by CD Reiss
This was going to explode. Michael Greydon, official famous person, found trying to obtain pictures of me as an adolescent. His intentions had been innocent, and no one would care.
I was a victim now. I wasn’t the sole owner of my life. I wasn’t in control, and I didn’t have power over the land. I was weak and wrecked, a puppy on the yellow line, waiting to get hit or be saved but unable to move. I hated it. I hated feeling like a target someone had hit and everyone else wanted to rescue.
Naked in the middle of the room, hugging my bundle of clothes, I must have been a sight to Michael in his movie star jeans and celebrity smile. I must have looked like a lost china lamb.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said, putting his perfect hands on my bare shoulders. “They’re on paper. He told Carlos the versions he sent you were the only digitals, and he took them with his camera phone. They won’t be around. I’ll explain what happened. It’ll be done.”
“No, it was supposed to be done years ago, when I left. And it was. Now I have to explain everything to strangers. It was hard enough to explain just to you. And once I walk out of here, they won’t let me near you until you’re cleared. Trust me. I know the system.”
I stared straight in his face, but I couldn’t see him. I had no idea what he was feeling or thinking. I couldn’t feel past the need to run away and do something, anything.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying my best to be comforting when all I wanted to do was leave. “This is going to be a pain in the ass for you, and it’s my fault.”
“You need to stop saying things like that.”
“Well, it’s because of me. You can’t deny that. So listen, thank you for helping me with this. You’re a good guy, and you did something amazing for me that you’re going to pay for. You have to go, and I have to go. Let’s just get on with it.”
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door.
I jumped out of my skin. “The gate?” I gasped half a sentence.
“My damn publicist.” He kissed my cheek tenderly and walked to the front.
I went into the bathroom to dress. Through the door, as I hitched up my lace-topped stockings, I heard voices, not the whisperings of two men who worked together but something else. Something more terse and businesslike. I wrestled with the zipper on the back of my dress, contorting myself into a knot rather than walk out the bathroom door undone. When I did walk out, a new scene awaited.
The bedroom door was closed. The sheets were twisted all to hell, as if two people had been entwined in them all night long. A middle-aged woman stood in the room with her hands folded in front of her. She wore a blue sweater with beads around the neck and a navy skirt that ended right below the knee. Her light brown hair was darker at the roots, and her black shoes had a sensible low heel.
“Are you Laine Cartwright?” she asked.
Could I say no? Could I deny everything? Could I laugh and ask how anyone could think a man like Michael Greydon would knot up the sheets with Laine Cartwright?
“Maybe,” I replied, unable to hide my hostility.
“May I speak with you?” She pointed at a chair as if she was the one who had fallen in love in that room a few hours earlier.
I realized she was going to tell me about the pictures. She was going to say Michael had bought them. She was going to ask my age and about Jake and why I’d been a fuckdoll when I was fifteen. I didn’t want to answer any of it. I didn’t want to hear a bad word about Michael, and I didn’t want that room tainted with those years. I wanted that space, that bed, the air, and all of it to only hold love.
“No,” I said. “If you want to talk to me about the pictures, you have to take me to First Street. I want all of it recorded, because I’m not repeating it.”
She nodded as if the request wasn’t unusual.
“And I’d like to call my lawyer.”
“You’re not being accused of anything,” she said. “But of course, that’s fine. Would you like to call a friend to come with you?”
I hadn’t expected that. I figured I’d go alone to the precinct like a criminal, get questioned in a cold, hard room, and take a cab back to my empty loft. But I did want someone to go with me. I wanted to lean on another human being for strength and comfort, and I wanted it to be Michael. I pressed my lips between my teeth, holding back the choke and blubber that gathered in my throat. He was the last person I could ask for, and he was all I wanted.
Who would a normal person ask for? Their mother. I barely remembered mine. I’d visited her twice in a grey room with aluminum folding chairs and a card table. She’d tried to squeeze all of life’s lessons into half an hour, and I remembered none of them. Stay out of trouble. Value yourself. Don’t let a man run you. Blah blah blah. Goddamn her. What useless high-handed crap it all was.
My mother was supposed to teach me to do something, cook, get an apartment, go on interviews, balance a checkbook. But Irving had taught me how to do that, and how to pay quarterly taxes, calculate focal length, go on an interview. He’d cosigned my first checking account, helped with the deposit on the apartment I got after I left Jake, gave me a trade I could use to support myself.
“I do,” I said. “I do have a friend I want to bring.”
Chapter 32
Michael
Here’s a secret the LAPD keeps pretty close to the vest, and one they’ll deny to your face. If they want to get into your house, they’ll get into your house no matter who you are or what security system you have. They didn’t need Ken to give them my maid’s key. They had tools.
My gate was broken, and the door to the main house had been broken in. I couldn’t believe they’d even knocked on the door of the guest house when I saw that, but I had no time to ask before I was put in a squad car and driven away.
Outside the broken gate, they waited. I’d never resented the paparazzi before, with their cameras and catcalls. But that day, with everything in my life interrupted, a day of explanations ahead, and ugliness between Laine and me, I hated them. They stood a respectful distance from the police car, but they caught me there. I’d be stuck in a room explaining things while they guessed at the truth and made up lies about Laine.
And it was so titillating. What could be better than Michael Greydon staring at child pornography with his hands in his pants? It explained why I hadn’t had a long-term relationship since Lucy, why I didn’t stay out late or do drugs. My vice was worse than a simple substance abuse problem. It was the story of the year, and they’d ignore the truth for as long as they could, because the truth was honorable and real.
The LAPD didn’t book me right away. They took me into a room and asked questions, the most pertinent being, “Did you or did you not arrange for the purchase of sexually explicit photographs of an individual you knew to be under the age of eighteen?”
Once my lawyer, Joe Barnett, showed up in his suit and aftershave, I told him the truth, because that was what I knew how to do. Then I admitted to the LAPD that yes, I’d arranged for the purchase of the pictures, and yes, I knew that the girl in them was under eighteen.
They booked me without hearing the rest of it. Barnett had told me that was what would happen. I asked about Carlos. They told me he was being held but not arrested. I asked about Laine. No one would tell me if she was all right.
“Find out,” I told Joe. “I don’t care what you have to do.”
“If she’s implicating you—”
“I don’t care. Make sure she’s not alone. Make sure she’s not upset. Go to her house and make sure she’s okay.”
He agreed, but he lied. I knew it from the way his mouth moved. He was as invested in protecting me as I was invested in protecting Laine. There was nothing in it for him to check on her and report back to me.
So I sat in the quiet cell, which was comfortable enough with its soft seat and frosted glass, as if designed with a pending apology in mind. I thought about what I’d done, and not done, and the foolhardy arrogance that had led me there. Laine�
��s past had been her secret. She’d protected it, and because of me, it was no longer a secret. It had the potential to go horrifyingly public. Guilt lay on top of regret, whispering potential ammunition in my ear.
You arrogant, overconfident ass. This is her life. It’s not a movie. It’s not a story you’re telling yourself about yourself.
“She’s fine,” Ken said after my two-hour wait in the apology room.
We sat across a table in a white room with a wood table. Portraits of dead cops looked down at us.
“How do you know?” I asked, infuriated by his casual posture, his legs crossed and foot shaking at the ankle as if he needed to be somewhere else.
“If she’d killed herself, we’d have heard.”
“You know what, Ken—”
“Don’t you even think of firing me.” He put both elbows on the table. “You need me, and I’m not wasting my breath convincing you of it. I don’t care if you admit to me that what you did was stupid, but once you’re out of here, you’d better admit that to the public. They want your head.”
“It was stupid,” I said.
“Good. That’s progress.”
“Did the pictures get out?”
He didn’t answer.
I slammed my hand on the desk. “Answer me.”
“Yes.”
A vacuum opened in my chest, and my heart fell into it.
Ken continued. “Her brother—”
“Foster brother.”
“This Jake guy had them scheduled to post to a porn site,” he said. “He was going to use that to pressure her, but they went up while he was being questioned.”
“We can’t stop it, can we?”
“Look, she’ll get over it. You, on the other hand, might not.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I want resources behind getting those pictures taken down. I know it’s impossible to get them all.”
“It’s just plain impossible. If she were nobody, I could contain it. But she’s not. She’s your girlfriend.”
My girlfriend. The word sounded infantile.
“So here’s what we have outside these walls,” Ken said, “and try not to get discouraged by the fact that it’s all bad news. On one hand, you’ve got a news media cycle that only knows why you were arrested. They haven’t found out that you sent your bodyguard to get pictures of your girlfriend to protect her. All anyone can envision is America’s Boyfriend beating off to shots of naked little girls. On the other hand, Laine’s pictures are taking a slow tour around the porn world tagged as ‘vintage teens.’ They’ll get drowned out in two weeks by the flood of shit on the internet. But when you explain publicly what happened, people will start searching for the pictures, and she doesn’t look that different. They’ll stop being a fetish tag and start showing up on CelebrityOgler.com with blurred nipples.”
I must have made some move with my hands or some expression that betrayed my immediate rage. I didn’t have a word besides No for the invasion that would be.
As if Ken saw an opening, he leaned forward. “If you don’t want to get run out of town, you have to explain what happened. If you want those pictures to die a quick, painless death by irrelevance, you have to quietly yet openly dump her now. No one will care about her enough to search.”
“Quietly yet openly? What the hell is that?”
“Call her a girl you used to know, had a short thing with, then start talking about the movie.”
“What movie?” I was biding my time in asking that. I didn’t know what to think, so I asked a meaningless question.
“Any movie. Just make the studio happy, because Bob Rice is cancelling contracts. You’re already in breach for not doing the PR you agreed to.”
I shook my head. There was no use in talking further to Ken. I wasn’t leaving Laine. If there was a third way out of this, I would find it. Breaking up with her wasn’t an option, even if it was the best way to protect her.
Chapter 33
Laine
Phoebe was in Las Vegas to see a client, but she promised to get back by morning. She gave me the number of a colleague, but they didn’t pick up.
The lady in the blue sweater said I didn’t have to talk to her until my moral support showed up, which pissed me off. I was a grown woman and didn’t need backup. She kept treating me like a victim, incapable of consenting to anything. As if my being a little older would have changed my ability to make a decision about who could stick what inside me. I’d consented to the sex. Yes, I’d hated it, but I consented. And I consented to the pictures, and yes, I hated that more, but I consented.
“We may find they were distributed over the internet,” she said softly.
“I didn’t consent to that,” I said, crossing and uncrossing my legs. My stockings had started sagging, and I felt out of place, with my fancy pink dress, in a room decked out in jeweled colors and decorated with the alphabet. An indoor play structure sat in one corner, and in another was a child-sized white table stacked with anatomically correct dolls.
“Miss Cartwright, we can prosecute a distributor of child pornography whether you consent or not.”
“So do it. Just not Michael. Hang Jake out to dry. I don’t care.”
She handed me papers, and they all had the word victim on them. I wouldn’t sign them. I wouldn’t even look at them. Before I could shove them up her ass, there was a knock on the door.
A man stuck his head in. “Your family’s here.”
I didn’t waste a minute before walking out to the lobby. Tom was there, his monochrome face in a room that finally matched him. Irving had shown up like a beat-up knight on an old brokeback horse, so quickly that traffic must have parted before him. I didn’t know what family meant to me until they came when I needed them. I was so surprised and relieved to see them, I hugged them both so hard I thought I’d break them.
“He didn’t do anything,” I said after the first greeting. “He was trying to get them so we could burn them. And I keep telling them that, but they won’t let him go.”
“I shouldn’t have developed them,” Tom said.
“You saved my life. If you hadn’t put them under my nose, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”
“Yeah, well. I came to see you, but also…” He rolled his eyes, indicating the room at large. “Gotta tell them my side.”
“They wouldn’t put you away for it,” I said with an edge of desperation.
“I was a year younger than you, dorkhead.”
“Still are,” Irving said. “Go talk to the fuzz and get it over with.” He nudged Tom toward the sign-in desk then pulled me to a plastic chair.
“Can we not, I don’t know, talk about this?” I said.
“Sure.” He picked a magazine off the little linoleum table. “Personally, what you did when you were fifteen is your own business. Are they letting you go?”
“I guess I can go any time. I have to sign some stuff, but I want to wait for Michael.”
“You like him.”
I nodded. “If anyone else had gotten picked up for this, we’d laugh about it in a week, but him? This could hurt him, so I have to make sure we look like a united front. You know, so the public knows I’m not mad at him or anything.”
“Speaking of the public, they’re waiting outside. Your peers, I mean.” He licked his finger and flipped a page of celebrity news. “I’m going to ask the obvious. How do you like being on the other side of it?”
I looked over his shoulder at the magazine. Britt with a roller in her hair. Brad wearing white in winter. Fiona with ice cream on her shirt.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“I don’t think there’s a precedent for this, so do whatever you have to. Do whatever is right.”
We sat there another few minutes. Tom waved as they led him to a room to tell the story of his forgotten camera and an exposed roll of film. Irving didn’t ask about the pictures, and I tried not to think of them being distributed. I hoped that they hadn’t been. I didn’
t know how I’d function if people knew.
Yet it seemed foolish to hide. If they were out, they were out. I wasn’t that girl anymore. She was scared and lonely, sensitive and breakable. I’d broken her and put her back together, myself.
Just me.
And Irv.
And Tom.
And Hollywood.
I wasn’t that girl anymore, but I loved her.
Why shouldn’t she have a voice in all this? Why should I leave it to Michael’s machine and the police? Hadn’t that girl been silenced long enough?
I took a deep breath and stood.
Irving looked up at me. “What’s on your mind?”
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I knew what Irving would say. He’d say I didn’t know what I was doing. He’d say I was being impulsive and that I’d get in trouble. So I walked out the door without saying anything.
I was still in last night’s dress. The shawl had gotten lost somewhere. Michael’s house, or the police car, or any of the ten rooms I’d been shuffled between. Didn’t matter.
They saw me through the glass door, and twenty of them called my name, their faces obliterated behind flashes and cameras. There was a video camera among them—I could tell by the constant flare from the left. Fill lights on such a cloudy day would keep the pictures from being flat. Toby or Franco were behind the fill if I had my guess. I pushed the door open and stood on the precinct steps alone in my pink dress. I folded my hands in front of me and stared into the lights. Clickclickclick a tempo in unexpected rhythms, like fusion jazz.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Miss Cartwright,” a few said in unison like a third-grade class.
I laughed, remembering that I liked my job and I liked those guys. I got them. I shielded my eyes from the lights. “Who’s got the vid rig?”
“Me,” a voice shouted.
I recognized the accent. “Franco! Hi! Renaldo? You there?”