So 5 Minutes Ago (16 page)

Maybe it’s his smile. Or the gold in his eyes. Or the fact that he’s leaving. Or that he just had his hands on me for the first time. Or maybe it’s because I have nothing more to lose. “But what if I don’t want to go?”

I smile, embarrassed.

He smiles back. Not embarrassed, like he’s deciding something. “Well,” he says, putting his hands in his pockets and shrugging. “That would be an entirely different story.”

I’ve lost him. I’ve overplayed my hand and fucking lost him.

“Okay, well, uhm, have a good trip and I guess we’ll see—” I sputter when suddenly Charles’s mouth is on mine. Oh dear God. I didn’t lose him. I did not fucking lose him.

We stay that way for several seconds or years and then he pulls back and smiles again. I could get used to that smile.

“Uhm, given that you’re technically my boss, I’d say that was sexual harassment. If it wasn’t so nice.”

Oh God, do I have a complete death wish?

“Hey,” Charles says, smiling at me. “Can you please shut up? Just for a minute.”

“Okay, that definitely sounds like harassment,” I say, but Charles’s mouth is on mine again.

And there’s more. Oh God, there’s more. My chopstick is knocked loose and my hair falls to my shoulders. I feel his hand on the back of my neck and now lower and now he’s pushing me where? Against the wall. I am up against the wall with Charles leaning into me and I am suddenly very, very aware that I am wearing a skirt. And that my legs are bare. And that they are starting to be lifted off the floor. I reach out and fumble for the light switch that I swear is right here. Where,
where
is it? Here? Yes, here. No, the lamp. Oh, wait.

There’s a crash.

Oh God, the lamp. Oh fuck, the lamp.

“Hey, so they didn’t have any Camel Lights.”

Steven. With a pack of Marlboros. In the doorway.

Everything stops. Oh, don’t
stop. Please
don’t stop. But we do stop. We stop and I slide back down the wall until my feet touch the floor. For a second we all look at one another. Frozen. We are a Mexican standoff in a Tarantino movie. No one can shoot without being fatally wounded.

“Hey,” Charles says finally.

“Hey,” I say for no real reason.

“Hey,”
Steven says, smiling. “I was just going to say . . . but I’ll try a different store,” he says, reaching out and flicking off the light switch. “On my way home.”

It’s dark now except for the light from the parking lot coming in the window and my back is still pressed against the wall. “So, hey,” I say softly in the dark.

“Hey,” Charles breathes, his mouth on my ear again. “Hey.”

12 Party Animals

                  I am not the kind of girl who goes to a place like this. Not of my own free will. Not even if it is owned by Johnny Depp. I’m not a clubgoer. Never have been, and at this age, never will be. I just can’t do that many drugs to transform standing around a dark, howling loud room at 2
A.M.,
jostled by people who are drunker and prettier than I am, into something other than the torture that it is.

But then up until yesterday, I wasn’t the kind of girl who would think of having sex in her office. Let alone actually have it. Actually, I didn’t. Have it. Not that I didn’t want to. Not that
we
didn’t want to. But after Steven’s little coitus interruptus, followed by a troupe of Biggies trooping noisily down the hall with the last of the cake, followed by the realization that Charles’s limo was arriving at his hotel in less than an hour, we didn’t. Have it. But we wanted to. And that’s the important thing.

“Absolutely,” Steven said, when I called him the next morning to thank him for his swift and perceptive exit and, God, I owed him one. “Intention is nine-tenths of the law.”

“Actually, I think possession is nine-tenths of the law and we didn’t get quite that far.”

“All I know from watching
Law & Order
is that if you intend to commit a crime, it’s much more serious. So if you and Charles intended to commit sex, even if you didn’t actually commit it, it’s serious.”

Serious. Boy, that’s a word that will get you in a serious amount of trouble. I thought I was serious with Josh and looked what happened there. I just became seriously depressed. There’s no way I’m going there with Charles. Not yet.

“You know, you should just break down and go to law school,” I say to Steven, dodging the whole “serious” thing. “I mean, one of us should know something useful in life. Besides how to get a client in
Vogue.
Or how to sneak them out of a hotel. Or that even publicists need to get their hair blown out before red-carpet events.”

“I’m serious—he’s serious,” Steven counters, unwilling to let this drop.

“Well, I’m not doing the ‘serious’ thing. Not yet. Although he did call me from the airport. Twice.”

“Seriously?”

“Look, I still don’t even know how we wound up where we did. Besides, he lives in New York and technically he’s my boss.”

“So?”

“So where do we go from here?”

Now, that all seems like hours ago. Actually, it is hours ago. It’s going on 11
P.M.
in the VIP lounge of the Viper Room, which truth to tell is indistinguishable from the non-VIP part of the club. Just another black box up a cramped, code-violating staircase from the ground-floor black box. You just need a Day-Glo-colored wristband to get in. I’ve been here, at G’s so-called party, for more than an hour. Of course as a non-clubgoer I was one of the first to arrive, and even my 10
P.M.
arrival required a stop for espresso at the Coffee Bean and Leaf back in Sunset Plaza. So far all I have seen are bartenders, a crew setting up sound equipment on the room’s miniature stage, and a few fellow early birds who look like G’s old Sony cronies, given their jeans-and-sports-jackets outfits and the restless way they keep checking their Cartier watches.

I scan the room again. Nobody I remotely know. And it will take more than espresso to make me talk to studio execs. Besides, I’ve had about as much as I can take of Lil’ Kim or whoever is wailing over the sound system. I can either hit the ladies’ room and check my messages again or wander downstairs and try to kill half an hour mingling with the vox populi.

Actually, it’s ladies’ room and messages followed by Diet Coke—part penance for yesterday, part the need to pace myself for the evening to come—downstairs in the main club followed by another trip to the ladies’ room. When I emerge it’s 12
A.M.
Sunday morning, which in clubland means the planet has turned on its axis. The stairway to the VIP room is now packed with Biggies in black leather jackets, tight jeans, and big, lush ponytails that take an entire afternoon to craft. They all seem to have brought along five dates each. Guys in jeans and buzz cuts and a few in porkpie hats. The newest in geek cool. Why is it that women have to kill themselves to look beautiful in the most casual surroundings while guys can get by on dorkiness? Adam Sandler has a lot to answer for.

But at the moment, he is nowhere in sight. Just this teeming river of Hollywood pilot fish fighting their way upstream. “Hey, Alex,” “Hey, Alex,” the Biggies chant as they thunder by, sweeping me into their wake, a dark sea of black leather jackets, and on up the stairs into the VIP room, the white-hot center of it all.

I lose all track of time. And space, for that matter, given that it’s dark enough in here to develop dailies. I have no idea how long I’ve been here, or how many drinks I’ve had—Diet Cokes alternating with white wines—or how many times I’m wedged in a knot of people, shouting and peering and nodding in the near pitch-black—shouts and nods and peering are what pass for conversation in a club—until I am ready to pass out from the sheer effort it takes to have a good time. I have made the rounds of the Biggies, the inner circle, and their geeky, arrogant dates—screenwriters, agents, lesser studio execs—with whom I barely register. To them I am just another publicist. Not blond. Not twenty-something. Except for my clients, I do not exist.

I try to check the time but can’t see my watch, it’s so dark. I scan the room. G is nowhere to be seen and no one seems to have any idea where he is or exactly when he is arriving. Or even that it matters. I am hot in my leather jacket and sick of carrying my purse, tiny and useless as it is, and my feet are killing me in my new kitten heel boots. I scan the room again. Still no G. He’s my boss and I don’t trust him, but even my paranoia has its limits. I reach through a knot of people, slide my empty glass to the bar, and turn toward the stairs.

I hear the drawl before I make out its owner.

“Hey, Alex, don’t tell me you’re bailing already?”

Troy. Heading up the stairs with the kind of wide-awake-at-midnight eagerness possessed only by the young and well-fueled and with the kind of coltish, vacant-looking arm candy possessed by almost every male in Hollywood.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” I blurt out before I realize my mistake. I have been here for hours spinning my wheels, but the real party, the heart of the matter, is only just beginning. And I nearly missed it.

“Hey, it’s the G-man’s big night. Can’t miss that, darlin’,” he says, sweeping by my question as he sweeps by me, hauling the leggy blonde after him. “Sorry,” she breathes as I lean back to let them pass in a cloud of perfume. The King of Good Times and his Queen for a Day.

“Hey, Alex,” floats back down the stairwell. Troy again. “Let’s try and hook up later. I need to talk to you.”

I know we will never hook up later. Never mind that we do, actually, need to have a conversation, more than one, in fact, before we make our way to the Beverly Hills courthouse for his pretrial hearing or whatever it is. And never mind that he has never once apologized or even acknowledged that his little display of star pique on the steps of the Chanel boutique has cost me some serious capital at work. That I narrowly avoided being put on probation. And it’s why I am standing here at God knows what hour, exhausted and bored, trying to suck up to my boss. Never mind any of that. Because it is just the way it works. And I know it.

I also know that I have to put all that out of my mind, my whining and my pounding eardrums and my screaming feet, turn around and work this sucker like the grown-up that I am. If Troy is here, then other clients are sure to follow. And frankly, what the hell is Troy doing here? If he didn’t hear about this party from me, who invited him? Suddenly the idea of getting a look at G up close and partying among the faithful is much more intriguing, even imperative, than it was a few minutes ago.

“Hey,” I say, charging up the stairs after Troy. “Let’s definitely hook up.”

I am all too correct in my assessment. A stream of celebs, some BIG clients, a few DWP clients, and a few others not signed to the agency, flow up the stairs into the room. They are minor and mostly TV—Rose McGowan, Selma Blair types—but still. I know this because I have positioned myself at the top of the stairs, leaning casually against the wall, armed with another Diet Coke and my suspicions. This party is getting better, which is to say weirder, by the minute. Not only am I the only DWP agent here—even Suzanne is glaringly absent—but the celebs, such as they are, keep coming. Claire Danes. Eddie Furlong. Tracy Ellis Ross. One of the Hilton sisters. I can never keep them straight.

Not that it matters. As a rule, celebs do not turn out for anything that doesn’t have something in it for them. A movie premiere. A charity event. A fashion show. But not a publicist’s party. Stars guard their presence like currency. Unless they don’t mind becoming a banana republic like Jennifer Tilly, who turns out for any event, no matter how small and insignificant, they don’t risk devaluation by showing up at just any party. Especially one thrown by publicists for a publicist.

Just then, a beefy-looking guy in a goatee, black sport jacket, draped in a trio of babes, and with a cell phone pressed to his ear plows up the stairs. Nikki Gans. Hollywood’s official, off-the-books party planner. Well, that explains a lot. The Iranian-born Londoner, or London-born Iranian, or maybe he’s just Israeli, no one seems to know, has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for papering a party. His Rolodex is better than half the agents’ at CAA. The fact that he looks like one of Tony Soprano’s gang doesn’t hurt his chances for rounding up the usual glittery suspects. For the right fee. Of course G would have hired him if he wanted to make a statement with his party.

I press against the wall to let the party-meister and his entourage pass in a veil of cologne. “We just got here,” Nikki is saying into his phone. In his unplaceable foreign accent, he sounds like an arms trader. “No, New Line is
next
week. We’re going to the Standard after this. What? No, we still have to hook up with the MTV people at Opaline and arrange all that.”

“Nikki,” says one of the babes, plucking at his sleeve. In her skintight satin sheath, hair extensions, and three-inch heels, she looks like an exotic dancer. She probably is an exotic dancer. “Nikki, when are we going to meet Carla Selena?” she says. “Is that tonight?”

Nikki holds up a hand in the air as he keeps walking and talking into his cell. Carla? Nikki might have gotten the Rose McGowan crowd to turn out for G, but there’s no way Carla would show. Not here. Not after she fired Suzanne. Not when there’s not another celeb of her stature in residence. Still, I’m curious. But before I can catch Nikki’s answer, they disappear into the crowd.

I’m just deciding whether I have the energy to follow them, when one of the Biggies comes to rest by my perch.

“Hey, Alex, pretty amazing turnout, don’t you think?”

I slide over to make room. She takes a sip of her martini and scans the crowd. “I mean, I knew my clients were coming but I didn’t know so many others would.”

I make convivial noises—Nikki notwithstanding, at this point she knows more about the inner workings of this party than I do—and let her prattle on.

“I know Nikki helped out, but it must have to do with G having been at Sony,” she says, scoping out the crowd. “I mean, a lot of our clients worked with him at Sony before they joined our agency. And others. Like Carla.”

“Carla? Carla Selena?” I say. This is too much of a coincidence. Paths cross in Hollywood, but I’m stunned at this news. I didn’t know Carla and G had had any dealings. When Carla flounced out of DWP, leaving Suzanne in the lurch just after the merger with BIG, G never said a word. Never tried to step in and mend fences. Acted like it was just Suzanne’s fuck-up.

“Oh yeah,” she says, turning to look at me. “He was the marketing guy on one of her first films. Her first
hit
film. I think they go way back.”

Going “way back” in Hollywood usually means one of two things. You just met and you need to suck up to the person big-time. Or you met a while ago and you still need to suck up. It’s all part of the Food Chain Rules. Of course, G would want everyone to think he was tight with celebs. It’s why he hired Nikki to stock his birthday party.
All
publicists want everyone to think they are tight with celebs. But with few exceptions, no one believes it. Clients come and go. Publicists come and go. Shit, careers come and go. If G marketed one of Carla’s films, it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Except that G never mentioned knowing her when she fired the agency. Just let Suzanne twist in the wind.

“Oh, well, I guess that explains it,” I say as casually as I can. But the well has run dry.

“Yeah,” she says, pushing off from the wall. “Well, I’m gonna mingle.”

I decide to hunt down Troy. If he’s not too stoned, I should be able to get something coherent out of him. Normally, on a Saturday night Troy would be home, smoking dope in his unfurnished rental house high above the Strip—his possessions consist largely of what one would use on a camping trip: sleeping bag, dog, SUV, and plenty of weed—followed by a tour of the Strip with the boys until he’s killed enough brain cells and heads back home with the night’s arm candy. Come to think of it, Troy is one of the few celebs who
would
be at the Viper Room on a Saturday night. Still, he’s the only star I know well in this room and even if he is high, he’s at least got to know who invited him here.