Shadow of the Dolls

by Jacqueline Susann

  “Can you take me to Santa Monica this time? Alice says I have to go to Santa Monica.”

  Anne watched Jenn’s shoulders fall.

  “Oh,” Jenn was saying. “That sounds not so great. But I could bring books and stuff, they give us tons of homework, and you could rent me videos.… I wouldn’t be bored.… But, Daddy … it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.” She handed the phone to Anne. “He doesn’t want me to come visit,” she said. “He doesn’t want me around.”

  Anne took the phone back. “It sounds like you handled that very well.”

  “Do you have to be such a bitch,” he said.

  “It’s a good thing Jenn is standing right here, because otherwise I’d be able to say exactly what I’m thinking.”

  “You don’t have to say it, I can guess. Look, there must be some way around this.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Lyon. You have two hours to figure this out. Two hours.”

  But it was Gretchen who figured it out. She came home from an early shift to find Jenn crying in the bathroom and Anne lying on the couch, rubbing her temples.

  “What if I went to California, too?” she said. “We could do girl stuff during the day, and then at night you and your father could hang out.”

  “Could we go to Santa Monica?”

  “Sure. And can we go to Disneyland?” Gretchen asked.

  “Sure! Mom, what do you think?”

  “Mom is thinking that it would be very nice to have the house to herself for a week,” Anne said. She was also thinking of how much the last-minute plane fare and the rental car would cost and how much she would enjoy asking Lyon to pay for it. “Mom is thinking this is one wonderful plan.”

  We both have to order dessert,” Neely was saying. “And not sorbet or fruit tarts, either. Real desserts. A zillion calories. With whipped cream. This is a special occasion.”

  It was the night after Jenn and Gretchen had flown out to California, and they were celebrating their good news: Anne’s new job, and the shooting of the Helen Lawson picture, which would at long last start next month.

  “Why not,” Anne said. “I can’t remember the last time I had dessert.”

  “And let’s get some more wine. This bottle is almost empty,” Neely said. It was eight o’clock in the theater district, and the restaurant had cleared out. “What the hell, let’s get some champagne. You come here much?” she asked.

  “I don’t really go anywhere much,” Anne said. She still wasn’t dating. Every three or four months, Patrick Weston called her. They would meet at a bar near his apartment, have a few drinks, and fall into bed.

  “Each time I think, That was nice, but that’s it, I’ll never see him again, and then a few months later he calls, and I think, Why not? There isn’t anything else going on in my life.” Anne took a sip of the champagne. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

  “You don’t talk about this stuff with Stella?”

  “My God, Stella is the last person I’d want to know about this.”

  “So who do you talk to, then?”

  “No one, really,” Anne said. “Curtis is thumbs-down on this kind of thing.”

  “I’m honored, then,” Neely said. “I guess you figure you can tell me because whatever you do, I’ve done a thousand times worse.” She smiled. “That’s what I never got about the Catholics. Who would want to confess to a priest? Now if you put a hooker behind that grate, I’d be in there every week and I wouldn’t hold anything back.”

  Anne laughed. “There’s an idea.”

  “So,” Neely said. “Does this guy have potential? Maybe you should try going out on a real date or something.”

  “I don’t think so. The first hour, before the alcohol kicks in, we hardly know what to say to each other. We really don’t have a single thing in common.”

  “Except in the kip.”

  “Except in the kip. I can’t believe I said that!” said Anne.

  “Don’t worry, your tongue won’t fall out. So, it is what it is. Everyone could use a fuck buddy. Man, you know what I really want right now? I want a cigarette. I haven’t had a cigarette in years and years. You want one? I’m gonna get some smokes from the waiter.”

  “What about your voice?”

  “One cigarette. I’m feeling naughty.”

  “Okay, one cigarette,” Anne said. It was so easy, talking to Neely. Anne felt that she could say anything in the world, and Neely would never disapprove.

  They inhaled their Marlboro Lights, Neely blowing perfect smoke rings.

  “Listen, when you talk to Jenn, tell her they can use my pool. Lyon’s pool is about as big as a bathtub. I’ll call the boys and let them know.”

  “I can’t believe they’re already eighteen.” Judd would be hearing from colleges soon; Neely was confident he would get in everywhere he applied—Stanford, Princeton, MIT. Dylan had lousy test scores and was taking the year off before applying again.

  “He doesn’t know what he wants to do,” Neely said. “And when I was eighteen, I already had a career and a husband.” She turned to the side. “So, you haven’t noticed anything different about me?”

  “Your hair is different?” Anne offered. Neely had grown her hair down to her shoulders and colored it strawberry blond.

  “My hair is always different. You don’t notice anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “I had a little work done a couple of months ago.” She stroked her jawline. “They kinda pulled all this up.”

  “But you’re only thirty-six!”

  “It’s my genes, what can I do. You should have seen my mother. You can’t really tell, can you. My plastic surgeon is a genius. If you’re ever looking.”

  “Oh, I could never,” Anne said.

  “Everyone does it, Anne.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I just can’t imagine it for myself, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, with your genes, you’re lucky, you probably won’t need anything done for another ten years.”

  “In ten years I’ll only be forty-seven. Did it—did it hurt very much?”

  “It hurts like you wouldn’t believe. They give you tons of Percocet, but all that does is take the edge off. Heroin, they should give you heroin! And you can’t imagine how disgusting it is, afterward. The oozing! I hired a nurse and checked into a hotel for three weeks. Having a kid is nothing compared to getting your face done.”

  The waiter arrived with the check.

  “Listen, Anne, I want to ask you a serious question, and I want an honest answer. Are we friends again?”

  “Of course we’re friends again.”

  “No, I know, we get together a few times a year, talk about men, talk about our kids, blah blah blah, have some laughs. But I’d like us to really be friends again. I miss you. Everyone else, they see me as”—she made little quotation marks with her fingers—“ ‘Neely O’Hara.’ But with you I’m just Neely.”

  Anne wished she had another cigarette. “So much has happened to us, Neely. Not all of it good.”

  “Well, we’re older and wiser, right?”

  “I’m older, but I don’t really feel any wiser,” said Anne. She was thinking about Lyon, about Neely and Lyon. She had not forgotten what it was like, to be sitting alone at midnight, knowing your husband was in bed with your best friend. She knew Neely was thinking about it, too.

  “That was so long ago, Anne.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.” She was thinking about her job, her fabulous new job, which never would have happened without Neely, and she knew Neely was thinking about that, too.

  Neely laid down her plastic. “We’re even now, okay? Are we even?”

  “We’re even,” said Anne.

  “And anyway, we’re always gonna be friends, whether you like it or not. Because the only people who ever really know you are the people who knew you when you were on the way up. You’re always gonna know me better than anyone else, and vice versa, whether we like it or not.”<
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  “To ‘whether we like it or not,’ ” said Anne, lifting her half-empty glass of champagne.

  “To ‘whether we like it or not.’ ” And now when Neely smiled, Anne could see the difference, she could guess at where the scars were, she knew what the knife had taken and what it had left behind.

  Jenn sat by the side of Neely’s pool, smoking a cigarette. Gretchen was lying on a chaise longue, reading a fashion magazine. Dylan was taking photographs with the new thousand-dollar camera his father had bought for him. Ted had insisted that he do something constructive on his year off, so Dylan had signed up for photography classes.

  “If my mother ever sees a photograph of me smoking, I’ll have to kill you,” Jenn said.

  “She won’t see these. Stop smiling. It’s sexier if you don’t smile.”

  Jenn lifted her chin and looked off to the side.

  “Hey, that’s pretty good,” Dylan said.

  “I’m practicing to be a model. Here, I’ll show you.” She arched her back over the side of the chair and let her long hair fall to the ground.

  “This is going to be so cool,” Dylan said.

  “At home I practice in the mirror,” Jenn said. She spent hours at it, after school and before Anne came home, flipping through magazines and copying the models’ poses.

  “You have the body for it,” said Dylan.

  She hoped she wasn’t blushing. “I do?”

  “Yeah. Long legs, long neck, no tits.”

  Just wait, I’m only thirteen, she wanted to say. It made her crazy that Dylan still treated her like a little girl. Five years wasn’t such a big age difference, or at least it wouldn’t be such a big difference when they were both a little older. Lyon was almost ten years older than Anne, and no one thought anything of it. Someday, someday.

  Jenn had it all worked out. She rehearsed the scenarios at night, before she fell asleep. She would become a famous model, and Dylan would become a famous fashion photographer, and they would meet in Paris during the spring shows (Jenn at eighteen, Dylan at twenty-three) and fall in love, right in front of the Eiffel Tower. Or maybe they’d be in Miami, shooting on the beach while salsa music played in the background. Or in New York, they would run into each other at some hip nightclub. Jenn had never been to a nightclub, but Alice had snuck into a few with her older sister and described them in detail to Jenn, right down to the mirrors in the bathrooms and the color of the tiles over the bar. Jenn and Gretchen had spent the last three days hanging out with Dylan and Judd at Neely’s house, and Jenn didn’t want to go home ever again.

  “Your turn,” Dylan said to Gretchen.

  She lifted the magazine over her face. “No way! I hate having my picture taken!” She hated her crooked grin, her nose that photographed even wider than it already was, the little acne scars that looked even bigger in photographs.

  But Dylan kept clicking away. “Sit up straight,” he said. “Cross your legs at the ankle.”

  She kept her face hidden behind the magazine and followed his instructions, moving her legs to the left and then the right, arching her back, twisting her torso into profile. She could tell where he was from the clicks of the camera.

  “Hey,” she said, realizing he had just taken half a dozen close-ups of her cleavage, “hey, that’s enough of that, mister.”

  “You have a great body,” he said. “You should show it off more.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gretchen said. “You’re an evil thing.”

  “I’m getting some more iced tea. Does anyone want iced tea?” Jenn called over.

  “No thanks,” Gretchen and Dylan said in unison.

  Jenn could hear them laughing from the kitchen. She wished Gretchen would go away, far away, or at least to Disneyland. When she got back to the pool, Dylan was taking pictures of Gretchen’s feet.

  “What are you guys doing tonight?” he asked.

  “Going out to dinner with my father,” Jenn said.

  “Nothing,” Gretchen said.

  “Wanna come out with me and my friends? We’re checking out a new club.”

  “I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “Maybe.”

  “Can I come, too?” Jenn asked.

  “I thought you were going out to dinner,” Dylan said. “Anyway, you’re too young, you won’t get in, you have to be twenty-one.”

  “But you’re not twenty-one!”

  “Yeah, well, they know me.”

  “I can pass for twenty-one. My friend Alice and I go to clubs all the time in New York. We get dressed up and put on makeup and no one ever asks us for ID.”

  “And what does your mother say about that,” he asked.

  “I wait till she goes to sleep, and then I sneak out,” Jenn said. Alice lived in a large apartment on Park Avenue, a series of rooms strung along a hallway, so it was easy for her to fool her parents. “It’s easy,” Jenn said.

  “I’ll think about it,” Dylan said.

  Lyon took Jenn to a restaurant in Brentwood, and when they got back from dinner Gretchen was gone.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird, Gretchen going out with a bunch of kids?” Jenn asked her father.

  “What’s the age difference—four years? That really isn’t so much,” Lyon said.

  “Dylan isn’t even old enough to drink,” Jenn said. “If they got in trouble, Gretchen could be arrested.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You shouldn’t let them go out,” Jenn said.

  “She’s an adult, she can take care of herself,” Lyon said. “I’m certainly not going to spend my time worrying about Neely’s children. Any more than Neely worries herself.” He wished Jenn weren’t spending so much time at Neely’s house. At first he hadn’t minded—they had a lovely pool, and he didn’t have to be anxious about Jenn and Gretchen driving around a strange city with plenty of dangerous neighborhoods. But Jenn just came home grouchier every day. It was painful to watch her moon after Dylan, who Lyon guessed was encouraging this little crush. And once he thought he smelled pot on Gretchen’s clothes. Who knew what went on in that house, two unsupervised eighteen-year-old boys with too much money and too much time on their hands. Lyon remembered what he had been like at eighteen: the last person anyone would want one’s thirteen-year-old daughter to spend time around.

  Jenn got into her pajamas and they watched a Steve Martin video until midnight. Lyon dozed off and began to snore.

  “Daaaad,” she said, poking him. “Time to go to bed.”

  She got into bed and waited half an hour, until she was sure he would be fast asleep. Gretchen still wasn’t home. The rental car was in the driveway, so Jenn guessed they had taken Dylan’s car.

  She put on a pair of jeans and running shoes and pulled a sweatshirt over her pajama top. She made a pile of pillows under the covers, just the way Alice had described to her, and tiptoed down the stairs.

  On the way to Neely’s house she passed a woman walking a poodle, but other than that the streets were empty. The driveway was full of cars, and the lights were on in Judd’s room. The rest of the house was dark.

  There were at least a dozen people around the pool, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She didn’t recognize anyone.

  “Hey, who are you?” someone asked.

  “Jennifer Burke.”

  “Are you a friend of Judd’s or Dylan’s?” someone else said.

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Really,” said a girl in a very short knit dress. “Well, that’s a new one. Have a beer.”

  Jenn didn’t like the taste of beer, but she took one anyway. They were playing reggae on a boom box and gossiping about people she didn’t know. No one seemed to expect her to talk. When they passed the pot around, she shook her head.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t like dope?” the girl asked.

  Jenn had never smoked dope. “Actually, I’m allergic.”

  “Oh really? I never heard of that.”

  “Yes, it’s very rare. But I am aller
gic. If I had even one puff, I’d stop breathing and you’d have to take me to the hospital. I’ll have another beer, though.” The second beer tasted better.

  “Let’s go swimming,” one of the girls said. She pulled off her clothes and jumped into the pool. Her breasts were enormous, and white against her tan body.

  “You’re staring at her tits,” one of the boys said to Jenn.

  “I am not!” Jenn said.

  “You are too. So is everyone. Don’t worry, she loves it. She’s always the first one to take her clothes off.” He started to unzip his jeans.

  “I have to go pee now,” Jenn said. She went to the bathroom off the kitchen, but the door was locked.

  “Nobody’s home!” came a voice from behind the bathroom door.

  “We don’t want any!” came another voice.

  “Goddamn those Jehovah’s Witnesses!”

  Jenn went upstairs. Judd was wearing headphones and playing a computer game.

  “Hey Jenn, didn’t know you were here. Wanna play?” he asked.

  “I’ll just watch,” she said.

  “You weren’t hanging out with those cretins downstairs, I hope.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Ugh,” Judd said. “I can’t wait to go to college. This town sucks. Is that a beer in your hand?”

  “I just took a sip,” she said.

  Jenn still couldn’t figure out what made one identical twin so attractive and the other one so … so just plain normal. They had the same face, the same thick, dark eyebrows, the same gray eyes. Judd was paler and wore his hair short; Dylan was tan, and his hair reached the top of his collar. But other than that, they looked exactly the same. Except they were completely different.

  Judd had been in her fantasies, too. Sometimes he was the best man at their wedding, a yellow rose tucked into the lapel of his fine gray suit. Sometimes he was sitting with Jenn by the side of a hospital bed, waiting for Dylan to come out of a coma after his plane crashed, the plane he had chartered so he could get home in time to accompany Jenn to the Academy Awards. Sometimes Judd was dying from some rare incurable disease, and Jenn was comforting Dylan, holding him in her arms, now she was all he had left in the world.

  “You have a computer at home?” Judd asked.

  “Sure, everyone has a computer,” Jenn said.