closed behind her, and then unlocked the door to the lobby. The flashbulbs continued until the elevator closed behind her.
The apartment was eerily quiet. To be honest, she had allowed herself to hope against hope that Julian would drop everything and fly home to talk things through. She knew his days were jam-packed and nonnegotiable—as an approved member of the “cc” list, she received his daily schedules, contact info, and travel plans by e-mail every morning—and she knew he couldn’t very well cancel any of the post-Grammy press opportunities to come home a couple days early. But it didn’t change the fact that she desperately wanted him to do it anyway. As it stood now, he was scheduled to land at JFK in two more days, on Thursday morning, to do another round of New York media and talk shows, and she was trying not to think about what would happen then.
She only managed a quick shower and a bag of microwave popcorn before the buzzer rang. Nola and Walter burst through into the tiny foyer in a happy entanglement of leashes and coats, and Brooke laughed for the first time in days when Walter jumped vertically four feet in the air and tried to lick her face. When she finally caught him in her arms, he squealed like a piglet and covered her mouth in kisses.
“Don’t expect the same greeting from me,” Nola said, scrunching her face in disgust. Then she relented and hugged Brooke hard, and together with Walter, the three of them made a funny little tepee. Nola kissed Brooke on the cheek and Walter on the nose and then headed straight for the kitchen to pour vodka over ice with some olive juice.
“If what’s going on outside your apartment right now is any indication of how it was in Los Angeles, I think you might need this,” Nola said, handing a glass of cloudy vodka to Brooke. She sat opposite Brooke on the sofa. “So . . . you ready to tell me what happened?” she asked.
Brooke sighed and sipped her drink. The liquid was sharp, but it warmed her throat and hit her stomach in a surprisingly pleasant way. She couldn’t bring herself to relive the whole thing again, point by miserable point, and she knew that although Nola would be sympathetic, she could never really understand what the night had been like.
So she told Nola about all the assistants swarming, the gorgeous hotel suite, the gold Valentino. She made her laugh with the story of the Neil Lane security guard and bragged about how perfect her hair and nails had been. She glossed over the call from Margaret, saying only that the hospital higher-ups were crazy and she really had missed a lot of work, and waved off the look of shock on Nola’s face with a laugh and a sip of her drink. She dutifully provided details on what the red carpet was like (“so much hotter than I thought—you don’t realize until you’re there how many lights are beating down”) and what the stars looked like in person (“thinner, for the most part, than in their photos, and almost universally older”). She answered Nola’s questions about Ryan Seacrest (“charming and adorable, but you know I’m a Seacrest lover and apologist”), whether or not John Mayer was cute enough in real life to warrant all the women he cycled through (“I honestly think Julian is cuter, which, now that I think of it, really doesn’t bode well”), and offered a highly unhelpful opinion on whether Taylor Swift looked better or worse than Miley Cyrus (“I’m still not positive I can tell them apart”). Not really knowing why, she deliberately omitted the Layla Lawson meeting, the women in the bathroom, and the lecture from Carter Price.
What she didn’t tell Nola was how thoroughly devastated she’d been when she hung up the phone after being fired. She didn’t describe how icy Julian had been
when he told her about the pictures, how it was Julian’s focus on “managing their impact” and “staying on message” that upset her the most. She left out the part where, as they strolled the red carpet, the paparazzi hounded them with humiliating questions about the pictures and screamed insults, hoping to make them turn toward the camera. How could she explain to anyone the way she felt listening to Carrie Underwood perform “Before He Cheats,” wondering if every single person in the auditorium was staring at them and chuckling to themselves—then trying not to remain stony-faced when Carrie delivered the song’s refrain, “Cause the next time that he cheats / Oh, you know it won’t be on me.”
She omitted the parts about sobbing in the car on the way to the airport and praying Julian would beg her to stay, absolutely forbid her from leaving, how his tepid, halfhearted protestations were devastating. Brooke couldn’t admit that she was the last to board the flight in the pathetic hope that Julian would come sprinting to the gate, like in every movie, and plead with her to stay, or how, when she finally walked the jetway and watched the door close behind her, she hated him more for letting her go than whatever idiotic crime he’d committed in the first place.
When she finally finished, she turned to Nola and looked at her expectantly. “Was that a good summary?”
Nola just shook her head. “Come on, Brooke. What’s the real story?”
“The real story?” Brooke laughed, but it sounded hollow, miserable. “You can read the real story on page eighteen of this week’s Last Night.” Walter jumped up on the couch and rested his chin on Brooke’s thigh.
“Brooke, have you even considered that there’s a logical explanation?”
“It gets harder and harder to blame it on the tabloids when your husband actually confirms it.”
The expression on Nola’s face was one of disbelief. “Julian admitted . . .”
“He did.”
Nola set her drink down and stared at Brooke.
“I think the exact quote was ‘there was the removal of clothes.’ Like, he has no idea how that happened, but ‘removal’ took place.”
Last Night at Chateau Marmont Page 30