Imperial Bedrooms Read online

  “Am I the only one you’re interested in?” she asks. “I mean right now, for the part?”

  My eyes scan the bedroom we’re lying in until they land on hers. “Yes.”

  “Why?” And then a teasing smile. “Why me?”

  This question and my subsequent nonanswer leave her wanting to impart information that, in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza, has no reason to even exist. You ignore why she left Lansing at seventeen and the casual hints of an abusive uncle (a made-for-sympathy move that threatens to erase the carnality) and why she dropped out of the University of Michigan (I don’t ask whether she’d ever enrolled) and what led to the side trips to New York and Miami before she landed in L.A. and you don’t ask what she must have done with the photographer who discovered her when she was waitressing at the café on Melrose or about the career modeling lingerie that probably seemed promising at nineteen and that led to the commercials that led to a couple of tiny roles in films and definitely not putting all her hopes into the third part of a horror franchise that panned into nothing and then it was the quick slide into the bit parts on TV shows you’ve never heard of, the pilot shot but never aired, and covering everything else is the distant humiliation of bartending gigs and the favors that got her the hostess job at Reveal. Decoding everything, you piece together the agent who ignores her. You begin to understand through her muted complaints that the management company no longer cares. Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I’ve done it before.

  We sit in my office naked, buzzed on champagne, while she shows me pics from a Calvin Klein show, audition tapes a friend shot, a modeling portfolio, paparazzi photos of her at B-list events—the opening of a shoe store on Canon, a charity benefit at someone’s home in Brentwood, standing with a group of girls at the Playboy Mansion at the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party—and then always it seems we’re back in the bedroom.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” she asks.

  “This. You.” I smile. “What do you want?”

  “I want a part in your movie,” she says. “You know that.”

  “Yeah?” I ask, my hand tracing her thigh. “My movie? Which part?”

  “I want the part of Martina.” She kisses me, her hand moving down to my cock, gripping it, releasing it, gripping it again.

  “And I’m going to try and get it for you.”

  The pause is involuntary but she recovers in a second. “Try?”

  If we aren’t in bed or watching movies we’re at the Bristol Farms down the street buying champagne or at the Apple store in the Westfield Mall in Century City because she needs a new computer and also wants an iPhone (“It’s Christmas,” she purrs as if it matters) and I’ll hand the BMW over to the valet at the mall and notice the looks from the guys taking the car, and the stares from so many other men roaming the mall, and she notices them too and walks quickly, pulling me along, while talking mindlessly to no one on her cell phone, a self-protective gesture, a way to combat the stares by not acknowledging them. These stares are always the grim reminders of a pretty girl’s life in this town, and though I’ve been with other beautiful women, the neurosis about their looks had already hardened into a kind of bitter acceptance that Rain doesn’t seem to share. One of the last afternoons together that December, we’re heading to the Apple store drunk on champagne, Rain nestling into me, wearing Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses as we walk beneath the overcast sky looming above the towers of Century City, the chiming bells of Christmas carols everywhere, and she’s happy because we’d just watched her reel, which includes the two scenes she was in from a Jim Carrey movie, a drama that tanked. (After squinting hard at the screen, I enthusiastically complimented her and then asked why she hadn’t listed the movie on her résumé, and she admitted the scenes were cut.) She’s still asking me if I’m telling the truth about her scenes as we move toward the Apple store and I assure her that I am instead of admitting how dismaying the performance actually was. There was no way those scenes should have been kept in the movie—the decision to remove them was the correct one. (I have to stop myself from wondering how she got the part, because that would be entering a maze with no escape.) What keeps me interested—and it always does—is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality? This is where the suspense of it all usually lies. And later, for the first time since Meghan Reynolds, I think hopefully—lying in bed, lifting a glass filled with champagne to my lips, her face hovering above mine—that maybe she isn’t acting with me.

  We’re shopping at the Bristol Farms on Doheny for another case of champagne in the last week of December when I lose her in one of the aisles and I become dazed when I realize that the market used to be Chasen’s, the restaurant I came to with my parents on various Christmas Eves, when I was a teenager, and I try to reconfigure the restaurant’s layout while standing in the produce section, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” playing throughout the store, and when nothing comes it’s a sad relief. And then I notice Rain’s gone and I’m moving through the aisles and I’m thinking about pictures of her naked on a yacht, my hand between her legs, my tongue on her cunt while she comes and then I find her outside, leaning against my BMW talking to a handsome guy I don’t recognize, his arm in a sling, and he walks away as I wheel my cart toward them and when I ask her who he was she smiles reassuringly and says “Graham” and then “No one” and then “He’s a magician.” I kiss her on the mouth. She looks nervously around. I watch her reflection in the window of the BMW. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Not here,” she says, but as if “not here” is a promise of somewhere better. The deserted parking lot is suddenly freezing, the icy air so cold it shimmers.

  During that week we spend together things aren’t completely tracking—there are lapses—but she acts like it doesn’t matter, which helps cause the fear to fade away. Rain replaces it with something else that’s easy to lose yourself in, despite, for example, the fact that a few of my friends still in town wanted to get together for dinner at Sona but the invitation caused a low-level anxiety in Rain that seemed alien to her nature and this became briefly revealing. (“I don’t want to be with anyone else but you” is her excuse.) But the lapses and evasions aren’t loud—Rain is still soothing enough for the texts from the blocked numbers to stop arriving and for the blue Jeep to disappear along with my desire to start work again on any number of projects I’m involved with and the long brooding silences are gone and the bottle of Viagra in the nightstand drawer is left untouched and the ghosts rearranging things in the condo have taken flight and Rain makes me believe this is something with a future. Rain convinces me that this is really happening. Meghan Reynolds fades into a blur because Rain demands that the focus be on her, and because everything about her works for me I don’t even realize it when it slips into something beyond simply working and for the first time since Meghan Reynolds I make the mistake of starting to care. But there’s one dark fact humming loudly over everything that I keep trying to ignore but can’t because it’s the only thing that keeps the balance in place. It’s the thing that doesn’t let me fall completely away. It’s the thing that saves me from collapsing: she’s too old for the part she thinks she’s going to get.

  So when will you help me?” she asks while we’re sitting in the café down the street from the Doheny Plaza, idling over a late breakfast, both of us floating away from hangovers with the dope we smoked and Xanax. “I think you should make the calls as soon as possible,” she says, looking at herself in a mirror. “Right when everybody comes back, okay?” I’m smiling at her serenely and nodding. I ignore the creases of suspicion on her face even after I remove my sunglasses, and then I assure her with a “Yes” followed by a warm kiss.

  This assumed peace lasts only about a week. There’s always the possibility of something frightening happening, and then it usually does. Two days before Kelly Montrose’s body is found, Rai
n wakes up and mentions she had a dream that night. I’m already up, taking pictures of her while she sleeps, and now that she’s awake she flinches when I take another one and she says that in her dream she saw a young man in my kitchen, a boy, really, but old enough to be desirable, and he was staring at her and there was dried blood crusted above his upper lip and there was a blurred tattoo of a dragon etched on his forearm and the boy told her he had wanted to live here in 1508, but the boy told her not to worry, that he was lucky, and then his face turned black and he bared his teeth and then he was dust, and I tell Rain about the party boy who had owned this apartment and I tell her that the building is haunted, that at night vampires hide in the palm trees surrounding the building waiting for the lights to go out, and then roam the hallways, and finally the camera gets her attention and she’s animated and I keep flashing the camera, my head propped on a pillow while she glances at the flat-screen TV—a shot of people running from a jungle, an episode of Lost, and I reach for a Corona on the nightstand. “The vampires don’t roam the hallways,” she finally murmurs, recovered. “The vampires own the units.” And then we run lines for the part of Martina in The Listeners.

  Kelly Montrose was rumored to be with the Hispanic actress who had been found in the mass grave right before Christmas. The last sighting of him was on a tennis court in Palm Springs one afternoon in mid-December. Kelly’s naked body was smeared across a highway in Juárez and then propped against a tree. Two other men were found nearby entombed in blocks of cement. Kelly’s face was peeled off, and his hands were missing. There was a note pinned to his body revealing nothing: cabron? cabron? cabron? Things I didn’t know about Kelly: the crystal meth thing, the stepmother who died during plastic surgery, the supposed connections with the drug cartel. This discovery feels only tangential since I never really knew Kelly Montrose—he produced movies, I’d met him several times about various projects—and he was never close enough to anyone I knew to define any of my relationships. Rain spends the day before Kelly Montrose is found at a distance: pacing the balcony, texting, taking calls, returning calls, increasingly agitated, leaning against the railing, gazing past the plunge of the balcony at a couple of guys jogging shirtless on the street below. When I ask her what’s wrong she keeps blaming her family. I keep dragging her back to the bedroom and she’s always resisting, promising “In a minute, in a minute … ” After downing two shots of tequila she lazes on the balcony in just a thong, ignoring the helicopter swooping above her, and that night in the dark bedroom in the Doheny Plaza, drunk on margaritas, candles glowing around her while I complain about another movie playing on the giant flat screen, Rain can’t help it and for the first time something causes her to tune out and when I finally notice, my voice starts to waver and as I fade into silence she simply asks, without looking over at me, in a neutral voice, her eyes gazing at the TV, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

  I have to go to San Diego,” she says.

  I’m just waking up, squinting at the light pouring into the bedroom. The shades have been pulled up and she’s walking around in the brightness of the room collecting things.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Almost noon.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have to go to San Diego,” she says. “Something’s come up.”

  I reach out for her, trying to pull her back onto the bed.

  “Clay, stop. I have to go.”

  “Why? Who are you seeing down there?”

  “My mother,” she mutters. “My crazy fucking mother.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “What happened?”

  “Nothing. The usual. Whatever. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “When am I going to see you again?”

  “When I get back.”

  “When are you getting back?”

  “I don’t know. Soon. A couple of days.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “You seemed kind of freaked out yesterday.”

  “No, I’m better,” she says. “I’m okay.”

  To placate me she kisses me on the mouth. “I had a nice time,” she says, stroking my face, and the sound of the air-conditioning competes with the big smile and then the smile and the cool air become in the drift of things suddenly amplified, almost frantic, and I pull her toward me onto the bed and I press my face against her thighs and inhale and then I try to flip her over but she gently pushes me away. I lower the sheet, revealing my hard-on, and she aims for levity and rolls her eyes. I can suddenly see my reflection in a mirror in the corner of the bedroom: an old-looking teenager. She gets up and scans the room to see if she’s forgotten anything. I reach for the camera on the nightstand and start taking pictures of her. She’s staring into a Versace bag that had once been filled with packets of cocaine, the other thing that had fueled so much of the sex, the thing that helped make the fantasy seem much more discrete and innocent than it really was, the thing that made it seem as if the desire was reciprocated. “Could you call the valet and have him bring my car up?” she asks, frowning as she checks a text.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I said I’ll be back,” she murmurs absently.

  “Don’t make me beg,” I say. “I’m warning you.”

  “Even if you did it wouldn’t work.” She doesn’t look up when she says this.

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m imagining things.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m imagining there are many versions of this event.”

  “Event? I’m going to fucking San Diego to see my fucking mother.”

  “Neither one of us wants to admit that something’s wrong,” I murmur, snapping another pic.

  “You just did.” She briefly poses. Another flash.

  “Rain, I’m serious—”

  “Stop turning this into a drama, Crazy.” Again: the sly smile.

  “Drama?” I ask innocently. “Who? Me?”

  The last thing she says before she leaves: “Will you make sure I get that callback?”

  The digital billboards glowing in the gray haze all seem to say no and the poinsettias lining the median at Sunset Plaza are dying and fog keeps enveloping the towers in Century City and the world becomes a science-fiction movie—because none of it really has anything to do with me. It’s a world where getting stoned is the only option. Everything becomes more vague and abstract since every desire and every whim that had been catered to constantly in that last week of December is now gone and I don’t want to replace it with anyone else because there’s no substitute—the teen porn sites seem different, repainted somehow, nothing kicks in, it doesn’t work anymore—and so I re-create almost hourly in my mind the sex that happened in the bedroom over those eight days she was here and when I try to outline a script that I’ve been lazy about it comes out half sincere and half ironic because Rain’s failure to return calls or text back becomes a distraction and then, only three days after she leaves, it officially becomes an obstacle. The bruises on my chest and arms, the imprints from Rain’s fingers and the scratches on my shoulders and thighs, begin to fade and I stop returning various e-mails from people back in town because I have no desire to gossip about Kelly Montrose or dis the awards buzz or hear about people’s plans for Sundance and I have no reason to go back to the casting sessions in Culver City (because what I want has already happened) and without Rain here it all dissipates entirely and the calm becomes impossible, something I can’t control. And so I find myself in Dr. Woolf’s office on Sawtelle and the pattern that keeps repeating itself is again pointed out and its reasons are located and we practice techniques to lessen the pain. And just when I think I’m going to be able to deal with everything a blue Jeep with tinted windows passes me on Santa Monica while I’m crossing the intersection at Wilshire. An hour later I get a text from a blocked number, the first in almost eleven days: Where did she go?

  Rumors of a video of Kelly Montrose�
��s “execution”—that it had been circulating on the Web and seen by “reliable sources”—spreads within the community early one morning in the first week of January. There was supposedly a link somewhere that led to another link but the first link had been pulled and there’s nothing to find except people on various blogs debating the video’s “authenticity.” Supposedly there was a headless body in a black windbreaker hung from a bridge, a bleak desert lined with scrub brush beneath it, police tape whipping in the dry wind, and someone else wrote that the murder was set in a “laboratory” outside of Juárez and someone else countered with certainty that the murder was committed in a soccer field by men wearing hoods and someone else wrote No, Kelly Montrose was killed in an abandoned cemetery. But there’s nothing to substantiate any of it. Someone posted a picture of a severed head grinning broadly from the passenger seat of a bullet-ridden SUV but it isn’t Kelly. In fact there are no shots of him being pulled along a highway bound with rope, no close-ups of skin being peeled off a face, no shots of a pair of hands being amputated while mariachi music is scored over the images, and after the excitement peaks and the justification for the gossip surrenders to reality the rumors about the Kelly Montrose clips fade into a twilight stage.

  But I don’t care. After searching for the links I simply fall back into the habit of looking at all the pics Rain sent me and remember the promises I made that didn’t involve The Listeners but were about agents and about movies with titles like Boogeyman 2 and Bait and I remind her of them in texts I send—Hey I talked to Don and Braxton and Nate wants to rep you and Come back and we’ll go over your part and I’m talking you up to EVERYONE—that are only answered in the middle of the night: Hey Crazy that all sounds super! and I’ll be back soon!! dotted with emoticons. Unlike everyone else it’s not Kelly Montrose that causes my fear to return. It’s officially back and because of Rain’s absence no longer a faint distraction. And then it’s the blue Jeep that passed me on Santa Monica materializing nightly on the corner of Elevado and one night while I watch it dully from my office window it finally pulls away from the curb. And that’s when I notice for the first time another car, a black Mercedes, slowly pulling away from a spot farther down the street and following the Jeep onto Doheny and then up to Sunset. From the apartment below Union Square, Laurie has stopped contacting me completely.