I felt especially good about Chad. He continued to accept his grounding with grace and now had less than ten days to go. He’d gotten friendly with two boys on his swim team, and one of them—a Persian kid named Babak, who was a monster in the pool—wanted our whole family to come to a traditional Persian feast once Chad’s punishment ended.
As for Lisa Stevens, Chad said he barely thought about her.
I felt good about work and about Alex and Mia. I even felt okay about Wait/Great, since it was clear that girls like Sandra, Courtney, and Gisela were going to lead. All I had to do was follow, set up chairs, hand out programs, and clean up dirty coffee cups.
I felt good about Sean. He hadn’t called, IM’d, or emailed since he’d canceled his trip. Neither had I. Our tacit agreement to let it go was holding.
As for Brett, I didn’t just feel good. I felt mega-great. That night—as long as his shooting schedule allowed it—we were going to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Los Angeles Philharmonic and then to the House of Blues to hear B.B. King. Yin and yang music, Brett had called it. I was already planning my outfit.
I reached the parking lot, dug proudly into my bought-at-Target handbag, and handed my parking ticket to the smiling Latino attendant. As I did, my cell rang.
Huh. My mother. Calling from the church office.
“Hi, Mom. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” she responded. “Are you done with your shift? Of course you’re done with your shift, you wouldn’t answer if you were still working. What are you doing now?”
“About to head to Santa Monica, how come?” I saw the attendant pull up in my car; I motioned that I’d be a moment.
“Big news. I’ve got a reporter coming from the Los Angeles Times. They’re going to do a feature about me and Wait/Great. I want you to be a part of it.”
My mother’s office was on the church’s top floor. There were floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked south over Beverly Hills. It was also a spectacular mess. This was one of my mom’s quirks. Her church office in Mankato had been the same way; she forbade anyone to clean it for her. At first, the church board here had fretted. Then they’d suggested that all-important meetings be held in the fourth-floor conference room.
That was where I found my mom when I arrived. She wore one of her work pantsuits. With her were Mia and Sandra, both in shorts and T-shirts. Me, I was still in my Whitehall whites. I had no time to get settled, since a minute later, the Times reporter arrived with her photographer. The writer introduced herself as Luanna Siebert. She had long dark hair and dark eyes and wore a sensible pantsuit like my mom’s. The photographer had an impressive beard and an even more impressive beer belly.
“I write for the Saturday religion pages,” Luanna said as she sat across from us with a notebook and pen. The custodial staff had brought in ice water and glasses. Luanna poured herself some water before she said more. “We’re planning a feature on Minister Marsha coming here to Los Angeles, and we thought it would be good to mention Wait/Great. That’s why you girls are here.”
Fine, I thought. As long as I don’t have to be out front. All I’d wanted for that afternoon was to relax a little bit and go to Santa Monica. Instead, I was now sitting with a newspaper reporter. Talk about your uncomfortable and unplanned transitions.
“When were you planning to run the story?” Mia asked. “We’re having our first meeting on Saturday night.”
“But it’s mostly organizational,” Sandra explained.
“Not before then,” Luanna assured us. “There’s probably another story to do, if your little group catches on.”
I could see my mother bristle at the words “little group,” but she stayed cool. “I’m hoping our little group turns into a group that’s bigger than our biggest dreams,” my mom told the writer. “In the meantime, how can we help you make your story a success?”
Luanna smiled. My mom obviously wanted to make her life easy. “Let me start with you, Minister Marsha. I’ve got some questions about your experience back in Minnesota, what it’s like coming here, and what your hopes are for your new congregation.”
I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding. My mom was an ace at these kinds of questions. For the next ten or fifteen minutes, as the photographer clicked away, the interview stayed one-on-one. My mother was charming, and Luanna was charmed.
“So you don’t believe, Minister Marsha, that a Christian who doesn’t go to church regularly is a bad Christian?” Luanna asked.
“Here’s how I look at it,” my mother explained. “Church is two hours on Sunday. Of course, I’d love to have every single member in the pews every single Sunday. But people have busy lives, and there are a hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week. I’d rather my congregants be good Christians for a hundred and sixty-six of those hours and go fishing on Sunday than be good Christians on Sunday and forget what Jesus taught us the rest of the time.”
Home run answer. That’s my mother for you.
“These girls are lucky to have you as their minister,” Luanna commented.
“I’m lucky to have them in my congregation,” my mom responded. “Of course, one of them is my daughter, so she doesn’t have much of a choice. Do you, Natalie?”
I smiled my best smile. “It’s not that hard.”
“It must be quite a change for you, Natalie,” the reporter observed. “To have moved here from Minnesota? Kids must be really different.”
“Kids are kids.” I tried to be nonchalant.
Sandra barked a laugh. “That’s not true, Nat, and you know it. There’s so much more temptation here. There’s always someone richer than you, more beautiful than you, and definitely thinner than you.”
Luanna nodded. “I’d say that’s true. I doubt there’s anyone in Minnesota like Alex Samuels, for example. You’ve heard of her, Natalie?”
Gawd. She had no idea that Alex was my good friend. Or did she? Was this some sort of “gotcha” question?
My eyes darted around the table before I answered. Sandra could barely stop from rolling her eyes. Mia met mine with concern in her own. That helped.
“I actually know Alex,” I said.
“You know her?” Luanna asked. “Personally?”
“Yes, personally. She’s my friend.” I wondered whether honesty was the best policy here.
My mother came to my rescue. “Actually, Luanna? The Samuels kids were guests in our home recently. Alex is an interesting girl. I look forward to getting to know her better.”
Once again, that’s my mom in action. She could have scored shock-value points by mentioning that Shepard Samuels had come to church the past Sunday, but she didn’t want to invade his privacy. Good for her, but bad for Sandra, who tried unsuccessfully to hide her smirk.
“Let me say one thing about Alex,” Sandra offered. “In my opinion? No one is irredeemable. I don’t like to talk about this—I haven’t even mentioned it at Wait/Great yet—but I may as well say it now. After my dad died, I kind of fell in with a bad crowd. It was a way to deal with my grief. My mom likes to say that we moved here because there were too many ghosts in Manhattan. I think it was more that I had too many of the wrong friends.”
Sandra’s mother, Nona, was a famous singer from the eighties. She didn’t perform her songs anymore, though; now she was into the musical theater scene.
“No one is irredeemable,” Sandra continued. “But you have to want to redeem yourself. Alex Samuels has a long way to go.”
That made me angry with Sandra. She’d never even had a conversation with Alex. Who was she to decide how far Alex had to go?
Meanwhile, Luanna’s eyes bored into each of us three girls. I could hear the photographer clicking away. “Speaking of the Wait/Great group … All three of you girls are virgins, yes?”
Mia said yes. Sandra said yes.
I said yes.
Right then, I didn’t hate Sandra. I hated myself.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’d been in Lo
s Angeles for almost a month and seen some really over-the-top places to live. There was our place. There was Alex’s place, with the guitar-shaped swimming pool. There was Brooke Summers’s place, with its facade inspired by the White House. There was Kent Stevens’s hilltop compound, with its guesthouses, stables, and private roads.
Let me go on record as saying that the mansion belonging to Big Jam put them all to shame.
Mia invited me to hang out with her on Wednesday afternoon, the day after the interview with the Los Angeles Times. By the way, Brett had some emergency looping to do, so we never got to the House of Blues or the Hollywood Bowl. When your boyfriend is a TV actor, it happens.
I was used to mansions with gates at the bottom of the driveway. We had one. So did Alex, and so did Brooke. Kent Stevens had a guardhouse with two armed guards. Big Jam? He had a private four-lane divided road, which he’d modestly named Big Jam Drive. At the base of Big Jam Drive were two gatehouses. One handled ingress; the other handled egress. Manning the guardhouses were former British Beefeaters in their garish red garb. It was as if Big Jam’s manse was not a dwelling, but Buckingham Palace.
As I pulled up to Big Jam Drive in the Saturn, the Beefeaters marched to the center of the road. “Welcome to Jam-land,” one of them said with an Oxford accent. “Identification?”
I showed him my ID. He compared it to a list on a clipboard. Satisfied with my identity, he directed me to a discreet parking area behind a copse of sycamores. There I found not only a parking space, but also a jet-black Clydesdale-drawn carriage with the letters BJ carved elegantly into the doors. The carriage driver was also British. I half expected him to offer me fish-and-chips for the ride up the hill.
After five minutes of uphill clip-clop, the carriage emerged onto an open hilltop. There was a view of Los Angeles to the south, the San Fernando Valley to the north, Malibu and the ocean to the west, and the San Gabriel Valley to the east. The hilltop was dominated by Big Jam’s black mansion.
The mansion was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Soon after my family had arrived, Alex and I had watched an edition of the TV show In and Out, which brought viewers inside the home of a chosen celebrity and then followed the star for a night on the town. That day, In and Out had featured Big Jam; it was how I’d figured out that Mia was Big Jam’s daughter.
The coachman left me by the front door—a mammoth two-story-high black wooden portal. Before I could hunt for the bell, it swung open. A tuxedoed butler (think he was British? You’re right) was there to greet me. Behind him, in gym shorts and a tank top, was Mia. I was glad I’d worn something just as casual: cutoff black shorts and a thrift-store men’s bowling shirt from a league in Mankato.
“Thank you, Trevor, I’ve got it from here,” she said to the butler.
“Very well.” The butler moved off discreetly as Mia hugged me.
“Welcome,” she said.
I stepped into the black-marble foyer . “It’s good to be here.… Whoa. Is that an actual Van Gogh?” I pointed to a single painting on the far wall. It was all blues and oranges. I recognized it from a print that had hung in the art studio at Mankato East High School.
Mia nodded. “It is.”
“I thought that was in a museum in Europe!”
“It used to be, before he bought it,” Mia explained. “Anyway, he’s collected wine, he’s collected cars, now he’s collecting Impressionists. Next week? Maybe violins. Come on, I’ll give you the tour, then he wants to meet you.”
“Why does he want to meet me?”
“Because he’s Big Jam, that’s why.”
For the next ten minutes, Mia led me through the manse. There were rooms I remembered from In and Out, like Big Jam’s bedroom and the wine cellar, and rooms that I didn’t, like his living room, modeled on one of the chambers at the Palace of Versailles, and the indoor swimming pool.
As we walked together, we talked about Alex. Mia agreed that it was a good thing she’d returned to rehab. Then I gave her a rundown on what was happening with Sean and Brett, including my non-date of the previous night.
“What about work? Still rocking?” Mia asked. We moved from the indoor pool to the indoor golf simulator. My dad would have drooled.
“Big-time.”
“How much do you make in a night?”
“Usually? Three or four hundred.”
Mia whistled. “Wow. A lot better than Menchie’s. You know Big Jam eats there sometimes.” She pointed down a corridor lined with gold and platinum records. “He’s out by the pool. You ready?”
I nodded. “Sure, why not? He’s another famous person in a city full of famous people.”
“Don’t be shocked,” Mia said darkly.
We went out back through Big Jam’s billiards room—ten tables for billiards and snooker, plus a full bar with a bartender whose major duty seemed to be to stand around idly. The swimming pool area was behind a ten-foot-high stone wall; Mia had to enter a code on a keypad to be admitted.
A scene of calm debauchery awaited us inside.
The pool was Olympic-size and empty. It was ringed by wicker chaise lounges. Each one of those lounges was occupied by a nude young woman. They were white, Asian, Latina, black, and every shade in between.
“Equal-opportunity under-twenty-five eye candy,” I managed to quip.
“Where’s Big Jam?”
Mia pointed. There he was, facedown on a massage table, under a lanai twenty yards to our left. A much older Thai woman, fully dressed in baggy gray cotton pants and a matching cotton top, was walking on his back, working out the kinks with her weight as he grunted in appreciation. Big Jam himself was nude.
“Come on.” Mia started toward him. “Fifty-fifty he towels up.”
The Thai woman whispered something to Big Jam. He rolled over, sat up, and swung his legs off the side of the massage table. To my relief, after a brief mooning, he wrapped a black towel around his hips. I had no choice but to take in his imposing, chiseled physique, his shaved-bald head, and the many tattoos on his arms and chest.
“You must be Natalie,” he said.
“I am.”
I felt nervous. The whole situation was so ungodly. Not that Big Jam had been raised with God as a priority. He’d gone through a succession of foster parents as a boy in Gary, Indiana. Then, at age eighteen, he was convicted of armed robbery and sent to prison. After his release he became a hip-hop star who battled his record label and then started one of his own. His label made money hand over fist, and he parlayed that success into movie production, a clothing line, a worldwide network of hotels, and even an investment-management firm for the very, very rich.
All by age thirty-five, for a guy who’d never finished tenth grade.
“You know who Big Jam is?” he asked me. Like on the television show, he referred to himself in the third person.
I tried to keep it personal. “I do. You’re my friend Mia’s father.”
Big Jam boomed a laugh. “Big Jam is rarely referred to that way. You a church girl, like Mia?”
“We met at church, yes.”
“The church where your mother is the minister.”
Big Jam said it like an accusation. He sat back on the massage table; the towel came dangerously close to dropping to the ground.
“Let me tell you what I think of church. When I was in the joint, I saw all these cons get themselves religion. They study Old Testament, New Testament, Jew Testament, Koran, Loran, Roxanne, what have you.
“These dudes? They make parole, they get out, and all that God talk don’t do a damn thing for them, because soon they’re all back in the joint. ’Cept for Big Jam, who didn’t give a rat’s ass for God. Mia here? What good did religion do her mother? Her ‘God’ done brought her home when her daughter needed her most. What kind of God is that? Tell me, church girl Natalie. What kind of God he be?”
I don’t know why, but I wanted to defend the Almighty. Maybe because Big Jam was taking shots at two mothers. My own, who was alive. And Mia’s, who’d
died of cancer.
“ ‘Man’s ways are not God’s ways.’ ” I said, thinking about the book of Isaiah.
Big Jam laughed again, so long that it made me uncomfortable. “Big Jam’s ways are not God’s ways, either. Let me tell you how I’m doing without the Good Book. Take a look around. Look!” He swept his arms in all directions, then glared at me and Mia. “I’m a boy from Gary, Indiana, who doesn’t even know his mommy. I came from nothing. Nothing! But because of me, five thousand people go to work in the mornin’. Big Jam doesn’t know if they’re Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jainist, Buddhist, or Nothingist, but he does know that because of Big Jam, they’ve got a roof over their heads, food on their table, and a job to call their own. So you tell me, church girls: who’s doing more good for the world? Them doing the praying, or them doing the doing?”
“Just because you pray doesn’t mean you can’t do.” I boldly held my ground.
Big Jam actually smiled. It was the first real moment from him I’d ever seen.
“Good for you, Natalie Shelton. Good for you to take me on. When you’re ready for a job, come see me.”
He stretched back on the massage table. Clearly, our discussion was over.
I looked at Mia. She shrugged. As I watched the Thai woman go back to work on Big Jam’s shoulders and a couple of the eye candy babes walk to the pool and dive in, I was more grateful for my own family than I’d been in a long, long time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was Thursday night, and I was raking it in.
For my first turnover of tables, I had a number of high-profile guests. At one table was the former president of Bolivia with his wife. At another were four agents from CAA. At a third was a young hotshot music conductor; apparently he was very well known throughout the classical-music world. It didn’t hurt that he was young and handsome.
When famous people came to Whitehall for dinner, they mostly left each other alone save for maybe a discreet smile. That night I saw the conductor greet the Bolivian president warmly; they spoke rapid-fire Spanish for a while and then went back to their respective tables.
Little Lies Page 13