Amen, L.A.

by Cherie Bennett

  I turned back toward my table and found Alex arriving to meet me. In fact, she’d caught the whole scene with Ben and Cecilia.

  “You’re a celebrity,” she joked as she scooted over to the left so that I could sit easily. “In town for three days, already met Ben and Cecilia Burdette.”

  “Are they someone I should know?”

  Alex tilted her head back and laughed. “Only if you want to be an actor or a writer. He’s, like, the biggest entertainment lawyer in town.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  A waitress—one with wild red hair, chiseled cheekbones, and ruby lips—suddenly materialized at our table. “Alex? Ready to eat?”

  Alex smiled at her. “I’m starving.”

  “No menus?” I asked.

  “No need. Trust me, I know what’s good here,” Alex replied.

  I watched as the waitress efficiently poured two glasses of iced tea, put a wicker basket of home-baked breads at one side of the table, and placed a small artichoke-covered pizza atop a wire platter holder. It smelled heavenly.

  “Enjoy, you two.” The waitress moved off. The moment she did, Alex faced me.

  Okay. Her eyebrows were gorgeous, with nary a stray hair. Her eyelashes had gotten five times thicker and twice as long, not that they’d needed a lot of cosmetic support to begin with.

  “You wanted to talk. What’s going on?” she asked.

  My heart pounded. There was no easy way to admit this.

  “Someone at my church talked about you. She said I should Google you, and … I did.” I said it quickly, like ripping a bandage off an open wound.

  Alex looked at me quizzically. Then she laughed heartily. “That’s it? Someone told you to Google me, and you did?”

  “I feel terrible!”

  The laughter kept coming. It was okay at first. Then I felt offended. Maybe it was funny to her. It wasn’t funny to me.

  “Look,” I said quietly. “I think Googling a friend sucks.”

  “Please,” Alex scoffed, reaching for a slice of pizza. She licked some tomato sauce off her pinkie. “Out here it’s a compliment. People compete to see who has the most hits. You really have to try the pizza.”

  I put a slice on my plate. “What I did still sucks.”

  Alex bit into her pizza and washed it down with some iced tea. “You don’t feel bad about what you did, you feel bad about what you found out,” she clarified. “Believe me, if you’d found out I’d won an MTV Movie Award as best new actress, you wouldn’t feel bad. You’d be complimenting me for my incredible modesty. Instead, you read a bunch of horror stories and now you’re wondering, who is this chick? Right?” She smiled again, as if to defuse the intensity of what she’d just said.

  I tasted the tea, which had hints of rose and lilac. Delicious.

  “That’s part of it,” I allowed. “But I do feel bad about the Googling. It’s like, I don’t know, an invasion of your privacy.”

  “If it’s on Google, Natalie? It’s not private.”

  I nodded. She had a point.

  “Besides,” she went on, “this is Hollywood. Everyone Googles everyone else. And ZabaSearch, and 123people. I know kids who have a yearly subscription to Intelius. I think they know more about me than I know about myself. I Googled you. Not much out there. Lots of church-mission pictures. And someone on Facebook who doesn’t like you.”

  “Who?”

  Alex waggled her newly perfected eyebrows. “Check yourself out online. You might learn something.” She cocked her head toward the slice of pizza on my plate. “You’re supposed to taste it.”

  We ate in silence for a while. I saw Leonardo DiCaprio, baseball cap down low, come onto the patio to eat. Lil’ Kim sashayed inside with an entourage. Other than that, I concentrated on my food. It was a good excuse for not talking, seeing as how I still wasn’t sure what more I wanted to say.

  Alex called me on it.

  “You didn’t ask me to meet you to talk about the guilt of Googling,” she pointed out as she finished her third small slice. “So you want to discuss my past, or not?”

  “How much is true?”

  She countered with a question of her own. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? I mean it. The worst. Don’t hold back.”

  Yeah. The sex-with-Sean thing, in my opinion, but maybe not in Alex’s. I racked my brain for something else.

  “Some friends and I got caught skinny-dipping in the pond at the Mankato Country Club. By the police.”

  “Guys and girls?” Alex asked.

  I shook my head. “Just girls.”

  “You wild woman,” Alex teased.

  “It was Christmas Eve,” I added, trying to up my cool quotient. It was true. We’d had a warm spell in Mankato, and temps were in the sixties, which is pretty warm for Minnesota. Some friends and I decided to go skinny-dipping. “It was a quick dip.”

  She sipped more tea. “And then there’s me. I’ve stolen, driven drunk, and lost my license. I’ve driven drunk without a license. I’ve done E, LSD, smack, and crack. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen to a guy I didn’t know. I’ve embarrassed myself in public more times than I can count. And here’s the topper: I thought it was cool.”

  “Were you planning to tell me all this?” I asked, nervously refolding my napkin.

  “Eventually. I mean, I don’t think I need to wear it on a sign around my neck. Like Welcome to Beverly Hills, and by the way, I am a bad, bad girl.”

  Was that a tear I saw in the corner of her left eye? It was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  I took in the gorgeous people on the deck. A lot of laughter and a lot of preening. None of them seemed to be in a conversation as serious as ours.

  Then I felt Alex’s hand on my arm and turned back to her. “You know I’m out of rehab now,” she stated.

  “Yeah. And I think it’s great.”

  “It is great. I really think I have a chance this time. Somehow, it’s different.” She spotted someone she knew across the patio and gave a little wave of acknowledgement. “I’m living honestly, one day at a time.”

  “Then I’m going to be honest, too,” I told her. “I’m worried about being your friend. We’re really different. I’m not a party girl. I never was, and I never will be.”

  She stared into my eyes. “It’s not who I want to be anymore.”

  I felt guilty even bringing this up, but I thought it was important. “You did rehab before.”

  “And it didn’t take. I guess you got that one off the Internet. If at first you don’t succeed …” She balled her napkin up and tossed it onto her plate. “Look, that was then, and this is now. It wasn’t hard to figure out that you’re not a party girl. I mean, you might even be the oldest living virgin in Beverly Hills.”

  Um … not exactly. I smiled weakly.

  “I believe people can change,” Alex continued. “I can change. Do you believe me?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m a girl with a million scars. But I’m up front about all of them.” She raked her hair off her face. “The only people I truly cannot stand are the hypocrites. The ones who pretend to be someone they’re not.”

  I flushed. Right at that moment, I felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world.

  “I want you to be my friend. But if you are? I’ve done what I’ve done. I’m not proud of it. And I’m not playing poor-little-rich-girl-whose-parents-died, either. It’s my life; I’m taking responsibility for it.” She grinned. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll be a good influence on me.”

  In that moment, I finally made up my mind. I wanted to be her friend. I smiled at her. “Maybe I will.”

  Chapter Eight

  My grandmother—my father’s mother—Palma Shelton owns a farm in northern Iowa near a town called Manly, and I am not making that up. She has forty acres; my uncle Clarence Shelton and his wife, Lila, live just down the road with their children and tend another forty acres. Since Palma isn’t young anymore, Clarence and Lila help her with
the land. They grow corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa. They also have animals, like cows, goats, and chickens. About two hundred chickens, to be precise, that produce an awful lot of eggs. The chickens live in a chicken shack on Clarence and Lila’s property.

  There’s a point to all this.

  On Tuesday night, our family was invited to the home of Kent Stevens (father of Lisa Stevens, Gemma’s new BFF) for a barbecue. Kent Stevens’s mansion made Ricardo’s mansion look like Clarence and Lila’s chicken shack.

  Before we went over there, I did a Google search of Kent. That’s one thing about doing something that’s kind of wrong. The first time you do it, you can have all kinds of moral qualms. The second time, it’s a lot easier. By the third time, it takes on a kind of normalcy and you don’t even blink. Which is why it’s better not to do it the first time. Not that I was thinking in that direction when Sean and I got down on the cabin floor, but still.

  Anyway, I honestly had never heard of Kent before we arrived in Los Angeles. There are Hollywood moguls who do their best to stay in the public eye. Then there are those no one has heard of, who are often richer and more powerful than the people you have heard of.

  Kent Stevens fits into the latter category. There were very few articles about him, except for those that either called him a “private person” or gushed about his seven-figure donations to this charity or that charity, including our church. Kent and his wife, Joan, were on the boards of the opera, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. According to what I read, they specialized in raising money from their über-rich friends for various causes and then topping all the other donations with their own.

  Kent was the executive producer of four network episodic television shows, had a movie production company with guaranteed financing from Columbia TriStar for several twenty- to fifty-million-dollar pictures a year, and also produced television and movie-theater commercials. I was shocked by how lucrative that was, how much a drug company, like Pfizer, pays to get you to buy their brand of heartburn squelcher or cholesterol blocker.

  Oh yeah. For fun? He owned the largest exotic-car dealership in the western United States, located on the Miracle Mile near CBS’s production studios. Half the Lotuses, Ferraris, Porsches, Bentleys, Jaguars, and Alfa Romeos—especially the classic ones from thirty and forty years ago—on the road came through his dealership.

  Ka-ching.

  We drove to his house in the Subaru. Or I should say, we drove to the gate of his house in the Subaru. No mechanical gate at the base of the private hill, mind you. There was a guardhouse there, with two armed guards, and an actual hand-cranked tollgate, which had to be moved to let us in. I noticed a pair of Harley-Davidsons parked by the tollgate. I guessed in the event we decided to do a little gate-crashing, the armed guards would hop on their hogs and follow us with guns blazing.

  The guards had our names, so we easily entered the inner sanctum. Up, up, up a winding road that made our long driveway seem minuscule. We were deposited on a hilltop that towered over our own—I could see our house from there—in front of a sprawling white mansion. No, not a mansion. Mansion would mean one building. This was not a mansion. This was part of a compound, with various buildings splayed out on the hillside below us. They were all inspired by the main house, with soaring Greek columns.

  “Impressive.” Chad was the first to speak.

  “Who buys a place like this?” my dad murmured.

  “Someone with conspicuous consumption disorder?” I suggested.

  “Please,” Gemma snorted, and adjusted the neckline of her pink T-shirt to show as much cleavage as she thought she could get away with. “I’d buy it if I could afford it.”

  Mom smiled. “Are you sure you’re the kid of a minister?”

  My dad craned around and motioned for Gemma to readjust her neckline to something more modest, which she did with a dramatic sigh.

  “Welcome, Sheltons, welcome!”

  Kent, Joan, Lisa, and their golden retriever, who we soon learned was named Jensen, after Kent’s favorite sports car, bounded out to greet us. They looked like the ideal family. Kent was six two, young-looking for his fifty-five years, and wore a white tennis shirt and khakis. His thick salt-and-pepper hair seemed to glow in the late-afternoon light. Joan was about ten years younger, with the body of a woman who spent as much time being personally trained by Billy Blanks (the Stevens’s home gym proved to rival Reebok’s, and I am only slightly exaggerating) as going to charity board meetings. She wore an almost-too-short denim skirt and a blue silk short-sleeved shirt. Lisa was in a floral skirt the size of a Post-it and a red cami layered over a white cami. My sister eyed Lisa’s impressive exposed cleavage and yanked her shirt lower again.

  Let me see if I can get the grand tour of the Stevens estate down to two paragraphs, because if you’re really interested, you can Google Earth it and get the aerial view. The main mansion had eleven bedrooms and ten baths. There were three guesthouses, a garage that had space for twenty cars, a stable with four Arabian horses, the aforementioned gym, and a small observatory with a thirty-inch reflecting telescope that pretty much let you look in the window of anyone who lived within twenty miles of the Big Dipper.

  The thing that got me, more than anything else, was that the Stevenses had an art gallery. Actually, an art museum, which focused on late twentieth-century works by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons. One piece that really caught my eye was a dead shark suspended in an aquarium of formaldehyde. Kent told my dad and me—he was shepherding us around, with Lisa, Gemma, and Chad on our tail and my mother paired with Joan behind them—that the artist was Damien Hirst and he’d had to bid against dozens of others to acquire it.

  Who’d buy such a thing? I could see a live shark in a big tank, maybe. If you were into hammerheads. But dead? Please. That’s art?

  Kent must have seen me looking at it askance. “Not your taste, Nat?”

  Embarrassing.

  I recovered quickly. “It’s … interesting. I’m kind of more into French impressionists.”

  Kent smiled kindly. “We have a few of those, too, up in our bedroom. A Monet, a Manet, a Degas. Maybe after we sit a little, I’ll take you up there.” He motioned with his chin toward a small round table with a white tablecloth and several wooden stools whose blond wood matched that of the gallery floor. There was a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket nearby and three silver-topped serving dishes on the table.

  “Not a meal,” Kent assured us. “That’s later. Just an appetizer.”

  The moment we moved toward the table, a uniformed African American guy who looked like the model Tyson, only shorter, moved toward it, too. Where he’d been waiting, I had no idea. Once Gemma had caught up, she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, coated with, like, three layers of mascara. Honestly. My sister’s T-shirts should all read I flirt, therefore I am.

  “This is Keith,” Joan said as the impossibly handsome guy lifted the tops off the serving dishes. “We’d all be lost without him.”

  “Thank you, Joan,” Keith replied in a deep, melodious voice. He gestured to each plate as he uncovered it. “Cold lobster. Foie gras. Eight cheeses from eight countries in Europe. Enjoy.” He disappeared silently from the room.

  “Sit, sit, please,” Joan urged us.

  As we sat, Kent expertly opened the champagne.

  “Charlie? May Nat partake? It’s Taittinger. My personal favorite.” Kent indicated my champagne flute.

  My sister looked furious that the offer hadn’t been extended to her, and my father looked flustered. In Minnesota, no one asked parents whether they could pour their underage kids champagne.

  I bailed my father out. “I don’t drink, Mr. Stevens.”

  “Kent,” he said quickly. “Please, call us Kent and Joan. And good for you,” he added approvingly. He cocked his head toward a bucket of ice in which canned soft drinks were nestled. “Help yourself, kids.”

  “I’d rathe
r have the champagne, Daddy,” Lisa said with a little-girl pout.

  “Seriously,” Gemma agreed quickly.

  Mom eyed Gemma. “Seriously not,” she said firmly.

  “I read this article that said kids in families who don’t make a big deal about alcohol are less likely to become alcoholics,” Chad said.

  Lisa smiled at him through her bubble gum pink lip gloss and crossed her smooth, tanned legs so that her tiny skirt rode up even farther. My little brother’s eyes were glued to those gams. I wanted to remind Lisa that my little brother might look sixteen but he was all of thirteen. As in, his very first year of being an actual teenager. Then I figured Lisa was probably the L.A. version of Gemma. That is, she flirted because she could.

  We chatted amicably about what we’d done in L.A. so far. When I told Kent that I’d been to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to see a movie, he laughed with appreciation and then grinned at my father.

  “You’d better stick with your daughter, Charlie. She’ll show you how to enjoy Los Angeles. What have you been doing for fun?”

  My dad shook his head ruefully. “Mostly trying to finish my new book. It’s due at the publisher in sixty days.”

  Kent took a long sip of champagne. “That’s right,” he recalled. “You’re a writer. A real writer, who writes books. Unlike all these hacks out here who claim to write, when they’re actually banging out scripts.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” my dad said modestly.

  “What’s the title? What’s it about?” Kent seemed truly interested.

  “Well, it’s a mystery.”

  “I love mysteries!” Kent exclaimed. “They make good movies. Are you going to tell me the plot? And the title?”

  My father grinned, clearly happy that our host was showing such interest. “It’s called Inside Doubt. Basically what happens is that this girl gets a heart transplant—”