“That’d be fun.”
Still arm in arm, they walk the remaining ten minutes in silence. In her vampire life of afternoon auditions and Rosebud shifts all night, she’s rarely out in the world this early and is surprised by the sheer number of people (in cars, mostly in cars) being productive. A lot of them are actually lining up to vote at the hotel lobby.
“We could skip this and get coffee.” Gently she squeezes his shoulder, sinewy muscle under cotton. “Gore’s winning California with or without us.”
“You trust someone else to make decisions for you?” He grins; he may not be the best-looking guy in LA, not even the best-looking guy in their queue (it is Studio City), but when he smiles, she’d challenge any jaded person in this whole jaded city not to turn to microwaved butter. It’s the first time she’s seen it in a long time, and she wonders if this means Adam is off the couch for good, ready to take his rightful place as the only aspiring actor in this ghetto of aspiring actors she’s certain will make it. Wonders if tonight she’ll be fucking another voter.
* * *
The election has all but been called for Gore by the time Phoebe pulls open Rosebud’s famous bronze door around six.
Other than the sleek television sets above the bar, the place looks almost the same as it does in the pictures from the forties and fifties, when Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr., and Marilyn Monroe used to sip champagne cocktails and nibble veal chops in red leather banquettes.
“Hey, dollface.” Burke—the flamboyant fan-favorite bartender—waves her to the bar lining one wall of the enormous restaurant’s front room. “Try this.” He hands her a tumbler of something fruity-smelling and brown.
Taking a sip, she shudders.
“It’s a Tennessee—rye whiskey, cherry liqueur, and lemon juice,” he says. “Looks like Gore’s gonna win, so I figured we needed an appropriate cocktail.”
Two hours and 180 tables later, things are beginning to look a lot less sure for Gore, and Burke is mixing a drink called Texas Tea. On the TVs mounted between the shelves of liquor bottles, the NBC political guy is doing something wonky with a whiteboard every time Phoebe peeks over. By ten the place is packed, everyone maudlin. From what she gathers between seating guests, Florida has now been given to Bush.
A cheer erupts around eleven, but she doesn’t have time to see what’s going on because Jake James, Commander Jason Bryce himself, sashays past four waiting parties and requests a table for his group of six stoned-looking dudes in jeans and T-shirts. A check of the book isn’t necessary; Phoebe knows he doesn’t have a reservation, and all the large tables are booked until the kitchen closes at midnight.
“We’d love something outside,” Jake James says without actually looking at her. It’s a consolation that in her four-inch heels she’s taller than him.
His last few movies were box office and critical roadkill, and Jake has done his tour of the rehab circuit, but he’s still the biggest name in Rosebud at the moment, and Jerry, the manager, will be pissed if she can’t instantly accommodate him.
“We’re a little busy now,” Phoebe says lightly, signaling for Melissa to help pacify the grumbling customers. “Gimme a sec, and I’ll get you set up in our garden area.”
“Awesome. What’s your name, honey?” He continues before she can answer. “You must be new; I know all the hot girls here.”
Phoebe smiles, doesn’t mention she’s seated him twice in the past year, each time without a reservation.
Busboys install a makeshift table in the restaurant’s garden—prime real estate that remains out of paparazzi range while still boasting a view of the Hollywood sign. A four-top and a six-top have to be repositioned, customers midway through meals suddenly crammed into spaces far too small to adequately maneuver a knife and fork. Luckily, both tables are groups of tourists excited all the stories about Rosebud in the guidebooks are right—the stars do eat here!
Fifteen minutes later Melissa returns from seating a studio head outside and hands Phoebe a glass of criminally overpriced champagne.
“From Mr. James.” Melissa rolls her eyes conspiratorially, but there’s also an edge of jealousy. With long blond hair and an intense suntan, Melissa is the opposite flavor of Phoebe (if choices are limited to attractive, white would-be actresses). “He wants you to join him in a toast.”
Returning the eye roll, Phoebe takes a sip, though it’s strictly against Rosebud policy to drink on the clock. Weaving her way through the obstacle course of tables, plants, and people, she feels excitement build in her throat, decides she should give Jake her number when he asks, even though all the tabloids say he’s a prick and still dating that redheaded pop tart who sings “Chasing Nothing,” even though Phoebe kind of wishes Adam wouldn’t want her to.
Jake waves her over and takes her hand while the tourists and regulars all stare.
“I know you used a little magic to get us out here, so thank you,” he says, then raises his glass. The guys at his table follow. “To indecision.”
As they clink flutes, she’s starting to think he might not be the cad he’s always made out to be, then he leans in, whispers in her ear, “Downstairs men’s room. Second stall, five minutes.”
It’s not as though she has to go. Jerry may take care of celebrities, but that doesn’t include whoring out unwilling staff. And boning Jake James probably won’t help her career—a lesson she’s learned over and over in the seven years she’s been in LA. But on the off chance it might … she’s slept with worse for less.
Which is how she ends up in the semisecret basement bathroom, back pressed against a stall divider while the actor who saved countless worlds in the Eons & Empires movies jacks his fairly unformidable penis and squeezes her left breast so hard she worries the implant might pop.
When she was eight, she’d crashed her bike and needed fifteen stitches in her calf. Watching the doctor sew her up was disturbing, and she twitched and screamed until her father told her to imagine the whole family at Disney World. Before she knew it, the doctor was finished. Over the past seventeen years, the fantasy has morphed from Chase and her on the Dumbo ride to Oliver and her in her high school bedroom, but the idea is still the same.
She checks back in with her body just in time to avoid getting jizz on her thigh when Jake James finishes. He stops panting long enough to kiss her neck.
“Rock and roll, right?” he says. She can’t imagine there’s a required response, wonders if she’s hit some rock bottom of starfuckery.
In a startlingly chivalrous move considering what’s just happened, Jake stands guard at the door while she reassembles herself, then checks the hallway to make sure the path is clear. As little more than one boob was involved in the whole shebang, a quick yank to straighten her dress is all it takes to be presentable and back at the hostess stand.
“Soooo?” Melissa asks, and for a breath-catching second, Phoebe worries someone saw them in the bathroom. “Did you give him your digits?”
“He didn’t ask.”
And Jake James continues not to ask, doesn’t even say good-bye when his group slithers out the famous door to a waiting SUV an hour later.
They’re so slammed, Phoebe doesn’t understand that Jake’s toast was about the presidential race until after 1:00 A.M., when she and Melissa are sitting on bar stools, sipping Texas Tea, aching feet discreetly slipped out of high heels.
“Your hottie roommate coming?” Melissa asks.
“Probably not,” Phoebe says; the mention of Adam is a rabbit punch, even if her five minutes in the bathroom with Jake James was hardly a betrayal. Before he decided a better use of his time was screaming at the TV, Adam had tiptoed back in plenty of mornings smelling of sex and another woman’s perfume—even after he booked Goners and he and Phoebe started sleeping together. “He’s really into this election.”
“Bummer,” Melissa says.
In terms of hours logged, Melissa is probably Phoebe’s best friend in the city. Hired by Jerry on the same rainy Thurs
day two years earlier, they’ve double-teamed through horrible shifts, covered for each other so they could make auditions, and danced with Burke at every gay club in West Hollywood. And yet Phoebe had never mentioned when she started hooking up with Adam and isn’t about to bring it up now. But she finds herself thinking about her long-ago life in Chicago, of Evie and Nicole, of her brother making sure that her dates were good guys.
* * *
It’s after 3:00 A.M. by the time Phoebe is fumbling with her lock, hands fat and dumbed by the dull sick that comes from hovering on the brink of drunk. On the other side of the door, Tom Brokaw is on the TV offering commentary, and Adam is talking back.
“Thiz—iz my fault,” Adam slurs, standing less than a foot from the screen. He waves a drunken finger at her. “I’m from Florida, should’ve staaaaayed.” Then he adds a variation on his mantra since the network said they were no longer considering Goners as even a midseason replacement. “Not like I wazzz doing anything here.”
He’s in the same clothes, though there’s no evidence he made it to the gym. Eyes half closed, he sways, catches himself on Brokaw’s two-dimensional chin. If she was his girlfriend, Phoebe would probably be required to deliver a lecture, but she rents, doesn’t own.
“Your one vote would have changed everything?” In a few hours she’ll understand this is oddly close to the truth.
“Thaz right.”
Spinning on the toe of the expensive running shoes he’d gotten with a bit of the Goners money, Adam staggers to the hall closet and removes his not unformidable penis from his pants. Phoebe quickly grabs his arm and leads him to the bathroom, where he recognizes the toilet and continues. Not trusting his aim or stability, she leans against the sink, watches his clear ninety-proof spray into the bowl.
Turning toward her, he offers the goofy version of his kilowatt smile, asks, “Wanna hold it?” The hand on his dick follows his eyes, and she jumps to avoid the arc of urine.
“Adam!”
A repentant bad puppy, he bows his head to the task at hand, offers rambling apologies. Even after he’s retucked, he doesn’t look at her, and she feels guilty for snapping.
“It’s okay.” She forces a laugh. “I’ve got good reflexes.”
“No, iz not okay. I…” Adam’s still not looking at her, but lays one hand on her shoulder, the other against the tile wall for support. He ducks so his forehead touches hers, and she feels blood pulsing through him where their skin meets. A bead of his sweat skis down her cheek, tastes like alcohol.
Phoebe had been hesitant to let Adam move in when her old roommate packed up and went back to Iowa. She knew Adam wanted to sleep with her and figured that if they were living together, they might get drunk or bored and things would end badly (he’d already boned half the girls in their acting class). But when he booked the Goners pilot and they actually did hook up, it had been nothing like that at all. Adam’s agent had called with the news, and when he’d gotten off the phone Adam had looked beatific, so otherworldly happy, that Phoebe couldn’t not touch him.
“Phoebe,” he says with something that sounds like gravitas. Maybe now he’s going to apologize for the way he’s been for the past few weeks, acknowledge he’s lucky to have her. Maybe tell her he wants to give them a real try as a couple. Or not, tell her he wants to go back to being friends.
Nope, he’s going to fall into her.
He’s too thin and a good two inches shorter than the six one his head shots claim, but it’s still 165 pounds of deadweight boy suddenly in her charge, and she stumbles against the wall.
“Adam, come on,” she says, shaking him back to consciousness.
And she wants to tell him he can’t do this, not because she wants to be his girlfriend, but because she read the Goners script and it was shit—he deserves better than an asinine frat-boy character making PMS and date-rape jokes. Because it’s one dumb setback and he’s so close (so much closer than she’s ever been), and so many untalented people make it, all the truly gifted ones who keep trying have to. Because before he walked into Thetta Tunney’s workshop buzzing with the kind of commanding energy that felled trees and whistled teakettles (the kind that Jake James mustered to get her into that bathroom), she’d forgotten a lot of things, had started believing she’d come to California to seat starlets, go on dates with cheesy millionaires and washed-up actors, and irk her cardiologist father by not enrolling—even part-time—in one of the many area schools. Because when she and Adam put up their scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in class, he was so good it made her better, made her remember why she was enduring the city’s smog and traffic in the first place.
Of course she can’t say any of this now. So she oversees the unsteady mission to his bed, pulls off his shoes, and flops down beside him. As she plays with Adam’s sandy hair, the last thing she hears before falling asleep is Katie Couric’s cheery voice on the Today Show three hours ahead in New York. “Good morning, America. We still don’t have a winner.”
* * *
The country hasn’t elected a president and Phoebe hasn’t decided about Thanksgiving a week later when she nearly trips over Jake James outside the Dan Tana’s restrooms after puking up fifty dollars worth of meat.
“We meet again.” Jake smiles, and Phoebe can tell he has absolutely no idea who she is or why he knows her. After exchanging pleasantries, she leaves him to ponder and goes back to her date—an entertainment lawyer she met at Rosebud who’s polite enough to stand when he sees her approaching their table.
Lawyer is a bit on the quiet side, but she’s always been good at drawing people out, at getting them to talk, and soon she has him chatting about his work, joking about his high-maintenance clients. Lawyer asks softball questions—where she’s from, her family, and career. She talks about the print work and the industrial films, the local television commercials, and the Dannon spots five years ago that had seemed the gateway to something bigger but never amounted to anything more than six months of royalty checks.
“So do you think we’ll have elected a president by January?” she asks during a lull in the conversation. “Maybe we were just given two crappy choices.”
Inching his hand closer to hers, he agrees. “Isn’t that so often the case?”
Another bottle of wine, drinks at a nearby bar, and Lawyer takes her hand as the valet brings around his silver Maserati. He waits until they’re on Santa Monica Boulevard before asking her if she’d like to check out the amazing view at his place.
“I’m sure it’s stunning,” she says, “but I can’t sleep with you tonight.”
“I didn’t mean to imply…” He looks stricken she made that assumption, takes the turn onto Sunset toward her apartment. “I…”
“You don’t have to apologize.” Unhooking her seat belt, she slithers across the console to his lap, tells him to pull over, which he does without question.
If she really liked Lawyer or planned to see him again, Phoebe would start by unbuttoning his shirt, then lick circles around each nipple, travel down his stomach, spend a good few minutes teasing his inner thighs with her breath until he squirmed and moaned. She doesn’t plan on seeing him again, but he seems a fundamentally decent man, and she’s encountered so many less-than-decent men since moving to LA. Men who pushed her head into their crotches or dropped pills in her drinks. Strong men who got rough. Drunken men who probably thought the sex was more consensual than it was. Lawyer isn’t one of those men, and he deserves a reward for that. So for him she does this: runs her fingers down the shaft of his cock, tongues the head, swallows him down. The gearshift pokes her hip, and his grasp on her hair borders on pain, but Lawyer doesn’t take long, remembers her name when he comes.
“Oh, Phoebe.” Shuddering, he strokes her cheek. “Sweet, sweet girl.”
His semen in her mouth is powdery bland as he drives her home. She wonders if he tastes it when she kisses him good night.
Blue light from the TV flickering across his face, Adam is still boneless on the couc
h when Phoebe gets in after midnight; the tinge of unwarranted guilt.
“Do we have a president yet?” She leans on the doorjamb to pull off her shoes.
“Your lipstick’s smeared.” He’s so nonchalant he could be telling her he changed a lightbulb. “Silver Maserati get lucky on the first date?”
“Do you care?” No anger, she actually wants to know, is desperate to know.
He turns back to the screen. She follows, reads the ticker scrolling along the bottom: FLORIDA SECRETARY OF STATE KATHERINE HARRIS ANNOUNCES BUSH LEADS GORE BY 300 VOTES.
Thinking Adam won’t answer, Phoebe starts toward her bedroom, stops when she hears him stand.
“I used to,” he says evenly. A half-full bottle of Corona is on the coffee table, but his eyes are sharp. He isn’t drunk, isn’t high. “Not so much lately.”
“Because you don’t care about anything? Goners didn’t go, so nothing will ever matter again?”
“Things like you?” Voice hemorrhaging sarcasm, he’s next to her—too close, really—she can smell her lavender body wash on his skin spiked with sweat. “Because what we had was sooo meaningful?”
“Whatever, go back to your pity party.”
She actually feels the change in temperature as his pupils narrow.
“Poor, poor Princess Phoebe,” he says with a venom she’s only heard once, in their scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his Brick berating her Maggie, smoldering yet calm. “I apologize. I realize I haven’t been telling you how beautiful, how fucking special you are. Aphrodite herself, rising on the half shell.”
She remembers Adam’s mother’s visit, how Anna Zoellner mentioned her son had been a National Merit Scholar and gotten a full ride to college, remembers Adam is smarter than she is.
“Frankly, I thought I’d earned a reprieve,” he continues. “Thought maybe some other poor bastard could pick up the slack. But I was wrong. I’m not allowed to be upset about my life, because you need your favorite toy.”
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 5
