Imperial Bedrooms

They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away. Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons below Mulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasen’s with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered. And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-raped—I was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who in the book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that night—the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with. But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That’s how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That’s how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That’s how I became the boy who wouldn’t save a friend. That’s how I became the boy who couldn’t love the girl.

The scenes from the novel that hurt the most chronicled my relationship with Blair, especially in a scene near the novel’s end when I broke it off with her on a restaurant patio overlooking Sunset Boulevard and where a billboard that read DISAPPEAR HERE kept distracting me (the author added that I was wearing sunglasses when I told Blair that I never loved her). I hadn’t mentioned that painful afternoon to the author but it appeared verbatim in the book and that’s when I stopped talking to Blair and couldn’t listen to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart (“You Little Fool,” “Man Out of Time,” “Watch Your Step”) and yes, she had given me a scarf at a Christmas party, and yes, she had danced over to me mouthing Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and yes, she had called me “a fox,” and yes, she found out I had slept with a girl I picked up on a rainy night at the Whisky, and yes, the author had informed her of that. He wasn’t, I realized when I read those scenes concerning Blair and myself, close to any of us—except of course to Blair, and really not even to her. He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.

But there was no point in being angry with him. When the book was published in the spring of 1985, the author had already left Los Angeles. In 1982 he attended the same small college in New Hampshire that I’d tried to disappear into, and where we had little or no contact. (There’s a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Camden, where he parodies Clay—just another gesture, another cruel reminder of how he felt about me. Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”) Because of his presence I stayed at Camden only one year and then transferred to Brown in 1983 though in the second novel I’m still in New Hampshire during the fall term of 1985. I told myself it shouldn’t bother me, but the success of the first book hovered within my sight lines for an uncomfortably long time. This partly had to do with my wanting to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to write that first novel the author had written after I finished reading it—it was my life and he had hijacked it. But I quickly had to accept that I didn’t have the talent or the drive. I didn’t have the patience. I just wanted to be able to do it. I made a few lame, slashing attempts and realized after graduating from Brown in 1986 that it was never going to happen.

The only person who expressed any embarrassment or disdain about the novel was Julian Wells—Blair was still in love with the author and didn’t care, nor did much of the supporting cast—but Julian did so in a gleefully arrogant manner that verged on excitement, even though the author had exposed not only Julian’s heroin addiction but also the fact that he was basically a hustler in debt to a drug dealer (Finn Delaney) and pimped out to men visiting from Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco in the hotels that lined Sunset from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake. Julian, wasted and self-pitying, had told the author everything, and there was something about the book being widely read and costarring Julian that seemed to give Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope and I think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shame—he only pretended that he did. And Julian was even more excited when the movie version opened in the fall of 1987, just two years after the novel was published.

I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn’t clean yet and kept biting his nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation. (I saw Blair walk in with Alana and Kim and trailing Rip Millar. I ignored her.) The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything—all the pain I felt, the betrayal—I couldn’t help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian. (“I’ll sell my car,” I warn the actor playing Julian’s dealer. “Whatever it takes.”) This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair’s character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group—jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. “Be good to her,” Julian tells Clay. “She really deserves it.” The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.

As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience—the book’s actual cast—quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn’t give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn’t help) so the source material—surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality—had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir—the cinematography was breathtaking—and I sighed as it kept streaming forward, interested in only a few things: the new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me, as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared (Blair’s father died of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair’s mother). But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie’s new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That’s what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it’s what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. “I died,” he whispered. “They killed me off.” I waited a beat before sighing, “But you’re still here.” Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed—his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself—and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner’s office counted one hundred fifty-nine wounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping. His body was discovered by a group of kids who went to CalArts and were cruising through the streets off of Hillhurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space. When they saw the body they thought the “thing” lying by a trash bin was—and I’m quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder—“a flag.” I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article again from the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit (it had belonged to him but it wasn’t something he was wearing the night he was abducted) and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and pants were streaked with red. (Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then re-dressed.) But if they thought it was a “flag” my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then where was the blue? And then I realized: it was his head. The students thought it was a flag because Julian had lost so much blood that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black.

But then I should have realized this sooner because, in my own way, I had put Julian there, and I’d seen what had happened to him in another—and very different—movie.

The blue Jeep starts following us on the 405 somewhere between LAX and the Wilshire exit. I notice it only because the driver’s eyes have been glancing into the rearview mirror above the windshield I’ve been gazing out of, at the lanes of red taillights streaming toward the hills, drunk, in the backseat, ominous hip-hop playing softly through the speakers, my phone glowing in my lap with texts I can’t read coming in from an actress I was hitting on earlier that afternoon in the American Airlines first-class lounge at JFK (she had been reading my palm and we were both giggling), other messages from Laurie in New York a total blur. The Jeep follows the sedan across Sunset, passing the mansions draped with Christmas lights while I’m nervously chewing mints from a tin of Altoids, failing to mask my gin-soaked breath, and then the blue Jeep makes the same right and rolls toward the Doheny Plaza, tailing us as if it were a lost child. But as the sedan swerves into the driveway where the valet and a security guard look up from smoking cigarettes beneath a towering palm, the Jeep hesitates before it keeps rolling down Doheny toward Santa Monica Boulevard. The hesitation makes it clear that we were guiding it somewhere. I stumble out of the car and watch as the Jeep slowly brakes before turning onto Elevado Street. It’s warm but I’m shivering in a pair of frayed sweats and a torn Nike hoodie, everything loose because of the weight I dropped that fall, the sleeves damp from a drink I spilled during the flight. It’s midnight in December and I’ve been away for four months.

“I thought that car was following us,” the driver says, opening the trunk. “It kept moving lanes with us. It tailed us all the way here.”

“What do you think it wanted?” I ask.

The night doorman, whom I don’t recognize, walks down the ramp leading from the lobby to the driveway to help me with my bags. I overtip the driver and he gets back into the sedan and pulls out onto Doheny to pick up his next passenger at LAX, an arrival from Dallas. The valet and the security guard nod silently as I walk past them, following the doorman into the lobby. The doorman places the bags in the elevator and says before the doors close, cutting him off, “Welcome back.”

Walking down the Art Deco hallway on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza I’m aware of the faint scent of pine, and then I see a wreath has been hung on the black double doors of 1508. And inside the condo a Christmas tree sits discreetly in the corner of the living room, sparkling with white lights. A note in the kitchen from the housekeeper is a reminder of what I owe her, listing the supplies she’s bought, and next to that a small stack of mail that hadn’t been forwarded to the New York address. I bought the condo two years ago—leaving the El Royale after a decade of renting—from the parents of a wealthy West Hollywood party boy who had been redesigning the space when after a night of clubbing he died unexpectedly in his sleep. The designer the boy had hired finished the job, and the dead boy’s parents hurriedly put it on the market. Minimally decorated in soft beiges and grays with hardwood floors and recessed lighting, it’s only twelve hundred square feet—a master bedroom, an office, an immaculate living room opening into a futuristic, sterile kitchen—but the entire window wall that runs the length of the living room is actually a sliding glass door divided into five panels that I push open to air the condo out, and where the large white-tiled balcony drops into an epic view of the city that reaches from the skyscrapers downtown, the dark forests of Beverly Hills, the towers of Century City and Westwood, then all the way to Santa Monica and the edge of the Pacific. The view is impressive without becoming a study in isolation; it’s more intimate than the one a friend had who lived on Appian Way, which was so far above the city it seemed as if you were looking at a vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide. The view from the Doheny Plaza is so tactile that you can almost touch the blues and greens of the design center on Melrose. Because of how high I am above the city it’s a good place to hide when working in L.A. Tonight the sky is violet-tinged and there’s a mist.

After pouring myself a tumbler of Grey Goose that was left in the freezer when I escaped last August, I’m about to turn on the balcony lights but then stop and move slowly out into the shadow of the overhang. The blue Jeep is parked on the corner of Elevado and Doheny. From inside the Jeep a cell phone glows. I realize the hand not holding the vodka is now clenched into a fist. The fear returns as I gaze at the Jeep. And then a flash of light: someone lit a cigarette. From behind me the phone rings. I don’t answer it.

The reason I’ve sold myself on being back in Los Angeles: the casting of The Listeners is under way. The producer who had brought me in to adapt the complicated novel it was based on was so relieved when I figured it out that he had almost instantly hired an enthusiastic director, and the three of us were acting as collaborators (even after a tense negotiation where my lawyer and manager insisted that I receive a producing credit as well). They had already cast the four adult leads but their children were trickier and more specific roles and the director and the producer wanted my input. This is the official reason why I’m in L.A. But, really, coming back to the city is an excuse to escape New York and whatever had happened to me there that fall.

The cell vibrates inside my pocket. I glance at it curiously. A text from Julian, a person I haven’t had any contact with in over a year. When do you get back? Are you here? Wanna hang? Almost automatically the landline rings. I move into the kitchen and look at the receiver. PRIVATE NAME. PRIVATE NUMBER. After four rings, whoever is calling hangs up. When I look back outside the mist keeps drifting in over the city, enveloping everything.

I go into my office without turning on the lights. I check e-mails from all of the accounts: reminder of a dinner with the Germans financing a script, another director meeting, my TV agent asking if I’ve finished the Sony pilot yet, a couple of young actors wanting to know what’s happening with The Listeners, a series of invites to various Christmas parties, my trainer at Equinox—having heard from another client that I’m back—wondering if I’d like to book any sessions. I take an Ambien to get to sleep since there’s not enough vodka. When I move to the bedroom window and look down at Elevado, the Jeep is pulling away, its headlights flashing, and it turns onto Doheny, then moves up toward Sunset, and in the closet I find a few things left by a girl who hung around last summer, and suddenly I don’t want to think of where she might be at this moment. I get another text from Laurie: Do you still want me? It’s almost four in the morning in the apartment below Union Square. So many people died last year: the accidental overdose, the car wreck in East Hampton, the surprise illness. People just disappeared. I fall asleep to the music coming from the Abbey, a song from the past, “Hungry Like the Wolf,” rising faintly above the leaping chatter of the club, transporting me for one long moment into someone both young and old. Sadness: it’s everywhere.

The premiere is at the Chinese tonight and it’s a movie that has something to do with confronting evil, a situation set up so obviously that the movie becomes safely vague in a way that will entice the studio to buy awards for it, in fact there’s a campaign already under way, and I’m with the director and the producer of The Listeners and we drift with the rest of the crowd across Hollywood Boulevard to the Roosevelt for the after-party where paparazzi cling to the hotel’s entrance and I immediately grab a drink at the bar while the producer disappears into the bathroom and the director stands next to me talking on the phone to his wife, who’s in Australia. When I scan the darkened room, smiling back at unfamiliar people, the fear returns and soon it’s everywhere and it keeps streaming forward: it’s in the looming success of the film we just watched, it’s in the young actors’ seductive questions about possible roles in The Listeners, and it’s in the texts they send walking away, their faces glowing from the cell light as they cross the cavernous lobby, and it’s in the spray-on tans and the teeth stained white. I’ve been in New York the last four months is the mantra, my mask an expressionless smile. Finally the producer appears from behind a Christmas tree and says, “Let’s get out of here,” then mentions something about a couple of parties up in the hills, and Laurie keeps texting from New York (Hey. You.) and I cannot get it out of my head that someone in this room is following me. Sudden rapid camera flashes are a distraction, but the pale fear returns when I realize whoever was in that blue Jeep last night is probably in the crowd.

We head west on Sunset in the producer’s Porsche and then turn up Doheny to the first of two parties Mark wants to hit, the director following us in a black Jaguar, and we start speeding past the bird streets until we spot a valet. Small decorated firs surround the bar I’m standing at pretending to listen while a grinning actor tells me what he’s got lined up and I’m drunkenly staring at the gorgeous girl he’s with, U2 Christmas songs drowning everything out, and guys in Band of Outsiders suits sit on a low-slung ivory sofa snorting lines off a long glass cocktail table, and when someone offers me a bump I’m tempted but decline knowing where that will lead. The producer, buzzed, needs to hit another party in Bel Air, and I’m drunk enough to let him maneuver me out of this one even though there’s a vague shot of getting laid here. The producer wants to meet someone at the party in Bel Air, it’s business in Bel Air, his presence in Bel Air is supposed to prove something about his status, and my eyes wander over to the boys barely old enough to drive swimming in the heated pool, girls in string bikinis and high heels lounging by the Jacuzzi, anime sculptures everywhere, a mosaic of youth, a place you don’t really belong anymore.

At the house in the upper reaches of Bel Air, the producer loses me and I move from room to room and become momentarily disoriented when I see Trent Burroughs and everything gets complicated while I try and sync myself with the party, and then I soberly realize that this is the house where Trent and Blair live. There’s no recourse except to have another drink. That I’m not driving is the consolation. Trent is standing with a manager and two agents—all of them gay, one engaged to a woman, the other two still in the closet. I know Trent’s sleeping with the junior agent, blond with fake white teeth, so blandly good-looking he’s not even a variation on a type. I realize I have nothing to say to Trent Burroughs as I tell him, “I’ve been in New York the last four months.” New Age Christmas music fails to warm up the chilly vibe. I’m suddenly unsure about everything.

Trent looks at me, nodding, slightly bewildered by my presence. He knows he needs to say something. “So, that’s great about The Listeners. It’s really happening.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

After the nonconversation starts itself we enter into a hazy area about a supposed friend of ours, someone named Kelly.

“Kelly disappeared,” Trent says, straining. “Have you heard anything?”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask, and then, “Wait, what do you mean?”

“Kelly Montrose. He disappeared. No one can find him.”

Pause. “What happened?”

“He went out to Palm Springs,” Trent says. “They think maybe he met someone online.”

Trent seems to want a reaction. I stare back.

“That’s strange,” I murmur disinterestedly. “Or . . . is he prone to things like that?”

Trent looks at me as if something has been confirmed, and then reveals his disgust.

“Prone? No, Clay, he’s not prone to things like that.”

“Trent—”

Walking away from me, Trent says, “He’s probably dead, Clay.”

On the veranda overlooking the massive lit pool bordered by palms wrapped in white Christmas lights, I’m smoking a cigarette, contemplating another text from Julian. I look up from the phone when a shadow steps slowly out of the darkness and it’s such a dramatic moment—her beauty and my subsequent reaction to it—that I have to laugh, and she just stares at me, smiling, maybe buzzed, maybe wasted. This is the girl who would usually make me afraid, but tonight she doesn’t. The look is blond and wholesome, midwestern, distinctly American, not what I’m usually into. She’s obviously an actress because girls who look like this aren’t out here for any other reason, and she just gazes at me like this is all a dare. So I make it one.

“Do you want to be in a movie?” I ask her, swaying.

The girl keeps smiling. “Why? Do you have a movie you want to put me in?”

Then the smile freezes and quickly fades as she glances behind me.

I turn around and squint at the woman heading toward us, backlit by the room she’s leaving.

When I turn back around the girl’s walking away, her silhouette enhanced by the glow of the pool, and from somewhere in the darkness there’s the sound of a fountain splashing, and then the girl is replaced.

“Who was that?” Blair asks.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was invited.”

“No. You weren’t.”

“My friends brought me.”

“Friends? Congratulations.”

“Merry Christmas” again is all I can offer.

“Who was that girl you were talking to?”

I turn around and glance back into the darkness. “I don’t know.”

Blair sighs. “I thought you were in New York.”

“I’m back and forth.”

She just stares at me.

“Yeah.” And then: “You and Trent still happy?”

“Why are you here tonight? Who are you with?”

“I didn’t know this was your place,” I say, looking away. “I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you know these things?”

“Because you haven’t talked to me in two years.”

Another text from Julian tells me to meet him at the Polo Lounge. Not wanting to go back to the condo, I have the producer drop me off at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Outside, on the patio, next to a heat lamp, Julian sits in a booth, his face glowing while he texts someone. He looks up, smiles. As soon as I slide into the booth a waiter appears and I order a Belvedere on the rocks. When I offer Julian a questioning look he taps a bottle of Fiji water I hadn’t noticed before and says, “I’m not drinking.”

I take this in and deliberate slightly. “Because . . . you have to drive?”

“No,” he says. “I’ve been sober for about a year.”

“That’s a little drastic.”

Julian glances at his phone, then back at me.

“And how’s that going?” I ask.

“It’s hard.” He shrugs.

“You more cheerful now?”

“Clay . . .”

“Can we smoke out here?”

The waiter brings the drink.

“How was the premiere?” Julian asks.

“Not a soul in sight.” I sigh, studying the tumbler of vodka.

“So you’re back from New York for how long?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He tries again. “How’s The Listeners coming?” he asks with a sudden interest, trying to move me into the same world.

I gaze at him, then answer cautiously. “It’s coming along. We’re casting.” I wait as long as I can, then I knock back the drink and light a cigarette. “For some reason the producer and director think my input’s important. Valuable. They’re artists.” I take a drag off the cigarette. “It’s basically a joke.”

“I think it’s cool,” Julian says. “It’s all about control, right?” He considers something. “It’s not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you’re also one of the producers—”

I cut him off. “Why have you been tracking this?”

“It’s a big deal and—”

“Julian, it’s a movie,” I say. “Why have you been tracking this? It’s just another movie.”

“Maybe for you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe for others it’s something else,” Julian says. “Something more meaningful.”

“I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a vampire in it.”

Inside, the piano player’s doing jazzy riffs on Christmas carols. I concentrate on that. I’m already locked out of everything. It’s that time of night when I’ve entered the dead zone and I’m not coming out.

“What happened to that girl you were seeing?” he asks.

“Laurie? In New York?”

“No, out here. Last summer.” He pauses. “The actress.”

I try to pause but fail. “Meghan,” I say casually.

“Right.” He draws the word out.

“I really have no idea.” I lift the glass, rattle the ice around.

Julian innocently glances at me, his eyes widening slightly. This makes it clear he has information he wants to give me. I realize that I sat here, in this very same booth, one afternoon with Blair, in a different era, something I wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t seen her tonight.

“Are we lost again, Julian?” I sigh. “Are we gonna play out another scene?”

“Hey, you’ve been gone a long time and—”

“How do you even know about that?” I ask suddenly. “You and I weren’t hanging then.”

“What do you mean?” he asks. “I saw you last summer.”

“How do you know about Meghan Reynolds?”

“Someone told me you were helping her out . . . giving her a break—”

“We were fucking, Julian.”

“She said that you—”

“I don’t care what she said.” I stand up. “Everyone lies.”

“Hey,” he says softly. “It’s just a code.”

“No. Everyone lies.” I stub the cigarette out.

“It’s just another language you have to learn.” Then he delicately adds, “I think you need some coffee, dude.” Pause. “Why are you so angry?”

“I’m out of here, Julian.” I start walking away. “As usual, a total mistake.”

A blue Jeep follows me from the Beverly Hills Hotel to where the cab drops me off in front of the Doheny Plaza.

Something has changed since I was here seven hours ago. I call the doorman while staring at the desk in my office. The computer is on. It wasn’t when I left. I’m staring at the stack of paper next to the computer. When the doorman answers I’m staring at a small knife used to open envelopes that was placed on the stack of paper. It was in a drawer when I headed out to the premiere. I hang the phone up without saying anything. Moving around the condo I ask, “Is anyone here?” I lean over the duvet in the bedroom. I run my hand across it. It smells different. I check the door for the third time. It’s locked. I stare at the Christmas tree longer than I should and then I take the elevator down to the lobby.

The night doorman sits at the front desk in the lushly lit lobby. I walk toward him, unsure of what to say. He looks up from a small TV.

“Did someone come by my place?” I ask. “Tonight? While I was out?”

The doorman checks the log. “No. Why?”

“I think there was someone in my place.”

“What do you mean?” the doorman asks. “I don’t understand.”

“I think someone was in my condo while I was out.”

“I’ve been here all night,” the doorman says. “No one came by.”

I just stand there. The sound of a helicopter roars over the building.

“Anyway, they couldn’t get in the elevator without me opening it for them,” the doorman says. “Plus Bobby’s outside.” He motions to the security guard slowly pacing the driveway. “Are you sure someone was in there?” He sounds amused. He notices I’m drunk. “Maybe it was no one,” he says.

Pare it down, I warn myself. Put it away. Just pare everything down. Or else the bells will start chiming. “Things were rearranged,” I murmur. “My computer was on . . .”

“Is anything missing?” the doorman asks, now openly humoring me. “You want me to call the police?”

In a neutral voice: “No.” And then I say it again. “No.”

“It’s been a quiet night.”

“Well . . .” I’m backing away. “That’s good.”

An actress I met at the casting sessions this morning is having lunch with me at Comme Ça. When she walked into the room at the casting director’s complex in Culver City she instantly provided a steady hum of menace that left me dazed, which acted as a mask so I appeared as calm as a cipher. I haven’t heard of her agent or the management company that reps her—she came in as someone’s favor—and I’m thinking how different things would be if I had. Certain tensions melt away but they’re always replaced with new ones. She’s drinking a glass of champagne and I still have my sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and talking vaguely about her life. She lives in Elysian Park. She’s a hostess at the Formosa Café. I twist in my chair while she answers a text. She notices this and then offers an apology. It’s not coy, exactly, but it’s premeditated. Like everything else she does it wants a reaction.

“So what are you doing for Christmas?” I ask her.

“Seeing my family.”

“Will that be fun?”

“It depends.” She looks at me quizzically. “Why?”

I shrug. “I’m just interested.”

She touches her hair again: blond, blown out. A napkin becomes faintly stained after she wipes her lips with it. I mention the parties I went to last night. The actress is impressed, especially by the one I went to first. She says she had friends who were at that party. She says she wanted to go but she had to work. She wants me to confirm if a certain young actor was there. When I say he was, the expression on her face makes me realize something. She notices.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “He’s an idiot.”

Some people at that party, she adds, are freaks, then mentions a drug I’ve never heard of, and tells me a story that involves ski masks, zombies, a van, chains, a secret community, and asks me about a Hispanic girl who disappeared in some desert. She drops the name of an actress I’ve never heard of. I’m trying to stay focused, trying to stay in the moment, not wanting to lose the romance of it all. Concealed, a movie I wrote, is brought up. And then I get the connection: she asked about the young actor with the gorgeous girl I was gazing at because he had a small role in Concealed.

“I don’t really want to know.” I’m staring at the traffic on Melrose. “I didn’t stay long. I had another party to go to.” And suddenly I remember the blond girl walking out of the shadows in Bel Air. I’m surprised she has stayed with me, and that her image has lingered for so long.

“How do you think it went?” she asks.

“I thought you were great,” I say. “I told you that.”

She laughs, pleased. She could be twenty. She could be thirty. You can’t tell. And if you could, everything would be over. Destiny. “Destiny” is the word I’m thinking about. The actress murmurs a line from The Listeners. I made sure the director and producer had no interest in her for the role she auditioned for before asking her out. This is the only reason she’s with me at lunch and I’ve been here so many times and I realize there’s another premiere tonight and that I’m meeting the producer in Westwood at six. I check my watch. I’ve kept the afternoon open. The actress drains the glass of champagne. An attentive and handsome waiter fills it up again. I’ve had nothing to drink because something else in the lunch is working for me. She needs to take this to the next level if anything’s ever going to pan out for her.

“Are you happy?” she asks.

Startled, I say, “Yeah. Are you?”

She leans in. “I could be.”

“What do you want to do?” I look at her straight on.

We spend an hour in the bedroom in the condo on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza. That’s all it requires. Afterward she says she feels disconnected from reality. I tell her it doesn’t matter. I’m blushing when she tells me how nice my hands are.

The premiere is at the Village and the after-party, elaborate and fanciful, is at the W Hotel. (It was supposed to be at the Napa Valley Grille—because of overcrowding was moved to this less accessible but larger venue.) Forced to watch people pretend to yell and cry for two and a half hours can push you to a dark distance that takes a day to come back from, yet I found the movie well made and coherent (which is always a miracle) even though I often had to think awful thoughts in order to stay awake. I’m standing by the pool talking to a young actress about fasting and her yoga routine and how superstoked she is to be in a movie about human sacrifices, and the initial shyness—apparent in large, soft eyes—is encouraging. But then you say the wrong thing and those eyes reveal an innate distrust mixed with a lingering curiosity that everyone shares out here and she drifts off, and looking up at the hotel, encased in the crowd, clutching my phone, I start counting how many rooms are lit and how many aren’t and then realize I’ve had sex with five different people in this hotel, one of them now dead. I take a piece of sushi from a passing tray. “Well, you did it,” I tell the executive who allowed this movie to be made. Daniel Carter, who I’ve known since we were freshmen at Camden, is the director, but our friendship is worn out and he’s been avoiding me. And tonight I see why: he’s with Meghan Reynolds, so I can’t offer the faked congratulations I prepared. Daniel sold his first script when he was twenty-two and has had no problems with his career since then.

“She’s dressed like a teenager,” Blair says. “I guess that’s because she is one.”

I glance over at Blair, then look back across the crowd at Meghan and Daniel.

“I’m not going there with you now.”

“We all make choices, right?”

“Your husband hates me.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“There was a girl at your house, at the party . . .” The need to ask about this is so physical I can’t put a halt to it. I turn to Blair. “Never mind.”

“I heard you had drinks with Julian last night,” Blair says. She’s staring at the pool, the title of the movie shimmering on the bottom in giant cursive lettering.

“You heard?” I light a cigarette. “How did you hear this unless Julian told you?”

Blair doesn’t say anything.

“So you’re still in touch with Julian?” I ask. “Why?” I pause. “Does Trent know?” Another pause. “Or is that just a . . . detail?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That I’m surprised you’re actually talking to me.”

“I just wanted to warn you about him. That’s all.”

“Warn me? About what?” I ask. “I’ve been through the whole Julian thing before. I think I can handle it.”

“It’s not a big hassle,” she says. “If you can just do me a favor and not talk to him if he tries to make contact it would make everything a lot easier.” And then for emphasis she adds, “I’d appreciate it.”

“What’s Julian doing these days? There was a rumor he was actually running a teenage hooker service.” I pause. “It sounded like old times.”

“Look, if you can just do this one thing I’d really appreciate it.”

“Is this real? Or is this just an excuse to talk to me again?”

“You could have called. You could have . . .” Her voice trails off.

“I tried,” I say. “But you were angry.”

“Not angry,” she says. “Just . . . disappointed.” She pauses. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

For a few seconds we’re both silent and it’s a cold and minor variation on so many conversations we’ve had and I’m thinking about the blond girl on the veranda and I imagine Blair’s thinking about the last time I made love to her. This disparity should scar me but doesn’t. And then Blair’s talking to a guy from CAA and a band begins playing, which I take as my cue to leave, but really it’s the text I suddenly get that says I’m watching you that pushes me out of the party.

At the valet in front of the hotel, Rip Millar grabs my arm as I’m texting Who is this? and I have to yank my arm away since I’m so alarmed by his appearance. I don’t recognize Rip at first. His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks like he’s been quickly dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque. He’s on drugs, I’m thinking. He has to be on drugs to look like this. Rip’s with a girl so young I mistake her for his daughter but then I remember Rip doesn’t have any children. The girl has had so much work done that she looks deformed. Rip had been handsome once and his voice is the same whisper it was when we were nineteen.

“Hey, Clay,” Rip says. “Why are you back in town?”

“Because I live here,” I say.

Rip’s visage calmly scrutinizes me. “I thought you spent most of your time in New York.”

“I mean I’m back and forth.”

“I heard you met a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Yeah,” he says with a dreadful grin, his mouth filled with teeth that are too white. “I heard you really hit it off.”

I just want to leave. The fear is swarming. The black BMW suddenly materializes. A valet holds the door open. The horrible face forces me to glance anywhere but at him. “Rip, I’ve gotta go.” I gesture helplessly at my car.

“Let’s have dinner while you’re back,” Rip says. “I’m serious.”

“Okay, but I really have to go now.”

“Descansado,” he tells me.

“What does that mean?”

“Descansado,” Rip says. “It means ‘take it easy,’ ” he whispers, clutching the child next to him.

“Yeah?”

“It means relax.”

It happens again. While waiting for the girl to come over I’m reaching into the refrigerator for a bottle of white wine when I notice that a Diet Coke’s missing and that cartons and jars have been rearranged and I’m telling myself this isn’t possible, and after looking around the condo for other clues maybe it isn’t. It’s not until I’m staring at the Christmas tree that I finally hear the bones tapping against the windowpane: one strand of lights not connected to the other strands has been unplugged leaving a jagged black streak within the lit tree. This is the detail that announces: you’ve been warned. This is the detail that says: they want you to know. I drink a glass of vodka, and then I drink another. Who is this? I text. A minute later I receive an answer from a blocked number that annihilates whatever peace the alcohol brought on. I promised someone I wouldn’t tell you.

I’m walking through the Grove to have lunch with Julian, who texts me that he’s at a table next to the Pinkberry in the Farmers Market. I thought you said I was a total mistake, he typed back when I e-mailed him earlier. Maybe you are but I still want to see you was my reply. I keep ignoring the feeling of being followed. I keep ignoring the texts from the blocked number telling me I’m watching you. I tell myself the texts are coming from the dead boy whose condo I bought. It’s easier that way. This morning the girl I called over when I got home from the W Hotel was asleep in the bedroom. I woke her up and told her she had to get out because the maid was coming. At the casting sessions it was all boys and though I wasn’t exactly bored I didn’t need to be there, and songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield’s frame (. . . one time you were blowing young ruffians . . . sung over the digital billboard on Sunset advertising the new Pixar movie) and the fear builds into a muted fury and then has no choice but to melt away into a simple and addictive sadness. Daniel’s arm around Meghan Reynolds’s waist sometimes blocks the view at traffic lights. And then it’s the blond girl on the veranda. It’s almost always her image now that deflects everything.

You knew that Meghan Reynolds was with Daniel,” I say. “I saw them last night. You knew I’d been with her over the summer. You also knew she’s with Daniel now.”

“Everyone knows,” Julian says, confused. “So what?”

“I didn’t,” I say. “Everyone? What does that mean?”

“It means I guess you weren’t paying attention.”

I move the conversation to the reason I’m here in the Farmers Market with him. I ask him a question about Blair. There’s a longish pause. Julian’s usual affability gets washed away with that question.

“We were involved, I guess,” he finally says.

“You and Blair?”

“Yeah.”

“She doesn’t want you to talk to me,” I say. “She warned me, in fact, not to.”

“Blair asked you not to speak to me? She warned you?” He sighs. “She must really be hurt.”

“Why is she so hurt?”

“Didn’t she tell you why?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “I didn’t ask.”

Julian gives me a quick glance tinged with worry, and then it’s gone. “Because I started seeing someone else and it was hard for her when I broke it off.”

“Who was the girl?”

“She’s an actress. She works in this lounge on La Cienega.”

“Did Trent know?”

“He doesn’t care,” Julian says. “Why are you asking that?”

“Because he cared when it was me,” I say. “He still hasn’t cooled off. I mean, I don’t know why.” I pause. “Trent has his own . . . proclivities.”

“I think that was something else.”

“What’s . . . something else?”

“That Blair still likes you.”

When Julian speaks again his voice becomes more urgent. “Look, they have a family. They have children. They’ve made it work. I should have never gone there but . . . I never thought I would hurt her.” He stops. “I mean, you’re the one who always hurt her the most.” He pauses before adding, “You’re the one who always did.”

“Yeah,” I say. “This time she didn’t talk to me for almost two years.”

“My situation was more . . . I don’t know, typical. Something you’d expect,” Julian says. “The girl I met was a lot younger and . . .” This seems to remind Julian of something. “How did the casting sessions go this morning?”

“How did you know there were casting sessions this morning?”

Julian mentions a friend of his who had auditioned.

“Why do you know twenty-one-year-old actors?” I ask.

“Because I live here,” he says. “And he’s not twenty-one.”

We’re standing next to Julian’s Audi in the parking lot off of Fairfax. I’m going back to Culver City when he vaguely mentions a meeting, and I realize I haven’t asked him anything about his life, but then I don’t really care one way or another. I’m about to leave when suddenly I ask him, “What the fuck happened to Rip Millar?”

At the mention of the name Julian’s face becomes too calm.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Why are you asking me?”

“Because he looks freakish,” I say. “I actually got scared.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s a horror movie,” I say. “I thought he was going to start drooling.”

“I heard he inherited a lot of money. His grandparents.” Julian pauses. “Real estate investments. He’s opening a club in Hollywood . . .” An annoyance I never detected in Julian announces itself. And then Julian casually tells me a story he heard about this secret cult that encouraged members to starve themselves to death—some kind of torture kick, a how far can you take it? kind of thing—and that Rip Millar was somehow indirectly connected to them.

“Rip said something about how I’d met a friend of his,” I murmur.

“Did he say a name?”

“I didn’t ask,” I say. “I didn’t want to know who it was.”

I notice Julian’s hand trembling as he runs it lightly over his hair.

“Hey, don’t tell Blair we met, okay?” I finally say.

Julian looks at me strangely. “I don’t talk to Blair anymore.”

I sigh. “Julian, she told me she heard that you and I were at the Polo Lounge the other night.”

Julian’s expression is so completely innocent that I believe him when he says, “I haven’t talked to Blair since June.” Julian is totally relaxed. His eyes don’t waver. “I haven’t had any contact with her for over six months, Clay.” He reacts to the expression on my face. “I didn’t tell her we were at the Polo Lounge the other night.”

On a break and I’m listening to a message Laurie left on my cell phone (“If you’re not speaking to me at least tell me why . . .”), then I delete it midway. The rooms of the casting complex surround a pool, and the rooms are filled with the boys and girls auditioning for the three remaining roles. Sudden interest from a rising young actor whose most recent movie “caused a stir in Toronto” has taken one of the available roles off the table, the part of Kevin Spacey’s son. Only one boy out of the dozens seen yesterday has met the team’s approval for the other male role. Jon, the director, keeps complaining about the girls. Since The Listeners is set in the mid-eighties, he’s having problems with their bodies. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he says. “These girls are disappearing.”

“What do you mean?” the producer asks.

“Too thin. The fake tits don’t help.”

Jason, the casting director, says, “Well, they do help. But I get it.”

“I have no idea what you’re complaining about,” the producer deadpans.

“It all seems so unwholesome,” the director says. “And it’s not period, Mark.”

Talk turns to the actress who passed out while walking to her car after her audition yesterday—stress, malnutrition—and then to the young actor under consideration for Jeff Bridges’s son. “What about Clifton?” the director says. Jason tries to move the director’s focus to other actors, but the director keeps insisting.

Clifton is the one I lobbied hard for to be in Concealed, the one I took back to Doheny when I found out he was dating an actress I’d been interested in and who showed no interest in me since there was nothing I could offer her. It was made clear what Clifton needed to do if he wanted me to lobby for him. The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. “I’m not looking for a dude,” the actor said. “And even if I was, you’re not him.” In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn’t comply I would try to make sure he wouldn’t get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, “Let’s roll.” I couldn’t tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night. The BlackBerry on the nightstand that kept flashing, the fake tan and the waxed asshole, the dealer in the Valley who never showed up, the drunken complaints about the Jaguar that had to be sold—the details were so common that it could have been anyone. The same actor came in this morning and smiled briefly at me, did a shaky reading, then improved slightly on the second reading. Whenever I saw him at a party or a restaurant he would casually avoid me, even when I offered my condolences about his girlfriend, that young actress I had wanted, who overdosed on her meds. Since she had a small role in a hit TV show her death was recognized.

“He’s twenty-four,” Jason complains.

“But he’s still really cute.” The director mentions the whispers about Clifton’s sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton’s denial in a Rolling Stone cover story about the very famous actor’s new movie which Clifton had a small part in: “We’re so into girls it’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve never gotten the gay vibe,” the director says. “He butches it up, I guess.”

And then we refocus on the girls.

“Who are we seeing next?”

“Rain Turner,” someone says.

Curious, I look up from Laurie’s messages that I keep deleting and reach for a headshot. Just as I lift it off the table the girl from the veranda at Trent and Blair’s house in Bel Air walks in and I have to pretend I’m not trapped. The blue eyes are complementing a light blue V-neck and a navy-blue miniskirt, something a girl would have worn in 1985 when the movie takes place. Immediately introductions are made and the audition happens—bad, strident, one-note, every other line needs to be reread to her by the director—but something else starts happening. Her stare is a gaze, and my gaze back is the beginning of it, and I imagine the future: Why do you hate me? I imagine a girl’s anguished voice. What did I ever do to you? I imagine someone else screaming.

During the audition I look at Rain Turner’s IMDb page on my laptop. She reads for another role and I realize with a panic that she’ll never get a callback. She’s simply another girl who has gotten by on her looks—her currency in this world—and it will not be fun to watch her grow old. These simple facts I know so well still make everything seem freshly complicated to me. Suddenly I get a text—Quien es?—and it takes me a while to realize it’s from the girl I was flirting with in the Admiral’s Club at JFK the afternoon I flew out here. When I look up again I also realize I’ve never noticed the white Christmas tree standing by the pool or that the Christmas tree is framed within the window next to the wall with the poster for Sunset Boulevard on it.

I’m walking Rain to her car outside the offices on Washington Boulevard.

“So, is this the movie you wanted to put me in?” she asks.

“It could be,” I say. “I didn’t think you recognized me.”

“Of course I recognized you.”

“I’m flattered.” I pause, and then go for it: “Why didn’t you introduce yourself to the producer instead? He was at the party.”

She smiles as if amazed, then raises an arm to hit me. I back off playfully.

“Are you usually this brazen before cocktail hour?” she asks. “Jeez.” She’s charming but there’s something rehearsed about the charm, something brittle. The amazed smile seems innocent only because something else is always lurking along its borders.

“Or maybe you should have introduced yourself to the director?” I joke.

She laughs. “The director has a wife.”

“His wife lives in Australia.”

“I heard he doesn’t like girls,” she stage-whispers.

“So I’m that rare thing?” I say.

“What’s that?” she asks, trying to hide a brief moment of confusion.

“The respected screenwriter?” I suggest, half ironic.

“You’re also a producer on this movie.”

“That’s right, I am,” I say. “Which part do you want more?”

“Martina,” Rain says, immediately focused. “I think I’m better for that, right?”

By the time we get to her car I find out that she lives in an apartment on Orange Grove, off of Fountain, and that she has a roommate, which will make everything much easier. The transparency of the deal: she’s good at handling it, and I admire that. Everything she says is an ocean of signals. Listening to her I realize that she’s a lot of girls, but which one is talking to me? Which one will be driving back to the apartment on Orange Grove in the green BMW with the vanity plate that reads PLENTY? Which one would be coming to the bedroom in the Doheny Plaza? We exchange numbers. She puts her sunglasses on.

“So, what do you think my chances are?” she asks.

I say, “I think you’re going to be a lot of fun.”

“How can you tell that I’m going to be a lot of fun?” she asks. “Some people can’t handle me.”

“Why don’t you let me see for myself,” I say.

“How do I know you’re not crazy?” she asks. “How do I know you’re not the craziest dude I’ve ever met?”

“You’ll have to test me out.”

“You have my info,” she says. “I’ll think about it.”

“Rain,” I say. “That’s not your real name.”

“Does it matter?”

“Well, it makes me wonder what else isn’t real.”

“That’s because you’re a writer,” she says. “That’s because you make things up for a living.”

“And?”

“And”—she shrugs—“I’ve noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that.”

“About what?”

She gets into the car. “Things like that.”

Dr. Woolf has an office in a nondescript building on Sawtelle. He’s my age and deals primarily with actors and screenwriters, the three-hundred-dollar sessions partly covered by Writers Guild health insurance. I was referred last summer by an actor whose stalled career hastened a relapse, and this was in July after the breakdown over Meghan Reynolds entered its most intense stage, and during the first session Dr. Woolf stopped me when I started reading aloud the e-mails from Meghan that I saved on my iPhone, and we proceeded into the Reversal of Desire exercise—I want pain, I love pain, pain brings freedom—and one afternoon in August I left midsession in a rage and drove up to Santa Monica Boulevard where I parked in an empty lot and watched a new print of Contempt at the Nuart, slouched in the front row slowly crushing a box of candy, and when I came out of the theater I stared at a digital billboard overlooking the parking lot, its image: an unmade bed, the sheets rumpled, a naked body half lit in a darkened room, white Helvetica lettering curved against the color of flesh.

The nude pics Rain sends me later that afternoon (they come so much sooner than I expected) are either artistic and boring (sepia-toned, shadowy, posed) or sleazy and arousing (on someone’s balcony, legs spread, holding a cell phone in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other; standing next to a blue-sheeted mattress in an anonymous bedroom, fingers splayed against her lower abdomen), but every one of them is an invitation, every one of them plays on the idea that exposure can ensure fame. At the cocktail party in a suite at the Chateau Marmont—where we needed to sign confidentiality agreements in order to attend—no one says anything nearly as interesting as what Rain’s pictures promise. The pictures offer a tension, an otherness, that’s lacking in the suite overlooking Sunset. It’s the same dialogue (“What’s happening with The Listeners?” “You’ve been in New York the last four months?” “Why are you so thin?”) spoken by the same actors (Pierce, Kim, Alana) and the rooms might as well be empty and my answers to the questions (“Yeah, everyone has been warned about the nudity.” “I’m tired of New York.” “Different trainer, yoga.”) might as well have been made up of distant avian sounds. This is the last party before everyone goes out of town and I’m hearing about the usual spots in Hawaii, Aspen, Palm Springs, various private islands, and the party’s being thrown by a British actor staying at the hotel who had played the villain in a comic-book movie I adapted. “Werewolves of London” keeps blaring, a video of a ceremony at the Kodak Theatre keeps replaying itself on TV screens. A horrible story has moved rapidly through town involving a young Hispanic actress whose body was somehow found in a mass grave across the border, and for some reason this is connected to a drug cartel in Tijuana. Mangled bodies were strewn through the pit. Tongues were cut out. And the story gets more outlandish as it keeps being retold: there’s now a barrel of industrial acid containing liquefied human remains. A body is now dumped in front of an elementary school as a warning, a taunting message. I keep checking Rain’s pics that were sent through earthlink.net from allamericangirlUSA (subject heading: hey crazy, let’s get cracking) when I’m interrupted by a text from a blocked number.

I’m watching you.

I text back: Is this the same person?

I’m staring at a wall, at one of Cindy Sherman’s untitled film stills, when I feel the phone vibrate in my hand and the question is answered.

No, this is someone different.

A group of guys booked a table at a new lounge on La Cienega and I allow myself to be invited as I’m waiting for a cab and they’re waiting for their cars in front of Bar Marmont and I’m staring up at the parapets of the Chateau and thinking about the year I lived there, after I left the El Royale and before I moved into the Doheny Plaza—the AA meetings on Robertson and Melrose, the twenty-dollar margaritas from room service, the teenager I fucked on the couch in #44—when I see Rip Millar pull up in a convertible Porsche. I hide back in the shadows as Rip shambles toward the hotel clutching a girl in a baby-doll dress by the wrist, and one of the guys calls out something to him and Rip turns his head and makes a sound that passes for laughter and then says in a singsong voice, “Enjoy yourselves.” I started with champagne tonight so the lucidity hasn’t worn off and the dead zone isn’t bleeding forward yet and I’m in someone’s Aston Martin and he’s bragging about a whore he keeps in his Abbot Kinney condo just east of the Venice canals and another one in a suite at the Huntley. I murmur the hotel’s ad line (“Sea and be seen”) as we’re passing the limousines and gangs of paparazzi outside of Koi and STK, and standing at the curb in front of Reveal I’m staring at the cypress trees looming against the night sky until the two other guys from the party at the Chateau pull up to the valet and I don’t really know anyone so everything is comfortable—Wayne’s a producer with a deal at Lionsgate that’s going nowhere and Kit is an entertainment lawyer at a firm in Beverly Hills. Banks, who drove me, is a creator of reality shows. When I ask Banks why he chose this place, Reveal, he says, “Rip Millar recommended it to me. Rip got us in.”

Inside, the place is packed, vaguely Peruvian, voices bouncing off the high ceiling, the amplified sounds of a waterfall splashing somewhere compete with the Beck song booming throughout the lounge. As the owner leads us to our table, two paper-thin girls stop me at the entrance to the dining room and remind me about a night at the Mercer in New York last October. I didn’t sleep with either one of them—we were just doing coke and watching The Hills—but the guys become enticed. Someone mentions Meghan Reynolds and I tense up.

“It’s interesting how much play you get out of this,” Kit says, once we’re seated at a table in the center of the room. “Isn’t it exhausting?”

“That’s a question that contains a lot of other questions,” I say.

“Have you ever heard the joke about the Polish actress?” Banks asks. “She came to Hollywood and fucked the writer.” He pauses, glances at me. “I guess it’s not so funny.”

“Be in my screenplay and I’ll make you a star,” Kit says in a baby voice.

“Clay obviously doesn’t underestimate the desperation factor in this town,” Wayne says.

“In a place where there’s so much bitterness,” Banks says with a light touch, “anything is possible, right?”

“Possible? Hey, I just think it’s kind of unbelievable.” Kit shrugs.

“I think Clay is very pragmatic,” Banks says. “What’s unbelievable is clinging to a fading belief in love, Kit.” He pauses. “But that’s just me.”

“I mean, you’re a nice-looking guy for your age,” Kit says to me, “but you don’t really have the clout.”

Banks considers this. “I guess people find this out sooner or later, right?”

“Yeah, but they’re always replaced, Banks,” Wayne says. “On a daily basis there’s a whole new army of the retarded eager to be defiled.”

“You guys don’t need to remind me that I’m not really a player . . . but I can be useful, I guess.” I’m sighing, staying loose. “Just always make sure you have some kind of producer credit. Stay friendly with the director. Get to know casting agents. It all helps the cause.” I pause for effect before adding, “I’m very patient.”

“It’s a plan,” Kit says. “It’s very, um, subtle.”

“It’s a philosophy,” someone else says.

“It’s just how I roll.”

Wayne looks up, taking note of my uninflected voice.

“I guess it kind of makes sense. You’ve been involved in some high-profile hits,” Wayne mutters, “for what it’s worth.”

Kit leans forward. “It’s just not a very good way to make friends.”

Banks closes his menu when the owner leans down and whispers something to him. Josh Hartnett, who was going to play one of the sons in The Listeners and then bailed, walks over and crouches by the bamboo chair and we have a brief exchange about another script of mine that he’s been circling, but his apologetic lack of commitment only makes me seem more remote than I’m actually feeling. Though I know that what he’s saying isn’t true I smile and agree anyway. Austere plates of raw fish start arriving, along with ice-cold bottles of premium sake, and then the guys make fun of a very successful shark movie I wrote, and the series about witches I created that ran for two seasons on Showtime, then Wayne starts telling a story about an actress who stalked him until he cast her in a movie about a monster that looked like a talking beanbag. Just as the owner sends the table a complimentary dessert—an elaborate plate of sugared doughnuts drizzled with caramel—the night begins sliding into its last act. I’m scanning the room when I see the cascade of blond hair, the wide-open pale blue eyes, the dumb smile that offsets her beauty while at the same time making it more pronounced: she’s on the phone at the hostess stand. And then I realize it’s time to cross the line.

I knew you were here,” Rain says.

“Why didn’t you say something?” I ask, sobering up immediately in her presence. “You could have sent over a few cocktails.”

“I assumed you guys were already wasted when you came in.”

“Why didn’t you say hello?”

“I was seating a table,” she says. “Plus the owner likes to impress Banks.”

“So, this is where you work?”

“Yes,” she purrs. “Glamorous, isn’t it?”

“You seem happy.”

“I am,” she says. “I’m almost afraid of how happy I am.”

“Come on, don’t be afraid.”

She mimics a little girl. “Well, I could always be happier.”

“Well,” I say contemplatively. “I got your pics.”

When I get back to the Doheny Plaza, waiting for Rain to come over after she finishes her shift, I sit in my office checking Rain’s IMDb page again, studying it for clues. There are no credits for the last two years, stopping abruptly after “Christine” in a Michael Bay movie and “Stacy’s Friend” in an episode of CSI: Miami and then I’m filling in the missing pieces, the things she doesn’t want anyone to know. The credits begin when Rain must have been eighteen. I’m doing the math by guessing—the date of birth has been shaved by at least a couple years and I’m putting her age at probably twenty-two or twenty-three. She was at the University of Michigan (cheerleader for the Wolverines, “studying medicine”) but no dates are given (if she attended at all) so it’s hard to confirm exactly how old she is. Though Rain would say it doesn’t matter. Rain would argue that just the idea of her in a cheerleader’s uniform is enough. But the fact that there are no photos of her as a cheerleader causes more whispers in that darkly lit hallway, and the addition of “studying medicine” makes the whispering even louder.

The most recent information: Rain posted a month ago that she was listed as one of L.A. Confidential’s most eligible singles in the December issue, and so is—I notice unsurprisingly enough when I pull up the magazine online—Amanda Flew, the actress I hit on at JFK and who texted me during Rain’s audition. The photo of Rain in L.A. Confidential is the same headshot that obviously is Rain’s preferred image of herself: staring blankly at the camera so that her perfect features can speak for themselves, but there’s the beginning of a slight grin she almost manages to make suggestive of an intelligence that the cleavage and her career choice otherwise argue against. And it doesn’t matter if any intelligence actually exists because it’s really about the look, the idea of a girl like this, the promise of sex. It’s all about the lure. The MySpace page reveals nothing to me at first except that her favorite band is the Fray. “How to Save a Life” plays when you open the page. I’m about to scan it when I get a text from a blocked number.

I look down at the phone on my desk.

The screen says: I’m watching you.

Instead of ignoring it and turning away, I text back: Where am I?

Within the time it takes another text to arrive I’ve already walked to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of vodka. When I reach for the phone back in my office I freeze.

You’re at home.

I hold the phone away from my face and glance out the window.

And then I text back: No I’m not.

It takes a minute before the phone flashes a glow that tells me I have a response.

I can see you, the text reads. U r standing in your office.

I glance out the window again and am surprised when I find myself backing into a wall. The condo suddenly seems so empty but it isn’t—there are voices in it, and they linger like they always do—and I turn off the lights and slowly move to the balcony, and beneath the wavering fronds of a palm tree, the blue Jeep is parked on the corner of Elevado, and then I turn the lights back on and move to the front door and open it and stare down the empty Art Deco hallway, and then I’m walking toward the elevators.

I pass the night doorman and push the lobby doors open and then I’m walking quickly past the security guard and then I stumble into a jog toward Elevado and just as I turn the corner the Jeep’s headlights flash their high beams, immediately blinding me. The Jeep peels away from the curb and it causes a van coming up Doheny to swerve as the Jeep makes a right and lurches toward Sunset and when I look up I’m standing exactly where the Jeep was parked and can see the lights of my condo through the branches of the trees, and except for the occasional car cruising by, it’s dark and soundless on Elevado. I keep my eyes on the windows of my empty office as I walk back to the Doheny Plaza fifteen stories up, a place I was standing in just moments ago, being watched by whoever was in the blue Jeep, and I realize I’m panting as I walk past the security guard, and I slow down, trying to catch my breath, and smile at him, but as I’m about to head inside a green BMW pulls up.

I love the view,” Rain says, holding a tumbler of tequila, standing on the balcony overlooking the city. I’m staring past her down at the empty space on Elevado where the Jeep was parked and it’s three in the morning and I come up behind her and down below the wind gently drapes palm fronds over the rippling water of the Doheny Plaza’s lit pool and the only light in the condo comes from the Christmas tree in the corner and Counting Crows’ “A Long December” plays softly in the background.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I ask. “Someone . . . more age-appropriate than me?”

“Guys my age are idiots,” she says, turning around. “Guys my age are awful.”

“I have news for you,” I say, leaning into her. “So are guys my age.”

“But you look good for your age,” she says, stroking my face. “You look ten years younger,” she says. “You’ve had work done, right?” Her fingers keep combing the hair that had been dyed the week before. Her other hand runs along the sleeve of the T-shirt with the skateboard logo on it. In the bedroom she lets me go down on her and after I make her come she lets me slide in.

During the last week of December if we aren’t in bed we’re at the movies or watching screeners and Rain simply nods when I tell her everything that’s wrong with the movie we’ve just seen and she doesn’t argue back. “I liked it,” she will say, putting a light touch on everything, her upper lip always provocatively lifted, her eyes always drained of intent, programmed not to be challenging or negative. This is someone trying to stay young because she knows that what matters most to you is the youthful surface. This is supposed to be part of the appeal: keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can’t be held together forever—take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance. The surface Rain presents is really all she’s about, and since so many girls look like Rain another part of the appeal is watching her try to figure out why I’ve become so interested in her and not someone else.

“Am I the only one you’re interested in?” she asks. “I mean right now, for the part?”

“Why?” And then a teasing smile. “Why me?”

This question and my subsequent nonanswer leave her wanting to impart information that, in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza, has no reason to even exist. You ignore why she left Lansing at seventeen and the casual hints of an abusive uncle (a made-for-sympathy move that threatens to erase the carnality) and why she dropped out of the University of Michigan (I don’t ask whether she’d ever enrolled) and what led to the side trips to New York and Miami before she landed in L.A. and you don’t ask what she must have done with the photographer who discovered her when she was waitressing at the café on Melrose or about the career modeling lingerie that probably seemed promising at nineteen and that led to the commercials that led to a couple of tiny roles in films and definitely not putting all her hopes into the third part of a horror franchise that panned into nothing and then it was the quick slide into the bit parts on TV shows you’ve never heard of, the pilot shot but never aired, and covering everything else is the distant humiliation of bartending gigs and the favors that got her the hostess job at Reveal. Decoding everything, you piece together the agent who ignores her. You begin to understand through her muted complaints that the management company no longer cares. Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I’ve done it before.

We sit in my office naked, buzzed on champagne, while she shows me pics from a Calvin Klein show, audition tapes a friend shot, a modeling portfolio, paparazzi photos of her at B-list events—the opening of a shoe store on Canon, a charity benefit at someone’s home in Brentwood, standing with a group of girls at the Playboy Mansion at the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party—and then always it seems we’re back in the bedroom.

“What do you want for Christmas?” she asks.

“This. You.” I smile. “What do you want?”

“I want a part in your movie,” she says. “You know that.”

“Yeah?” I ask, my hand tracing her thigh. “My movie? Which part?”

“I want the part of Martina.” She kisses me, her hand moving down to my cock, gripping it, releasing it, gripping it again.

“And I’m going to try and get it for you.”

The pause is involuntary but she recovers in a second. “Try?”

If we aren’t in bed or watching movies we’re at the Bristol Farms down the street buying champagne or at the Apple store in the Westfield Mall in Century City because she needs a new computer and also wants an iPhone (“It’s Christmas,” she purrs as if it matters) and I’ll hand the BMW over to the valet at the mall and notice the looks from the guys taking the car, and the stares from so many other men roaming the mall, and she notices them too and walks quickly, pulling me along, while talking mindlessly to no one on her cell phone, a self-protective gesture, a way to combat the stares by not acknowledging them. These stares are always the grim reminders of a pretty girl’s life in this town, and though I’ve been with other beautiful women, the neurosis about their looks had already hardened into a kind of bitter acceptance that Rain doesn’t seem to share. One of the last afternoons together that December, we’re heading to the Apple store drunk on champagne, Rain nestling into me, wearing Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses as we walk beneath the overcast sky looming above the towers of Century City, the chiming bells of Christmas carols everywhere, and she’s happy because we’d just watched her reel, which includes the two scenes she was in from a Jim Carrey movie, a drama that tanked. (After squinting hard at the screen, I enthusiastically complimented her and then asked why she hadn’t listed the movie on her résumé, and she admitted the scenes were cut.) She’s still asking me if I’m telling the truth about her scenes as we move toward the Apple store and I assure her that I am instead of admitting how dismaying the performance actually was. There was no way those scenes should have been kept in the movie—the decision to remove them was the correct one. (I have to stop myself from wondering how she got the part, because that would be entering a maze with no escape.) What keeps me interested—and it always does—is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality? This is where the suspense of it all usually lies. And later, for the first time since Meghan Reynolds, I think hopefully—lying in bed, lifting a glass filled with champagne to my lips, her face hovering above mine—that maybe she isn’t acting with me.

We’re shopping at the Bristol Farms on Doheny for another case of champagne in the last week of December when I lose her in one of the aisles and I become dazed when I realize that the market used to be Chasen’s, the restaurant I came to with my parents on various Christmas Eves, when I was a teenager, and I try to reconfigure the restaurant’s layout while standing in the produce section, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” playing throughout the store, and when nothing comes it’s a sad relief. And then I notice Rain’s gone and I’m moving through the aisles and I’m thinking about pictures of her naked on a yacht, my hand between her legs, my tongue on her cunt while she comes and then I find her outside, leaning against my BMW talking to a handsome guy I don’t recognize, his arm in a sling, and he walks away as I wheel my cart toward them and when I ask her who he was she smiles reassuringly and says “Graham” and then “No one” and then “He’s a magician.” I kiss her on the mouth. She looks nervously around. I watch her reflection in the window of the BMW. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Not here,” she says, but as if “not here” is a promise of somewhere better. The deserted parking lot is suddenly freezing, the icy air so cold it shimmers.

During that week we spend together things aren’t completely tracking—there are lapses—but she acts like it doesn’t matter, which helps cause the fear to fade away. Rain replaces it with something else that’s easy to lose yourself in, despite, for example, the fact that a few of my friends still in town wanted to get together for dinner at Sona but the invitation caused a low-level anxiety in Rain that seemed alien to her nature and this became briefly revealing. (“I don’t want to be with anyone else but you” is her excuse.) But the lapses and evasions aren’t loud—Rain is still soothing enough for the texts from the blocked numbers to stop arriving and for the blue Jeep to disappear along with my desire to start work again on any number of projects I’m involved with and the long brooding silences are gone and the bottle of Viagra in the nightstand drawer is left untouched and the ghosts rearranging things in the condo have taken flight and Rain makes me believe this is something with a future. Rain convinces me that this is really happening. Meghan Reynolds fades into a blur because Rain demands that the focus be on her, and because everything about her works for me I don’t even realize it when it slips into something beyond simply working and for the first time since Meghan Reynolds I make the mistake of starting to care. But there’s one dark fact humming loudly over everything that I keep trying to ignore but can’t because it’s the only thing that keeps the balance in place. It’s the thing that doesn’t let me fall completely away. It’s the thing that saves me from collapsing: she’s too old for the part she thinks she’s going to get.

So when will you help me?” she asks while we’re sitting in the café down the street from the Doheny Plaza, idling over a late breakfast, both of us floating away from hangovers with the dope we smoked and Xanax. “I think you should make the calls as soon as possible,” she says, looking at herself in a mirror. “Right when everybody comes back, okay?” I’m smiling at her serenely and nodding. I ignore the creases of suspicion on her face even after I remove my sunglasses, and then I assure her with a “Yes” followed by a warm kiss.

This assumed peace lasts only about a week. There’s always the possibility of something frightening happening, and then it usually does. Two days before Kelly Montrose’s body is found, Rain wakes up and mentions she had a dream that night. I’m already up, taking pictures of her while she sleeps, and now that she’s awake she flinches when I take another one and she says that in her dream she saw a young man in my kitchen, a boy, really, but old enough to be desirable, and he was staring at her and there was dried blood crusted above his upper lip and there was a blurred tattoo of a dragon etched on his forearm and the boy told her he had wanted to live here in 1508, but the boy told her not to worry, that he was lucky, and then his face turned black and he bared his teeth and then he was dust, and I tell Rain about the party boy who had owned this apartment and I tell her that the building is haunted, that at night vampires hide in the palm trees surrounding the building waiting for the lights to go out, and then roam the hallways, and finally the camera gets her attention and she’s animated and I keep flashing the camera, my head propped on a pillow while she glances at the flat-screen TV—a shot of people running from a jungle, an episode of Lost, and I reach for a Corona on the nightstand. “The vampires don’t roam the hallways,” she finally murmurs, recovered. “The vampires own the units.” And then we run lines for the part of Martina in The Listeners.

Kelly Montrose was rumored to be with the Hispanic actress who had been found in the mass grave right before Christmas. The last sighting of him was on a tennis court in Palm Springs one afternoon in mid-December. Kelly’s naked body was smeared across a highway in Juárez and then propped against a tree. Two other men were found nearby entombed in blocks of cement. Kelly’s face was peeled off, and his hands were missing. There was a note pinned to his body revealing nothing: cabron? cabron? cabron? Things I didn’t know about Kelly: the crystal meth thing, the stepmother who died during plastic surgery, the supposed connections with the drug cartel. This discovery feels only tangential since I never really knew Kelly Montrose—he produced movies, I’d met him several times about various projects—and he was never close enough to anyone I knew to define any of my relationships. Rain spends the day before Kelly Montrose is found at a distance: pacing the balcony, texting, taking calls, returning calls, increasingly agitated, leaning against the railing, gazing past the plunge of the balcony at a couple of guys jogging shirtless on the street below. When I ask her what’s wrong she keeps blaming her family. I keep dragging her back to the bedroom and she’s always resisting, promising “In a minute, in a minute . . .” After downing two shots of tequila she lazes on the balcony in just a thong, ignoring the helicopter swooping above her, and that night in the dark bedroom in the Doheny Plaza, drunk on margaritas, candles glowing around her while I complain about another movie playing on the giant flat screen, Rain can’t help it and for the first time something causes her to tune out and when I finally notice, my voice starts to waver and as I fade into silence she simply asks, without looking over at me, in a neutral voice, her eyes gazing at the TV, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

I have to go to San Diego,” she says.

I’m just waking up, squinting at the light pouring into the bedroom. The shades have been pulled up and she’s walking around in the brightness of the room collecting things.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Almost noon.”

“What are you doing?”

“I have to go to San Diego,” she says. “Something’s come up.”

I reach out for her, trying to pull her back onto the bed.

“Clay, stop. I have to go.”

“Why? Who are you seeing down there?”

“My mother,” she mutters. “My crazy fucking mother.”

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “What happened?”

“Nothing. The usual. Whatever. I’ll call you when I get there.”

“When am I going to see you again?”

“When I get back.”

“When are you getting back?”

“I don’t know. Soon. A couple of days.”

“Are you okay?” I ask. “You seemed kind of freaked out yesterday.”

“No, I’m better,” she says. “I’m okay.”

To placate me she kisses me on the mouth. “I had a nice time,” she says, stroking my face, and the sound of the air-conditioning competes with the big smile and then the smile and the cool air become in the drift of things suddenly amplified, almost frantic, and I pull her toward me onto the bed and I press my face against her thighs and inhale and then I try to flip her over but she gently pushes me away. I lower the sheet, revealing my hard-on, and she aims for levity and rolls her eyes. I can suddenly see my reflection in a mirror in the corner of the bedroom: an old-looking teenager. She gets up and scans the room to see if she’s forgotten anything. I reach for the camera on the nightstand and start taking pictures of her. She’s staring into a Versace bag that had once been filled with packets of cocaine, the other thing that had fueled so much of the sex, the thing that helped make the fantasy seem much more discrete and innocent than it really was, the thing that made it seem as if the desire was reciprocated. “Could you call the valet and have him bring my car up?” she asks, frowning as she checks a text.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I said I’ll be back,” she murmurs absently.

“Don’t make me beg,” I say. “I’m warning you.”

“Even if you did it wouldn’t work.” She doesn’t look up when she says this.

“Can I come with you?”

“Stop it.”

“I’m imagining things.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m imagining there are many versions of this event.”

“Event? I’m going to fucking San Diego to see my fucking mother.”

“Neither one of us wants to admit that something’s wrong,” I murmur, snapping another pic.

“You just did.” She briefly poses. Another flash.

“Rain, I’m serious—”

“Stop turning this into a drama, Crazy.” Again: the sly smile.

“Drama?” I ask innocently. “Who? Me?”

The last thing she says before she leaves: “Will you make sure I get that callback?”

The digital billboards glowing in the gray haze all seem to say no and the poinsettias lining the median at Sunset Plaza are dying and fog keeps enveloping the towers in Century City and the world becomes a science-fiction movie—because none of it really has anything to do with me. It’s a world where getting stoned is the only option. Everything becomes more vague and abstract since every desire and every whim that had been catered to constantly in that last week of December is now gone and I don’t want to replace it with anyone else because there’s no substitute—the teen porn sites seem different, repainted somehow, nothing kicks in, it doesn’t work anymore—and so I re-create almost hourly in my mind the sex that happened in the bedroom over those eight days she was here and when I try to outline a script that I’ve been lazy about it comes out half sincere and half ironic because Rain’s failure to return calls or text back becomes a distraction and then, only three days after she leaves, it officially becomes an obstacle. The bruises on my chest and arms, the imprints from Rain’s fingers and the scratches on my shoulders and thighs, begin to fade and I stop returning various e-mails from people back in town because I have no desire to gossip about Kelly Montrose or dis the awards buzz or hear about people’s plans for Sundance and I have no reason to go back to the casting sessions in Culver City (because what I want has already happened) and without Rain here it all dissipates entirely and the calm becomes impossible, something I can’t control. And so I find myself in Dr. Woolf’s office on Sawtelle and the pattern that keeps repeating itself is again pointed out and its reasons are located and we practice techniques to lessen the pain. And just when I think I’m going to be able to deal with everything a blue Jeep with tinted windows passes me on Santa Monica while I’m crossing the intersection at Wilshire. An hour later I get a text from a blocked number, the first in almost eleven days: Where did she go?

Rumors of a video of Kelly Montrose’s “execution”—that it had been circulating on the Web and seen by “reliable sources”—spreads within the community early one morning in the first week of January. There was supposedly a link somewhere that led to another link but the first link had been pulled and there’s nothing to find except people on various blogs debating the video’s “authenticity.” Supposedly there was a headless body in a black windbreaker hung from a bridge, a bleak desert lined with scrub brush beneath it, police tape whipping in the dry wind, and someone else wrote that the murder was set in a “laboratory” outside of Juárez and someone else countered with certainty that the murder was committed in a soccer field by men wearing hoods and someone else wrote No, Kelly Montrose was killed in an abandoned cemetery. But there’s nothing to substantiate any of it. Someone posted a picture of a severed head grinning broadly from the passenger seat of a bullet-ridden SUV but it isn’t Kelly. In fact there are no shots of him being pulled along a highway bound with rope, no close-ups of skin being peeled off a face, no shots of a pair of hands being amputated while mariachi music is scored over the images, and after the excitement peaks and the justification for the gossip surrenders to reality the rumors about the Kelly Montrose clips fade into a twilight stage.

But I don’t care. After searching for the links I simply fall back into the habit of looking at all the pics Rain sent me and remember the promises I made that didn’t involve The Listeners but were about agents and about movies with titles like Boogeyman 2 and Bait and I remind her of them in texts I send—Hey I talked to Don and Braxton and Nate wants to rep you and Come back and we’ll go over your part and I’m talking you up to EVERYONE—that are only answered in the middle of the night: Hey Crazy that all sounds super! and I’ll be back soon!! dotted with emoticons. Unlike everyone else it’s not Kelly Montrose that causes my fear to return. It’s officially back and because of Rain’s absence no longer a faint distraction. And then it’s the blue Jeep that passed me on Santa Monica materializing nightly on the corner of Elevado and one night while I watch it dully from my office window it finally pulls away from the curb. And that’s when I notice for the first time another car, a black Mercedes, slowly pulling away from a spot farther down the street and following the Jeep onto Doheny and then up to Sunset. From the apartment below Union Square, Laurie has stopped contacting me completely.

What did you do over the holidays?” Rip Millar asks me when a number I don’t recognize shows up on my phone and I answer it impulsively, thinking it might be Rain. After I mention a few family appearances and that basically I just hung around and worked, Rip offers, “My wife wanted to go to Cabo. She’s still there.” A long silence plays itself out. I’m forced to fill the silence with, “What have you been doing?” Rip describes a couple of parties he seemed to have fun at and then the minor hassles of opening a club in Hollywood and a futile meeting with a city councilman. Rip tells me he’s lying in bed watching CNN on his laptop, images of a mosque in flames, ravens flying against the scarlet sky.

“I want to see you,” he says. “Have a drink, grab some lunch.”

“Can’t we just talk over the phone?”

“No,” he says. “We need to see each other in person.”

“Need?” I ask. “There’s something you need to see me about?”

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

“I’m going back to New York soon,” I say.

“When are you going back?”

“I don’t know.” I pause. “I have some things I need to finish up here first and . . .”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I guess you have your reasons to stay.” Rip lets it hang there before adding, “But I think you’ll be pretty interested in what I have to tell you.”

“I’ll check my schedule and let you know.”

“Schedule?” he asks. “That’s funny.”

“Why is that funny?” I ask back. “I’m really busy.”

“You’re a writer. What do you mean, busy?” His voice had been slack but now it isn’t. “Who have you been hanging out with?”

“I’m . . . at the casting sessions pretty much all day.”

A pause before “Really.” It’s not a question.

“Look, Rip, I’ll be in touch.”

Rip follows this with, “Well, how is The Listeners coming along?”

“It’s coming along.” I’m straining. “It’s very . . . busy.”

“Yeah, you’re very busy. You already said that.”

Move it out of this realm, make it impersonal, concentrate on gossip, anything to elicit sympathy so we can get off the phone. I try another tactic: “And I’m really stressed about what happened to Kelly. It really stressed me out.”

Rip pauses. “Yeah? I heard about that.” He pauses again. “I didn’t know you two were close.”

“Yeah. We were pretty close.”

The sound Rip makes after I say this is like a muffled giggle, a private riddle whose answer amused him.

“I guess he found himself in a slightly improbable situation. Who knows what kind of people he got involved with?” He gives both sentences a syncopated rhythm.

I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it until I’m calm enough to bring it back. There’s nothing to say.

“That’s what happens when you get involved with the wrong element” is all Rip offers, his voice crawling toward me.

“What’s the wrong element?”

A pause and then Rip’s voice becomes, for the first time I can remember, vaguely annoyed. “Do you really have to ask me that, Clay?”

“Look, Rip, I’ll get in touch.”

“Yeah, do that. I think the sooner you hear this, the better.”

“Why don’t you just tell me now?”

“Because it’s . . . intimate,” Rip says. “Yeah. It’s a very intimate thing.”

Later that week I’m roaming the fifth floor of the Barneys on Wilshire, stoned, constantly checking my iPhone for messages from Rain that never appear, glancing at the price tags on the sleeves of shiny shirts, things to show off in, unable to concentrate on anything but Rain’s absence, and in the men’s department I can’t even keep up the most rudimentary conversation with a salesman over a Prada suit and I end up at the bar in Barney Greengrass ordering a Bloody Mary and drinking it with my sunglasses on. Rip is having lunch with Griffin Dyer and Eric Thomas, a city councilman who resembles a lifeguard, and whom Rip had been complaining about but now seems friendly with, and Rip’s wearing a skull T-shirt he’s too old for and baggy Japanese pants and he shakes my hand and when he sees the Bloody Mary and that I’m alone he murmurs, “So, you’re really busy, huh?”

Behind him I can feel the burning wind coming in from the patio. Rip’s shocked-open eyes are bloodshot and I notice how muscular his arms are.

“Yeah.”

“Sitting here? Brooding at Barneys?”

“Yeah.” I shift on the bar stool and grip the icy glass.

“Getting a little scruffy there.”

I touch my cheek, surprised at how thick the stubble is and by how long it’s been since I shaved and I quickly do the math: the day after Rain left.

“Yeah.”

The orange face contemplates something and as it leans into me it says, “You’re so much further out there than I thought, dude.”

A trainer at Equinox introduces himself after I noticed him gazing at me while I work out with my trainer and asks me if I’d like to have coffee with him at Caffe Primo next door to the gym. Cade is wearing a black T-shirt with the word TRAINER on it in small block letters and he has full lips and a white smile and wide blue eyes and carefully groomed stubble and he smells clean, almost antiseptic, and his voice manages to sound both cheerful and hostile at the same time and he’s sucking on a water bottle filled with a reddish liquid and sitting in a way that makes you realize he’s waiting for someone to notice him and beneath the shade of an umbrella strewn with Christmas lights I’m staring at the traffic on Sunset as we sit at an outdoor table and I’m thinking about the beautiful boy on the treadmill wearing the I STILL HAVE A DREAM T-shirt and realize that it might not have been ironic.

“I read The Listeners,” Cade says, glancing away from his cell phone, a text that had been bothering him.

“Really?” I sip my coffee and offer a tight smile, unsure of why I’m here.

“Yeah, a buddy of mine auditioned for the role of Tim.”

“Cool,” I say. “Are you auditioning?”

“I’d like to,” Cade says. “Do you think you can get me in?”

“Oh,” I say, now getting it. “Yeah. Sure.”

Softly and with a rehearsed shyness he says, “Maybe we can hang out sometime.”

“Like . . . when?” I’m momentarily confused.

“Like, I don’t know, just hang,” he says. “Maybe go to a concert, see a band . . .”

“Yeah, that sounds cool.”

Young girls walk by in a trance holding yoga mats, the scent of patchouli and rosemary breezing over us, the glimpse of a butterfly tattoo on a shoulder, and I’m so keyed up about not talking to Rain in almost five days that I keep expecting a car to crash on Sunset because everything seems imminent with disaster and Cade keeps posing constantly as if he’d been photographed his entire life and in front of the H&M store across the plaza men are rolling out a short red carpet.

“Why did you come to me?” I ask Cade.

“Someone pointed you out,” he says.

“No, I mean, why me? Why not someone else connected with the movie?”

“Well . . .” Cade tries to figure out why I’m playing it like this. “I heard you help people.”

“Yeah?” I ask. “Who told you that?” The question sounds like a dare. The way it sounds forces Cade to be more open with me than he might have been.

“I think you know him.”

“Who?”

“Julian. You know Julian Wells, right?”

I tense up even though he said the name innocently. But suddenly Cade is someone different because of his connection to Julian.

“Right,” I say. “How do you know Julian?”

“I worked for him briefly.”

“Doing what?”

Cade shrugs. “Personal stuff.”

“Like an assistant?”

Cade smiles and turns away and then looks back at me, trying not to seem too concerned by the question. “Yeah, I guess.”

Blair calls to invite me to a dinner party she’s hosting in Bel Air next week and I’m suspicious at first but when she says it’s for Alana’s birthday I understand why I’m being invited and the conversation is mellow and tinged with forgiveness and after talking about simple things it feels easy enough to ask, “Can I bring someone?” even though a brief pause on Blair’s part forces me back to the past.

“Yeah, sure,” she says casually. “Who?”

“Just a friend. Someone I’m working with.”

“Who is it?” she asks. “Do I know them?”

“She’s an actress,” I say. “Her name’s Rain Turner.”

Blair is silent. Whatever we had recovered earlier in the phone call is now gone.

“She’s an actress,” I repeat. “Hello?”

Blair doesn’t say anything.

“Blair?”

“Look, I thought maybe you’d come solo, but I don’t want her here,” she says quickly. “I would never have allowed her to come here.”

“Why not?” I ask in a warning voice. “Do you know her?”

“Look, Clay—”

“Oh, fuck this,” I say. “Why would you invite me anyway, Blair? What are you doing? Are you trying to fuck with me? Are you still pissed? It’s been over two years, Blair.”

After a pause, she says, “I think we should talk.”

“About what?”

She pauses again. “Meet me somewhere.”

“Why can’t we talk now?”

“We can’t talk over the phone.”

“Why not, Blair?”

“Because none of these lines are secure.”

Turning off Sunset onto Stone Canyon I drive into the darkness of the canyons and valet park the BMW at the Hotel Bel-Air. I walk across the bridge past the swans floating in the pond and make my way to the dining room but Blair’s not there and when I ask the hostess I find out she didn’t make a reservation and outside I look around the patio but she’s not there either and I’m about to call her when I realize I don’t have her number. As I walk to the front desk I’m suddenly aware of how much effort I made to look nice even though nothing was going to happen. The receptionist tells me what room Mrs. Burroughs is in.

I pace around the grounds debating something and then I give up and walk to the room and knock. When Blair opens the door I walk in past her.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not going to happen.”

“What’s not going to happen?”

“This.” I make a tired gesture with my arm across the suite.

“That’s not why we’re . . .” She looks away.

Blair’s wearing loose cotton pants and she has no makeup on and her hair’s pulled back and whatever work she has had done you can’t tell and she’s sitting on the edge of the bed next to a Michael Kors bag and she’s not wearing her wedding ring.

“It’s just a suite that Trent keeps,” she says.

“Yeah?” I say, pacing. “Where’s Trent?”

“He’s still upset about Kelly Montrose,” Blair says. “They were close. Trent represented him for a while.” She pauses. “Trent’s helping plan the memorial.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” I ask. “Why am I here?”

“I don’t know why you keep—”

“It’s not going to happen, Blair.”

“You can stop saying that, Clay,” she says, an edge in her voice. “I know.”

I open the minibar. I don’t even look at what bottle I take out. Annoyed, shaky, I pour myself a drink.

“But why wouldn’t it happen?” Blair asks. “Is it because of her? The girl you wanted to bring to my house?” She pauses. “The actress?” She pauses again. “You don’t think I’d be upset about that?”

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask impatiently.

“I guess in a way it’s about Julian.”

“Yeah? What about him?” I down the drink. “You were having an affair with him? You guys hooked up? What?”

When Blair bites her lower lip she’s eighteen again.

“Julian told you?” she asks. “Is that how you know?”

“I’m just guessing, Blair,” I say. “You told me to stay away from him, remember?” And then: “What does it matter? It’s been over for a year, right?”

“Did you know that he broke it off?” she asks haltingly.

“Blair, I don’t know anything, okay?”

“He broke it off because of that girl.”

“What girl?”

“Clay, please don’t make this any weirder—”

“I don’t know what girl you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the girl you wanted to bring to the dinner party,” she says. “That’s who he left me for.” She pauses again for emphasis. “That’s who he’s with now.”

I break the silence by saying, “You’re lying.”

“Clay—”

“You’re lying because you want me here and—”

“Stop it,” she shouts.

“But I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Rain. Her name’s Rain Turner. That’s the girl you wanted to bring, right? When Julian broke it off with me she was the reason. They’ve been together ever since.” Again she pauses for effect. “He’s still with her.”

“How . . . do you know this?” I ask. “I thought you didn’t talk to him.”

“I don’t talk to Julian,” she says, “but I know they’re together.”

I throw the glass against the wall.

Blair looks away, embarrassed.

“You’re that upset over her? I mean how long have you even been with her?” Blair asks, her voice cracking. “A couple of weeks?”

Concentrating on the flower arrangement in the middle of the suite is my only hope of focusing while Blair continues.

“I made Trent take her on as a client because Julian asked me to, without telling me he was seeing her. It was a favor I did for him. I thought she was just a friend. Another actress who needed help . . . I did it because . . .” She stops. “Because I liked Julian.”

I’m murmuring to myself. “That’s why she was at your house.”

Blair realizes something after I say this. “You never asked her why she was there, did you?” Another silence. “Jesus, it’s still all about you, isn’t it? Didn’t you ever wonder what the hell she was doing there?” Blair’s voice keeps climbing. “Do you know anything about her except how she makes you feel?”

“I don’t believe any of this.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . she’s with me.”

Finally, I stagger toward the door.

“Wait,” Blair says quietly. “I better leave first.”

“What does it matter?” I ask, wiping my face.

“Because I think I’m being followed.”

I text Rain: If I don’t hear from you I’m going to make them give the part to someone else. In a matter of minutes I get a text from her. Hey Crazy, I’m back! Let’s hang. Xo.

In my office, sitting at my desk pretending to work on a script, I’m really watching Rain, who has just shown up, and she’s tan and pacing the floor, holding a glass of ice with some tequila in it, chatting casually about how crazy her mother is and her younger stepbrother who’s in the military and when she falls onto the lounge chair in the corner of the office it takes all the strength I have to get up and walk over to her and not say anything about Julian. She looks up at me and keeps talking, only lightly distracted, but when I don’t answer a question she touches her knee against mine and then I reach for her arm and pull her off the chair and when she reminds me about the reservation at Dan Tana’s I tell her, “I want to fuck you first,” and start pulling her toward the bedroom.

“Come on,” she says. “I’m hungry. Let’s go to Dan Tana’s.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to Dan Tana’s,” I say, pressing into her. “I thought you wanted to go someplace else.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Why? Who didn’t you want to see there?”

“Can’t we just hang?”

“No,” I say.

“Look,” she says. “Maybe after dinner? I just want to chill.” She strokes my face and then kisses me lightly on the lips and then she pulls her arm away and walks out of the office. I follow her through the living room and into the kitchen, where she heads for the tequila bottle and does another shot.

“Who was in San Diego?” I ask.

“What?”

“Who was in San Diego?” I ask again.

“My mother. I told you that about a hundred times.”

“Who else?”

“Stop it, Crazy,” she says. “Hey, did you talk to Jon and Mark?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?” She makes a face. “What does that mean?”

I shrug. “It means maybe.”

“Don’t do that,” she says quickly, whirling toward me. “Do not do that.”

“Do what?”

“Threaten me,” she says, before her face relaxes into a smile.

At Dan Tana’s we’re seated in the front room next to a booth of young actors and Rain tries to engage me, her foot rubbing against my ankle, and after a few drinks I mellow into acceptance even though a guy at the bar keeps glancing at Rain and for some reason I keep thinking he’s the guy I saw her with in the parking lot at Bristol Farms, his arm in a sling, and then I realize I passed him on the bridge at the Hotel Bel-Air when I went to see Blair, and Rain’s talking about the best way to approach the producer and director of The Listeners in terms of hiring her and how we need to do this carefully and that it’s “superimportant” she gets the part because so much is riding on this for her and I’m zoning out on other things but I keep glancing back at the guy leaning against the bar and he’s with a friend and they both look like they stepped out of a soap opera and then I suddenly have to interrupt her.

“There’s no one else you’re seeing, right?”

Rain stops talking, considers the vibe and asks, “Is that what this is about?”

“I mean, it’s just me right now, right?” I ask. “I mean, whatever it is we’re doing, you’re not hanging out with another guy, right?”

“What are you talking about?” she asks. “Crazy, what are you doing?”

“When’s the last time you had sex?”

“With you.” She sighs. “Here we go.” She sighs again. “What about you?”

“Do you care?”

“Look, I had a stressful week—”

“Stop it,” I say. “You got a tan.”

“Do you want to say something to me?” she asks.

I look around the room and she relents.

“I’m here with you now,” she says. “Stop being such a girl.”

I sigh and say nothing.

“What happened? Why are you so angry?” she asks after I order another drink. “I was only gone five days.”

“I’m not angry,” I say. “I just didn’t hear from you . . .”

“Look.” She scrolls through the iPhone I bought her and shows me pictures of herself with an older woman, the Pacific in the background.

“Who took these pictures?” I automatically ask.

“A friend of mine,” she says. “A girlfriend,” she stresses.

“Why does that guy at the bar keep looking at you?”

Rain doesn’t even glance at the bar when she says, “I don’t know,” and then shows me more pictures of herself in San Diego with the older woman I don’t believe is her mother.

Heading up Doheny I’m looking through the windshield of the BMW and I notice the lights in the condo are on. Rain sits in the passenger seat, arms crossed, considering something.

“Did I leave the lights on?” I ask.

“No,” she says, distracted. “I don’t remember.”

I make a right on Elevado to see if the blue Jeep is there and I cruise by the spot where it’s usually parked and it isn’t there, and after circling the block a couple of times I pull into the driveway of the Doheny Plaza and the valet takes the car and then Rain and I go back to 1508 and she lets me go down on her and when I’m hard enough she sucks me off, and when I wake up the next morning, she’s gone.

Rain is the only topic discussed in Dr. Woolf’s office on Sawtelle and I had referred to her anonymously in the last session while she was in San Diego as “this girl” but now with the information I have about Julian I tell him everything: how I had met Rain Turner at a Christmas party, and I realize while I’m describing that moment to Dr. Woolf that I had drinks with Julian at the Beverly Hills Hotel almost immediately afterward, and how I ran into her again at the casting sessions and then at the lounge on La Cienega, and I detail the days we spent together that last week of December and how I began to think it was real, like what I had with Meghan Reynolds, and then found out from Blair that Rain is supposedly Julian’s girlfriend—at this point Dr. Woolf puts down his notepad and seems more patient with me than he probably is, and I’m trying to figure out the game plan and then realize Julian must have known that Rain and I had spent those days together but how was that possible? Finally, near the end of the session, Dr. Woolf says, “I would urge you not to see this girl anymore,” and then “I would urge you to cut off all contact.” After another long silence he asks, “Why are you crying?”

I’m not taking no for an answer,” Rip says lightly, in singsong, over the phone after telling me to meet him at the observatory at the top of Griffith Park even though I’m hungover enough to forget how to fill the BMW’s gas tank at the Mobil station on the corner of Holloway and La Cienega, and cutting across Fountain to avoid the traffic backed up on Sunset I call Rain three times, so distracted that she’s not picking up I almost make a right onto Orange Grove in case she’s there, but I can’t deal. In the mostly deserted parking lot in front of the observatory Rip is on his phone, leaning against a black limousine, the driver listening to an iPod, the Hollywood sign gleaming in the background behind them. Rip is dressed simply in jeans, a green T-shirt, sandals. “Let’s take a walk,” Rip says, and then we’re wandering across the lawn toward the dome of the planetarium, and on the West Terrace we’re so high above the city it’s soundless and the blinding sun reflected in the faraway Pacific makes it look as if the ocean’s on fire, and the empty sky is completely clear except for the haze hanging over downtown where a dirigible floats above the distant skyscrapers and if I hadn’t been so hungover the view would have been humbling.

“I like it up here,” Rip says. “It’s peaceful.”

“It’s a little out of the way.”

“Yeah, but there’s no one here,” he says. “It’s quiet up here. No one can follow you. We can talk without worrying about it.”

“Worrying about what?”

Rip considers this. “That our privacy might be compromised.” He pauses. “I’m like you: I don’t trust people.”

The sun is so bright it bleaches the terrace, and my skin begins to burn and the silence that drowns everything out makes even the most innocent figures in the distance seem filled with ominous intent as they roam slowly, cautiously, as if any natural movement would disrupt the stillness and we pass a Hispanic couple leaning against a ledge as we move across the Parapet Promenade and once we’re on the walk-way and moving toward the East Terrace, Rip softly asks me, “Have you seen Julian lately?”

“No,” I say. “The last time I saw Julian was before Christmas.”

“Interesting,” Rip says, and then admits, “Well, I didn’t think you had.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Just wanted to know how you’d answer that question.”

“Rip—”

“There was a girl . . .” He stops, considers. “There’s always a girl, isn’t there?”

I shrug. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Anyway, there was a girl I met about four or five months ago, and this girl worked for a very exclusive, superdiscreet . . . service.” Rip pauses as two teenage boys speaking French pass by, and then looks around to see if anyone else is near us before he continues. “You can’t find it on the Net, it’s just word-of-mouth referrals so there’s no, um, viral trail. Everything was handled among people who knew each other so it was all fairly contained.”

“What . . . was the service?” I ask.

Rip shrugs. “Just really beautiful girls, really beautiful boys, kids who came out here to make it and needed cash and wanted to make sure that if they ever became Brad Pitt there’s no hard evidence that they were involved in anything like this.” Rip sighs, looks at the city and then back at me. “Comparatively expensive, but you’re paying for the low-key and the no records and how totally anonymous it is.”

“How did you find out about it?” I don’t want to know the answer but the silence, amplified, ramped up, makes me ask just to say something.

“Well, that’s one of the interesting parts of this story,” Rip says. “The guy who started the service is someone we know. I guess you could say he’s the one who hooked me up with the girl.”

“Who are we talking about?” I ask, even though something tells me that I already know.

“Julian,” Rip says, confirming it. “Julian ran it.” Rip pauses. “I’m surprised you didn’t know this already.”

“Julian ran what, exactly?” I manage to ask.

“The service,” Rip says. “He actually started it. All by himself. He’s personable in that way. He knows a lot of kids. He brought them in.” Rip thinks about it. “It’s something he knows how to do.” Another pause. “Julian’s good at it.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask. “I’m not interested in using an escort service to hook up and I’m definitely not interested in anything that has to do with Julian.”

“Oh, that’s a lie,” Rip says. “That’s a big lie.”

“Why is that a lie?”

“Because Julian is how I met a girl named Rain Turner.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Rip parodies a brief scowl and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Oh, dude, you handled that so awkwardly.” He sighs, impatient. “That girl you’ve been hanging with? The so-called actress you promised to give a part to in your little movie? Does this ring a bell? Please, don’t be an idiot with me.”

I can’t say anything. I’m suddenly gripping the iron railing. The information is an excuse not to look at him anymore. The fear, the big black stain of it, is rushing forward and it’s in the heat and the vast expanse of empty terrace and everywhere else.

“You’re shaking there, bro,” Rip says. “Maybe you want to sit down?”

On the East Terrace I’m finally numb enough to listen as Rip starts speaking again, after he takes a brief call confirming lunch and texts someone else back and we’re sitting on a bench in direct sunlight and I feel my skin blistering and I can’t move and up close Rip’s face is androgynous and his eyelashes are tinted.

“Anyway, so I meet her and I like her and I think we hit it off and then I’m not paying for it anymore and I’m actually thinking about divorcing my wife, which shows you how committed I am to this girl.” Rip keeps gesturing with his hands. “I tell Rain to quit the gig and she does. I take care of everything—pay the rent for her and the bitch roommate in that dump on Orange Grove, clothes, fucking hair, the Beamer, personal trainer, tanning salon, whatever she wants. I even got her a gig at that place on La Cienega, Reveal, all these things that Julian can’t afford to do—and guess what she still really wants?”

Rip waits. I’m processing everything. And then it hits me and I say in a low voice, “She still wants to be an actress.”

“Well, she wants to be famous,” Rip says. “But at least you’re paying attention,” he says. “That’s basically the correct answer.”

I can’t unclench my fists and Rip gets up and starts pacing in front of me.

“I think you know by now it’s never going to happen for her, but anyway Julian’s been bragging about what a great friend Clay is and that he’ll be sure to hook her up with you and this movie that I guess you have some hand in casting. Whatever. I mean, it sounded like bullshit to me but you’ve gotta have hope, right?” Rip suddenly stops and checks his phone, then puts it back in his pocket. “But when you first got into town Julian kind of riled you up about something and I guess you guys didn’t exactly hit it off that night so he didn’t ask you to help out.” Rip sighs, as if tired of it all, yet continues. “Somehow she manages to get an audition—something I admittedly don’t really care about or have the juice to do and anyway I think it’s a waste of time because she has no talent—and so she comes in and reads for you guys and I’m guessing she’s just fuck-awful but she has her charms and the rest is . . . well, why don’t you tell me what the rest is, Clay?”

I’m just sitting silently on the stone bench.

“I take it you’ve been banging her for a couple of weeks now?”

I don’t say anything.

Rip sighs. “That’s an answer in a way.”

“Rip, please—”

“And then she splits for San Diego,” Rip says. “Right?”

“She went to see her family.”

“Family?” Rip scowls. “Did you know that Julian was in San Diego with her?”

“Why would I know that?” I say.

“Oh, come on, Clay—”

“Rip, please, what do you want?”

He considers this. “I want her.” And then he considers something else. “I mean, I know, I know, she’s just a dumb cunt actress, right?”

I’m nodding and Rip registers the nods and cocks his head, curious.

“If you’re agreeing with me, then why are you so beat up over her?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say quietly. “I just am.”

“Have you ever thought that maybe this—your little freak-out—isn’t about her?” Rip says. “That maybe it’s about you?”

“No.” I swallow. “I haven’t.”

“Look, you’re not the threat,” Rip says. “She’s just using you. However . . . she really likes him.” Rip pauses. “Julian’s the problem.”

“The problem? What are you talking about? Why is he the problem?”

“Julian is the problem,” Rip says, “because Rain denied anything was going on with him until I found out about their little vacation in San Diego last week.”

“She told me she went to see her mother,” I say. “She showed me pictures of herself with her mother.”

Rip fake-smiles. “So, she has a mother now? In San Diego? Sweet.” But after he studies my reaction the smile fades.

“The first time I found out they were together I had gotten some information she couldn’t lie her way out of and I let it go because she promised me she wouldn’t go back to him or do anything with him but . . . this time . . . I just don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“This time . . . I don’t know if I’ll hurt him or not.” Rip says this so gently and with so little menace that it doesn’t sound like a threat and I start laughing.

“I’m serious,” Rip says. “This is not a joke, Clay.”

“I think that’s a little extreme.”

“That’s because you’re probably very sensitive.”

After a long pause, Rip says flatly, “I only want one thing. I want her back.”

“But obviously she wants someone else.”

Rip takes a moment to study me. “You’re a very bitter dude.”

I’m leaning forward, clutching my sides. I glance at him before nodding.

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

We’re walking across the grass toward the black limo and the driver waiting there and Rip glances at the Astronomers Monument as we pass it and I’m staring straight ahead, unable to focus on anything but the heat and the surreal blue sky and the hawks sailing over the soundless landscape, their shadows crossing the lawn, and I wonder if I’m going to be able to make it back to Doheny without getting into an accident and then Rip asks me something that should have been just a formality but because of our conversation now isn’t. “What are you doing the rest of the afternoon?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and then remember. “Are you going to Kelly’s memorial?”

“That’s today?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Rip says. “Didn’t really know him. We did some business, but that was a long time ago.” The driver opens the door. “I’ve got to deal with this dickhead about the club. You know, the usual.” He says this as if I should be hip enough to understand what exactly he means, and before getting into the limo Rip asks me, “When are you seeing her next?”

“I think maybe tonight.” Then I can’t help it and ask, “How do you feel about that?”

“Hey, I hope she gets the part. I’m rooting for her.” He pauses, and grins. “Aren’t you?”

I don’t say anything. I just barely shake my head.

“Yeah,” Rip says, convinced of something. “I thought so.” And then, as he slides into the back of the limo and before the driver shuts the door, Rip looks up at me and says, “You have a history of this, don’t you?”