Oh! You Pretty Things (25 page)

Okay, random confession: the edamame isn't really from Koi.

Koi is a celebrity-laden restaurant on La Cienega with overpriced food and a permanent coterie of paparazzi lingering outside hoping to catch Mel Gibson or Dennis Quaid or some other faded yet permanent A-lister doing something sake-infused and regrettable. There's nothing memorable about it, food-wise, other than the crispy rice batons that taste like delicious forty-dollar tater tots, but someone once told Eva that they have the best edamame in town.

I quickly learned that I didn't need to deal with the valet and the paparazzi and the snotty hostess if I had a stash of Koi to-go bags (a one-time $50 tip to a busboy) and the black plastic clamshell containers they use for their takeout orders (Smart and Final, $6.99/pack of 50).

Boom, done.

Eva's edamame actually comes from a hole-in-the-wall in a strip mall down at the bottom of the Laurel Canyon hill in the Valley. She would die if she knew, and something about that makes me a little gleeful.

In Eva's bedroom, Amanda, her in-call manicurist, is kneeling at the foot of the bed, massaging extra-virgin coconut oil into Eva's nonexistent calluses, and she politely averts her eyes when Eva whips her head in my direction.

“Jess, I'm not a fucking moron,” she says. “When I need you to take care of the car, I'll let you know.”

My face flames with humiliation, even though Amanda keeps her gaze focused on an imaginary point on the floor. It's really bad form to gawp when a fellow underling is being taken to task. Best to paste an un-stare onto your face—which, if you've spent any amount of time here, you'll have perfected.

I mumble an apology and Eva dismisses me with a pile of dry cleaning and two new pairs of Louboutins that need to go to Pasquale for red rubber soles.

I drive away seething with resentment, and when I get onto Nichols Canyon, I pull to the side of the road, between an empty lot and a faux-Italianate villa, and grab an empty bottle of Fiji water, which I beat repeatedly on the dashboard as I scream.

It's so much cheaper than therapy.

I wake up the next morning to this text:
Car out of gas on Newhall Ranch Road and the 5. Production sent a van for me. Please get it to set by noon. Also Barbara coming to house at 2.

Barbara is her on-call hair-removal expert, for the record.

No problem
, I text back.

It is what it is.

I've gotten way off track, here. I do feel bad about this thing with Dave. She's crying more softly now, and I'm saying whatever.

“How did you hear about it?” I say, during one of her snuffling pauses.

“The fucking bitch from
Soap Opera Digest
who pretends to be my friend called me,” she says, then pauses. “Oh! Wait. That's Scout, calling me back.”

And she's gone, to talk through her trauma with Scout. Which is fine. Honestly, it is. I kind of suck at being the shoulder to cry on.

I
blame you for this,” I tell Megan.

We're sitting at a rickety table at Doughboys, both slurping French onion soup, which is the only permissible way in L.A. to eat a raft of bread smothered in cheese. It's
soup
.

“How do you figure?” she says, twisting a string of melted Swiss cheese around her finger and pulling it off with her teeth.

“You were anti-Tyler from the beginning, and you know how much stock I put in your opinion. Now I've—as Donna would say—jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

“You're so full of shit,” she says, laughing as she tears a hunk of crusty baguette. “You couldn't get out of there fast enough when you thought Eva wanted you.”

“Hey, now,” I say. “I'm the one holding the rain stick. It's my turn to bitch.”

“Right, my bad. Carry on.”

“She runs out of gas, like, once a week. And what's worse is that a considerable part of my job is running interference between the four boys who think they're
thisclose
to getting her to say ‘I do.'”

“That's not good,” Megan says.

“I
know
,” I say. “And I'm totally not exaggerating.”

“Oh, I believe you about the redundancy,” she says. “JJ has three assistants. One for the house, one on set, and one free floater. It's embarrassing.”

“It's a good thing he's cute.”

“Yeah, I guess I should be glad he's not stringing along four side dishes.” She sets her bread aside. “But I'm starting to worry this isn't going to end well for you.”

“I just like complaining. It's still a pretty awesome job.”

“Just remember that we teach people how to treat us.”

“Thanks, Deepak,” I say. “Which reminds me, I read that the Dalai Lama asked a private-jet company to comp him for a trip.”

“What's your point?” Megan says, scooping up a last mouthful of cheese before tossing her napkin into the bowl.

“My point is, even the Dalai Lama has a Hollywood sense of entitlement. And he looks like a turtle.”

A
few weeks later, I step into the kitchen, toting bags of ginger tea and umeboshi plums, and surprise Eva
in flagrante confesso
with her masseuse, Nikki.

Eva doesn't let just anyone massage her since a bad experience in Telluride when the masseuse called her by her character name for ninety minutes, then sold a story to the tabloids about her cover-up tattoo. Now she has Nikki.

Nikki looks like a Barbie doll. Not in an impossible boob-to-waist-ratio way—she's actually a few pounds overweight, by Hollywood standards—but she wears an awful lot of pink, most of it angora, and her eyes are always layered in sparkly pink and pale-blue shadow. And she talks in a baby voice that rivals Marilyn Monroe singing a birthday ballad to John F. Kennedy. She's mesmerizing.

She and Eva have really upped the game on their friendship lately. It's causing major friction with Scout, and I'm getting daily calls where Scout demands to know Eva's whereabouts, then gets passive-aggressive when I tell her I don't know.

“That's weird. I always knew where Eva was when I was her assistant,” she says in the same affected voice that Eva uses when she's feigning ignorance about something that she's irked about.

Actually, Eva's much better at it than Scout. I figure I only catch it with Eva about 60 percent of the time and the rest I'm as blissfully ignorant as she's pretending to be. Scout's not exactly subtle. It's one of the things I like about her.

Here's the thing: Eva and Nikki went to South Africa together last month, and Scout was pissed that Eva didn't invite her. Frankly, I was pissed she didn't invite
me
, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Eva wanted to take a friend who could also give her daily massages. Being between Scout and Eva is worse than missing the trip, though. Now Scout's either being all weird with me or blurting out confessions about how much she resents Eva, and Eva's either ignoring the friction completely or dropping casual asides about how disappointed she is with Scout, which I have to stuff into some dark place in my gut and forget.

Eva's trip to Africa was a whirlwind decision after her spiritual adviser told her that Clytemnestra—the ancient alien being she channels by the hour—said there was a powerful lesson for her to learn by
taking care of the children
. This reading happened to coincide with a rerun on OWN about the school Oprah built in South Africa, and the next thing I knew I was grinding the American Express Platinum concierge to get a free first-class companion ticket so Nikki could go along “for good energy.”

Eva went all “of the people” while she was there. She tossed her cell phone into a nest of cobras at Kruger National Park—at least, that's what she said in the e-mail she dictated to the concierge at the Saxon, where she was staying, at fifteen-hundred-dollars a night for a junior suite villa. I'm guessing she didn't get anywhere near within throwing distance of a cobra. It's more likely that she had the bath butler take the phone away to put in the hotel safe when he came in to draw her nightly milk-and-honey soak.

Okay, yeah, I'm still a little pissed about being excluded, but also Eva is currently in a
filmmaker
stage and it's exhausting. In the short time I've worked for her, she's ricocheted through several pet projects—a memoir; a clothing line; a photography book of her famous friends, naked; and, now, documentary films.

She had me buy her a four-thousand-dollar camera from Samy's on Fairfax and when she got back from South Africa, she had forty-two hours of footage of herself tromping through shantytowns and orphanages in her Rag & Bone cargo pants, looking concerned and beautiful with her hair cascading down her back in shiny waves. There are a thousand pictures of Eva sitting in the dirt and making rope bracelets for wide-eyed African orphans who manage to convey both shyness and a clamorous need. That part of it is heartbreaking, especially when I think about what the money she spent could have done for any of the orphanages she visited.

She had her lashes done before she left and her eyes are dark-fringed and expressive when she raises them to the camera, speaking volumes about her character's—I mean
her
—anguish over the squalid poverty she's ameliorating via documentation. To be fair, there are fifteen minutes of footage of a bedraggled Nikki gamely perched on an upturned trash can in the middle of what appears to be a town dump. Her blond hair hangs in clumps, her white cotton T-shirt is smeared with dirt, and crescent moons of sweat seep from her armpits.

Off-camera, Eva asks questions like “How do you feel seeing all this suffering firsthand?” and Nikki fake-smiles her way through answers that are peppered with trite clichés about the universe never giving us more than we can handle.

E
va and Nikki are curled on the bentwood settee in the kitchen, having an animated conversation that abruptly stops when I walk in, like a needle scratching across the record of their pink angora intimacy.

“Hey, dudes,” I say, setting the bags onto the tile counter.

“Hiiiiiii,” Nikki baby-whispers.

“Did you get my umeboshi?” Eva asks.

I wave the plastic container of bloated pink fruit in her direction. “Right here.”

“You rule,” she says, and turns back to Nikki expectantly.

Nikki looks uncomfortable, like I just walked in on her changing her tampon or something. There's a long, hideous silence.

“Am I interrupting something?” I ask, which is the worst possible question to ask when you're actually interrupting something.

“No, no,” Nikki baby-whispers.

“Don't mind me,” I say. “I'll be out of your way in a sec.”

I'm unpacking agave syrup and pomegranates as fast as I can, but I know I've taken an assistant-size shit directly onto the bowl of cornflakes of their pre-massage girlfest.

“Oh, Jesus,
what
?” I finally blurt out.

Eva and Nikki exchange a meaningful look.

“You can tell her,” Eva says, and I immediately think they're going to say that Nikki's taking my job, because that's exactly how narcissistic I roll.

Nikki nods pinkly, and Eva tells me, “Nikki has a new suitor.”

That may sound forced, but Eva loves the word “suitor.” It's rubbed off on me, too. She also loves the word “haberdashery,” which she uses in place of “clusterfuck.” “It's a haberdashery,” she'll say, when nothing is going right. So far, I've managed to resist using that one myself.

“Okay,” I say. “Um, congratulations?”

They share a smile and Nikki gushes, “I've been seeing one of my clients.”

“Who?” I ask, and there's so much buildup that at this point if it's not Bill Clinton or Brad Pitt, I'm going to be severely disappointed.

Eva smiles like she just ate a canary and names a megacelebrity who has fallen into a tangle of drugs and weight fluctuations over the past decade.

“Wow, really?” I say. “That's kind of epic.”

They welcome me into their fluffy circle as Nikki continues the story, which involves late-night massage sessions that turn into sex that turn into him on the phone with his assistant at three in the morning ordering hot dogs from Pink's, and Nikki not knowing whether she should bill him for her massages.

“Fuck yes, you should,” I say.

“He's so sweet,” she says, eyes misted over with glitter and delusion.

“Dude, he kicks you out when he's done. Does the assistant even bring you a chili cheese?”

“Ohh.” She shudders. “I don't eat meat.”

“Right,” I say. “So that's a no.”

The silence returns. Thicker than ever.

“We're going to go upstairs,” Eva eventually tells me. “Can you make me a tea?”

I am so bad at the whole “girl talk” thing. Really, I'm like a cartoon. And I don't ever learn.

Example: a few weeks later, Eva meets a new boy at the Newsroom Cafe. She comes home and tells me, “He looks like a poet.”

“What does that mean?” I ask. “Narcissistic and poor?”

She doesn't laugh.

Example: Scout and I are standing outside the Friday-night AA meeting on Rodeo Drive, fielding questions that inquiring sober boys always want answered. Eva was sober for a while when she first got to Hollywood. It's not a secret; she talks about it in interviews all the time.

“Hey, where's E?” asks the nightlife impresario she dated for a while.

“Working, I think,” Scout says.

One by one, boys float into our orbit, make their inquiries, and are sent away with no pertinent information. It's easy. In the car on the way to get coffee at Swingers, we laugh about it.

“Boys are so transparent,” I say.

“I know, right?” Scout checks her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Where is that hooker, anyway? She told me she was meeting us. I've left her, like, three messages today.”

“Yeah, I don't know,” I say. “I thought she was coming.”

I think I sound pretty nonchalant, though I know perfectly well that Eva had no intention of coming to the meeting, that she's getting a massage at the house and then having dinner with her agent.

Scout eyes me. “Why are you doing that right now?”

“What?” I ask, but I know what she means.

“Why are you stonewalling me? Dude, she's my best friend.”

So awkward. “I know, it's weird. But she asked me to keep all the work stuff separate.”

“Jess,” Scout says, sounding like someone trying to have a conversation with a toddler. “She doesn't mean me.”

“Oh, I know,” I say, but of course she does mean Scout. She specifically
said
Scout.

It feels fake and uncomfortable and, if I'm telling the truth, kind of powerful.