Thin, Rich, Pretty

by Harbison, Beth

  She decided to like that he was being informal.

  “You, too.”

  He gestured at the maître d’, who immediately ushered them to a quiet table for four in the back.

  Nicola was puzzled by that for a moment, until Trick explained, “I like having some elbow room. Hate it when they squeeze me into a little table that has no room.”

  “Me, too,” she agreed sincerely. What she didn’t add was that she, like most of the population, didn’t usually have any choice about such things.

  The waitress filled their water glasses and lingered over drink orders, showing extra attention to Trick, even after he’d ordered and looked away from her. Her lingering drew his attention back long enough for him to say, “That’s all, sweetheart.” It was distinctly dismissive, and even the waitress seemed a little embarrassed as she slunk away.

  “I guess you get that a lot,” Nicola commented, privately feeling horrible for the poor girl.

  “Lazy waitresses? You have no idea.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she was lazy. I think she just recognized you.”

  He sneered. “I ordered a drink, not a blow job. She doesn’t need to stick around for a drink, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Nicola nodded, though she didn’t love the implication that the waitress might have been equally useful giving him the drink or the blow job. But she didn’t let herself get too hung up on the details—he probably just had different turns of phrase.

  This didn’t mean anything really. Not necessarily.

  Their drinks came, and they ordered dinner without anything remarkable happening while the waitress was there or after she left.

  “So . . . that was you in Karaoke Nights, huh?” Trick asked.

  “No, Duet.” Karaoke Nights was a terrible teen comedy, like a bad imitation of A Night at the Roxbury, if such a thing were possible.

  “That’s right.” He shot a finger gun at her and winked. “That’s what I meant. Good flick.”

  Except that he hadn’t seen it. “Thanks.” What could she say now? He didn’t mean what he was saying, so she couldn’t mean what she was saying. This was going to get really old, really fast. “What about you? What are you working on now?”

  “Gamehunter Three. The first two were such huge successes that they begged me to come back for another.” He rubbed his fingers together, indicating a big payout. “So I agreed to help ’em out.”

  She laughed—he had to be kidding, right?—and said, “It’s good to have work in this day and age, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve always got work. Not worried. So tell me something.” He nodded toward her. “You’re an actress. Been around a while. You’ve got your chops.”

  She flushed under his praise, however faint. “I guess so.”

  He picked up his Scotch on the rocks, wiggled it for a moment, then took a sip before asking, “What do you think my best picture is?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My best work. Everyone’s got a different favorite. I’m just wondering what yours is.”

  “Oh.” For a moment, she thought he had to be joking. But he wasn’t. He was including her in the conversation by asking her what she thought of him. “Well. Gamehunter is a good one, for sure.” She figured he was angling for that one since he’d mentioned it. “And, of course, Harvest Moon.” She was careful with that one, in case he suddenly remembered the lovesick girl who was little more than an extra.

  She needn’t have worried.

  “What did you think of me in Dance Fever? Too ripped?” He flexed his bicep, in case there was any doubt as to what he meant. “I don’t want to get a reputation as nothing more than a pretty boy.”

  “Well, no.” Though she gathered he thought of himself that way. “I think people think of you as a really good actor.”

  He swirled his Scotch again and gave a dry laugh. “Brinkman didn’t.” He was referring to Norman Brinkman, a genius director who had started working in the late seventies, with the likes of Martin Scorsese after he’d done Taxi Driver.

  Brinkman was a genius.

  Nicola would have given anything to work with him.

  “You were just great in Choirboy,” she objected. And she meant it. He’d played the angry street kid as if he meant every word. “It was an inspired performance.”

  “Inspired by that guy being a dick.” Trick snorted. “I hated that guy. He had me pissed off the whole time.”

  “Oh. Hm.” She didn’t want to admit it, but if Brinkman had found himself with a talentless egomaniac for a lead, the smartest thing he could have done—and undoubtedly would have done—was just piss him off and keep him pissed off until the cameras stopped rolling.

  The waitress and another server came and put their food down in front of them. Trick had ordered the rib eye steak with mushroom confit in a size so large it would have embarrassed Fred Flintstone, and Nicola had ordered the mint-crusted tuna.

  At least one thing tonight was going to leave a good taste in her mouth.

  “But you like my performance, huh?” Trick was saying. He didn’t acknowledge the servers at all.

  “Yes.” Then more than now. “I did.” She gave the waitress a small smile and nod of thanks as she set the plate down.

  “Tell me more.”

  “More?” Dare she hope he wanted to know more about her? Maybe she’d read him wrong and he wasn’t only thinking about himself and his own achievements. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well . . .” He sawed off a big piece of steak and popped it into his mouth, asking, without chewing first, “What else have you seen of mine?”

  Everything. But she wasn’t about to admit that now. “I’m not sure. What else were you in?” She cut off a small piece of tuna and chewed it with her mouth closed.

  For a moment, his jaw went slack; then he scrutinized her and started to laugh. “You had me going for a minute,” he said, waggling a finger at her. “Pretty good.”

  He had her number. He just didn’t know she wasn’t trying to be funny. “So. I heard you were up for the lead in Duet at first,” she said, trying to rein the conversation into something they might actually have in common, however tenuously. “That’s interesting.”

  “Was I?” He shook his head and put another enormous piece of steak in his mouth. “I get so much shit thrown my way, you know?”

  “I can . . . only imagine.” Said the woman who felt like she’d been turned down for more parts than she’d even auditioned for in the past few years. She poked at her baby spinach salad. “That was the role of my life. It certainly would have been interesting if you’d been in it instead of Robert. I wonder how it would have impacted the success of the film.”

  “Robert?” He looked blank.

  “Robert Dean Zunick.” Even if her name didn’t impress Trick, Bob’s should. “He got the role.”

  “Right.” He nodded, reaching for the steak sauce the waitress had left with their entrées. “Right. Good guy.” He drowned the top-quality Kobe rib eye in steak sauce, hacked off another piece of steak, then nodded appreciatively. “That’s more like it.”

  Given the quality of her tuna entrée, she was pretty sure he’d just basically smothered the best steak he’d ever eaten in what was essentially ketchup, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce.

  The rest of the meal proceeded in pretty much the same way: Trick talked about himself in between mortifyingly huge shovelfuls of food, and every time Nicola tried to inject anything that she thought might be a common interest—or something that took the focus off Trick exclusively for even a moment—he grew noticeably bored.

  At one point, between the end of his steak and the arrival of his fourth Scotch, he even concentrated on cleaning his watch crystal while she told him something about her grandmother.

  That was when Nicola decided she’d had enough.

  There was no question of who got the check. When they were finished eating, Trick just made a we’re outta here gesture at the waitress and got
up. Obviously he had a tab running here, and they didn’t need to be so gauche as to bring a paper for him to sign.

  It worked fine for Nicola. By the end of dinner, she was so sick of him, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to sit through another one of his movies.

  Unless she was in it.

  And at the rate things were going, that seemed about as likely as running into a T. rex on the PCH.

  So no check meant no waiting for a check, which meant no more of this interminable conversation she was having with Trick.

  He held the front door for her to exit. When she turned to say good night, he spoke first.

  “So what do you say we go back to my place and”—he gave a cocky smile and let his implication dangle for a moment before saying—“you know . . .”

  She sighed, not because his proposition was offensive. It wasn’t. If he had been the dream-come-true she’d thought he was, before these past few hours, she would gladly have gone home with him and you know’d until they were exhausted.

  Now she didn’t want to do anything with him. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore, God knew she didn’t want to listen to him anymore, and she definitely didn’t want to go home with him for the honor of, as he’d so eloquently put it earlier tonight, blowing him.

  Or more.

  “Actually, Trick, I’ve got to get back home. I’ve got an early call.” She didn’t. She didn’t have any calls at all at the moment.

  “Aw, come on.” He hooked his hands over her shoulders and drew her close to him. “Just for a little while?”

  Heaven help her, it was tempting. Looking into his eyes from this proximity, the vacancy shaded by the night, she could see the same thing every woman who loved him saw on the silver screen. His face was beautiful; his mouth a sensual curve. If he’d shut the hell up, she might have a chance at falling for the fantasy long enough to enjoy herself.

  But he couldn’t. “Come on, no one says no to the Trickster.”

  “Oh, gross,” she said involuntarily. But at this point, she didn’t care. “I’m sorry,” she lied, “but you can’t say that kind of crap to any girl with an iota of self-respect and expect her to fall into your arms. You’re like a walking, talking when you sleep with someone, you sleep with everyone that person has ever slept with public service announcement.” She crinkled her nose and shook her head. “No thanks.”

  He hesitated for a moment before saying, “Now you’ve really got me goin’.” That smile again. “Come on, just for a little while. I can guarantee you won’t want to go.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. But thanks.” She took her valet ticket out of the outside pocket of her purse and handed it to the guy at the valet podium. She was glad to see he gave it to a runner right away.

  The sooner she got out of here, the better.

  “You are so beautiful,” Trick said, his mouth cocked into a half smile. “If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be wasting my time.”

  If this was what this so-called beauty had bought her, she didn’t want it. Even as recently as a few hours ago, it felt like her new looks had gotten her a ticket to heaven, but now she saw that they had only unlocked a door that should have stayed locked.

  It had been a lot more fun thinking Trick was the hottest guy who’d ever lived than knowing he was a self-referencing egomaniacal dud.

  “You’re wasting your time now,” she said with a wan smile.

  He narrowed his eyes and smiled back. “Ooooh, baby, you’re good at this game.”

  “Thanks.” She was profoundly relieved to see her car rounding the corner and pulling up in front of the restaurant. “And thanks for dinner. I . . . really enjoyed it.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  She said nothing but gave him a brief smile of thanks before going to the driver’s side of her car.

  “Is that Patrick Naylor Jr.?” the valet asked as she slipped him a five.

  “That’s what I’ve been asking myself all night,” she answered. “And now I don’t even know for sure who I am anymore.”

  15

  Lexi carefully lifted the torn lid of the Kinney Shoes box and set it aside. There were some birthday cards, signed by people whose names Lexi didn’t recognize; a few handwritten recipes; about ten playbills; and a “nothing book,” which was a blank book that Anna had used as a journal with messages for Lexi.

  Finding it was like finding the Holy Grail.

  Her mother had written it directly to her, so reading it was as close as she’d ever get to having a conversation with her. But, in some strange way, it did kind of feel like a conversation. As she read, sometimes she smiled, sometimes she cried, she had a million questions, but her frustration that they’d never be answered was overshadowed by the sheer joy of having the journal.

  Anna had evidently begun it when she was pregnant, and it was filled with breezy, meandering entries about the baby clothes she’d just purchased at a yard sale and how an old friend of her mother had given her a windup baby swing and a Johnny Jump Up, and she was trying to imagine the baby who would eventually use them.

  I wonder who you’ll be, she wrote at eight months’ pregnant. A boy? A girl? John (for my father)? Alexis (for yours)? I went to the big consignment sale at the community center today and bought all yellow things because I don’t know. Your dad thinks you’re a boy, but maybe I shouldn’t put this in writing, but I have a hunch you’re a girl. No matter who you are, we just can’t wait to meet you!

  Three days after Lexi was born, the entry said: Well, hello, Lexi! Welcome to the bigger world! Do you have any idea how incredibly much I love you? You are better than I ever imagined, and my heart is more full than I could have dreamed was possible!

  About a year later, an entry began, Hello, sweetheart! You’re asleep in your crib, so I thought I’d take a moment to say hello to the you in the future. We had a long morning of playing Where’s Lexi? with the blanket over your head. You never seem to get tired of that! And your new love is dancing. . . .

  Lexi smiled to herself. It was funny for her to imagine herself ever loving dancing, as she was so laughably bad at it now. She longed for the days when she had been uninhibited and unself-conscious, safe in the world no matter where she went because she was so cushioned by her mother’s love.

  It hadn’t mattered a bit that they were so poor, they had to buy secondhand clothes at a consignment sale and borrow an old crib from a neighbor. To read Anna’s joyful prose, it was hard to believe they’d ever struggled.

  But they had. Later journal entries alluded to the fact that they’d had to move suddenly when they were evicted from an apartment in Gaithersburg and the brief time they’d spent sharing a studio in an old neighborhood in Bethesda.

  Anna hadn’t known then that the hardware her husband and his buddies were working on in the garage would eventually lead to the founding of one of the biggest digital communications corporations in the United States, and that, at least for eleven years or so, she would live on Easy Street.

  Hers was a Cinderella story.

  For a while anyway.

  Then—poof! She was gone. Leaving a beloved daughter without nurturing and a workaholic husband who had no idea how to be a father, much less a single father.

  So what did that make Lexi’s story? What was the opposite of Cinderella?

  Or was she the opposite? To go backwards would imply that she’d experienced hardship before privilege, and that simply wasn’t the case. Lexi had had it easy her whole life.

  Except she hadn’t been like the girls she went to school with, which was difficult sometimes. As a child, she couldn’t have put her finger on the difference exactly; she knew now that she’d been raised with a humility and gratitude that the old Potomac money simply didn’t have.

  Reading the journal now filled in pieces of her life that she might never have understood. Sure, she’d known that Daddy had “made it big” at some point in her early childhood, and there was a house somewhere in Northwest D.C. that had been the
first she’d lived in, as a baby, with her late grandparents. Beyond that, she’d known no details.

  Now she did. Now she knew that her parents had really loved each other. And loved her. Once they’d been a happy family.

  Anna hadn’t actually written that directly, but there was a lightness in her tone, an optimism about the future and about life in general that seemed greater than anything Lexi recalled while her mother was living.

  Then again, the woman had been ill for some time, and most of Lexi’s memories were based on those last couple of years, so the conclusion that poor equals happier probably wasn’t a fair one.

  But emotion wasn’t based on fair. Emotion was based on very faulty intuition much of the time. Lexi knew that. Logically, she knew that.

  Nevertheless, something deep inside her told her that the wealth was the cause of everything bad that had happened in her life. And, though she’d never been determined to throw away her bank account balances and credit cards while her father was alive, she did always suspect that “the other half” wasn’t living so badly.

  According to the journal, Lexi’s mother had worked one summer as a clerk at Tiffany & Co. in New York, living in a tiny studio apartment in Midtown. Though Lexi would have loved to read more details about it, it was interesting that Anna had found the work so satisfying. She loved to go to work every day, she said, loved feeling productive and having that routine.

  It was as if she were speaking to Lexi from the grave.

  So maybe, in some way, it was good that Michelle had kept the money. Morally corrupt, of course, but maybe it was better for Lexi.

  Maybe it was her only shot at finding out what happiness really felt like.

  In the past, whenever Lexi had needed a little pick-me-up, she’d gone to the mall and done some shopping. It almost always helped, at least temporarily. Clothes, shoes, accessories, all those things provided the needed lift, in varying degrees.

  But the cosmetic counters were the best. Intricately shaped and painted bottles, glistening lids, fancy fonts and poetic descriptions of the miracles contained within. She loved the feel of those packages in her hand, the smell of the creams and perfumes, the taste of lip glosses. In many ways, it was better than sex, though she was aware that might speak more to the quality of her former boyfriends than to sex on the whole.