Inside (29 page)

Back at the apartment, she called Julia, whose assistant put her through right away, an unprecedented act.

“Darling girl,” Julia said, “where the fuck have you been?”

“I told you. Scotland, in a play.”

“You and your plays,” Julia said, trying to sound fond, though her disgust was obvious. Julia was about toothpaste commercials, modeling if necessary. She was about getting your face out there. “Fortunately for you, they waited. You must’ve really done a number on that guy.”

The first guy who came to Anne’s mind was Sergio, sprawled on the unforgiving cobblestones, his eyes flashing when he rose up again to hit her, his anger laid bare. Then she refocused and said, “What guy?”

“Michael Linker,” Julia said, as if everybody knew who this was. “He saw you in that godforsaken thing on Long Island.” At the time, Julia had called the godforsaken thing a masterpiece of contemporary drama.

“Whatever,” Anne said.

“Not whatever! He just got promoted to a new studio-exec position and wants you to audition for this pilot that sounds
amazing
. Gritty family drama, lots of sex. It’s a cable show. You need to be on a plane to Los Angeles
today
. Call me back with your flight info and I’ll get you a car on both ends.”

Anne had been telling Julia for months that she didn’t want to leave New York, that she wasn’t interested in television, that independent films were the only projects for which she wanted to be considered. Standing in her apartment, the air conditioner wheezing asthmatically, she realized that nobody cared what she wanted.

“Annie,” Julia said. “You’re on this, right?”

“I’m there,” she said.

That night she got on a plane, no longer tracking whether she ought to be asleep or awake. In California the car delivered her to a hotel,
where she took a bubble bath, then ordered room service. Outside, the sun glared over a tangled mass of highways. Her interview wasn’t until the next day, and she had hours to enjoy herself on someone else’s money. So she went swimming at the hotel pool, then took another long bath. She remembered Hilary, when she first came to stay, gulping down donuts and any other food in the apartment. In retrospect, her appetite was surely fueled by pregnancy, but she also seemed to believe in eating while the eating was good, like a feral cat. Anne felt the same way about creature comforts. When luxury was available, she would gorge herself.

Then she pulled out the script that had been waiting for her when she checked in. She read it through and started rehearsing her lines. Low expectations or not, she wasn’t going to sabotage herself. She’d work with what she had. She remembered Julia’s parting words. “You may not be the best or the prettiest, but you don’t have to be,” she’d said. “You only need to seduce one person at a time.”

Her appointment was at ten, on a studio lot. When she arrived, two people were waiting—Michael Linker, her fan from the play, and a woman he introduced as Diane. The office was both lavish and uncomfortable, designed to put newcomers at a disadvantage. Michael sat on a white Lucite desk, lounging in jeans and a crisp white shirt. Diane leaned back against a windowsill piled high with scripts. Anne was given an entire white leather couch to herself, into the depths of which she sank gracelessly, looking up at them.

“Thanks so much for coming in,” Michael said.

“Yes, thank you,” Diane echoed, smiling broadly. “We’re so happy you could make the trip. Michael’s been raving about you ever since he got back from the Hamptons, and finally I just couldn’t stand it anymore and told myself, I have to see this girl!”

“You were incredible in that play,” Michael said. “You ruled the stage, and that final scene was, my God, so heartbreaking.”

“And Michael’s not easy to impress,” Diane said. “I hardly ever hear him gush like that.”

This was clearly a lie. It was their job to gush. Anne crossed her
legs, trapped in the couch, and kept smiling. “Thanks. You guys are
so
nice.”

“It’s our pleasure, really,” Diane said. She had long, dirty-blond hair and wide-set, strangely vibrant blue eyes. Anne wondered if they were colored contacts. She was having a little trouble concentrating. Ordinarily she worked best one-on-one, responding to cues from the person in front of her; with two people, though, each broadcasting a distinct sexual energy, she couldn’t quite figure out how to play the situation.

“Okay, my dear,” Michael said. “Enough shameless flattery. Are you relaxed? Let’s talk about the story. Then let’s hear you work with it.”

The character was an abused woman who triumphs against the odds and finds love again. In the scene Anne had been given, she confronts her cold, unremorseful husband, the abuser, with anger, tears, and recriminations.

Now sitting behind his desk, Michael was reading the husband’s part. Diane had pulled up a chair beside him and was fiddling with her nails.

Anne figured she knew this much: When sex is there at the beginning, it’s still there at the end. Even a woman who hates you still wants you to think she’s beautiful, desirable, so great that you never should’ve treated her so badly, never should’ve let her go. So she played the scene as sexy as she could make it.

When she was done, Diane muttered something under her breath, but Anne couldn’t hear what it was.

“Fabulous,” Michael said routinely. “Could you just give us a minute, darling?”

“Sure.” She stood outside in the hallway, breathing a bit heavily, adrenalized and a little turned on. An old boyfriend, a medical-school dropout, had told her that when he needed to calm down during sex, he used the images of diseased skin from his dermatology textbook. Pustules, rashes, oozing sores. Of course, after he told her this, during sex she was always thinking about him thinking about skin diseases, and pretty soon she was too turned off to see him again. But she kept the technique. After running through the images in her mind, she felt more nauseated than anything else.

The door opened and Diane smiled at her, blue eyes glowing. “Let’s go down the hall and see if the camera loves you as much as we do, okay?”

She went through the scene again, this time with an actor Michael brought out without explaining who he was. Anne didn’t recognize him. When they were done, he unbuckled his belt, peeked down his pants, and said, “Scared the shit out of you, didn’t she, buddy?” Then he laughed and left the room, patting Michael on the shoulder. Anne could have turned this remark over endlessly in her mind, but didn’t. Her mother had once told her that whoever cares the least has the greatest advantage. It wasn’t a motto she herself had been very good at putting into practice. But Anne was.

And it must have worked, because months passed before she went back to New York. She let her apartment languish there, unpaid—it wasn’t her name on the lease, and the furniture was worthless, so who cared?—as a new life in L.A. grew up around her.

She was cast in the pilot and had read-throughs with the actor playing her husband—not the one from the original audition, but a kindly type who brought a charming snakiness to the role that was significantly more disturbing. As she studied the script, she realized that what she’d thought was a starring role was in fact a small, supporting one. How had she gotten this impression? Had they actually lied to her or simply let her believe something that wasn’t true?

The main character was a man who had partnered with her husband in a business deal whose crookedness extended to the top echelons of a major corporation and, from there, to the government. Her job was to be beautiful and damaged—at one point she was taken hostage—and in most of her scenes she had no lines, because she’d been gagged.

Diane found her a place to stay, a tiny mother-in-law cottage on some producer’s estate. It had a sweet little yard clustered with cactus and blooming plants, fuchsia petals leaning gaudy and lovely against the stucco walls. Beyond the garden was the mansion where the producer lived, a Spanish-style villa with a red tiled roof. Diane
also leased her a car and gave her an advance on her salary. She was almost impossibly helpful, and from this Anne could only deduce that Diane thought she was going places. When she told Julia what was happening, a tightness stole into her agent’s voice that she recognized as the palpable fear that Anne would screw it all up. This fear was justified. The easier things came to her, the more worthless they felt, and the more she was tempted to cast them aside.

But she liked Diane. She could be catty and obnoxious and she talked shit about Michael behind his back. She told Anne that her little cottage was hideous and had to be redecorated as bluntly as she had told her that her ass was saggy and she needed to join a gym.

“I don’t do gyms,” Anne said.

“Honey, this is L.A.,” Diane said. “You don’t have a choice.”

They compromised by jogging together on the beach, a picture of California living so cinematic that Anne had a hard time keeping a straight face. Fortunately, Diane was extremely fit and the pace she set forced Anne to breathe hard, straight face or not. Afterward she made Anne order an egg-white omelet, paid the check, then drove her home. She didn’t introduce her to anybody else, and for the first two weeks she was the only person Anne knew in town.

At home, she read and reread the script. She sat on a patio chair in the garden wearing a broad-brimmed hat, letting the sun play on her legs. Other than that, she had nothing to do. Sometimes she got in the car and drove around aimlessly, along the city’s wide avenues where no one was on foot, so unlike New York. She never thought about what would happen next; she lived in the bubble of the present moment, waiting, waiting.

On Monday of her third week, Michael called to say that the funding couldn’t be secured and the project was dead. “Fortunately for you, my darling child, you’ll get snapped up by somebody else before you can even turn around. Some of these other assholes are going to be in real trouble.”

After he hung up, Anne called Julia, who said, “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me. The whole deal fell through.”

Julia sighed. “I guess you better come home.”

“Will they pay for my ticket back?”

“Please,” Julia said.

That night Diane showed up with two bottles of rosé, which they drank while sitting on the plastic lawn furniture in Anne’s living room.

On the third glass, Diane burst into tears. “I’m just so fucking tired,” she said, her blond hair shining in the dark.

In front of them, the windows of the producer’s villa glowed with light, though nobody ever seemed to be at home. The lights were on timers that went off and on at the same time every day. There were alarm systems, pesticide warning signs, gardeners, and maids, but no one who actually seemed to live there.

“What happens now?” she asked Diane, who shrugged, her usually erect posture collapsing under the wine.

“We all hustle and find something else to do. You’ll do great, you just have to get out there. You’ve got so much fucking charisma it’s ridiculous. I, on the other hand, will get fired, probably tomorrow.”

“You will? Why?”

“Because this is the third project I’ve had fall apart on me. Three strikes, you’re out. Like baseball and jail.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Diane snorted. “Look for another job, I guess, where I can get fucked over by a fresh set of faces.”

Something about her transparent made-up toughness reminded Anne of Hilary, and she sighed.

Diane looked up, laughing. “Look at how pathetic we are. It’s terrible. Let’s go out or something.”

“I don’t have any money,” Anne said.

“Oh, shut up. You know I’ll pay.”

In addition to paying, she drove. She took Anne to a club where they did shots of tequila and danced and flirted with a couple of guys Diane introduced to Anne, though she couldn’t tell if Diane actually knew them or had just started talking to them on her way back from the bathroom. They were cute, surfers in suits with wavy hair and blinding teeth. Too pretty to have sex with, Anne thought.
They’d expect all kinds of gratitude and wouldn’t do any of the work. But flirting was fine, and so was dancing and drinking. She threw her body into it, letting her muscles flow and her thinking stop. It was three in the morning when they got back into the car. Diane was talking a mile a minute—maybe she did some coke in the bathroom?—about how she might go down to Baja and just chill for a few weeks, get her head clear, maybe work on this screenplay she had an idea for, or meet a Mexican guy and get laid and drink tequila on the beach, did Anne want to come? Diane’s voice was ringing in her ears like an annoying phone, and she was on autopilot herself, so she used her usual trick to get someone to shut up, which was to lean over and kiss her. It wasn’t the first time she had ever kissed a woman, but it had been a while.

Diane tasted like lip gloss and alcohol.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “Wow.”

Instead of driving home they went to a nearby hotel. It was expensive, and Diane paid. The bed had the nicest sheets Anne had ever felt. She ran her hands through Diane’s hair. She was a beautiful thing, Diane, scrubbed and shiny and soft. Anne felt like she was stroking a puppy, a feeling made stronger by how little the other woman weighed and the soft whimpering sounds she was making. It didn’t exactly feel like sex—not the sex that Anne was used to—but it felt good, at least until they passed out.

When Anne woke up, she was alone. She had danced off a lot of the alcohol and felt better than she would have expected. She took a long shower, and when she came out Diane was back, wearing a hard-to-read smile.

“I went for a walk,” she said. “My head was killing me. I ordered breakfast for us. How do you feel?”

“Better after the shower,” Anne said.

“I’ll take one too.”

While the water was running, room service came, everything under silver lids, like in a movie. With food in her Anne felt sleepy again.

“You can stay until noon if you want,” Diane said. “I guess I should
get changed for work. They’ll expect me to be at the office so they can kick me out on my ass, those bastards.”

She slid out of her robe, revealing her smooth, pretty body, then stood behind Anne and ran her hands down inside her terrycloth. Anne surprised herself by arching her back in response, a need rising up that she hadn’t known was there. They went back to bed, this time sober, and neither of them left the hotel until noon.