I'm Glad About You(90)

“It means sucking up.”

“Just Hollywood then.”

“I have a friend in the PR department here, I’m trying to get them to throw me a bone,” he admitted.

“What happened to the Times?”

“Newspapers are a dying breed.”

“You got fired,” she guessed.

“I didn’t want to work there anyway.” This got him the flash of a grin, not a full laugh. He couldn’t quite tell if she was upset or her makeup was askew. Or maybe it was the hair. It made her seem frail. The few times they had met, he had found her to be many things, but “frail” was never one of them.

“What are you doing, wandering the lot alone, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he noted, glancing about. “Where are your minders? Where’s the entourage?”

“I escaped while they weren’t looking.”

“Escaped what?”

“Oh, do you think I’m going to answer that? You’re a reporter.”

“That is using the term very loosely.” Okay, that made her laugh. For a moment, her whole being came into focus and then evaporated. She shot a look over her shoulder, the swift paranoid glance of someone under siege.

“What’s with your hair?”

“Don’t you like it?”

“I just like your normal color.”

He hadn’t meant it to wound her; he had hoped that it would make her laugh again. But she reacted strangely. She turned and looked behind her, making sure that nobody had heard that—at least, that’s what he thought she was doing—until a mere moment later, when she reached up and yanked at the black mop on her head, and revealed that underneath there was another head of hair.

“It’s a wig,” she announced. “They wigged me.”

He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t either, for a moment. Then, in a simple unself-conscious moment of exhaustion, her hand fell to her side, her fingers loosened, and the wig dropped.

“Can we get out of here?” she asked. “I mean, do you have a car, or anything?”

“Of course I have a car, it’s LA,” he told her. “Do you need a ride?”

“A ride would be great.”

The wig lay forgotten at her feet.

She never specified where she wanted a ride to, but they ended up at Venice Beach, where they sat on a bench and watched the crazies and the Rollerbladers. Alison took off her shoes and ran to wade in the surf, which was a worry, as the East Coaster in him was certain the water was full of pesticides and jellyfish. But she was having so much fun he couldn’t bring himself to mention either pesticides or jellyfish, although he didn’t go in himself. He just watched. She was gorgeous.

Seth knew he was being stupid. She wasn’t a person anymore; she was a story, and a big one. He could sell this as Roman Holiday for starlets, complete with surreptitious candids taken with his iPhone, but it would create real problems for her if he did. Would it be worth it? He watched her, alert, as she rolled up her khakis and splashed around with the unthinking abandon of someone who had grown up without an ocean nearby. That’s a costume, he remembered. She’s still wearing her costume.

Alison was drenched by the time he insisted she get out of that filthy water, so he bought her a Venice Beach sweatshirt, and a pair of sweatpants too. As she ripped off her wet clothes and changed in the backseat of his rental car, he willed himself not to watch in the rearview mirror. That made her laugh too. “It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked,” she reminded him. But to him it felt as if while they had been moving forward in time, he had somehow slipped backward into a more innocent past. Maybe it was her; she was in all seriousness kind of acting like a twelve-year-old. She climbed over the seat in her ridiculous sweats and dropped into the seat beside him, looking around with an unguarded curiosity. “There presumably is someplace to get a drink around here,” she announced.

There were many places to get drinks three blocks from Venice Beach, but she rejected them all (“sleazy,” “gay,” “yuppie bullshit”) and in the end they bought a bottle of vodka and parked in a turnaround up on Mulholland, where they could look at the lights in the valley and get drunk without anyone bothering them.

“So is that the demimonde?” she asked, tipping the half-empty bottle toward the city flung beneath them. The night sky was clear, and the sun having just set, the mountains hovered in a silent, crisp blue shadow. The lines of light spilling toward them across the miles of uninterrupted plain were eerie and beautiful.

“That’s the valley,” he answered. “I would have to say, definitively, that the valley is not the demimonde.”

“Why not?”

“Too many poor people.”

“There are plenty of losers with no cash in the demimonde.”

“Not in my demimonde.”

“Your demimonde?”

“Are you kidding? I’m an entertainment reporter. The demimonde is my turf,” he informed her.

“The demimonde is my turf,” she reminded him.

“Well, then you know I’m right. The valley is not the turf for the demimonde. The demimonde is up here in the hills, in the hidden homes of movie stars such as yourself.”

“You know, it’s so weird. I would have thought that you had to want to be a movie star, to be a movie star. All those people out there trying desperately to be movie stars. Like, working at it. And with me I’m just hanging around one day and someone says, ‘Here, put on this wig.’”