Dear Daughter (25 page)

“Wasn’t Billy who called me.”

My body went cold. “Walt,” I said.

“That’s right, I finally caught him.”

“Look at you, Eliot Ness.”

He leaned in. “I don’t know if I mentioned this, but the other day I was actually
this
close to catching him. Had him in my car, even. But then I stopped to get gas and he just—snuck away.”

“And you were too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. Even though someone might have seen you two on the side of the road.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Cigarette?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

We were almost at the entrance. Faint strains of classical music could be heard through the half-open door. The other stragglers were stubbing out their cigarettes and stomping their feet before heading in.

I looked at Leo. “Well, as long as we’re exchanging information, I don’t know if I told you
this
: My truck seems to have just up and disappeared.”

Admiration teased at his lips. “What a shame. I can’t imagine what could have happened to it.”

“This place is just full of mysteries, isn’t it?”

I reached for the door, but Leo threw out his hand to keep me from opening it fully. He didn’t say anything, waiting for me to make the next move. And, even knowing better, I did.

“What if we made a deal,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“I’ll leave—which’ll reduce your workload by, what, 50 percent?”

“What do you want in return?”

“Access to your records room.”

“Not a chance.”

“Access to some very specific records, then.”

I’d like to say that he drew me close then, but in truth we drew close to one another. His eyelashes, I noticed, were short and brambly, nothing that might cause a girl to wax poetic. But I stared at them nevertheless, because that way I wouldn’t have to pay attention to his eyes.

I wasn’t just treading on thin ice. I was stomping on it.

“Which ones?” he asked.

“Jared Vincent’s arrest record. And any associated case files.”

His expression didn’t change, not one bit, which is how I knew I’d surprised him. He turned and pushed us through the door.

“I think I’d rather keep you where I can see you.”

I slapped his hand away and then slapped his arm for good measure.

“You know,” he said, “I haven’t had this much fun in forever.”

I hate to say this, but neither had I.

•   •   •

I’ve already told you about Kristof, so I suppose now I might as well tell you about Oliver—for the sake of context, mind you, not because I’m looking for some kind of absolution.

Oliver, you see, was my first.

(The word you’re probably thinking of right now is “lover,” but the word I’m thinking of is “mark.”)

I’m sure you’ve heard a version of this story before—probably the one where he spotted me at a club in Hollywood, hanging upon the cheek of night like a jewel or whatever, and was immediately transfixed by my beauty. But the truth is, we met at this place down near the shitty end of Robertson, on a stretch the mechanics’ signs still call Beverly Hills but the maps don’t even bother to name.

Wait—let me back up.

The fact is, you have to start as you mean to go along. It’s an easy mistake to make—to fuck up in the beginning—because of course at the start you don’t have a clue how you
should
go along. I mean, just look at Paris. She was so perfect in so many ways. But if your debut is a sex tape with a nobody—I mean, some guy named
Rick
? Come
on
—it will never be forgotten that you were slumming it from the start. The stench of pussy rot will stick to you forever, no matter how much peach you put in your perfume.

But sorry, ladies, in my world the reality is that you’re going to have to fuck your way out of obscurity, so if you can’t have a Rick—and please, never ever have a Rick—who do you choose?

Well, in my (I don’t think it’s wrong to say expert) opinion, you can’t start out with a tycoon or an heir or, god forbid, a hotelier, because no matter how much money these men have, they’re basically just glorified butlers, always hovering attentively nearby in impeccable dress, occasionally holding your purse. You also can’t choose an actor, because they’re simply not human. Avoid them at all costs.

If you’re really serious about doing this, what you have to do is find a musician. They have the edge, the creativity, the celebrity, the talent, and if you’re lucky, they’ll die young. Your best bet is to find one who’s vaguely critically admired but also Top 40 material. It wouldn’t hurt if he has an accent. Voilà. Instant exposure, minimal indignity.

Not that I understood any of this when I met Oliver. I just got lucky. But in retrospect he was perfect: The don’t-give-a-shit attitude. The dry English wit. The alcoholic thirst of forty Russian men.

I was fifteen, and I’d just moved to L.A. We’d moved because my mother wasn’t quite ready to relinquish her then-husband, Jakob Elsinger, a Swiss banker of appropriately clockwork dependability who had been drawn to Southern California’s equally clockwork climate. My mother initially opposed the move—“America is so tiresome,” she’d say with a languid sigh, conveniently ignoring the fact that she
was
American—but Köbi talked her into it. He had a way of doing that. He was the only one of them who ever could. I can’t believe I never asked him to teach me how.

But I thought I knew everything back then.

I couldn’t wait to leave Switzerland. I was sick of the endless parade of tutors, of the long, lonely hours with nothing to do and no one to see. I’d argued that I should be allowed to go away to boarding school, but my mother never seriously entertained the notion, and not even Köbi could get her to budge on that one. My mother meant to homeschool me once we got to California, too, but I exercised the nuclear option: I registered at the nearest public high school.

She agreed to let me go to one of those fancy hush-hush private schools easily enough after that.

I loved my new school. Not the actual coursework, of course, although I secretly appreciated the chance to learn something other than party manners and European decorative arts. The social side of things, though, was another matter entirely. Oh, the glorious
rapacity
of those children. They didn’t have teeth; they were born with fangs (slash publicists). I can’t tell you how refreshing this was, how invigorating. I’d spent a lifetime living with a pathologically discreet mother in a world where overt ambition was akin to leprosy. Los Angeles was an Irish Spring body wash of a city.

After just three weeks in the company of my classmates I had acquired more practical cultural knowledge than I had in three years with the finest tutors in Europe.
I
may not have been born with fangs, but that’s where I learned to sharpen my talons. And also to apply fake lashes.

Meanwhile, my mother was floating on a cloud of charity functions and plastic-surgery consults, and Köbi could see the ocean from his twelfth-floor office. It seemed a perfect arrangement. I was almost happy.

But then my mother fucked it up. She and Köbi had been fighting for months, so it didn’t come as a
total
surprise when it happened. By that point their marriage had begun to remind me of one of those African lakes that burp out poisonous gas, and every time I went to sleep I wondered if I’d suffocate in my sleep. And so I knew that eventually one day I would come home from school to find my mother having Köbi’s things packed up. I even knew what she would say: “I suppose you’ll blame me for this, too.”

I didn’t know that she would threaten to take me out of school.

Well, fuck that noise.

That’s when I decided to go for a walk down Robertson to a bar I’d seen once when I made the mistake of letting my driver cut through Culver City.

It wasn’t the nicest of places. The bar was backlit with red LEDs, which at night probably effected a sort of Eurotrashy glow, but in the middle of the day it just felt like we were all sitting under one of those heat lamps they use to keep Big Macs warm. The barstool was too hard beneath me, with a curved metal back that presumed some kind of scoliosis, and the glasses tasted like detergent.

I was three vodkas in when Oliver sat down two stools over. I barely registered his presence, much less his identity. I remember distantly noting the round-toned rumble of his voice as he ordered—“whiskey, rocks, yeah?”—but I was otherwise uninterested.
Judge Judy
was on.

“A little young for this place, aren’t you?” was the first thing Oliver said to me.

I looked over. There were two of him—my eyes had already gone dopey from the booze—but I could tell that he had a runner’s build, lithe and muscular. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. And not a novelty one. It was just plain blue cotton. On the bar in front of him was an inexpensive phone and a yellow pack of cigarettes. In another city this might’ve meant he was just a normal guy, but in L.A. it was nothing less than a masterfully conspicuous repudiation of conspicuousness. I was impressed.

“Probably,” I said.

We sipped our drinks in silence. He ordered another.

“You live here?” he asked.

“For now.”

I could hear the ice cubes rattle in his glass as he swirled it. When I imagine the noise a brain makes as it’s cogitating, this is still the sound I think of.

“You like it?” he asked.

“What’s not to like? And don’t say something tedious like ‘the traffic.’”

“I was going to say ‘the locals.’”

When I looked at him this time I managed to ratchet my eyes into something approaching focus, and as his two images converged, they went solid where they met—a Venn diagram of a man. It was in that intersection where I finally recognized not just who he was but what he was: the way I was going to keep myself in California.

In one beautiful moment, everything I’d ever learned crystallized into a perfect, glittering plan.

My mother thought she could hide me away again? Then I’d just turn myself into someone who was impossible to hide.

I sidled over to him, pulled out one of his cigarettes, rolled it between my fingers.

“Give a girl a light?”

•   •   •

We ended up back at his place. I was as awkward as a preschool Christmas pageant, and he was kinder than he needed to be. Holding my hand during. Talking to me after. The next morning, when we woke up together, I was warm and hungover, and I almost changed my mind.

Then he reached over and ruffled my hair. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “It’s been fun.”

I went downstairs, shoes in hand. I tiptoed past the second-floor terrace and the first-and-a-halfth-floor deck and the first-floor pool, and then on through to the white-on-white kitchen he obviously never used. I leaned against the counter and let my feet fall flat to the concrete floor, soaking up the chill. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. By the time Oliver came downstairs, I was on my second.

“I thought you’d left,” he said.

“Not yet.”

He just stood there.

“There’s coffee, if you want it.”

“Uh—brilliant, thanks.”

I waited until he’d filled a mug and lit a cigarette before I told him.

“You know I’m not eighteen,” I said.

“Neither am I.”

“I mean I’m not
yet
eighteen.”

“So what?”

“Oh,” I said, flattening my lips into the neither-smile-nor-frown of pitying superiority. “I forgot. It’s probably different in England.”

“I don’t follow.”

“See, in California, fucking me’s a felony.”

His mug crashed onto the counter. “Bullshit.”

“Sorry, mate.”

He rubbed his hand over the back of his head in a manner I found deeply satisfying. “But you were right there with me—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “But don’t worry, there’s an easy enough way to fix this.”

He eyed me warily—though that could have just been because my mascara was all smeared to shit. “What do you want?”

“Just a little favor.”

“Why does that sound too easy?”

I reached over and ran my knuckle across his cheekbone. “It’s a pretty long favor.”

•   •   •

Oliver and I were together for three months, playing off our looks, charm, and the titillating possibility that what we were doing might be illegal. He consistently encouraged rumors that our relationship was chaste, and I consistently encouraged rumors that it wasn’t, earning him female fans and me male fans. It was wildly mutually beneficial, as firm a foundation for a partnership as anything.

But you have to walk away from the table eventually, and as soon as the press started reporting on Oliver’s wandering eye I knew it was time. It’s not that I particularly minded the acts themselves—after that first night neither one of us ever wanted to touch the other again—I just minded the indiscretion. I wasn’t about to become the victim. It wasn’t sympathy I was after.

Lucky for me, at that time his drug use was spiraling, because even clever Oliver couldn’t sidestep every cliché. And then, wouldn’t you know? I just happened to be with him the night he overdosed.

(By the way, he was never in any
real
danger of dying. I just needed him to get close enough that I could reasonably claim to have saved him. You don’t really think I’d have done anything like this without having studied a toxicology textbook, do you?)

I was the one who called 911; I was also the one who called E! The next day’s photos of Oliver being rolled into the ER on a gurney while I ran alongside in the five-inch Louboutins I’d picked out specially were some of my most fetching ever.

I suppose I could have stayed with Oliver. Stuck by him. Been the girl to reform him. Gotten him off the booze and the drugs. Professed my love for him to
People
magazine.

Or I could have gone out the very next night and shimmied up against a succession of chiseled-face models.

Guess which one I chose?

But it was better for us both, really.

(Plus, honestly? After he got out of rehab his music went to shit.)