Then Came You Read online

  When I failed to land speaking roles, Travis got me work doing background, standing in or body doubling, along with jobs that were acting only insofar as they involved costumes. I worked for three years at a real-estate office’s annual Oktoberfest, dressed in a dirndl and black leather boots, pouring beer and passing platters of schnitzel and bratwurst from eight o’clock at night until two in the morning. The only acting I had to do was acting like I didn’t mind when the real-estate agents with gelled hair and gold chains would grab my ass or ask me to sing “Edelweiss.”

  It was two a.m. the third year I worked the party, and I was thinking of nothing except counting my tips (as the night went on, men had stuffed bills into my frilly garter belts), unzipping my boots, and going home for a long, hot shower, when the cops rolled in, lights blaring, paddy wagons parked outside. The story, which I learned later that night, in jail, was that a few of the girls, like me, had come from legitimate talent-management companies, while the rest were in the employ of a soon-to-be-notorious Beverly Hills madam and had discreetly made themselves available for fun and games in a vacant three-bedroom suite.

  Travis showed up with bail money, and I was released after none of the men said they’d slept with me and Travis provided W-2s to show that I really did work as an actress. We collected my belongings, my wallet and my watch, and he took me to breakfast at the Griddle, apologizing as I glared at him between gulps of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a stack of syrup-soaked pancakes. “I had no idea, Samantha,” he said, gazing at me earnestly and maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice that he had the same sculpted hair and heavy cologne as the real-estate agents at the party. . the men who, I’d heard from one of the girls in the holding cell, had paid to be fellated while balancing ashtrays on the girl’s head so they wouldn’t have to set down their hand-rolled cigars for the act.

  “It’s India,” I reminded him. I’d had it legally changed right after my breasts healed. I took one last bite, set my crumpled paper napkin on top of my sticky plate, and pushed it away. “No offense, Travis, but I think I need another manager.”

  His fleshy face hardened. “Wait, wait. Let’s not be hasty here. You still owe me.”

  “And I’ll pay you,” I told him. “But I can’t work with you anymore.”

  I got Kevin’s name from a friend of a friend of a girl I knew, someone who’d actually gotten cast in a network pilot. “He’s a baby agent,” she’d confided. I said that didn’t matter. Better a baby agent than an almost pimp.

  Kevin had an office in a glass-and-marble tower in Century City. He’d gone to Rice, then moved to California and worked his way up from the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies in town. He was just signing his first clients: potty-mouthed comics who barely looked old enough to have learned the curse words they spewed onstage, wannabe starlets and fresh-off-the-bus singers and geeky fanboys who just knew they were destined to be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, mostly because their mothers had told them so.

  Kevin wasn’t tall, maybe an inch or two more than my five foot six, with narrow shoulders and delicate wrists and hands. His clothes — sharply creased jeans and a checkered blue-and-white button-down shirt, a black leather belt with a silver buckle and black leather cowboy boots — were so well kept that they looked brand-new. He was losing his light-brown hair but not making a big deal about it, not attempting a comb-over or hiding beneath a baseball cap, and there was something about him, the way he looked at you when you talked, leaning close like it would hurt him to miss a word, that made you feel special.

  He was a good listener, which was important for his line of work: after four years in Los Angeles I’d figured out that performers were black holes of neediness. Actors (I included myself in this tally, but at least I had good reasons to be needy) wanted to talk mostly about themselves, and they wanted you to listen, and if Kevin was prepared to do this — quietly, politely, intensely — then he’d be a success.

  “Can you take me on?” I asked. He looked at my list of credits — scanty and padded, like my breasts before I’d had the work done — then gave me a look of earnest regret and shook his head. I wasn’t surprised. It was one thing to be nineteen, new in town and full of promise, but at twenty-three, if you hadn’t landed so much as a line and you’d spent four years trying, your prospects and potential had diminished considerably.

  “I can’t offer you representation. However…” And he smiled, a charming grin that lit his face. “I’d love to take you to dinner.”

  I figured I’d date him casually, just for fun. . a sport-fuck, as my roommate, Terri, would say, while I tried to find another agent who could get me the kind of job that meant I didn’t have to waitress, or temp, or be part of crowd scenes on cop shows, or spend all day on a gurney as an extra on ER. But then I learned that Kevin came from money. Big old family money, Houston oil money, the kind of money that meant that the art museum in town was named after your grandfather and your father had inherited one of the most legendary privately owned art collections in the world. It didn’t take long for me to abandon my dreams of stardom and decide to dream of becoming Kevin’s trophy wife instead.

  Kevin lived with his brother, Carlton, who worked as an art broker. The brothers hadn’t used family connections to get their jobs, but they weren’t above using their trust funds to go in together on a spectacular penthouse apartment in an old Art Deco apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown. The apartment spanned the top floor of the twelve-story building. A fountain, with mosaic mermaids cavorting on its sides, splashed in the building’s tiled lobby, where a sad-eyed, soft-spoken Dominican man sat watching the security cameras. The boys’ place was enormous, with soaring, mostly empty white walls, high-ceilinged rooms with elaborate crown moldings, and all the latest electronics.

  Each brother had his own wing: bedroom, bathroom, office. The two of them shared the kitchen, where very little cooking went on, and the den, where the wet bar got a lot of use, where Nintendo was played and the occasional bong was fired up on the weekends. Carl liked to party — sometimes I’d be in the kitchen in the morning, making Kevin a protein smoothie, watching as the parade of the Young and the Panty-less proceeded from Carlton’s bedroom to the elevator. Kevin was more ambitious than his brother, and his late nights were all work-related. He would put in a full day at the agency, trying to get his writing clients gigs on sitcoms or doing punch-up on movies in production, trying to get his actors auditions and his singers’ demo tapes into the right hands. Then he’d grab a quick bite, usually a bunless burger or a bowl of turkey chili somewhere like Hugo’s or the Urth Caffé, and head out to a club to hear a comic or a band, a showcase or a play, to check out new actors or support the ones he’d already signed.

  After realizing what Kevin was, and what an association with him could lead to, I’d slowly tapered off on the auditions, redone my résumé, and landed an entry-level job at a public-relations firm that managed musicians and movie stars. Some nights after work I’d join Kevin, picking my way across the darkness of a tiny theater or perching on a folding chair in a high-school classroom or church basement for a performance of Equus or a night of Tennessee Williams monologues.

  Work kept me busy, but my real job was Kevin, and my impromptu, ongoing audition for the role of Kevin’s wife.

  This required editing my past. I made myself a year younger, reasoning that younger was always better and it was never too early to start. I told him I’d done two years of college before making the trip to Los Angeles. I doled out parts of my true story: that my mother had given birth to me before she’d finished high school, that my grandparents had raised me, that they were now very old and in assisted living, that my mother had remarried and that she and I didn’t see each other much. Kevin raised his eyebrows, pinning me with his gaze, but I’d learned his tricks by then and knew that he could feign absolute interest while mentally choosing his five favorite Celtics or deciding whether he’d have the sautéed spinach or the quinoa on his pick
-a-plate at Hugo’s.

  He brought me home to Texas for Christmas the first year we dated. I met two more brothers, one in boarding school and one in college; a cowboy-booted father; and a brittle blond mom who worked as a decorator and did ninety minutes of step aerobics every day. Kevin’s father, red-faced and beer-gutted, had grabbed my boob after one eggnog-heavy evening, but his family seemed to accept me as the kind of girl Kevin would inevitably end up with: sweet and pretty, with a job that she’d be happy to abandon after the first baby came along.

  For three years I was a rich man’s girlfriend, with everything that meant: weekend jaunts to Napa Valley with Carl and whatever girl he was seeing, wine tastings and afternoons lolling in hot springs; courtside seats at sporting events; fine wine, fancy food, four-star hotels.

  True, being Kevin’s girlfriend, with an eye on being his wife, required every bit of the physical effort I’d put into being an actress. I’d work out on the Nautilus machines at my gym, then jog through Runyon Canyon or put in five miles on the treadmill. The upkeep was both painful and, on my salary, prohibitively expensive, especially since I was still paying Travis back. But it was all necessary: the highlights, the bikini waxes, the weekly manicures and biweekly pedicures, the haircuts and the tan, the lingerie and shoes and clothing, the constant diet. It was an investment, I told myself, sliding my credit card across the hair or tanning salon’s counter, writing the checks. An investment in my future.

  One night, three years after we’d met, Kevin came home at six o’clock, which was unusual. We weren’t officially living together then, but I spent five nights of every week at his house, using my own apartment mostly as a glorified closet. I was in Kevin’s kitchen, still in the bike shorts and running bra I’d worn to the gym, running a sponge dreamily over the marble countertops, imagining that all of this was mine, when he came through the door, whistling. He’d been away for five days, first at some kind of fraternity reunion back in Houston, then off to Vegas, where a client was opening for Jay Leno. We’d talked on the phone a little, but now he didn’t seem happy to see me. “Oh,” he said, blinking like he didn’t recognize me. “Oh, hey.”

  I felt my hands go cold. I knew what “Oh, hey” meant. I’d heard him say it on the phone to clients he’d been ducking, in person to sweaty comedians and bad-breathed screenwriters he wasn’t going to take on, or was getting ready to drop. The song he’d been whistling on his way through the door was “Hey Jealousy.” This wasn’t good.

  To his credit, he didn’t break up with me over the phone, any more than he’d pretended he’d wanted to represent me just to get into my pants. He walked right up to me, took my cold hands in his, looked me in the eye with his I’m-listening face and said, “I think we should take a break.”

  What followed was predictable. I asked if there was someone else. He denied it. He asked if we could still be friends. I told him to go to hell. Then I dramatically crammed all of my possessions (and a few things of his that I thought he wouldn’t miss) into a half-dozen trash bags and dragged them to the elevator, then into the Corolla I’d had for years and kept parked next to Kevin’s Audi. “Hold on,” he said, following me into the underground parking lot and watching as I slung the bags into the trunk. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Come on, Indie. We’re probably going to see each other around. We should at least be friends.”

  I spun around on one sneakered foot, so furious it was all I could do to keep from hitting him. He’d wasted my time, the best years of my life. I would never be thinner or prettier than I was at that very moment. My face, my body, my youth — these were my commodities, and he’d wasted them. . or, rather, I’d been dumb enough to squander them on him. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re never going to see me again.”

  I guess I went a little crazy then, the way you can go crazy only if you’re young and female and living in Los Angeles, where there’s an entire world of medical professionals dedicated to making you look even better, even younger, when you could fill out a bunch of applications and have a fistful of new credit cards in less than a week. Using these new cards, not letting myself think about how I’d pay off their balances, I had my hair color switched from blond to a rich, glossy chestnut, shot through with strands of copper and gold. A little liposuction came next, because no matter how hard I’d worked, I’d never been able to rid myself of the jiggle on my inner thighs, the bit of back fat that bulged over the top of my low-riding jeans. From there, it was an easy step to Botox for my brow and fillers for my cheekbones, injections that would subtly reshape my face, turning me into a pretty stranger, and to implants a cup size bigger than the ones I’d initially picked.

  I woke up in the recovery room, on a hospital bed, alone, with an IV needle stuck into the back of my hand, in a room with tiled floors and drab green walls that smelled of disinfectant. Tears trickled down my swollen cheeks. My forehead stung from the needles; my torso and thighs felt like an entire football team had been kicking them. The anesthesia had left me queasy. When it wore off I knew I’d be starving. I hadn’t eaten the day of the operation, and I’d been dieting for the month before; the looser my skin, the doctors had said, the easier it would be for them to suck out the most fat.

  A nurse asked how I was feeling and helped me to sit up. A while later, Dr. Perez came in to see me. He touched me gently — my jaw, my nose, my cheekbones, tapping and prodding, murmuring to himself, before pulling open my gown. I’d been bandaged, bound from my breasts to just above my knees, in the stretchy bodysuit that I would wear for the next two weeks. “No mirrors yet,” he cautioned, and I smiled, even though it hurt, imagining the state my face was in. When I’d healed, I looked just the way I’d hoped: glamorous, quietly sexy, with full lips that fell naturally into a pout and a nose that seemed made to turn skyward.

  I spent three months recovering. When I told my boss I was moving to New York she sighed, scratched with her capped Montblanc pen underneath the wig she’d worn since her chemo and promised me a job in the firm’s Manhattan office. After eight years in New York, years of handling actors and singers and Broadway stars who wanted you to help them pretend they were straight when they were photographed at places like the Man Hole, I went out on my own.

  Six years after that, I met Marcus in the coffee shop. Less than three hours later he’d called, saying that he was on his way to Japan for a few days but would be back that weekend, and would I like to have dinner?

  “Ah. Japan,” I said, leaning back in my chair, kicking off my shoes, and crossing my legs, squeezing them together to keep them from shaking. “I was just there last week.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked.

  “I think,” I told him, “that it’s all about the emerging markets right now.”

  “Are you free Saturday?”

  “I’m afraid I have plans,” I said. I didn’t have plans, but I knew that I had to at least give the impression of being busy on a Saturday night. “But Sunday could work.” This wasn’t strictly adhering to the playbook, but Marcus was the real deal, and I couldn’t put him off long enough for some other girl who’d been waiting for her big chance to swoop in and take what could have been mine.

  He took me to Eleven Madison Park, which had just gotten four stars in the Times, a fact that should have made it impossible for a civilian to get a reservation. Marcus was no civilian. “Mr. Croft! Welcome!” said the man behind the podium, sounding as if Marcus was a long-lost family member who’d come, maybe bearing good news about a dead relative’s will. I stood in the vestibule, my new dress snug around my body, and inhaled the scent of fresh flowers and buttery sauces, roasted meats and rich desserts, a fragrance that meant money. I could feel my body respond, my nipples tightening, my heartbeat speeding up. Easy, I told myself as Marcus slipped off my coat and handed it to the pretty young girl who’d materialized to whisk it away. They never hired ugly people in places like these. How they got around the civil rights laws I have no idea, but I had never seen an unattractive bartender or
waitress or coat-check girl in any of the best restaurants in Manhattan. Maybe no ugly person ever applied. Maybe they all just know to stay away.

  The maître d’ led us to the center of the room, past a table set with a dozen oversized glass vases, each containing a single stalk of hydrangea leaning at an angle. I ran my fingers over the creamy paper on which the day’s menu had been printed — minted pea soup, roast spring chicken stuffed with foie gras, baby suckling pig, a dozen other delicacies that made my mouth flood. All I’d had that day was chamomile tea and a wheatgrass shake. After Marcus’s call, I’d embarked on a five-day juice fast that had left me six pounds thinner and a little wobbly. . but six pounds was six pounds, and I needed every ounce of advantage I could get.

  With my right hand, I lifted my wineglass. With my left hand, I gripped the table so that he wouldn’t see me trembling. Don’t screw this up, I told myself. Don’t lose this one, too.

  My normal dinner was broiled fish and steamed greens, but I knew that men liked to see women eat. So I’d allowed myself an ambrosial Parker House roll, soft as a cloud in my hand, with fresh, unsalted, locally sourced butter. I’d started with a salad, but one with lardons sprinkled over the lettuce and a poached egg on top, and I had that foie gras stuffed chicken, crisp-skinned and succulent, every juicy bite of it exploding in my mouth, the flavors and textures, salty, sweet, rich, dancing over my tongue.

  “You’re very pretty,” said Marcus. I set my fork on my plate.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.” He wore the uniform of a successful New York businessman, but his voice was midwestern, plangent and nasal, not Chicago, like I’d guessed, but Detroit. His father had owned a garage, and his mother did the books. Marcus had invented a way to heat car seats, a technology he’d patented, then sold to the automakers, becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five.