Angels (46 page)

“Nooooooo” is heard. Emily threw herself bodily across the room and screamed, “Noooo, don't answer it! I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. It'll be Larry the Savage and I need the weekend off.”

But it was another hang-up. “Definitely a stalker. I'm a full-fledged L.A. woman now.” Emily sounded cheered.

“We're wilting in this heat,” Mum gasped, flinging herself onto Emily's couch and waving her hand in front of her face.

Anna, Helen, and Dad trooped in behind her, their faces pink from the five-minute walk from the hotel.

“It's very oppressive,” Emily agreed. “I think we might be due a thunderstorm.”

“Rain?” Mum sounded alarmed. “Oh God, no.”

“Sometimes in Los Angeles you can have a thunderstorm without any rain,” Helen said.

“Is that a fact?” Mum asked.

“No.”

Shopping at the Beverly Center was on that afternoon's agenda.

“Let's get going.” Emily jingled her car keys.

“I've been practicing my signature.” Helen flexed her hands. “For all the credit-card slips I'll be signing.”

“Go fecking easy,” Dad barked. “You're up to your neck in debt as it is.”

“I don't know why you're coming shopping,” Mum said to him.

“You'll have an awful time.”

“I won't.”

“Oh, but you will,” Helen promised. “D'you know what I'm thinking?” she asked dreamily. “I'm thinking underwear. Lots of revealing, lacy underwear. Half-cup bras and thongs and…”

“He doesn't know what a thong is,” Mum said. “To be honest,”

she admitted, “neither do I.”

“Let me
explain
,” Helen said, and launched into an eager exposition. “…everyone says that they're like butt floss…”

ANGELS / 371

“Oh those ones,” Mum said sourly. “I've washed plenty of them.

When did they stop being G-strings?”

As it happened, the Beverly Center lift disgorged us, not at an underwear shop, but at the next-best thing—a swimwear shop. In we all tramped, Helen leading, Dad bringing up the reluctant rear.

It was a class act: not just swimsuits, but coordinating wraps, sarongs, overshirts, hats, bags, sandals, sunglasses…Not cheap, mind. The bikinis cost more than the week in the sun they'd be bought for, the changing rooms were bigger than my bedroom, and the shop assistants were those determined, terrierlike helpful ones that you couldn't fob off by murmuring, “Just looking.” The type that would riposte, “For what? An all-in-one? We have some great Lisa Bruce pieces that would be perfect on your figure.” And before you know it, she's frog-marching you to the changing room, sixteen wooden hangers clanking in her arms. These women were the type who'd squeeze in the door of the changing room to get a gawk at you. The sort who'd double-bluff you by saying that one didn't suit you—so you thought they were honest—just to tell you that the next one (the more costly one, of course) was wonderfully flattering. And if they saw that you were in any way unconvinced, they'd call five or six of their fragrant, twiglet-thin colleagues to press the message home.

I knew this to my cost. There was a boutique in Dublin with the same air, where I'd ended up buying an expensive chiffon skirt—that I'd never once worn—just to get out of the place. And I wouldn't have minded, but I'd only gone in because it had started to rain and I'd no umbrella/hood/hat/nice hair that looked better after it had been drenched in rainwater.

However, even knowing all of this, I felt an adrenaline rush as soon as we crossed into the store; everything was so beautiful.

Helen, Anna, Emily, Mum, and I instantly split up and spread out, alighting on our favorite colors like bees on flowers. Dad hovered by the door, staring at his feet.

372 / MARIAN KEYES

Within seconds I was well on my way to talking myself into a swimsuit/wraparound skirt/visor ensemble when my attention was caught by an exchange at the cabana-hut-style changing room. From the number of discarded bikinis and fluttering assistants, a choosy customer was within.

“Marla,” a laden assistant called over the straw door, “is the DKNY totally great on you?”

“Totally great,” Marla's disembodied voice said. “But my breasts are still too high.”

Too high
? All of us out of towners ceased our browsing and turned, as one, to exchange what on earth…? looks. What did she mean, too high? Too big?

We regrouped in the center of the room—even Dad—and Helen went to the cabana hut for a gawk. “Too high,” she confirmed on her return. “So lifted, her nipples are almost on her shoulders. A halter neck is her only hope.”

“Ah, here,” Dad murmured, squinting up from his feet. “I think I'll just go to the pub and have a pint and read the paper.”

“There aren't any pubs around here,” Emily said. “Just some strip joints.”

“Don't let any of the girls sit with you,” Anna advised. “You'll be charged for it.”

“No,” Mum said firmly. “Find a coffee shop, that's good enough for you.”

“It's Saturday night tonight. I'd love a bit of glamour, girls,” Mum sighed. “Where's a good place to go?”

“There's the Bilderberg Room,” Emily said, doubtfully, but I shook my head. I knew where to take Mum. I'd known it was her sort of place the first (and only) time I'd gone there: the Four Seasons, Beverly Hills.

Dad refused to go. “I'm sick of getting dressed up. I want to watch sports and eat peanuts.”

“Fine. Stay at home then, we don't care.”

*

*

ANGELS / 373

I needed the horse-hair wax to fix my hair for the Four Seasons, and I picked my way through Emily's bomb-site bedroom.

“It's on the dressing table,” she said.

But the dressing table was crammed with stuff, and when I lifted the wax, I dislodged a heap of photos, which slithered to the floor.

“Sorry.” As I gathered them up, I saw that they'd been taken at a party a couple of years before, when Emily had been home in Ireland. Instantly intrigued—I love looking at photos—I shuffled through pictures of Emily and her friends in various states of disarray. One of her winking, another of me and her blowing kisses at the camera—“The state of us,” I said, holding it out to her. “And we thought we were gorgeous”—Emily with Donna, Emily with Sinead. One of me, waving a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, my pink shiny face and red Satan eyes happy and carefree, me again, slightly more demure, then a picture of Emily with the cutest man. He had lovely cheekbones and shiny dark hair flopping over his forehead and he was laughing mischievously into the camera.

“Christ, who's he?” I asked in admiration. “He's yum!”

“Hahaha,” Emily deadpanned.

Before she'd even finished, I'd recognized the man—of course I'd recognized him—and I started to shake with reaction. Emily was staring at me carefully. “Did you really not know who he was?

Or are you joking.”

“Joking,” I said. “Of course I knew who he was.”

It was Garv.

I was almost afraid to turn to the next photo because I suspected I knew who it was of—and it was: Garv and me, head to head, together and happy. And for a second I could remember what that felt like.

“Come on, then,” I said, my heart rate returning to normal. “Fix my hair.”

Mum loved the Four Seasons, fingering the swagged curtains and saying with respect, “I'd say they didn't come 374 / MARIAN KEYES

cheap.” Next to be admired was the couch. “Isn't it a bee-yoo-tiful shade?” Then she asked in awe, “Would you say those statues are antiques?”

“Pretty old,” Helen said. “Not as old as you, obviously, but good and old.”

When the waiter came, Emily, Helen, Anna, and I ordered complicated martinis and urged Mum to have one too. “Should I?”

Her eyes were alight at her daring. “All right. Lord above!” Her attention had been hooked by a pair of high, enormous breasts that had walked past, attached to a child's body. “She's very well developed.”

Maybe because it was Saturday night, but the breast-implant girls were out in force. “It's as good as a cabaret,” Mum said after a particularly ginormous pair passed us. “Just as well your father didn't come. He'd probably throw his neck out again.”

“Look at her,” Emily said in an undertone, indicating a woman wearing HUGE sunglasses.

Who was it? Someone famous?

“Nah, that Jackie O. look is so over. No, she's had her eyes done.

Anytime you see someone wearing those glasses indoors, they've just had their eyes lifted. Will we get another drink?”

We'd just embarked on our second round of complicated martinis when, across the room, I saw someone I recognized. “Oh. My.

God.”

“What? Who?” Emily asked.

“Look.” I nudged her, and on a nearby couch, no more than twelve feet away from us, sat Mort Russell. He was on his own, ostentatiously reading a script, just so everyone would know he was in The Business. He hadn't noticed us.

“Who's he?” Mum, Anna, and Helen clamored.

Maybe we shouldn't have said anything, but like I said, we were garrulous to the tune of one and a half complicated martinis, so Emily and I spilled it all: the story of the pitch; the wild enthusiasm from Mort and his acolytes; the talk of Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts; the possibility of opening

ANGELS / 375

on three thousand screens across America…and how it had all come to nothing.

“But why?”

“Dunno. He might have meant it at the time.”

“Could have been he was just being cruel. Leading you on, like,”

Helen posited, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

“That's no way to behave,” Mum scolded. “And letting your poor mother buy that navy spangly dress under false pretenses. And it was a shocking price. Even though it was at—”

“—forty percent off,” we all finished for her.

An attempt to explain that Mort Russell had had nothing to do with Mrs. O'Keeffe's navy spangly dress, that that was the fault of an entirely different and unrelated executive, was fruitless. All Mum cared about was that Mrs. O'Keeffe had been tricked into buying an expensive dress to wear to a film and, as of yet, no film had materialized.

“She's had to wear it to the Lion's fundraising barbecue to try to get use out of it. And her manning the sausages.” Tight-lipped, Mum shook her head at the injustice, the downright
indignity
, of it all. “Getting it splashed with some honey-marinade stuff. I've a good mind to go over there and tell that pup what's what.”

“Haven't we all?”

The five of us were looking at Mort Russell so hard I was surprised that he hadn't intuited it. Perhaps he was used to it. Maybe he thought our stares were admiring ones.

“Do you know what? I will go over to him!”

We tried to talk her out of it. “No, Mum, don't. It'll only make things worse for Emily.”

“How could it make things worse for Emily?” she asked, with irrefutable logic. “Didn't he waste her time, lead her up the garden path with false promises, then turn her down? And hasn't she a contract with someone else now?”

She had a point.

“Listen to me,” Emily said quietly. “Just don't humble him in front of anyone else.”

376 / MARIAN KEYES

My head snapped back to Emily. She was giving the okay!

“They can live with humiliation so long as none of the people they want to impress know about it,” she explained to Mum. “Try and find out why he passed on my script. And, Mrs. Walsh, if you can make him cry, I'll make it worth your while.”

“You're on!”

And without further ado, she was up and off! Appalled and thrilled, we watched her go.

“It's the martinis,” Emily muttered. “It was too much for her delicate, two-spritzers-a-month constitution.”

My mother isn't a small woman and I almost felt sorry for Mort Russell as this Irish battle-axe descended upon him, bristling with righteousness.

“Mr. Russell?” We saw her mouth.

Mort assented, his face withholding friendliness. Then Mum must have explained who she was because Mort twisted his head to have a look at us, and when he registered Emily, his tan retreated by a couple of shades. Emily wiggled her fingers at him in a travesty of sociability, and then the berating began: a wagging finger, a voice high with indignation.

“Oh God,” I whispered faintly.

We followed the action closely and our anxiety was tempered with glee. Mort's face was sullen and hostile. I'm sure they never have to deal with the consequences of their wild promises, these Hollywood types.

We could hear most of what Mum was saying. “There's a name for people like you,” she scolded—then abruptly faltered. “Except it's usually for girls.”

“But never mind!” Back on track, the dressing-down resumed. “A tease, that's what you are. You should be ashamed of yourself, getting the poor girl's hopes up like that.” Then she told him about Mrs. O'Keeffe's navy spangly dress, with no mention that it had been forty percent off.

Mort Russell mumbled something and Mum said, “So you should be,” then she was back.

ANGELS / 377

“What did he say?” we clamored. “Why did he make all those promises and not follow up?”

“That's just his way, he said. But he said he was very sorry and he won't do it again.”

“Did he cry?”

“His eyes were wet.”

I didn't really believe her, but so what.

“I think this merits another round of complicated martinis,” Emily said gaily.

A NERVY EXCITEMENT
hummed within me all day Sunday, and when the goatee boys invited everyone over for an evening barbecue, I had to take Emily aside. “This barbecue tonight,” I said, flooded with anxiety in case it scuppered my plans, “I can't go, I'm sorry.”

“Why, what are you doing?” Emily was alert—and alarmed.

“I'm going to see Shay.”

“On your own?”

I assented.

“But, Maggie, he's married! What are you at?”

“I just want to talk to him. I want”—I picked a word I'd heard on Oprah—“closure.”

In exasperation she said, “We all have ex-boyfriends, it's called life. We can't go tracking them down and getting closure from every one of them. We just live with it. If you'd had more boyfriends in your time, you'd know all this.”

“He's not just an ex-boyfriend,” I said. “And you know it.”