Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  The stylist’s eyebrows shot practically to the roof of the RV. ‘Please! Dolce’ll just blacklist her if she doesn’t give something back,’ she said pityingly. ‘And she doesn’t want that to happen. None of the major labels are giving her stuff for free yet. Angelina Jolie she ain’t – she’s just another little starlet on the make.’

  The stylist was quite right: Milly was very much on the make. The afternoon appointment with Maitland Parks in the penthouse suite of the Charlotte Street Hotel was of great importance to her, and she was determined to create the best impression possible. Maitland Parks was barely in his thirties, but had already directed two very well-received arthouse films in the mumblecore genre – hyper-naturalistic, partly improvised movies about young adults, recently graduated from college, loafing around waiting aimlessly for their lives to start.

  Now, with backing from a major studio, he had the budget to step up to the big leagues, and was planning a film set in Portland, Oregon, dimly understood to be about a group of postgraduate students researching aspects of human behaviour while falling in and out of love with each other. The cast was to be a roster of young, beautiful actors in their early twenties, and there was already a big buzz around And When We Fall, the working title of the screenplay. Milly had been on the phone to her agent almost every day for the last few weeks, insisting that she get a chance to meet Maitland when he came to London for casting.

  He wasn’t doing anything as overt as conduct auditions; mumblecore was too laid-back and cool for that. No, he had taken the suite in the small, quirky Charlotte Street Hotel, a favourite of television and film people who wanted a boutique experience in Fitzrovia, and was engaging in a series of what he called ‘meeting-slash-encounters’ with a selected flurry of the latest British crop of actors. None of them knew for which part they were being considered, whether they’d be expected to put on an American accent, what, if anything, would be required of them; they all went in highly nervous, trying to give Maitland Parks exactly what he wanted without any idea of what that might be. It made them even more insecure than actors usually were, which was precisely what he intended.

  ‘Hey,’ he drawled as Milly came through the front door of the suite. ‘Milly, yeah?’

  He was sprawled on the big, brightly striped sofa placed underneath the gabled windows of the top-floor suite. The light streamed in behind him, giving him an excellent view of Milly but turning him into a skinny dark outline. It was a classic power play: he could see her, she could barely see him. But it was by no means the first time Milly had encountered something like this. Directors loved to throw pretty young actresses off-balance emotionally.

  Milly had already decided not to seem too bright and confident – the characters in Maitland Parks’s films were the opposite of those qualities – so she murmured softly: ‘Hi! Yes, I’m Milly,’ flashed a shy sweet smile, and looked for where she should sit down.

  ‘Yo,’ Maitland said, lifting a hand limply and flapping it at the matching sofa facing his, its pink, lime, burgundy and navy stripes clashing with the white pillows on which big coloured flowers were splashed. Presumably that was a deliberate design decision, but Milly thought that if you were hungover it would give you a shocking headache.

  ‘This place is like, really freaky,’ Maitland drawled, as Milly moved one of the pillows, sitting down and wedging it behind her back.

  ‘The colours don’t really match,’ she agreed.

  ‘Don’t they?’ Maitland sounded surprised; she could still not make out his face. ‘I actually meant the ceilings. They’re so low. And the walls all slant in. Which is weird. I feel like they’re trying to squash me in the night.’

  ‘It’s the top floor,’ Milly said carefully. ‘You know, with a gable roof.’

  They must have those in America, she thought doubtfully. Don’t they?

  ‘Yeah,’ Maitland said. ‘My assistant told me the penthouse had a gable roof when she booked me in. I guess I just didn’t know what it . . . meant.’

  He fell silent. Milly followed suit. This was how she always handled this kind of not-audition-just-a-meeting-slash-encounter; she tried to pick up the mood of the director or producer or casting director and to echo it. The whole point was to demonstrate that she could take direction. So she folded her hands demurely in her lap and sat quietly, her gaze directed to the surface of the shiny laminated black and white lace-print coffee table, on which was a large vase of flowers and a tray on which was set a bottle of water, an ice bucket and three glasses.

  ‘You want something?’ Maitland asked after a while, shifting on the sofa. Milly had researched him before today, of course, knew what he looked like, the archetypal skinny white indie boy with long bushy sideburns contrasting oddly with his cadaverous cheeks. He had a scrawny chest and long stick-like legs, his eyes bulging thyroidally behind the thick lenses of his 1970s-repro black-framed designer glasses.

  ‘Maybe some water. Shall I pour you a glass?’ Milly responded politely, lifting her eyes to his face, projecting the image of him she had seen photographed in magazines onto the dark outline in front of her.

  ‘Nah, I meant pills,’ Maitland corrected her laconically. ‘We got Adderall, Ritalin, Valium, Xanax, Oxy, Darvon, Ambien.’ He ticked the list off on his fingers. ‘Maybe other stuff too. You want some?’

  ‘Oh, um, sure!’ Milly said gamely, feeling that she was expected to say yes; she’d have had a drink or five with a director, she told herself, so this really wasn’t any different. ‘What do you think I should have?’

  ‘Man, I dunno,’ Maitland said, sounding genuinely taken aback by this. He sat up, leaning forward to look at her more closely. ‘You like uppers or downers?’

  I like champagne, actually, you American weirdo, Milly wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and said as sweetly as before: ‘A little bit of an upper, I suppose? I don’t want to pass out while we’re talking.’

  Not that you’re doing much talking, she added silently.

  ‘Oh, you could totally pass out if you wanna,’ Maitland Parks said casually. ‘No worries. Yo, Kumiko!’

  Maitland raised his voice a couple of decibels higher, from a drawl into an almost normal pitch: this seemed to be what passed for a shout with him. Milly started. She hadn’t realized they weren’t alone. Because from the bedroom of the suite emerged a slender, flower-like Japanese-featured woman, her body a pale stalk, her face the centre of the blossom, her hair an explosion of dark petals cascading down to her waist.

  Clearly this was Kumiko. As far as Milly could see, the wonderfully thick black mane was the only hair on Kumiko’s entire body. And Milly was very well placed to judge, because Kumiko was not only entirely naked, but so unself-conscious about her nudity that she came over to the coffee table and bent over it to place the bowl that she was carrying onto its surface. Her back was to Milly and her nether regions, because of her slimness, were almost entirely exposed as she bent forward.

  ‘So yeah, this is what we got,’ Maitland said, gesturing at the bowl, which was full of yellow plastic vials and paper packets of prescription drugs. ‘Help yourself. Kumi?’

  ‘I already did my Xanax,’ Kumiko said, smiling at him and Milly in turn, and curling up on the sofa next to him. ‘I’m so mellow.’

  ‘Cool!’

  Milly had been going to opt for an Adderall – she’d heard it was the prescription version of cocaine, fantastic for weight loss, and she was interested to try it – but the appearance of a naked Kumiko had changed her mind, made her decide that she might need to take the edge off. She reached out, pulled the bowl closer to her and selected a vial containing Valium, shaking two pills out into the palm of her hand and washing them down with some water from the jug.

  ‘You’re super lucky,’ Kumiko said languidly. ‘Mait hasn’t offered anyone else some of our stash yet, and he’s seen three people already today.’

  ‘Yay me!’ Milly said. ‘That makes me feel pretty.’

  She flashed a smile to show she w
as joking – you could never tell how much people from LA would pick up on British humour.

  ‘Funny,’ Maitland observed, which was, Milly had noticed over the years, the way that Hollywood types reacted to someone being comic; they didn’t laugh out loud, or even smile, simply acknowledged gravely that the attempt to amuse had been successful.

  ‘You are pretty,’ Kumiko said, crossing her legs and giving Milly a very explicit flash in the process. ‘I love your make-up too. It’s so dramatic.’

  ‘I did a shoot for the Telegraph magazine this morning,’ Milly explained.

  ‘Yeah, your agent told me,’ Maitland said.

  He fell silent after that, staring at Milly, and Kumiko did too. If Milly hadn’t been an actress, she would have been extremely uncomfortable, but Milly was both an actress and a raving egotist who put herself squarely at the centre of the universe, and there was nothing that made her happier than a film director who wanted to sit and look at her. His naked girlfriend, or whatever she was, didn’t bother Milly in the slightest. She was fine with nudity, knew that Maitland Parks’s previous films had involved it, and was quite prepared to strip on screen. Or off it, if necessary.

  ‘Kumiko’s not an actress,’ Maitland said after a long while. ‘She’s the embodiment of the spirit of And When We Fall.’

  The only possible response to this was ‘Oh, that’s really cool,’ and that was exactly what Milly said, widening her baby-blue eyes and tilting her head in the classic tell-me-more pose.

  ‘I’m the total freedom that the characters are trying to reach,’ Kumiko added languidly. ‘You have to let yourself go – fall – to get there.’

  Milly nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘That’s really interesting,’ she said. She had noticed that there was no screenplay anywhere that she could see, not on the coffee table, the desk, nor on the deliberately not-matching chairs scattered around the large living room. Turning her head a little, she tried to glimpse the bedroom through the open door, acres of cream carpet leading to a wide gilt-framed bed with a mirrored headboard and carved posts at each corner topped by large gold finials, a padded backless bench at its foot. She couldn’t spot a script there either.

  ‘You’re wondering about a screenplay, right?’ Maitland said with impressive penetration. ‘I don’t work like that, showing actors a script. I’m sort of the new Woody Allen.’

  ‘Only I’m not his adopted daughter,’ Kumiko observed, which made Milly stifle a laugh and say gravely: ‘Funny,’ instead.

  ‘Woody sends his actors their scenes the night before they’re going to be shot,’ Maitland informed Milly. ‘And he tells them they can change any of the lines if they want, to get it into their voice. Then he collects the sides the next day. I mean, not him personally, of course. A runner does it.’

  ‘Do they know the story?’ Milly asked, thinking that she could risk a question.

  ‘Barely ever,’ Maitland said, relaxing back in the sofa. ‘Just their own interactions and their characters. It’s deeply cool.’

  Yeah, for him and for you, Milly thought. Not so much for the actors, I bet. It sounds like a total nightmare.

  ‘Wow, how fascinating. I’d so enjoy working that way. What an adventure,’ she said with the utmost sincerity: no one could have told what she was really thinking.

  ‘I work in a very improvisational style,’ Maitland said, to which Milly nodded earnestly. This was good, this was very good; he was talking about his process, making her sound as if she might be involved in it eventually . . .

  ‘Can you take your clothes off now?’ Kumiko asked.

  Milly had been half-expecting this, but she’d thought the request would come from Maitland rather than Kumiko. She looked swiftly at Kumiko and then back at Maitland, judging the mood of the meeting; she was able to make out some of Maitland’s features now, her eyes having acclimatized somewhat to the shadow in which he was sitting, and as far as she could tell he was looking at her with a very interested expression. Kumiko was clearly speaking for him.

  ‘Sure!’ Milly said brightly, bent down and started to unfasten her suede high-heeled Miu Miu stacked sandals. Kumiko and Maitland watched her intently as she undressed, and, as before, she relished the attention. She knew she was thin enough even for Hollywood’s demanding tastes: she watched what she ate but didn’t need to starve herself, was lucky enough to be naturally skinny, which meant that she didn’t have the telltale signs of an eating disorder which betrayed many actresses. No bulimic points to her jaw from repeated throwing up, no dangerous hollows on her body where the flesh had been starved away.

  And she was young enough to wear her thinness very well. In about fifteen years’ time, Milly would need to choose between her face and her bottom, as the French said; she would need to eat more or look scrawny. But now, she was a UK size four, perfectly fitting into designers’ sample sizes, as Victoria Glossop had already noticed, and Milly knew, as she stood up in the space between the coffee table and the sofa and reached back to unzip her pretty floral Whistles dress, arching her back so that the points of her little-girl breasts were even more visible, that neither Maitland nor Kumiko, would have any criticisms at all of what they were about to see.

  She let the dress puddle to the floor and stood, hands by her sides, presenting herself. This, too, was part of the job, taking your clothes off in hotel rooms in front of directors, and really, hotel rooms were the nicest place for it, as far as Milly was concerned. You had to do it in hired rehearsal rooms, in casting directors’ offices, in much starker and less upholstered and welcoming environments than this. She’d much rather drop her dress on a cream carpet, stand in her expensive, lacy Myla matching underwear set and let herself be admired by people in a penthouse suite at the Charlotte Street Hotel.

  The underwear was truly spectacular, a pale pink set called Delena, mesh and geometrically patterned French lace with rose-gold fittings. The bra plunged deeply; it would have given Milly cleavage if she had anything to cleave. The skimpy thong had a low-rise cut, showing off almost all of her flat stomach, and it had an extra, decorative strap of lace which looked designed for someone to hook their finger through and pull the wearer towards them. Sensing from the quality of the attention radiating from the other sofa that she could spin this out a little, Milly turned slowly, rotating a hundred and eighty degrees, giving them a good look at the way the gusset of the thong slid between her small white buttocks, the material scrunching together as it covered her folds, at the criss-crossing straps at the damp crease at the top of her bottom, also offering an opportunity for someone to slide their finger beneath them, feeling the skin below, pulling the thong slowly down . . .

  She unfastened the bra first, dropping it to the sofa, before she hooked her thumbs into the lace straps of the thong and started to ease it over the almost infinitesimal curve of her hips. She didn’t wiggle or make any movement to sexualize what she was doing, to make it into a striptease. If you set aside Kumiko’s nudity, there was nothing overtly sexual about her and Maitland’s bearing, and Milly sensed that any bump and grind would be a complete turn-off for him, at least.

  The thong fell to the ground, and she bent down to pick it up, giving them the same view that Kumiko had given her earlier that afternoon. When Milly stood up, she was about to place the thong on top of the bra – it had cost fifty-five pounds, she definitely wasn’t going to leave it on the floor – but Maitland finally spoke.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ he said, reaching out his hand, and Milly leant across the coffee table to place it in his palm. He unfolded the delicate scrap of lace, took the straps and hooked it across his ears, placing the gusset over his nostrils. His black-framed glasses gleamed above them like a doctor wearing a surgical mask; since he was now inhaling entirely through his nose, the sound of his breathing was louder in the room, exaggerated, as if it were an oxygen mask hooked up to a tank.

  Kumiko seemed unfazed by it – but then it doesn’t seem like anything fazes her, Milly though
t. I wonder if I can ask them to put on some music? Maitland sounds asthmatic now – it’s really off-putting . . .

  Kumiko rose, smiling at Milly, extending her hand to her. Milly had known this was coming, in some variation, for a while now; she smiled back as she took Kumiko’s hand and followed her through into the bedroom, Maitland tailing them closely, huffing and puffing like a heavy breather in the middle of a phone stalking session. Which isn’t that far from the truth, Milly thought, very relieved to see that he was taking a seat in one of the upholstered armchairs, pulled over awkwardly close to the bed, clearly in anticipation of any bedroom encounters, and that Kumiko was guiding Milly onto the mattress. They were performing for Maitland; he wasn’t going to be involved in the action. Or so she hoped.

  This was, without a doubt, how Milly would have preferred the audition to take place – with Kumiko alone. Because by now it definitely was an audition. Peter Mandelson had once declared himself to be ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’, and Milly Gamble was intensely relaxed about whatever she had to do to get a coveted part that would put her on the Hollywood radar. Given a choice, however, Milly would definitely have chosen Kumiko over Maitland, even before he’d masked himself up with her thong – I hope I get that back, it’s part of the set – and started breathing like an emphysema sufferer.

  Light poured in through the huge windows set into the slanting gable roof; hopefully the clearly illuminated spectacle of Kumiko pushing Milly gently back to the pillows and spreading her legs was distracting enough to help Maitland ignore the sensation that the angled walls were closing in on him. Milly arched back picturesquely, stretching her arms behind her, raising her waist so she looked even slimmer, wishing there was something to grab onto behind her, as stretching out into an extension was extremely flattering. But the headboard was a smooth sheet of mirror set into the gilded wood, and she had to content herself with arching more, head back, so she could glimpse her reflection as Kumiko knelt down, bent her lips to Milly’s lower ones, spread them apart with very practised fingers, and started to put on a show for Maitland.