Tainted Love (17 page)

“Fine.” Kiley sat up.

“Ever fainted before?”

Kiley shook her head. “Nope. I have no idea …I feel great. Normal.”

“Good. Because I'm going to walk you back into the water, and we're going to do it again. Just you and me. Forget about what happened before. Could be as simple as the temperature difference on your skin between the cold water and the sun shocking your system. So, you ready?”

Kiley nodded and stood. She was utterly baffled about what had just happened to her and was utterly determined to do it right this time.

She and Roger walked to the near end of the pool, and started down its gentle slope toward the deep water. The cool water reached her knees, her waist, and again the top of her swimsuit.

“You good?” Roger asked.

“I'm fine.”

“Okay then, mask on.”

Kiley put her mask on. So did Roger.

“Regulators in.”

They put in their mouthpieces. Once Roger saw that Kiley's was securely in her mouth, he made the same downward motion with his arm. Kiley sank beneath the water.

Oh God.

It happened again. She was dizzy and nauseated. She couldn't breathe. She felt as if she was going crazy, or dying. Her heart pounded. It was horrible, the worst thing she had ever experienced in her life. It took all her will to push up so that her head was out of the water before she passed out again.

She ripped off her face mask, panting, gulping for air, trying hard not to cry. “I—I don't—”

Roger put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Kiley, have you ever heard of panic disorder?”

No, it couldn't be.
Please God, don't let me have it.

“Kiley?” Roger prompted.

“My mother.” Kiley's voice was flat. “She gets panic attacks.”

Roger nodded. “Maybe there's some genetic basis for it. Something in your family.”

“I can't have it. My mother is … she's afraid of everything and I'm …I swim all the time. I swim underwater. Why should I get an attack when I've got the gear on, and not when I don't have it on?”

“When you're swimming underwater you know you can surface at any time. In your gear, you might be fifty feet down. Or sixty. Or deeper. So even though you weren't deep now, psychologically … maybe you were.”

Kiley realized she was crying, salty tears mixing with the chlorinated water on her face. She fisted them away. How could she hope to study the ocean if she couldn't submerge in scuba gear? What a joke. She looked up. Bruce and his friends had gathered at the edge of the pool and were staring at her with concern. Or maybe it was pity—the same pity that she had felt for her own mother so many times.

“Talk to your doctor,” Roger recommended. “You're not the first person to discover it the hard way. And better here in the pool than out on the ocean.”

“Thanks. I guess I'm done for the day, huh?”

“Yeah.”

She trudged out of the pool with the gear she feared she might never wear again, wondering whether she was not just done for the day, but done for life.

“Good evening, and welcome to my humble abode.”

Beverly Baylor bowed low with a theatrical flourish, and then enveloped Esme in a bear hug as if they were long-lost friends, instead of two people who'd crossed paths at the Craft Services tent on a movie set a few days before. Esme suffered through the embrace. Where she had grown up, there were friends and there were strangers. Beverly was definitely a stranger.

The soap opera business had been good to the movie star. She lived in a white, ultramodern house on Tenth Street in Santa Monica that she currently had up for sale. Esme had tarried at the For Sale sign on her way to the front door, and extracted a one-page dossier about the house. It was a knockdown property built in the mid-1990s, which meant that Beverly had purchased a previous house on this same plot
of land and knocked it down to build this one. With five bedrooms, high ceilings, windows that soared toward the roof, and a backyard spa and patio, Beverly was asking a cool 3.4 million dollars. Beverly herself was bathed in the soft yellow light of her entryway. She wore a lavender silk peasant shirt, tiny purple shorts, and leather lavender-beaded sandals. It was an outfit that would have been appropriate on a woman half Beverly's age, even if the star did have the surgically adjusted body to make it work.

Esme had been surprised when Beverly had called her the morning after her visit to the movie set and begged for a tattoo appointment even before the Chinese one was lasered into oblivion. The actress explained that she wanted cowboy-style body art on her inner thigh, since the current love of her life was rodeo champ Maverick Saturn. They had been dating for three months. Beverly had confided details of startling intimacy, such as when and where they had first had sex (third date, in the stables at Will Rogers State Park). Why the inner thigh? Beverly wanted to mark the spot that her cowboy loved to kiss the most. When Esme pointed out that Maverick might not be thrilled by the idea of smooching his own image, Beverly giggled and suggested that would not be a problem for this particular Wyoming cowboy.

Way too much information.

Esme had invited Jonathan to join her, but just as he had been all week, he was shooting back in Topanga Canyon. She'd left the twins with Tarshea; they were screening
Bruce Almighty
for the zillionth time in Steven and Diane's home theater. At least she could breathe easy now that Ann Marie and Tarshea had hit it off nicely at the club. Tarshea had called to
set up the interview, in fact. Surely she'd get the job. She was a great girl, and was going to make Ann Marie a fabulous nanny.

Beverly ushered Esme inside. The front entryway opened to an enormous family room that Beverly bragged had just been redone in a southwestern motif. A brown leather sofa with an elk skin thrown over the back dominated the room, along with camel chairs in the shape of riding saddles. There was a free-standing twenty-foot stone fireplace. Above it was a rack of antique firearms and a mounted elk's head that presumably once belonged to the creature whose skin was currently adorning the sofa. Cowboy art and photographs from the Old West covered the walls, including an enormous depiction of the Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. Esme got close enough to read one of the epitaphs on a headstone. “Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44—no Les, no more.”

“I redecorated for Maverick,” Beverly gushed, “and I just adore, adore, adore it. It's so earthy. He shot the elk. Look at this picture.”

She pointed to the far wall, where there was yet another oversized framed photograph. This one was of a rangy blond guy in a cowboy hat, chaps, and vest, along with the actress herself. Beverly was entwined around him, as naked as Maverick was clothed. He looked to be about twenty-five.

“Isn't he delicious? He's going to do a guest run on my soap in the fall, as a mysterious cowboy who comes to town and steals my heart because I have amnesia and don't remember my husband and three children. So, come meet the girls. Girls!”

The actress called toward the kitchen, and two women approximately her age marched out into the family room.

“The artist!” a very blond woman cried, clapping her
hands. She was even skinnier than Beverly, and wore a tight black miniskirt, white tank top, and thigh-high boots with Lucite stiletto heels.

Beverly did a quick introduction. The blond was Kirsti and proudly announced that her husband was a full partner at Endeavor. The redhead was Elena, a regular on another ABC soap. She was another size nothing, with wavy, glossy hair and cheekbones that could cut glass. On her left ring finger was a diamond the size of a golf ball. She waved it in Esme's direction. “We've heard so much about you.”

Beverly motioned toward her two friends. “Oh darling, you're going to do everybody. That's what makes it so fun.”

“Botox parties are so last year!” Kirsti laughed.

Now Esme understood. This was to be a tattoo party, though no one had bothered to inform her. She did some quick arithmetic. If she did all three women, it could take four or five hours. Maybe longer. At the rates that Jonathan had quoted, she could leave with … well, a shitload of money.

Still, she felt a professional obligation to set them straight before she got down to work. “It takes at least a couple of hours to do a really good tattoo. Longer, if you want me to do it freehand.”

“Oh poo, that doesn't matter. We've got all night.” Kirsti grinned and then reached for a bowl of shelled macadamia nuts on Beverly's coffee table. She brought a fistful of nuts nearly to her mouth, and then smacked her right hand with her left hand. “Bad hand. Very bad. No nuts for you!”

“Don't be so obsessive, Kirsti,” Elena advised. “You probably haven't eaten all day.”

“Not true. I had a granola bar for breakfast,” Kirsti defended herself.

Beverly plopped herself down next to Esme. “I'm first, since it's my house. But I'm assuming you're not in a rush. We brought our checkbooks.”

“I actually have cash,” Elena put in.

Well then. Cash and checks. Time to get to work.

Esme opened her box and set out her tools. As she got everything ready, Beverly's elderly Latina maid came in with a tray of beverages ranging from iced tea to Campari to a pitcher of cranberry martinis. She caught Esme's eye and flashed a barely discernable wink of solidarity.

Esme smiled back. “Could you please put some water on to boil?”

“I have it already,” the maid replied. “From the tea. I'll get it for you.”

“In a bowl, thanks. Boiling. I need it for sterilization.”

“And the appetizers, please, Anna,” Beverly instructed. “Thank you! Esme, dear, where do you want me? I've set up lights in the conversation pit, if that would help.”

“That would be fine.”

There was a conversation pit at the far end of the living room. Beverly deposited herself on the second step, lifted the bottoms of her short-shorts, and pointed one bubble gum– pink finger at the very top of her right thigh. “That's where I want it.”

“You're really sure you want your boyfriend to be looking at himself when he kisses you there?” Esme couldn't help herself. It was so much tougher to undo a tattoo than to apply one.

Her friends roared with laughter at some inside joke as Esme went through her pre-tattoo sterilization routine. Fortunately, the star was a fan of bikini wax, so there were few stray hairs on her upper right thigh.

“You make my work easier,” Esme told her.

“Oh honey, we all get the Brazilian wax at Pink Cheeks in Sherman Oaks,” Beverly said.

“Well, I have to shave you anyway.” Esme had no desire at all to shave Beverly Baylor's anything, but wasn't about to skip any of the hygiene steps. People treated the acquisition of a tattoo like a visit to the makeup department at Fred Segal— something to do for kicks. But Esme knew tattoos were equally art and serious business. An infection could ruin your whole year.

Beverly leaned back to give Esme better access to her skin. “Shave away. But I'm warning you. Paparazzi have been known to pay my neighbors to climb in their trees and shoot with a telephoto lens. They'll say we're having a mad affair, Esme. Think about how high you want to go.”

Ten minutes later, Beverly's friends had put a U2 CD on her sound system, Anna had brought in a plate of vegetarian appetizers with little caloric content, and Esme had finished her preliminaries. “So, what do you want, Beverly? A cowboy? A cowboy on a horse? Neck and shoulders? Full-length?”

“Definitely full-length, from what I've heard,” Kirsti snickered.

“Absolutely,” Beverly agreed.

“How big?” Esme asked.

“Very!” Elena cried, a comment that elicited more peals of
laughter from a group that Esme was liking less and less by the minute.

“I meant the tattoo.”

“Oh … this.” Beverly held her hands about five inches apart.

“Someone, bring me some paper and a pencil,” Esme ordered. “I want to get this right. A cowboy on a horse, right?”

“Right. Anna! Bring paper and pencil to Esme, please! From my art room!”

A moment later, the maid appeared with a full-fledged sketch pad and charcoal art pencil and handed them to Esme, who had gone to the photograph of Maverick in order to get a good look at the structure of his face. Only then did she sketch.

Magically, a profile view of Maverick appeared. He was on a gray horse, flinging a lasso toward an unseen target.

“How'll that be?” She showed the sketch to her client as the music shifted to a techno band that Esme didn't recognize.

The soap star gazed at the sketch. “It's … perfect. I love it. Don't you love it, girls?”

Kirsti and Elena gathered around their friend, nodding approvingly. “You're a very talented girl,” Elena declared. “I'll wait all night for you to do me.”

Once again, the three women exploded in laughter. Esme just gritted her teeth.

It's a job
, she reminded herself.
Remember how much they're paying you. You don't have to like them to do it well
.

“Okay, let's get started. This is going to hurt somewhat,” Esme warned. She turned on her needle, and got her containers of ink in easy range.