Alison, of course, had no way of knowing that this shit was the backdrop to her reasonable but impertinent questions about why they might be reshooting such an idiotic little scene for the third time.
So when Lars stormed off the set, she was left exhausted and appalled. Of course everyone knew that they were sleeping together, so there was no way to interpret Lars’s explosive reaction as anything other than a fed-up lover whose fuse had finally been lit. And while everyone liked Alison, Lars was the director. She was doing a great job but everyone also knew that she wouldn’t even have this part if Lars hadn’t handed it to her. Within seconds the delicate balance of collegial affection which had kept the set afloat evaporated. Ronnie, the first AD, called out, efficiently, “Everyone take five!” and scurried after Lars. The sound guy scurried forward, to carefully disconnect her mic and her wire. Everyone else scurried away.
The whole thing was so stupid, but there was something truly frightening about how quickly everyone had evaporated, as if cued by some offstage god in a paranoid nightmare. Bewildered, Alison stood alone on the set for just long enough to realize they weren’t kidding, and then she went back to her chair, guessing without guidance that maybe she should stick close to the set while Ronnie and Norbert and Lars worked out what to do next, in consultation, of course, with the studio. But the small island of slingback chairs which had been placed near the set for the actors to lounge in was also deserted. None of the few crew members who lingered nearby would meet her glance. She considered taking her chair and waiting, like a good girl, for everyone to return, but her heart choked her. She stood up, confused and impatient. When they wanted her back on the set, they could just come and ask.
The closest path back to her two-banger was through the soundstage. The set of the mocked-up apartment where she was supposed to be putting on lipstick was tucked back in the far corner; she cut through it, and through the Mexican bar where she waited tables and where the black ops regularly got drunk, before turning to the loading dock, which opened out onto a hard, featureless concrete pathway. For once there was no twenty-two-year-old production assistant walking ahead of her while reporting her location to someone else on a walkie-talkie. She turned a corner and found herself face-to-face with a small army of union carpenters who were hauling a magnificent Mayan temple out to another loading dock, where it would be picked up and shipped out to the nearby desert hills which were being transformed into yet another jungle set. Seeing the deconstructed pieces of the set being placed so neatly on the silent concrete gave Alison a sudden rush of panic. I like this job, she thought. I really like this job.
She walked around another corner, wishing desperately that there was someone whom she could call. Her mother was no good; she never lost her tone of mild judgment whenever Alison even inched toward telling her what her life looked like. Megan was lost in her children, and Jeff—the one brother who had, long ago, in their youth, almost understood her—she hadn’t talked to for almost a year because he was off on another grant somewhere, maybe in Hong Kong. She was tired of talking to Ryan, who would just tell her to go suck it all up, that she was going to be a star but she wasn’t yet and she owed everyone an apology. She wondered what the guys would say if she showed up at whatever trailer they were hanging out in. At least they liked her. They seemed to like her. They enjoyed working together. Alison took a few steps toward the line of closed trailers and remembered that none of them were called to the set today; when they rescheduled this third reshoot they gave everyone else the afternoon off. The alleyway with its line of trailers was empty, still and ruthless in the afternoon sun.
She knew that something dreadful had just happened to her, but she honestly couldn’t tell what. Having been skeptical for so long about the different steps she was required to take up the path to where everyone wanted her to go, she finally had allowed herself to relax into the delights of all the delightful things which were being showered upon her. Pretty clothes, flirty boys, nice hotel rooms, terrific sushi—seriously, the sushi in Los Angeles was so good it temporarily made up for the sunlight and the loneliness. But the whisper of fear was back upon her; she remembered in the moment poor Pinocchio, hanging out with the wrong crowd, allowing them to drag him to that terrifying amusement park where they all turned into donkeys. She wondered briefly if she might be sprouting a tail.
The problem with all this light and heat, she thought, is there’s no place to hide. Maybe that was why people just flattened out, finally, it was less risky to just let go of whoever it was inside you that made you a person. There was no time for that stuff out here anyway. You had to go to the gym, to sit in the sun, to make an appearance at restaurants where people went to see and be seen. She hadn’t started hanging out in clubs yet but she knew that was next on the agenda; Ryan told her definitively that she was going to have to “come out” from Lars’s “shadow” and claim a place in a hipper, more current crowd. After practically throwing her into Lars’s bed himself, Ryan was ready to move on; Lars Guttfriend, one of the biggest action directors in the business, was yesterday’s news. People weren’t people out here, they were moves on a chessboard in a town where no one knew how to play chess.
What her next move was, she had no idea. She turned a corner, lost, and looked around.
She looked pretty. Ridiculous, but pretty. They had her all dolled up as a sort of femme fatale, but with a modern twist, low-slung khaki trousers, one of those tacky wife-beater undershirts, a little bit of belly button showing, just in case the boys weren’t being driven crazy enough by the rest of it. She looked mad, fed up, almost like she was about to start crying. There was a charming dissonance to it all.
“Hey, movie star,” he called.
Alison raised her hand to shade her eyes in that endless sun. He wondered for a moment why she wasn’t wearing sunglasses, when she smiled.
“Man, they’ll let anyone on these lots,” she observed. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
It was more auspicious than their last meeting, at least you could say that. “I’m stringing for Entertainment Weekly,” Seth informed her.
“Meaning?”
“You’re in Entertainment Weekly often enough, you don’t know what that means?”
“I don’t know what ‘stringing’ means, it sounds like a complicated Ivy League insider code word.”
“It means sucking up.”
“Just Hollywood then.”
“I have a friend in the PR department here, I’m trying to get them to throw me a bone,” he admitted.
“What happened to the Times?”
“Newspapers are a dying breed.”
“You got fired,” she guessed.
“I didn’t want to work there anyway.” This got him the flash of a grin, not a full laugh. He couldn’t quite tell if she was upset or her makeup was askew. Or maybe it was the hair. It made her seem frail. The few times they had met, he had found her to be many things, but “frail” was never one of them.
“What are you doing, wandering the lot alone, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he noted, glancing about. “Where are your minders? Where’s the entourage?”
“I escaped while they weren’t looking.”
“Escaped what?”
“Oh, do you think I’m going to answer that? You’re a reporter.”
“That is using the term very loosely.” Okay, that made her laugh. For a moment, her whole being came into focus and then evaporated. She shot a look over her shoulder, the swift paranoid glance of someone under siege.
“What’s with your hair?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I just like your normal color.”
He hadn’t meant it to wound her; he had hoped that it would make her laugh again. But she reacted strangely. She turned and looked behind her, making sure that nobody had heard that—at least, that’s what he thought she was doing—until a mere moment later, when she reached up and yanked at the black mop on her head, and revealed that undernea
th there was another head of hair.
“It’s a wig,” she announced. “They wigged me.”
He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t either, for a moment. Then, in a simple unself-conscious moment of exhaustion, her hand fell to her side, her fingers loosened, and the wig dropped.
“Can we get out of here?” she asked. “I mean, do you have a car, or anything?”
“Of course I have a car, it’s LA,” he told her. “Do you need a ride?”
“A ride would be great.”
The wig lay forgotten at her feet.
She never specified where she wanted a ride to, but they ended up at Venice Beach, where they sat on a bench and watched the crazies and the Rollerbladers. Alison took off her shoes and ran to wade in the surf, which was a worry, as the East Coaster in him was certain the water was full of pesticides and jellyfish. But she was having so much fun he couldn’t bring himself to mention either pesticides or jellyfish, although he didn’t go in himself. He just watched. She was gorgeous.
Seth knew he was being stupid. She wasn’t a person anymore; she was a story, and a big one. He could sell this as Roman Holiday for starlets, complete with surreptitious candids taken with his iPhone, but it would create real problems for her if he did. Would it be worth it? He watched her, alert, as she rolled up her khakis and splashed around with the unthinking abandon of someone who had grown up without an ocean nearby. That’s a costume, he remembered. She’s still wearing her costume.
Alison was drenched by the time he insisted she get out of that filthy water, so he bought her a Venice Beach sweatshirt, and a pair of sweatpants too. As she ripped off her wet clothes and changed in the backseat of his rental car, he willed himself not to watch in the rearview mirror. That made her laugh too. “It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked,” she reminded him. But to him it felt as if while they had been moving forward in time, he had somehow slipped backward into a more innocent past. Maybe it was her; she was in all seriousness kind of acting like a twelve-year-old. She climbed over the seat in her ridiculous sweats and dropped into the seat beside him, looking around with an unguarded curiosity. “There presumably is someplace to get a drink around here,” she announced.
There were many places to get drinks three blocks from Venice Beach, but she rejected them all (“sleazy,” “gay,” “yuppie bullshit”) and in the end they bought a bottle of vodka and parked in a turnaround up on Mulholland, where they could look at the lights in the valley and get drunk without anyone bothering them.
“So is that the demimonde?” she asked, tipping the half-empty bottle toward the city flung beneath them. The night sky was clear, and the sun having just set, the mountains hovered in a silent, crisp blue shadow. The lines of light spilling toward them across the miles of uninterrupted plain were eerie and beautiful.
“That’s the valley,” he answered. “I would have to say, definitively, that the valley is not the demimonde.”
“Why not?”
“Too many poor people.”
“There are plenty of losers with no cash in the demimonde.”
“Not in my demimonde.”
“Your demimonde?”
“Are you kidding? I’m an entertainment reporter. The demimonde is my turf,” he informed her.
“The demimonde is my turf,” she reminded him.
“Well, then you know I’m right. The valley is not the turf for the demimonde. The demimonde is up here in the hills, in the hidden homes of movie stars such as yourself.”
“You know, it’s so weird. I would have thought that you had to want to be a movie star, to be a movie star. All those people out there trying desperately to be movie stars. Like, working at it. And with me I’m just hanging around one day and someone says, ‘Here, put on this wig.’”
“I have a feeling it was a little more complicated than that.”
“Not all that much.”
She took another hit off the vodka bottle with just enough exhaustion to lead him to suspect she was lying. “The wig isn’t what’s made you a movie star.”
“I’m not so sure it isn’t the wig,” she said. “Or the wig and the dresses. Honestly, the acting isn’t anywhere near as difficult. You spend hours in hair and makeup, and wardrobe, you spend years in wardrobe, and then like sixty people change their mind about your costume and your hair, even the head of the fucking studio is obsessing on what I wear, it just takes forever. And then I get to the set, and the scenes are really not all that—you know, half the time, I’m just running from one set of rocks to another, yelling, ‘Come on!’ Occasionally I get to throw a grenade. I was doing more acting on that terrible television show.”
“You have good scenes in this.” She looked at him, surprised. “I have a friend in the Xerox department. She slipped me the script.”
“A friend in the Xerox department. That’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.”
“It’s not a euphemism; they have Xerox departments, and I have friends there. And none of them are in the demimonde, let me reassure you. There are no Xerox departments in the demimonde.”
“There are no actresses there either, let me assure you.”
“No, the actresses are all in the theater, starving.” He knew plenty of them, and they were no fun. OCD losers who lived in a constant state of rage because they couldn’t get cast in anything, and when they did get cast the plays were so bad no one came to see them. Plus they got paid next to nothing. Then they proceeded to lord their Commitment to Art over any actor out there who did manage to land a money gig. Like Alison. He was sure they all hated her. Certainly her old friend Lisa had nothing good to say about her.
“You ever hear from Lisa?” Alison asked, as if she were reading his mind.
“Now and then.”
“She won’t talk to me. She’s convinced I stole you from her.”
“That’s not what she thinks.”
“Oh ho.” Alison glanced over at him. “What does she think?”
“She thinks that the demimonde would be a fun place to live, and she’s jealous that you get to live there, and she doesn’t.”
“So how’d you end up here?” she asked. He’d asked himself that question, on plenty of drunken nights. How was it that no amount of money, looks, talent, pedigree, education could extricate him from this petty, demeaning, and meaningless livelihood; why couldn’t he shake himself out of it, write that novel, run off to Africa to report about child soldiers, research a book on China’s stunning takeover of global capitalism? Why couldn’t he do that? He himself had taken every step down the path to the nihilistic cultural abyss which was entertainment reporting—there was no choice that he hadn’t made with full knowledge of where it was leading. But there had been some whispered promise along the way, this is how you get to where you’re going, this isn’t the destination, this is power, you need to build up your power, make a name for yourself, get to know people, this is how writers rise.
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you,” he reminded her.
“Is this an interview?”
“You’re lucky it’s not. You could get in big trouble for saying shit like this to a reporter. You know not to do that, right?”
“Lancelot, where have you been all my life?”
“Hey, listen, I’m serious.” She arched her eyebrow in surprise. For all her flirty irony, she really was, somehow, a total innocent. “You need to call somebody, tell them where you are.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a commodity, you’re like a valuable thing to them. You can’t just run off, it freaks them out.”
“They should be freaked out. They treat me pretty shitty, if you want to know the truth.”
“They treat everybody shitty. You have to take it until you have enough power to treat them shitty.”
“Why can’t they just treat me well, and then when I have power, I won’t want to treat them shitty?”
“Because that’s not the way it works. And besid
es which, they don’t think they’re treating you shitty. They put you in a movie and they’re making you a big star, they think that’s pretty nice of them.”
“But they don’t talk to me like I’m a human being!”
“You’re not a human being.”
“I am too.”
“Well, you have to try and forget that for now.”
“That’s right, you had to apologize to me because you were so mean to me on the red carpet.”
“I was not mean to you. But I did have to apologize and get it out into the Twittersphere that I wasn’t sexually harassing you. Because if I didn’t it would have wrecked my career.”
“Such as it is.”
“Well, precisely. I know what I’m talking about. You need to call somebody right now and tell them where you are and that you weren’t feeling well and you’re so sorry you had to go home and get some rest. Have your agent do it.”
“I don’t have my cell phone, I left it in my trailer.”
“You can use mine.” He reached into his pocket.
“Do I have to do it right now?”
“Yes, you have to do it right now.”
“Once I do it, this will all be over,” she warned him. “Like, we escaped, we really did, for six hours. And once I call in, we won’t have escaped anymore.”
You really need to kiss her right now, his brain informed him. But the cell phone was already in his hand, an anchor holding him in place. Its cold weight tugged him back into the reptilian subcortex which innately understood the narrower rules by which the demimonde operated. Something she had said earlier had been lurking there.
“Gordon is personally approving your costumes?”
“Yes, it’s a complete pain in the ass. They have to send him swatches.”
“What do you mean, swatches?”
I'm Glad About You Page 28
