Killing Monica

by Candace Bushnell

  Besides her hardscrabble background, Pandy discovered a few more things about her real-life Monica. Interestingly, these were the kinds of things that Monica herself never would have experienced firsthand.

  Such as: SondraBeth had dated a heroin addict. Her most recent ex, she explained, was a well-known actor with a nasty habit on the side. “I thought he was the love of my life, but then I found out he loved his heroin more than he loved me. You know your life is pretty bad when you can’t even compete with a bag of smack.”

  Pandy laughed appreciatively. Encouraged, SondraBeth continued. “He said, ‘I love you, babe, but I love my horsie more.’ That’s what he called it: ‘my horsie.’ And even then, I didn’t want to leave him. That’s how stupid I was. But my agent and manager said I had to cut all ties.” She shrugged; despite claiming she would never be a slave to the business, it seemed her agent and her manager wielded more power than most people’s parents. “They told me to stay out of LA for a while. Take something in New York. That’s why I was so desperate to play Monica.”

  “I thought you were desperate to play Monica because of me,” Pandy replied, feeling surprisingly hurt.

  “Of course I wanted to play Monica because of you,” SondraBeth quickly countered, slinging her arm over Pandy’s shoulder. “But you already know that, Peege. Monica is about you and me. Not some stupid guy.”

  This had made Pandy laugh. Because no matter how hard SondraBeth tried to ignore men, they simply could not tear their eyes away from her.

  Pandy had had plenty of experience with the kind of electrical sexual attraction that women of great beauty exerted on men; a few of these great beauties were her closest friends. She had seen, all too often, how even the most accomplished and intelligent man could be easily reduced to his base animal desires when presented with a gorgeous woman—not to mention the self-serving fantasy that accompanied the prospect of sex. But even the seductive arts of a great beauty paled in comparison to what SondraBeth had. Her physical perfection was coupled with enormous charisma: she un-self-consciously managed to be wildly flirtatious while still remaining “one of the guys.” Pandy figured it must be due to some kind of survival mechanism. After all, unlike her own, the success or failure of SondraBeth’s career rested in the hands of men like PP.

  “Who needs a man, anyway?” SondraBeth had nevertheless declared. “It’s not like we don’t have plenty of fun without them.”

  This, Pandy did agree with. They did have plenty of fun. Too much fun in the eyes of some, as she would soon discover.

  * * *

  “Hey, hey, hey.” It was a Thursday afternoon in late July, hot as hell. Coming through the phone line, SondraBeth’s husky voice sent prickles of electricity down Pandy’s spine. “Whatcha doin’, sista?”

  “I’m bored as hell, sista,” Pandy replied with giggle.

  “Let’s get out of Dodge.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?” Pandy asked. “You wrangle some poor man’s limo?”

  “Betta, Peege.” They’d spent enough time together to develop their own silly secret lingo. “I got wheels.”

  “Pick me up.”

  “You got it, baby.”

  Half an hour later, there was a terrific honking on the street outside Pandy’s building. She leaned out the window to see SondraBeth getting out of a small, shiny black car, waving like a game show contestant.

  Pandy grabbed her overnight bag and ran downstairs.

  “What the hell?” she asked breathlessly, staring in awe at the brand-new car. It was only a Volkswagen Jetta, but to Pandy, who’d never owned a car, it might as well have been a Bentley.

  “How’d you get it?”

  SondraBeth tapped the palm of one hand with the back of the other. “Cold hard cash. I went to the dealership on Fifty-Seventh Street and bought this baby right off the floor. Thanks to you, baby.” She pointed at Pandy. “I just got my first check.”

  “Nice.”

  “Get in.” SondraBeth opened the passenger door for Pandy. “Inhale that new car smell.” SondraBeth got behind the wheel, adjusting the mirrors.

  “Where are we headed?” Pandy asked.

  “I’m sick of the Hamptons. Too many goddamned journalists, even on the beach. How about Martha’s Vineyard?”

  “The Vineyard?” Pandy shrieked. “But it’s a five-hour drive to the ferry.”

  “So?”

  “Five hours in a car?”

  “That’s nothing. Back in Montana, you have to drive five hours to get to a supermarket.” SondraBeth expertly steered the car into a tiny opening between a bus and a van. “Besides, it might be a good idea if we’re not seen together in public for a couple of days.”

  “Are you breaking up with me?” Pandy chortled.

  “Hardly.” SondraBeth reached into the backseat and dropped the New York Post onto Pandy’s lap. In the top corner was a blurry color photograph of Pandy, mouth wide open as she screamed into a mike. PANDABETH STRIKES AGAIN, read the caption.

  “So?” Pandy said, pleased she’d made the cover.

  “So read the story,” SondraBeth said ominously. “PP certainly did.”

  “PP?” Pandy asked, aghast, as she quickly flipped the grimy pages to Page Six.

  “The devilish duo known as PandaBeth caused Panda-monium at Joules on Tuesday night when they took to the stage to belt out their own rendition of ‘I Kissed a Girl,’” Pandy read aloud. She scanned the rest of the story, emitted a short, unimpressed laugh, and tossed the paper onto the backseat. “That’s nothing.”

  “Of course it’s nothing. But…” SondraBeth frowned.

  “What?” Pandy demanded.

  SondraBeth shrugged. “It’s just that I got a call from my agent. According to him, PP says you’re in the papers too much. And not in a good way.”

  “Me?” Pandy laughed, outraged. “What about you?”

  “I’m not as famous as you are, Peege. Anyway,” she continued, honking her horn at a pedestrian trying to cross against the light, “don’t get huffy. He’s mad at me, too.”

  “About what?” Pandy said, outraged.

  “About my sticky fingers.”

  “I see,” Pandy replied knowingly as she leaned back and crossed her arms. She was all too familiar with SondraBeth’s habit of picking up things that didn’t belong to her, with the sort of careless impunity that implied she simply didn’t know better.

  “Come on, Peege,” SondraBeth whined. “You know how it is. I borrowed from the wardrobe department a couple of times. I have to. Everyone expects me to look a certain way, but no one seems to understand that I can’t actually afford to look that way. And, okay, maybe the clothes didn’t come back perfect. But it’s not my fault if I fall down every now and again. I’ve never had to walk in high heels on a goddamned sidewalk before.” She swerved sharply to avoid hitting a taxi that had suddenly stopped to disgorge a passenger.

  “Fuck PP. He’s toast!” Pandy declared, slamming her hand on the dashboard for emphasis. “How dare a man who calls himself Pee-Pee tell us what to do?”

  They laughed the whole way through the long, long drive up the coast, stopping for fried clams and Bloody Marys, screaming profanities out the windows at other drivers—“Asshat!” “Asswipe!”—and even talking their way out of a speeding ticket.

  They were drunk by the time they got on the ferry, and drunker and high when they got off. In the middle of the ferry ride, SondraBeth had pulled Pandy into the stinking stall in the ladies’ room. SondraBeth shoved her hand down her bra and pulled out a small envelope of cocaine. “Stole it from Joules himself the other night,” she said, handing Pandy the package and a set of keys. “It’s melting…it’s melting… ,” she opined, like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “It’s your goddamned body heat,” Pandy said, dipping the key into the powder and taking a hit. “You’re just tooooooooo hot!”

  “And don’t I know it.”

  Full of themselves, the
y strolled through the packs of tourists in the lounge. It was their first time together away from the axis of LA and New York, and Pandy discovered yet another thing about SondraBeth: She had a disconcerting way of getting friendly with strangers. Which she immediately began doing the moment they entered the bar at the front of the ferry.

  “Hello,” she said brightly to the bartender as she plopped onto a stool. “What’s your name?”

  “Huh?” The bartender’s head jerked up.

  “I’m SondraBeth,” she said, leaning over the counter. “And this,” she added with a flourish, “is PJ Wallis.”

  The bartender, an old guy with a creased face who looked like he couldn’t deal with one more drunk tourist, took a good look at SondraBeth. He wiped his hands on a cloth and suddenly beamed, causing the skin on his face to shatter into a million wrinkles.

  “You don’t say,” he said, glancing quickly at Pandy and back to SondraBeth.

  “PJ Wallis,” SondraBeth repeated. When the bartender only cocked his head in inquiry, she hissed, “She’s famous.”

  Before Pandy could intervene, SondraBeth was telling the bartender—along with several other passengers, all of whom were men—about how Pandy had “discovered” her in a hair salon in LA and had brought her to New York to be the star of the movie version of Monica.

  * * *

  They got the last room at one of the big inns on the bay in Edgartown.

  They spent the first night holed up in their room, sprawled on the king-sized bed, ordering vodka cranberries from the curious and yet seemingly amused staff. As the TV blared in the background, they snorted up the rest of the first gram, and then another that SondraBeth had hidden in her suitcase. “Did I ever tell you the story about the Little Chicken Ranch?” SondraBeth asked.

  “No,” Pandy said, laughing. She figured SondraBeth was talking nonsense.

  “I’m serious. And you can’t ever tell anyone. It could ruin my career.”

  “I promise,” Pandy said.

  “Well.” SondraBeth took a deep breath, got off the bed, and pulled back the curtain. The view was of the Dumpsters behind the kitchen, which was why the room had been available. “Remember how I told you I grew up on a cattle ranch? Well, I did, but I ran away when I was sixteen.”

  “You did?” Pandy asked in awe. She’d never met anyone who had actually run away from home before.

  “I had to,” SondraBeth said, nodding as she tipped more powder onto the top of the shiny wooden bureau. “Once my boobs came in—well, let’s just say those ranch hands got a little too grabby.” She looked at the coke, then picked up a cigarette instead. “My father didn’t do a thing—he’d always said he wished I’d been a boy—and my mother…” SondraBeth paused as she lit up the cigarette. “She was basically checked out.” She inhaled deeply and passed the cigarette over to Pandy. “So I split,” she said as she exhaled. “I’d heard about this place where they’d help you—but they were Jesus freaks, so I went and worked at this strip club called the Little Chicken Ranch instead.”

  “What? You ran away and you were a stripper?”

  SondraBeth looked back at the line of coke. “Hello? That’s what usually happens to runaway girls. They become strippers. Or worse.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Pandy said as she picked up the straw, trying to digest this information. “I’m sorry,” she added, wiping the sticky residue from beneath her nostrils.

  “Best way to make money in a pinch,” SondraBeth said, leaning over to take another line. “But it gave me an advantage, that’s for sure. It made me realize how incredibly stupid men are. They’re worse than animals—most animals have more respect for each other than most men have for women. But what the fuck, right? I didn’t make the world; I just have to live in it. And then I got lucky—some guy saw me and said I should be a model. But the fact is, if I had to sell my body to survive, I would,” she said fiercely, handing Pandy the straw.

  And suddenly, Pandy understood. SondraBeth was an angry girl, too.

  “That fucking sucks,” she declared.

  “Hey.” SondraBeth shrugged. “I survived. So that was my childhood. What about yours?”

  “Mine?” Pandy laughed. “It was terrible. My sister and I were the cootie queens of the school.”

  “You?” SondraBeth shook her head. “No way.”

  “We were pretty isolated. I never even went to see a movie in a movie theater until I was sixteen. Before that, I thought most movies were like those old black-and-white films on TV.”

  “Christ,” SondraBeth said. “Where the hell did you grow up?”

  “In Connecticut.” Pandy smiled viciously. “In the smallest town on the planet. Called…” She hesitated. “Wallis.”

  SondraBeth’s eyes bugged out of her head. “You’ve got a town named after you, sista?”

  Pandy waved this away. “It’s hardly a town. More of a village. My great-great-great-something founded it back in the early 1700s. And then they just stayed there.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They died in a car crash when I was twenty. So I’m kind of an orphan.”

  “What about your sister?”

  Pandy hesitated. SondraBeth had just revealed one of her deepest secrets; for the first time in her life, Pandy was tempted to disclose her own.

  Except it wasn’t her secret to reveal. “She lives in Amsterdam,” Pandy said quickly. “I haven’t seen her for a while.”

  “Why on earth would anyone live in Amsterdam, except for the pot?”

  “I guess she likes it there.” Pandy’s voice sounded unintentionally forlorn.

  “Oh, Peege! I’m sorry,” SondraBeth exclaimed. She got on her hands and knees and crawled across the bed toward Pandy. She flung her arms open and pulled Pandy’s head to her chest, patting her on the back. “Don’t be sad. From now on, I’ll be your sister.”

  And she had been. For a while, anyway. But what SondraBeth didn’t know was that even sisters didn’t last forever.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LOOKING BACK on it, Pandy realized that she, too, should have known better. She should have understood the dangers of being so close with SondraBeth, and how the success of Monica would inevitably drive them apart. But she’d never suspected that a man—Doug Stone—would end up being the lever, inserting himself into their friendship like a wedge.

  And she certainly should have known better about Doug.

  But once again, when it came to romance, hope trumped common sense.

  Three years had passed since that raucous party at the Chateau Marmont where SondraBeth claimed Pandy had made out with Doug in a drunken moment that Pandy still couldn’t remember.

  During those three years, Doug had been proclaimed the next big thing. Named one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive—which in turn landed him on the cover of Vanity Fair—he was now a genuine movie star. During a cold, blustery February, while Pandy was celebrating the success of another Monica book and the second Monica movie was in production, Doug Stone arrived in New York.

  Pandy was seated at one of the coveted front tables at Joules when Doug came in with a posse that included a director and a womanizing television star. They were shown to the next table. Doug recognized Pandy; it wasn’t long before one table joined the other and Pandy found herself next to Doug, reminiscing.

  They laughed about the crazy party in her suite at the Chateau. Pandy admitted that she didn’t remember kissing him, but would never forget how he’d ordered and eaten three breakfasts from room service. “I had the munchies,” he said, pulling her chair closer.

  He was even better-looking than she remembered.

  Thanks to his success, Doug had mastered a star’s ability to ingest the light in the room and reflect it outward, creating an irresistible magnetism. And yet he still maintained a semblance of what he must have been before he became an actor: the easygoing, beloved star quarterback of the high school football team, who assumed that life, having gone his way so far, would most
likely continue on this track. Pandy wondered if his relaxed self-confidence came from knowing that he never had to work at attracting the opposite sex; never had to worry about being accepted or liked the way regular people did. His spectacular good looks granted him freedom from the concerns that most people deemed shallow but nevertheless had to deal with on a daily basis.

  They had an immediate and easy intimacy that Pandy suspected he had with any woman on whom he focused his attentions. Nevertheless, that night, fate conspired against reason when a terrific clap of thunder followed by torrential rains trapped them inside the club. Joules locked the doors, turned up the music, and out came the pot and cocaine. At some point in the next twenty-four hours, Doug went home with her. Despite his condition, he made love in a passionate and expert fashion that was almost too good to be true. Pandy suspected that his performance was just that—a performance—and one he probably couldn’t maintain.

  But he did maintain it, for the next ten days, anyway. Ten days in which they blissfully hung out in Pandy’s brand-new loft on Mercer Street, bought with her Monica earnings. It was mostly devoid of furniture, but that didn’t matter. They drank, had all kinds of sex, ordered takeout, watched bad movies, and had more sex.

  Conversation, Pandy had to admit, was minimal. Which was why she kept reminding herself that it was nothing more than a fling. But once again, as had happened so many times before, her entreaties to herself not to get too emotionally involved were useless against the power of her romantic fantasies. And so, unable to say no to what looked, smelled, and actually felt like love according to all those fairy tales, she allowed herself to fall in love with him—just a little bit, she cautioned herself, the same way most women promised themselves to have only one bite of chocolate.

  But Pandy was never good with the one-bite theory, and before she knew it, she was sliding into that delicious time warp where everything is heightened, and everything the beloved says is brilliant, important, and meaningful.

  Just like chocolate.