Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  Hugh peeled his knee off the knee of his seatmate yet again and watched parched brown hills pass beneath the plane. Soon the head flight attendant told them they should secure their tray tables and return their seat backs to a fully upright and locked position; and if those on the right-hand side of the plane looked out the window they would see the world-famous Hollywood sign as they made their final descent into hell.

  RUTH SPOTTED HUGH FIRST. HE CAME OUT OF THE TERMINAL and into the outdoor baggage claim area in a thicket of businessmen and Paris Hilton look-alikes wearing shoes from which you could fall to your death. Hugh hadn’t seen them yet—he seemed to be trying to extricate himself from a tangle of wheeled carry-ons—and Ruth was stunned by his appearance. He was visibly sweating and his hair was sticking up in the back and his skin tone was gray. Had he always looked like this, and she’d just gotten used to it? Her mind’s-eye view of Bethany was always a year or so out of date…. Anyway the moment passed as Hugh caught sight of Bethany. His face lit up and he was, once more, just Hugh.

  Bethany squealed, sprinted to him, and threw her arms around his neck. He dropped his carry-on, wrapped his arms around her, lifted her a few inches off the ground, closed his eyes, and breathed her in. “How’s my sweetie-girl?”

  “Daddy, we have so much to show you!”

  With Bethy clinging to his right arm and his carry-on slung around behind him, Hugh put his left arm around Ruth and gave her a hug. They walked awkwardly, all three of them locked together that way, until Bethy caught her arm on the strap of Hugh’s carry-on bag and he lost his balance and veered into Ruth and they came apart.

  Once they were in the car, Hugh said he was starving, so Ruth and Bethany, in a spirit of hyperfestivity, agreed that they had to take him to Bob’s Big Boy immediately, even before they off-loaded his suitcase at the apartment. Hugh had been here just once before, when Ruth and Bethy first moved into their little apartment. He’d stayed for only a day, and they hadn’t spent any of it sightseeing, unless you counted the inside of Mimi Roberts’s studio as a sight.

  “Daddy,” Bethany said from the backseat, “you’re just going to love it here so much. We need to take him to the Disney building, Mom, so he can see the seven dwarfs holding up the roof, and there’s an iron fence around it that has these things—”

  “Finials,” said Ruth.

  “—that are shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. And there’s this older Disney building, too—it’s where they do animation—and part of it is shaped like a huge wizard’s hat, blue with stars, right, Mom, like from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice?”

  “Right,” said Ruth, and smiled at Hugh: Do you see how much she loves it here?

  “Oh, and tomorrow we should take him to Poquito Mas—it’s a restaurant near us and they have this sign, Daddy, that if you see someone famous you should respect their privacy because taking their picture is rude. Mom and I like to eat there sometimes. We haven’t seen anyone famous, but we probably will soon.”

  Ruth made a turn onto Alameda. Below the overpass, evening traffic clogged the 134. Ruth indicated the mess down there with a slight inclination of her chin. Hugh looked down and shook his head. Bethy just kept on talking.

  “And we really want you to see where I audition, Daddy, even though we probably won’t be able to go in because if it’s on a studio lot you have to have permission, and you can only get permission from your agent or manager, and Mimi said she’d get us on a list only if I was really auditioning for something, and you hardly ever do, on a Saturday.”

  Ruth could see in the rearview mirror that Bethany’s coloring was high, her eyes sparkling. She looked at Hugh, looked in the mirror at Bethy, looked back at Hugh: How can you think this isn’t worth doing? Look at her! She couldn’t judge Hugh’s frame of mind, though. He seemed subdued. She felt a pang of guilt: he’d been back there in Seattle, alone and in the damp, while she and Bethy had been down here in LA having the time of their lives. She said to Bethany, “Honey, let’s give Daddy a minute or two of quiet, okay?”

  “Okay.” Bethany subsided momentarily. “Oh! But Daddy, guess who we saw at Starbucks the other day? You’ll never guess.” Then she paused to let him guess. He couldn’t.

  “Nicole Richie! She was right there in front of Mom. She looked just like herself, too—I mean, she wasn’t all made up and stuff and she was just wearing these old jeans and carrying a huge purse like you could carry a whole computer in, except then this dog pops out, I think it was a teacup Yorkie, lots of people have them here—”

  “Breathe,” said Ruth.

  “—and anyway, she looked just like a real person, but it was definitely Nicole Richie. We saw Kyra Sedgwick pulling out of the parking lot one time at Ralphs, too. She was driving this regular old car. What was it, Mom?”

  Ruth just raised her eyebrows in the rearview mirror. Bethany had recently started asking gratuitous questions just to sound grown-up. Ruth felt the faint but distinct call of a headache coming on.

  “Whatever,” Bethy said. “The thing is, you never know who you might see. I mean, you can be just standing in line at Sav-On or wherever, and boom, right behind you there’s Will Smith. It’s so exciting.”

  Bethany sat forward and said to Hugh, “How come you aren’t saying anything? Are you tired?”

  “I’m fine,” Hugh said.

  “You don’t seem fine. You aren’t saying anything. Neither of you is saying anything.”

  “I was listening, honey,” Hugh said. “But you weren’t leaving a whole lot of extra leg room in the conversation. So I was listening. I’m still listening.”

  Bethany chewed a nail. “You don’t even really want us here, do you?”

  “Did I say that? I didn’t hear me say that.”

  “Well, you don’t. I know you don’t,” said Bethany.

  And then they were at Bob’s, where the weekly Friday evening gathering of classic cars was well under way in the parking lot. Luckily the wait inside was brief and they were seated at one of Ruth and Bethany’s favorite booths near the front of the restaurant, where they could watch people come in. Their waiter was the shy Hispanic man who never showed any sign of remembering them, except that Ruth was sure he did because she made a point of always making eye contact with him and saying “please” and “thank you,” which she doubted most other people did. She had the absurd urge to introduce Hugh, so he’d know she wasn’t some sad woman adrift in a sea of single, fat, middle-aged women.

  While they ate their burgers—Bethy had insisted they all get burgers—Ruth and Hugh made small talk about what one of his dental hygienists had named her new baby and how the annual pumpkin pyramid in front of the Queen Anne Albertsons had been destroyed by a nighttime vandal, spreading orange gore from the Halloween massacre on streets and sidewalks for blocks around. Hugh said the Neighborhood Watch committee thought it had a credible lead, and the police said they hoped to arrest a suspect by Monday; and Ruth said, “Well, sure,” and then Hugh turned to Bethy and asked whether hearing about home made her want to go back.

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Ah,” said Hugh.

  “Why?”

  “I just thought it might.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” Bethany said emphatically, and she made a production of sucking up the dregs of her milk shake, and then Ruth caught the eye of their gentle waiter and asked for the check. For some reason, as he set the slip down on the table in front of her, Ruth touched his hand and held it there for just a minute. He looked at her, alarmed, and she managed to smile as though all she’d meant was to say thank you when she didn’t really know why she’d done it, hadn’t planned to do it at all.

  HUGH, STRUGGLING TO PULL HIS WALLET OUT OF HIS pants pocket, hadn’t even seen the waiter put the bill on the table. Out of the blue he was recalling the phone conversation he’d had with his mother a couple of days earlier, when he’d mentioned that he would be coming down to LA for the weekend. The exact words he’d used were, “I’ll be leaving fo
r a couple of days. I have some things to talk over with Ruth.”

  “You’re getting a divorce?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “There’s no shame in it.”

  “I know there’s no shame in it.”

  “I read in the Times the other day that they even have an expression for it now. Starter marriage.”

  “We’re not getting a divorce. It’s not a starter marriage.”

  “She’s in LA. You’re here. And this is till death do you part?”

  “You know why she’s there, Mom. It’s as much of a sacrifice for her as it is for me.”

  “So when are they coming back?”

  When, indeed. Helene Rabinowitz let an eloquent moment of silence go by and said, “There’s my point.”

  Hugh was increasingly aware of the flaw in their thinking: if Bethy did well—and Ruth was prepared to do whatever it took for her to do well—she wouldn’t be coming home, potentially not for five years or even more, if she stayed in Hollywood the way most of the working kids did, and fit college around their work and audition schedules. Ruth would be coming home for holidays and the occasional vacation; and the more successful Bethy became—and he would admit that she could be successful if she got the right break—the fewer of these there would be. Hugh could just picture the increasingly strained conversations between them; the fewer and fewer shared moments to pore over, until the marriage didn’t so much die as gutter out.

  And yet, to leave his practice for one in Los Angeles would be financially suicidal. They needed every penny he was earning right now to stoke the ruinous bonfire that was Hollywood. Clothes that Ruth swore were necessary to clinch an audition. Haircuts and eyebrow-shaping and facial waxing that cost more every month than they would have spent in Seattle to coif the entire family. The never-ending classes and showcases and coaching upon which Mimi Roberts insisted. The higher car insurance and cost of automobile maintenance. The apartment. By his rough accounting, if the wholesale purchase of goods and services kept to its present level—and Hugh hadn’t seen any sign that it would let up—they would be spending between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars a year. In cash. Indefinitely.

  When Hugh was in LA the last time, another studio father who sold boiled peanuts for a living had calmly told Hugh that he’d spent somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars so far to launch his daughter’s acting career. At the time, Hugh had thought the man was a cracker and a blowhard, but now he could see that he had just been honest.

  So Hugh had privately begun to peruse online listings for dental practices that were taking on new dentists. He could hire a young dentist to take over his own Seattle practice for a few months—six months, a year—and if he told his patients that it was strictly temporary, they’d stay with him, he was reasonably sure. He’d been treating some of them for twenty years now—twenty years!—and they were used to him. They’d wait. He wouldn’t buy into the LA practice, of course, so he wouldn’t make much money, but the Seattle practice would meet its expenses even with a 15 percent patient attrition rate, if he paid the fill-in dentist less than he had been paying himself, which he was sure he could get away with. The arrangement wouldn’t work in the long run, but temporarily it would do. They’d never touch Bethy’s earnings to defray their expenses, of course, if there ever were any earnings, which Ruth kept assuring them there would be—big earnings, potentially. These they would put into Bethy’s college fund. Still, he could see how not only less scrupulous but also more financially strapped parents than he and Ruth were could easily burn through a child’s money. Just yesterday Ruth had told him on the phone about a boy Bethy’s age who’d made a quarter of a million dollars in one year by making lots of commercials. The kid popped up on TV ads all the time; even Hugh recognized him now. Freckles, shaggy haircut, weak chin, lippy manner. Who knew homely could pay so well? Ruth had said the kid and his family lived in a condo just a block from the ocean in Santa Monica. One more year like this one, the mother had told Ruth, and they’d bring the whole family out from Tucson. Four kids and a husband and they’d all be able to live off the kid’s wages, at least until the dad got his feet on the ground. On the other hand, Ruth had told Hugh some horror stories about families that had given up everything to come to Hollywood and their kids had never hit, or had given up the business, and they’d ended up bankrupt. Bankrupt! Putting that on a kid’s shoulders was more than Hugh could imagine.

  But for now all of this was strictly theoretical. For now he kept going to work and cleaning and drilling and filling and repairing and replacing the teeth for which he’d trained all those years, and it was satisfying work and for that he was grateful.

  AFTER THEY’D FINISHED AT BOB’S AND RUTH HAD DRIVEN them by the Disney headquarters and animation studio (“Let Mom drive so you can see!” Bethy had insisted to Hugh), Ruth pulled into their designated parking space in the alley behind their dumpy building and helped Hugh get his carry-on out of the trunk.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I can do it. I can do a lot of things by myself now.”

  “I know you can,” Ruth said, mildly annoyed. “I just thought I’d help.” She stalked ahead of him and Bethy, rattling their apartment key.

  “This is the pool,” Bethy said to Hugh as they skirted the swimming pool in the courtyard of their apartment building. “I mean, duh.”

  “I remember,” Hugh said. “Do you swim much?”

  “Not here,” Bethany said. “Look at it—it’s gross. I heard someone found a dead rat in it the other day.”

  Hugh just raised his eyebrows.

  “Please let us move to the Oakwood, Daddy,” she said. “Oh, please, please, pretty please? I mean, you wouldn’t need to give me a single present for Hanukkah or Christmas or my next birthday or anything, if we could just get an apartment at the Oakwood.”

  Ruth looked back and saw Hugh inhale and, for just a moment, close his eyes. “Let’s not talk about this right now, honey,” Ruth said.

  “You guys don’t even care if I swim in a gross pool with a dead rat in it—”

  “Bethany,” Ruth warned.

  “—even though I could get tetanus or rabies or dengue fev—”

  Ruth wheeled around and snapped, “Enough. That’s enough from you.”

  Bethany burst into tears and Ruth couldn’t get the damned apartment door unlocked, and Hugh took the keys from her and got the door open just as Bethany shrieked, “You don’t even care about me.” Hugh just sighed, and since there was nowhere to go inside the little apartment to get away from each other, Ruth turned on the old TV and they had the lights out by eight forty-five.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING BETHANY WAS CHEERFUL AGAIN—she wasn’t a child who held grudges, God be praised—and Hugh looked more rested in spite of the lumpy mattress. They had him drive them over the hill to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, where he treated them to crepes and they caught a glimpse of someone who might have been Zach Braff. On their way back, they drove through Laurel Canyon so Bethy could show Hugh the two-million-dollar dream home that had slid down the hill in a mudslide and was now in pieces, pressed up against a chain-link fence with gang tags spray-painted all over it. “I saw this TV special about how all the hills around LA are unstable, and they had the owner on it and he was crying,” Bethany said. “He said it took them two years to build it, and then it fell down the hill after they’d only been in it for, like, three months or something.”

  “Well, it’s a terrible thing to lose a home,” Hugh said.

  Bethany said, “One of my friends here—her name is Allison—doesn’t really have a home. Her mom moved in with her boyfriend and then they got married and they have this room that they call the guest room even when Allison is back there living in it. So she lives at Mimi’s.”

  “Mimi Roberts boards kids?” Hugh said to Ruth, appalled.

  “Sure,” Bethany chirped from the backseat. “Their parents live in like Ohio or Arkansas or wherever. It’s kind of all right, though, bec
ause they get lots of spending money and they can buy whatever they want at the 7-Eleven and stuff. Hillary—she lives with Mimi, too—bought six Snickers bars one day. We told her she shouldn’t eat them because she’ll get fat—well, that’s what Allison said—but Hillary just said tough titties.”

  “Bethany,” Ruth warned.

  “What?”

  “That’s vulgar.”

  Bethany shrugged. “So anyways, she ate them all and then she threw up and now she says she’s never eating another Snickers bar for the rest of her life, and I bet she won’t.”

  “You don’t even want to know what those things do to your teeth,” Hugh said. “I could tell you some stories.”

  Bethany turned to look out the window. Hugh was always offering to tell them some stories. In his view, the dental landscape was a slippery slope that led straight to bridgework and periodontics. Now all he said was, “I’ll show you the x-rays sometime.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bethany said.

  They agreed that Hugh would take Bethany to an acting class while Ruth stayed at the apartment and did laundry in the creepy laundry room. She refused to go there after dark, and their days were all packed, so she and Bethy were down to their last sets of underwear. Bethany’s class was a special four-hour one with a guest teacher who was a former child star.

  “Four hours—the kids are going to be in this class for four hours?” Hugh said when they told him.

  “It’s important, Daddy,” Bethy assured him. “It’s on audition skills and redirects and cold-reading and stuff.”

  “And those are things you can’t learn on your own?”

  “Not really.”

  “This is according to Mimi, I presume,” he said to Ruth.

  “It’s very basic,” Ruth said. “Every client has to take it. Bethy’s lucky because there isn’t a boot camp going on right now, so it’s a small class.”