Oh! You Pretty Things (18 page)

T
he move into the new apartment is freakishly smooth, and working for Eva is literally a dream come true. And I mean
literally
literally: I've dreamed of this a hundred times. I'm talking on the phone with Eva Carlton like we're friends, I'm making plans and running errands for Eva Carlton.

For the first time in my life, I'm inside the circle of
real
celebrity. That's not me with my nose pressed against the glass, that's not me feeling left out, left behind. Maybe I'm not famous, but I'm famous-adjacent, and the glow from the nearby klieg lights is good enough for me.

Also, this is pretty much the easiest job I've ever had. For the first few weeks, I hardly even see Eva—which is thoroughly disappointing—because she's on a break from
her soap and working on a different show, which she mockingly calls
Thirtysomething High
. She's in practically every scene because they're maximizing the time they have her, stockpiling pieces of story that they'll drop in for weeks or months after she's gone.

Mostly my job is cooking for her at my new apartment, then delivering the food to her before she gets home. I keep offering to cook at her house—I'm dying to get all Top Chef on her completely unused six-burner Viking range and Bosch double wall oven with the convection feature I've only read about in cooking magazines.

She's still brushing me off, even though I'm pretty sure we're past the
Star
magazine suspicions. Maybe it's just the privacy issue. She told me on my third day on the job, “This is the most important thing you need to learn: I don't like people knowing my business. Especially about money. And that includes everyone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“A lot of people—my manager, my mom, even Scout—are going to want information from you, stupid shit that may seem unimportant, but it's the most important thing, above anything else, that you protect my privacy.”

Which is easier if I'm never in her house, I suppose. Whatever. My new kitchen is the size of an airplane bathroom, but there's something to be said for working at home in your underpants.

My first big purchase with my Eva money is a Mazda GLC that I buy for two thousand bucks. It's metallic gold and I tell myself that the upholstery smells like Cheetos, but it's really closer to feet. It's a three-door, and there's a hole in the hatchback where someone removed the wiper-blade mechanism, but other than that, the car is cherry.

I start running errands for Eva—easy things like picking up clothes from the dry cleaners or purchases from Barneys and Fred Segal. It's amazing how quickly the anorexic salespeople at Les Habitudes morph into caricatures of fawning kindness when I say who I work for. I'm not gonna lie, I love it.

It takes me ten days to fall for Eva. I find myself doing all of the silly, obsessive things most girls do when they're pining after a guy: I check my phone every thirty seconds to make sure I haven't missed a call or e-mail; I spend inordinate amounts of time choosing my outfits, piling discarded clothing like a haystack on my unmade bed. I let imaginary conversations unspool in my head where I'm witty and poignant and just the right amount of self-effacing.

I know I'm deep into a friend crush, but it feels intoxicating and perfect. For the first time, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I'd always imagined that all I needed was one victory for myself—hell, one
moment
for myself—to lay the ghosts of my childhood to rest, to start my own life instead of feeling Donna looming over me. But this is even better.

I feel the first rough swells of love when I finally start working at Eva's house. She acts like she doesn't know what to do with me, like she's never had an assistant before. Maybe it's because her previous assistants were all culled from her handful of close friends, either ones who went way back or ones like Scout, whom she met when she was a cocktail waitress at Skybar on Friday and Saturday nights. Or maybe she was just trying to make me feel comfortable, like I was a part of her family. I'm such a sucker for women who want to make me a part of their family.

Sadly, I'm still in a phase with Eva where I'm hypercritical of everything that comes out of my mouth, constantly taking the temperature after every sentence I utter and beating myself up for always sounding too something: too eager, too agreeable, too desperate to please.

I think it's the flip side of the problem that most girls have with boys, all fluttery and insecure about their breath or if you can see that little bulge of back fat over their bra straps. Weirdly, I don't have that. Boys are easy. Girls see everything and tuck it away to use against you later. Girls smile in your face and then spit in your hair when you bend down to tie your shoes. Boys are Labrador puppies, eager and sniffy; girls are coyotes, lurking in packs, waiting for a weak animal to cross their path.

And for the first month, my working life with Eva feels like one long date with a boy I'm really, really into.

“Oh, you like Okkervil River? I
love
Okkervil River.” Truth is, I barely know who they are—a couple guys with train-conductor beards and a skinny girl playing a lute?—but I forge ahead anyway. “My favorite song? Um, you know, that one they play all the time, I can't remember what it's called.”

This is where a normal person would let the silence happen. Nope.

ME:
What's your favorite?

EVA:
Right now it's “Stay Young.”

ME:
Yeah, I really like that one too.

The way Eva flips through magazines while we're talking doesn't do anything to ease my worry about my inadequacies.

Why can't my insecurity take the form of uncomfortable silences? That would be such a gift. Instead, I rush to fill any open space with words that clatter like the beads from a broken necklace onto the sidewalk.

Then a crazy thing happens. We start talking about our childhoods.

I'm standing in Eva's capacious closet, hanging up dry cleaning; she's sitting cross-legged on her king-size Duxiana bed, piles of magazines strewn around her, a couple scripts folded back to various places, scribbled with notes in red ballpoint pen. She's wearing a white cotton romper with frilly eyelet around the leg holes and a pair of suede, knee-high UGG boots.

“Do you ever think things would be easier if you'd had a different childhood?” she says.

I freeze with my arm still outstretched toward the space I've created to hang up a handful of Rag & Bone denim. “What do you mean?”

She doesn't answer, so I gather up the wire hangers and dry-cleaning bags and step into the bedroom, where I find her hugging a pillow to her chest and peering up at me, her eyes wide and engaged.

“My dad used to beat the shit out of me for little things,” she says. “Like forgetting to pick up the dog bowls from the kitchen floor. He'd drag me out of my bedroom and into the living room. I guess it wasn't satisfying if he didn't have an audience.”

I feel like I've hit the emotional jackpot, but I'm clueless how to proceed. “That's hideous,” I say, internally cringing at the hollowness of my tone.

“My mom would beg him to stop, but she'd always close the living-room curtains so the neighbors couldn't see.”

“Wow,” I say, “that's as bad as what your dad did.”

She shoots me a sharp frown and my stomach plummets. Then her face crumples and she starts to cry. “You're right,” she says, wiping her tears with the scalloped edge of the white Frette sheet. “You're right.”

“I never met my dad. Donna calls him the sperm donor.”

“Who's Donna?”

“Oh,” I say. “My mom.”

“You call your mom Donna?”

“Yeah, she lost ‘Mom' when I was fourteen.”

“What does that mean?” Eva says, and she's morphed from being a teary rumple into an eager sponge, sopping up the details of my story like it's spilled wine.

“That's when I moved out,” I say, and I'm not sure why, but I'm not feeling nearly as freaked out as I was a couple minutes ago. There's something easy about just telling the fucking truth.

“So what did you do? Did you get emancipated?” Eva sweeps a pile of magazines onto the floor with her UGG-booted foot. “Here, sit.”

“No,” I say, flopping down beside her. “I just, you know, found a roommate on Craigslist and got a job at a catering company that hired undocumented workers.”

“Is that how you started cooking?”

“No,” I say. “I made shitty sandwiches in a commercial kitchen that girls in booty shorts and tank tops sold door-to-door in office buildings.”

“Seriously?” Eva says, laughing. “Who does that?”

“I know, right?” I say.

We sit in her darkened bedroom for an hour, swapping mother stories, which absolutely cements my girl crush on her. I find myself telling her about meeting Trent Whitford, about that first failed photo shoot on the beach.

“Two days later,” I say. “My mother hoses me down with Calèche like a cosmetics-department lady and says she convinced Trent to give me another chance.”

Eva's big eyes get even bigger. “What did you say?”

“I told her I wasn't going,” I say. “She told me I was.”

“So you did?”

I shrug. “He took me to ‘this killer beach pad' up past Paradise Cove, all palm trees and hibiscus and bougainvillea. I remember thinking that my mother would shit herself. There were other cars there, so I figured at least we wouldn't be alone, but when we walked in through the unlocked front door, there was no one.”

“Shit,” Eva says.

“Yeah. Then, y'know, we split a bottle of champagne, and he took me outside and stopped in front of this golf cart with a fringed canopy. He asked if I'd ever driven a golf cart. I was peeing my pants.”

Eva edges closer to me. “What did you say?”

“I told him to ask me again in five minutes.”

“Oh my God, do not stop talking,” Eva says, and she flips her bare, tanned legs across mine, like she's not going to let me up until I finish the story.

I tell her that Trent laughed, hooking his leg around the console between us in the golf cart and mashing his foot on top of mine onto the gas pedal. I tell her that I burst into squealing giggles as we went careening down the path toward the ocean. We swerved and swooped downward until we reached a contemporary, two-story house. It was dark inside, but I could see straight through the sweeping walls of glass to a lit-up black-bottomed swimming pool and the waves cresting in the ocean just beyond.

“Whose house is
this
?” I asked.

Trent pushed my hair over my shoulder, letting his fingers linger on my neck for just enough time to make me shiver.

“Darling,” he said, like he was talking to a small child. “This is the pool house.”

I was grateful for the dim light of the driveway to hide my embarrassment. “Well, obviously.”