Trashed

by Alison Gaylin

  For a while, she didn’t answer the phone for anyone except friends, and then she stopped answering the phone at all. She lived off Lean Cuisines and filtered water and Emerald’s pills and she slept, taking enough pills to ensure that her sleep would be deep, dreamless.

  Holly was waking up from a sleep now, waking up to a ringing telephone. She heard Simone’s voice floating out of the living room answering machine saying somethingabout the article. She put the pillow over her head. She didn’t want to hear it. Holly probably shouldn’t have hung up on Simone like that. Odds were, Simone didn’t know the rumors about Randi DuMonde. Very few people did. Holly had heard from Rico Valdez, Cambria’s gardener on Suburban Indiscretions. And what he had told her, he had told her in deepest confidence. What he had told Holly had to do with Randi DuMonde and Emerald. Holly didn’t believe it. She refused to believe it. But now. . . . What had Simone said? Was Emerald ever represented . . .

  Holly got out of bed and took the box out of her closet—a box of Emerald’s things from years ago, long before she had gotten the part of Cambria. Long before she and Holly had ever met. Holly knew what was in it, though. After she found out about the cutting, Emerald had given her the box, and said, “You may as well be the keeper of all my secrets.”

  Emerald had asked her not to show the box to anyone. And, if for any reason Emerald were to die or disappear or if she wound up in a hospital, Holly was supposed to destroy it. She hadn’t destroyed it, not yet. She hadn’t been able to.

  “Sorry, Emerald,” Holly whispered. Then she opened the box. It was filled with stacks of spiral notebooks, which may have explained Emerald’s disgust of shags. Holly pulled out the top one and opened it. It was a journal. They were all journals.

  She read, eyes unblinking, breath going shallower with each page. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  To think Holly had yelled at Rico over this. “How can you spread such an awful rumor?!” Rico was right. After a few more pages, Holly had had enough. She was about to put the journal away when something fell out of it, a folded, yellowing magazine article. She picked it up, unfolded it.

  It was that famous 1998 Vanity Fair piece: “Secrets of Desire.” She read it through, even though she’d read the piece before. She read it through for clues. But when she saw what was attached to the piece, she had no need for clues anymore. It was as if the cumulative effects of the pills she’d been taking took flight, leaving Holly behind, clearheaded. More clearheaded than she’d been in years.

  It was a contract. A ten-thousand-dollar freelancer’s contract from Vanity Fair, made out to Emerald Deegan, a.k.a. Desire.

  Holly didn’t want to think about what all this meant. She was through thinking. Now was the time to start asking questions. She went into the living room, found her phone book, and looked up the number of DuMonde Management.

  TWENTY-ONE

  As Simone and Julie arrived at Randi DuMonde’s Beverly Hills mansion, Simone’s first thought was, Randi must have some well-paying clients. After the enormous wrought-iron gate swung open, the limo pulled up a long winding driveway to a wasteful showpiece of a house, full of sleek angles and cathedral-sized windows and wood probably carved right off northern sequoias. “One person lives here?” Simone said. “I mean, does she at least have a dog?”

  Julie laughed. “Randi is a fan of excess.”

  “I’d nominate her for fan club president,” said Simone. But she couldn’t look at Julie. She’d been having trouble with that the whole ride here, even though her friend didn’t seem to notice. Simone’s head felt like a box of lies. As she smiled at the back of the front seat, trying to focus on what Julie was saying—about the film opening Friday, about Randi, about the party—that box threatened to burst.

  There was so much going on in her mind, so much she couldn’t tell Julie. . . .

  She was still worried about Holly. Simone had tried calling her once more, right before the limo picked her up. She had told her again about the article, asked her to please call. No response. Again. She kept wondering: Should I go to her house? Knock on the door? Or would that be an intrusion?

  Also, she had arranged to meet Walker. In exchange for his not telling a soul that she was Greta Glass’s sister, Simone had said she’d meet him at his apartment whenever the party ended and give him a true Chrylan scoop. If her leads proved accurate for a change, then he, in turn, would reveal what Furlong’s chambermaid had said.

  If Nigel finds out, she told him, I’ll lose my job for sure.

  He won’t. I promise, Nigel does not have spies in my apartment.

  So on top of everything else, Simone was now a tabloid double agent. Queen of Duplicity, with a box of lies for a head. How had this happened to her, in only a week?

  “. . . and Jason said, ‘Screw you, we’re keeping the murder at the end!’ Can you imagine? To the head of the studio! I swear, if it weren’t for his last name, he would have so been fired. Where are you, Simone?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m monologuing here.”

  Simone turned and looked at Julie’s face, the pencil lead picking up the color of her clear blue eyes. Honest eyes, no matter what she was doing with Chris. The limo pulled up in front of the house.

  “Julie,” said Simone.

  “Yeah?”

  What kind of a job expects you to do this to a friend?

  “What is it, Simone?” The driver got out of the car, opened the door.

  “I . . . I don’t like sushi.”

  Julie widened her eyes in mock horror. “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier? Oh . . . now I can never speak to you again!”

  “Yeah, well . . . sushi party and all. I didn’t want to hurt your manager’s feelings.”

  As she started to get out of the car, Julie patted her hand. “At least,” she said, “there are no more secrets between us.”

  The inside of Randi’s house was arty intimidating, like a museum. The mammoth door opened onto an indoor Zen garden, with blue slate floors and bonsai trees and an enormous pile of glossy, multicolored stones with water trickling down the sides.

  There wasn’t a chair in sight.

  Nearly every guest, in this area at least, was tall, breathtakingly beautiful, and female. It reminded Simone of one of those old Star Trek episodes, where the Enterprise lands on the Amazon planet and even Spock starts to feel his logic getting fuzzy.

  She wondered if they were all Randi’s clients, because, stunning as they were, none of their faces were famous, or even familiar looking. Randi must specialize in the up-and-comers. And just like that, she recalled Destiny’s eyes, the wad of money shoved into her mouth.

  Why would a Hollywood über-manager sign a seventeen-year-old stripper? Why would she introduce that stripper not to directors or producers, but to a club owner?

  Simone looked at Julie, her powder blue gaze roaming around the room, searching, no doubt, for Chris Hart. She remembered Lara saying that she, too, was a client of Randi’s. How could the same manager rep a seventeen-year-old stripper and a superstar like Lara Chandler?

  Julie stopped and peered through one of the area’s large windows. Simone looked in that direction and saw Chris Hart, Lara-less, motioning for Julie to join him. “Come on, Simone,” she said. But when she started to pull her out, Hart shook his head, and mouthed the word “Alone.”

  Julie said, “Sorry, I . . .”

  “No problem. Go ahead.”

  Julie hurried through the cluster of guests and out into the landscaped grounds, leaving Simone to fend for herself in the Zen garden.

  A cater-waiter walked up to Simone with a tray of sushi. “Sea urchin?”

  “No, thank you.” She watched him leave, wondering if maybe he was a tabloid reporter.

  “Simone.” It was Randi DuMonde, looming over her in a sleeveless bright red cocktail dress. Simone was beginning to wonder whether the woman owned clothes of any other color.

  “You remembered my nam
e.”

  “That’s my business,” she said. “Remembering names.” Randi was at least a foot taller than Simone, and up close, she saw how large she really was—her eyes, her shoulders, her teeth, her feet. Randi didn’t just intimidate Simone, she made her feel lower on the food chain.

  “How are you holding up?” Simone said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know . . . Dest—” Shit. Would it make sense for Simone to remember Destiny’s name? How many times was it mentioned at Swifty’s? “Your client. The young girl who—”

  “Destiny, yes,” she said. “The police are now thinking it might be drug-related. She smoked crack, which . . . well, if I had known that I never would have signed her.”

  No drugs. She said they ruined your looks. Why would Charity have lied about that? Simone looked at Randi, looked deep into her eyes, and knew. It was she. She was the one who was lying. “So you don’t think Keith Furlong—”

  “What?” she said. “I never said anything about Keith Furlong.”

  Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” started to play.

  “A classic,” said Simone.

  “My ringtone.” Randi answered her cell as Simone stood there, shifting from foot to foot, wondering whether or not their conversation had ended. This was a whole new dimension of awkward. “How did you get this number? ” said Randi. “I see.” She looked at Simone. “Excuse me, I’m going to have to take this.”

  She walked away. Simone stood there for a few minutes, trying to figure out what had changed Randi’s mind about Keith Furlong, why she was claiming that Destiny smoked crack. Right next to her, a supermodel type leaned against a wall, listening raptly to a balding man, the top of whose head barely cleared her collarbones. “So I told Marty, ‘Stop it with the costume dramas. What are you, PBS?’ ”

  The model gaped at him for a few minutes, then began laughing hysterically.

  “So,” he said, “you want to, uh . . . you know . . .”

  “I have been dying for you to ask me that.”

  The look in the model’s eyes—that hunger—made Simone think of Charity. But Pleasures was a strip club and Charity was a stripper and that hungry look was part of the performance. She glanced around the room and saw that same look on the faces of so many other beautiful women. Up-and-comers. Was this what all young actresses had to do? Was the casting couch really so pervasive? Or did this have something to do with the managerial style of Randi DuMonde? She remembered Julie, the way she’d looked at Blake Moss’s agent. That same hungry look. . . .

  The short, balding friend of Marty’s trailed the model to the end of the Zen room and through a hallway. Simone kept her distance, but followed.

  She passed some kind of marble spa with a massage table, a Jacuzzi, and a sink full of black healing stones, then an entertainment area with a pool table, vintage jukebox, and a cinema-sized plasma screen, then a yoga room with nothing in it but windows and mats, all spotless, all with doors wide open, but not a party guest to be seen anywhere. The model and Marty’s friend seemed to have disappeared. Where did everyone go? Simone wondered . . . until she saw a series of closed doors.

  She tried one. It was locked, but when she pressed her ear up against it, she heard the model’s throaty voice saying, “And I sing a little too. You want to hear me sing?”

  Marty’s friend said, “Let’s see what else you can do with your mouth.”

  “Ooh, okay . . . Mmmmmm . . .”

  “God . . . Wait, slow down, I’m gonna . . .”

  Simone winced, backed away from the door. Okay . . .

  She tried another door. This one opened. Inside, she saw a chiseled, middle-aged man with his pants around his ankles, a blonde on all fours in front of him, while a dark-skinned woman grasped his shoulders, wearing a strap-on . . .

  She closed the door quickly.

  “Like what you see?” said a voice behind her as a big hand slipped around her waist. She recognized the voice, the hand, before she turned around—and for once she was glad to see him. “Blake,” she said. “What’s the deal with Randi?”

  Blake smiled. “Perceptive girl,” he said. “But what would you expect from Columbia Journalism?”

  “You mean she really. . . . ?”

  “No, but I can see why you’d think that. Come with me, angel. We’ll talk.”

  Blake Moss took Simone’s hand and led her back into the spa room, closing the door behind him. “Talk to me,” said Simone.

  “Wait.” He drew the shades on the enormous window and switched on the lights. “Now,” he said, “we have some privacy.”

  And his eyes went cold.

  Simone cleared her throat. “So, is Randi a—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Randi.” He moved toward Simone. Within seconds, she was pinned against the tile wall, one of his hands pushing her shoulder against it, the other grabbing her hip. Moss’s face was inches away from hers, his voice low, threatening. “I want to talk,” he said, “about what you do for a living.”

  Simone’s heart pounded. His breath was hot in her face and his eyes glared into hers.

  “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “I knew you weren’t as clean as you look,” he said. “But I didn’t know you were that dirty.” When he spoke again, it was like a nightmare come to life, everything within her giving way, crumbling with each word. . . . “You’re tabloid scum, angel. You’ve been spying on your friend, getting her into all kinds of trouble with Chris, printing all her secrets. ”

  Tears sprung into Simone’s eyes. “No,” she whispered.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, angel.”

  A tear leaked down the side of her face.

  Blake said, “Are you, angel? Are you ashamed?”

  “Yes.”

  He moved closer, shook his head. He clicked his tongue at her. Click, click, click . . .

  “Does . . .”

  “Does Dylan know?” he said.

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

  “No. Right now, the only one who knows is me.”

  Simone exhaled. Her breath was raw, shaky.

  “And if you like,” Moss said, “we can keep it that way.”

  “You mean . . . you won’t tell her?”

  He loosened his grip on her a little, but his eyes still drilled into hers. “I mean I won’t tell her . . . if.” He grinned. That snaking half leer of a grin, and he didn’t need to tell her if what. “You’re disgusting,” he said softly. “You ruin people’s lives. You need to be shamed.” He brought his hands up to her shoulders, pressed down hard until her knees hit the tile floor. “Deeply shamed.”

  Simone closed her eyes. She felt his hand on the back of her neck. “Play dead,” he murmured, and she thought of Julie laughing like a kid on her floral-print couch. She thought of Kathy telling her she’d saved all their jobs, and Matthew and Carl with their wedding plans and their bags from Neiman Marcus, and Elliot . . . Elliot willing to spend a day in a Dumpster, hunting for spent needles, just to be able to keep working at the Asteroid .

  Moss’s grip tightened on her neck and the other hand ripped at the top of her blouse, popping buttons, and she heard his breath go fast and ragged. “You sick bitch.” As Moss pulled her to him, Simone realized that she, too, would spend a day in a Dumpster to keep her job at the Asteroid.

  But she wouldn’t do this. This was one line she could not cross.

  She yanked Moss’s hands away and pushed him back.

  “I . . . am going to tell Dylan.”

  “I don’t care. Just leave me alone.”

  He leaned against the massage table, wheezing, his belt buckle undone. Simone pulled her shirt together and fell against the door, pushing it open, heading back through the hallway into the Zen room, practically knocking down Nathaniel as she passed. “Where’s Dylan?” she said.

  “By the pool with Chris,” said Nathaniel. “What happened to you?”

  Simone didn’t answer. What was the poin
t? Before long, no one around here would ever speak to her again.

  Randi DuMonde’s swimming pool was the size of a small lake, with a natural-looking waterfall rushing over slick rocks to feed it. It was surrounded by tiki torches, which reminded her of Blake Moss’s party. How long ago was that? It feels like years.

  Simone glanced around its perimeter, until finally she caught sight of Julie standing near the waterfall, engaged in what looked like a friendly conversation with Chris Hart. But she couldn’t hear what they were saying over the other guests’ voices and the rushing water, or the steel drum band playing calypso at the far end of the garden.

  When Simone got closer, though, she heard. “I cannot trust you,” Hart was saying. “And if I cannot trust you, I don’t know how you expect this to—”

  “No, I swear. I—”

  “Why, Dylan? Why did you?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t know where they got their information, I swear, I . . .”

  “I wish I could believe you.”

  Hart stormed off. And before Simone could say anything, Julie was off too, shouting at him to wait, please wait, yet not getting what she wanted.

  Simone stood on a grassy hill near the pool watching Julie run into the cabana, closing the door behind her. She took a deep breath, thought about leaving, just turning around and leaving, calling a cab to pick her up. But then she saw Blake Moss standing across the pool and staring at her with frost in his eyes, and she knew. She had to be the one to tell Julie.

  She walked down the hill, past a female sitcom star she recognized talking to a heavy comedian and one of the LA Lakers—something about a recent trip to Paris—and Simone thought, Maybe Randi is just a regular manager. But it didn’t make any difference. It was her job—not Randi’s—that was the point.

  All the lights were off in the cabana, save the dim electronic glow of Julie’s cell phone. She wasn’t talking to anyone on it, just holding it between her two hands, like a child holding a toy. Simone’s eyes adjusted to the dark room just as Julie began to cry. She was sitting on the floor, and Simone sat down next to her. “What’s wrong, Julie?”