Текст книги "Spin"
Автор книги: C. D. Reiss
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SPIN.
Songs of Corruption – Book One
C.D. Reiss
one.
Oh, Jonathan.
I mentally rolled my eyes, if such a thing were possible, and kept my physical eyes focused on the woman singing. She had a lovely voice. It wasn’t quite like a bird, but more like a dozen of them layered one on top of the other. The effect was hypnotic.
I glanced at my brother again. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah?”
“You just agreed that the Angels were superior to the Dodgers.”
He looked away from her, and I sensed the air between them rip. I hadn’t felt anything but annoyance with his lack of attentiveness until he looked at me again, and his entire face changed from voracious and single-minded to the usual bemused and arrogant.
“This season?”
“Are you even paying attention?” I asked.
“Look, you have six sisters and me. All your sisters will tell you to forget Daniel Brower completely. I’m telling you to forgive him if you have to, but if you’re going to, just do it and drop it. I’m the one you keep talking to about him, and I keep giving you the same answer. So it sounds like you want to go back to him.”
He was in love with his ex-wife, who had left him for another man. Of course he’d be the most forgiving, and of course he was the one I chose to be with.
“I can’t. Every time I look at him, I can’t stop seeing him having sex with that girl.”
“Don’t look at him.”
I folded my hands on the table. I shouldn’t see my ex. Ever. But he’d called, and I had lunch with him, like a damned fool. He’d said it was business, and in a way, it was. We had a mortgage together, and bills, and I knew the intimacies of his campaign for mayor about as well as I’d known the intimacies of his body. But with so much dead weight between us, I had trouble eating. In the end, of course, he’d asked for me back, and I’d declined while holding back tears.
“He keeps asking to see me,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, Theresa. He’s stringing you along.” Jonathan tipped his drink to his lips and watched the woman standing by the piano like a hawk observing a mouse. “I thought I had it bad.”
I felt a sudden ball of tension wrap up in my chest. I couldn’t exactly place it, but it irritated me. “Do you know her? The singer.”
“We have a thing later tonight.”
“Good, because I was going to say you might want to introduce yourself before you slobber on her. Maybe dinner and a show.”
He smiled a big, wide Jonathan grin. After his wife left, he’d turned into a womanizing prick, but he rarely let us see that side of him. He was always a gentleman, until I saw him look at that singer. It made me uncomfortable. Not because he was my brother, which should have been enough, but because of an uneasy, empty feeling I chased away.
“Go to Tahoe or something for a few weeks,” he said. “Slap some skis on. You’re giving yourself an ulcer.”
“I’m fine.”
The musicians stopped, and people clapped. She was good. My brother just applauded with his eyes and tipped his glass to her. When she saw him, her jaw tightened with anger. Apparently, he knew her well enough to piss her off.
He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I know damn well how not fine you are.”
I looked him square in the eyes, and I knew his hurt matched mine. He healed himself by seducing whoever he fancied. I didn’t think I could use the same strategy. It stopped mattering when the singer made a beeline for our table.
“Hi, Jonathan,” she said, a big, fake smile draped across her face.
“Monica,” he said. “This is Theresa.”
“That was beautiful,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“You were incredible,” Jonathan said. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”
“I’ve never heard of a man trying to sandwich another woman between fingering me and fucking me in the same day.”
I almost spit out my Cosmo. Jonathan laughed. I felt sorry for the girl. She looked as if she was going to cry. I hated my brother just then. Hated him with a dogged vehemence because not only was he messing with her feelings, he still looked at her as though he wanted to eat her alive. When I saw how she looked at him, I knew he would win. He would have her and a dozen others, and she wouldn’t even know what was happening. I couldn’t watch.
“I’m going to the ladies’,” I said and slid out of the booth, not looking back.
I leaned against the back of the stall, staring at the single strip of toilet paper dangling off the roll. I had a few squares in my bag, just in case my brother brought me to yet another dump, but I didn’t want to use them. I wanted to dig into that feeling of emptiness and find the bottom of it.
You always have a few squares in your bag. And two Advil. And a tampon.
Daniel’s voice listing the stuff I carried for emergencies; his face, smiling as we went out the door for some charity thing; him in a tux, me in something, holding a satin clutch into which a normal woman couldn’t fit more than a tube of lipstick and a raisin.
“You got your whole kit in there?” he’d asked.
“Of course.”
“Space and time are your slaves.”
I’d been pleased at the way he looked at me, as if he couldn’t be more impressed and proud, as if I ruled the world and his servitude was the natural order. Pleased as a king opening a pie and finding the miracle of four-and-twenty blackbirds.
But though I’d been with him for seven years, he’d never looked at me the way Jonathan looked at that singer. Never. Maybe that was why Daniel had had sex with his speechwriter. He didn’t revere her; he fucked her.
Daniel had always called me Tink, short for Tinkerbell, because of my curvy, petite frame. A sprightly, delicate fairy. Not someone you looked at hungrily.
I saw the singer in the hall, looking distant and resolute at the same time, as if she was convincing herself of something. She stopped short when she saw me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was rude and unbecoming.”
I was going to deny it, but I was struck by a distraction that cut me to the core. I smelled pine trees, deep in the forest, damp in the morning after a night of campfires and singing. The burning char and dew mingled in the song-like trails of cigarette smoke, rising and disappearing. And then it was gone.
“My brother’s an asshole, so I don’t blame you.” I regretted that almost immediately. I didn’t talk like that, especially not about family. I took her hand and squeezed it. “We both loved your voice.”
“Thank you. I have to go. I’ll try to see you on the way out.” She slipped her hand away and walked toward the dressing room.
I caught the scent again and looked in her direction, as if I could see the smell’s source. It could have come from anyone. It could have been the gorgeous black lady with the sweet smile. It could have been the plate of saucy meat that crossed my path. Could have been the waft of parking lot that came through the door before it snapped closed.
But it wasn’t.
I knew it like I knew tax code; it was him. The man in the dark suit and thin pink tie, the full lips and two-day beard. His eyes were black as a felony, and they stayed on me as his body swung into the booth.
The smell had come from him, not the other man getting into the booth. It was in his gaze, which was locked on me, disarming me. He was beautiful to me. Not my type, not at all. But the slight cleft in his chin, the powerful jaw, the swoop of dark hair falling over his forehead seemed right. Just right. I swallowed. My mouth had started watering, and my throat had gotten dry. I got a flash of him above me, with that swoop of hair rocking, as he fucked me so hard the sheets ripped.
He turned to say something to the hostess, and I took a gulp of air. I’d forgotten to breathe. I put my hands to my shirt buttons to make sure they were fastened, because I felt as if he’d undressed me.
I had two ways to return to Jonathan: behind the piano, which was the crowded, shorter way, or in front, which was less populated but longer.
I walked in front of the piano. The less crowded way. The longer way. The way that took me right past the man in the pink tie.
I wanted him to look at me, and he spent the entire length of our proximity talking earnestly to the baby-faced, bow-lipped man next to him. I caught the burned, dewy pine scent that made no sense and kept walking.
I felt a tug on my wrist, a warm sensation that tingled. His hand was on me, gentle but resolved. I stopped, looking at him as his hand brought me to his face. He drew me down until he was whisper close. A sudden rush of potential went from the back of my neck to the space between my legs, waking me where I thought I’d died.
I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t speak.
If he kissed me, I would have opened my mouth for him. That, I knew for sure.
“Your shoe,” he said with an accent I couldn’t place.
“What?” I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes: brown, wide, with longer eyelashes than should be legal, hooded under arched brows proportioned for expression.
Was I wearing shoes? Was I standing? Did I need to take in air? Eat? Or could I just live off the energy between us?
He pointed at my heel. “You brought yourself a souvenir from the ladies’ room.”
He was beautiful, even as he smirked with those full lips. Did I have to turn away to see what he was talking about? It was that or put my tongue down his throat. I looked down.
I had a trail of toilet paper on my stiletto.
“Thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure.” He let go of my hand.
The space where he’d touched felt like a missed opportunity, and I went to the bathroom to return my souvenir.
two.
After I’d kicked Daniel out of my loft, Katrina moved in. Living alone had thrust me hip deep into depression, and her things around the house changed my feeling of complete emptiness into a feeling that something was right even when everything was wrong.
For her part, she was dealing with a career that had crashed and burned when she filed a lawsuit against the studio that had funded her Oscar-nominated movie. She said there were profits she was entitled to share; they insisted the production operated at a loss. Fancy, indefensible, and legal accounting proved them right, leaving her bank account empty and her career in tatters.
She and I were cars passing on opposite sides of the freeway. As a nearly-but-not-quite-famous director, she was on set at odd hours, and when she wasn’t, she was trying to hold her production together with spit and chewing gum. She couldn’t pay much, so her crew left for scale-paying gigs and had to be replaced, or they dropped out of a day’s shooting with grave apologies but no replacement. Set designers, assistant camera people, gaffers did it for love and opportunity. Production assistants, also called PAs, were the unskilled and barely paid necessities on set, and most likely to drop out.
Her script supervisor, the person responsible for the continuity of the shots, couldn’t work nights or weekends. After Katrina fired her line producer, who was in charge of keeping ducks in rows, she discovered he hadn’t hired a second script supervisor. She shrugged it off as the risk one takes in “the business,” then segued into a long pitch about my attention to detail, my love of consistency and order, and my eagle eye for continuity. She’d asked—no, begged—me to step in for evenings and weekends.
I met her on set under a viaduct downtown at six a.m. The food truck was set up, and the gaffers and grips were just arriving.
“Let’s face it, Tee Dray,” she said, pointing the straw of her Big Gulp at me, “it’s not like they gave me enough money to pay union for weekend calls.” She wore a baseball cap over a tight black pixie cut that only she could pull off. A Vietnamese Mexican with an athletic build, she carried herself as if she owned the joint. Every joint. When we were at Carlton Prep together, she was a bossy outcast and the most interesting person at school.
“You’re paying me on the back end,” I said.
“Sure,” she said with a strong smile. “Forty percent, but I keep the books.”
We hovered over the coffee and fruit. It was still dark, the ambient hiss of the freeway above as low as it would ever be.
“You know what to do?” she asked.
“I have the binder from last time. Track shots, cuts, who’s wearing what, where their hands are, off-book dialogue, et cetera.”
“I really appreciate this,” she said.
“You deserve a comeback. I’d finance the whole thing, you know.”
“Then I’d feel obligated to sleep with you.” She winked. A flirtatious bisexual, she’d offered herself to me more than once, joking, then not, then joking again.
“I think I’m getting to the point I’d take you up on it,” I joked back.
We’d lost touch during college then reconnected when she got representation at WDE, where I ran the client accounting department. She had directed an action movie with heart and suspense that filled theaters for months. It was in the lexicon of greats, nominated for awards, watched and rewatched years after release. When she’d lost her contract with Overland Studios because of her lawsuit, I knew all the intimate fiscal details because I worked for her agent. She could cry on my shoulder or vent her frustration without explaining the nuances of studio math, or as she called it, ass-rape on a ledger.
A studio like Overland loaned a production company money to make a film then billed themselves interest. The interest compounded for the months of production then into the years following release until a blockbuster like Katrina’s wound up with no profits. No amount of litigation could erase the foul and totally legal practice.
Her current self-made episodic piece, to be shot in diners and under viaducts, was financed through a tiny holding in Qatar. Written, directed, and produced by Katrina Ip, it could put her back on the map. I couldn’t have rooted harder for anyone’s success.
“You need a man,” she said. “A rebound cock to fuck the sad right out of you.”
“Nice way to talk.”
“The truth isn’t always nice. Let me set you up with my brother, and you can set me up with yours.”
“You don’t have a brother.”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying. What about Michael?” She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head. The lead actor in the production had made it clear he was interested in me and a couple of other attractive women on set. He was a man whore, but a nice one.
“I’m not ready,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart. It’ll come back. Some time.”
I pressed my lips together, and though the sun was just peeking over the skyline, it was light enough for her to see the prickly heat brush my cheeks.
“Theresa,” she said, “call is in four minutes. I’m going to have no time to talk. So tell me now. And fast.”
It was a miracle we’d even had time to talk already. Directing a movie was like having a wedding every day for four months. You threw the party but couldn’t enjoy it.
“I went out with Jonathan last night, and there was a guy. A man. I had toilet paper on my shoe and—”
“You? Miss Perfect?”
“Yes. I was so embarrassed.” I dropped my voice to a near whisper when Edgar, her assistant director, approached with a clipboard and a problem. “He was breathtaking.”
She leaned on one hip. “Los Angeles is wall-to-wall breathtaking.”
“He was different. When he touched me—”
“He touched you?”
“Just my wrist. But it was like sex. I swear I’ve never felt anything like that.”
“You tell me this now?”
Edgar got within earshot, and I dropped my eyes. Even thinking about that man in range of a stranger made me feel shameful.
“Kat,” Edgar spoke fast, “honey, the LAPD—”
“Give them the forms,” she shot back.
“But they—”
“Can wait five minutes.” She pulled me behind a trailer. The hum of the generator almost drowned her out. “You cried on my lap for hours over Danny Dickhead. Now you have a hundred-twenty seconds to tell me about this new one.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I will cut you.” She didn’t mean it, of course. Even coming from the wrong side of Pico Boulevard, her threats were all affect.
“Brown eyes. Black hair.”
“You must be off blonds since Dickerino Boy.”
“Six feet. Built. My god, his hands. They weren’t narrow or soft. They were wide, and... I’m not making any sense. But when he looked at me, my skin went hot. All I could think about was… you know.”
“You got a number?”
“Not even a name.”
Her phone dinged, and three people approached at once. Her day had begun. She turned away from me but flipped her head back. “You just got woken up.”
three.
Ten years ago, I couldn’t have gotten a donut three blocks away from my loft without getting jacked. In Los Angeles at the turn of the second millennium, the wealthy moved from the city’s perimeter back to the center. And if anyone was “the wealthy,” it was me.
We lived in an old corset and girdle factory. It had been abandoned in the sixties, used as a warehouse by a stonecutter and cabinet maker, then expanded and converted into lofts just before the Great Recession. The units had gone at fire sale prices. I could afford whatever I needed, but Daniel had insisted on paying half, and the recession hit him hard. So a short sale downtown loft at a million and change it was.
And I was stuck with it. He moved to Mar Vista after I kicked him out, and I commuted across town to Beverly Hills to run client accounting at WDE.
Studios did not cut checks to talent; they cut checks to their agents. The agents deducted their ten percent fee and sent the client the rest. Thus, Hollywood agencies were the beating heart of the industry, the nexus through which all money circulated.
And most of them were still cutting paper checks.
I’d been hired to move the company from paper to wire transfer, and I’d done it. I’d convinced old guard agents, grizzled actors, below the line talent, banks, and business managers to get into the twenty-first century. Many of our clients still insisted on bike-messengered and armored-trucked paper checks, but they were more and more the minority. New clients weren’t given a paper option.
I was still necessary to manage the rest of the paper trail, chase studios for payment, and run the department, but I felt my job was done. The only thing worse than the idea of living with my job was the idea of living without it, of drifting into a life without purpose. My sister Fiona had made an art form of it in her youth, and I’d watched her slip into debauchery. I’d do anything to not be her.
But there I was, closing my eyes and seeing those hated checks. I heard the tones of my follow-up call to the messenger service, the tip tap as Pam logged them in one by one, and I thought, I want to burn it all and then slip into oblivion. I never did. I dreamed about it sometimes while I spaced off looking at the numbers or listening to one of the agents throw his anxiety on the table when a client’s check was a day late.
I thought about law school then dismissed the idea. If I became a lawyer as well as an accountant, I’d be so valuable I’d be miserable.
“Hey, Fly Girl.” Gene stood over my desk. “Rolf Wente’s business manager needs you to follow up with Warner’s.”
I tapped my phone log. “We have calls out to them.”
“You look tired. How was the weekend? Do the whole party thing?”
If I didn’t answer, and if I wasn’t specific, he’d spend fifteen minutes telling me about his party habits. “Went to dinner the other night. We saw this lounge act. The singer was terrific. Faulkner. Something Faulkner. Like the writer.”
“Never heard of her,” he said.
“Nice voice. Original.”
“Whyncha send me the deets? Maybe we’ll get out there on the WDE dime. Bring the assistants. Make them feel loved.”
“Okay.” I turned back to my work, hoping he’d leave.
“And get on Warner’s, okay? We lose old Rolf, and we’re up the ass on the dry highway. Let me know about the singer by the end of day.”
I didn’t realize that by suggesting a musician, I was obligated to ride the company dime to yet another show at Frontage. I was exhausted even thinking about it, until I remembered the man with the pink tie. I grabbed my phone and went outside.
I walked by Barney’s. It was bridal month, apparently. High end designers had their white gowns in the window. Jeremy St. James had a jewel-encrusted corset over a skirt no more modest than a strip of gauze. Barry Tilden layered dove white feathers on skirt worthy of Scarlet O’Hara, topping it all with a bodice made purely of silver zippers.
“Deirdre?” I said when I heard her pick up. “You there?”
“What time is it?”
“Ten. What are you doing next Thursday night?”
Sheets rustled. “I have to be at the shelter late.”
“Wanna go out?”
“I can’t do anything fancy, Tee. It makes me sick.” My sister Deirdre despised the consumptions of the rich. She lived in a studio the size of a postage stamp and put every penny of her trust fund interest toward feeding the hungry. It was noble to the point of self-destruction.
“It’s not fancy. Kind of dumpy. I don’t want to go with just work people. They all look at me like they’re sorry for me about Daniel. I hate it.”
“I’m not a good buffer.”
“You’re perfect. You keep me on my toes.”
She sighed. “All right. You’re buying, though. I’m broke.”
“No problem.”
We hung up, and I fist-pumped the ivory Sartorial Sandwich in the last window. I needed Deirdre there to give me a reason to escape the WDE crowd, especially if the breathtaking man was there.
