Bleak Read online

  Being a Moxie project, the listing is inevitably a battleground for the ongoing Moxie-Millie feud, which began with a bang five years ago when Moxie’s boyfriend, teen singing sensation Mark Mumm, guest starred on an episode of Millie Sherwood’s tween hit, Lolly Dolly, and kissed her while a cannon sounded in the background, per the script. (It was the Easter special.) When Moxie heard about the scene—and that it required twenty takes to get it right—she was irate and immediately began calling Millie names in the press. She never actually used the words big fat ho, but a gleeful Perez Hilton reported that it was strongly implied.

  There’s nothing like warring thirteen-year-old girls to up circulation.

  Their fans, perennial tweens themselves, instantly took sides. Either you were a Moxie or a Millie. Either you were a sweet, wronged girl with a broken heart or a slut. In recent years, the roles have switched. Millie has earned a squeaky-clean, virginal reputation and Moxie has become the slut. The fans don’t care. Once a Moxie, always a Moxie.

  There are nine conversations devoted exclusively to the feud. Dontthankme started the most recent one with the subject head Favorite Moxie Characters. “Moxie should play Millie in the movie of Millie’s life!” he or she writes. HiLife_07 doesn’t take that lying down. “MS could play MB better!!!!!!!!” Dontthankme shoots back with “MS can’t even play herself!!!!!!!” Later in the string, someone suggests that the producers of J&J should call the evil character Millie Sherwood.

  I don’t know which character that refers to. They’re all evil in their own way.

  There are other threads concerned with more mundane matters like when auditions are being held and where the shooting is taking place. These posts, remarkably adorable in their naiveté, are my favorite. Imagine believing substantive information is conveyed over IMDB chat boards, that people with real power spend their days surfing discussions about movies that don’t even exist. It’s a network of pimply teenyboppers sitting in their preadolescent bedrooms in buried-deep places like Missoula and Fayetteville worshipping their idols.

  And yet when samson&delilah posts the day before I leave for L.A. that everyone knows Moxie’s not involved anymore, my heart stops.

  Day 863

  I arrive in L.A. with a used Toyota Corolla, three telephone numbers and a check for $21,250. Each one is a disappointment in its own way. I’d wanted to buy an adorable red Miata—in remarkable condition for a ten-year-old car with ninety thousand miles on it—but my parents literally restrained me. My dad took my left arm while my mom took the right. After a long struggle in which I twisted my shoulder, they bribed me with cousin Carol’s cast-off. A doctor in Westport, she just bought herself a BMW M series and was happy to make a donation to the less fortunate.

  The numbers are also courtesy of my parents. The first belongs to the daughter of a woman my mother went to high school with and hasn’t seen in twenty years. As they speak regularly on the phone, my mother doesn’t think it’s at all weird for me to call up the daughter of a person I’ve never met and ask if I can crash for a few days. The second is a distant cousin in the valley named Sloan Meeks. Mom insists he’s a power player in the record industry but when I Google the name all that comes up is an auctioneer in Tallahassee. The third is another old army buddy of Dad’s—he has one for every occasion. I refuse to make the call, so my dad does it for me. With not a spec of understanding for my deep, deep mortification, he triumphantly hands me his address and tells me I’m expected on October 15th by 5 p.m.

  If I don’t arrive by then, Dad and his buddy will call out the military. I can’t imagine anything more humiliating.

  My parents, who don’t have their fingers in every single pie, have nothing to do with the check. It’s my own fault that I forgot my agents split a fifteen percent commission. It’s not hugely significant in the grand scheme of things, but right now, while I’m starting from scratch in a new city, the extra $3,750 would have meant a lot. It costs me almost half that to drive cross country.

  Bob Pirelli and his wife, Janet, are waiting on the doorstep when I arrive at 4:46 on the prescribed day. I’m two hours later than I expected to be but of course I got stuck in traffic.

  Look at me—here for less than a day and already I’m behaving like a local.

  The Pirellis take me inside their split colonial and offer me a startling array of refreshments: coffee, hot chocolate, iced tea, Coke, juice, water, club soda, beer, gin, whiskey. They both talk at the same time as they run through their welcome speech, exhorting me to treat their home like my home.

  I thank them, consider whether that means I can put my shoes on the furniture and ask for iced tea.

  Mr. Pirelli, who insists I call him Bob, plops down in an overstuffed blue armchair and tells me to do the same. I sit on the edge of the couch. In a flash, his wife is back with a tray of drinks. I take the iced tea gratefully.

  “I can’t thank you enough for letting me stay,” I say, feeling stupid. I would have much rather have paid for a few weeks at a Motel 6 rather than deal with the awkwardness of being a grateful guest. All I want to do is find a quiet room and hide.

  Janet waves me off. “It’s what we would want someone to do for our children.”

  “Your father saved my life, you know,” Bob says.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say, honestly amazed. My father’s army career, as far as I know, was remarkable only in its uneventfulness. He spent two years filing draft records at Fort Dix in New Jersey. When he talks about hazardous duty, he means getting his paperwork-averse colonel to sign a form in triplicate.

  Bob sees my surprise and launches into the tale. “We were out one night drinking to the coming nuptials or fatherhood—I can’t remember which—of our staff sergeant. After my sixth whiskey shot, I remembered I had to pick my parents up from the train station and shot out of there like a bat out of hell. Your father followed me to the parking lot and wrestled the keys from me.” He shakes his head. “Best damn thing anyone ever did for me.”

  Now that sounds like my father.

  Janet nods her head, remembering the solemn occasion. Turning to happier matters, she says, “Tell us about your plans.”

  Without going into too much detail, I explain about the book and the movie and how I want to try my hand at screenwriting but also want to be in L.A. to keep a closer eye on the movie. “Not that I’m going to be looking constantly over the producer’s shoulder,” I hasten to add.

  “Screenwriting sounds so exciting,” Janet says. “Didn’t your mom also mention something about your working in a law firm?”

  “We’ll see,” I say vaguely, unwilling to divulge the web of lies I told my parents to get them on board with the move.

  Janet asks how one goes about being a screenwriter—“We know nothing of the industry despite living here. Bob sells insurance and I’m a dental hygienist”—and I say I’m going to take some classes first. I tell them a friend’s helping me get started. I barely know Harold Skimpole, but it’s simpler to call him that than explain that a stranger I’ve been e-mailing hooked me up with one.

  A timer dings and Janet jumps up. “Dinner.”

  We have lasagna and brussels sprouts with Entenmann’s coffee cake for dessert. Conversation during the meal is surprisingly easy. They talk about their three children, and I talk about my parents. Afterward we go into the den and watch television for a few hours. We all go to sleep after The Good Wife.

  My room is a small pink square in the back of the house on the ground floor. Lace-curtained windows overlook a small lawn, a wood shed with two window boxes overflowing with petunias and a six-foot chain-link fence. I can’t see the sunrise or the Hollywood Hills or the lights of the Sunset Strip, but I have that same feeling of optimism.

  Even with the sensible car and the creepy cousin in the valley and the missing five grand, I
know everything’s going to be all right.

  Day 865

  Production shuts down on Moxie’s new movie, One-Way Ticket, when she’s admitted to the Vanderbilt Medical Center for severe abdominal cramps and vomiting. The attending quickly determines it’s food poisoning and prescribes liquids to prevent dehydration. She’s released after thirty-six hours but is too weak to return to filming for another three days.

  Her publicist issues a statement thanking the public for its generous support and identifying the culprit as the samba sashimi deluxe at Samba Sam’s Sushi on 12th Avenue near Kirkwood.

  The story is fishy in more ways than one—who gets sushi in land-locked Tennessee on a Sunday night—and rumors begin to circulate that she had her stomach pumped. They pick up momentum when Samba Sam insists to Page Six that Moxie didn’t touch her sashimi. She ate half a miso soup, drank four glasses of sake, wrote “Millie is a cunt” in her kittenish scrawl with big hearts over the i’s on the bathroom wall and left at ten-thirty with her entourage while her assistant stayed behind to settle the bill. Then he lists the names of six other customers who had the samba deluxe that night.

  Recognizing the self-interest inherent in the restaurant owner’s claim, Cindy Adams ends the item with an ellipses. It’s up to the reader decide.

  Star isn’t so coy, and when a telephone call to the hospital’s billing department turns up no cases of food poisoning for October 3rd, it declares on the cover: Moxie’s Terrifying Tangle with Death. “Moxie Bernard came perilously close to crossing the line—the little white line, that is—on Sunday night, as doctors scrambled to save the frail, one-hundred-pound star from the consequences of her own alleged cocaine addiction. Says a nurse on duty, ‘She’s lucky to be alive. It was touch and go for a while there. She’s such a pretty girl. I wish she’d take better care of herself.’”

  Impatient with the delay, the director of One-Way Ticket, Stewart Purcell, complains to the bartender at the Peabody that Moxie is the most unprofessional actor he’s ever worked with, and that’s including Horace, the one-eyed chimp from Do No Wrong. He sends Moxie a memo, cc’d to the head of the studio and leaked to the press, insisting that she cease and desist her party-girl lifestyle for the duration of the film. There are only five more weeks left.

  Reporters are on the set Monday morning when the movie resumes shooting, and Moxie, in good spirits but still pale, swears to stay off sushi for the rest of her life. The line gets a laugh from Nancy in the studio, who says, “Me too.”

  In the Pirelli’s mint-green living room, I switch off the television and stare at the blank screen, trying to convince myself that sushi is code for cocaine, that getting her stomach pumped sobered Moxie in more ways than one, that the young actress has repented, seen the light and changed her ways.

  But even as I wish for it with all my might, I know it’s too much to hope for.

  Day 871

  With all the stress from the move, I had no time to obsess over samson&delilah’s everyone knows pronouncement. But now that I’m in L.A., in the candy-striped bedroom of Charlene Pirelli, I have all the time in the world.

  I finger the numbers on my phone, debating whether to call Nadia in Lloyd Chancellor’s office. Our relationship so far as been limited to my gushing over the fabulously amazing party she threw and her insisting it was nothing. I sent her and Lloyd each a box of chocolates as a thank-you but neither ever acknowledged receipt. I know they got them because I tracked the packages to their office. A Chris M signed for them at 1:23 on August 28.

  A week later, I picked up the phone to play dumb and ask if my gifts arrived but my nerve fell short of open passive aggression.

  Now it’s falling short again. I e-mailed Nadia last week about the post, and she has yet to respond. I can’t decide if her silence is because: 1) I’m so off her radar she doesn’t even know I exist; 2) she’s horrified that I read IMDB boards; 3) it’s true and she can’t bring herself to tell me.

  I’m sure it’s the first. She’s so busy she can’t even take a millisecond to thank a pathetically grateful writer for a box of pricey Jacques Torres truffles. And, really, why would she want to spare my feelings? I’m just some random stranger who happens to have her e-mail address.

  Still, Lester’s speech about not taking things for granted plays in my ears. This is what he meant. Nothing is anything until it is something.

  The lack of hard information is killing me.

  I dial Chancery Productions. As the phone rings, I list all the reasons why calling is stupid. I’m going to look like a stalker. If Nadia wanted to talk to me, she would have talked to me. I should stick with low-impact communication. I should let her control the dialogue. It would save her the embarrassment of awkward conversation in real time.

  I’m about to hang up when a cheery voice chirps hello. I ask for Nadia.

  “She’s unavailable,” she sings. “Can I take a message?”

  I freeze. Do I want to leave a message? No, then I can go back to brooding and pretend I never called. And yet I hear myself say, “Yes, please tell her to call Ricki Carstone.”

  “And to what is this in regard?”

  “The Jarndyce and Jarndyce movie,” I explain, then cringe as the dead silence on the other end grows. “I wrote the book.”

  I don’t know why I add that other than I feel stupid and insignificant, like some IMDB groupie trying to find out when auditions are.

  “What’s the number please?” she asks.

  Silently berating myself for calling, I give her my cell and hang up.

  Then I sit on Charlene’s ruffled pink bed and wait for Nadia to call back.

  Day 876

  I move into Bleak Lofts on North Hampshire because the apartment has a large balcony where I can grow Meyer lemon trees and it’s smack in the heart of a neighborhood called Los Feliz. The Happy.

  I can think of nothing more wonderful than happiness and homemade lemonade.

  The space is empty, and the manager hands me the keys as soon as I sign the lease. The place is mine.

  By the end of my second week in Los Angeles, I’m promising to have the Pirellis over for dinner as soon as I settle in and carrying my meager belongings into a spacious apartment with an actual room for dining. We don’t have those in New York, only multitasking living rooms and alcoves.

  Not only is the apartment amazing, the building has a pool. I can swim laps every morning if I want to. Or every night. Or in the middle of the day when I’m feeling stiff and tired from writing.

  Welcome to L.A.

  As I’m rolling in the third and last load, the door next to mine opens. A tall guy with wavy brown hair, blue eyes and a five-o’clock shadow steps into the hallway and eyes me suspiciously. In ratty jeans, a gray UCLA T-shirt with holes and a torn seam and bare feet, he looks scruffy and out of place.

  If anyone should be suspicious, it’s me.

  “Please say you’re the new tenant.”

  “I’m the new tenant,” I respond dutifully.

  He nods abruptly. This information, although exactly what he wants to hear, does little to improve his mood. “OK, now say it like you’re not blindly appeasing a stranger.”

  I try for a little conviction. “I’m the new tenant.”

  He closes his eyes and lets out a long sigh. “Thank God.”

  “Old tenant not much of a prize?” I ask, smiling at the intensity of his relief. I’ve had a few dismal neighbors myself. On Charles Street, I lived next to a snake charmer. She played the same six bars of music over and over for months until she was bit. They carried her out on a stretcher, and I never heard from her again.

  “The old tenant was great,” he says, resting his shoulder against the door frame. “Iraq War vet. Real quiet. Always asked if I needed stamps when
he went to the post office. He skipped town three months ago to run a golf course in Scottsdale and left me with a conscienceless building manager who lets his niece throw raves here every Sunday and Monday night. If they were partying on the weekend like normal folks, I might have been cool with it because I’d be out partying myself but Sunday and Monday are emphatically at-home nights. Stealing yourself for the first day back and then recovering from it.”

  I know exactly where he’s coming from. Paralegaling was all stealing yourself and then recovering.

  “Well, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be quieter than a full-blown rave. Even a half-blown one. More like no-blown,” I say.

  “Bless you, my child.”

  I laugh and realize he doesn’t look that scruffy after all. His appearance is more athletic-male-fixing-a-leaky-pipe. “Actually, all things considered, I’m amazed the apartment’s in such good condition. I would never have guessed it was the sight of so much debauchery. The walls are scratch-free, and it doesn’t smell like a frat house.”

  “I was going to the store,” he announces, and I feel myself blush. Of course he’s going somewhere—store, plumbing, it’s all the same. Just because I have all the time in the world to chat with my new neighbor, who now qualifies as one of the four people I know in L.A. (and that’s counting the Pirellis as two separate people, which they really aren’t), doesn’t mean he does too.

  “Right, of course,” I mutter, fiddling with my keys.

  “The store was the plan. I’m out of eggs and waffles. I need both for breakfast tomorrow. I’m big on breakfast. Keeps me going until lunch at two, which is important. But now I’m thinking I’d rather be neighborly and treat you to a welcome-to-Bleak drink. Do you have the time? Or would it be more neighborly if I offered to help you move? I’m prepared to carry small items of furniture. Armchairs but not couches.” He smiles with a hint of shame, as if refusing to lug around a stranger’s overstuffed sofa is a crime against humanity.