What her next move was, she had no idea. She turned a corner, lost, and looked around.
She looked pretty. Ridiculous, but pretty. They had her all dolled up as a sort of femme fatale, but with a modern twist, low-slung khaki trousers, one of those tacky wife-beater undershirts, a little bit of belly button showing, just in case the boys weren’t being driven crazy enough by the rest of it. She looked mad, fed up, almost like she was about to start crying. There was a charming dissonance to it all.
“Hey, movie star,” he called.
Alison raised her hand to shade her eyes in that endless sun. He wondered for a moment why she wasn’t wearing sunglasses, when she smiled.
“Man, they’ll let anyone on these lots,” she observed. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
It was more auspicious than their last meeting, at least you could say that. “I’m stringing for Entertainment Weekly,” Seth informed her.
“Meaning?”
“You’re in Entertainment Weekly often enough, you don’t know what that means?”
“I don’t know what ‘stringing’ means, it sounds like a complicated Ivy League insider code word.”
“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.