The premiere is at the Chinese tonight and it’s a movie that has something to do with confronting evil, a situation set up so obviously that the movie becomes safely vague in a way that will entice the studio to buy awards for it, in fact there’s a campaign already under way, and I’m with the director and the producer of The Listeners and we drift with the rest of the crowd across Hollywood Boulevard to the Roosevelt for the after-party where paparazzi cling to the hotel’s entrance and I immediately grab a drink at the bar while the producer disappears into the bathroom and the director stands next to me talking on the phone to his wife, who’s in Australia. When I scan the darkened room, smiling back at unfamiliar people, the fear returns and soon it’s everywhere and it keeps streaming forward: it’s in the looming success of the film we just watched, it’s in the young actors’ seductive questions about possible roles in The Listeners, and it’s in the texts they send walking away, their faces glowing from the cell light as they cross the cavernous lobby, and it’s in the spray-on tans and the teeth stained white. I’ve been in New York the last four months is the mantra, my mask an expressionless smile. Finally the producer appears from behind a Christmas tree and says, “Let’s get out of here,” then mentions something about a couple of parties up in the hills, and Laurie keeps texting from New York (Hey. You.) and I cannot get it out of my head that someone in this room is following me. Sudden rapid camera flashes are a distraction, but the pale fear returns when I realize whoever was in that blue Jeep last night is probably in the crowd.
We head west on Sunset in the producer’s Porsche and then turn up Doheny to the first of two parties Mark wants to hit, the director following us in a black Jaguar, and we start speeding past the bird streets until we spot a valet. Small decorated firs surround the bar I’m standing at pretending to listen while a grinning actor tells me what he’s got lined up and I’m drunkenly staring at the gorgeous girl he’s with, U2 Christmas songs drowning everything out, and guys in Band of Outsiders suits sit on a low-slung ivory sofa snorting lines off a long glass cocktail table, and when someone offers me a bump I’m tempted but decline knowing where that will lead. The producer, buzzed, needs to hit another party in Bel Air, and I’m drunk enough to let him maneuver me out of this one even though there’s a vague shot of getting laid here. The producer wants to meet someone at the party in Bel Air, it’s business in Bel Air, his presence in Bel Air is supposed to prove something about his status, and my eyes wander over to the boys barely old enough to drive swimming in the heated pool, girls in string bikinis and high heels lounging by the Jacuzzi, anime sculptures everywhere, a mosaic of youth, a place you don’t really belong anymore.
At the house in the upper reaches of Bel Air, the producer loses me and I move from room to room and become momentarily disoriented when I see Trent Burroughs and everything gets complicated while I try and sync myself with the party, and then I soberly realize that this is the house where Trent and Blair live. There’s no recourse except to have another drink. That I’m not driving is the consolation. Trent is standing with a manager and two agents—all of them gay, one engaged to a woman, the other two still in the closet. I know Trent’s sleeping with the junior agent, blond with fake white teeth, so blandly good-looking he’s not even a variation on a type. I realize I have nothing to say to Trent Burroughs as I tell him, “I’ve been in New York the last four months.” New Age Christmas music fails to warm up the chilly vibe. I’m suddenly unsure about everything.
Trent looks at me, nodding, slightly bewildered by my presence. He knows he needs to say something. “So, that’s great about The Listeners. It’s really happening.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
After the nonconversation starts itself we enter into a hazy area about a supposed friend of ours, someone named Kelly.
“Kelly disappeared,” Trent says, straining. “Have you heard anything?”
“Oh, yeah?” I ask, and then, “Wait, what do you mean?”
“Kelly Montrose. He disappeared. No one can find him.”
Pause. “What happened?”
“He went out to Palm Springs,” Trent says. “They think maybe he met someone online.”
Trent seems to want a reaction. I stare back.
“That’s strange,” I murmur disinterestedly. “Or … is he prone to things like that?”
Trent looks at me as if something has been confirmed, and then reveals his disgust.
“Prone? No, Clay, he’s not prone to things like that.”
“Trent—”
Walking away from me, Trent says, “He’s probably dead, Clay.”
On the veranda overlooking the massive lit pool bordered by palms wrapped in white Christmas lights, I’m smoking a cigarette, contemplating another text from Julian. I look up from the phone when a shadow steps slowly out of the darkness and it’s such a dramatic moment—her beauty and my subsequent reaction to it—that I have to laugh, and she just stares at me, smiling, maybe buzzed, maybe wasted. This is the girl who would usually make me afraid, but tonight she doesn’t. The look is blond and wholesome, midwestern, distinctly American, not what I’m usually into. She’s obviously an actress because girls who look like this aren’t out here for any other reason, and she just gazes at me like this is all a dare. So I make it one.
“Do you want to be in a movie?” I ask her, swaying.
The girl keeps smiling. “Why? Do you have a movie you want to put me in?”
Then the smile freezes and quickly fades as she glances behind me.
I turn around and squint at the woman heading toward us, backlit by the room she’s leaving.
When I turn back around the girl’s walking away, her silhouette enhanced by the glow of the pool, and from somewhere in the darkness there’s the sound of a fountain splashing, and then the girl is replaced.
“Who was that?” Blair asks.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Why are you here?”
“I was invited.”
“No. You weren’t.”
“My friends brought me.”
“Friends? Congratulations.”
“Merry Christmas” again is all I can offer.
“Who was that girl you were talking to?”
I turn around and glance back into the darkness. “I don’t know.”
Blair sighs. “I thought you were in New York.”
“I’m back and forth.”
She just stares at me.
“Yeah.” And then: “You and Trent still happy?”
“Why are you here tonight? Who are you with?”
“I didn’t know this was your place,” I say, looking away. “I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t you know these things?”
“Because you haven’t talked to me in two years.”
Another text from Julian tells me to meet him at the Polo Lounge. Not wanting to go back to the condo, I have the producer drop me off at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Outside, on the patio, next to a heat lamp, Julian sits in a booth, his face glowing while he texts someone. He looks up, smiles. As soon as I slide into the booth a waiter appears and I order a Belvedere on the rocks. When I offer Julian a questioning look he taps a bottle of Fiji water I hadn’t noticed before and says, “I’m not drinking.”
I take this in and deliberate slightly. “Because … you have to drive?”
“No,” he says. “I’ve been sober for about a year.”
“That’s a little drastic.”
Julian glances at his phone, then back at me.
“And how’s that going?” I ask.
“It’s hard.” He shrugs.
“You more cheerful now?”
“Clay … ”
“Can we smoke out here?”
The waiter brings the drink.
“How was the premiere?” Julian asks.
“Not a soul in sight.” I sigh, studying the tumbler of vodka.
“So you’re back from New York for how long?”
“I don’t kno
w yet.”
He tries again. “How’s The Listeners coming?” he asks with a sudden interest, trying to move me into the same world.
I gaze at him, then answer cautiously. “It’s coming along. We’re casting.” I wait as long as I can, then I knock back the drink and light a cigarette. “For some reason the producer and director think my input’s important. Valuable. They’re artists.” I take a drag off the cigarette. “It’s basically a joke.”
“I think it’s cool,” Julian says. “It’s all about control, right?” He considers something. “It’s not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you’re also one of the producers—”
I cut him off. “Why have you been tracking this?”
“It’s a big deal and—”
“Julian, it’s a movie,” I say. “Why have you been tracking this? It’s just another movie.”
“Maybe for you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe for others it’s something else,” Julian says. “Something more meaningful.”
“I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a vampire in it.”
Inside, the piano player’s doing jazzy riffs on Christmas carols. I concentrate on that. I’m already locked out of everything. It’s that time of night when I’ve entered the dead zone and I’m not coming out.
“What happened to that girl you were seeing?” he asks.
“Laurie? In New York?”
“No, out here. Last summer.” He pauses. “The actress.”
I try to pause but fail. “Meghan,” I say casually.
“Right.” He draws the word out.
“I really have no idea.” I lift the glass, rattle the ice around.
Julian innocently glances at me, his eyes widening slightly. This makes it clear he has information he wants to give me. I realize that I sat here, in this very same booth, one afternoon with Blair, in a different era, something I wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t seen her tonight.
“Are we lost again, Julian?” I sigh. “Are we gonna play out another scene?”
“Hey, you’ve been gone a long time and—”
“How do you even know about that?” I ask suddenly. “You and I weren’t hanging then.”
“What do you mean?” he asks. “I saw you last summer.”
“How do you know about Meghan Reynolds?”
“Someone told me you were helping her out … giving her a break—”
“We were fucking, Julian.”
“She said that you—”
“I don’t care what she said.” I stand up. “Everyone lies.”
“Hey,” he says softly. “It’s just a code.”
“No. Everyone lies.” I stub the cigarette out.
“It’s just another language you have to learn.” Then he delicately adds, “I think you need some coffee, dude.” Pause. “Why are you so angry?”
“I’m out of here, Julian.” I start walking away. “As usual, a total mistake.”
A blue Jeep follows me from the Beverly Hills Hotel to where the cab drops me off in front of the Doheny Plaza.
Something has changed since I was here seven hours ago. I call the doorman while staring at the desk in my office. The computer is on. It wasn’t when I left. I’m staring at the stack of paper next to the computer. When the doorman answers I’m staring at a small knife used to open envelopes that was placed on the stack of paper. It was in a drawer when I headed out to the premiere. I hang the phone up without saying anything. Moving around the condo I ask, “Is anyone here?” I lean over the duvet in the bedroom. I run my hand across it. It smells different. I check the door for the third time. It’s locked. I stare at the Christmas tree longer than I should and then I take the elevator down to the lobby.
The night doorman sits at the front desk in the lushly lit lobby. I walk toward him, unsure of what to say. He looks up from a small TV.
“Did someone come by my place?” I ask. “Tonight? While I was out?”
The doorman checks the log. “No. Why?”
“I think there was someone in my place.”
“What do you mean?” the doorman asks. “I don’t understand.”
“I think someone was in my condo while I was out.”
“I’ve been here all night,” the doorman says. “No one came by.”
I just stand there. The sound of a helicopter roars over the building.
“Anyway, they couldn’t get in the elevator without me opening it for them,” the doorman says. “Plus Bobby’s outside.” He motions to the security guard slowly pacing the driveway. “Are you sure someone was in there?” He sounds amused. He notices I’m drunk. “Maybe it was no one,” he says.
Pare it down, I warn myself. Put it away. Just pare everything down. Or else the bells will start chiming. “Things were rearranged,” I murmur. “My computer was on … ”
“Is anything missing?” the doorman asks, now openly humoring me. “You want me to call the police?”
In a neutral voice: “No.” And then I say it again. “No.”
“It’s been a quiet night.”
“Well … ” I’m backing away. “That’s good.”
An actress I met at the casting sessions this morning is having lunch with me at Comme Ça. When she walked into the room at the casting director’s complex in Culver City she instantly provided a steady hum of menace that left me dazed, which acted as a mask so I appeared as calm as a cipher. I haven’t heard of her agent or the management company that reps her—she came in as someone’s favor—and I’m thinking how different things would be if I had. Certain tensions melt away but they’re always replaced with new ones. She’s drinking a glass of champagne and I still have my sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and talking vaguely about her life. She lives in Elysian Park. She’s a hostess at the Formosa Café. I twist in my chair while she answers a text. She notices this and then offers an apology. It’s not coy, exactly, but it’s premeditated. Like everything else she does it wants a reaction.
“So what are you doing for Christmas?” I ask her.
“Seeing my family.”
“Will that be fun?”
“It depends.” She looks at me quizzically. “Why?”
I shrug. “I’m just interested.”
She touches her hair again: blond, blown out. A napkin becomes faintly stained after she wipes her lips with it. I mention the parties I went to last night. The actress is impressed, especially by the one I went to first. She says she had friends who were at that party. She says she wanted to go but she had to work. She wants me to confirm if a certain young actor was there. When I say he was, the expression on her face makes me realize something. She notices.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “He’s an idiot.”
Some people at that party, she adds, are freaks, then mentions a drug I’ve never heard of, and tells me a story that involves ski masks, zombies, a van, chains, a secret community, and asks me about a Hispanic girl who disappeared in some desert. She drops the name of an actress I’ve never heard of. I’m trying to stay focused, trying to stay in the moment, not wanting to lose the romance of it all. Concealed, a movie I wrote, is brought up. And then I get the connection: she asked about the young actor with the gorgeous girl I was gazing at because he had a small role in Concealed.
“I don’t really want to know.” I’m staring at the traffic on Melrose. “I didn’t stay long. I had another party to go to.” And suddenly I remember the blond girl walking out of the shadows in Bel Air. I’m surprised she has stayed with me, and that her image has lingered for so long.
“How do you think it went?” she asks.
“I thought you were great,” I say. “I told you that.”
She laughs, pleased. She could be twenty. She could be thirty. You can’t tell. And if you could, everything would be over. Destiny. “Destiny” is the word I’m thinking about. The actress murmurs a line from The Listeners. I made sure the director and producer had no interest in her for
the role she auditioned for before asking her out. This is the only reason she’s with me at lunch and I’ve been here so many times and I realize there’s another premiere tonight and that I’m meeting the producer in Westwood at six. I check my watch. I’ve kept the afternoon open. The actress drains the glass of champagne. An attentive and handsome waiter fills it up again. I’ve had nothing to drink because something else in the lunch is working for me. She needs to take this to the next level if anything’s ever going to pan out for her.
“Are you happy?” she asks.
Startled, I say, “Yeah. Are you?”
She leans in. “I could be.”
“What do you want to do?” I look at her straight on.
We spend an hour in the bedroom in the condo on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza. That’s all it requires.
Afterward she says she feels disconnected from reality. I tell her it doesn’t matter. I’m blushing when she tells me how nice my hands are.
The premiere is at the Village and the after-party, elaborate and fanciful, is at the W Hotel. (It was supposed to be at the Napa Valley Grille—because of overcrowding was moved to this less accessible but larger venue.) Forced to watch people pretend to yell and cry for two and a half hours can push you to a dark distance that takes a day to come back from, yet I found the movie well made and coherent (which is always a miracle) even though I often had to think awful thoughts in order to stay awake. I’m standing by the pool talking to a young actress about fasting and her yoga routine and how superstoked she is to be in a movie about human sacrifices, and the initial shyness—apparent in large, soft eyes—is encouraging. But then you say the wrong thing and those eyes reveal an innate distrust mixed with a lingering curiosity that everyone shares out here and she drifts off, and looking up at the hotel, encased in the crowd, clutching my phone, I start counting how many rooms are lit and how many aren’t and then realize I’ve had sex with five different people in this hotel, one of them now dead. I take a piece of sushi from a passing tray. “Well, you did it,” I tell the executive who allowed this movie to be made. Daniel Carter, who I’ve known since we were freshmen at Camden, is the director, but our friendship is worn out and he’s been avoiding me. And tonight I see why: he’s with Meghan Reynolds, so I can’t offer the faked congratulations I prepared. Daniel sold his first script when he was twenty-two and has had no problems with his career since then.