Angels (30 page)

Next I called Emily, one of the few people who'd known the full extent of my reluctance to get pregnant—and only because she'd been of the same mind. She was one of those people who, if you asked if they liked children, would reply, “Love them! But I couldn't manage a whole one.”

I broke the news that I was eight weeks' pregnant, and when she asked me, “Are you happy?” I heard myself reply, “I've never been so happy in all my life. I was a fool to have waited so long.”

There was silence, then a sniff. “Are you crying?” I asked suspiciously.

“I'm so happy for you,” she wobbled. “This is wonderful news.”

*

*

ANGELS / 237

It was on a routine visit to the bathroom one Saturday after-noon when I saw it. This wasn't just the spotting they'd talked about.

This was crimson, and
everywhere
.

“Garv,” I called, surprised by how normal I sounded. “Garv! I think we'd better go to the hospital.”

Out by the car, I decided I wanted to drive myself. I was quite insistent, something to do with control, probably. And Garv, who rarely loses his temper, stood in the street and yelled, “I'LL

FUCKING DRIVE.”

I remember every part of the journey to the hospital in almost hyperreality. Everything was acutely sharp and clear. We had to go through town, which was so thronged with Saturday afternoon shoppers we could hardly get the car through the streets. The sheer numbers of people made me feel entirely alone in the world.

At the hospital we parked in an ambulance bay, and to this day I could still tell you what the woman on admissions looked like.

She promised that I'd be seen as soon as possible, then Garv and I sat and waited on orange plastic chairs that had been nailed to the floor. We didn't speak.

When a nurse came for me, Garv promised, “It'll be okay.”

But it wasn't.

It was a nine-week fetus, but I felt as if someone I knew had died.

It was too early to tell the sex, and that made me feel worse.

A shared loss is harder, I think. I could handle my own pain, but I couldn't handle Garv's. And there was something I had to say to him before the guilt devoured me whole. “It's my fault, it's because I didn't want it. He or she knew it wasn't wanted.”

“But you did want it.”

“Not in the beginning.”

And he had nothing to say to me. He knew it was true.

ON SUNDAY EVENING
Lara came over.

“Not out with Nadia?” Emily asked.

“Nah, she got her butthole bleached and can't sit down.”

“Excuse me?” I spluttered. “Her butthole? Bleached?”

“It's the latest thing in plastic surgery,” Lara explained. “Lots of girls do it. To make it look pretty.”

“Like getting your teeth whitened,” Emily chipped in. “Except it's your butthole instead.”

“You're making this up!”

“We're not!”

“But who'd see…when…?” I stopped. I was better off not knowing.

“I got me a present.” Lara thrust a box at us.

“Lovely,” Emily enthused. “What is it?”

“It's my new state-of-the-art caller ID. So sophisticated it can almost tell me what my caller is thinking. Listen to the functions!”

As she listed all the things it could do, she reminded me of Garv—boys and their toys—and I wondered what the link was between loving gadgets and wanting to have sex with girls.

We took ourselves and a bottle of wine out to the lounge chairs in the fragrant back garden, where Lara tried to quiz Emily on her thirty-six-hour date with Lou. But Emily ANGELS / 239

tetchily dismissed him. “I had a good time, but he's not going to call.” She was far more interested in analyzing her work situation.

“The new script just isn't coming together, so if Mort Russell passes on
Plastic Money
, that's it. Game over.” She blew into her hands and her face was pale. “I've got no other choice, I really am going to have to go back to Ireland.”

Lara shook her head. “I've been thinking about this. There must be other work you can do.”

“Yeah, I hear they're hiring at Starbucks.”

“No, other
writing
work. Script polish.”

“What's that?” I asked Emily.

“I take a shitty script that's about to go into production, make it coherent, add jokes, and make the main characters three-dimensional and likable. For that I get a pittance and someone else gets the credit.” Emily sighed, “Obviously, I'd love it, but there are so many writers in this town and we're all chasing the same pieces of work.

David says he's tried for me.”

“Agent, schmagent. The time has come to get out there and hustle yourself,” Lara encouraged.

“I do!”

“You need to do more than look pretty and give out your cards at parties. You've got to
bother
people. That's if you really don't want to go home to Ireland.”

“I really don't.”

“Okay. I'll see if I can swing something and so will Troy. And what about that Irish guy? You know, the one from Dark Star Productions. Shay something? Shay Mahoney?”

“Shay Delaney.” Beside me I could feel Emily's sudden awkwardness.

“Yeah, him. Wonder if he's got any shit Irish films that could use a polish.”

“I'm sure he's got plenty of shit Irish films that could use a polish,” Emily said. “But no money to pay for it.”

“You never know,” Lara mused. “Call him. Convince him.”

240 / MARIAN KEYES

Emily made noncommittal noises and I was relieved. I didn't want her to call him.

“Oh, enough doom and gloom already!” Emily declared. “We need cheering up. Lara, will you tell us your ‘I'm okay, you're okay’

story?” She snuggled into her lounge chair like a child preparing for her bedtime story. “Off you go,” she encouraged with the air of someone who'd heard this many, many times. “I'd been nineteen for seven years and it was starting to show…”

Lara took a deep breath, and began. “Okay, I'd been nineteen for seven years and it was starting to show. I'd been the prettiest girl in my high school, and seven years earlier I'd come to L.A.

hoping to be the next Julia Roberts.”

Emily was happily mouthing the words along with her.

“But L.A. was full of chicks who'd been the prettiest girls in high school and I was nothing special.”

I began to object that Lara was
very
special but she stopped me.

“Tell it to the hand. Look around you, this town is full of babes.

They are everywhere and a thousand new ones arrive every week, can you
imagine
? But at the time, I didn't know this. So I start looking for work, hit a brick wall, and end up having to do pay theater.”

“What's that?”

“Productions you pay for a part in.”

“
You pay them
?”

“Yeah, but there's always the chance that some hotshot director will spot you and you get to put something on your résumé. Anyhoo, after that, I got a few walk-on parts where
they
paid
me
and I thought I was on my way. In between acting jobs, I waited tables and got my boobs and lips done.”

“Biggened,” Emily explained. “And some casting director told her to drop ten pounds—”

“Was her name Kirsty?” I asked sarcastically.

At that point the story of Lara's life stalled while Emily had a little rant about Kirsty telling me I needed to drop ten pounds. (I had exaggerated to make her seem worse.) Lara ANGELS / 241

soothed and smoothed, then Emily resumed. “Right! Some casting director told her to drop ten pounds, though she was already X-ray skinny—so she ups her exercise to four hours daily. Then she began starving herself and ate only twelve grapes and five rice cakes a day.”

I didn't believe her. No one could survive on that.

“It's true,” Lara confirmed. “I was constantly hungry.”

“Even though you were on pills,” Emily reminded her.

“That's right. I knew every doctor who gave fake prescriptions.

I took so much speed—that's what diet pills are—my mouth was always dry, my heart was racing…”

“…I was permanently homicidal,” Emily chimed in with the last bit.

“I was so poor and so unhappy. Six days out of seven, I managed to stick to my diet. But—and it was like Russian roulette, I never knew which chamber was loaded—on one of the days, I broke my diet. And how! Three pints of ice cream, a pound of chocolate, four bags of cookies…then I made myself puke it all up.”

“Bulimia,” Emily intoned gravely at me. “For all the good it did her.”

“You got it. Instead of graduating to speaking parts, even the walk-on-parts stopped happening. They said my look was over.

Big, blond Aryan types were out and wide-eyed waifs who looked like they'd been abused as children were in.”

She paused, and Emily prompted her: “I'd been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single callback.”

“I'd been to twenty-three auditions in a row without a single callback and I hadn't had a paying acting job in over two years.

I'm stone broke and all the time I'm getting older, my ass is slipping, my face is getting lines, and every week a thousand
real
nineteen-year-olds are getting off the bus and hawking their fresh teenage bodies around town. I couldn't just couldn't go back to waiting tables, so I slept with a director—a
man
—who promised me a part. It never happened. Then I got so desperate, I slept with a
writer
.”

“Why's it worse to sleep with a writer than a director?”

242 / MARIAN KEYES

Emily and Lara both chuckled. “Because writers in Hollywood have no power. They're the amoebas of the Hollywood food chain, even farther down the scale than the caterers on a movie set.”

“Then”—Lara bit her lip—“just when I think it can't get any worse, my girlfriend threw me out. She'd found out about my sleeping with the director. I had no job, no money, no girl, no self-respect—no rice cakes, even. The long dark cocktail hour of the soul.” She laughed, but saw fit to add, “It was horrible, I can't tell you. The dream was over, I knew I was beat, and it just about broke my heart. I saw myself going back home to Portland on the bus and I felt like the biggest failure in the history of the world. So there you go—my sordid life as an actress!”

“At least you never did a porn film,” I comforted.

“Oh, I did.” She sounded surprised. “I even put it on my résumé.

For a while.”

“But the moral of the story,” Emily prompted. “Let's not get sidetracked.”

“The moral of the story is, I thought I would never be happy again,” Lara said. “I was twenty-six years of age and all washed up.

I'd had plastic surgery, I'd given years of my life, I'd used up every bit of my hope, and I had nothing to show for it. I hated myself and I wished I was dead.”

“She tried slitting her wrists,” Emily said.

“But I couldn't even do that right. Did you know you're supposed to do it lengthwise instead of crosswise?”

“Yes.”

“Smarter than me. But here's the thing, my life did get better. I made the decision to let go of my dreams because they were killing me, and I stopped asking the impossible from myself. I changed my attitude and decided to focus on what I had rather than what I didn't have. And, most of all, I decided I wasn't going to be bitter.”

“So you went back to school,” Emily said.

“So I went back to school and two days—
two days
—after I got those little letters after my name, I got hired by a ANGELS / 243

production company. So I still got to work in the movies, right! I hadn't wanted to work behind the scenes, I'd wanted to be in front of a camera, but I sucked it up and got with the program. And yeah, there are times when I see a girl's face on the silver screen and I wish it was mine,” she said. “But most times I'm down with it. I love my job—except for when I nearly got canned for missing
Two Dead Men
—I love the movies I work with, and I got over the girl. So there you go.”

“I love that story,” Emily sighed. “Makes me think that whatever happens, I'll be okay. And so will you, Maggie.”

We lapsed into a silent glow of hope, and, for the first time, heard a conversation floating over the hedge from next door. The goatee boys were also taking the evening air in their backyard.

One of them said, “…crusty and kinda green…” This gave rise to groans and “Oh, man!”s.

“Like peeing razor blades,” the first voice said, and more groans ensued.

“Venereal disease,” Emily whispered, her face alight with disgust.

“Ssshhh, listen. One of them has VD.”

Sure enough, we listened and there was more talk of peeing fire and a visit to the quack.

“Which one of them is it?” Lara asked. “Ethan? Curtis?”

“Betcha it's Ethan.”

“It doesn't sound like him.”

“And Curtis is too weird, who'd sleep with him?”

“You'd be surprised.”

We eavesdropped a bit more. Whoever it was, their winkie was like a war zone and the doctor had only added to the grief because he'd put a type of furled umbrella down into the afflicted willy—then opened it! Behind the fence, cries of horror rose up into the night and I myself felt the first signs of queasiness.

“It's not Luis,” I insisted. “He's too sweet.”

“So who is it then?”

“I've got to know.” Emily pulled her lounge chair across, 244 / MARIAN KEYES

stood on it, and poked her head over the fence. “Which one of you is it?
Luis
? I'm surprised.”

Still standing on the lounge chair, she turned back to us, “It's Luis, and they want to know if we want to come over. They're doing tequila shots. Dude, that's most excellent!” Despite her sarcasm, she seemed happy enough to go over. So did Lara, and I had no problem at all with it; nearly everything I did in Los Angeles was strange and new, so this was no different.

But as we passed through their darkened house, I got the fright of my life when I saw a seven-foot-tall figure looming blackly out of a corner. It turned out to be a cardboard Darth Vader—Curtis's most prized possession. “I got a C-3PO too, and a Chewbacca suit,”

he boasted. “And three of the original posters.”