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.’”
“I have a feeling it was a little more complicated than that.”
“Not all that much.”
She took another hit off the vodka bottle with just enough exhaustion to lead him to suspect she was lying. “The wig isn’t what’s made you a movie star.”
“I’m not so sure it isn’t the wig,” she said. “Or the wig and the dresses. Honestly, the acting isn’t anywhere near as difficult. You spend hours in hair and makeup, and wardrobe, you spend years in wardrobe, and then like sixty people change their mind about your costume and your hair, even the head of the fucking studio is obsessing on what I wear, it just takes forever. And then I get to the set, and the scenes are really not all that—you know, half the time, I’m just running from one set of rocks to another, yelling, ‘Come on!’ Occasionally I get to throw a grenade. I was doing more acting on that terrible television show.”
“You have good scenes in this.” She looked at him, surprised. “I have a friend in the Xerox department. She slipped me the script.”
“A friend in the Xerox department. That’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one.”
“It’s not a euphemism; they have Xerox departments, and I have friends there. And none of them are in the demimonde, let me reassure you. There are no Xerox departments in the demimonde.”
“There are no actresses there either, let me assure you.”
“No, the actresses are all in the theater, starving.” He knew plenty of them, and they were no fun. OCD losers who lived in a constant state of rage because they couldn’t get cast in anything, and when they did get cast the plays were so bad no one came to see them. Plus they got paid next to nothing. Then they proceeded to lord their Commitment to Art over any actor out there who did manage to land a money gig. Like Alison. He was sure they all hated her. Certainly her old friend Lisa had nothing good to say about her.
“You ever hear from Lisa?” Alison asked, as if she were reading his mind.
“Now and then.”
“She won’t talk to me. She’s convinced I stole you from her.”
“That’s not what she thinks.”
“Oh ho.” Alison glanced over at him. “What does she think?”
“She thinks that the demimonde would be a fun place to live, and she’s jealous that you get to live there, and she doesn’t.”
“So how’d you end up here?” she asked. He’d asked himself that question, on plenty of drunken nights. How was it that no amount of money, looks, talent, pedigree, education could extricate him from this petty, demeaning, and meaningless livelihood; why couldn’t he shake himself out of it, write that novel, run off to Africa to report about child soldiers, research a book on China’s stunning takeover of global capitalism? Why couldn’t he do that? He himself had taken every step down the path to the nihilistic cultural abyss which was entertainment reporting—there was no choice that he hadn’t made with full knowledge of where it was leading. But there had been some whispered promise along the way, this is how you get to where you’re going, this isn’t the destination, this is power, you need to build up your power, make a name for yourself, get to know people, this is how writers rise.
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you,” he reminded her.
“Is this an interview?”
“You’re lucky it’s not. You could get in big trouble for saying shit like this to a reporter. You know not to do that, right?”