So 5 Minutes Ago

by Hilary De Vries

  “Even I think that’s gross.”

  “That’s because you always think in double entendres,” I say, yanking off my jacket and tossing it onto my chair.

  “Oh, come on. How else do you think he meant that? As a fashion compliment?”

  “Look, I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt,” I say, pausing to look down at my T-shirt. Actually, Nixon does look pretty good swelling out over my breasts.

  “Why? Because he invited you to his supersecret party?”

  “Of course not. I just don’t want to start seeing plots behind every damn thing he does. It’s depressing. And exhausting. And it makes me feel even more cynical than I normally do. Besides, I have enough to deal with keeping up with my clients.”

  “Oh God. You’re falling for his tactics. You’re doing exactly what you swore you wouldn’t do. You’re believing what he says. You don’t believe what anybody says in Hollywood. Hello? ‘I’ll call you!’ ‘The lawyer’s drawing up the papers now.’ ‘Of course you’re on the list!’ ‘We love it!’ ”

  Steven is starting to get agitated. Or maybe the circulation in his legs is starting to go, given his Pee-wee suit.

  “I could take you a lot more seriously if you would just lose the tie,” I say, suddenly heading for my desk and rooting around in the drawers. “It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who looks like a pedophile.”

  Steven scowls but loosens his tie. “It was indecent exposure, actually, and what are you looking for? A Gideon Bible in your time of need?”

  “Since we’re out of champagne, I thought a cigarette might do.”

  “You haven’t smoked in three years and now you want a cigarette?”

  “I want a cigarette every day of my life,” I say, slamming the drawer shut. I realize I’m shaking. Between being up since five, heatstroke from Kelly’s damn photo shoot, all the champagne and cake, and now G’s creepy invitation to his private party, my nerves are screaming for the steadying influence of nicotine.

  “Well, I don’t smoke.”

  I shoot him a look.

  “Well, not at the office.”

  “Fine. But can you go downstairs to the bodega and get me a pack of Camel Lights? Please.”

  Steven shakes his head. “Then will you play nicely with the other children? And realize they are all lying sacks of shit? You have to play by the rules or you really will get hurt.”

  “You’re a godsend,” I say, reaching for my wallet and handing him a five. “And buy yourself something. Like a lawyer.”

  “Just for that . . . “ he says, slipping off his tie. He drapes it around my neck and starts to retie it. I’m so happy he’s going for cigarettes I just stand there and let him knot it.

  “There,” he says, pulling the ends tight. “Now you look like a waitress at Hooters. At least they know when some guy’s trying to bullshit them.”

  “Like you would know,” I say, waving him off. “And remember, Camel Lights.”

  After Steven leaves, I reach in my bag for the bottle of Arrowhead I have left over from the photo shoot. I take a slug, make a halfhearted attempt to untie the tie—I never got these stupid bow-tie knots—and give up. I’m still hot from the afternoon in the sun at Kelly’s and all the sugar is only making it worse. I pull out my desk chair and drag it over to the corner of my office that is directly under the air-conditioning vent. I sit down, put my feet on the wall, lean back, and close my eyes. I am waiting for cigarettes. For sweat to dry. For salvation. God knows how long I’m sitting there, semiconscious, when I hear a knock and my office door opening.

  “Just hand them to me,” I say without opening my eyes. “I don’t think I can get up.”

  “Actually, I just came to say good-bye.”

  I leap to my feet so fast, I spill the rest of the water on my skirt. Charles. In his neatly pressed shirt and tie. Oh, great. I’ve managed to dodge him for two weeks and now he corners me when I look like a dropout from clown college.

  “Oh, sorry, I was just waiting for Steven,” I say, rubbing at my skirt. “He went on an errand.”

  Charles smiles. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” His tone is polite, but I can only imagine the impression I’m making. Or not making in my stained skirt, Nixon T-shirt, and bow tie. Whatever chance I had with this guy has clearly sailed. And taken my dignity along with it.

  “Oh, this,” I say, pulling at the tie. “It was just a little joke.”

  I pull on the tie some more but cannot get it to untie. Actually, I manage to only make it tighter.

  “A very little joke, apparently,” I say, giving up on the tie and giving him an embarrassed if slightly strangled smile.

  “Here, that looks very uncomfortable,” Charles says, moving toward me. “Even if it does match your chopstick.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut just for a second. Oh God, could this day get any worse? Could I be any more of a train wreck? But he reaches out and begins to gently pull the tie apart.

  “I think you have to have gone to a million ballroom dance classes to learn to do this,” he says, working at my neck.

  “Well, there you go,” I say. “I only took piano lessons and there wasn’t any dress code.”

  He works at the tie some more and I can’t tell if he’s becoming annoyed or not. “Here,” he says, tilting my head back slightly. “That’s easier.”

  I close my eyes again as he works at my neck for a minute. And for another minute. I feel the tie begin to loosen and I open my eyes. He’s so close I can see the flecks of gold mixed in the green of his eyes. He looks at me looking at him and smiles.

  “So wait,” I say, pulling back, suddenly self-conscious again. “Why are you saying good-bye? I thought you weren’t leaving for another—”

  “Shhhh,” he says softly, putting his fingers on the sides of my neck and pulling me toward him. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be. Don’t move. Don’t even talk.”

  I breathe out slowly. “Okay,” I whisper. “But why are you leaving? I mean so soon.”

  It’s something back in the New York office. Some legal thing. Or insurance or Stan’s departure. Or something that means he has to take the red-eye. Tonight. “But it doesn’t matter,” he says, leaning in closer, his mouth brushing my ear, “because I plan on being back and forth.” He leaves his mouth there. Just for a second, and I feel his breath on my neck. I want to stay here forever. No cigarettes. No clients. No G’s party. Just Charles and his warm, soothing voice.

  “There,” he says, sliding the tie free and stepping back. “You’re free to go.” He hands me the tie and smiles.

  Maybe it’s his smile. Or the gold in his eyes. Or the fact that he’s leaving. Or that he just had his hands on me for the first time. Or maybe it’s because I have nothing more to lose. “But what if I don’t want to go?”

  I smile, embarrassed.

  He smiles back. Not embarrassed, like he’s deciding something. “Well,” he says, putting his hands in his pockets and shrugging. “That would be an entirely different story.”

  I’ve lost him. I’ve overplayed my hand and fucking lost him.

  “Okay, well, uhm, have a good trip and I guess we’ll see—” I sputter when suddenly Charles’s mouth is on mine. Oh dear God. I didn’t lose him. I did not fucking lose him.

  We stay that way for several seconds or years and then he pulls back and smiles again. I could get used to that smile.

  “Uhm, given that you’re technically my boss, I’d say that was sexual harassment. If it wasn’t so nice.”

  Oh God, do I have a complete death wish?

  “Hey,” Charles says, smiling at me. “Can you please shut up? Just for a minute.”

  “Okay, that definitely sounds like harassment,” I say, but Charles’s mouth is on mine again.

  And there’s more. Oh God, there’s more. My chopstick is knocked loose and my hair falls to my shoulders. I feel his hand on the back of my neck and now lower and now he’s pushing me where?
Against the wall. I am up against the wall with Charles leaning into me and I am suddenly very, very aware that I am wearing a skirt. And that my legs are bare. And that they are starting to be lifted off the floor. I reach out and fumble for the light switch that I swear is right here. Where, where is it? Here? Yes, here. No, the lamp. Oh, wait.

  There’s a crash.

  Oh God, the lamp. Oh fuck, the lamp.

  “Hey, so they didn’t have any Camel Lights.”

  Steven. With a pack of Marlboros. In the doorway.

  Everything stops. Oh, don’t stop. Please don’t stop. But we do stop. We stop and I slide back down the wall until my feet touch the floor. For a second we all look at one another. Frozen. We are a Mexican standoff in a Tarantino movie. No one can shoot without being fatally wounded.

  “Hey,” Charles says finally.

  “Hey,” I say for no real reason.

  “Hey,” Steven says, smiling. “I was just going to say . . . but I’ll try a different store,” he says, reaching out and flicking off the light switch. “On my way home.”

  It’s dark now except for the light from the parking lot coming in the window and my back is still pressed against the wall. “So, hey,” I say softly in the dark.

  “Hey,” Charles breathes, his mouth on my ear again. “Hey.”

  12 Party Animals

  I am not the kind of girl who goes to a place like this. Not of my own free will. Not even if it is owned by Johnny Depp. I’m not a clubgoer. Never have been, and at this age, never will be. I just can’t do that many drugs to transform standing around a dark, howling loud room at 2 A.M., jostled by people who are drunker and prettier than I am, into something other than the torture that it is.

  But then up until yesterday, I wasn’t the kind of girl who would think of having sex in her office. Let alone actually have it. Actually, I didn’t. Have it. Not that I didn’t want to. Not that we didn’t want to. But after Steven’s little coitus interruptus, followed by a troupe of Biggies trooping noisily down the hall with the last of the cake, followed by the realization that Charles’s limo was arriving at his hotel in less than an hour, we didn’t. Have it. But we wanted to. And that’s the important thing.

  “Absolutely,” Steven said, when I called him the next morning to thank him for his swift and perceptive exit and, God, I owed him one. “Intention is nine-tenths of the law.”

  “Actually, I think possession is nine-tenths of the law and we didn’t get quite that far.”

  “All I know from watching Law & Order is that if you intend to commit a crime, it’s much more serious. So if you and Charles intended to commit sex, even if you didn’t actually commit it, it’s serious.”

  Serious. Boy, that’s a word that will get you in a serious amount of trouble. I thought I was serious with Josh and looked what happened there. I just became seriously depressed. There’s no way I’m going there with Charles. Not yet.

  “You know, you should just break down and go to law school,” I say to Steven, dodging the whole “serious” thing. “I mean, one of us should know something useful in life. Besides how to get a client in Vogue. Or how to sneak them out of a hotel. Or that even publicists need to get their hair blown out before red-carpet events.”

  “I’m serious—he’s serious,” Steven counters, unwilling to let this drop.

  “Well, I’m not doing the ‘serious’ thing. Not yet. Although he did call me from the airport. Twice.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Look, I still don’t even know how we wound up where we did. Besides, he lives in New York and technically he’s my boss.”

  “So?”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  Now, that all seems like hours ago. Actually, it is hours ago. It’s going on 11 P.M. in the VIP lounge of the Viper Room, which truth to tell is indistinguishable from the non-VIP part of the club. Just another black box up a cramped, code-violating staircase from the ground-floor black box. You just need a Day-Glo-colored wristband to get in. I’ve been here, at G’s so-called party, for more than an hour. Of course as a non-clubgoer I was one of the first to arrive, and even my 10 P.M. arrival required a stop for espresso at the Coffee Bean and Leaf back in Sunset Plaza. So far all I have seen are bartenders, a crew setting up sound equipment on the room’s miniature stage, and a few fellow early birds who look like G’s old Sony cronies, given their jeans-and-sports-jackets outfits and the restless way they keep checking their Cartier watches.

  I scan the room again. Nobody I remotely know. And it will take more than espresso to make me talk to studio execs. Besides, I’ve had about as much as I can take of Lil’ Kim or whoever is wailing over the sound system. I can either hit the ladies’ room and check my messages again or wander downstairs and try to kill half an hour mingling with the vox populi.

  Actually, it’s ladies’ room and messages followed by Diet Coke—part penance for yesterday, part the need to pace myself for the evening to come—downstairs in the main club followed by another trip to the ladies’ room. When I emerge it’s 12 A.M. Sunday morning, which in clubland means the planet has turned on its axis. The stairway to the VIP room is now packed with Biggies in black leather jackets, tight jeans, and big, lush ponytails that take an entire afternoon to craft. They all seem to have brought along five dates each. Guys in jeans and buzz cuts and a few in porkpie hats. The newest in geek cool. Why is it that women have to kill themselves to look beautiful in the most casual surroundings while guys can get by on dorkiness? Adam Sandler has a lot to answer for.

  But at the moment, he is nowhere in sight. Just this teeming river of Hollywood pilot fish fighting their way upstream. “Hey, Alex,” “Hey, Alex,” the Biggies chant as they thunder by, sweeping me into their wake, a dark sea of black leather jackets, and on up the stairs into the VIP room, the white-hot center of it all.

  I lose all track of time. And space, for that matter, given that it’s dark enough in here to develop dailies. I have no idea how long I’ve been here, or how many drinks I’ve had—Diet Cokes alternating with white wines—or how many times I’m wedged in a knot of people, shouting and peering and nodding in the near pitch-black—shouts and nods and peering are what pass for conversation in a club—until I am ready to pass out from the sheer effort it takes to have a good time. I have made the rounds of the Biggies, the inner circle, and their geeky, arrogant dates—screenwriters, agents, lesser studio execs—with whom I barely register. To them I am just another publicist. Not blond. Not twenty-something. Except for my clients, I do not exist.

  I try to check the time but can’t see my watch, it’s so dark. I scan the room. G is nowhere to be seen and no one seems to have any idea where he is or exactly when he is arriving. Or even that it matters. I am hot in my leather jacket and sick of carrying my purse, tiny and useless as it is, and my feet are killing me in my new kitten heel boots. I scan the room again. Still no G. He’s my boss and I don’t trust him, but even my paranoia has its limits. I reach through a knot of people, slide my empty glass to the bar, and turn toward the stairs.

  I hear the drawl before I make out its owner.

  “Hey, Alex, don’t tell me you’re bailing already?”

  Troy. Heading up the stairs with the kind of wide-awake-at-midnight eagerness possessed only by the young and well-fueled and with the kind of coltish, vacant-looking arm candy possessed by almost every male in Hollywood.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” I blurt out before I realize my mistake. I have been here for hours spinning my wheels, but the real party, the heart of the matter, is only just beginning. And I nearly missed it.

  “Hey, it’s the G-man’s big night. Can’t miss that, darlin’,” he says, sweeping by my question as he sweeps by me, hauling the leggy blonde after him. “Sorry,” she breathes as I lean back to let them pass in a cloud of perfume. The King of Good Times and his Queen for a Day.

  “Hey, Alex,” floats back down the stairwell. Troy again. “Let’s try and hook up later. I need to talk to y
ou.”

  I know we will never hook up later. Never mind that we do, actually, need to have a conversation, more than one, in fact, before we make our way to the Beverly Hills courthouse for his pretrial hearing or whatever it is. And never mind that he has never once apologized or even acknowledged that his little display of star pique on the steps of the Chanel boutique has cost me some serious capital at work. That I narrowly avoided being put on probation. And it’s why I am standing here at God knows what hour, exhausted and bored, trying to suck up to my boss. Never mind any of that. Because it is just the way it works. And I know it.

  I also know that I have to put all that out of my mind, my whining and my pounding eardrums and my screaming feet, turn around and work this sucker like the grown-up that I am. If Troy is here, then other clients are sure to follow. And frankly, what the hell is Troy doing here? If he didn’t hear about this party from me, who invited him? Suddenly the idea of getting a look at G up close and partying among the faithful is much more intriguing, even imperative, than it was a few minutes ago.

  “Hey,” I say, charging up the stairs after Troy. “Let’s definitely hook up.”

  I am all too correct in my assessment. A stream of celebs, some BIG clients, a few DWP clients, and a few others not signed to the agency, flow up the stairs into the room. They are minor and mostly TV—Rose McGowan, Selma Blair types—but still. I know this because I have positioned myself at the top of the stairs, leaning casually against the wall, armed with another Diet Coke and my suspicions. This party is getting better, which is to say weirder, by the minute. Not only am I the only DWP agent here—even Suzanne is glaringly absent—but the celebs, such as they are, keep coming. Claire Danes. Eddie Furlong. Tracy Ellis Ross. One of the Hilton sisters. I can never keep them straight.

  Not that it matters. As a rule, celebs do not turn out for anything that doesn’t have something in it for them. A movie premiere. A charity event. A fashion show. But not a publicist’s party. Stars guard their presence like currency. Unless they don’t mind becoming a banana republic like Jennifer Tilly, who turns out for any event, no matter how small and insignificant, they don’t risk devaluation by showing up at just any party. Especially one thrown by publicists for a publicist.