American Girls(66)

“Is that why you drive the way you do? Method?”

Jeremy had driven us to a clearing at the top of a hill. I got the sense that there might have been other people not too far away, also parked to see the view. He turned the key in the ignition to let the music play, loudly at first, and then he turned it lower.

“I almost killed someone,” he said. “That’s what my sister was talking about. That’s why I didn’t go to Japan. I was out one night with Josh and we’d been partying way too hard. Righteous, ugly partying, the kind the photographers love, and I think they figured we were both in the same car, because the paparazzi followed Josh. I woke up in the back of the club and it was practically morning and my head was black, just black. So I got in my friend’s car, his keys were in my lap and we sometimes did that, to throw off whoever might be stalking my ride. And I didn’t have my license yet but that didn’t matter to me at the moment, I was so sure I could handle the car. I was going down Vine, and this girl was crossing the street, and I came so close to hitting her, all I could see was this look on her face, how surprised she was. I could have been the last thing she ever saw. I did hit her, I guess, but it wasn’t enough to go to the hospital or anything. So I called my publicist and they gave her some money, and by some great miracle, no one found out. My sister knows because she was there when I called my mom. She’ll probably let it out someday, but I’m okay with that.”

His hands clenched the steering wheel as he talked, and he stared out the front window at the great expanse of Los Angeles, lit from below by the hustle and bustle of the night.

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

“So I went into recovery,” he said. “It’s not an excuse for not being there for her, but it’s the truth. I know my sister thinks it’s a joke, but it isn’t. There’s a guy in one of my meetings. A really big actor from the nineties, and he was my sponsor for a while. He told me that everyone spends their lives wanting to be like us, and thinking this is it. The big dream. But the real trick is just learning to be regular.”

I watched a woman leave her house about a hundred yards straight down the hill. She went into her backyard and lit a series of tiki torches, and they were beautiful, like fireflies.

“There’s probably something to that,” I said. If I hadn’t known Jeremy better, maybe if I hadn’t been with him tonight, I might have thought it was a jerk-off thing to say, like when really beautiful people say that beauty is only skin-deep. But I could see that it was almost as hard for him to blend in as it was for him to stand out. And even for those with the dream in their grasp, it was always in danger of slipping away.

“What are you thinking about?” He lifted the leather armrest that separated us.

“Nothing,” I said.

I said nothing, because I knew that saying “I was thinking about Charles Manson” would be the absolute wrong thing to say when Jeremy Taylor was focusing his impossibly perfect face on yours. Even I had that much sense. But I was thinking about Charles Manson, about how, on top of everything, he couldn’t stand the thought of being regular. The address where Sharon Tate was staying, 10050 Cielo, had just been vacated by a record producer who’d turned down Manson’s songs. He’d said they’d never work, never break into the mainstream. Manson may have been driving that black, hippie LSD trip of a school bus around like it was a movable Technicolor orgy, but the stops he made were all about him. He wanted to be bigger than the Beatles. He believed he would be. It was all so much less interesting and more petty than the pseudo-psychic, Satanic, Beatles-referencing mania. There was no mystique to being told “You are not good enough,” losing your mind, and taking your anger out on the messenger and the blessed. If he had been born thirty years later, TLC would have given him a reality show, and the world might have been a safer place.

“You are thinking about something,” Jeremy said.

“I am,” I said. “About a paper that I need to write.”

Jeremy laughed, and when he touched me his palms were damp on my arm. It seemed outside the realm of the real and possible, but he was nervous. Before I could say something to get him off the hook, Jeremy took my face in both of his hands and gave me a kiss so gentle, and then so firm, that it made me forget that he kissed women for a living. He pulled back and smiled, pushed my hair off my face, and kissed me again.

“Stop thinking about your paper. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I wanted him to kiss me again, and he did.

“Is this because I’m regular?”

“It’s because you’re beautiful.”

“I thought you said I was interesting.”

“Interesting is beautiful, put that in your paper.”

I didn’t care that it sounded like a line out of a movie. I didn’t care that no one would believe me, or that it would ruin it even to tell. I sat there under the Hollywood sign and made out with Jeremy Taylor like we were the happy ending of a really foul-mouthed romantic comedy. If a roving band of hippies had come out of the mountains and tried to cut us down, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have cared. And the only thing I can say is that it was nothing like I’d imagined. It was so much better.

“You go home tomorrow,” he finally said. “Just when we’re getting to know each other.”