Oh! You Pretty Things (7 page)

O
n Friday morning, I lose it with the Starbucks barista, who insists on letting milk dribble into the cup as she's scooping the foam.

“I need just foam,” I say. “Absolutely no milk.”

“But it's made of milk,” she says, her brow furrowing in confusion.

“I'm not asking for a nutritional breakdown,” I say. “I need a venti cup of all foam. Just foam. No liquid.”

She frowns and crosses her arms over her milk-stained, green apron. “I have a lot of other customers and this cup will take three pitchers to fill with just foam.”

“Well, you better get on it then.” I immediately regret my tone, but I can't show weakness by backpedaling now. “I'll be right here.”

Great. One week in, and I've become the asshole coffee orderer.

Whatever. It's not like this particular Starbucks, on the corner of Seventh and Montana in the rarefied flats of Santa Monica, is any stranger to special requests. The neighborhood surrounding the deceptively down-home shopping street is filled with the kind of aw-shucks celebrities who lean toward large dogs and immaculately restored old American muscle cars. I'm usually in line behind a couple of them, wearing artfully tattered vintage concert tees and Havaianas and special-ordering coffee like it's their day job.

But celebrities are treated differently, of course. Even the sticky-pawed toddlers waiting in line with their stay-at-home moms gawp in appreciation when Pamela Anderson blows in wearing sheer white leggings and knee-high faux shearling boots. Actually, little kids are the only ones who stare.

The rest of us—patrons, baristas, and even the occasional homeless person—have perfected the L.A. art of the un-stare. It's just one of the many tacit understandings that make this city function: we pretend, at least in public, that we're not interested in the gods who walk among us, usually by studiously attending to a small grooming matter or the contents of our cell phones whenever they come into range.

I don't even have to bother with the un-stare today. Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Kitsch could be oil wrestling in the middle of the floor and I wouldn't take my eyes off Tyler's milk order. I've opened with a gambit of rudeness, and that's a good way to end up with something in your drink that is unfit for human consumption. I mean, hypothetically, of course. I'm sure no one at Starbucks would ever do anything like that. Certainly not the girl who is radiating death lasers at me as she plunks my order on the counter and growls “Have a nice day” at me through gritted teeth.

T
he next day, Megan leaves three drunk messages at five in the morning, telling me I should come to Hawaii, that I
need
to come to Hawaii. There's some problem with the shoot, so she's stuck in Maui indefinitely, boo-hoo. But when I call back, it goes straight to voice mail.

“No permanent job offer yet,” I say after the beep. “But I haven't been fired. I'll call that a victory. Enjoy the sun!”

I add the last bit because I saw a picture on one of the tabloid blogs of her sitting by a big hotel pool in a black catsuit and a giant straw hat. The caption read “Megan Campion takes her sunscreen seriously.” Yeah, well, she's playing a fucking vampire.

Then I get a FedEx envelope with a bunch of hundred-dollar bills and a note:
The per diem on this show is insane. Shove half in a drawer for a rainy day. The rest for a plane ticket.
Miss you.

A smiley face? She's definitely getting laid.

I haven't had sex since a random friend of Pete's—the Date Palm manager—came to town to look at business schools. In my defense, I'd just finished a three-day juice fast and my stomach was so flat it seemed like a waste not to let someone appreciate it. Totally lost on the business-school dude, who drank four shots of tequila, then pinched the inch of flesh above my Hanky Panky boyshorts and asked if I wanted some Adderall. The humiliating part is that I still blew him after that.

The sexual hierarchy is weird in my life. When Megan's around, I'm the sassy sidekick, the girl who the boys all cozy up to in order to get closer to her. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but that's a comfortable role for me. And it takes the place of having to worry about my own life. It's easy to be that person. God knows I had years of practice with Donna.

Not that Megan's anything like my mother, but there's a certain type of woman who just pulls focus when she walks into a room. Angelina, Charlize, any number of Jennifers. It's what this whole town is built on.

My mother had it.

Megan has it.

Me? Nope.

But being in Megan's orbit makes my own star shine a little brighter. When she's gone, it's like an eclipse, the dark side of the moon. Am I still shining if nobody sees?

According to my mother, no. Just another of my failures. I was a shy child with lank hair and a pudgy body despite her constant, grinding efforts. I wanted to hide in my bedroom and read books, but instead there were photo shoots and salon appointments and painful auditions where I gamely tried to act like I was enjoying imaginary bowls of pudding. My mother stood in the back of the room in her Guess jeans, mouthing the words that turned to lead when they passed my lips. The memory still brings the blushing snakes up my neck.

My mother believed in Scientology and Rolfing and expensive haircuts. She believed in bad karma and good tans. More than anything, she believed that if I booked a movie or TV show, her life would fall into place. So she kept dredging up auditions, which inevitably ended in halfhearted choruses of “We'll be in touch” from as early as I can remember until the month before my fifteenth birthday.

That's when she got me a big break, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime chance that changes everything. That's when she put me in front of Trent Whitford, a critically acclaimed director whose movies rarely make much at the box office, yet he still gets mentioned in the same breath as Kubrick and Scorsese.

There's a lot of shit that ensures that Donna will never make the short list for Mother of the Year, but this is the one thing I still can't get over.

T
he second week of my trial period starts rough. There's a new girl at Starbucks; she looks confused when I place my order, and I feel a queasy tremor of dismay. I really hope she understands that
bone dry
means she has to wait until the milk has settled in the metal pitcher before scooping only the foamiest of foam into the cup. Yep, that's my life right now.

Tyler is full of quirky charm, but he's also becoming increasingly particular by the day. And it's not only about coffee anymore. He's decided that all he wants to eat are diced, fresh mangoes for breakfast and handmade artichoke ravioli for lunch, which I sauté in clarified butter and sprinkle with fresh thyme picked from the terra-cotta pots artfully jumbled beside the carport.

At least it gives me a chance to shine.

“I'm so sick of 17th Street Café,” he said last week when the fries were too limp, even though I'd had them packaged separately and to prevent condensation opened the Styrofoam clamshell during the ten-block drive to the house.

“This,” he said, holding aloft a wilted example for my inspection, “is disgusting.”

“Mmm-hmm.” I was giving him about 30 percent of my attention. With the remainder, I was laying out neat rows of pictures I'd taken the afternoon before at several Melrose antiques stores.

Fries momentarily forgotten, he flicked his gaze across the glossy images and heaved a sigh.

“What?” I said.

Tyler extended his little finger and pointed down the rows of three in rapid succession. “Fake, fake, hideous. Not what I asked for, mediocre, probably fake. Not bad, ooh, really fake, annnd . . .” He picked up the last photo to study. “Not even Biedermeier.”

If he was right, then half the fancy stores on Melrose Place were selling fake antique furniture at escalated prices, which I highly doubted, but still. He certainly knows his shit. It didn't even matter. The point was that I'd failed. Or at least felt like I'd failed. Or maybe there was a moving target and I wasn't even sure what success looked like anymore.

Tyler glumly waggled a fry at Zelda, who launched from her perch on the Roche-Bobois sofa that has become the bane of Tyler's existence.

“You know what I'm in the mood for?” he said. “Ravioli.”

I leaped into the void left by my Biedermeier debacle. “I can do that! I made fresh pasta all the time when I worked for Wolfgang.”

“Really?” Tyler perked up. “You can do that?”

“Absolutely,” I said, even though the truth is I worked for Wolfgang for less than six months, mostly as a secretary. Still, sometimes they'd let me in the prep kitchen to do scut work.

Cooking is pretty much the only thing that's ever come easily to me. All the feelings I stumble over putting into words—
I'm sorry, I suck, I love you
—are far easier for me to express through food. Cooking for Tyler would be an ideal situation, except the menu never changes. I'm just saying the same thing over and over like a parrot.

I've made ravioli from scratch four times in six days, transforming flats of fresh artichokes from their raw, spiky state into a smooth puree. Each artichoke has to be steamed and scraped to collect the meat; each sprig of thyme is fresh-plucked from the garden and hand-stripped. It takes a metric fuck ton of artichokes to make a single cup of puree.

When that's done, I make the pasta dough and let it rest before rolling it into thin, translucent sheets on the Atlas roller. Some days this works better than others. I often have to scrap a batch and start again because I've misjudged the ratio of wheat flour to semolina. There are machines that can do this in a fraction of the time, but I make it by hand because Tyler said the pasta from the machine tasted funny.

It's endless. The only thing I'm trying to say with my food at this point is
You're bugging the shit out of me.

I'm elbow-deep in the ravioli process—steamed hair, flour-encrusted shirt and all—when I meet the boys from Fleurs et Diables. Fleurs et Diables is the company that takes care of the blooming plants on Tyler's deck. The whole operation is two guys in tight white T-shirts emblazoned with stylized devils lounging on a carpet of rose petals. They pull up in their branded white Range Rover once a week, snip a few things, then ceremoniously sprinkle “Peruvian blue magic”
here and there. It's allegedly some kind of powdered rain-forest spore they smuggle in from the Amazon, but I'd bet all the money in my bank account—granted, that's about $47—that it's Miracle-Gro in a burlap satchel they bought at Anthropologie. Still, Tyler's convinced it's the magic that makes his tea roses bloom year-round.

The whole process takes twenty minutes, start to finish.

Monthly charge: $1,500.

I must say, though, the deck looks fantastic. It's a weeping profusion of white roses cascading from hand-painted Italian urns. There are rosemary bushes neatly trimmed into topiary balls and rectangular planters lined with green moss that's been hand-cut into checkerboard two-toned patterns. There are dwarf kumquat trees with waxy, white blossoms and bright-orange fruit, and an arbor of rare, white bougainvillea shading a fifteenth-century Italian church-altar table, surrounded by eight folding wooden chairs with leather hassocks.

I made the mistake of calling them gardeners.

The little buff one said, “We're botanical stylists,” with an Arctic chill in his voice.

I swallowed a snicker. “Right. Got it. I'm Jess.”

When the regular-size buff one introduced himself, I wasn't sure if he said Kirk or Kurt, so I said, “How do you spell that?”

He arched a perfect eyebrow. “It's Kirk with two
k
s. But only the second one is capitalized.”

“So unique,” I say sweetly. You're a freak, kirK, but you really fill out that T-shirt. Also, I need to know who does your brows, because they're spectacular. The flower boys, by the way, are completely straight. In any other city, if I described a buff man with perfect eyebrows driving a white Range Rover and holding a plant mister, that might involve different connotations.

Welcome to Hollywood.

At least the week ends in triumph. On Friday, I skip Starbucks. Instead, I slip into the kitchen twenty minutes early. Zelda sniffs for a biscuit as I rummage through the refrigerator, pulling an unopened bag of bourbon micro-lot espresso roast from the freezer, and a glass bottle of Broguiere's organic milk. Everyone in the neighborhood gets at least one bottle delivered two times a week. No one on the street talks to each other, but they all share vendors: the milkman, the dog groomer, the car detailer who arrives armed with Q-tips and baby wipes to extract grime from Bentleys and Range Rovers and Carreras. We're all in this together, yo. Our people make the village.

I leave the antique French wine carrier by the front door on Wednesdays, and on Thursday mornings it's filled with two glass bottles of milk, fresh from the cow. It's the most expensive milk on the planet. No matter that we don't use milk in this house. It's part of the décor.

But not today. Today I'm going to tackle the cappuccino machine and make Tyler a coffee.

The La Marzocco GS/3 is a metaphor for my life: big, shiny, and superfluous. I grind beans in the burr grinder, tamp the grounds into the holder, and fire up the gleaming beast.

The plumbed-in line isn't feeding water into the reservoir, so I dump in tap water and hope for the best. A few minutes later, a stream of inky brown espresso flows into the oversize ceramic cup. I feel like I just discovered penicillin. I pour a few inches of milk into the pitcher and plunge the steaming wand into it. The sound is like a freight train. I'm used to it from my stint at the Date Palm, but Zelda tucks her tail between her hind legs and creeps into the living room.

I hear the bedroom door creak open, and Tyler pads into the kitchen.

“Hey, sparkle,” I say with a buoyancy in my voice that I'm channeling from a long-ago childhood moment when my mother was lurching around the kitchen, struggling to hold a cup of coffee in her shaking hands. “How are you?”

“What's that?” he says.

I've got the loftiest puff of foam rising above the edge of the milk pitcher, and I waggle it in his direction. “Intelligentsia coffee and the most ephemeral foam you've ever seen, from cows untouched by human hands.”

“Really?” He cocks his head at the GS/3. “I thought that thing was toast.”

“I'm the coffee whisperer,” I tell him. “You know I have a Venice boardwalk pedigree.”

I pour the espresso into the cappuccino cups with a high-handed flourish, then scoop foam as glossy and stiff as meringue onto the top of each one. Tyler reluctantly takes the warm cup from my outstretched hand. He sniffs like a cat nosing a long-dead grasshopper on a perfectly manicured lawn.

Then he takes a tentative sip and sighs in pure pleasure.

I dump the coffee grounds and the milk leftovers into the Herbeau Luberon farmer's sink, rinsing the debris into the disposal with the Frattini pull-down faucet. There isn't one thing in this kitchen that isn't an architectural marvel and a name brand.

“Oh my God, Jess,” he finally says. “This is nectar.”

“Thanks,” I say, shrugging like it's nothing.

And maybe I'm not cooking anything except ravioli, maybe I'm not even moving forward in any perceptible fashion, but that's okay. My pleasure at Tyler's approval eclipses all else.

Here's the thing: approval is an issue for me. Big. Thanks, Donna.