“Fuck Gwendolyn. Seriously.”
“She’s very protective of her creation—”
“I am not her creation. She’s not God.”
“No, but her franchise has made you and me and a lot of other people a lot of money. All she wants is to meet. Gavin du Pré personally requested that you meet with her and smooth her feathers.”
“I’m busy this week.”
“No, you’re not.”
I hung up on Siobhan. This lacked gravitas on a smartphone, jabbing at a picture of a button. For a while I lay in bed smoking weed and watching a reality show where face-lifts in Hervé Léger bandage dresses slop martinis around and talk shit on each other. Some of these women have had so much work done their words come out all mushy because they can’t move their lips. With their spooky round eyes and stubby little snouts, they look like cats transformed into humans by an incompetent wizard.
I wondered if I could spend the rest of my life lying around this house, watching TV. I wondered how long it would take for the morning glory to grow over the windows, sealing me in.
I’d been on the verge of being cast in Archangel when Gavin du Pré set down his coffee cup at our breakfast meeting and very quietly and politely asked me to stand up and take off my clothes.
I was surprised for half a second and embarrassed about being dumb enough to have been surprised ever after. We were alone in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills, facing each other across a little white-draped table laden with a silver coffee service and a multi-tiered stand of miniature quiches and tarts and croissants that Gavin had kept telling me to eat before he asked me to get naked. “I promise you won’t get fat from one little croissant,” he’d said. “Look how tiny it is. Just have a taste. A taste won’t hurt you.”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t encountered creeps before. They’re on every set and in every executive hierarchy like they’re mandated by some sort of local creeps union. But the stakes had never been so high, not even close. This is a game changer, Siobhan and I had said to each other when the meeting got scheduled. I’ve never figured out if she knew what she was sending me into. She’d gone out of her way to mention Gavin was married and had daughters around my age—eighteen, then.
Gavin was an inoffensive-looking, beigey, fiftyish guy with full, pale lips and wire-rimmed glasses and pocket squares that artfully complimented his ties. “I need to get a look at you,” he said, and I decided to understand that as a professional need, not a personal one.
I never told Siobhan because I didn’t want her to know I’d actually done it. My uncle Mitch had been dead for a couple of months then, and even though he’d never exactly been “involved” or “protective,” I had a new, hard feeling of aloneness. I hadn’t even hesitated. I’d stood there naked in front of Gavin, and I turned in a little circle when he asked me to, and when he took out his dick and asked me to please suck it, I did.
* * *
—
The day after the day after Jones Cohen, I was lying by my pool watching a vulture circle. The sky in L.A. is full of vultures, sometimes great big spiraling tornadoes of them towering up into the clouds, only people usually don’t look. I was a little surprised, almost insulted, that there weren’t any helicopters spying on me. Were the paparazzi allowed to use those little hobbyist drones? Maybe not, because they would if they could. That should be inscribed over their coat of arms: We Would if We Could.
The doorbell startled me. I thought the paps must have climbed my gate, decided to storm the house. It rang again. I waited for my assistant, Augustina, to deal with it until I remembered I’d sent her home, urgently pressing a packet of edibles into her hand even though she doesn’t like weed. My bodyguard, M.G., was patrolling the perimeter. I heaved myself up, went and looked at the security screen. My neighbor, the venerable Sir Hugo Woolsey （Venerable, venal, venereal, he says）， was leaning close to the camera, waving a bottle of Scotch and shouting “Chicken soup for the philanderer’s soul!” into the intercom like he didn’t trust it to actually transmit or amplify his voice. Hugo dresses like a hipster Nebuchadnezzar and lives with his young and beautiful boyfriend, so it always surprises me when he does old-person stuff with technology.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door. “How’d you get past the gate?”
“You gave Rudy the code ages ago. Don’t you remember? He was making a little delivery.” He mimed pulling on a joint. Hugo’s boyfriend Rudy’s principal responsibilities in life were to keep it tight and to stay current on the best weed available citywide, medical or otherwise. “It’s mayhem down there,” he said, sweeping into the kitchen. “M.G. ought to have a bullwhip to crack at them.”