Some time later, a car screeched to a jarring halt outside, a door was slammed, then came the clatter of heels on the path. I listened to them, wondering where they were going, and located them just as they burst into the room, bearing a mussed and distraught Lara.
‘Where’s Emily?’
‘Out with Troy. What’s wrong?’
‘Oh my God!’
‘A glass of wine?’ I suggested.
She nodded and followed me into the kitchen.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked again. Had she been mugged? Or in a car crash?
‘It’s Nadia. She called me tonight, and on my new caller display panel her number came up as “Mr and Mrs Hindel”. Can you believe it – Mr and Mrs Hindel! She’s married. The bitch is married!’
I poured the wine faster and said, ‘It could be a mistake. She might have been married once but they could be separated now.’
‘Oh no, she admitted it all.’ Lara caught sight of herself in the mirror and groaned. ‘God, I look like twelve miles of rough road.’ In fairness, I’d seen her looking better: her lovely tan was mushroom-coloured. ‘She was totally up front about it – she was just a sexual tourist having an adventure.’
After a painful gap, Lara squeezed out, ‘She was just using me.’ And she began to cry in a contained, dignified way that brought a lump to my own throat. ‘I really liked her,’ she wept, the way women usually weep about men. ‘It hurts just as bad when it’s a girl.’
‘I know, I know.’ Well, I knew now, didn’t I?
‘I thought she was someone special.’
‘You’ll meet someone else.’ I stroked her hair.
‘I won’t!’
‘Shush, you will. Of course you will. You’re beautiful.’
‘I feel so bad.’
‘You do now, but you’ll get over it. She wasn’t the one for you.’
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ With a watery smile, she said, ‘I’ll give myself a week to obsess about her, then I’ll get over her.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ I encouraged.
‘Thanks.’
Foreheads almost touching, we shared a rueful, can’t-live-with-them-can’t-shoot-them look and, all of a sudden, she was taking my face in her hands and kissing me softly on the lips. I was startled, but even so I noticed that it wasn’t unpleasant.
That was the moment, of course, that Emily chose to come home. I saw her shock before I saw her face; white and appalled, it loomed through the night-time window at me. In more of a hurry than usual, she burst into the house and looked, in confusion, from Lara to me.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘You’re not going to believe this.’ Lara began her tale of woe.
Both Emily and I listened intently to Lara, but we weren’t meeting each other’s eye much. Not at all, in fact. We didn’t even exchange words until eventually I said, ‘I’d better go to sleep. I need my full fourteen hours.’
Then Emily called after me, ‘Troy says hey.’
‘Does he? ‘Night.’
I went to bed and shut my eyes and for once I wasn’t thinking about Garv. I wasn’t even thinking about Troy. I was thinking about Lara.
30
The next morning, in the time between chopping the bananas for my first-thing smoothie and putting them in the blender, we were informed of Emily’s salvation – Larry Savage had bought her screenplay!
Naturally enough, she nearly screeched the house down with relief. And nothing, not even the proviso that she had to rewrite the script to include Chip the dog, could dent her joy.
‘I’il change my entire cast to orang-utans if he wants!’ Emily declared. ‘So long as he gives me the money.’
‘How much will you get?’ I asked, feeling pretty uplifted myself.
‘Writers’ Guild minimum, the stingy bastard,’ she said airily. ‘It’s nearly an insult!’
But an insult that ran to almost six figures. With the promise of half a million dollars if they actually made the movie.
The thing was, though – would they make it? I knew from my own small experience that this was impossible to gauge; no matter how enthusiastic a producer was, they still had to convince the studio executives and the Green-Light Guy that it was a movie worth making. And that was easier said than done. But still, we wouldn’t worry about that today…
Emily surgically attached herself to the phone and began a ringathon: that night we were having another party, a proper party, and this time we really had something to celebrate.
Meanwhile, the good news was criss-crossing amongst her friends, and those that hadn’t already spoken to her were ringing in, so call waiting was doing overtime. ‘Hold on a minute, the other line is going,’ I kept hearing.
And one of those call waitings was Shay Delaney. I knew immediately: the air molecules around Emily seemed to rearrange themselves into a guilt-filled configuration. What a terrible pity he hadn’t rung the previous night and left a message, because I could have wiped it and Emily would never have known. And what an even worse pity that I’d never have the guts to do something like that.
When the telephone frenzy had played itself out, Emily approached me as I sought out a clean T-shirt in my suitcase.
‘I invited Shay Delaney to come tonight,’ she said apologetically. ‘In the heat of the moment, it just slipped out. Do you mind?’
‘Bit late if I do,’ I said briskly, continuing to rummage in my suitcase.
‘I could uninvite him.’ As if.
‘I’ll do it right now.’
‘No, it’s OK.’ Tonight was Emily’s long-awaited celebration, I had no right to spoil it. And Shay Delaney was ancient history.
Emily decided the party should be catered. I was doubtful – my only experience of caterers was of acquiring dozens of sample menus, taking six weeks to deliberate over them, then finally deciding it would be cheaper to pay my mother to make ham sandwiches and apple tarts. But in Los Angeles, you just pick up the phone and say, ‘I want Vietnamese finger food, miniature pastries and pink champagne for forty.’ And four hours later, three buffed out-of-work actors are efficiently transforming your house into a white-clothed, crystal-glinting venue, bursting at the seams with Vietnamese finger food, miniature pastries and pink champagne. As smooth and speedy as Formula One engineers changing a tyre, they were, and the moment the last champagne glass was placed in the triangular configuration and the last sprig of coriander placed on the pile of glass noodle spring rolls, they were on their way again.
‘Off to save someone else’s party?’ Emily asked.
‘You got it.’
‘Well, thank you Super Caterers, how can we ever repay you?’
‘Just doin’ our job, ma’am.’
‘And the invoice is in the mail.’
‘And we know where you live.’
‘We’ll be back for the glasses and stuff in the morning. Enjoy!’
Once they’d gone, Emily decided we’d try the pink champagne. ‘Just to make sure it isn’t poisonous.’
We clinked glasses and Emily said, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you. To my lovely assistant, Maggie.’
‘To a brilliant script!’ I said gallantly.
‘To Larry Savage!’
‘To Chip the dog!’
‘To a cast of orang-utans!’
In the dreamy, happy silence that followed, I heard myself ask, ‘Does he know I’m staying with you?’
‘Who?’
‘Shay Delaney.’
‘No. Well, I never mentioned it.’
Just like that, my bubble burst and I was at the mercy of all the stupid feelings you get when someone was once your sole preserve but now you’re out in the cold, excluded and irrelevant.
And speaking of excluded and irrelevant, ‘Is Troy coming tonight?’
‘Yeah.’ Emily looked uncomfortable. ‘I know you don’t want to see him, but he’s been my friend for a long time and he’s helped me so much with the script. I couldn’t not invite him.
’
I saw her point, but this put paid to my hope that Troy would have the decency to steer clear of me for the rest of my stay and thereby spare me any further mortification. It stung that I wasn’t even worthy of being avoided!
‘Well, if Troy’s coming,’ I said, whipping off my ‘Boys are Mean’ T-shirt, ‘I’d better find something else to wear.’
‘Why?’
‘In the words of the song: He’s so vain, I bet he’ll think this T-shirt’s about him.’
Shortly after seven, people started arriving. Justin and Desiree were the first to show up. Next, bearing a bottle of champagne, came Lou the commitmentphobe, who was swarthy, sexy and extremely pleasant. When I whispered to Emily how nice he seemed, she replied, ‘Oh, these guys are clever, I’m not saying they’re not.’
Then I saw Troy’s jeep parking across the road, and to my shame I immediately began wishing for the best: that he might take me to one side and whisper an apology about how he’d been too busy to ring me – even though I knew for a fact it wouldn’t happen.
And how right I was! As he alighted from his car, I got a pain in my stomach when I saw that he was accessorized by Kirsty. Then they were crossing the road and coming through the door. Before I had time to wonder how he’d behave, he was walking straight over to me. My heart constricted with hope… then he was planting a brotherly kiss on my cheek and saying, real goofy and friendly like, with none of the innuendo I’d come to expect, ‘So Irish, you were the one driving the getaway car!’
‘What?’ I asked shrewishly. Funny that, I’d meant to sound calm and cool.
‘You saved the day on Monday, right? Driving Emily across town to Empire. Even offered to do the pitch, yeah? If it hadn’t been for you, well, who knows… Oh, thanks,’ he took a drink from Justin. ‘Hey guys, how about we raise our glasses to Irish?’
Justin and Lou obediently raised their glasses with Troy and chorused, ‘To Irish!’
Interestingly enough, mind, Kirsty’s glass of low-fat water didn’t budge and her lips remained zipped.
‘Hey, we haven’t met – I’m Troy, Emily’s friend.’ Troy thrust his hand at Lou by way of introduction.
‘Lou,’ Lou replied evenly. ‘Emily’s boyfriend.’
‘Oh,’ Troy said. ‘Yeah, right.’ He was looking at Lou and Lou was looking at him – what I recognized as an Alpha-male moment. If they’d been lions they’d have been circling each other, sizing up their respective strengths.
‘So where is she?’ Troy looked around for Emily.
‘Here!’ she called, emerging from her bedroom.
Both Lou and Troy stepped forward, but Troy got there first and spread his arms in homage. ‘The success story! Need a director?’
‘Eat my shorts,’ Emily laughed.
‘So what’s the catch?’ Troy asked.
‘Why should there be a catch?’
‘C’mon Emily, you know these guys, there’s always a catch. How bad is it?’
‘Chip the dog gets a part.’
‘You happy to do that?’
‘If the man is happy to give me the money.’
‘Whatever happened to art?’ Troy teased. ‘Whatever happened to principles?’
‘Amazing how easy it is to compromise when you’re broke and scared,’ she grinned.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Troy smiled. ‘Congratulations, baby girl, I’m way happy for you.’
At this point, Kirsty decided that there was too much grinning and camaraderie going on with Emily and Troy, so she stepped between them and started whining to Troy about her mineral water having the wrong size bubbles, or something.
They arrived in their dozens: Lara, David Crowe, Mike and Charmaine, Connie and her entourage, Justin’s two friends from the dog park, a gang of scriptwriters from Emily’s Learning Annex class, another bunch from gyrotonics. It was so much like a rerun of last week’s premature shindig that when I found the Goatee Boys moshing in the front room, I groaned, ‘Groundhog day.’
Everyone brought presents: the studio had sent half a garden of flowers earlier; David Crowe had arrived with an arrangement only marginally smaller. It was a happy night, a night of celebration. Most of the people present were connected in some way with the world of movies, so Emily selling a script gave everyone a lift – a victory for one was a victory for all.
But I didn’t feel happy or celebratory, not even close: I was burning up from Troy’s treatment of me. Bad enough to use me for a one-night stand, but I wasn’t even important enough for him to hide his carry-on with Kirsty from. At least he respected her enough to lie to her. And I was complicit in my own humiliation – by keeping my mouth shut, I was going along with it and making it easy for Troy.
It was all wrong, but I could see no way to make it right. What would be achieved by telling Kirsty I’d slept with Troy, then bitch-slapping her like we were on the Jerry Springer Show?. Apart from the fact that I’d enjoy it?
So not only did I hate Troy – and Kirsty – but I hated myself. And, though I didn’t like facing it, I was angry with Emily for inviting Shay Delaney. Small wonder that I felt I hated the whole world. My sole consolation was that I didn’t hate Kirsty just because Troy was dancing attendance on her; luckily I’d already hated her.
I wandered around ungraciously shoving trays of food at people who seemed indignant at the implication that they occasionally ate. If it hadn’t been for Justin I’d have had no takers at all.
‘Gotta take care of this,’ he said, wobbling his belly and popping a jumbo prawn into his mouth. ‘I got my job to think of. Now, what about you, Princess?’
‘Sure, another three or four more can’t hurt,’ I said, reaching for a prawn.
But he was talking to Desiree, tempting her with a spring roll, which she disdainfully turned her nose up at.
‘See that?’ he asked anxiously. ‘She usta love Pacific Rim.’
‘Maybe she’s sick. Why don’t you bring her to the vet?’
‘She’s not sick. It’s worse than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m scared she has anorexia.’
‘Anorexia? But… but she’s a dog’
‘Dogs can get anorexia,’ he said sadly. ‘There was a thing in the LA Times about it.’
‘Please tell me that you’re joking.’ ‘Maggie,’ he said sadly, ‘I wish I was.’
I picked up my tray and set off on another thankless circuit and wondered: What kind of place was this where even the dogs got eating disorders?
‘See you at the pastries in five,’ Justin called after me.
Justin and I kept bumping into each other in the garden at the tray of pastries. They’d lured me back so often I was actually beginning to get embarrassed and, sure enough, a short time later, Justin and I both showed up beside them.
‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ I said, and in the hope that if I couldn’t see them, I wouldn’t be as tempted to eat them, I turned my back – and came face to face with Troy and Kirsty. Shite.
‘Having fun?’ Troy asked.
‘Um, yeah.’ I turned around, located a thumb-sized chocolate eclair and threw it at my mouth. I just couldn’t help myself.
‘Great news for Emily, huh?’
‘Yeah, urn…’
Then, like I was possessed by a sugar demon, I was picking up a dime-sized doughnut. (When you ask for ‘miniature’ in LA, that’s exactly what you get.) Kirsty watched it carefully, following its journey from the tray to my mouth, then asked with fake sympathy, ‘That’s, like, number at least seven. Are you pre-menstrual?’
The taste of rough sugar vanished from my mouth, to be replaced with the taste of hatred.
‘You know what you gotta do?’ she carolled. ‘You gotta try zinc. Zap those sugar cravings! But forget glucose, forget candy! I got something even better!’ A statement like that was bound to attract a lot of attention in Los Angeles. Several heads turned to her and when she was satisfied that her audience were hanging on her every word,
she continued. ‘Better’n all of them is – a frozen grape! Just buy grapes at the market, put them in the ice compartment, and any time those old sugar cravings come calling, scare ‘em away by eating a frozen grape. Totally sweet and zero, read my lips, zero calories.’
All I could say was, ‘Grapes have more than zero calories.’ A poor attempt, but better than nothing.
‘She’s right,’ Justin said, making mischievous eye contact with me. ‘Grapes are very high in fructose. You’re looking at fifteen to twenty calories a grape.’
‘More,’ I lied. I hadn’t a clue. ‘Depending on the size of the grape. If it’s a big one and has a particularly high sugar content, you could be looking at as many as–’ I paused for effect, ‘-FIFTY calories.’
‘Seems to me you should stick with pastries,’ Justin concluded, reaching for a tiny custard pie. ‘Better for you!’
With that, Justin and I exchanged a high five with our eyes, then peeled away, leaving Kirsty with her reputation as a food guru in tatters.
Just when I thought I was in the clear, Shay Delaney arrived.
All evening I’d been as tense as an exam hall, wondering if he’d show, but the more time had passed the less likely it had been that he’d appear. Naturally enough, the minute I decided he wasn’t coming was when I spotted a tall, dark-blond head across the garden. It couldn’t be…
It was.
Every one of my muscles tensed as I waited for him to notice me. And waited. And waited…
He seemed to know almost everyone. Heads were thrown back and laughter floated at me as he worked the garden and chewed the fat with David Crowe, Connie, and Emily’s friend Dirk. Well, they say the movie world is very small.
Finally, unable to bear the suspense, I placed myself in his path.
Just like the last time, he looked gratifyingly shocked. ‘Maggie Garvan!’
‘Walsh,’ I corrected, defiantly – the last time we’d met I’d have died if he’d found out about the breakdown of my marriage, and now I was determined that he should know about it.