The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  My understanding of my last memories of Ashley had changed, too. Now I see that that last weekend in New York, it only looked as though she had all the power she could ever need. There was a whole other world waiting for her that she didn’t get a chance to access. I can see now that Ashley might have been just at the moment of starting to get bored with it all. That was why the episode with Oliver was so disappointing; she had hoped that it might have been a glimpse into the other side. At twenty-one, she was pushing up against the limits of what sex could make possible, and part of her was yearning to be on to the next thing. What might it have been for her?

  • • •

  “What kind of girl was Ashley Ellerin?” Lindner asks Chris.

  “Beautiful. Fun. Outgoing. Friendly.” Chris begins to cry. The air in the room is heavy and sad; it feels as if there’s a storm outside even though it’s still the same brilliantly sunny LA day it always is. It’s as if people are breathing more slowly, as if we’re watching a painful medical procedure, one that’s necessary and will potentially make the patient’s life easier in the long run but in the present it’s all needles and scalpels and cries and viscera. I almost feel complicit, getting to sit on this side of things, taking notes, watching it all unfold. Being able to walk out of the room if I want, evade eye contact.

  “What kind of crowd did Ashley hang out with?” asks Lindner.

  “Some celebrity types, young Hollywood . . .” Chris trails off. Young Hollywood. I picture MTV’s The Hills or some E! show about children of the stars. Mercedes-Benzes and movie premieres and nightclubs and red carpets and acting like an asshole to the valet.

  “This crowd—did they do drugs?”

  “Smoking crystal meth, doing cocaine,” Chris says with resignation. I wonder if he’s embarrassed at all. I wonder if he wishes he could lie—or maybe there are some aspects he’s lied about already? He must know this doesn’t sound good, that it makes them look like stereotypes, and that they can scarcely afford a drop in sympathy points. But he’s also not one to overexplain things it seems, and I respect that.

  The questions roll forward: What was her house like? What sort of people stopped by? Were they always announced?

  “No.”

  “Why was it different when [the defendant] stopped by unannounced?” Lindner asks.

  “He just wasn’t in our group of friends,” says Chris.

  “It was a question of class, was it?” Lindner persists. “A question of not being a Hollywood guy?” He draws out this last part, almost sneering. You’re all just a bunch of beautiful, seedy trust funders, and my client was an earnest middle-class man and you call him creepy and assume he’s a serial killer. You judgy entitled young Hollywood fucker. Or so I hear in the pauses.

  Objection! Sustained.

  Minutes tick by. Marna Miller takes a turn. Tears. Silence. Crumpled tissues being shoved into pockets. Repetition. The stories and the phrases recur like lyrics and a chorus. Young Hollywood. Beautiful. Flirtatious. He just wasn’t in our group of friends.

  During the slower parts I google Chris’s hair salon. It’s a hip-looking place in Pasadena called Crowned Studio Salon with a punk-inspired, accessible website. In the staff bios section, I spot stylists with lip rings and mohawks and purple streaks in their hair. Chris smiles brightly in his head shot. He is the Lead Cutting Specialist.

  “Did you find the defendant’s behavior threatening?”

  Objection! Overruled.

  “Did you tell Detective Small that you thought the defendant was acting stalkerish?”

  Objection! Sustained.

  “After you told [Ashley] about the defendant and that you thought he was stalkerish and weird and strange, did the defendant still show up at the residence . . . and did she still let him in?”

  “Yes.” Chris’s voice cracks, and he grabs for a tissue. Of course yes. Ashley’s death is not his fault or her fault, but it’s why we’re all here watching this horror movie, shouting at the screen “Don’t open the door!” a thousand times over, isn’t it? Do you have to make him relive it all? Do you have to make us?

  Finally, mercifully, it’s done. Chris leaves the stand slowly, lethargically, depleted, and I can see the relief dripping off him as he walks toward the door even as it’s coupled with perhaps some shame. When you’re up there testifying, even though it’s the victim they’re asking about, it’s you who’s put up on the operating table, I am learning. How you spent your time, decisions you made, all of it is suddenly relevant. You’re being picked at just the same, and you’re actually alive to face it, and it hurts, and it’s not fair, and you can’t get out of it. But for now, relief trumps all. Chris is finished. He can get a drink, rejoin his friends, put this all behind him for a bit.

  He did his best, I’m sure of it, but I’m left with the uncomfortable sense that something felt a little unrelatable about him, or at least just now. Maybe it’s his hair-trigger tears or his tales of drug use. I feel like an asshole for thinking all this, and I feel the urge to run out after him. To find him and console him, to tell him I was there. That I know how hard it was—how hard it is. I know he did what he could. But instead I stay seated, I type notes. I look around at Christine and the CBS woman and the lawyers as if it’s all fine. We just witnessed the same stuff, my internal dialogue is the same as theirs, nothing to see here. I tell myself I’m not even sure that that kind of thing would be allowed—he’s probably busy with Jen and her boyfriend and Justin in the hallway. I’m too new; what could I say that would even make a difference? It’s not clear where I belong yet or whether I’m to be trusted, anyway. Like the defendant, at least for now, I’m just not in their group of friends.

  11

  SCORPIO RISING

  COME AROUND THE curve of Sunset Boulevard a few blocks past Fairfax, and you see Chateau Marmont emerging like some fantasy castle in the sky, all gleaming white spires and faux Gothic arches and Italianate pointy trees reaching up and up. It looks so much like a European estate from the fifteenth century that if you squint your eyes you almost don’t notice there’s a Starbucks/rental car outfit right down the road and a flashy Mexican place called the Pink Taco across the street.

  The Chateau, everyone in LA calls it. “The after party was at the Chateau,” says my actress friend, who also does voice-overs. “Let’s definitely get drinks at the Chateau when you’re in town,” says another, in development but technically the assistant to a showrunner. I find all of it—the job titles, the fake-European allusion—laughably pretentious, but I’m just not from around here.

  The place has certainly earned its city lore. Built in the 1920s as Los Angeles’s first earthquake-proof apartment building, the Chateau quickly became the spot for bad behavior of all types in Golden Age Hollywood and thereafter. Back then, studios had a code of conduct written into stars’ contracts for what was permitted on camera as well as what was expected of them in public. Who those people really were was another story, and the studios knew that with or without their control, something would have to give. To make up the difference, the studios rented rooms at the Chateau for stars to go at it and get up to no good. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow were rumored to have had a torrid affair upstairs. Howard Hughes was said to have gawked from his room through binoculars at women around the pool. Led Zeppelin’s drummer rode his motorcycle through the lobby. Roman Polanski fled there after his statutory rape charges before leaving the country. John Belushi overdosed in Bungalow Three. Helmut Newton fatally crashed his car in the driveway. Lindsay Lohan holed up there during her first drunk-driving scandal.

  The Chateau is like a movie set that way, an intricately constructed fantasy that encourages you to play against type. It’s like being in permanent vacation mode. It’s a place where you can imagine losing all your clothes, and then maybe your mind, and still wanting to go back as soon as you’re able to. It’s a place where you can picture getting discovered or meeting someone who might change your life, whether for good or ill you don’t ye
t know but you go ahead with it anyway. And it came as little surprise to me to learn from Chris that this magical mystery castle was Ashley’s playground.

  Ashley would go to the Chateau with her crowd for late-night drinks at the turn of the millennium, lazing about in the low lighting and faux worn banquettes in the bar, drinking Red Bull and vodkas. Did she ever meet someone and make her way upstairs to a suite or the penthouse? Did she ever skinny-dip in the pool or give anyone a fake-but-real lap dance on a dare? Did she ever do lines in the bathroom with a Spanish director in town for the Golden Globes or the girlfriend of an exec from Paramount? The potentially illicit scenarios were endless.

  Marisa and Rainn, my hosts on this trip, have brought me here tonight. It’s only a few minutes from their bungalow in West Hollywood, where I’m sleeping on an air mattress in the spare room that Rainn occasionally uses as his office. With its Spanish-style roof and front terrace looking out over Laurel Canyon, it’s hard to liken the house to anything that exists in Brooklyn because it’s one of those completely Californian structures that would be impossible to picture anywhere else, not to mention the fact that the person who pays its not insubstantial rent—Marisa’s boyfriend, Rainn—makes his living as a lunar astrologer.

  Marisa and I have known each other for quite some time, stretching back to my first years out of college in New York, pre-9/11, pre–Ashley’s death, pre–a lot of things that would come to leave a permanent mark on us both. Ours had been the kind of friendship that faded in and out for years at a time over petty squabbles that turned into public rows and, finally, quasi referendums on our individual values, which at times seemed to diverge wildly. We would find our way back together again at the usual cross stations: boyfriends coming and going, apartment leases broken, though we could never keep it up for long. After she had moved to California following a messy breakup, we had achieved the closest thing yet to consistency between us. The distance had seemed to soften the edges, lower the stakes—perhaps age had done that, too. We didn’t have to have everything in common to love each other—maybe we didn’t have to have much at all.

  Now we saw each other a few times a year—I’d stay at her place when I visited to research Ashley, and she’d be at mine in Brooklyn when she was back east seeing family. Rainn had been her man since even before she had touched down in Los Angeles, a souvenir from her cross-country journey. Their origin story was distinctly wacky and one I loved to retell to friends. He had been her telephone astrologer on and off throughout her twenties; they’d speak twice a year for hourlong readings of her chart: what to look out for, what planetary alignments would be affecting her, which romantic entanglements were to be avoided, that kind of thing. Marisa was a passionate believer in astrology and would argue for its classification as a science to anyone who dared challenge her. “If our bodies are ninety-three percent water and the earth is seventy-one percent water and the moon and the planets control the oceans, how can we claim we’re not also controlled by them?” she would cry, her voice getting higher and shriller. I had long since learned to let that one lie.

  Rainn would send a recording of their calls afterward to her in cassette and eventually CD form, and Marisa had kept all of them from the very first, neatly organized in a box under her bed. They had never met in person, but since she was about a due for her biannual reading at the time of her cross-country move, Rainn suggested they meet up where he was based in Arizona as she was passing through. Maybe it was the breakup she was coming off of that made all of it seem heightened, but the chemistry was instant, as she tells it. The first time she saw him she could barely look away; his aura was so intense she felt she could see a glow around him—he was the most magnetic person in the room. She was attracted to his deep spirituality, and he saw in her the embodiment of everything he had ever hoped for in a partner. They got secretly engaged after just a few months. Why secretly? I could never get a handle on that one. I always figured that despite Marisa’s distinct lack of skepticism about many things, even she knew that Rainn and their story had a whiff of the absurd—why bother inviting that kind of criticism just yet? A new relationship was fragile enough.

  If Rainn can predict when his clients will or won’t meet their soul mate, one might ask, shouldn’t he have seen something this life-changing on the horizon for himself? “Everyone always asks that,” Marisa says, bemused, without ever giving a clear answer.

  • • •

  We sit outside on the garden patio at the Chateau, an impossibly lovely, shaded courtyard just off the restaurant where the waiters sport starched vests and a hamburger is $23. Terry Richardson is curled up on a threadbare couch in the corner of the lobby as we come in. Our server looks like a soap opera actor or swimmer or both, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s come straight from a morning on the water in Venice, his designer wet suit stashed in the staff locker room next to the walk-in cooler in the basement.

  The three of us order wine and a cheese plate and chat about what’s been happening at the hearing, though it’s not I who brings it up. My close friends know a bit about what’s going on, and I understand that when they ask about things they’re genuinely interested as well as trying to be supportive about issues in my life that have no bearing on them, akin to asking after my great-aunt with Alzheimer’s or what’s been going on at New York magazine. But sometimes I really hate having to talk about it, especially in settings like bars or parties or at brunch. Especially brunch. As practiced as I’ve become at the sound bites, explaining casually to strangers what I couldn’t yet understand about the significance of her life to mine at this point, getting into the new and unprocessed details doesn’t seem right, nor does shutting down my friends’ kind encouragement. The drugs and Chris and the slut shaming and the emotions and all the rest don’t feel appropriate at this moment either, on this lovely spring evening with surf-god waiters setting down taleggio and fig jam around us, but Marisa has asked, and she cares and she is my host, and I want to be gracious and throw her a bone.

  I also don’t like having to bring Rainn in on things as if he were someone I felt close to, but such is how it goes with your friends and their partners. Sometimes it can feel challenging and a dash manipulative on the part of your friend, like “Tell us one of your crazy dating stories while we sit here and gasp and add incredulous murmurs and stare at you while holding hands” or “Tell that one about the fascinating/tragic/painful thing that happened to you so my new boyfriend can see how interesting you are and then we all laugh and I get points for having interesting friends.” But that’s my role in this friendship scene, stone set as hers. Such is coupling. Such is growing up and watching your friends find their person, or their series of persons. Some times are easier than other times. This is not one of the easier times.

  Marisa’s been encouraging me to bond with Rainn ever since the first time I met him last year, and I’ve been dutifully giving it my best effort. Rainn is unfailingly kind, rather soft-spoken, and appears to adore Marisa. However he suffers from the not uncommon affliction of taking his work home with him, which in his case means he is practically single-mindedly focused on astrology to the exclusion of almost all other topics. Everything, to him, is seen through the lens of a telescope pointed up at the moon and stars. Though he can handle a few minutes of polite getting-to-know-you talk, you can see his eyes glaze over when the conversation turns to subjects other than the cosmos, which is to say, most of the time. Again and again I find myself struggling to take him seriously, and then I feel like a judgmental asshole. Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just take people at face value? Their beliefs are their beliefs and mine are mine, and there is nothing wrong with that. But in my head, of course, I can never quite leave it at that; I am always trying to pick things apart and poke at the holes.

  When Marisa and Rainn bicker, Marisa tells me, Rainn rarely addresses the issue at hand. Instead of discussing, say, why he walked out in a huff or missed an important date, he’ll simply invoke the planets to jus
tify why things were destined to go down the way they did. Venus was in retrograde that month, that was why their affection was lacking, he might say, and the full moon was in Aquarius, so there was that. It could never be something as basic as “You hurt my feelings” or “I’d like to be having more sex” between them; it was much more likely to be cycles of restriction and delay: Uranus is active, Neptune’s clouding judgment so we can’t make this decision now anyway, let’s pick it up again at the end of this phase.

  Last year when I came for a stay, I let Rainn give me a reading at Marisa’s suggestion. He asked for my birth date and place and time and then took a few hours to prepare my chart, which he then consulted on his computer as he spoke while I sat in front of him, reclining on the couch like in some mock therapy session. I have the ability to look at someone and know exactly who they are, he told me, but I suffer from periods of self-doubt. I am entering a phase where I will manifest my destiny, and I am destined to be a person who inspires growth and change in others. Justice will be very important in this life. I nodded encouragingly and even took a few notes, but the whole thing left me with a vaguely empty feeling. Plenty of what he said was empowering and allowed me to stay safe within my bias about parts of myself I already understood, but I had a hard time sucking it all down. How could I differentiate between what was wise and true and what was just a confident person getting high on his own supply? Or maybe there wasn’t much of a difference at all.

  • • •

  We’re almost done with our first glass of wine, the cheese plate solidly picked over with just a few cornichons and toast points left around the perimeter. Marisa and I are discussing what we want for our second glass—should we switch to cocktails?—and Rainn hasn’t spoken for at least fifteen minutes.