The Starlet

by Mary McNamara

  “Oh, for godsake,” Juliette said, her head pounding against the young woman’s relentlessly disjointed commentary. She reached for a pan of milk she had been heating on the stovetop. “Stop saying that. The only thing that will kill you right now is your own stupidity. You’re not a minor anymore. Get a new manager, tell your mom to back off. Quit the movie. It’s your life. It’s your career. You’re a grown-up. Act like one.”

  Mercy shivered. “Your mom must be dead,” she said.

  Juliette started, scalded her hand on the milk she was pouring.

  “I’m sorry,” Mercy said, “but she must be, because if she were alive, you would know. You can’t fire your mother. It doesn’t work that way, not even in Hollywood.”

  “Fine,” said Juliette, angry at the burn, which really hurt, and the reason she got it. “Here’s an idea: Why not give sobriety a shot? If you want people to stop treating you like a spoiled, strung-out starlet, stop acting like one. If you want people to stop treating you like a drug addict, stop being one.”

  “What a great idea,” Mercy said, just as sarcastically. “Why haven’t I thought of that? Where do you think I was for three weeks before I got yanked over to Rome, a week early because, you know, suddenly Lloyd Watson’s schedule changed? You think I’ve been holed up at Resurrection because I like eating off a tray? ‘Go to rehab,’ everyone said. ‘Go to Resurrection, they’ve helped so many people.’ So I went, and you know what?” she said, her face going gray. “It wasn’t any different than anywhere else.”

  Juliette paused, and swallowed a derisive comment—she was not a fan of posh rehab centers, and Resurrection was one of the poshest. It was run by Steve Usher, a former rock star who had surrendered his guitar and party-boy ways during the late nineties in favor of a meditative lifestyle that revolved around a memoir/recovery guide he had nicknamed the Little Book. Usher had long straggly rock-star hair and an unfortunate habit of showing up at even the most formal gatherings wearing loose linen tunics and no shoes. Resurrection was located halfway down a cliff in northern Malibu; it had its own mini-tram and a gift shop. But still, Juliette thought, a person like Mercy couldn’t exactly show up at some local AA meeting without causing a furor. Usher, by all accounts, understood the particular perils of getting sober in the limelight quite well. If reports were true, he had actually helped quite a few A-list celebrities, not to mention many more of the still rich but less notorious.

  “You can’t blame rehab, Mercy,” she began a bit more gently. “Really, you can’t. It’s hard to get sober, the hardest thing you can do.”

  “Jesus, you sound just like them,” Mercy said contemptuously. “It’s a terrible place, Resurrection; you have to be out of bed by nine and eat in the dining room with everyone else. And they make you ride horses and call it therapy. I hate horses,” she said, her voice rising to a childish singsong. “Let me stay here. Let me stay with you. I’ll do whatever you want, I promise. I won’t drink or talk to anyone. I’ll pick grapes and do the dishes and learn how to make coffee. It’s nice here, and I don’t take up much room.”

  “First of all,” Juliette said, smearing butter on her burned hand, “you are not going to seriously talk to me like you are five years old. That’s just bizarre. And second of all—”

  As if on cue, her BlackBerry rang. Juliette’s BlackBerry had not rung for weeks. Before she left L.A., she had changed her number and given it to only two people: Eamonn Devlin, the general manager of the Pinnacle, and Michael O’Connor, who, while the rest of the world thought he was doing location work, had spent the previous January and February receiving chemotherapy at the hotel. Both had contributed, in their own ways, to Juliette’s decision to escape to Cerreta. She had left L.A. to find a little breathing room, and both men had honored her intentions. Neither had called, or written, or emailed since she had arrived. Not that she had checked. All that often.

  This call, her BlackBerry informed her, was from Dev.

  “Hello?” she said, turning her back on Mercy and walking into the living room. “Hello, Dev?”

  “What the hell is going on over there, J.?”

  If Juliette had expected her first post-vacation conversation with Devlin to be tender or emotional or even kindly, that went right out the window. “There are photos all over the Internet of you fishing Mercy Talbot out of some Florentine fountain, did you know that? Her mother just called me, demanding to know where you were, exactly, and what you had done with her daughter, exactly, and it’s two in the morning here, J. Two in the morning.”

  “Sorry, Dev,” Juliette said, stung by his tone. “Lovely to hear from you, though, and I certainly hope she didn’t interrupt anything. Or anyone.”

  There was a pause that stretched on until she thought perhaps he had hung up, and then Devlin laughed. Softly, gently, as if at some private joke, and for the first time since she had left, Juliette thought about going home.

  “Only beautiful dreams, J. Only beautiful dreams,” he said. As the tension left his voice and her neck, she could imagine him rolling onto his back in bed, could almost see the dark eyes twinkling beneath his bedside lamp. “How are you anyway? Drawing strength from risotto and good red wine? I thought I might get a postcard, but no, the first word I get is off Defamer. You look as lovely as ever, of course, though I cannot say the same for our Mercy. I suppose you know about Lloyd Watson. Some people are wondering if it wasn’t suicide, that the idea of working with Mercy was just too much for the poor man to bear.”

  “Oh, come on,” Juliette admonished—it was always disturbing to see the speed with which the death of a celebrity became fodder for jokes. Also she could feel Mercy’s eyes on her. She stepped out onto the wide front porch and watched a handsome blond intern trundle a wheelbarrow full of kindling across the courtyard. How did Gabe get these amazing-looking young people to do all this work for room and board? The allure of Tuscany was powerful indeed.

  “I’m not joking,” Devlin said. “Rumor had it they were involved and she was the one who knocked him off the wagon. But what I am most interested in is how you come into it. I thought you were ‘getting away from it all.’ I hope that didn’t mean you were just getting away from me. Among all those young and handsome Italian men.”

  Juliette felt her scalp get hot, just as if Devlin had caught her admiring how the intern’s shoulders flexed beneath his burden. Instead of answering, she recited the previous day’s events, not that she had to explain much—all she had to say was Mercy, fountain, and paparazzi and Devlin completely understood. “Well, good for you,” he said finally. “She’s a handful, but good Lord, she comes by it naturally enough. That mother is a horror. You should have heard her grilling me about your background and what you thought you were doing, what I knew about Lloyd Watson and how the Pinnacle was prepared to ‘deal with the situation.’ Mostly she wanted to know where you were. Fortunately, I could honestly tell her I did not know or she’d be on your doorstep as we speak.”

  There was another small pause. Juliette had not told Dev where she was going, at least not exactly, and he had not pressed her. “You know where I am, J. Just give me a shout when you’re ready,” he had said during their last conversation before she left Los Angeles, the conversation in which he had also told her he loved her, though God only knows what that meant. Juliette had known Devlin for almost twenty years, during which time he had loved a lot of women, a few of whom she had actually met once or twice. But she had never mentioned Cerreta to him, though out of habit more than secrecy; it was not something she discussed with anyone. Now she felt shy about explaining herself. Over the phone, and in this context. Cerreta was family, part of her past, and she never discussed either family or past. Not with anyone. Not even with a man she had known and trusted for so long.

  “I told you, I’m in Italy,” she said. “Tuscany, if you want to be more precise. But if I had told you more than that, you’d have told me where I should stay and where I should eat and who I should scout out for a job at the
Pinnacle, and I just want to rest . . . for a while.”

  “For a while,” repeated Devlin. “I like the sound of that. As long as it isn’t too much longer ‘a while.’ You had a lot of vacation accumulated, J., but at some point corporate will be calling.”

  She didn’t say anything because she had nothing yet to say. She still had not decided if she ever would return to the Pinnacle, or Los Angeles, for that matter. She had sold her house and neglected to buy or rent another; as of this moment, she had no place to live, save Cerreta.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll leave that for another day. Keep an eye on Mercy, though, if you can bear it. She’s a lovely girl, you know. Troubled, but lovely.”

  “Would you like to speak with her?” Juliette asked sarcastically. “I can put her right on.”

  “God, no.” Devlin laughed. “I’ve had enough Talbot women whispering in my ear for today. But maybe you can talk some sense into her. She’ll wind up dead if she’s not careful, and that would be a damn shame. Meanwhile, I told her mother you were an ideal and most discreet companion for anyone in need, so maybe she’ll leave the poor girl alone for a few weeks anyway. Although it won’t be nearly that long if Becker has anything to say about it. From what I hear, he’ll have a new leading man before all his various permits expire, if he has to convince one at gunpoint. Which we both know he is perfectly capable of doing. So she should be out of your hair in no time. Your long and lovely hair,” Devlin said with a stagy sigh; now she could definitely hear him settling back into a pillow and grinning his wide and knowing grin. “I should have asked you for a lock before you went. To wear beside my heart.”

  Juliette laughed at his melodramatic tone and a sudden tender memory of his bed, where something had once almost happened, but in the end, in the probably quite fortuitous end, did not. “I do miss you. There, I’ve said it. But that doesn’t mean I’m coming back.”

  “I understand, J., I understand. Well, Tuscany’s not such a big place; perhaps I’ll come to you. Maybe it’s time I got out of the hotel business altogether.”

  “You should get some rest. You sound delirious. I’ll talk to you soon, though, let you know how things are going.”

  Devlin laughed and murmured a farewell that might have been fond or even suggestive, but Juliette did not quite catch it because Mercy had suddenly appeared just behind her.

  “‘Dev’? Is that Devlin?” she asked. “Can I talk to him?”

  “It was, and no, you can’t, because now he’s gone,” she said, hanging up and drawing Mercy back into the house just as a pair of German tourists, dusty backpacks in place, passed by. “Your mother woke him up in the middle of the night looking for you.”

  “I would have loved to hear that conversation,” Mercy said, throwing herself down on the long sofa that lay in front of the huge stone fireplace. “He’s why we stayed in the Pinnacle after the fire, you know. Eamonn Devlin,” she said in a tone usually reserved for James Bond. “He’s got such a crazy-great reputation—I heard he used to work for the IRA or run guns in South Africa or something sexy like that.” She sent Juliette a glance searching for confirmation, then smiled a small secret smile when Juliette refused to even acknowledge the words. “Still, my mother’s a match even for Devlin. I bet he told her to let me stay here, though, and I bet he told you to let me stay here, too. He’s one of the few people in L.A. who actually likes me. Which is good,” she said, pulling a blanket over herself. “Because he’s one of the few people in L.A. whose opinion I respect. They say he killed a man,” she added, in a surprisingly decent impersonation of John Wayne. She shifted uncomfortably.

  “You really flushed the Oxy?” she said. “Because now I think maybe I’m getting my period, and I really do get terrible cramps.”

  Juliette nodded absently. “I told you, there’s plenty of Advil,” she murmured, hefting her BlackBerry, wondering what her life would be like if she really never went back to the Pinnacle or saw Devlin again, thinking that she should call him right back and tell him all about Cerreta and her parents and Gabe, or maybe just ask him what he meant, exactly, when he had said “I do love you, J.,” and then let her go to Italy without another word.

  But it all seemed so big a change in plan, so definitive and dramatic, and she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Besides, what would he say? Nothing that would make anything any clearer. She, Juliette, had to decide what she wanted next, how she felt. About him, about Michael, about what sort of life she wanted, what sort of person she wanted to be. She had spent too many years of her life letting other people, with all their tempting problems and tantalizing needs, shape who she was.

  And anyway, it was two o’clock in the morning there; she wouldn’t want to wake him up again.

  When Juliette turned to tell Mercy she could stay, for a few days, a week at the most, Mercy had fallen asleep.

  Chapter Three

  LIKE MOST PROFESSIONAL WAIFS, Mercy Talbot had a remarkably high threshold for self-abuse. She slept a lot the first day and when she finally showered and dressed, she looked so thin and drawn that Juliette would not let her leave the house before she ate. “Carbs,” Mercy said happily, grating drifts of parmesan onto an alarmingly large portion of linguini. “They’re the only real drugs in Hollywood. If I could have bread even once a week, I wouldn’t need cocaine.”

  “I thought I read in a magazine that you ate whatever you wanted,” Juliette said, her mouth twitching at the corner.

  Mercy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the rest of the sentence being ‘as long as it has no fat, sugar, or taste. Or if I barf it up on command.’ This one model always tells the press she eats a candy bar every day. Only it’s one of those mini-mini candy bars and that’s all she eats all day. Me,” she said, shoving another forkful in, “I’ve always been a savory girl.”

  Once she had eaten, it was as if her Florentine bender had never taken place. She flung herself out of the house and wanted to see every inch of Cerreta, hear every story of every house on the property, every room in the villa. For all the sophistication of her young life, Juliette realized, Mercy had really never traveled except for work. And then she had always been in the controlled environment of the set. But when Juliette offered to take her back to Florence for some nonmedicated sightseeing, Mercy shook her head. She had never been anywhere more beautiful, she said, she was never going to leave Cerreta if she could help it.

  “This is yours?” she asked over and over again as they walked in the gardens, the vineyards, then into the woods, following trails to the ruined abbey, the Etruscan excavation site, the half-finished castle abandoned deep in the forest. “I can’t believe this is yours. Why would you work in a hotel when this is yours? Why would you ever live in Los Angeles if you could live here? It’s a castle, you have your own freaking castle. Why are you putting up with whiny movie stars like me when you have your own freaking castle?”

  Wandering through the villa or out into the fattoria, amid the tangled flower beds and well-tended vegetable gardens, Juliette had to admit that there was a peace here, a droning, lavender-infused calm that draped itself around the doorways, along the sun-warmed stone wall, and hung like the amber evening light that stretched limitless and unquestioning over the hills. The world seemed far away, somewhere over the billowing waves of trees, and not terribly important. She could imagine staying here, if not forever, then for a long time. And in the still-practical part of her brain, she could certainly imagine a lush but still authentic sanctuary that would keep Gabe in all the interns and traditional farm implements he could ever need—eco-friendly travel was the hottest trend going, and Gabe was so green you could practically steam him and serve him with brown rice. Why not use all her hard-won experience at the Pinnacle to help them both create a sane and lovely life?

  Standing just outside what remained of the castle that so impressed Mercy, Juliette tried to explain why she had stayed away for so long. Her father had been a college professor, and when she was a child, her
parents and Gabriel’s had talked endlessly of leaving Connecticut, with its bitter winters and the endless demands of university life, and living in Tuscany year-round. Until Juliette was in high school, most of her summers had been spent here, painting and planting and learning how to mortar stone walls, harvest the olives, and keep the aging generator and water pump from shutting down permanently.

  “But then I got older,” she said, “and . . .” She paused, almost finished the sentence, then didn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I lost interest.”

  “They died, didn’t they?” Mercy said matter-of-factly. “Your parents. That’s why you jumped that time I said your mother must be dead. How did they die? Car wreck?”

  Juliette’s mouth went dry. Mercy was standing on a crumbling staircase that rose along a stone wall that enclosed what must have once been the beginnings of a formal garden. Now it ran wild with chestnut trees and ash, raspberry thickets and sudden riotous spills of orange poppies. With the sun behind her, Mercy’s hair shone like a halo, and her eyes were gazing at something over Juliette’s shoulder, something far away in the distance. In her hand was a wild iris she had picked, and with her pale and strangely peaceful face, she looked like a medieval saint, wrought of stained glass or marble.

  “How did you know that?” Juliette asked harshly. Juliette never spoke of her parents. Ever. “Who told you that?”

  For a moment Mercy didn’t answer, just stood there as if she were listening to distant music or lost in a far-gone memory. “Well, it’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said reasonably when she at last turned her attention back to Juliette. “You and Gabe own this now, so your parents must be dead. Only something fairly traumatic would make you lose interest in a place like this, so I figured it must be something tragic. I guess it could have been a plane wreck or a murder/suicide, but car accidents are much more common.”