Killing Monica

  Pandy shook it off and sat up sharply, her sudden movement causing the world to spin ever so slightly.

  She glanced around. The pool was quieter now, the heat having driven away all but the die-hard sunbathers. Suzette was sleeping. Portia was at the bar, in the middle of an animated conversation with someone Pandy couldn’t see.

  Suzette’s reading glasses had fallen into the space between the two chaises. Pandy picked them up, put them on, and read Henry’s texts.

  “Call me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We need to talk.”

  And finally, “Where and when can I meet you?”

  Pandy shot up. She was suddenly wide awake and stone-cold sober. Henry had had word. That was why he wanted to see her.

  Her hand trembled as she tapped in his number, walking briskly to the shaded awning at the far end of the pool. The phone rang and rang, until it went to voice mail.

  “Damn,” Pandy said aloud, hanging up. She immediately sent him a text: “Do they LOVE it?”

  “Where are you?” came the reply.

  “Pool Club.” She was tempted to add, “Answer your damn phone,” but couldn’t be bothered to tap in all the letters.

  “On my way!” Henry wrote back. He’d added an exclamation point; that meant it had to be good news. Suddenly feeling giddy with anticipation, Pandy hurried toward her friends, waving her phone in the air.

  The club was filling up again, this time with mothers and children who must have just gotten out of school. Pandy skipped around a toddler wearing so many flotation devices, he looked like a small astronaut.

  “Henry’s coming!” Pandy said to Suzette, who was now awake due to the screams of the many children who appeared to have taken over the club. “I think it’s good news.”

  Unable to contain her excitement, Pandy began pacing, circling around the nest of deck chairs as she mumbled incoherently. “After all this…I can’t believe…Ohmigod.” Overcome, she had to sit down.

  “Honey, are you all right?” Suzette asked.

  Pandy put her hand to her chest. She wished she could explain to her friends how important this was, but she knew they’d never quite understand. She vigorously nodded her head instead. “Where is Henry?” she cried out impatiently.

  “Henry’s coming?” Portia asked, strolling over with a drink in a plastic martini glass sloshing onto her hand. She looked at Pandy assessingly. “Doll, you’re all sweaty. Why don’t you take a dip in the pool?”

  “Don’t want Henry to see you all sweaty like that,” Suzette joked pointedly.

  “Maybe I will,” Pandy replied, realizing that the excitement of her impending triumph had indeed made her perspire. She grabbed her cell phone and walked to the edge of the water. Unable to bear the suspense any longer, she tapped in Henry’s number.

  He picked up after the first ring.

  “Henry,” she said eagerly. “They do love it, right?”

  “We’ll talk about it when I get there.”

  “When you get here? What’s that supposed to—”

  What felt like a giant sponge slammed into the back of Pandy’s knees. She took a step forward, her arm swinging upward to correct her balance. The toddler in the astronaut suit rolled past her and splashed into the water as Pandy watched her cell phone plunge into the pool.

  As her phone hit the bottom, the realization that Henry had bad news dropped like a brick into the pit of her stomach. Motioning wildly, she stumbled back to her friends. “I need a phone!” she screamed.

  “Why?” Portia asked.

  “I need to call Henry.”

  “I thought he was coming here.”

  “I need to know. Before he gets here.” Pandy choked out the words, reaching for Portia’s phone and dialing.

  And then the sun must have gone behind a cloud because a shadow began to darken Pandy’s vision. A wave of nausea caused her knees to buckle as she dropped onto the chaise and Portia’s phone fell out of her hand.

  “Sweetheart. Are you all right?” Portia bleated as Suzette picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

  “Henry?” Suzette asked.

  She looked over at Pandy and nodded. “I see. Yes, I will,” she said briskly, and hung up.

  “Whadhesay?” Pandy screamed.

  “He’ll be here any minute. He’s hired a car.”

  “A car?” Pandy asked in confusion. Black and white squares began pinwheeling in front of her.

  “I don’t understand. What just happened?” Portia demanded, talking over Pandy as if she weren’t there.

  “I think her book just got rejected,” Suzette said in a stage whisper.

  “What?” Portia gasped.

  “Her new book,” Suzette hissed. She made a slicing motion across her throat.

  “Ohmigod,” Portia screeched. She paused, then added, “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean, is that all? Isn’t that enough?” Suzette’s voice rose.

  Portia shrugged. “I thought maybe Jonny wasn’t going to give her a divorce. Or he wanted even more money.”

  Pandy struggled to sit up. “He’s giving me the divorce!” she shouted.

  “Well, then. There’s no problem, is there?” Portia continued blithely as she draped a towel over Pandy’s shoulders. “If it’s only the book—you can just write another one, right?”

  “Oh, good. Here comes Henry now,” Suzette exclaimed with false cheer.

  “Pandy?” Henry asked, leaning over her.

  Pandy was now frozen in place, her hands soldered over her eyes.

  Henry peeled back her little finger and then slowly pulled her hands away.

  “The book?” Pandy gasped.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said, as Pandy’s throat closed in terror.

  * * *

  It took a stiff slug of vodka before Pandy was able to speak again.

  She swayed on her barstool, alternating between sobs of grief and valiant reassurances. “It doesn’t matter!” “It’s all for a reason!” And most of all: “It will all be all right.” In between these statements were longer moments that felt like some sort of punctuation that would never end: a very long dash, for instance.

  She wanted to crawl into the deepest and darkest of holes; to tunnel lower than she’d ever gone before—where, naturally, she would curl up and die.

  But as the people around her wouldn’t allow that sort of behavior, Pandy went along with their plan:

  Yes, she did agree that it might be a good time to take a couple of days off.

  Yes, she had been holed up for a very long time.

  And yes! She had been dealing with a huge amount of stress. Particularly with Jonny. People couldn’t believe what he had put her through.

  So, yes, she would go to her house in Wallis to recover, especially after these last few months in New York. Henry would join her tomorrow morning at the latest.

  And so she went willingly into the town car Henry had hired to transport her to Wallis.

  She didn’t ask Henry how or why all this seemed to have been arranged in advance, being too confused to ask questions.

  “Goodbye!” She waved out the window to her friends.

  She raised the window and leaned back against the seat. The blast of cold air-conditioning in the car met the day’s heat, and a cloud of steam began to form. Pointing her finger, Pandy briefly held it to her temple. Then she lowered it. Aiming it at the foggy glass window instead, she wrote two words:

  HELP ME.

  Rescued by Suzette, her device came back to life and began vibrating, releasing those buoyant Monica notes into the air like happy-face balloons. Pandy put her hand over the machine to silence it. She looked past the angry line of cars on the other side of the West Side Highway. A sleek white boat, sails trimming the wind, raced across the spackled surface of the river.

  For a moment, she pretended she was in Miami.

  The fantasy was short-lived. Looming ahead was a second Monica billboard—another reminder of
her disastrous failure.

  What no one knew was that without her new book, she couldn’t pay Jonny.

  Meaning she, PJ Wallis, was finished. Monica had won after all.

  And then she frowned. Like the first billboard, this Monica also lacked her leg.

  Despite the circumstances, the sight caused her to convulse with mad, wild laughter. She suddenly had a crazy urge to call SondraBeth Schnowzer to tell her that Monica’s leg was still missing.

  SondraBeth was the only person in the world who would have appreciated the hilarity of the situation.

  The car rounded the corner, and Pandy took one last look at the billboard as her laughter turned to tears. And for the first time in a long time, Pandy remembered how different it had once been, nine years ago when it was new and fresh and exciting…

  And how it had all started when she’d said those four fateful words:

  “I want that girl.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I WANT that girl!” Pandy had exclaimed.

  She was in Los Angeles, sitting in the backseat of a town car, when she’d seen the billboard. It was hanging over Sunset right near the Chateau Marmont, where Pandy was headed after another dispiriting round of auditions for the lead role of Monica.

  All of a sudden, the car had come around the curve after Doheny, and there she was: masses of hair fluttering behind her like the American flag; shining green-gold eyes looking out over the flattened landscape of the universe. In her arms was a golden wolf pup.

  Then the tagline: WHAT IF DOGS CAN SEE STARS, TOO?

  “Her!” she screamed, pointing up at the billboard as they passed by. “That girl.”

  The driver laughed. “She’s a model.”

  “So what?”

  Handsome and genial, the driver laughed again. “It’s the same old story. Everyone who comes to Hollywood has the same dream. They think they’re going to discover some unknown talent. Some gorgeous model who turns out to be a movie star in disguise.”

  Pandy smiled. “And isn’t that your story, too? A movie star in a gorgeous male model’s body?”

  The driver glanced back at her in his rearview mirror. He laughed toothily, appreciating her humor. “I guess you could say that.”

  For a second she could see The Girl’s reflection in his mirrored shades.

  And then she was gone, and in the next moment, the driver was pulling into the driveway of the Chateau Marmont.

  The studio had flown Pandy out to Los Angeles for the casting of Monica, and Pandy had been given the star treatment: a car and driver at her disposal, and bungalow 1 at the Chateau. Bungalow 1 may or may not have been the room where John Belushi died; the staff was vague on the particulars. In any case, the large, dark apartment was enormous. It included two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a terrace shielded from the pool by a chain-link fence woven with thick greenery. Not surprisingly, given its history, there was something unsettling about the place. The first evening, sitting in the front room on the orange fuzzy-caterpillar couch, the TV an arm’s length away, Pandy had thought, You could go crazy here.

  Well, she wouldn’t be the first, she thought now, getting out of the car and slotting her key into the private door that led to the pool and the bungalow. Throwing her stuff onto the caterpillar chaise, she rushed upstairs and flung open the windows, looking past the brown haze on the horizon and trying not to think about the word “no.” A word that was to showbiz as smog was to LA.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Noooo.”

  And, of course:

  “NO!”

  That last “no” had been hers. Delivered just that afternoon at the end of another fruitless casting session, when the studio people tried to convince her to let Lala Grinada play Monica. Lala had the limpest blond hair Pandy had ever seen, and she looked like someone who would starve herself under the slightest bit of pressure. And she was British.

  No, Pandy thought. Lala Grinada was not going to play Monica. She leaned out the window and, by craning her head sharply to the left, discovered that she could just catch a glimpse of The Girl on the billboard.

  And then, as if it were a sign from the Hollywood gods themselves, the buzzer rang and Pandy rushed downstairs, breathlessly opening the door to discover a waiter holding a tray with a bottle of champagne. Propped against the glittering condensation on the silver ice bucket was a gray envelope bearing the name PJ Wallis. Written in block letters and underlined twice.

  Pandy shook off the droplets and ripped open the envelope. Inside was a single heavy card, on which a note was written in the same block lettering: Hope you’ve enjoyed your stay in LA so far. Looking forward to our meeting tomorrow! It was signed with two letters: PP.

  Peter Pepper, the head of the studio that was making Monica.

  Who calls himself PP—Pee-Pee? Pandy wondered as she slid the letter back into the envelope.

  PP, she knew, wanted to talk about casting.

  This was good. She wanted to talk about casting, too.

  The part of Monica had been offered to several well-known actresses, all of whom had turned it down for various reasons. One claimed she didn’t understand the character. Another was worried that Monica wasn’t likable. Yet another insisted she couldn’t use bad language, take drugs, or be rejected by a man on-screen.

  No actress who was any good wanted to play Monica. And the ones who wanted to play her weren’t good enough.

  Pandy picked up the phone. “Can I have two vodka cranberries with ice and a bacon cheeseburger, medium rare?”

  “Just one person,” she clarified. Then: “One person. Two drinks. I’m thirsty.”

  Pandy put the phone down.

  “I need that girl,” she said aloud.

  * * *

  The next morning, before the meeting with PP, Pandy risked her life crossing Sunset to get to the newsstand across from the Chateau. The road forked oddly, and anything in the intersection was potential roadkill. Pandy darted, stopped, darted. She imagined herself as John Belushi in Animal House.

  She bought a pile of magazines and two packs of cigarettes, just in case.

  * * *

  “I hear you haven’t liked anyone so far,” PP said, leaning back in his conference room chair.

  PP was a squarish man with a squarish head and smooth dark hair that resembled the sort of plastic coif favored by action figures. He had thick, blocky thighs that strained against the fine fabric of his black suit pants. He always sat with his legs apart.

  “If you’re referring to Lala Grinada, you’re right,” Pandy said boldly.

  PP—Pee-Pee—scanned the faces around the conference table, taking his time to pause at each one before he said, “Lala Grinada would never be right for this. Whose bad idea was that?” He tilted back in his chair.

  “The agency,” someone said.

  “Actually, there is someone I’d like to see,” Pandy interjected. “She looks right for the part, anyway.”

  “Looks are something,” agreed one of the other executives—a second- or third-in-command, Pandy guessed. “Who is it?”

  “Her.” Pandy laid out the array of magazines, turning to the pages that featured The Girl in a variety of ads—lingerie, fine jewelry, and perfume.

  “Her?” someone asked incredulously.

  “Is she the one with the—”

  “The name? Yes. That ridiculous name that no one can remember.”

  “SondraBeth Schnowzer.”

  “How would that look in the titles?”

  “Terrible.”

  “What kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “Austrian, maybe. Like Schwarzenegger.”

  “Schnowzer,” someone said in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice.

  There was benign laughter around the table.

  “Sorry, darling,” someone said to Pandy.

  “Hold on.” PP raised his hands from behind his head as his chair’s front wheels dropped to the floor. His dark
eyes caught Pandy’s.

  “It’s not that crazy,” PP said, addressing the room. “I happen to know she’s taking acting classes. Roger?”

  Roger quickly looked down at his BlackBerry and tapped out a message. In a moment there was a light rap and the blond wood door opened a crack.

  “Come in,” PP answered.

  “I just wanted to give this to Roger,” a young woman said, making herself invisible as she handed Roger a piece of paper.

  Roger scanned the document, then raised his sparse eyebrows as if impressed. “She has some real credits here. Mostly indie movies, but lots of them.”

  “Indie movies. Meaning she’s a relative unknown. I love that.” PP pushed back from the table and stood up. “Interesting. Okay. Go,” he said, shooing them all away with his fingers.

  Pandy lingered a moment as the others left the room.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “You are just terrific!” PP suddenly exploded, and before Pandy had a chance to react, he embraced her in a bear hug.

  * * *

  Roger was waiting for her on the other side of the door.

  “That was it,” he said, walking her down the hall. “You got the hug.”

  “The hug?” Pandy asked, clutching the magazines to her chest.

  “It’s a sign. PP likes you.”

  “And that means what, exactly?”

  “You’ve got a meeting with SondraBeth Schnowzer.”

  Pandy stopped and stared at him as he paused to hold open the heavy glass doors that led to the elevator bank.

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You’ll meet her, get to know her a little. If you still think she’s right, PP will make sure she gets an audition.”

  “Wow,” Pandy said. “That’s it? It’s that easy?”

  “Hollywood is an easy place when you know the right people.”

  “Great!” Pandy enthused. “So when can I meet her?”

  “Right now,” Roger said, pressing the button for the elevator. “The car will take you to a salon near the Chateau. SondraBeth will be there. She wants to get her hair done or something.”

  A disturbing thought occurred to Pandy. “Is she high-maintenance?”