Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

“But it’s not white, it’s ecru. One thing I’ve discovered in my admittedly brief time at this house is that there are more different shades of white than there are different shades of what we call color. There’s the quartz white of the wet-bar countertop, dove white in the bathroom Corian, the linen white of the napkins, the milky eggshell color of the leather sofa over there in the living room. The lack of color is dazzling in its variety. I don’t even know if my untrained eye is capable of distinguishing them all, I can barely make out a difference, but to Brenda it must be like a rainbow. I’m like a worm gazing up at the stars.”

  “But why,” asks Patrick, “do you think they’re hiring people like you, people with no experience, instead of regular servers and caterers? Did Brenda and Jay give you a reason?”

  “Well, I like to think we bring a certain wide-eyed novelty to the job that might make it more exciting. To be served by someone who can still find a way to be amazed by the task, rather than some cynical, hardened champagne-slinger.”

  “Is that what Brenda told you?” Patrick presses. He knows that something is very wrong with how Brenda is running this party—how she and Jay are running the whole film, in fact—but he needs a reason in order to know why he feels that way.

  Horseshoe lowers the tray slightly, and his eyes take on a glazed look.

  “America is the land of the amateur,” he begins. “The garage inventor. The jamboree dancer. The people no longer wish to watch expert chefs compete against expert chefs, creating intricate logjams of meat and vegetables. If you give uncooked food to an expert chef, all you get is expertly cooked food—we’ve seen it a million times. But if you give it to a retired truck driver with a heartbreaking story, an eight-year-old child with a passion for battleships, who knows what could happen? What could they discover in that reality-show pantry? What could you discover in their discovery? The surprise of success is a miracle. The possibility of failure is an aphrodisiac. What if a real-estate agent doodling random lines and triangles on the floor plan of a house were to independently re-create the discovery of the Euler line? Are you more amazed to see a beautiful flower growing in the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanical Garden, or from a trash heap by the side of the freeway, where cars slow down as they take the off-ramp? A glacier-white lily the size of a baby’s head, its vivid green stalk reaching up toward the sky from out of the mouth of a can of Monster Energy drink.”

  Brenda walks up, tilts Horseshoe’s tray back up so that it is flat and no longer lists toward the floor. In an oversized sweater dress of light, fluffy mauve, she tilts her head breezily to the side to reveal a single monstrously complicated earring. She looks toward Patrick as though trying to bring him into focus. In his discomfort, he swallows another glass of champagne whole.

  “What are you doing here, Patrick? Are you here to work? Because, if you are, you’re very late.”

  “Cassidy asked me to come,” he responds.

  “Oh, right,” Brenda says, and her irritation mingles with a subtle tinge of relief. “I didn’t remember inviting you to work this event. Grandpa Billington used to say that when you lose your ledger of what you’ve said and done, the man who picks it up off the ground becomes your master.”

  “I heard that your grandfather personally ordered the ending of Citizen Kane to be reshot,” Horseshoe says with reverence.

  “It’s true,” Brenda replies breezily, “he was a crotchety old shit. But listen, Patrick. We’re very lucky you turned up. Cassidy is acting a bit wobbly now in the other room, and I think it would be good if you watched over her. Not”—and here she pauses—“in a professional capacity, but in a personal one. You probably know how emotional she can be. She uses herself as a battery, she drains herself for her work—which is beautiful, but risky too in its way.” She reaches out smiling and squeezes Patrick’s arm close to the elbow, three quick times between her middle finger and thumb. “Can you stick close to her tonight?”

  Brenda looks at him, and her waiting face has the smoothness and consistency of butter. He knows that, if he leaned forward and licked it, it would not taste of mineral and chalk and the fake floral scent of foundation, but of something pure and young and springtime. He can tell that he is nodding because of the way the room and all the formless, over-shaped things in it seem to bob gently up and down.

  In the sunken, plushly carpeted living room, an archipelago of seating meanders through the pale, ghostly space. Islands of cream in a sea of silky taupe, the organic ovaloid shapes of the furniture marred by human bodies twisted in conversation, strewn with legs crossed or knees bent, knobby and crookedly jointed. They lean in awkward semi-repose on floor pillows patterned in vaguely ethnic stripes—the human form like a broken spider, a top-heavy starfish, a fragile and imbalanced splay. There are women who look like they belong, women in graphic prints or deceptively simple clothes that reveal intricate, useless deviations up close. There are men who dress like Jay Arvid, and men who seem like they are trying to dress like him. Looking at the scattered bodies, Patrick can tell that the outfit Cassidy chose for this event is both too fancy and too cheap. Soft music seeps from an unseen opening. Dozens of small salmon toasts circle through the room on a shiny platter. An unplayed piano in the corner is a soft custom gray, the color of chinchilla.

  When he finds Cassidy, it’s in a remote quadrant of the room, hidden behind a large abstract sculpture. Her dress sparkles weakly in the dim light. She’s sitting on a kidney-shaped sofa with two men seated on either side of her, and her expression is grimly sunny, her smile a muscle in contraction. In her hand, there’s a martini glass filled with yellowish tequila.

  “I love this stuff,” says the guy on the right, grabbing the spangly fringe on her dress and rubbing it between his fingertips.

  “I want to bat it around, like a kitty cat,” says the guy on the left, and they both laugh. With their short haircuts and dark sports jackets, they have a paired look, they might be workout buddies whose schedules, diets, clothing, and slang are all beginning to converge.

  “You guys are so fun,” Cassidy says. She leans forward and laughs in a shiny way, like a string of mass-produced holiday bells. “How are you involved with the film again? You’re both investors, right?”

  “Well,” says the one on the right, “Evan’s an investor. I’m a maybe, depending on how convincing Brenda and Jay are tonight. I’m thinking of throwing my chips in on the sequel. Get in on the ground floor and claim a greater share of the equity.”

  “In my view, this film is too crowded already,” says Evan. “Time to close the airplane doors and prepare for takeoff. I have a six-percent stake, but people buying in tonight are getting point-eight percent, point-forty-five percent.”

  “Not even a sliver of the pie,” his pal interjects. “A little grocery-store sample with a toothpick stuck in it.” He slurps cola-colored liquid from a heavy tumbler.

  Cassidy laughs with them and brings the martini glass to her lips, her fist tight around the slender stem. Patrick feels jealousy stir within him, like an itch sliding among the soft wet organs, with no hard parts to scratch it. She looks perfectly comfortable in this contrived situation, and even if she’s only acting, the performance is compelling. Her spangles shudder in the lamplight as she leans forward, giggling, and sets her glass on a large hunk of glass, a coffee table shaped like an ice cube within which a vintage rotary phone floats paralyzed, like a mosquito in amber. Suddenly her precise, girlish features light up and she begins to speak with a new confidence.

  “Well, guys, if you’re looking for equity,” says Cassidy, scratching her chin with a manicured hand, “I’m actually putting together a film later this year. We have a great script; it’s a story about two sisters who grow apart after one of them becomes a pop star, and of course I’d play the lead, so we already have one big name signed on. I have a couple producers involved already, but you could really shape the project if you come
in at this stage, not to mention carve out big slices of pie for yourself. Pie at breakfast, pie for lunch, whatever you want. This is going to be really big.”

  She leans forward for emphasis, eyebrows raised, and looks each of them square in the eye. Patrick recognizes this character: it’s Kassi Keene, wide-eyed and bright, offering solutions with a big scoop of heart and just a pinch of wry wit. The two guys chuckle stiffly.

  “Are you doing a bit?” the other one asks, confused. “I mean, you aren’t making a movie, right?”

  “Of course I am,” she replies.

  “I heard you were being sued by that paparazzo you beat up in the drugstore? I heard they froze all your funds. It would make it hard to get your project insured.”

  “Well, I can and I am,” Cassidy snaps. “You know, nobody would even remember that twenty-minute span of my life if it hadn’t been for the tampons. It was seriously not even a blip on the radar of the vast ocean of my life.”

  “It’s just not a good time for me,” says Evan slowly. “I’ve got some liquid sloshing around, but I can’t afford spillage, if you know what I mean. I’m on a strictly positive-returns-investment plan.”

  His friend nods eagerly. “But we’re big fans,” he adds. “Fans for life.”

  “So true,” Evan says. “I used to watch Kassi Keene in my freshman-year dorm room with a bunch of kids from our floor. We’d buy beer for cheap from the sketchy RA, and we’d drink every time Kassi said something that was clearly ironic foreshadowing. It was so fucking fun. I fucking cried when your dad went missing after the school bake-sale shoot-out and you were standing all alone by the brownie table in the rain. Such good memories.”

  Cassidy stands up, tilts the rest of the tequila down her slender white throat, and hands the empty to Evan’s friend.

  “That’s fine,” she says, “but some of us believe in the passage of time and not dwelling in some, like, nostalgia prison. Have a great night, guys. Enjoy the booze.”

  Her heels sink syrup-slow into the thick, soft carpet as she walks away, leaving little pits in her wake. Patrick watches her make her way out of the sunken room, toward the bright doorway beyond. She leans against the doorframe, swaying in place for a long moment, and then steps through.

  As she makes her way through the beige, cedar-scented maze of Brenda’s home, Cassidy wonders why all her luck seems to have run dry. She remembers the spells her sister used to do for her in their small, shared bedroom with the one window that looked out onto the neighbor’s GrillMaster. June, so quiet at school and so shy with strangers, became someone else when she did spells: she spoke in a low voice, the voice of a woman, instructing Cassidy on what the spell they were doing was called and what it would make happen. Sometimes they did spells for money, for a hundred bucks to be found randomly by each of them within the next week. Sometimes they did spells for love, or for some girl they didn’t like to break both her legs and go through lengthy physical therapy to heal them, at which point she would regret ever being mean to the Carter sisters. But mostly June insisted on spells to get Cass auditions, to promise big parts to come when she turned eighteen, spells to make her eyelashes grow longer and her hair to grow wavier. These spells June did for her career really worked. Cassidy believed it then and believes it even more today, looking back on a decade of luck and adoration that dried up almost exactly when June left her. What if she called her sister right now and demanded a spell to bring financing for a project she made herself, one all her own, a big, easy part in a franchise with a huge budget, etc.? Did magic by demand have its own power, or would June’s fragile witchcraft work only when given freely, volunteered?

  Patrick finds her barefoot on a Billington countertop, her silver heels overturned on the tile floor. She’s crouched on the immaculate stone surface, rifling through the expansive pantry, pulling out bottles and scrutinizing the labels with an expression of cold interest. A few hard bits of sparkle gleam on the floor, casualties of the climb. Patrick can see the Braille of gooseflesh on her exposed thigh where the party dress has ridden up, as chill nocturnal air flows through the open windows.

  “Hamlin,” she calls, turning her feline face slightly in his direction, “have you ever tasted water from the Perito Moreno Glacier? In Patagonia?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “How about from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf?” she asks, thrusting a bluish glass bottle toward him, the craggy, long-tailed shape of Antarctica etched into its surface. A little ribbon of gold-leafed paper wrapped around the cap shows that it’s pristine, unopened.

  “No,” he says. “What is this, just water?”

  “It’s fourteen hundred fifty a bottle, if you can even find a bottle to buy. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Brenda owns a shelf full of this stuff, and meanwhile, do you know how they pay out my contract?” She tears off the shiny paper and pulls off the cap, peers down into the blue slosh. “In mismatched bottles of Poland Spring, random liters of kiwi- and mango-flavored seltzer, gallon jugs with the lids taped on. Stuff that Brenda and Jay would never let touch their lips. Can you get us a couple of glasses?”

  Patrick looks around the room, its vertical surfaces an intimate, fleshy pink. Small hexagonal tiles crawl across the backsplash, their color the shade of a wet tongue. Light seeps out from some unseen source underneath and behind the cabinets, falling softly upon the gray slate floor. The surfaces are smooth, seamless, with no hint of handle or knob, no sign of daily routine or personal use, not even a saltshaker left out on the countertop. It looks, he realizes, profoundly inhuman: a place built by people with the intention of leaving it unused, untouched, unloved.

  “Oh god,” Cassidy says, impatient. “Never mind.” And she takes a long, deep drink from the thick-rimmed mouth of the bottle, the soft muscle beneath her jaw tight and slack by turns as the cool liquid slips through. She wipes her mouth with the back of her arm and hands it over.

  “You know,” she says as she leans back against the cabinet door, her narrow shoulders gleaming white against the strange, poreless material. “I booked my first job the week I moved to L.A. Most kids show up and do weeks or months of auditions, they go through season after season of lessons, coaching, trying out for anything, and getting nothing. I got this my third day out there. It was a commercial for that drug Optimorox: ‘Are you apprehensive about the future? Do you worry that negative thoughts are beginning to drain all the good out of your life? If you suffer from inadequate or not-enough positivity, Optimorox may be able to offer something better.’ I was playing the daughter of this depressed dad; we’re at some kind of carnival or state fair and he can’t enjoy himself, but then he pops a few Optimorox, and suddenly he’s able to have a great time with his daughter again. This actor who played my dad—he was amazing. He was funny, he was good-looking in a really believable way, he smelled like roasted cinnamon almonds when you pop the top off a brand-new can. He was a dream dad. Mine had just left us all a few weeks ago, and this guy was so nice to me. He kept saying that he hoped he’d have a kid just like me someday, that he wanted to meet my mom and take us all to a real fair, a real carnival. You know, when you’re playing the ring toss and eating funnel cakes for a shoot, you’re still actually playing ring toss and eating funnel cakes. It’s fun. I think it was the most fun I’d ever had at that point, because every moment had this extra shimmer around it, this special magic that came from the fact that it was going to be happening on TV. It was going to happen again and again, even after we stopped filming.”

  “Your TV dad hit on you?” He lifts the smooth rim of the bottle to his mouth and lets the cool, crisp water slide in, tasteless and pure. It moves across his tongue, quick and smooth and with an infinitesimal bitterness. But the flavor seems to vanish too fast for him to comprehend: Even as he tastes it, the taste evaporates, erases itself. He can’t get the flavor of the precious, expensive water lodged in his memory. When he holds t
he bottle away from his lips, he can see that it’s already nearly empty.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she replies. “Anyway. We film for two days, and everyone is telling me how amazing I am, how they can’t believe this is my first time acting, how I’m going to be in movies and TV shows, I’m going to have my face on a lunchbox someday. They pay me three thousand dollars, and my mom cries when the check shows up, and we all go to this diner in Marina del Rey and eat unlimited shrimp. When we leave, there’s this mountain of little pink shrimp tails on the table; underneath the lights, it looks like a pile of jewels shining there. We felt rich. And then, a few weeks later, word comes back from the producers that they’re reshooting the commercial because their target demographic has shifted up an income bracket, and they need a little girl who looks more upscale. So they never put me on TV. But the commercial comes on every day while my sister and I are home for the summer, and my dream dad is there, laughing and hugging and loving this little girl who looks a lot like me, but I guess richer. And even though I know that my fake dad probably doesn’t love her more than he fake-loved me, even the fake version is so much more real than anything I had in my life.”

  There’s a long pause. Patrick clears his throat.

  “Do you trust Brenda and Jay?” he asks. “No offense. I know you seem close to them. But they seem like they’re out for themselves.”

  “They probably are,” says Cassidy calmly. “In this business, you sigh with relief when you realize someone’s out for themselves and not out to get you.”

  “But they’re not acting in the best interests of the film. Or the crew.” He’s starting to get heated. “I don’t even get the sense sometimes that they expect this film to be released. I catch line-production mistakes all the time, actors saying lines that aren’t what’s in the script, never mind what’s in my book. I don’t think they care.”

  “And what do you want to do about it?” Cassidy looks amused, but also curious. “Are you going to make a big speech in front of everyone on set and walk out? You wouldn’t be here, in this town, in this job, if you had something else you thought might work out better. You don’t know how much better it feels to have a small chance than to have no chance.”