Damage Control

by Jae

  “Tell me, please,” Jill said.

  Grace blew out a breath. “The paparazzi are at it again. They somehow found out that we shared a hotel room in Macon. So now they’re putting one and one together and coming up with three.”

  Painfully slow, Jill reached up and massaged her temples. “Shit.”

  “They’re expecting a statement about our affair from me before noon tomorrow,” Grace added, making air quotes with her fingers.

  Jill made a face as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. “Can’t we just tell them ‘no comment’?”

  “Only if you want them to think you’ve got something to hide,” Lauren said. “Saying ‘no comment’ to a reporter is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. It’ll only make them dig deeper. Didn’t your publicist tell you that?” It was usually the first thing she told clients that were new to the entertainment business.

  “I don’t have a publicist,” Jill said. “Like I said, I always wanted my acting to speak for itself, so I stayed away from any other publicity as much as I could. But it seems I really need a publicist now.” She grinned at Lauren, crinkling her lightly freckled nose. “You wouldn’t happen to know a good one, would you?”

  Lauren knew she should say no. It wasn’t only that this was shaping up to be a PR nightmare that would have her working overtime in the very near future. Somehow, this felt personal for her, and she usually preferred to be all business when it came to her job. But when she felt the pleading gazes of the two actresses on her, saying no was not an option. “All right. I’ll need to talk this over with my boss, but as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got yourself a publicist.”

  When she reached over to take Jill’s hand in both of hers, she hoped like hell that she wouldn’t end up regretting it.

  CHAPTER 7

  They were both silent on the half-hour drive to Grace’s home. Lauren kept glancing over, but Grace seemed deep in thought, looking out the window, and Lauren was content to let her be and just drive in silence. It had been a long, eventful day for both of them.

  When Lauren turned left, taking the Laurel Canyon Boulevard exit, Grace cleared her throat. “Thirteen years.”

  Lauren looked over at her with a small smile. “I hope it won’t take us that long to get you and Jill out of this mess.”

  “No, I mean, that’s how long it’s been since I had a drink.”

  Lauren sensed the importance of this moment. Grace, who was notoriously closemouthed about her private life, had just trusted her with a secret that could harm her career. None of her fans had the slightest inkling that the golden girl of romantic comedies had once succumbed to addiction, and it was best to keep it that way. “Thirteen years,” Lauren repeated, not sure how to react to that big proof of trust. “Which means you stopped drinking when you were…?”

  The tension visible on Grace’s face relaxed into a smile. “Is this your subtle way of asking me how old I am?”

  “I know how old you are,” Lauren said. “Twenty-nine, like so many other actresses have been for years.”

  “I’m really twenty-nine.”

  Lauren grinned at the indignant tone. “I know. Which means you stopped drinking when you were sixteen.”

  “Almost seventeen,” Grace said.

  “Wasn’t that when you left that TV series?”

  “No, that happened earlier, when I was fourteen. The drinking began when they kicked me off the show.”

  “They kicked you off?” Lauren asked. “Why would they do that?”

  “Ratings, why else?” Grace sighed.

  “But you had a lot of loyal fans, didn’t you? I mean, purse lady clearly still remembered you fondly after all these years.”

  Grace stared through the windshield. “Yeah, but I bet she remembers the cute little girl, not the pimply-faced teenager. As I grew older, I wasn’t so cute anymore.”

  Somehow, Lauren doubted that. The actress was cute, even barefoot, scratched, and in a stained dress. Lauren could hardly imagine her as an awkward teenager.

  Grace must have seen her skeptical expression, because she said, “No, really. It was bad. I had acne like you wouldn’t believe, and keeping the weight off was a constant battle. After the powers that be sent little Amber off to boarding school in Europe, I had trouble finding work for a year or two. My mother dragged me to every dermatologist and to every cattle call in town. God, that was humiliating.”

  Lauren had accompanied a few of her clients to casting calls, so she knew how demoralizing they could be. She could only imagine how Grace must have felt as a teenager—when her self-esteem was low to begin with—having to face casting directors who eyed her every pimple and each extra ounce of fat on her body and told her she wasn’t good enough for a role.

  “That’s when the drinking got bad,” Grace said.

  “How did you manage to keep it quiet?” Lauren asked. “I’ve worked in PR for eight years now, and I never even heard rumors about it.”

  Grace shrugged. “Acting was the only thing that meant something to me. I always stopped drinking early enough to be sober when call time came. My mother was also very creative when it came to covering for me.”

  Her mother had covered for her instead of putting her into rehab? Lauren couldn’t believe it. She didn’t know what to say to that, so they drove along in silence, only the hum of the engine filling the space between them.

  A loud growling noise interrupted the silence.

  Grace pressed a hand to her stomach. “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize for being human,” Lauren said. Truth be told, she was pretty hungry too. She’d skipped lunch and dinner, and by now, her stomach felt as if it were ready to digest itself. She looked over at Grace. “Do you want to stop somewhere for something to eat?”

  “At this hour?”

  “Hey, this is LA, the city that never sleeps.”

  “That’s New York,” Grace said.

  Lauren playfully rolled her eyes. “Smart-ass.” She paused when she realized what she was doing. When had their interaction become less professional and more like the banter between friends?

  But Grace didn’t seem to mind. The teasing probably introduced a normalcy she didn’t often get in her interactions. “Yeah, but I’m a barefoot smart-ass with scratched-up knees. Even if we find a place that is still open, we can’t walk into a restaurant looking like this.”

  She was right, of course. People usually just saw the freedom that money could buy celebrities—a shopping trip to Paris, vacationing on the Bahamas, a new sports car every year—but there were actually a lot of things Grace couldn’t do. Lauren wondered if she’d ever had a beer at a corner bar or taken a stroll through the park in a pair of old jeans and no makeup. “Right,” Lauren said. “Can you imagine the headlines I’ll have to deal with tomorrow if you show up in a restaurant like that?”

  “Are you implying that I look less than my usual gorgeous, sophisticated self?” Grace asked in a faux haughty tone.

  Lauren looked away from the street for a moment. The headlights of oncoming cars bathed Grace in streaks of light, so Lauren could take in Grace’s scraped knees, the ivy stains on her white dress, and the baggy sweatshirt that kept slipping over her hands. “You look beautiful.” She cursed herself as soon as she’d said it.

  Just when she was about to add something such as, For an actress who’ll soon turn thirty, Grace said quietly, “Thanks.”

  In the awkward silence, the gurgling of another stomach—this time Lauren’s—sounded overly loud.

  “Guess I’m not the only one who’s hungry,” Grace said with a mild smile.

  Lauren nodded. “I could eat a horse.”

  “Well, I don’t think I have any ungulates in my fridge, but there should be enough other stuff to throw together a salad and sandwiches. Yo
u’re welcome to join me.”

  Lauren wanted to accept the invitation, sensing that Grace rarely if ever had guests over, but she knew it wasn’t a good idea. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but…”

  “You want to keep things professional,” Grace said. “I understand.” She turned her head and stared out the side window to the darkness beyond.

  The playful mood was gone, and Lauren almost wished she would have accepted the invitation. “I wouldn’t put it beyond Stan to keep an eye on your house to see who’s coming and going. Can you imagine what he’d write in that Celluloid Closet column of his if a known lesbian was seen sneaking out of the home of Grace Durand in the middle of the night?”

  Grace groaned. “Jesus Christ. Sometimes, a sandwich is just a sandwich.”

  “Not when you’re in show business, Dr. Freud.”

  “I guess.” Grace looked out the window again.

  “Well,” Lauren said when the silence in the car continued, “I’m fairly sure Stan isn’t keeping an eye on my place.”

  Slowly, Grace turned her head and looked at her.

  “We need to talk about what to tell Stan tomorrow anyway, and we might as well eat while we do that,” Lauren added.

  When Grace nodded her acceptance and said, “I’d like that,” Lauren started to wonder whether she’d picked her socks up off the floor in the living room before leaving for work this morning.

  Grace suppressed a giggle as they glanced left and right and then, when they were sure no one was watching, snuck into Lauren’s apartment building in Brentwood. She hadn’t done something like this since she had been a teenager, sneaking out to party with some of her older co-stars.

  Luckily, everything was quiet as they made their way down the corridor, with no neighbors peeking out of their apartments. Lauren stopped in front of the last door to the right and unlocked it. She reached in to turn on the light before letting Grace enter ahead of her.

  Still barefoot, carrying her stilettos in one hand, Grace squeezed past Lauren and looked around.

  By the standards of her Hollywood acquaintances, the apartment was small, but Grace instantly liked it. The front door opened directly into a long living/dining room, with no space wasted on a hall. Four chairs were placed around a square dining table on which a stack of bills and magazines waited for Lauren’s attention. To the right, an open archway led into a small, but fully functional kitchen.

  The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the stainless steel refrigerator. Grace realized belatedly that she hadn’t asked Lauren if she lived alone. She was curious but didn’t want to appear nosy by asking about Lauren’s private life. Lauren was her publicist, after all, even if she was starting to feel almost like a friend. I guess scrambling up a brick wall together can do that to you, but you’d better be careful. She’d been burned by new friends more than once. People she’d thought she could trust had revealed all kinds of personal information to the media. Nothing scandalous, but still, it rankled her to read in magazines about her battle to keep off weight or about how much she’d paid for her couch. As a result, she’d become slower to trust over the years. Despite her internal admonition, she had a feeling that Lauren wouldn’t betray her, even without a confidentiality clause.

  Lauren walked past her and opened the sliding glass door leading to a small balcony. Fresh air streamed into the apartment. She gestured at the camel-colored microfiber couch in the living room. “Please, have a seat while I rustle up something to eat.”

  When Lauren moved to the kitchen, Grace stood by the open balcony door for a moment, breathing in the fresh air. Through the palm trees and greenery surrounding the building, the lights of the city glittered in the distance. “Nice,” she said when she finally turned and settled into the plush couch cushions.

  “Thanks,” Lauren said from the kitchen, her voice sounding muffled as if she had her head stuck in the refrigerator. “Nothing special, but I like it here. It’s not like I’m home that much anyway, so it’s enough for me.”

  “How long have you lived here?” Grace asked as she eyed the stack of scripts on the coffee table. Was Lauren reading them for one of her clients?

  The refrigerator door thudded closed, and then pots banged. “About eight years.”

  “And before that, you lived in Boston?”

  Lauren stepped around the breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the living room and sent Grace a startled gaze. “Did you google me or something?”

  Grace laughed. “No.” Grinning, she pointed at the sweatshirt she was still wearing.

  “Oh.” Lauren went back to the part of the kitchen Grace couldn’t see. “Yeah, I went to BU, but I was born in LA.”

  “Oh, wow. You’re probably the first LA native I’ve met.”

  The sound of a jar popping open and Lauren’s chuckle drifted over. “What can I say? We’re a rare breed. Onions?”

  “Uh, excuse me?”

  “Do you want onions?”

  What the heck was Lauren making? “No, thanks.”

  “How about you?” Lauren asked and leaned over the breakfast bar to look at Grace. “Where were you born, Betty G. Duvenbeck?”

  Grace winced at the use of her birth name. “What? That big red file you have on me told you my birth name but not where I was born?”

  “How do you know it’s a red file? There are other colors too, you know?”

  “After my mother fired you your first week, I have a feeling I rate the red file,” Grace answered. She realized that she liked Lauren’s gentle teasing. It was so unlike the reverent tone most other people used when talking to her. Lauren seemed unimpressed by her celebrity status and made Grace feel as if she could for once be herself—whoever that was. Sometimes, after spending months getting into the head of a character, it was hard to remember.

  A drawer opened and closed in the kitchen. “I’m pleading the fifth. So, where were you born?”

  “Londen,” Grace said.

  “London? You don’t sound British.”

  “Not London. Londen.” Grace spelled it for her. “A tiny little town in Illinois, with nothing but cornfields and one stop light.”

  “Did you like it there?” Lauren asked from the kitchen.

  Grace curled her bare toes into the soft carpet. “I guess it was okay. I didn’t really spend enough time there to be sure. I spent a lot of my childhood in LA and Toronto, shooting commercials, TV shows, and later movies.”

  “We have that in common,” Lauren said. “Well, not the shooting, of course. But I practically grew up on various movie sets too. My whole family is involved in the entertainment business.”

  “You mean other than your parents?”

  “Yeah. Let’s see… We have several actors, two screenwriters, and a costume designer. Oh, and my godfather and godmother are studio executives. Our family dinners looked more like production meetings. I knew long before I entered school that I never wanted to end up in show business. It’s a crazy line of work, and you have to be a bit nuts to survive in it. Um, no offense intended,” Lauren added as if only now remembering who she was talking to.

  Grace smiled. “No offense taken. So what happened to make you end up as a publicist for the people in this crazy business?”

  “I guess I missed the California sunshine,” Lauren said.

  “That’s your answer? You missed the California sunshine, and that’s why you went into PR?”

  “Well, not directly,” Lauren said. “After four winters in Boston, I moved back here. I worked in the marketing and communications department of a nonprofit organization for three years.”

  Grace could see her in that line of work, maybe helping underprivileged children, homeless people, or animals in need. Somehow, she got the impression that Lauren was a person who’d throw herself into her job and
be good at it, no matter what it was. “What happened then?”

  “I did someone a favor,” Lauren said. “An old friend of my family, who is a talent agent, needed something written for one of his clients, so I helped out for a while.”

  “And you were hooked.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grace wished she could see into the kitchen area and watch Lauren’s face. She couldn’t quite figure out whether Lauren regretted going into PR or thought it was the best thing that could have happened to her career. Before she could open her mouth for another question, Lauren asked, “Ready for my award-worthy midnight snack?”

  As if in answer, Grace’s stomach rumbled again. “Beyond ready.”

  Lauren rounded the breakfast bar with a tray. “Mind if we eat here, or do you want to move to the dining table?”

  “Here is fine.” Grace craned her neck to see what Lauren had prepared.

  After pushing the stack of scripts out of the way, Lauren set the tray on the coffee table.

  Steam rose off four hot dogs. Other bowls held condiments such as onions, relish, and shredded cheese. Bottles of ketchup and mustard balanced at the edge of the tray.

  Grace’s mouth watered as she caught a whiff. “Oh, God. Do you know how long it’s been since I had one of those?”

  “Oh. I didn’t think… Is it okay?” Lauren asked.

  “I really shouldn’t…” Her mother would have a heart attack if she saw her eat junk food, especially this late in the day.

  Lauren pointed at the fridge. “If you’d rather have a salad, I can—”

  “No. This is fine.” Grace decided that she’d just spend an extra half hour on the elliptical trainer tomorrow and reached for one of the soft, white buns.

  Lauren settled on the recliner across from Grace and watched her pile condiments on her hot dog. During her career, she’d had lunch with many actresses, and most of them just picked at their salads instead of eating heartily.