American Girls(59)

You would have thought Roger had just finished filming Citizen Kane, the way he clapped after he said “Cut.”

“You are more beautiful,” he said, holding a towel to my sister’s nose while she continued to cry. “You have made something real. So real.”

My sister was inconsolable. Maybe it was the place, something in the air that remained. They may have built a new house, reseeded the yard, put fifty years or even a hundred between the address and its history. It didn’t matter. Even in the warm late afternoon, maybe especially at a time like that, when it seemed like nothing savage could ever happen in such a quiet and beautiful space, the hillside still felt haunted.

“It doesn’t even look like my face anymore,” she finally said.

She was right, but it wasn’t just the nose. My sister was scared. Her face was her fortune, and it looked different. Better, I thought, but not the same.

The actor was on his phone, calling his agent. He didn’t seem terribly moved by any of it.

“I cannot ask you to forgive me again,” Roger said. “And still I ask.”

“It doesn’t matter. It can’t be fixed.”

“I think you look better.” I finally worked up the courage to say it, not just because I wanted her to feel better, but because it was true.

She had stopped crying and was looking at her face again in the makeup mirror she kept in her bag.

“It looks like a piece of modern freaking art. A fun-house mirror would be kinder.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“This better be huge at Sundance,” she said to Roger, and he nodded vigorously.

“Enormous,” he said. “We have tapped into the collective unconscious of America. Its violence. I would break my own nose if I could take it back, but the film, it is beautiful. It is something more than it would have been. You have truly suffered for your art.”

Please, I thought, please let her say yes. Please let him have to break his nose.

“You don’t have to be such a drama queen,” Delia said. “Plain old queen is bad enough.” She winked at me, and just like that, she was back.

“I’m out,” her movie-husband said, and we all shook hands and did a round of air-kisses and he was off to the next romantic comedy.

“We should celebrate,” Roger said. “It is our wrap day, your last week in Los Angeles, Anna?”

“It is,” I said. “I have to finish a paper.”

“Papers are for next week. Tonight we toast.”

“I don’t want to toast. I can’t toast.”

“Relax,” Delia said. “We’ll go somewhere low-key. I think I need beer goggles to get used to my face. Maybe after a few drinks I’ll look good to me again.”

“You would seriously have to kill yourself if you were actually ugly, wouldn’t you?”

“God, Anna, to hear you talk, you’d think I was the vainest person in the world. Did you see how I looked in that last shot?”

“Great acting,” Roger interrupted, “takes great humility.”

So it was going to be that kind of a night. I’d hoped they would drop me with Dex so that I could meet Jeremy for the Chips Ahoy! wrap party. The party started in three hours, so as long as Delia stayed sober enough to drive, or got drunk enough that I could sneak off, there was still hope.

Roger drove us to a tiki bar in Silver Lake, a hipster neighborhood that was near his home. I expected the place to be empty, but there were at least fifteen or twenty people, some working alone on computers, others sipping late-afternoon cocktails.

“I am a regular,” Roger said. “Do not order alcohol and we will be fine.”

The waitress who took our order was heavily tattooed, with black bangs and long, straight hair. She knew Roger and half smiled when he introduced me as a writer for his next movie.

“Make sure he pays you, kid,” she said, winking like we were old pals.

“I miss this place,” Delia said after her second scotch and soda. “Is it wrong if I just drink scotch?” She trailed her finger over the water beading on the side of the glass. Her eyes were still puffy from crying, and she hadn’t reapplied her makeup. “Have they rotated the music? I hope not. I never get over this way. You’d think I would, but it always feels like forever in the car. But I miss the jukebox. I hope they haven’t changed everything up. I’m going to go play something.”

I sat next to Roger, who watched Delia cross the room to the jukebox. My phone chirped a message from Jeremy: “C U in 30, buttercup?” I was bronzing the screen.

Delia came back as Johnny Cash started singing “I Still Miss Someone.” My mom loved Johnny Cash, would play his music anytime we surrendered media control. She and Lynette didn’t listen to music as much now, except for kids’ stuff, and the song reminded me of the summers when Delia was still at home, when my mom and dad were still together. Delia was softly singing along and looking at Roger, sharing some moment from their horror show of a love affair. It made me feel more lonely and more sad that she was singing to Roger, when it should have been Dex, or me, or anyone else.

And then one of those things happened that I would have paid a million dollars not to have seen, that I will spend at least the next three summers trying to forget. Roger leaned across the table and kissed my sister. French-kissed her, and not like someone who was even kind of, sort of confused about his sexuality. And while I am no expert on kissing, there was no unseeing that in her boozed-out stupidity, she kissed him back.