Trudy dropped by the set a few times, always in stylish shades, ostensibly to check out the available guys, but really to bug the director, Ted, into giving her a part. Ted would never take the bait, so Trudy would do the next best thing—make Leah go out with her for drinks before she had to go pick up her kids at one relative’s house or another.
Their favorite watering hole was a place on Sunset Boulevard, where the drinks were way too high for Leah to afford—she’d spent most of her War of the Soccer Moms windfall on a new car—but Trudy insisted it was a great place to see and be seen by all the right people.
“Who are the right people?” Leah asked once.
Trudy shrugged behind her John Lennon shades. “Directors. Producers. People like that. The next big thing is discovered in places like this all the time.”
They both looked around at the other people in the bar. “Do you see anyone you know?” Leah asked.
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
Exactly.
Leah drank water most of the time; Trudy drank Pink Ladies and talked endlessly about her kid (genius), her boyfriend (loser), and what she’d heard about the post-production work on War of the Soccer Moms. It had been three months since production wrapped, with a scheduled release date in another six months, to hit the summer rush.
“The film editing isn’t going very well,” Trudy told Leah one afternoon, nodding as if she was in-the-know, which she wasn’t. But then again, she was an actress and liked the part.
“It isn’t? How come?”
“Because there are a couple of divergent opinions about how it ought to be edited—one side thinks Charlene needs more screen time because she’s the big draw, but get this—” Trudy paused, glanced surreptitiously about to see if anyone was listening in, then leaned forward and whispered loudly, “Apparently, Nicole was blowing the executive producer the whole time! And guess who is the exec’s good golfing buddy?”
“Who?” Leah whispered.
Trudy inched forward a little more. “The head of the studio.” She sat back, clearly pleased with her scoop. “So who do you think is going to get more screen time? Charlene?” she asked, thrusting one hand out, palm up, “or Nicole?” she finished, thrusting the other hand out in the opposite direction. “Do you believe that shit?”
“I don’t know, and I’ll be honest, Trudy—I don’t care,” Leah said. “All I care about is how much screen time I get. And with whom, of course.”
With a snort, Trudy picked up her Pink Lady and took a healthy swallow. “You’re not going to get enough screen time to make a difference to an ant, kiddo. With two stars like Charlene Ribisi and Nicole Redding, the rest of us poor bit players will be lucky to get a toe into a shot,” Trudy said confidently. She suddenly sat up, her eyes shining. “Is Nicole a slut or what? She was blowing the exec producer the whole time she was trying to blow your guy.”
At the mention of “her guy,” Leah almost choked on her water.
“What’s the deal with him, anyway?” Trudy asked. “What happened to him?”
Leah shrugged and looked around the room, avoiding eye contact. “Who knows? It was just one of those production flings, anyway. You know, once it wraps, that’s the end, and everyone is cool with that.”
“Really?” Trudy asked, her brow wrinkling. “Are you cool with that? Because I thought he was so into you.”
Leah shrugged again and pretended to be examining the drink menu.
“Okay, what about the lighting guy?”
“Who?” Leah asked, pretending not to know, hoping Trudy would drop it, knowing it was exactly the wrong thing to do.
So wrong, in fact, that Trudy actually laughed at her. “Don’t give me that crap, girl,” she said cheerfully. “So? Have you heard from him?”
“Oh him,” Leah said flippantly. “No, I haven’t. He went back to Puerto Rico, I think.”
“I thought it was Spain.”
“Spain, Puerto Rico,” Leah said with a flick of her wrist as if they were practically the same country. She’d told so many lies about Juan Carlo the night she came back from the cabin that she couldn’t remember what she’d said any longer.
“That whole thing was so weird,” Trudy doggedly went on.
Leah glanced up over the top of the drink menu. “What was weird?”
“Just you and that guy,” Trudy said thoughtfully. “It was so unlike you.”
“Everyone has a one-night stand now and again,” Leah retorted. “What about you and the sandwich guy?”
“Not the same thing,” Trudy said with a shake of her head. “Because I am that kind of person, so it’s no surprise when I do it. But when you do it, we all sit up and take notice.”
Great, just what any girl wanted to hear. “It was a long time ago,” Leah said, and ducked her head again. “I think I might try one of these martinis,” she added, hoping to divert Trudy to one of her favorite pastimes—drinking.
But Trudy was having none of it. “Michael Raney, that was really weird,” she said, squinting at Leah over her John Lennon sunglasses. “I mean it—he was so into you. We all saw it.”
“You guys saw what you wanted to see.”
“Don’t think so. And I don’t think it was just a production fling.”