Oh! You Pretty Things (29 page)

I
'm not a great traveler. For starters, I sweat in enclosed, forced-air situations like airplanes and high-rise New York hotel rooms. And as an added bonus, I'm also a sweller. My hands and feet plump up like Cajun sausages on a charcoal grill. As a result, I've learned to travel only in breathable fabrics and comfortable shoes (read: at least a half-size too big), which gives me a Bozo-visits-the-big-city kind of vibe.

It doesn't lend itself to feeling put-together, so when Eva glances at me, I'm already a little defensive.

“What?” I say.

“Did you bring me that thing about that guy?”

“Of course,” I say, and dig the manila folder from my bag.

Antonio “Tony” Cavalucci. IMDb gave me nothing but the preproduction notice for the movie he's in town to shoot, starring every Method actor you've ever heard of. When I deep-dived into his Internet presence, I discovered that he's a recent grad from Juilliard—drama division, naturally—and an actual poet, with a couple things published in the
Mississippi Review
and
Tin House.

Eva flips the dossier onto Minka's neat piles of makeup and stands from her director's chair, raising her arms overhead like she's about to do a Sun Salutation. “Can we clear the room? I need to get dressed.”

Without so much as a glance between them, Minka and Todd start disassembling their setup.

“You can leave that,” Eva tells them. “I'll need touch-ups before I go to Jon Stewart.”

“Let's eat,” Todd says. Always good to have a lumbering male presence in the room with all this estrogen.

“Yeah, I'm starving,” Scout says from the bed, muffled through the king-size pillow she's positioned over her face.

Eva vaults onto the bed in her underwear and her tiny white tank top and curls up next to Scout. “I want you to come with me right now. There'll be a ton of food in my dressing room.”

Scout groans and sits up, letting the pillow fall to the floor. “I'm so rank. Do I have time for a shower?”

“No,” I say. “I've got to get in there, and we need to be out of here in fifteen minutes.”

“Go ahead,” Eva says to Scout. “Just hurry up.” Then, to me, “Why don't you stay here and unpack me? You can have the morning off.”

I should be relieved, but instead I have a burning sense of . . . shame? Maybe self-loathing. Why doesn't she want me to come? I mean, meeting Kathie Lee Gifford isn't on my bucket list, but still. I'm not good enough?

Scout upends one of her giant bags onto the carpet, creating a mountain of debris, and I say, “Why don't I come back and deal with it once you're done with the show?”

“There's no time for you to get yourself together,” Eva says.
“And I want you to go down and grab me hard-boiled eggs and turkey bacon to take in the car.”

Turkey bacon? Yeah, Eva is only a vegan when she's in L.A., but who am I to judge? I'd kill for a hot pastrami sandwich from Katz's, slathered in deli mustard, with a full sour pickle and a Dr. Brown's cream soda. Which, sadly, is not on the menu for me right now.

“I'll get it sent up.” I grab for the phone, stung that I'm left out of their plans but kind of looking forward to a moment alone to grab a shower.

“Go to the deli across the street. It will be faster and, like, a tenth of the price.”

“I'm a sweaty mess.” I don't point out that she's not paying for her own food. “I just got off the redeye.”

“And I'm going on live national television in an hour,” Eva says without inflection, like she's just making an observation.

I set the phone down.

“You're awesome,” Eva says, slipping into the bathroom without a second glance.

M
inka, Todd, and I crush into the elevator at the same time and we ride down fifteen floors to their less-upscale floor. I'm not entirely bummed that their accommodations are unspectacular. Yup, I'm just that petty.

“See you this afternoon,” I say.

“Later,” says Todd in his frat-boy voice, and Minka flips me a little hand wave.

It's rough to come back from the moment where your boss chastises you in front of the other help. If they shine me too hard, it will be awkward once it's blown over, but if they commiserate, it could end up biting them in the ass later.

In the deli across the street, the guy behind the counter laughs when I ask for turkey bacon. “We have bacon bacon,” he says. “You want it?”

“Can you make it
look
like turkey bacon?”

He flicks his gaze past me. “Next,” he calls. Subtle, dude, but I was raised by a woman who elevated dismissiveness into an art form. You can't shame me over bacon. My first instinct is to turn this into a knock-down, drag-out thing, but instead I veer off toward the grocery section of the store and grab a package of turkey bacon from the meat case. I take my place back in line and when I get to the front again, I slide it across the counter with two twenties and smile beatifically. “Are you positive you don't have turkey bacon?”

He looks me up and down. “Eight minutes,” he says with a grunt that sounds kind of approving, if I had to give it a tone rating.

I hear Donna's voice in my head. “
You catch more flies with honey
.”

Yeah, honey and forty bucks
.

I wonder what she wanted to talk to me about.

When I get to the Town Car idling in front of the hotel, I'm clutching the cooked bacon, a Styrofoam clamshell with four pre-salted and peppered peeled eggs, and a plastic container of hummus that I know Eva won't touch, but I thought it was important to have options. I also have a breakfast sandwich for Scout and another clamshell of fruit salad for me.

Eva's going to be pissed about the Town Car.
I hate that I can hear the driver breathing
, she'll say.
I'd rather just take a cab
.

What she'll mean is that she'd rather take a stretch or a blacked-out Navigator or Escalade, but I'm feeling okay because the transportation wasn't my call. At least I won't be there while Eva spools out a chipper question about the marquee at Radio City Music Hall, visible down Sixth Avenue, or some other touristy question that only I—or in this case, Scout—will be able to parse as annoyance.

Twenty-seven minutes later, I'm standing on the sidewalk as the Town Car pulls into morning traffic with Eva and Scout. Eva has appropriated my fruit salad—
Ooh, that looks amazing
, she said—and I'm holding the container of hummus and the empty, eggy, Styrofoam box, which is dripping salted water onto one of my dirty black ballet flats.

Fine with me. Hot coffee, power nap, and a quick makeover to the trashed room and I'll be golden.

Except I'm halfway through my first cup when Scout texts:
Eva left that thing you gave her about that guy. Can you run it over?

I hesitate with my hand on the keypad. Wouldn't a normal person pretend they didn't get this text right away? I look longingly at the granite-and-marble bathroom. I could be in the shower, right? Maybe I'm in the shower. What's fifteen minutes in the big scheme of things?

SCOUT:
You there?

ME:
Got it. OMW.

SCOUT:
Great. Also, Eva says please deal with the Town Car situation, whatever that means.

I
wipe my armpits with one of the damp towels Eva left on the floor. I don't use the clean one, because I have big plans for it after I get back. I grab the Tony dossier, start for the door, then stop short. There are piles of makeup and hair products, Scout's dirty laundry, and Nag Champa incense boxes littering the floor. There's no way I can let a maid clean this room. One iPhone photo and it's a cover story for next week's
National Enquirer.

EVA CARLTON LIVING LIKE
HOMELESS PERSON IN
FIVE-STAR HOTEL!

There's not enough time to handle it now, so I hang the Privacy Please sign and take off.

By the time I get through the phalanx of
Today
show pages and security guards and the giant metal detector, Eva is already live and charming the hell out of Kathie Lee and Hoda, which, let's face it, is not the easiest thing to do when you're nine times hotter than either of them were in their prime.

A chipper Blake Lively lookalike escorts me to Eva's temporary dressing room, marked with a chalkboard with her name written on it in pink calligraphy and says, “Don't you love your job? It must be
delirious
to travel around with her.”

“It is,” I say. “In fact, I'm hallucinating right now.”

She opens the door into a closet-size space with a tiny gray loveseat and a low table with a cellophane-swathed basket spilling Cheez-Its and M&M's.

“Do you want me to take you to the staging area?” Blake asks.

“No need,” I say. “I'm just dropping this off.”

I put the folder on top of Scout's knockoff Gucci bag and grab a sleeve of Oreos from the basket on my way out.

When I get back to the hotel, Scout texts:
Where did u go? We missed you! We're going shopping in SoHo. Meet at the Marc Jacobs store at 10. Mwah
.

At ten of ten, I've wrangled the room into shape, taken a shower, and made myself relatively presentable in Gap khakis and the Prada work boots Tyler gave me for our two-week anniversary. I'm feeling a little nostalgic for his benign coffee neuroses right now, I'm not going to lie.

I'm outside a few minutes later, and “Love the Way You Lie” sounds on my phone as I'm telling the cabdriver, “Mercer and Houston.”

I know it's my mother, but I answer anyway. There's something bothering me about our last conversation, but I can't put my finger on it. Her recent attentiveness makes me wonder how much the inevitable bill is going to set me back.

“I got the job with Larry Moss!” she squeals. “The beginners' workshop, Tuesdays and Thursdays from six to ten.”

“That's great. Is that what you wanted to tell me in person?”

“No,” she says, uncharacteristically short.

I give it a second. “Okay. So when do you start?”

“Already did,” she says. “Last night. I'm going to audit for the next couple of weeks, then I'll start doing some real work.”

“When do you start getting paid?”

“Don't be bourgeois,” she says. “I'm practicing my craft.”

“So you're an intern?”

“I'm an employee. I really think I have something happening here. And the Eva connection sure didn't hurt.”

“What Eva connection?” I say as the taxi driver bypasses Times Square and continues on Fifth Avenue in the crazy snarl of midtown traffic.

“We-e-ell,” my mother says
.
“I may have mentioned that you and Eva have a relationship.”

“Take Park,” I snap at the driver, who shoots me an aggrieved glance in the rearview. “What does that mean, ‘a relationship'?”

The driver hooks a left onto Forty-First Street, where we immediately get stuck in a honking swarm of stopped cars. He makes eye contact with me in the rearview mirror and shrugs an
I told you so
.

“It doesn't
mean
anything,” my mother says. “I just told him that you're traveling with Eva, handling her press.”

“You said what?” I take a breath that doesn't calm me. “Eva's been working with him for years. You think he doesn't know who her players are?”

“Oh, that reminds me, how was the
Today
show? I saw the whole thing. She looked amazing.”

“Mom, this is not a great time for me. Can we talk when I get back?”

“Do you need a ride home from the airport?”

“Since when do you have a car?” I say, my agenda antennae quivering at high alert.

“Rick's letting me use his.”

“No, I'm fine,” I say, then start making hanging-up noises. “Okay, then . . .”

“Well, why don't you come to dinner this weekend? I invited Larry and his lovely codirector, and told them you and Eva would round out the table. I'll make Irish stew.”

The cabdriver bellows out the window and pounds his open palm on the hollow metal of his door for emphasis. He's covering my range of emotion far better than I ever could, so I stick the phone out the window and point it in his direction, giving my mother the full audio version of his wrath.

Which backfires, because he thinks I'm capturing a video for
Cabbies Gone Wild
or something, and he turns his red-faced ire in my direction.

“You got fucking problem?” he says, sounding like Viggo Mortensen's ruthless Russian mob cleanup man in
Eastern Promises
.

“Gotta go,” I tell my mother, then hang up and explain to the driver, “I was just letting you yell at my mom.”

He snorts a laugh. “For that, I charge extra.”

“Well worth it,” I say, then lean back and close my eyes.

The Larry Moss thing makes me feel like I swallowed a lawn mower. My mother is a stalker, and God knows, Eva's already got plenty of those:

“Belinda, girl, why'd you divorce Slater?”

“When are you coming back to Mount Adams?”

“Why don't you come to dinner with your acting coach?”

My phone buzzes just as we're inching past Washington Square Park. It's Scout:
Marc Jacobs was a bust. SoHo is so played. On our way to Jeffrey. Divert
.

I'm four blocks away and now I have to cut across lower Manhattan to catch up. I pull up the address on my phone, because it's somewhere I've read about a million times but never actually been.

“Change of plans,” I tell the driver. “I need to go to Fourteenth and Washington.”

He furrows his unibrow. “In the Meatpacking?”

“Yep.”

We're heading up West Street and the little red dot on my map is finally visible in the top left-hand of my screen when Eva texts.

Can you stop at Liquiteria and get me an All Greens with extra ginger? Get Scout one too.

I groan and the driver shoots me the unibrow from the front seat.

“Hold on,” I tell him. “One more stop.” I do a location search for something juicy and closer. Of course, One Lucky Duck.

ME:
I'm almost there. I'll grab you something similar from One Lucky Duck.

EVA:
Ew, no. Never heard of it. Oz says Liquiteria is the shit. Anyway, we're done here. Going to Alexander McQueen. Text me on your way back and I'll tell u where we are. Oh, and can u pick up my bags from here? I don't want to carry.

Eva's good at just ignoring things—questions, people, speed limits—that aren't part of her plan. It's infuriating but really kind of aspirational.

“Okay,” I tell the driver. “I need to go to Liquiteria in the East Village, then come back here.”

The driver gestures to the meter.

“Not a problem,” I say.

“For me too, then,” he says, with a snaggle-toothed smile.

The scene at Liquiteria is like the first day of a warehouse sale at Barneys. I wait for an eternity to order, while my phone blows up with a volley of texts from both Eva and Scout, and Viggo circles the block a hundred times.

SCOUT:
Dude, where areee you? You're taking foreverrrrr.

EVA:
There are bags at McQueen and Scoop, too.

EVA:
Also Matthew Williamson.

EVA:
Remind me to tell you about the candles.

ME:
I'm on my way back. Where should I bring juice?

SCOUT:
Eva says get all the stuff first. We're on the move.

I feel like I'm doing one of those connect-the-dots puzzles from a kids' magazine, but instead of ending up with a drawing of a kitten or a teddy bear or a pointy-eared rabbit when I'm done, I just have some rapidly warming juice and the meter on my cab, which has clicked into three digits and is washing me with a fresh wave of anxiety about expenses.

I HAVE EVERYTHING!
I'm feeling so triumphant that I use an exclamation point.
Where r u?

There's radio silence from both Eva and Scout for twenty minutes while I text and retext each of them, my triumph fading into lowercase letters and lesser punctuation.

Where r u guys?

R u there.

Hello?

Guess I'll head to hotel and drop this stuff off.