Amen, L.A.

by Cherie Bennett

  “How old?” Kent interrupted.

  “About twenty-five,” I chimed in, wanting to be part of the conversation. I’d read the first half of the manuscript. It was really good.

  “Excellent.” Kent took another sip of champagne. “Very castable. Go on. What’s it about?”

  My dad traded a look with my mom, who nodded her encouragement. “I have a very talented husband,” she put in helpfully.

  Dad put his appetizer plate on the table. “It’s a pretty simple story. This girl, Dru, she gets a heart transplant. Then she starts getting all these weird vibes and thoughts, like something is up with the heart donor. It’s like the heart is speaking to her—‘Help me! Help tell my story!’ ”

  Kent was rapt. “Go on. I want to hear more.”

  My father’s eyes got wide like they did whenever he was excited. “I don’t want to give too much away.”

  “Talk, man!” Kent banged the table gently. “No one in this town reads, including me. Just tell me your story.”

  “Okay, okay,” my dad said quickly. “Anyway, Dru sets out to find the person who gave her the heart—to find out how that person died. And what looks like an accident doesn’t really have anything to do with an accident. He was murdered. The murderer figures out what she’s doing, sees his cover being blown, and sets out to kill her, too.”

  “I love that!” Joan exclaimed, smoothing her already perfectly smooth hair.

  “That’s fantastic! How about Natalie Portman as the girl, Matt Damon as the guy who donates the heart, and maybe De Niro as the leader of the criminal gang that killed Damon in the first place?” Kent’s eyes shone. This was clearly his element.

  There was no criminal gang. Which is what my dad told Kent. In response, the producer chuckled. “Aw, we won’t let that stop us. Listen, Charlie. Does anyone have an option yet on Inside Doubt?”

  “What’s an option?” Gemma asked breathlessly, clearly excited by all the movie talk.

  “It gives a producer the right to produce a book or a script,” Lisa explained, the showbiz-savvy kid that she was. She smiled at my brother again.

  “My kid has the business in her blood,” Kent said approvingly. “So this option, it’s usually a small payment—maybe ten thou—to be followed by a larger payment if the movie actually gets written and shot, and a humongous payment if the movie gets released.”

  I could see my dad trying to stay cool. And failing. He cleared his throat. “My book hasn’t been optioned.”

  “You control the rights?” Kent’s eyes bored into his.

  “Yes, I think—”

  “Then send the manuscript—whatever you’ve got—to my office tomorrow. I’m interested. Correction: I’m really, really interested. This sounds like it would make a helluva movie, and I know exactly the right writer for it. Shane Black. Ever heard of him?”

  I hadn’t. Neither had my father. Kent told us to Google him and then stood.

  “Well, this has been a productive get-together,” he declared. “How about if we go out back for the real meal?”

  Kent and Joan led the way. Gemma and Lisa walked together, whispering and giggling like old friends. Chad followed, his eyes on Lisa’s thighs.

  I caught up to my mom and dad. “Dad, that’s so fantastic!” Mom took Dad’s hand. “It really is, Charlie.”

  “It’s kind of amazing,” Dad admitted, flushed with happiness. “I guess this is how people do things here.”

  I was thrilled for my dad. I really was.

  Dinner was astonishing.

  The Stevenses’ huge back deck had an African theme. The teak flooring had been imported from Tanzania, the handcrafted furniture from Niger and Malawi, the native rugs from Botswana, and dotting the deck were pedestals of central African folk art. The meal was from French-speaking North Africa, set out on a long crafted table with a carved chair for each of us. There was spiced lamb barbecue from Morocco, heaping dishes of couscous, moussaka, Egyptian tablich zucchini, shish kebab; the food kept coming and coming, accompanied by a choice of wine or fragrant fruit juices. Kent and Joan were the perfect hosts, making us all feel part of the conversation. Kent even invited us to a future tour of the shooting set of his most successful TV show, Working Stiff, about a massage therapist who doubled as a private eye.

  “Who knows?” He looked directly at Gemma, who’d expressed her interest in acting. “Maybe we can even find a part for you.”

  Gemma looked like she had died and was sitting in the lap of Our Heavenly Father, who was expounding about the boutiques in heaven before he handed her a no-limit black American Paradise Express card—Don’t leave your cloud without it. “You mean it?”

  “Gemma, as you get to know me,” Kent said, “you’ll come to see I never say anything I don’t mean.”

  “I can vouch for that,” Joan chimed in. “He asked me to marry him and didn’t give me a choice.”

  Before dessert came out, Chad and Lisa said they were going up to the main house to play some pool in the rec room. The rest of us talked some more; my mother outlined some of her ambitious plans for the church while Kent nodded approvingly, and then we all walked down to a koi pond below their deck to feed the carp. We came back to a dessert of homemade ice cream, and finally it was time to go home. I volunteered to go up to the main house to get Chad.

  I didn’t find him in the rec room. Instead, I found him upstairs. In Lisa’s room. They were shoulder to shoulder, flipping through her huge CD collection, laughing and exclaiming over bands they both loved and bands they both hated.

  “Chad?” I asked.

  He turned. “Oh, hey, Nat.”

  Lisa looked up at me, totally cool and in control. “Your brother has great taste in music.”

  I truly did not think my parents would be thrilled to find Chad where he was at that moment. But maybe I was over-reacting. Chad hadn’t had a girlfriend yet. It wasn’t his fault he looked so much older than he really was.

  Chad thanked Lisa, and she walked us down to my family. There were more warm goodbyes, please-come-backs, and a reminder to my dad to send that manuscript to Kent. That was great. But all the way home, I wondered about Lisa Stevens and my brother. Then I decided I was reading too much into it. Definitely.

  Chapter Nine

  In the aftermath of our non-conversation about feelings, Sean and I kept our long-distance relationship going.

  It wasn’t hard. I emailed him every night with the news of the day. When I was invited to the set of Working Stiff on the following Friday, I told him. When I thought maybe I should get a job for the summer because it might be a good idea to try to earn some money of my own, but didn’t know what that job should be, I told him. After a particularly good meeting with the church youth group, where we made plans with Mr. Bienvenu for an interfaith charity project, I told him.

  We talked on AIM. We Skyped every other day or so. We traded a lot of texts. It was almost like it had been before we went to ground at the lake cabin, when things were uncomplicated and we kept it simple.

  It wasn’t all simple, though. There were several times when I tried to reopen the conversation about our feelings—to share how I was doing emotionally here as a stranger in a strange land. Sean couldn’t really reciprocate. He managed to say that he was still planning to come to Los Angeles in July, that he missed me, and that I should be careful with all the crazy kids in Los Angeles. “Stick with the church and I think you’ll be fine. Otherwise, who knows?” he warned.

  That warning was why I didn’t tell him everything. I didn’t talk about my new friend Alex Samuels, fresh out of rehab. I definitely didn’t talk about how I’d met a guy named Brett exactly once but thought about him a lot. I didn’t talk about how, on Wednesday, I was having the first spa day of my life, courtesy of my new friend Alex.

  “You’re going on Friday to a TV set? You can’t. Not with your hair like that,” Alex had declared when we were walking together on the asphalt strip that everyone called the Venice Beach boardwalk. By t
he time we’d finished a breakfast of spinach and feta cheese omelettes at the Rose Café and Market, serenaded by a street musician doing Beatles covers, Alex had booked appointments for us at Agua Spa at the Mondrian hotel in West Hollywood.

  Okay. I felt a little guilty when I did my online homework and took a look at the price lists. Their website had a menu of services and products: An hour of table shiatsu for $165. A revive/cellulite detox for $175. The Ultimate Manicure at $65. It was too much. I screwed up my courage and told Alex that I couldn’t accept such an overly generous gift. She laughed and said she wouldn’t mind paying, but the fact was that spas, hotels, and restaurants sent gift certificates to the homes of celebrities and club kids all the time so they could brag to other clients that such-and-such was a customer, or that so-and-so was expected to be in later in the afternoon. That day’s treatments at Agua were courtesy of Agua. If there was anyone to thank, it was the Mondrian management. Which I was quite ready to do when an older but nimble Japanese woman worked on my nude back and thighs while I lay on a cedar-scented massage table. Six feet away from me, Alex was getting the same treatment from her own masseuse.

  “Are we happy campers?” Alex asked, turning her head toward me. Her voice carried over soft Japanese music playing through the sound system.

  “Blissful,” I reported as the masseuse began to knead the tension out of my shoulders with oil that smelled of night-blooming jasmine.

  Alex smiled and closed her eyes. “Good. There’s a lot more spas where this one came from.”

  “This one is fine for me,” I told her, and then was gently shushed by my masseuse.

  “You need more relax,” she told me quietly. “You carrying lots of tension, blocking good chi.”

  Figuring I needed all the good chi I could get, I closed my eyes and gave myself to the experience. Ahead of me, I knew, were a manicure, pedicure, hairstyling, and professional makeup application. Plus lunch at one of the hotel restaurants. Alex told me that plenty of people came to the Mondrian spa and then took a room upstairs because they didn’t want the day to end.

  Okay. I was loving it. I was feeling a teensy bit guilty about loving it, like how could it be fair for me to be so privileged when kids in L.A. were going hungry or their schools were filled with graffiti and they didn’t even have their own textbooks? Not that giving up my massage was going to get them new textbooks. But still.

  I was also thinking about why Alex had picked me to be her friend. I mean, it wasn’t like she was lacking for fascinating human companionship. She knew tons of people. While I realized that she probably didn’t want to surround herself with the same people she’d been hanging out with when she went into rehab, it couldn’t be that every single one of her pre-rehab friends would fail a urine test. This was just a guess on my part. What about Brett?

  Anyway, back to Alex. Was I a friend of convenience, because I lived within walking distance? Someone who wasn’t a drinker or a druggie, who wouldn’t tempt her to do something she’d later regret? Some kind of a project, like in the movie Clueless (which, by the way, if you’ve never seen it, you totally need to find), where I was the hick girl from Minnesota who she could help transform into Los Angeles beautiful, and this spa day at the Mondrian was just another step in that process?

  No. That was just nuts. A day at Agua was par for the course for someone like Alex. She liked me; I liked her. Why wouldn’t she invite me, especially if she wasn’t paying for it? This was her normal, the same way that going to Salon De Lovely out on the Blue Earth Highway, where Mary Teegarden had been cutting my hair—my whole family’s hair, for that matter—for as long as I could remember, was my normal. Alas, Mary didn’t do shiatsu.

  Agua shiatsu gave way to the mani/pedis, during which my toes were done with robin’s egg blue toenail polish. The nail tech gave me a foot massage that lasted almost a half hour before she went to work on the nails themselves. The manicure was fabulous—ballet pink polish, while Alex opted for steel gray.

  After that, we were escorted down a short hallway to the Agua Spa hair salon. The salon also had a Zen vibe going on, all white on white with soft lighting that could be adjusted as necessary. Instead of the eighties hair metal I was used to hearing at Salon De Lovely, we were treated to Bach harpsichord. Alex and I were separated—there were neat partitions so clients didn’t have to feel they were being watched by other clients—and I was taken under the wings of two more Japanese women, Yoko and Suki. Yoko was in charge; Suki did whatever Yoko wanted her to do. Yoko studied me from every angle. She lifted my hair and rubbed it between her fingers, let it fall against my neck, and pronounced my need for hair extensions.

  Hair extensions? Like … sewing someone else’s hair onto your hair and wearing it? So not me.

  “You try,” Yoko insisted. “If you don’t like, I take off.”

  She had a point. So for nearly two hours, I closed my eyes and rode on the harpsichord as Suki and Yoko made the world’s tiniest braids and then used some kind of tool to attach endless tiny bundles of incredibly gorgeous human hair, in shades of dark golden blond, and pale gold, to my own boring blondish locks. Yoko had me turned away from the mirror so I couldn’t see what she was doing. Even after she finished the extensions, she used two different colors on just a few of the strands of my own hair in the front and at the crown, covering each one with tin foil while it “cooked.”

  “Looking good!”

  I turned. There was Alex, still wearing one of the Mondrian-monogrammed white bathrobes we’d put on after our shiatsu. Her stylist had taken maybe two inches off her lush dark hair and had given her eye-grazing bangs.

  “You look fantastic,” I told her.

  “Thanks.” She cocked her head at the aluminum foil bundles on my head. “And you look like you could contact Mars,” she teased.

  A half hour later, when my hair had been rinsed and shampooed with something that smelled like fresh mint, then blown dry—with my back still to the mirror—Yoko finally pronounced me done and spun my chair around.

  Holy whoa. I looked so good. The subtle variations in color brightened up my face, and the fantastic blow-out, away from my temples with some volume on top, made it look less round.

  Yep. No doubt about it. Five hours after arriving at the salon, now massaged, mani’d, pedi’d, and hair extended, I was at least 20 percent cuter. Not Gemma cute. But still. No wonder people did this on a regular basis. I believe what came out of my mouth was:

  “Wow.”

  “You like?” Yoko asked.

  “I love,” I admitted.

  “You’re not done. Makeup next, with Amber. Then, lunch. Because frankly, I’m starved.” Alex smiled at me approvingly. “Wait till your sister sees you.”

  “She’ll want to come here.”

  “She’ll have to have a friend of her own take her,” Alex declared. “Of course, Lisa Stevens probably lives here, so she’s halfway home. But whatever. Let’s get your makeup done.”

  Makeup turned out to be a fairly protracted affair, far more protracted than I would ever do in front of my own mirror. First there was Amber—tall, skinny, liberally tattooed—who, when I told her I had never had my eyebrows “done,” looked as shocked as if I’d told her I didn’t shower on a regular basis. She set to work plucking and grooming them into delicate arches. Then she applied makeup with a subtle hand: some luminous stuff on my skin that she assured me had a built-in sunscreen, Nars blush in a color called Orgasm—no, I don’t know what they do for a marketing campaign—Dior eye shadow that made my eyes look bigger and brighter, tons of Dior mascara, and a peachy nude lip gloss that looked like my own natural lips, only a zillion times better.

  When Amber finished, the person looking back at me from the makeup mirror was not even the new me post-extensions. It was an even cuter, way hotter version of me.

  “Bye-bye, Mankato,” Alex commented, her gaze meeting mine in the mirror.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about her saying that. Did enjoying all thi
s attention, all the primping, mean I was giving up my essential self and turning into someone I didn’t know and might not even like just to fit in?

  No. I would never be that girl.

  “Come on.” Alex tugged me out of the makeup chair. “Let’s show you off.”

  The Asia de Cuba restaurant at the Mondrian was dazzling. The maitre d’ took us to the outdoor patio, which held rows of four-seat white-clothed tables between rows of the biggest planter pots I’d ever seen—fully six feet high and five feet around, planted with ficus trees and bougainvillea bushes. I felt positively dwarfed.

  “Alex! What a surprise!”

  The voice came from between two of the planters just as we were about to sit. A moment later, Alex’s friend Brooke squeezed through to talk to us. She looked even more amazing than she had the night we’d met at the cemetery, in a low-cut white tank tucked into a tiered high-waisted floral print skirt and platform espadrilles. After a big hug for Alex and a more modest one for me, plus an explanation that she was here with a couple of people whose names meant nothing to me, she stepped back and gave me an assessing look. “Someone pulled their look together. Nicely done.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely.

  “It really is an improvement, though it’s gonna cost a fortune to keep the extensions up,” she mused, lifting a handful of my hair, then letting it flutter back down against my cheek. “The makeup, too.”

  “Well, I probably won’t do this all the time,” I admitted. “It’s a lot of work I can’t afford.”

  I liked myself for saying that aloud. You can take the girl out of Mankato, but I didn’t want to take the Mankato out of the girl.

  “Shame,” Brooke commented, oozing faux sincerity. Her gaze flicked ever so subtly to my thighs, then back to my face. “You might want to start with a personal trainer, though. I have this guy that can give you buns of steel in like three weeks. In your case, though, I’d book him for the three-month special. Alex can give you my number. Gotta run. Alex, call me.”