Postcards From the Edge (20 page)

“The nose and the chin are the worst part. We are almost done with the nose. It was very clogged. Are you using our cleanser?”

“Yes,” lied Suzamne.

“Well, you should use it three times a day,” said Marina sternly. “And use our scrub.”

“Okay,” said Suzarule. “Owwww!”

“Sorry,” said Marina without remorse. “The chin, you know, very sensitive.” She started to move under Suzanne’s chin onto her neck.

“No, no,” Suzanne said earnestly. “Leave that.” “But it is a very big-“

‘Just leave it,” she said adamantly. “Just do the part of my face the world sees, and leave the underbelly to me.”

“But-“

“It hurts too much and I don’t care enough, okay?” snapped Suzanne. “Leave it!”

“Okay,” sniffed Marina.

They finished the facial in silence, then Suzanne slipped off the little pink robe and paid the bill. She left Marina, whom she loathed and felt guilty for loathing, a big tip.

She decided to have the car washed. She always felt good

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when she got the car washed, like she was truly participating in her life. While she waited, she called her machine to check her messages. Mark Auerbach’s secretary had called about setting up a meeting for her on the new Spencer Matheisen picture, A Total Bust. Her dentist Dr. Gibbon’s assistant had called asking if she had forgotten she had an eleven-fifteen appointment for a cleaning. (She had.) She’d also had calls from Kate Rosenman, a producer friend of hers in AA, and her brother Thomas, who’d called from Turkey, where he was filming a documentary on the unearthing of Noah’s Ark. And, from New York, her friend Lucy Copeland had called from underneath a sleeping Scott Hastings-her newest married lover-“just to say hi.”

When she got back in her car, she noticed how clean the windshield was. She was going to feel good now, Suzanne thought. She was going to enjoy her life as though she was someone else living it, someone who had won living her life as a prize. Her house, her friends, her family, her clothes, her car … She was going to appreciate them as though she had had this whole other life before, and now she had won this one. She drove through the heart of Beverly Hills, down the palm-lined streets, listening to Steely Dan sing “Don’t Take Me Alive.”

By the time she got home, her determination to enjoy her life had been crushed under the weight of pre-party tension. She opened a Diet Coke, ate a miniature Tootsie Roll, called and left a message for Lucy-she knew she’d be out, but she wanted to go on record as having called-then went in to run her bath.

“Why can’t I look like Nastassia Kinski?” Suzanne thought, an hour and a half later, as she put the finishing touches on her makeup. She had read in Vogue that there was an operation that made your lips big like Nastassia Kinski’s. Unfortunately, it involved taking skin from your vagina and moving it to your mouth. Suzanne couldn’t quite bring herself to do this, fearing that it would ruin kissing for her. Still, it rolled around in her head for weeks as a vague possibility. She scrutinized her work

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and saw that she had disguised her blemish so well that it was now a highly conspicuous white spot, a headlight on her face. She had a tendency to keep her chin down in her chest when her skin broke out. Even if people seemed to be looking in her eyes, she knew they were thinking, “Poor thing, she’s got a zit. Her life must not work.”

Sometimes when she looked in the mirror she thought, “Sure, that girl is attractive. She looks good.” As soon as she walked away from her reflection, though, she added, “But I’m not.” Her whole personality was designed to distract people from her looks. The fact that she was quite pretty-and that, on some level, she even knew it-made it all the more bizarre when she opened her mouth and Phyllis Diller came out.

She checked her outfit in her full-length mirror. With her tight blue skirt, with her top that snapped between her legs so that it looked tight, and especially with her stockings, she was definitely “dressed for them.” She stepped into her treacherous black heels, put on her black jacket, grabbed her blue bag, and took one last look at herself.

She sighed. “I look like a basketball with lips,” she thought. “An angry grape. A two-day-old balloon.”

“You look fine,” said her sane part, that tiny section of her brain that sat in the back and cheered.

“I look ready,” she thought, then said aloud, “Let’s party,” and strode off to her car. She switched on the ignition and “Burning Down the House” came blasting out of her speakers as she backed down the driveway.

She took the long way to Wallis’s house so she could have a nice, calming, deafening drive. She found she was now changing stations even when she found a song she liked. She had come to enjoy the quest for a good song more than the songs themselves. Interesting. She checked herself repeatedly in the rearview mirror as she drove.

When she was a block away she saw the parking attendants, dark men in red jackets and black pants. Suzanne saw the cars

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they’d already parked-the Porsches, the Jaguars, the Rollsesand suddenly panicked. She should have brought a date, she realized. Should have had her hair done. Should have worn a different dress, other earrings, less perfume. She got out of her car looking as casual as possible and turned it over to a total stranger. Looking at the lights on the lawn, she thought, “I could still leave. I could still turn around screaming and sobbing and grab my keys back from the man with strange sideburns and …”

Suzanne walked stoically up the imposing driveway, like a condemned man about to face a firing squad without cigarette or blindfold, to the huge, secluded stone mansion. A butler opened the door. She stood in the entrance for a moment experiencing waves of HPT-Hollywood Party Terror-then went in.

Under a large mirror was a silver tray containing tiny envelopes with the names of the guests on them. Suzanne smiled wanly at the butler and headed dutifully for the tray. After some graceful rummaging, she found her envelope. Her name was misspelled. The butler asked if she wanted anything to drink. “Does it show?” she replied, and ordered a stiff Diet Coke.

The wall next to the stairs was lined with art, lots of art. The house was clearly a showcase for this collection, and all the furniture was in bland, don’t-look-at-me colors so that guests could fully appreciate Wallis’s fabulous art. Actually, it was Wallis’s husband’s art collection, but whenever anyone thought about Wallis and Milton Klein, they mostly thought about Wallis. Wallis had the personality, Milton had the money. Wallis had the style, Milton had the hit television shows. Wallis had Milton.

In the ten years she had known the two of them, Suzanne had never actually had a conversation with Milton. She talked to Wallis a lot on the phone, but then Wallis talked to everyone she knew a lot on the phone. Wallis had once pointed out to Suzanne that one of her ears was “smushed in” tighter against

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her head, and had said it was from talking on the phone so much. She had speaker phones now, but she still preferred the old-fashioned method of cradling the receiver between her shoulder and head. Wallis liked to say that she wasn’t a gossip, she was the gossip, figuring that if you were going to be something you should be it completely. Wallis and Milton had had one daughter together and an assortment of children from other marriages. None of their offspring was in evidence tonight.

On the wall next to the guest bathroom was a painting that always looked very familiar to Suzanne. She assumed it was a famous painting, a Picasso or a Matisse. She thought it was awful. Maybe if she took an art class, she thought, she could appreciate some of the art that everyone around her seemed to appreciate. She wondered why she had ever quit smoking. Maybe she should just smoke at parties.

She walked down the two steps into the living room, with its unobtrusive furniture, its obtrusive art, and its view of the backyard that was set up to look like another painting: a painting of a backyard with a Henry Moore sculpture of a nude fat woman in it. She heard a squeal and spotted Wallis coming toward her, a smiling vision in red and blond. “If it isn’t the brain trust herself!” cried Wallis, embracing Suzanne. “You look adorable!” Suzanne knew then, with absolute certainty, that she must look even worse than she thought.

“You mean my huge rubber head?” she mumbled into Wallis’s perfect long hair that almost didn’t smell of hair spray. “Your rubber what?” Wallis said, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you talking about? Come over here and say hello to Toni and Harlon.”

Suzanne knew Toni and Harlon from other parties. Toni Barnes had just won an Academy Award for playing the murderous florist in A Bunch of Violets, and Harlon DeVore was her boyfriend and business manager. Suzanne thought she should probably smoke. She would never win an Academy Award, and even if she did, she would probably always be as tormented as

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she was now, so what could a cigarette matter? She congratulated Toni on her Oscar and asked Harlon if he’d missed her, just to see how good a job he’d do of pretending to remember who she was. Then she moved over to a bowl of nuts to breathe privately and plan her strategy. She was in a full-tilt panic, but she tried to look like she couldn’t imagine doing anything more relaxing than standing alone at a table next to something that looked like pink whipped cream but was probably salmon mousse and picking cashews out of a bowl of nuts in a room full of celebrities in Bel Air.

Standing with her back to Suzanne was Rachel Sarnoff, an attractive studio executive who, Suzanne had heard from Wallis, had just broken off a three-month affair with Todd Zane, an English rock star and a legendary cocaine addict. Rachel had gotten Todd to promise he’d quit cocaine-Todd promised everyone he went out with that he’d quit cocaine for themand then she’d caught him doing cocaine again, so she’d broken up with him. Suzanne wondered how Rachel was handling the breakup. She looked fine, but then, except for her, everyone in Hollywood looked fine all the time. That had nothing to do with anything.

Rachel was talking to a guy Suzanne vaguely knew from New York, a playwright named Tom Sarafian. From the conversation that Suzanne was desperately trying to overhear, she thought this was probably their first meeting.

“What does that mean, A Night Full of Shoes?” Rachel demanded. “It sounds so pretentious.”

“Of course it’s pretentious,” Tom said, trying to soothe her. “In New York, pretentious is commercial.”

“How can you stand it?” Rachel snapped. “How can you live there, with everyone so pale and intellectual and sweating from drugs?” Suzanne guessed the breakup with Todd Zane had been painful.

Just then, Wallis walked up to them with a “new girl.” Milton collected art and Wallis collected artists, and this was her latest

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find, a dark-haired dark-eyed beauty whom she was presenting to Rachel and Tom. “This is April Lanning, an artist from Manhattan. Milton bought a piece from her last week.” April smiled politely and said hello.

“Don’t you remember me?” asked Tom. “No,” said April blankly. “Should I?”

“We dated in the Hamptons a few summers ago,” Tom said, then waited expectantly for her flash of recognition.

April looked quite embarrassed. “I’m afraid I don’t,” she said.

“Did you have sex?” Rachel asked Tom.

“I believe we tried, but I was …” He searched for the right word, then snapped his fingers as he found it. “Impotent!” he said brightly, as if it was a good word, like “tan.” April looked very flustered.

“Really?” said Rachel. “From alcohol and drugs, or do you have some kind of psychological disorder?”

“Well,” said Tom, “probably the latter. Let’s put it this way, it wasn’t the first time.”

“I don’t really…,” April stammered. “The Hamptons?” “Maybe it’ll come back to you over dinner,” offered Wallis. “Come say hello to Suzanne.” She steered April away from Rachel and Tom, who noticed Suzanne and waved at her. She smiled back, trying not to look at his sad crotch.

“Have you two met?” Wallis asked Suzanne as she practically carried April toward her. “Suzanne Vale, April Lanning.” “No,” said Suzanne. Then, shaking April’s hand, she said to her, “But you once almost had sex with an impotent acquaintance of mine.” April looked ashen. “I’m kidding,” Suzanne said. “Nice to meet you.”

“You should see her pieces,” Wallis enthused, squeezing April’s arm. “I never knew I liked photorealism before.” “Have you been in L.A. long?” Suzanne asked.

“Huh?” said April.

“I think April could use a drink,” said Wallis. “Come, dear.”

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She led April past the painting made of broken teacup pieces, toward the bar in the corner.

Suzanne saw her skin doctor, Walter Marks, enter the room and felt reassured. She made her way over to his beaming bearded face. “You’re disappointed in my hair, aren’t you?” she greeted him. “I have too much makeup on, don’t I? Be honest with me. Do I look orange?”

“You’re not drinking, are you?” said Walter. “No, of course not, you don’t drink.”

“You don’t drink either, do you?” asked Suzanne, kissing his cheek.

“Hardly ever,” he said. “I like to feel like I could perform surgery at any given moment.”

“That’s interesting,” said Suzanne. “My goal was to feel I could go into surgery at any given moment.”

“Who are you here with?” Walter asked.

“No one. You think I’m desperate, don’t you?”

“Impaired, yes,” Walter said. “Desperate, no. Why do you keep coming to these things when they cause you such torment?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m working on it in therapy” “How is Norma?” Walter asked. “What a terrific lady” “She’s great,” Suzanne said. “She said a great thing last week. I told her I thought people confused fame with success, and she said they confused fame with acceptance and-Who cares, right? You don’t care. Who’s that?” she asked with a nod of her head toward the door, where a fortyish blonde was standing in a dress that looked like it had something long and stringy sticking out from the bottom.