Imperial Bedrooms

  “She’s dressed like a teenager,” Blair says. “I guess that’s because she is one.”

  I glance over at Blair, then look back across the crowd at Meghan and Daniel.

  “I’m not going there with you now.”

  “We all make choices, right?”

  “Your husband hates me.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “There was a girl at your house, at the party … ” The need to ask about this is so physical I can’t put a halt to it. I turn to Blair. “Never mind.”

  “I heard you had drinks with Julian last night,” Blair says. She’s staring at the pool, the title of the movie shimmering on the bottom in giant cursive lettering.

  “You heard?” I light a cigarette. “How did you hear this unless Julian told you?”

  Blair doesn’t say anything.

  “So you’re still in touch with Julian?” I ask. “Why?” I pause. “Does Trent know?” Another pause. “Or is that just a … detail?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That I’m surprised you’re actually talking to me.”

  “I just wanted to warn you about him. That’s all.”

  “Warn me? About what?” I ask. “I’ve been through the whole Julian thing before. I think I can handle it.”

  “It’s not a big hassle,” she says. “If you can just do me a favor and not talk to him if he tries to make contact it would make everything a lot easier.” And then for emphasis she adds, “I’d appreciate it.”

  “What’s Julian doing these days? There was a rumor he was actually running a teenage hooker service.” I pause. “It sounded like old times.”

  “Look, if you can just do this one thing I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Is this real? Or is this just an excuse to talk to me again?”

  “You could have called. You could have … ” Her voice trails off.

  “I tried,” I say. “But you were angry.”

  “Not angry,” she says. “Just … disappointed.” She pauses. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

  For a few seconds we’re both silent and it’s a cold and minor variation on so many conversations we’ve had and I’m thinking about the blond girl on the veranda and I imagine Blair’s thinking about the last time I made love to her. This disparity should scar me but doesn’t. And then Blair’s talking to a guy from CAA and a band begins playing, which I take as my cue to leave, but really it’s the text I suddenly get that says I’m watching you that pushes me out of the party.

  At the valet in front of the hotel, Rip Millar grabs my arm as I’m texting Who is this? and I have to yank my arm away since I’m so alarmed by his appearance. I don’t recognize Rip at first. His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque. He’s on drugs, I’m thinking. He has to be on drugs to look like this. Rip’s with a girl so young I mistake her for his daughter but then I remember Rip doesn’t have any children. The girl has had so much work done that she looks deformed. Rip had been handsome once and his voice is the same whisper it was when we were nineteen.

  “Hey, Clay,” Rip says. “Why are you back in town?”

  “Because I live here,” I say.

  Rip’s visage calmly scrutinizes me. “I thought you spent most of your time in New York.”

  “I mean I’m back and forth.”

  “I heard you met a friend of mine.”

  “Who?”

  “Yeah,” he says with a dreadful grin, his mouth filled with teeth that are too white. “I heard you really hit it off.”

  I just want to leave. The fear is swarming. The black BMW suddenly materializes. A valet holds the door open. The horrible face forces me to glance anywhere but at him. “Rip, I’ve gotta go.” I gesture helplessly at my car.

  “Let’s have dinner while you’re back,” Rip says. “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, but I really have to go now.”

  “Descansado,” he tells me.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Descansado,” Rip says. “It means ‘take it easy,’” he whispers, clutching the child next to him.

  “Yeah?”

  “It means relax.”

  It happens again. While waiting for the girl to come over I’m reaching into the refrigerator for a bottle of white wine when I notice that a Diet Coke’s missing and that cartons and jars have been rearranged and I’m telling myself this isn’t possible, and after looking around the condo for other clues maybe it isn’t. It’s not until I’m staring at the Christmas tree that I finally hear the bones tapping against the windowpane: one strand of lights not connected to the other strands has been unplugged leaving a jagged black streak within the lit tree. This is the detail that announces: you’ve been warned. This is the detail that says: they want you to know. I drink a glass of vodka, and then I drink another. Who is this? I text. A minute later I receive an answer from a blocked number that annihilates whatever peace the alcohol brought on. I promised someone I wouldn’t tell you.

  I’m walking through the Grove to have lunch with Julian, who texts me that he’s at a table next to the Pinkberry in the Farmers Market. I thought you said I was a total mistake, he typed back when I e-mailed him earlier. Maybe you are but I still want to see you was my reply. I keep ignoring the feeling of being followed. I keep ignoring the texts from the blocked number telling me I’m watching you. I tell myself the texts are coming from the dead boy whose condo I bought. It’s easier that way. This morning the girl I called over when I got home from the W Hotel was asleep in the bedroom. I woke her up and told her she had to get out because the maid was coming. At the casting sessions it was all boys and though I wasn’t exactly bored I didn’t need to be there, and songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield’s frame ( … one time you were blowing young ruffians … sung over the digital billboard on Sunset advertising the new Pixar movie) and the fear builds into a muted fury and then has no choice but to melt away into a simple and addictive sadness. Daniel’s arm around Meghan Reynolds’s waist sometimes blocks the view at traffic lights. And then it’s the blond girl on the veranda. It’s almost always her image now that deflects everything.

  You knew that Meghan Reynolds was with Daniel,” I say. “I saw them last night. You knew I’d been with her over the summer. You also knew she’s with Daniel now.”

  “Everyone knows,” Julian says, confused. “So what?”

  “I didn’t,” I say. “Everyone? What does that mean?”

  “It means I guess you weren’t paying attention.”

  I move the conversation to the reason I’m here in the Farmers Market with him. I ask him a question about Blair. There’s a longish pause. Julian’s usual affability gets washed away with that question.

  “We were involved, I guess,” he finally says.

  “You and Blair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She doesn’t want you to talk to me,” I say. “She warned me, in fact, not to.”

  “Blair asked you not to speak to me? She warned you?” He sighs. “She must really be hurt.”

  “Why is she so hurt?”

  “Didn’t she tell you why?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t ask.”

  Julian gives me a quick glance tinged with worry, and then it’s gone. “Because I started seeing someone else and it was hard for her when I broke it off.”

  “Who was the girl?”

  “She’s an actress. She works in this lounge on La Cienega.”

  “Did Trent know?”

  “He doesn’t care,” Julian says. “Why are you asking that?”

  “Because he cared when it was me,” I say. “He still hasn’t cooled
off. I mean, I don’t know why.” I pause. “Trent has his own … proclivities.”

  “I think that was something else.”

  “What’s … something else?”

  “That Blair still likes you.”

  When Julian speaks again his voice becomes more urgent. “Look, they have a family. They have children. They’ve made it work. I should have never gone there but … I never thought I would hurt her.” He stops. “I mean, you’re the one who always hurt her the most.” He pauses before adding, “You’re the one who always did.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “This time she didn’t talk to me for almost two years.”

  “My situation was more … I don’t know, typical. Something you’d expect,” Julian says. “The girl I met was a lot younger and … ” This seems to remind Julian of something. “How did the casting sessions go this morning?”

  “How did you know there were casting sessions this morning?”

  Julian mentions a friend of his who had auditioned.

  “Why do you know twenty-one-year-old actors?” I ask.

  “Because I live here,” he says. “And he’s not twenty-one.”

  We’re standing next to Julian’s Audi in the parking lot off of Fairfax. I’m going back to Culver City when he vaguely mentions a meeting, and I realize I haven’t asked him anything about his life, but then I don’t really care one way or another. I’m about to leave when suddenly I ask him, “What the fuck happened to Rip Millar?”

  At the mention of the name Julian’s face becomes too calm.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because he looks freakish,” I say. “I actually got scared.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s a horror movie,” I say. “I thought he was going to start drooling.”

  “I heard he inherited a lot of money. His grandparents.” Julian pauses. “Real estate investments. He’s opening a club in Hollywood … ” An annoyance I never detected in Julian announces itself. And then Julian casually tells me a story he heard about this secret cult that encouraged members to starve themselves to death—some kind of torture kick, a how far can you take it? kind of thing—and that Rip Millar was somehow indirectly connected to them.

  “Rip said something about how I’d met a friend of his,” I murmur.

  “Did he say a name?”

  “I didn’t ask,” I say. “I didn’t want to know who it was.”

  I notice Julian’s hand trembling as he runs it lightly over his hair.

  “Hey, don’t tell Blair we met, okay?” I finally say.

  Julian looks at me strangely. “I don’t talk to Blair anymore.”

  I sigh. “Julian, she told me she heard that you and I were at the Polo Lounge the other night.”

  Julian’s expression is so completely innocent that I believe him when he says, “I haven’t talked to Blair since June.” Julian is totally relaxed. His eyes don’t waver. “I haven’t had any contact with her for over six months, Clay.” He reacts to the expression on my face. “I didn’t tell her we were at the Polo Lounge the other night.”

  On a break and I’m listening to a message Laurie left on my cell phone (“If you’re not speaking to me at least tell me why … ”), then I delete it midway. The rooms of the casting complex surround a pool, and the rooms are filled with the boys and girls auditioning for the three remaining roles. Sudden interest from a rising young actor whose most recent movie “caused a stir in Toronto” has taken one of the available roles off the table, the part of Kevin Spacey’s son. Only one boy out of the dozens seen yesterday has met the team’s approval for the other male role. Jon, the director, keeps complaining about the girls. Since The Listeners is set in the mid-eighties, he’s having problems with their bodies. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he says. “These girls are disappearing.”

  “What do you mean?” the producer asks.

  “Too thin. The fake tits don’t help.”

  Jason, the casting director, says, “Well, they do help. But I get it.”

  “I have no idea what you’re complaining about,” the producer deadpans.

  “It all seems so unwholesome,” the director says. “And it’s not period, Mark.”

  Talk turns to the actress who passed out while walking to her car after her audition yesterday—stress, malnutrition—and then to the young actor under consideration for Jeff Bridges’s son. “What about Clifton?” the director says. Jason tries to move the director’s focus to other actors, but the director keeps insisting.

  Clifton is the one I lobbied hard for to be in Concealed, the one I took back to Doheny when I found out he was dating an actress I’d been interested in and who showed no interest in me since there was nothing I could offer her. It was made clear what Clifton needed to do if he wanted me to lobby for him. The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night. The BlackBerry on the nightstand that kept flashing, the fake tan and the waxed asshole, the dealer in the Valley who never showed up, the drunken complaints about the Jaguar that had to be sold—the details were so common that it could have been anyone. The same actor came in this morning and smiled briefly at me, did a shaky reading, then improved slightly on the second reading. Whenever I saw him at a party or a restaurant he would casually avoid me, even when I offered my condolences about his girlfriend, that young actress I had wanted, who overdosed on her meds. Since she had a small role in a hit TV show her death was recognized.

  “He’s twenty-four,” Jason complains.

  “But he’s still really cute.” The director mentions the whispers about Clifton’s sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton’s denial in a Rolling Stone cover story about the very famous actor’s new movie which Clifton had a small part in: “We’re so into girls it’s ridiculous.”

  “I’ve never gotten the gay vibe,” the director says. “He butches it up, I guess.”

  And then we refocus on the girls.

  “Who are we seeing next?”

  “Rain Turner,” someone says.

  Curious, I look up from Laurie’s messages that I keep deleting and reach for a headshot. Just as I lift it off the table the girl from the veranda at Trent and Blair’s house in Bel Air walks in and I have to pretend I’m not trapped. The blue eyes are complementing a light blue V-neck and a navy-blue miniskirt, something a girl would have worn in 1985 when the movie takes place. Immediately introductions are made and the audition happens—bad, strident, one-note, every other line needs to be reread to her by the director—but something else starts happening. Her stare is a gaze, and my gaze back is the beginning of it, and I imagine the future: Why do you hate me? I imagine a girl’s anguished voice. What did I ever do to you? I imagine someone else screaming.

  During the audition I look at Rain Turner’s IMDb page on my laptop. She reads for another role and I realize with a panic that she’ll never get a callback. She’s simply another girl who has gotten by on her looks—her currency in this world—and it will not be fun to watch her grow old. These simple facts I know so well still make everything seem freshly complicated to me. Suddenly I get a text—Quien es?—and it takes me a while to realize it’s from the girl I was flirting with in the Admiral’s Club at JFK the afternoon I flew out here. When I look up again I also realize I’ve never noticed the white Christmas tree standing by the poo
l or that the Christmas tree is framed within the window next to the wall with the poster for Sunset Boulevard on it.

  I’m walking Rain to her car outside the offices on Washington Boulevard.

  “So, is this the movie you wanted to put me in?” she asks.

  “It could be,” I say. “I didn’t think you recognized me.”

  “Of course I recognized you.”

  “I’m flattered.” I pause, and then go for it: “Why didn’t you introduce yourself to the producer instead? He was at the party.”

  She smiles as if amazed, then raises an arm to hit me. I back off playfully.

  “Are you usually this brazen before cocktail hour?” she asks. “Jeez.” She’s charming but there’s something rehearsed about the charm, something brittle. The amazed smile seems innocent only because something else is always lurking along its borders.