Sympathy for the Devil

by Christine Pope

  Sure enough, she showed up looking drop-dead in a pair of skinny jeans tucked into tight boots and an extravagant chocolate-colored suede jacket with a fur collar.

  “Nice,” I commented, when I opened the door and saw her ensemble. “Very JLo. I hope that’s faux.”

  “Of course it’s faux,” she replied, sailing on past me. “I know better than to wear real fur in this town.”

  I didn’t bother to reply, but just gathered up my bag, clipped the press photo ID to my lapel, and then gave her the extra pass. Her gaze fell on the half-empty box of Godiva chocolates that still sat on the coffee table. I’d forgotten to put it back in the kitchen after my binge of the night before.

  “Self-medicating, I see,” she remarked.

  “Well, it’s cheaper than crack,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Nina said. “But whatever. If that’s the worst thing you’ve done since the two of you fought, I suppose you’re doing okay.” Her expression sobered. “I’m guessing you still haven’t heard from him.”

  “No.” And I don’t think I’m going to, either, I thought. Surely he would have called me or come to see me by now if he were going to at all. That hurt now just as much as it did the first time I had thought it, but I knew I couldn’t dissolve into a mess right then. I had a job to do.

  Nina gave me a hard look, and nodded slightly. I knew then that she wouldn’t bring the subject up again. If I wanted to talk about Luke, fine, she’d be there for me, but she’d known me long enough to understand that I tended to keep things inside. I’d never had much patience for the long angst-fests some of my friends indulged in every time they went through a breakup, even though some of those relationships had lasted only a few weeks. My one indulgence had been after Brad and I split up; in my defense, I had really thought I’d found the person I could spend a significant amount of time with, if not the rest of my life. Most of the time, though, the endless discussions and second-guessing that followed a breakup just seemed like an invasion of privacy to me, and my attitude hadn’t changed much over the years. Did I really want someone else, even my closest friend, to know all the details of the thousand and one ways I’d died inside since last Friday night?

  In silence I let the two of us out. Nina had offered to drive, and I’d accepted, since that would be one less thing for me to worry about. Twice during the preceding several days I’d almost rear-ended someone in the lurching traffic on Wilshire just because I’d been brooding over Luke and not paying attention. The last thing I needed tonight was to get in an accident while I was technically on the company clock. That would open up a whole legal can of worms I didn’t think I had the energy to deal with at the moment.

  The festival was being held in Hollywood at the Arclight complex, which was a large theater and restaurant built around what used to be a dome-style movie palace. The dome still existed, although completely refurbished and updated, but around it had been constructed a high-end multiplex that was sometimes put to use as a venue for premieres and festivals. The girls and I loved the Arclight because it had this great institution known as “21+ Screenings,” which we referred to as “alcoholic cinema.” Basically, if you were twenty-one or over, you could buy a drink in the bar and take it into the theater with you. More than one craptastic movie had been made bearable by this wonderful innovation. We kept wondering when it was going to catch on with other theater chains.

  However, there wouldn’t be any alcoholic cinema for me tonight. Roger wasn’t expecting a huge piece on the festival — an opening spread, with a couple of partial pages to follow — but I still had to keep an eye out for any possible interview subjects, as well as generally observing the ebb and flow of the crowd and paying attention to which films had buzz and which didn’t. I briefly hooked up with Lee Chiang, our photographer, and he informed me that Sofia Coppola was definitely there — he’d already gotten a few shots of her, and said that I should try to snag her for a few choice quotes whenever she reappeared. I nodded, then went back to circling the venue and hoping I didn’t look as awkward as I felt.

  Nina proved to be a great resource. She was a lot more sociable than I, and I watched her work the crowd and gather up some valuable intel while I was studiously taking notes on the films being shown and who had attended (and who hadn’t).

  The glaring lights of a TV crew off to one side caught my attention. I turned to see who they were interviewing, and it turned out to be Emma Stone. She looked amazing — and a lot smaller in person. I jotted some more notes in my little book, including several all-important details of her outfit, such as the impossibly skinny jeans, jeweled sandals, and beaded camisole, all of which wouldn’t have been very appropriate for Los Angeles in mid-February if it weren’t for the enormous turquoise shawl she had flung over one shoulder.

  Then Nina came bounding up and said she had a possible Eva Longoria sighting down one hallway. “I’ll come back with a full report,” she added, then took off again, eyes glowing and hair bouncing. She reminded me of a kid on an Easter-egg hunt.

  “You know that girl?” came a voice at my ear, and I turned to see an unfamiliar man, the sort of slick, attractive, well-dressed type that L.A. churns out in droves, staring thoughtfully after Nina.

  “She’s one of my best friends,” I responded.

  “Is she a model? Or an actress?”

  “No,” I replied. “She’s the manager of a gallery in Santa Monica.”

  “Amazing,” he said. “She has the sort of face that should be on camera.”

  True, but I knew that Nina couldn’t care less about modeling or acting. She’d done some modeling back in high school, just local shows and a bit of print work, but she’d told me frankly that she hated it. “I never knew something could be so hard and so boring at the same time,” she’d grumbled once to me, when the ten-thousandth person had asked why she wasn’t a professional model.

  “I don’t think she’s really interested in that sort of thing,” I added. I figured it was nothing more than the truth.

  “That’s just because she’s never had the proper representation,” he replied. He fished in the pocket of his Italian dress shirt for a card case and pulled it out, then retrieved a business card and handed it to me.

  The card identified him as one Allan D’Alessandro. He didn’t look very Italian to me, but whatever. However, I did recognize the agency — it was one of the biggest in L.A. It appeared that Nina had pulled someone of importance into her slipstream.

  “Aren’t models supposed to be in their late teens or early twenties?” I asked. “Nina’s almost twenty-eight.”

  He waved a hand. “These days age isn’t so important,” he said. “Besides, I could easily pass her off as twenty-two, twenty-three. Has she ever had acting lessons?”

  “Um…I don’t think so.” I didn’t know whether to be irritated or amused. Here I was at my first big reporting assignment, right in the middle of a happening Hollywood event, and instead of interviewing a celebrity or talking to one of the event organizers, I was playing pimp for Nina. It figured.

  At that moment she came loping across the foyer area, curls bouncing. “False alert,” she said. “But I did see Kathy Griffin.”

  “I’ll make a note of it,” I replied. “Oh, Nina, this is Allan D’Alessandro. He’s an agent.”

  I could see a look of puzzled curiosity pass over her features, but she didn’t have time to say anything before he cut in, “You have an amazing look, Nina. Have you ever thought about pursuing representation?”

  “I’m not an actress,” she said, her tone dubious.

  He smiled, showing perfectly bleached teeth. Or maybe they were caps. “Acting can be taught. But it’s a lot more difficult to fake looks like yours.”

  Nina lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Really,” he assured her. He barely glanced over at me as he said, “You don’t mind if I borrow your friend for a while, do you?”

  “Hey, she’s a free agent,” I replied.
Then I shot her a look that said, I can help you get rid of this guy if you want.

  Surprisingly, though, she said, “Why don’t you buy me a drink, and we can discuss it?”

  “Deal.”

  So they went off, and left me to stand there and stare after them with a look (I was sure) of baffled amazement on my features. Maybe Nina just hadn’t pursued the whole acting thing because she hadn’t gotten a good enough offer.

  Still, I felt more than a little abandoned, a feeling that was mitigated slightly by the fact that right after they left, I turned around and almost knocked over Sofia Coppola, who’s actually very tiny in person. She also turned out to be extremely gracious, answering my (to me, anyway) clumsy questions with care and thought. It turned out that we had a sort of mini-interview right then and there; about five minutes later she begged my pardon and said she had to move on, but that it was very nice to talk to me and she looked forward to reading my article.

  That encounter helped to salvage the evening. I felt as if I hadn’t made a complete idiot of myself, and I did get some good material. Then I met up with one of the organizers of the event, an intense redhead named Louise Steinberg, and we chatted for a while about emerging women directors and the importance of developing complex roles for women of all ages.

  Between those two discussions and the notes I had taken earlier in the evening, I was pretty sure I had more than enough information to fill up the three and a half pages Roger had allotted for my article. Nina, however, was nowhere in sight, and I wasn’t quite desperate (or mean) enough to pry her out of the bar yet.

  Still, that left me rather at loose ends. I thought about ducking into one of the theaters and actually watching a segment of one of the films entered in the festival, but I worried that Nina wouldn’t be able to find me if I disappeared like that.

  I stood in the center of the lobby, irresolute, and then heard a half-familiar voice call out my name. “Christa?”

  So I turned, and found myself looking at probably the last person I thought I would have ever seen at the Arclight. He’d filled out a little bit over the intervening years, but I still would have known him anywhere.

  “Brad?” I responded, wondering what the hell he was doing here. Last I’d heard, he’d settled in the Bay Area permanently after getting his masters in anthropology at Stanford.

  His gaze was frankly admiring. “You look incredible,” he said, as if he hadn’t dumped me all those years ago and left me to brave UCLA on my own.

  “Thanks,” I replied, and was suddenly glad I’d spent that extra ten minutes in front of the mirror before Nina arrived at my apartment.

  “So what are you doing here?” he asked.

  I lifted my press ID badge. “I work for SoCal magazine,” I said. “But what are you doing here?”

  “Good for you,” he said, after looking at the badge and giving me an approving nod. “As for me — that’s kind of a long story. You got a few minutes?”

  “Probably more than that,” I answered, since Nina still appeared to be MIA.

  “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

  I hesitated. After all, there had been a lot of weirdness in my life lately, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the reappearance of the one true flame from my college years. Then again, I was dying to know what the hell he was doing here, of all places. “Sure,” I said at last. “As long as it’s decaf.”

  We wandered over to the restaurant/bar that occupied the far end of the lobby area and managed to snag the last unoccupied booth. As the hostess led us to our seats, we passed Nina and Allan D’Alessandro, who appeared to be in the middle of a hard sell. When Brad and I walked by their table, however, Nina’s gaze flickered upward and then froze as she recognized who my companion was. Her mouth dropped, and I shot her a seraphic smile. For once it was fun to be the one flummoxing Nina instead of always the other way around.

  Brad and I sat down, and then there was an awkward silence as we both tried to gaze at one another without appearing to outright stare. Finally I shook my head. “You know, it’s sort of freaking me out to see you here.”

  “Believe me, I know.” Brad gave me a rueful smile. “It’s probably not the sort of place you’d expect me to turn up.”

  I nodded.

  “I guess it started after my father died — I don’t know if you heard about that or not.”

  “No,” I said. I’d met Brad’s father a few times, and he’d seemed like a genuinely nice person, and someone who was far too young and vital to have passed away so soon. “I’m sorry to hear about that.”

  A shadow seemed to move across Brad’s hazel eyes, that dusky mixture of green and brown and gold I remembered so well. “It was pretty rough. Pancreatic cancer. He only had about three months from diagnosis to — well, you know.”

  I winced. That had to be one of the worst ways to go. And for it to happen to as good a man as Brad’s father had appeared to be — well, it was the sort of thing that made you start to question what the hell God really was up to with the world.

  “Anyway,” Brad went on. Someone who didn’t know him well would have thought he seemed somewhat detached from the situation, but I could see the tension in his hands as they wrapped around the menu, the downward droop at the right corner of his mouth. “He told me something right before he died. He told me to make a difference in the world, to follow my dreams and help other people follow theirs as well. That’s why I’m here.”

  A little puzzled, I stared back at him. The Brad I remembered certainly wasn’t into film, except in a casual “going to the movies on the weekend” sort of way. I hadn’t expected him to be dabbling in filmmaking. “So you’re directing or producing?” I asked.

  “Producing, sort of,” he replied. “When he got ill, my father sold his company. Made a huge profit. I decided to take my share and use it to help finance independent productions, give a leg up to talented people who couldn’t get the time of day from the studios because their stuff wasn’t mainstream enough.”

  Well, that sounded more like Brad. Although he certainly wasn’t as rabid as my mother about such things, he’d had a strong crusading streak and was always donating his spare cash to various causes. What got him started in independent film I had no idea — after all, we hadn’t seen each other for almost seven years — but I had to admit there were worse ways for him to be spending his money. In fact, awful as it might sound, I thought he would work really well as an interviewee for a sidebar to my article, one that gave some insight into the financial side of the small filmmaker.

  “So one of your films is entered in the festival?” I asked, wishing there were a polite way for me to pick up my pen and start taking notes.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been working with this amazing documentary filmmaker, Madeleine Czerny. She’s really passionate, really dedicated.”

  Ludicrous as it might sound, I started to feel a little jealous. Somehow I sort of doubted that Brad had ever used those words to describe me. But I just made an approving sound so he would go on.

  “Anyway, I don’t know if you noticed her film on the program or not. It’s called Yesterday’s Heroes, and it’s about the walking wounded coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, about the psychological and physical difficulties they face, their problems dealing with the bureaucracy and the VA. I mean, these people risked their lives going over there for a bogus war, and then they got cheated by the same government that lied to them in the first place. When you hear some of these stories — ” He broke off suddenly, and then gave a self-deprecating shake of the head. “Sorry — I tend to get the bit between my teeth and then keep going when I start talking about this stuff.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I think it’s great that you get to do something you really care about. In fact — ” I hesitated, then figured the hell with it. After all, I was here to gather material for an article. “Would you mind if I took a few notes for my article? Do I have your permission to quote you?”

  “Um — sure
,” Brad replied, looking a little taken aback. Then his expression cleared, and he added, “The extra exposure would be great.”

  At that moment the waitress showed up to take our orders. I ordered a decaf café au lait, and Brad asked for a cappuccino.

  While he was ordering, I pulled my pad and pen out of my bag and jotted down a few notes. It felt more than a little weird to be interviewing my former boyfriend for the piece, but this was my job now; I needed to be a little more thick-skinned. The waitress left, and I asked, “So how does this financing work? Do you sort of let it be known that you’re willing to support these projects, or do you actually seek out aspiring filmmakers to lend them a hand?”

  “A little of both,” he said. “In Maddy’s case, I actually knew her fiancé — he and I went to Stanford together.”

  A wave of inexplicable relief washed over me. So Brad’s relationship with this Madeleine person had to be strictly professional. Then I wanted to smack myself. Why the hell should I care what was going on in Brad’s personal life? Wasn’t I still trying to work through the sudden derailment of my relationship with Luke?

  Trying to hide my confusion, I stared down at the notepad and kept scribbling. I heard Brad say,

  “I didn’t really ask you to have a cup of coffee with me so we could talk business, though.”

  “Oh?” I said, and finally looked up, only to see him watching me with the earnest, level stare I remembered so well.

  “No,” he replied. “I’ve missed you, Christa.”

  Despite myself, I could feel a little flicker of hope stir somewhere deep inside. Maybe I could still salvage something from the wreckage of my love life. A long time ago, when I had been in one of my long dry spells between relationships, Nina told me my real problem was that I wouldn’t let myself get over Brad. “You keep building him up as this dream boyfriend, but he left,” she’d said. “I don’t care if he was Prince Charming and JFK Jr. rolled into one — he’s gone.” At the time I’d almost hated Nina for that bit of brutal honesty, but I’d had to admit to myself she was right, even though I’d never say it to her face. I’d forced myself to move on after that, telling myself over and over that it was done, he was four hundred miles away, east was east and west was west and never the twain shall meet, and all that. It had almost worked.