A-List #10, The: California Dreaming: An A-List Novel (A-List)

by Zoey Dean

  Love,Dad

  That was it. She hadn't shed even a tear last night, not in the worst of it, nor when she'd stepped into the international-arrivals terminal to be reunited with her father, Sam, and Eduardo. Crying in public was another banned activity in the This Is How We Do Things Big Book.

  But now, reading her father's words, here alone in the kitchen, the tears came. And she let them. When she was finished, she wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then rubbed her temples and took a deep breath.

  Her dad had thought of everything, and thankfully there were tissues on the tray. The food that Mimi had left for her was simple: fresh fruit salad with diced mangoes and peaches, yogurt dotted with pistachio nuts, and herb-stuffed grape leaves. There was a miniature baguette fragrant with dill on the breadboard. She suddenly realized she was ravenous. She finished it all, slathering the bread with mounds of soft butter, relishing every bite and swallowing like it was her last meal on earth.

  The midnight walk out to the gazebo had the same otherworldly quality. The fresh-cut grass smelled wonderful and tickled her bare feet. A few crickets chirped off toward the swimming pool, and an insomniac mockingbird sang in the branches of the eucalyptus tree. She took in everything. The gaslights that illuminated her path. The tennis court, the swimming pool, the hot tub, the shuffleboard court, and the barbecue pit. Her father's estate was one of the rare ones in Beverly Hills with lots of land around it--it was so easy to take that for granted, too.

  "Anna." As promised, her father was waiting for her in the New England-style wooden gazebo, large enough to seat twenty. He wore a crisp white Lacoste polo and khakis. His feet were bare like hers. Shadows from the gaslights danced across his handsome, smiling face. Directly above them was an enormous eucalyptus tree.

  "Good morning," she responded.

  He laughed. "It's not morning, but it doesn't matter."

  He patted the bench. She sat. He just stared at her. She knew why, but she still didn't know what to say.

  "You saw my note?" She nodded slightly.

  "You ate?"

  "I ate."

  "You're sore?"

  "Worse than I've ever been in my life."

  "There was Advil. That should help. ..." He trailed off. "Someone once said that nothing focuses the mind like one's impending doom. I could say the same thing for the impending doom of your children. Did I ever tell you about your mother's and my experience in France? We were on a TGV from Paris to Lyon, and there was a bomb scare on our train. Very nerve-racking for most of the passengers, though the conductor just kept going, since the next station was just five kilometers away. Your mother simply raised a finger to summon a waiter into our stateroom and asked that the next martini be dry with an extra olive." He smiled at her. "But of course, nothing compares to what you went through. I could spend the next twenty-four hours just staring at your face."

  Anna looked at her father in wonderment, still not quite sure what to say. This was another side of Jonathan Percy. Most of the time, he was an ambitious, driven businessman wearing Savile Row power suits and moving tens of millions of dollars of other people's money around. Off the clock, in his most private moments, he was a closet stoner with a three-day growth of beard and a Peter Pan "I never want to grow up" complex that Anna found more annoying than charming.

  But now? In the aftermath of last night? He seemed like a different man entirely. A father.

  "How did you happen to end up on a plane to Bali in the first place?" he asked as he ran his fingers through his spiky brown hair distractedly. "When Sam called to tell me you were on that plane--well, after she told me, I was so freaked that I pretty much didn't hear anything else."

  How to explain? That she'd gone because of a wonderful boy she'd known since she was a kid but had only now rediscovered? That seeing Ben kissing Cammie at the club had made her want to flee as far as she could get, as fast as she could get there? Or the reason that sounded most ridiculous of all: she hadn't enjoyed the Yale freshman mixer back in New York.

  "It sounds ridiculous now, but ... I went with Logan on a whim."

  "That's an awful long way to go on a whim," Jonathan noted, but he seemed more amused than angry. "When were you planning to come back? What about Yale?"

  Ah, yes, what about Yale? She was due to report for freshman orientation in a week. She'd met her roommate, Contessa, a published poet and self-admitted sex addict from Horace Mann, who managed to be both stridently competitive and "I'm not part of your fascist power structure" at the same time. They had not clicked. But this wasn't the time to discuss that. Too much. Too fast.

  "I'd have been back in time to go to school," she fibbed. "I just needed to get away for a while." She leaned back on the uncomfortable gazebo bench and stared out at the elegant house, built by her grandparents in the 1950s. It was massive, white stucco with red shutters, shaded by giant palm and eucalyptus trees. It was strange to think that after all these months of calling it home, from now on she might not see it more than once a year.

  "I can understand that. So what now? Another, um, flight to Bali?"

  "Would you be eager to jump on the next jet?" she asked, arching a blond eyebrow with a smile. "And can we put this discussion of Yale, trips, and the like off for twenty-four hours? All I want to do is breathe."

  Her dad laughed, then reached down and scratched a bare ankle. "Consider it put off. Damn, I love being barefoot. It's hard to stay in the moment. Or at least it's always been hard for me. I always want the next thing and the next thing. And then it turns out the next thing I thought I wanted is never the thing I actually want."

  She was curious. "So what is it you do want?"

  It was very quiet in the yard. Anna thought she could hear the faint chirp of crickets. The moon glowed brightly above them.

  "The summer I was twenty," her father finally said, "a buddy of mine took off on this tramp steamer to the South Seas. Fiji, or American Samoa, I don't exactly remember. He was going to do volunteer work in these native villages. Build a school. Teach English. This guy--Darren Chesterfield--his dad was a senior partner at Bear Stearns and owned about half of East Seventy-fourth street between Madison and Park Avenues. He could have done anything he wanted. He invited me along." Her father got a faraway look in his eyes, and he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I thought about it. The adventure. The feeling that I'd be doing something more important with my summer than smoking reefer and getting into trouble." His eyes flicked to her. "But I decided not to go."

  "Where is Darren now?" Anna asked. She swatted at a couple of gnats that were circumnavigating her head.

  "He ended up in Appalachia, in a town called Haggertsville, something like that. He's a teacher there. I hear from him now and then. He's really happy."

  "Aren't you happy?" Anna asked, leaning forward on the gazebo bench and looking at her father intently.

  He didn't answer right away. "I would like to matter," he finally responded. "I can't tell you how many times I've wondered what my life would have been like if I'd gone with Darren. I think I might have become a teacher too. But I didn't. I couldn't imagine telling my parents I was taking a leave of absence from college and doing something as déclassé as teaching high school." He shrugged.

  "Why didn't you ever tell me that before?" Anna asked.

  "Maybe because you were never in a plane crash before." He draped an arm around her shoulders. "Besides, if I had gone to be a schoolteacher, I would never have met your mother. Which means there'd be no Susan and no you."

  "True." She turned her head from side to side. The Advil was finally kicking in, and she realized her range of motion had increased quite a bit. It still hurt, but it no longer felt like she'd been run over by a succession of heavy motor vehicles on the West Side Highway. "But except for the progeny part, you both would probably have been better off."

  He smiled at her. "Ah, but the 'progeny' part trumps everything else. You'll see one day when you have kids."

  Kids. Children.
If she wasn't ready to talk about Yale, she definitely wasn't ready for this conversation. In fact, she couldn't imagine why her dad had brought it up. "If being a parent was so important to you, why did you do so little of it?" Anna asked bluntly. It was something she would never have said even a day ago--too indiscreet, too direct. But if she was going to live like she was dying, there wasn't much utility in self-censorship. "When I came here at the end of December, I felt like I didn't know you at all."

  Her father rubbed his chin. If he was offended by the question, he didn't show it. "I suppose wanting something and being good at it aren't necessarily the same thing."

  Well, that was honest, at least, Anna thought.

  "What about you, Anna Banana?" he asked, and she grinned. That had been her sister Susan's pet name for her when they were very young, and still part of something resembling an intact family. "Is there something you have a burning desire to do? Besides go to Yale?"

  She said nothing, just shook her head. "Not now, Dad. Please. I need to think."

  He nodded, pursing his lips. "Well, keep thinking. Here's how I see it. Right now, you're looking at the world with a special kind of clarity. That clarity fades, Anna. It doesn't last forever. Take advantage of it."

  Anna stood.

  "Heading back in?" he asked. "Going back to sleep?"

  "Yes on the in, no on the sleep. I might read for a while. ..."

  "Say hi to Don Quixote for me. I may stay out here and have a smoke. It's been kind of stressful." Anna saw her father reach into his jeans pocket and take out the Altoid tin in which he kept his marijuana. He'd stopped hiding his penchant for it soon after she'd arrived. "Want to join me?" he asked.

  "I'll pass. But enjoy." What else could she say? It had been kind of stressful.

  "Wait a sec. Come here."

  Her father stood too, and held his arms out to her. She went into them for the longest hug she could remember. Once again, she felt tears well up in her eyes. This time, she choked them back.

  They parted wordlessly, and Anna made her way back toward the house, loving the feel of the cool night air on her skin and the grass again under her bare feet. It was well past midnight and she had every reason to go back to sleep. Or even draw herself a bubble bath to end all bubble baths in the white claw-foot tub in her bathroom. She had every accoutrement she needed. Candles. Vanilla bergamot bubble bath from Bliss. A white Egyptian-cotton robe from the Four Seasons gift shop. She could put on her iPod and relax or text back to the endless voice mails she was sure awaited her. Or at least call Logan. Thinking about him made her smile. That they had lived though a death-defying experience, in every sense of that word, made her feel so connected to him, even though they'd only reconnected just a few weeks ago. That he was so very right for her seemed miraculous. They were so much alike.

  But. There was something else she needed, even before him, or the bubble bath, or more sleep. As she entered the house, her whole body tingled with an odd feeling of excitement. Purpose, even.

  She stopped in the kitchen to make a container of French-press coffee. Black and strong, with fresh-ground beans from Costa Rica. She carried it up to her room, along with one white bone-china cup imported from Tunisia. Then she went straight to her rolltop desk, booted up her white iBook, and opened her draft screenplay--the autobiographical one, about the conservative Upper East Side high school senior who goes out to Los Angeles in the middle of her senior year.

  Back in Manhattan, she'd written all of ten pages or so. Barely enough to establish her main character. Not nearly enough to get into the heart of the story.

  Now she started to write. And write some more. Her fingers clicked at the keyboard, the coffee went untouched, and she didn't stop until noon the next day, so tired she could barely lift herself out of the chair. And the whole damn thing was done.

  Wedding Bell BluesSunday afternoon, 12:38 p.m.

  "I've decided I want a maid of honor. And I'd like it to be you. Cammie, you're my oldest friend. Good times and bad. Cool boyfriends and assholes. Dee, no offense," Sam concluded, turning from Cammie to Dee Young, who held the title of second-oldest friend.Dee grinned back at Sam, blinking her huge, saucer-shaped blue eyes. "None taken. It should be Cammie. She deserves it," Dee affirmed in her girlish voice.

  "I wouldn't go that far, Dee." Cammie said dryly. She looked down at the nail tech who was working busily on her pedicure. Sam and Dee were experiencing the same service on either side of her. "Easy on the cuticles," she cautioned.

  It was Sunday morning--well, really early afternoon, since Sam didn't actually do Sunday mornings--and Sam was with Cammie and Dee in her bedroom, which was roughly the size of a small island nation, although better appointed. Each of them sprawled on a white silk chaise lounge brought up from the side of her father's heated swimming pool and arranged them in the center of Sam's floor. Three young women from Fab Feet on the Go provided foot soaks, reflexology massages, and pedicures.

  It was a good thing, too. They had a Hollywood wedding to plan--one that would take place in just six days.

  When Sam had woken up this morning, she'd felt a flutter of panic that had persisted all the way through her eucalyptus-scented steam shower and home-baked croissant with Kenyan mountain-grown coffee. Actually, it was more than a flutter. It was more like a flock of panicked birds wheeling in her pancreas. Had she really agreed to be married at the end of the week? Had she really agreed to think about skipping USC film school and moving to Paris with Eduardo instead? Had she really let sixteen precious hours tick off the wedding-planning clock?

  The only way to possibly accomplish this affair was to enlist her best friends' help. But Cammie was totally and thoroughly booked. Overbooked, in fact, running Bye, Bye Love. That left Dee and Anna, in theory. But Anna was recovering from a near-death experience, and Sam hadn't even seen her since she'd crash-landed at LAX.

  That left Dee. Dee was a lot of things. Petite. Cute. Amusing. Entertaining. From time to time a bit of a ditz. But a budding wedding planner wasn't one of the nouns or adjectives on the foregoing list.

  In a crunch, Sam knew she could pull it off herself, if she had to. But the idea of being responsible for the planning of one's own wedding was humiliating. She glanced around the room, hoping for some jolt of inspiration.

  Sam's room was as minimalist as the films she someday wanted to make--focused around a few key details without too much clutter. The centerpiece was her California king bed, which had a clean, silver-poled, roofless canopy. The carpet was white, as were the walls. Adorning the walls were a collection of black-and-white framed movie posters, signed by the producer, the director, and the stars. Among these were Au Revoir, Les Enfants; Amelie; Breakfast at Tiffany's; and Dominick and Eugene. Her dad's action films were conspicuously absent. Sam caught Audrey Hepburn's eye, looking chic as ever in her black dress and diamond necklace. Holly Golightly, her character in Tiffany's, would never plan her own wedding, she was sure. But then again, she might be the type to get married with only a few days' notice.

  "So what do you say, Cammie? Will you be Sam's maid of honor?" Dee prompted, jolting Sam out of her reverie. She realized that Cammie hadn't actually said okay.

  Asking Cammie hadn't been an easy choice. Cammie could sometimes be a bigger bitch than just about anyone Sam had ever known. But they'd been best friends for so many years. Longevity counted, and so did loyalty. Especially in this town. She just hoped that neither Dee nor Anna would be insulted.

  "Are you kidding?" Cammie downed a glassful of Taittinger champagne and set the empty glass on the carpet beside her. "Of course I'll do it."

  "And you'll still be a bridesmaid," Sam added to Dee.

  "Fantastic." Dee nodded her small blond head happily. Her bright blue eyes were shining. "I'm psyched. It's not every day that a girl gets to help plan her best friend's wedding and receive her high school diploma."

  "It's too bad you didn't have a real graduation," Cammie pointed out.

  "It was fine,"
Dee told her. "I finished my GED. After the year I had, I'm lucky to even be able to think straight."

  Sam was glad that Dee had been able to finish all her GED requirements, given that she'd missed so much school when she had a medium-size nervous breakdown on a class trip to Las Vegas back in the spring. She'd ended up on the psychiatric floor at Cedars-Sinai, and then did a good long stay at the Ojai Institute near Santa Barbara, where the doctors figured out what was wrong with her brain chemistry--practically everything--and put her on a regimen of drugs designed to smooth out her manic depression.

  Dee was a new person after Ojai. Kinder. Simpler. More coherent. But sometimes, Sam missed loopy, premeds Dee, who never met a countercultural or New Age fad she didn't fall in love with. EST. Kabbalah. Marianne Williamson. Whoever the guru of the moment happened to be. There was no doubt, however, that Dee was a far more stable and functional person after her treatment than before it. More boring, maybe. But more stable.

  Sam studied her friends, who seemed to make up a living exercise in contrast.

  Cammie could definitely pass as a bona fide Hollywood starlet, with her perfect (if artificially enhanced) breasts, mass of strawberry blond curls, and Pilates-toned figure. This morning, she wore a flirty little Zimmermann sundress and Jennifer Meyer chandelier earrings, even though the extent of their plans was to get pedicures, eat junk food, and maybe watch the 20 Most Extravagant Celebrity Weddings countdown on E!

  Next to Cammie, Dee looked almost mousy, though to call her plain would be a disservice. Her petite figure was made for skimpy L.A. fashion, and her shaggy, shoulder-length pale blond hair always looked rock-star perfect, with--near as Sam could tell--little to no effort. She'd come for her pedicure in a wild graphic print dress from Nicolas Ghesquière's new Balenciaga collection.

  Sam herself wore a baby blue floral paisley Chloé shift dress, with a scoop neckline and oversize side-slash pockets that took the attention away from her oversize hips.

  The nail tech tapped Sam's heel, a signal for her to switch feet. Her toenails had been painted a new dark brown shade called Vamp that was in the process of taking Hollywood by storm. Sam thought she could get away with wearing it one more time before she'd see it on girls from the San Fernando Valley and never be able to go near it again.