by Sarah Lassez
Amid grunts of “Be careful” and “Shit, this is heavy,” I began to look at Jonas in a different way. He actually had some very nice muscles, and because it was a hot February, I was getting a full display. “Would you grab that?” I’d ask, then pause discreetly to watch him stoop to pick something up. Hmm. “And that, too?”
The day skidded into night, and soon we had everything stacked and shoved into our new place. Jonas offered to hang a few paintings in my room, an offer I jumped at not only because of my strange inability to hang anything straight (I could be equipped with a level and a tape measure and still hang things as if I’d been on crack) but also because I got to lie on the bed and watch as he reached and stretched, hammered and hung.
Just as he finished with the last nail, we caught it…very soft, barely audible. The sound of Gina in her room, crying. Jonas turned to me. First, I’m sure he was shocked that Gina cries, as picturing her in a vulnerable moment was a little bit like imagining a blizzard blanketing the Sahara. Second, I think we both were a bit horrified at how thin the walls were. That, we both knew in a way that made me blush, could be problematic.
“I need to spend some time with her,” I told him. “She’s a bit freaked out. You know, first time on her own and all.”
Of course Jonas understood. I walked him downstairs, but at the door he hesitated, lingering as if trying to remember if he’d left something behind.
“Did you forget something?”
“Yeah, I did.”
Already I was picturing the mess in my room. Anything he’d forgotten wouldn’t be unearthed till May. I hoped it wasn’t important, because it was as good as gone. “What?”
“This,” he said, and leaned in…and kissed me.
3
Finding My Sparkle
BEING IN LOVE IS LIKE WEARING AN IMPENETRABLE cloak of happiness, like sleeping on clouds, like discovering unused gift certificates in your wallet. My joy was out of control. Every ex I’d ever had and every actress who’d ever gotten the parts I’d wanted could all have moved in next door, yet still I’d be smiling. Not even the fact that China was more disgruntled in our new apartment, and hence more focused in her “gift giving,” could upset me. Jonas loved me, and that was all that mattered.
One of the first things I did was call Aurelia, who revealed she’d had a feeling he liked me. Why, I wanted to know, had she deceived me by saying he saw me as just a friend?
“Because you weren’t meant to know. You were meant to relax and just go with it.”
Of course, that made perfect sense. Relaxing for me is a near impossibility. I’m a control freak. If I could, I’d own the world and hand out daily memos on exactly what everyone was to do that day, exactly what they were to say, and exactly what they were to feel. Should anyone stray from the plan, I’d fire them. Simple. Fired. And Jonas’s liking me wasn’t something I’d been ready for at the time. On the contrary, I was so focused on keeping his friendship that if I had known that he was interested in me, I would’ve freaked and embarked on a sabotage mission, thwarting any and all chances for romance and developing a strange claustrophobia that would have demanded that he stay at least two feet away. So what Aurelia said made sense. Perfect sense.
But now she was free to sing his praises, to claim she saw us together forever. I just smiled as she said this, though inside I was doing cartwheels. I’d found him!
Overall our relationship was going well, and in most ways we were scarily compatible. Of course there are always exceptions, and ours came in the form of Star Wars. Jonas, it turned out, was a Star Wars freak and often bolted out of bed at five a.m. on a Saturday to be the first to get the newest action figure. Being the supportive girlfriend I was, I even endeavored to help him in this, a one time and one time only attempt on my part. There by his side at the crack of dawn, I accidentally dropped what I considered to be a “doll,” a grave misnomer on my part, I soon learned.
Before I knew what was happening, he’d swooped down to retrieve it, gently touching the corner of the box, and narrowing his eyes into slits. When he looked back up at me, it was as if he’d just caught the kid who’d been egging his house and smashing his mailbox.
“This,” he said, “is the super-rare variant of Slave Leia from Jedi, with the brown chain instead of the gray chain.” Then his eyes went back to the box, as if having seen me, the perpetrator, had been too much. “You have to be careful,” he cried. “The corner of the box is dented. Do you know how much this is worth?”
My eyes went to the price tag by his thumb, and I suggested $4.99, as that seemed to be what the store was asking for the action figure. The look of dismay on his face was like that of a modern art professor who’d just overheard Picasso described as “That dude who painted the f’d-up people,” and in that moment I realized that Jonas and I were on very different wavelengths regarding all things Star Wars. After that I stayed home and slept in, knowing somewhere out there was my boyfriend, carefully carrying boxes to a register, speaking a language I was incapable of understanding.
One day Jonas and I were sitting in his Jeep, waiting for a light to turn green, when beside us grew the furious revving of a motorcycle, the ridiculous sound of a man desperate to look cool.
Jonas laughed and pointed out the window. “Hey. It’s Charles Darnette. What a dork.”
Sure enough, though his froggy face was slightly obscured by his helmet, it was him. My future—That’s when it hit me. Jonas was an actor, with dark hair and dark eyes, he wasn’t too tall, and, in fact, we’d met years ago when I’d auditioned to play his girlfriend in a movie. I remembered that at the time I had been intrigued by him, enraptured by his curious beauty.
All the predictions were coming true, and I knew this was it. Jonas and I would be together forever. I smiled, and thanked God for his kindness that my future husband wasn’t the black leather-clad frog on the motorcycle that had just stalled.
Other people hear of the hottest movie, the hippest bar, or the best mixed martini, and they can’t resist. They must see it, they must go there, they must down it. Me? Someone tells me of a good psychic and I’ve made an appointment before the story’s even finished.
One of the first times I discovered this about myself was when a friend told me about Drew. “He was so right on I was terrified! I couldn’t sleep for days!” With glowing reviews like that, how could I stay away? Next thing I knew I was parked in front of a smog-gray apartment building in the midst of Culver City, certainly not a mecca of spirituality but close enough to Sony Entertainment Studios that I’d known how to get there without a map, an accomplishment that always gave me a slight thrill.
I stared at the bars on the lower windows and began to doubt myself. Was this wise? But I’d heard such good things about him, how could I walk away? Whatever. As long as there wasn’t a gigantic fluorescent hand in the front yard, I figured I was doing okay. In I went.
Drew was about seven feet tall, super thin, and had a voice like a drag queen on helium. Part of me instantly loved him and wanted him to be my new best friend, while the other part was already checking for escape routes.
“Your grandmother’s spirit is here,” he said immediately.
I scooted my chair in closer to the kitchen table, relieved. See? Everything’s fine.
He made a little tsk-tsking sound. “And boy is she pissed.”
I looked up and caught him rolling his eyes, like he and my grandmother went way back and this was just so typical of her.
“She’s really upset you’re here, getting this reading. Don’t worry, though. I’m gonna send my grandma’s spirit to talk to yours. She’ll settle down.”
Okay then, I thought, envisioning some spiritual conference with ghostly shrieking little old ladies.
I can’t say it got much better. When I pulled out a photo of Jonas, excited for confirmation that he was indeed the love of my life, Drew was silent. He chewed his lip, studying the photo as if he’d have to do a police sketch later. Finally he sp
oke. “Is this your brother?”
To say I was horrified would be an understatement. No one wants to think of their boyfriend as their brother—but even more upsetting, I don’t have a brother, nor do I have a sister, so what did this say about Drew’s psychic ability? I’d just paid this man a hundred dollars to fully creep me out. “No, that’s my boyfriend.”
Drew shook his head and tossed the photo on the table. “Oh, no, honey. He’s not the one for you.”
I was shattered, completely devastated, and trying not to lose it in Drew’s kitchen. All my emotions were careening, and I felt the need to upheave the table, cry like a fiend, and pelt Drew with the salt and pepper shakers. Perhaps he saw the look of trauma on my face, or realized I hadn’t taken a breath since he’d last spoken, but he picked up the picture once more. “You guys aren’t done, though.”
Gee, thanks.
“You still have more growing to do. The guy you’re with after him? He’s the one you’ll marry.”
The devastation hit me in bits and pieces. I didn’t know what to think anymore. Jonas and I did have problems, problems that developed after our peaceful honeymoon period, problems I’d overlooked due to Aurelia’s insistence that we were meant to be. I’d started to wonder, for instance, how two people could be meant to spend a lifetime together if they couldn’t even decide on dinner without breaking into a brawl. Or, for that matter, how enjoyable that love would be if progress was considered backing out of the driveway without already having commenced in the screaming match. Gina, who was now dating an Irish musician and suffering for such a perilous choice, tried to comfort me. “Listen to yourself,” she said. So I turned to my tarot cards, asking over and over again how I truly felt.
The splinters in our relationship burrowed deeper each day, and our fights began to escalate to sensational proportions. Putting two actors together could be risky, but when those actors were Jonas and I—both stubborn and prone to drama—the combination was positively volatile. Soon our evenings together began to resemble scenes from The War of the Roses, and still Aurelia persisted that ours was a destined love. Destined for what? I began to wonder. Romeo and Juliet’s had been a destined love, but that hadn’t worked out so well, now, had it?
Somehow, through tears and determination, I stayed with Jonas, though I continually felt twitches of instinct, nudges of insight. Leave. This isn’t right. You shouldn’t be fighting like this. But was that just because of Drew? Each psychic sat on my shoulders like a devil or an angel, barking commands into my poor befuddled brain.
During a rare peaceful time with Jonas, I decided that Aurelia was right and Jonas was the one, and, this being the case, clearly we should move in together. After I approached him with a sweetly worded ultimatum, he agreed, and Gina began the hunt for a new apartment. Well, really it was I who was hunting for her, as she’d recently started working at a literary agency for a man who called her Servant Girl, and time was not a luxury she had. Every day I’d scan the papers for new listings and then plan my life with Jonas, envisioning romantic dinners at home, copper pots, and a lifetime of free foot massages.
When we found Gina a place she liked, she packed up to leave, informed me she was taking Onyx (who, upon our moving in together, had slighted me by choosing her closet over mine), and then, before I knew it, was gone. I filled the resulting void with the beginnings of my life with Jonas. She took her TV, and I convinced Jonas to buy a new one. She took her couch, so Jonas and I went shopping—eventually and mistakenly buying one that was too big to fit through the door and that had to be hoisted through the balcony, and may be permanently stuck there. Still, everything was so encouraging, so wonderful…except for the fact that he wouldn’t move in. He’d been furnishing and paying rent at our apartment, but the our part was a bit misleading, because at the end of the day he was nowhere to be found. He kept going home, “home” being the place where I wasn’t.
It seemed there was always an excuse, and three months later the only thing that had made it from his apartment to mine was a life-size Princess Leia cutout. I sequestered Leia in the empty room, sat on my gi-normous couch, and told myself all was fine.
Facing facts isn’t easy for me. If I want something, I have a very, very hard time giving up. My brain is like a Venus fly-trap—even I can’t make it let go of certain things—and when it does finally release, it does so at a disturbingly slow pace. So, after four months of having a Princess Leia cutout as a roommate—during which time Jonas actually got a new roommate himself at his apartment—I had to face that perhaps he wasn’t ready to move in.
After countless tarot readings, we broke up. There I was, in my great apartment with a view of the city and all the makings of a wonderful life, completely alone and frantically pulling tarot cards to see if I’d done the right thing.
With time I did feel I’d made the right choice, but the frantic card pulling never stopped. Two very celibate years passed, and I tried to ignore that not only was I about to turn thirty, but I also had no real source of income and had been reduced to buying groceries and anti-aging creams with the checks MCI and AT&T sent me (a blessed benefit of my long-distance friendship with Aurelia). Thank God for those checks because, although eating tends to be important, I’d have done just about anything to anti-age. Thirty, as far as Hollywood is concerned, is one shaky step away from cutting out coupons for PoliGrip and comparing walkers on a large community porch. You age in actress years, each birthday hurtling you forward with such speed, such vicious force, that when someone at a liquor store asks to see your ID, you’re so overjoyed that you could throw a party and send out a newsletter. And, if truth be told, that clerk will forever be one of the few who knows your true age. So trained is an actress at keeping her age a deep dark secret, that some of my friends genuinely have no idea how old they are and must call upon rusty math skills to come up with a number they will never ever speak aloud.
And it wasn’t just my career that was telling me I was old. Even my mother got in on the fun, informing me one day that it was okay, she was coming to terms with the fact that she’d never have grandchildren. It seemed that the hill I’d thought I’d been approaching was actually a cliff, and it was only a matter of time until my unemployed and single self was falling through the air, about to land in a place called Too Late.
Gina too was enduring single life, vowing never again to date a man who referred to Guinness as Vitamin G, and together we shared our fantasies about fleeing the city and moving to a place to which beauty queens, models, and the female prize of every small town didn’t migrate each year. (There’s no shortage of pretty girls out here, a fact of which the men in L.A. are damn well aware.) One day, we decided, we’d move to a place where a man would open a restaurant’s door for you because he was polite, not because he was using those seconds to scope the room and determine who was who and which table would be the most advantageous. In this new land we’d find not only love but also a one-bedroom house that didn’t cost a million dollars simply because it was in an area where the sounds of gunshots were a bit more distant.
But there would be no moving. All predictions pointed to my taking on this town and beating it at its own game, so the love I decided to concentrate on was that of acting. I didn’t need a man to act. I didn’t need a man to be successful. I’d simply get a part on the next hit show and buy myself a cute little silver Bug, a Spanish-style house, and a Chihuahua that would bounce around and periodically go for dips in my infinity pool. From there would come the guy, because men are drawn to confidence and a girl who’s got her shit together. And, my God, if I had the Bug and the job and the house, then I’d have my shit together and I’d be happy and who wouldn’t want to be with me? I’d radiate all that good stuff that draws men in like moths. Yep, my new plan was to trick love into finding me.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. Hollywood is where dreams go to shrivel up and die—the town itself being the ultimate unrequited love. Though I focused on my career, my career re
fused to focus on me. Audition after audition yielded nothing but more and more miles on my car (a death trap Del Sol I’d bought with the insurance money) and an increasing confusion on my part as to why people were stubbornly refusing to see me as the starlet I should be. And, to add to my delight, I was fired from my agency. It was devastating, but I still don’t think they ever really knew who I was. All I had left was my manager, Holly, who continued to stick by me through thick and thin…or thin and thinner and thinnest. God bless her.
Upon discovering the small, insubstantial role of a French girl in a movie called Until the Night, Holly immediately called the director and tried to sell me for the role.
“Actually,” I was told he said, “we were thinking of Sarah for one of the leads.”
I can only imagine Holly fell out of her very expensive ergonomically correct chair. At the very least her jaw dropped. This shift in conversation would be much like if Holly had asked someone to do her a favor by hiring a friend as an errand boy, only to hear the words “Actually, we were thinking of making him vice president.” It turned out the director was a fan of Abel Ferrara’s The Blackout, a film I’d done that hadn’t been a financial or critical success but that had garnered a fan base of young edgy directors, who, with any luck, will all hire me.
When I heard the description of Karina, the character I was meeting for, I was shocked: a high-priced call girl/L.A. party girl/model. Not that I have any qualms about playing a hooker, but in my mind I pictured her as absolutely soaring in height and with cleavage that cost more than my car. To cast this they could seriously go to any Starbucks in Los Angeles and find ten of those girls. Why me? Not that I considered myself unattractive, but I liked to think of myself as more sophisticated, more chic. Apparently, though, I was wrong. And thus commenced my Play a Whore phase.
Now, nudity is not something I shy away from—as long as there’s a reason for it, and that reason isn’t to jack up ticket sales or give the crew a reward for working long hours. Of course, it also has to be my choice, and not just because they “accidentally” got a shot of my right breast—something that happened early on in my career. How one accidentally includes a breast in a shot, and then goes on to edit that scene over and over and simply never notices the renegade breast, is beyond me. But after reading the script for Until the Night, I decided this was one of those cases in which a touch of nudity was fine. Actually, the way I saw it, Karina being topless in one scene was important, as it established her as a free spirit. See? I’m seriously a director’s dream.
