A Better Goodbye Read online

  As soon as she had walked through the door, he’d wondered what she’d be like in bed. He’d wondered about the other girls too, but this one—What the hell is her name? he asked himself—this one made him think the sex would be fun even if it was for pay. There would be laughter afterward, not an anxious glance at the clock, and maybe if you got her laughing long enough, she’d want to go again. Or maybe she’d just want to talk, and it wouldn’t be about her rotten ex-boyfriend or whether you liked her eye shadow. For all Nick knew, it might be about the book she was reading.

  He could see old-time soldiers on its dust jacket, guys riding horses and swinging swords, but he had to squint to make out its title. The Charterhouse of Parma had just registered on his brain when the new girl looked up. Right away she made sure her robe covered her boobs, as though he hadn’t already seen them when she came out of her second session. The gesture told him she thought he’d been trying to sneak a peek, that she’d probably decided then and there he was a creep.

  He asked the question that was on his mind anyway: “What’s a charterhouse?”

  “A monastery,” she said, sounding like she expected to have to explain what a monastery was.

  “Some Catholic I am,” he said. “I should have known that.”

  She didn’t say anything, but she did smile.

  “Parma’s got to have something to do with Parmesan cheese, am I right?” he said.

  “Yeah, they make it there.”

  “There where?”

  “In Northern Italy. Toward the French border.”

  “You been there?”

  “No, I just read about it.”

  Nick was right. She liked to laugh. She was doing it now. But he still couldn’t think of her name, and it was driving him nuts.

  “So your book,” he said. “True story or made up?”

  “A novel,” she said.

  “You like it?”

  “Great so far. I mean I’m only on page two-thirty-seven, but there’s all these rich people scheming back in the nineteenth century, and a nobleman getting thrown in prison, and an aunt loving him enough to break him out.”

  “He the good guy?”

  “I’m not sure there are any good guys, not like Americans expect anyway. The writer, Stendhal, he’s French, and the way he saw it, everybody’s pretty spoiled and corrupt. And they’re all, like, I don’t know, in love with themselves.”

  “But you keep reading anyway?”

  “Of course. It’s way better than modern novels.”

  Nick shook his head. “Keep looking. There’s got to be a good guy in there somewhere.”

  “Why?” the girl asked, smiling as she closed the book, using a finger to mark her place.

  “Well, it’s a story, and stories always have good guys.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Okay, maybe if it’s a true story, there isn’t one. But you said your book is made up. So why would the writer waste his time on a bunch of—”

  “Corrupt narcissists?”

  “College girl, huh?”

  “Sorry,” she said, a guilty look on her face.

  It stayed there until Nick said, “Why be sorry? If I was smart, I’d talk that way too. Corrupt whatevers, huh? I would have just called them scumbags.”

  “Me too,” the girl said, “but we just met.”

  They both laughed. Then Nick said, “So you’re positive there’s not gonna be a hero?”

  “The book’s not about that, I don’t think.”

  “What’s it about then?”

  “Happiness. They’re all searching for it.”

  “They going to find it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I’m not sure anybody ever finds it,” the girl said. “Not all the time anyway. If you’re happy all the time, you’re an idiot. Of course, you don’t want to be unhappy all the time either. I used to be like that. Unhappy, I mean. And then I told myself I was going to change and be happy every single minute. But that’s impossible. So now I’m just, like, trying to balance things out.”

  “You were unhappy all the time?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  She gave Nick an apologetic smile and started reading again, leaving him to do whatever he wanted, go back to his sports section or keep wondering what her great unhappiness was. Her problems certainly didn’t show on her. Nick guessed that was part of her appeal to clients. He had felt it himself, the two of them talking the way they might have over lunch or maybe even on a date. She was the first of the massage girls who made him feel good about his sleazy, off-the-grid job. But he couldn’t remember her name until Sierra came back and called her Coco.

  Nick was trying to embed it in his memory when Scott showed up with far different concerns about Coco. “New girl doing all right?” he asked Sierra.

  “Four clients already,” she said. She looked at Nick. “Or is it five?”

  “I’ll check the book,” he said.

  “Whatever,” Sierra said. “She looks like a good producer.”

  “Figured she would be,” Scott said.

  “Asshole,” Sierra said.

  Scott wiggled his eyebrows. “Hey, power has its privileges.”

  Nick knew it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, Scott banging the girls who worked for him. This wasn’t a piano recital. The girls got hired because they looked good and didn’t hesitate when it came to sex with strangers. But he still felt, well, not bad exactly—let down was more accurate—to hear Coco lumped with the others. The only question Nick had about her after that was how long she’d last.

  The girls for the evening shift flaked. Or maybe it was just Ling, who didn’t bother to call. “I knew we’d never see that bitch again,” Sierra said, not sounding the least bit unhappy. The other girl, Heather, had gotten on her cell to say she had car trouble and was stuck in Culver City. No way Sierra could complain about that. Massage girls seemed to have cornered the market on cars that broke down every other week. Jenny sat there hoping hers wouldn’t be next.

  She and Nick were the only audience Sierra had for her masseuse updates and excoriations. Scott had already split and Sierra was eager to get going. She kept talking about a doctor’s appointment she couldn’t miss. But if Jenny took off too, the way she already should have—her shift was supposed to be over at four—that would leave no one to take care of business, and the phones were starting to ring again. Scott would go out of his mind.

  “I can stay,” Jenny said. “If you want me to.”

  “You mean it?” Sierra asked.

  Jenny considered the question for a moment. She had been doing massage long enough to know the favor wouldn’t be returned. But she needed the money, and her need outweighed her well-advised reluctance. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

  Sierra acted like she didn’t hear the qualifier. “That is so cool,” she said. “I owe you big time, I mean really. Just let me know what I can do for you, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jenny said. But as she started to wonder whether Sierra had a date or an appointment with a drug dealer, a bolt of fear jerked her gaze toward Nick. “You’re sticking around aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “First in, last out—that’s me.”

  Jenny was too relieved to make her laugh sound sincere, but she didn’t care. She had her peace of mind, and it couldn’t be disrupted even when her five-thirty didn’t show. He’d sounded like a jerk on the phone anyway. Her seven o’clock, on the other hand, was so sweet he made her teeth ache, extra polite and full of compliments. Come on, she thought, even I know I’m not beautiful—why don’t you just settle for cute? The client said he was a lawyer, so maybe he couldn’t help running off at the mouth. But how successful a lawyer could he possibly be? Jenny wondered. He was so pale she thought she’d be able to see through him if she held him up to the light. Fair skin,
blond hair, invisible eyebrows, eyes with most of the blue wrung out of them. Good grief, the translucent man.

  By the time she came back with a hot towel to clean him up, he was asking if she ever did outcall. The answer was no, for the moment anyway. She knew what would come next: maybe they could get together for dinner, not a date really, just a chance for them to talk in a more relaxed atmosphere. She wanted to ask if the hand job she’d just given him hadn’t been relaxing, but resisted the impulse. He looked like a pretty sensitive guy. Now that she’d spent an hour—okay, more like forty-three minutes—with him, she even believed that his name was what he said it was, Mark. And Mark, the translucent man, was infatuated.

  Infatuation meant repeat business, but he gave her a fifty-dollar tip too, which was something the vast majority of the infatuated usually managed to forget. As soon as he was gone, though, Jenny put her mind on other things. For one, she was exhausted; her hands, arms, and back ached, making her wonder how real massage therapists, the ones with licenses and strict rules of conduct, could stand it. And then there was the apartment; if it wasn’t clean when she walked out the door, she wouldn’t be able to sleep no matter how tired she was. The curse of OCD, she thought.

  When she heard the vacuum cleaner start up, she couldn’t have been more surprised if Spider-Man had flown through the window. She walked to the guest bedroom door and looked inside. Nick was hard at work, and he stayed at it until he realized she was watching.

  “Hey,” he said, turning off the vacuum.

  “Do you do this every day?” she asked.

  “Somebody’s got to.”

  “Everywhere else I’ve worked, it’s always been me.”

  “You want to take over, be my guest.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll wash a load of towels.”

  “Yeah, I noticed you use a lot more than Sierra.”

  “I hope that’s a compliment.”

  “It is. Means you’re not asking these guys to lie down in whatever the guy before them left behind. Just because the towel gets turned over doesn’t mean it’s not still there, you know.”

  “Gross,” Jenny said, wrinkling her nose.

  “But true, right?” Nick said, and he started to laugh.

  Then she laughed too, harder than she had before, hard enough for her to think he would make her laugh again. The security guy. She couldn’t believe it.

  19

  Scott kept telling himself he should have shaken off the bad karma from that makeup bitch by now. He’d assumed the new Asian girl would get him started, but all she’d done was outsmart him. Lots of brainpower, those Asians. Of course he’d never seen any evidence of it in the others he’d hired. They were all nuts. But this Coco, aka Jenny—what the fuck kind of Korean name was Jenny anyway?—wouldn’t let him get away with scamming her on the split, and she wouldn’t let him get in her pants, either. If he hadn’t been so hot to dump Ling, he would have told Jenny to pay for her own green tea and split. Oh, fuck it, she was in the starting lineup until she pissed him off, as she inevitably would, and that freed Scott up to contemplate how his world was shrinking.

  There were no meetings with producers, no invitations to parties that were worth a damn. He’d been three weeks without an agent and it looked like the Rock or Dwayne Johnson or whatever the hell he was calling himself would sprout tits before he got another one. Even DuPree was playing games, going days before he returned Scott’s calls, and that was the last thing Scott needed. He needed a score, something that gave him a rush, that made him think of himself as anything besides another Hollywood reject who ought to be back in acting class, polishing his craft, as though he’d had any craft to start with. Until his second act came along, it would be all he could do to drag his ass out of bed before noon and stare at a life circumscribed by two overpriced apartments, the one where he lived with his decaying dreams and the one where girls peddled their asses to provide his only source of income.

  Just two days ago he had fired Heather after she called to say her car had broken down again. Fucking idiot bitch should have learned about cabs. Other than Coco, it wasn’t likely the new girls he’d hired would be any better equipped in the brains department. One was a brunette named Brianna, the other a black chick calling herself Cookie. He wondered if DuPree liked black chicks. And then, as he picked up the phone and hit speed dial, he thought, fuck DuPree. And fuck black chicks and white chicks and every other kind of chick. What made any of them so fucking special anyway? The ad he kept in L.A. Weekly must have generated a million calls from girls who were hot to make a living on their backs. What a fucking town. Shake a tree and whores fell out of it. Whores and actors, like there was any difference between the two.

  It was a weak moment, DuPree saying yes when Scott called about lunch. DuPree had been surprised to hear from him, what with that lame-assed TV series he was supposed to be shooting and all. But then Scott said the thing had blown up on him. “Creative differences,” like DuPree knew what that meant. But he felt sorry for his pet white boy, so they headed to a Eurotrash hangout on the Strip where he’d eaten a dozen times and still couldn’t remember the name, just the blue awning out front.

  Scott was plowing through a T-bone and pommes frites while DuPree picked at his salade niçoise and smiled to himself when that phrase creative differences came back to him. In his world, differences got settled with guns. He wondered how that would play in Hollywood, a bunch of slick fuckers who made a fortune with pretend violence, running for their Range Rovers when he walked in the door slinging honest-to-God lead. With guns every place he looked, it wasn’t all that imaginative, but he would sure as hell establish the fact that he was righteously indignant.

  “Okay, I told you my sad story,” Scott said, taking a break from chewing. “What you been up to?”

  “This and that,” DuPree said. “Nothing to get erect about. Just looking for my next business opportunity.”

  “You still haven’t told me exactly what your business is.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “It’s not illegal, is it?”

  DuPree scowled. The white boy was all the time asking about things he didn’t have a right to know. Maybe he felt entitled, seeing as how he’d pulled DuPree’s ass out of the fire that night in front of the Standard. DuPree had just taken apart a pumped-up bouncer who had dissed him once too often, collapsed his face with a right hand and kicked him until he was bleeding all over Sunset Boulevard. Women were screaming and paparazzi were snapping pictures and two more weightlifter-bouncers were bearing down on DuPree when Scott rolled up in his raggedy Porsche, shouting, “Get in!” DuPree had no idea who he was, but he knew a getaway car when he saw one. Off the two of them went, Scott chattering about how he’d wanted to fuck that bouncer up himself.

  That was more than a year and a half ago, before 9/11, and the motherfucker hadn’t shut up since, talking about coming up hard in foster homes and detention centers, just like Steve McQueen. Most of the time DuPree let his bullshit slide—he was just a punk-assed white boy who was pretending when he acted and pretending when he wasn’t. But sometimes, like now, DuPree enjoyed fucking with him.

  “What you saying, Scottie?”

  That stopped the white boy in mid-chew.

  “You saying I got to be a criminal on account of what’s any African-American male if he don’t work in the motherfuckin’ entertainment industry and he still got him some fine clothes and a phat ride and acts like, damn, I’m as good as any white man?”

  At least the white boy had the presence of mind to swallow his steak before he said something. “It’s just a question, dude. You don’t have to get all Quentin Tarantino on me.”

  “You ask the same question every fucking time I see you,” DuPree said.

  “Because I’m interested in what you’re up to,” Scott said. “Sincerely, man.”

  “Told you before,” DuPree said. “Not much.”

  It was the truth. Artie Franco, going to pick up his old lady in
Whittier, had been blindsided by two kids in a stolen car. He landed in the hospital with a broken leg, broken ribs, bad face cuts, and a back screaming for surgery. All of which meant Artie was in no shape to get in DuPree’s face about clocking that tortilla queen with the pit bull, never mind convincing him to rob an armored car.

  “But,” DuPree said, “as I think I also told you, I am exploring opportunities.”

  “For business,” Scott said, leaning across the table, his voice dropping conspiratorially, his T-bone forgotten.

  “That’s right.”

  “You ever work with a partner?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Now DuPree knew where this was going. He should have seen it coming, all the hints Scott had given him, more and more of them as his acting career went down the toilet, and now bringing it home with this:

  “I want in.”

  “Scottie,” DuPree said, “there’s nothing to be into.”

  “Yeah, I understand. But when there is.”

  “Just like that? Without knowing anything about anything?”

  “Man, I know, all right? You think I’m just some dumb fucking actor, but I’ve seen a lot of shit. I can handle myself. Fuck, I saved your ass, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did,” DuPree said, wishing he had jumped into any car except Scott’s.

  “Okay, then,” Scott said. “You find something you think I can help you with, call me.”

  DuPree nodded and said, “All right, I hear you.” Then he pointed at Scott’s plate. “Mind if I take that bone home for my dog?”

  20

  That guy Mark kept coming back to see Coco. It seemed like he was there every day she worked, and she worked almost every day. Nick couldn’t help thinking Mark’s business must be going to hell, as much time as he was spending away from it. He was some kind of lawyer, but not necessarily a dream date. “He’s starting to make me uncomfortable,” Coco told Nick one afternoon. “Like way too possessive, you know?” She didn’t stop seeing him, though.