In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (6 page)

“Yeah, the ExecuStay.” Phoebe’s not even sure she’s still registered, but it’s good to see Adam off their secondhand couch, so she tells him to give her a few minutes and she’ll come along. “Just lemme brush my hair.” She starts to run fingers through her short black bob, but he reaches for her hand.

“Don’t—it’s sexy like that.”

It is; she knows.

After he booked the pilot and they started sleeping together, Adam had suggested she chop the heavy, straight hair that had hung halfway down her back since sixth grade. He’d said it would accentuate her features, make her more distinctive. Following the cut, she’d booked two crappy local print ads through her crappy modeling agency and had gotten even more phone numbers slipped to her at the hostess stand at Rosebud. But it’s been weeks since she and Adam have had sex and, as they never bothered discussing what it meant when they started screwing, they’d certainly not gotten around to analyzing what it means now that they’re not. Phoebe’s been waiting for him to say
anything.

His hand still on her arm, him noticing she looks good—this could be that moment.

He lets her wrist go; it’s not.

“When I was in high school, they let everyone over eighteen leave early to vote.” His voice takes on the gauzy nostalgia it has had since
Goners
was pronounced a no-go and he started idealizing the small Florida town where he grew up. “I don’t think my grandfather’s ever forgiven me for going for Clinton.”

She’d still been seventeen in November 1992, but Oliver had been of age, and when they were in love and telling each other everything, he’d confessed that he’d been confused by the punch cards in the voting booth. Kissing him, she’d whispered they should go back to her dad’s house, because she’d “never fucked a voter before.” (She’d actually never fucked anyone at that point but was trying on her sexuality and liked the way it sounded.) Now that’s the kind of line she’ll throw out at an audition to show she’s tougher than she actually is, something to say when flirting with the bartenders and waiters so they’ll remember to tip her out at the end of a shift. With Oliver, it had been different—eight years ago, sex had been a concept linked to love.

Adam suggests they walk to their polling place, since it’s just down the street.

“
Nobody walks in LA,
” she sings in her best New Wave voice, and when he laughs, she feels herself smile, excited she made it happen.

The natural light in their basement apartment is so limited that, stepping outside, she’s temporarily blinded by the sun. Tripping over broken concrete, Phoebe grabs Adam’s biceps for support. He pats her fingers. Neither one lets go when she’s stable.

“Are you going home for Thanksgiving?” he asks. “Your father
and
your brother called again last night.”

“So everyone can tell me I’m wasting my life? No thanks.”

Adam shrugs. “I like your parents.”

The feeling wasn’t entirely mutual. Six weeks ago, her father and Gennifer had been in town and taken Adam and her to The Palm. While Gen had squeezed Phoebe’s arm in the ladies’ room and pronounced Adam “a doll,” her dad had barely contained a grimace when she’d said Adam was an actor, and he’d taken strange issue with Adam calling him “Dr. Fisher” instead of Larry.

Phoebe doesn’t mention this. Nor does she ask if Adam is going to Florida. In February, after he shot the
Goners
pilot and he and Phoebe were hooking up, Adam had flown his mother out to visit, but he never goes home.

She tells him Melissa, another hostess at the restaurant, is having an orphans’ Thanksgiving in Culver City (doesn’t ask if he slept with Melissa, who had asked Phoebe for his number last year after Phoebe and Adam’s acting class had come in for drinks).

“We can do that if you stick around,” Adam says, and she thinks this might be his way of asking her to.

“That’d be fun.”

Still arm in arm, they walk the remaining ten minutes in silence. In her vampire life of afternoon auditions and Rosebud shifts all night, she’s rarely out in the world this early and is surprised by the sheer number of people (in cars, mostly in cars) being productive. A lot of them are actually lining up to vote at the hotel lobby.

“We could skip this and get coffee.” Gently she squeezes his shoulder, sinewy muscle under cotton. “Gore’s winning California with or without us.”

“You trust someone else to make decisions for you?” He grins; he may not be the best-looking guy in LA, not even the best-looking guy in their queue (it
is
Studio City), but when he smiles, she’d challenge any jaded person in this whole jaded city not to turn to microwaved butter. It’s the first time she’s seen it in a long time, and she wonders if this means Adam is off the couch for good, ready to take his rightful place as the only aspiring actor in this ghetto of aspiring actors she’s certain will make it. Wonders if tonight she’ll be fucking another voter.

*   *   *

The election has all but been called for Gore by the time Phoebe pulls open Rosebud’s famous bronze door around six.

Other than the sleek television sets above the bar, the place looks almost the same as it does in the pictures from the forties and fifties, when Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr., and Marilyn Monroe used to sip champagne cocktails and nibble veal chops in red leather banquettes.

“Hey, dollface.” Burke—the flamboyant fan-favorite bartender—waves her to the bar lining one wall of the enormous restaurant’s front room. “Try this.” He hands her a tumbler of something fruity-smelling and brown.

Taking a sip, she shudders.

“It’s a Tennessee—rye whiskey, cherry liqueur, and lemon juice,” he says. “Looks like Gore’s gonna win, so I figured we needed an appropriate cocktail.”

Two hours and 180 tables later, things are beginning to look a lot less sure for Gore, and Burke is mixing a drink called Texas Tea. On the TVs mounted between the shelves of liquor bottles, the NBC political guy is doing something wonky with a whiteboard every time Phoebe peeks over. By ten the place is packed, everyone maudlin. From what she gathers between seating guests, Florida has now been given to Bush.

A cheer erupts around eleven, but she doesn’t have time to see what’s going on because Jake James, Commander Jason Bryce himself, sashays past four waiting parties and requests a table for his group of six stoned-looking dudes in jeans and T-shirts. A check of the book isn’t necessary; Phoebe knows he doesn’t have a reservation, and all the large tables are booked until the kitchen closes at midnight.

“We’d love something outside,” Jake James says without actually looking at her. It’s a consolation that in her four-inch heels she’s taller than him.

His last few movies were box office and critical roadkill, and Jake has done his tour of the rehab circuit, but he’s still the biggest name in Rosebud at the moment, and Jerry, the manager, will be pissed if she can’t instantly accommodate him.

“We’re a little busy now,” Phoebe says lightly, signaling for Melissa to help pacify the grumbling customers. “Gimme a sec, and I’ll get you set up in our garden area.”

“Awesome. What’s your name, honey?” He continues before she can answer. “You must be new; I know all the hot girls here.”

Phoebe smiles, doesn’t mention she’s seated him twice in the past year, each time without a reservation.

Busboys install a makeshift table in the restaurant’s garden—prime real estate that remains out of paparazzi range while still boasting a view of the Hollywood sign. A four-top and a six-top have to be repositioned, customers midway through meals suddenly crammed into spaces far too small to adequately maneuver a knife and fork. Luckily, both tables are groups of tourists excited all the stories about Rosebud in the guidebooks are right—
the stars do eat here!

Fifteen minutes later Melissa returns from seating a studio head outside and hands Phoebe a glass of criminally overpriced champagne.

“From Mr. James.” Melissa rolls her eyes conspiratorially, but there’s also an edge of jealousy. With long blond hair and an intense suntan, Melissa is the opposite flavor of Phoebe (if choices are limited to attractive, white would-be actresses). “He wants you to join him in a toast.”

Returning the eye roll, Phoebe takes a sip, though it’s strictly against Rosebud policy to drink on the clock. Weaving her way through the obstacle course of tables, plants, and people, she feels excitement build in her throat, decides she should give Jake her number when he asks, even though all the tabloids say he’s a prick and still dating that redheaded pop tart who sings “Chasing Nothing,” even though Phoebe kind of wishes Adam wouldn’t want her to.

Jake waves her over and takes her hand while the tourists and regulars all stare.

“I know you used a little magic to get us out here, so thank you,” he says, then raises his glass. The guys at his table follow. “To indecision.”

As they clink flutes, she’s starting to think he might not be the cad he’s always made out to be, then he leans in, whispers in her ear, “Downstairs men’s room. Second stall, five minutes.”

It’s not as though she has to go. Jerry may take care of celebrities, but that doesn’t include whoring out unwilling staff. And boning Jake James probably won’t help her career—a lesson she’s learned over and over in the seven years she’s been in LA. But on the off chance it might … she’s slept with worse for less.

Which is how she ends up in the semisecret basement bathroom, back pressed against a stall divider while the actor who saved countless worlds in the
Eons & Empires
movies jacks his fairly unformidable penis and squeezes her left breast so hard she worries the implant might pop.

When she was eight, she’d crashed her bike and needed fifteen stitches in her calf. Watching the doctor sew her up was disturbing, and she twitched and screamed until her father told her to imagine the whole family at Disney World. Before she knew it, the doctor was finished. Over the past seventeen years, the fantasy has morphed from Chase and her on the Dumbo ride to Oliver and her in her high school bedroom, but the idea is still the same.

She checks back in with her body just in time to avoid getting jizz on her thigh when Jake James finishes. He stops panting long enough to kiss her neck.

“Rock and roll, right?” he says. She can’t imagine there’s a required response, wonders if she’s hit some rock bottom of starfuckery.

In a startlingly chivalrous move considering what’s just happened, Jake stands guard at the door while she reassembles herself, then checks the hallway to make sure the path is clear. As little more than one boob was involved in the whole shebang, a quick yank to straighten her dress is all it takes to be presentable and back at the hostess stand.

“Soooo?” Melissa asks, and for a breath-catching second, Phoebe worries someone saw them in the bathroom. “Did you give him your digits?”

“He didn’t ask.”

And Jake James continues not to ask, doesn’t even say good-bye when his group slithers out the famous door to a waiting SUV an hour later.

They’re so slammed, Phoebe doesn’t understand that Jake’s toast was about the presidential race until after 1:00
A.M.
, when she and Melissa are sitting on bar stools, sipping Texas Tea, aching feet discreetly slipped out of high heels.

“Your hottie roommate coming?” Melissa asks.

“Probably not,” Phoebe says; the mention of Adam is a rabbit punch, even if her five minutes in the bathroom with Jake James was hardly a betrayal. Before he decided a better use of his time was screaming at the TV, Adam had tiptoed back in plenty of mornings smelling of sex and another woman’s perfume—even
after
he booked
Goners
and he and Phoebe started sleeping together. “He’s really into this election.”

“Bummer,” Melissa says.

In terms of hours logged, Melissa is probably Phoebe’s best friend in the city. Hired by Jerry on the same rainy Thursday two years earlier, they’ve double-teamed through horrible shifts, covered for each other so they could make auditions, and danced with Burke at every gay club in West Hollywood. And yet Phoebe had never mentioned when she started hooking up with Adam and isn’t about to bring it up now. But she finds herself thinking about her long-ago life in Chicago, of Evie and Nicole, of her brother making sure that her dates were good guys.

*   *   *

It’s after 3:00
A.M.
by the time Phoebe is fumbling with her lock, hands fat and dumbed by the dull sick that comes from hovering on the brink of drunk. On the other side of the door, Tom Brokaw is on the TV offering commentary, and Adam is talking back.

“Thiz—iz my fault,” Adam slurs, standing less than a foot from the screen. He waves a drunken finger at her. “I’m from Florida, should’ve staaaaayed.” Then he adds a variation on his mantra since the network said they were no longer considering
Goners
as even a midseason replacement. “Not like I wazzz doing anything here.”

He’s in the same clothes, though there’s no evidence he made it to the gym. Eyes half closed, he sways, catches himself on Brokaw’s two-dimensional chin. If she
was
his girlfriend, Phoebe would probably be required to deliver a lecture, but she rents, doesn’t own.

“Your one vote would have changed everything?” In a few hours she’ll understand this is oddly close to the truth.

“Thaz right.”

Spinning on the toe of the expensive running shoes he’d gotten with a bit of the
Goners
money, Adam staggers to the hall closet and removes his
not
unformidable penis from his pants. Phoebe quickly grabs his arm and leads him to the bathroom, where he recognizes the toilet and continues. Not trusting his aim or stability, she leans against the sink, watches his clear ninety-proof spray into the bowl.

Turning toward her, he offers the goofy version of his kilowatt smile, asks, “Wanna hold it?” The hand on his dick follows his eyes, and she jumps to avoid the arc of urine.

“Adam!”

A repentant bad puppy, he bows his head to the task at hand, offers rambling apologies. Even after he’s retucked, he doesn’t look at her, and she feels guilty for snapping.