A Better Goodbye Read online

  It wasn’t the first time he had thought of that, but he had never done it with a job within reach. This was when he was supposed to call on his powers as a thespian to defeat the sameness of the material, to spin the stereotypically sour Al Grondyke in some new and unforeseen way. God knew Scott needed the fifty-two hundred dollars he could make on Stringer—and he’d ask his agent to demand final position on the acting credits, the one where it would say “And Scott Crandall” like he was a big deal.

  Quite frankly, though, he was beyond caring. Without even thinking about it, he rolled up his sides and let the crushing monotony of his career drive him deep into his seat. He neither moved nor let the name Grondyke enter his consciousness again until the casting director summoned him for his three minutes in front of Stringer’s producers. As he walked through the door, the infinite wisdom of his decision to tune out was validated. The casting director was pulling aside the actor who had just read, a guy Scott actually liked. “The producers want you to come back later and meet the director,” she was telling him. “And don’t change a thing—you were perfect.” Scott knew instantly that he was dead on arrival.

  He didn’t bother getting upset when he saw that the three producers he was reading for were far more intent on their lunches, one very crunchy salad and two sandwiches dripping with what looked like Russian dressing. When the casting director asked if he wanted to do his scenes sitting or standing, he had to resist the impulse to say, “Standing—on my head.” But he managed to annoy her anyway by reading every one of his lines and hardly bothering to make eye contact with her. She was staring death rays at him as he left. Of course that might also have been because of his response when one of the producers, the young one naturally, couldn’t have been out of his twenties, confided that he still had a Stormy Weathers T-shirt. “No shit?” Scott said.

  He would deal with the inevitable fallout from the casting session later. All he wanted to do now was get to Patys in Toluca Lake and dig into a hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Those fucking producers had reminded him how hungry he was.

  He headed toward a table that an older blonde waitress was clearing. She had her hands on an abandoned copy of the Times when he snatched it from her, an act of daring that earned him a nasty look and a little advice: “If you want it that bad, make sure you take it with you.” He flashed a smile that sent her to the kitchen muttering and flipped through the ketchup-stained paper until he found the sports section. Shaq and Kobe were getting along for a change—what was up with that? And then it didn’t matter because he saw a story about a fighter he remembered seeing back when both of them had futures. By the time he finished reading it, he didn’t care that the waitress hadn’t come back yet. He’d had an epiphany, and if the producers who never hired him anymore didn’t know the meaning of the word, they could look it up.

  7

  Jenny wanted to see how high she could bounce off the sofa, treating it like a trampoline, her long hair flying and her laughter filling a designer-perfect living room. Up she’d go, her eyes pinwheeled by the blur of Impressionist paintings and Moroccan pottery, and when she descended she would see her friend Rosie bouncing up toward the stratosphere she’d just left and loving it as much as she had. Rosie did massage too. Gentle and willowy, she was a Singapore fantasy right down to her broken English. But she was self-conscious about her accent until she took a hit of Ecstasy. Jenny, on the other hand, did E because it made her feel so good, even now when the guy who had invited Rosie and her up to the Hollywood Hills was running back into the room, screaming at them.

  “Get the fuck offa there! That’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar sofa!”

  “What?” Jenny said, unable to stop bouncing on demand, just hoping she wouldn’t go as high as she had before.

  “The fucking sofa! It cost two hundred thousand fucking dollars!”

  “No way,” Rosie said, laughing harder than ever.

  “Goddammit, I’m not fucking around!”

  The guy looked as angry as the music he and his band played. He wasn’t the lead singer—if he was, he probably would have been in jail or rehab—but he was supposed to be this great guitar player. He even had a contract with a major label to do a solo album. At least that’s what he had told Jenny and Rosie at the Falcon in Hollywood when they were making up their minds to take off with him. His house sounded great, Spanish, built in the twenties, featured in Architectural Digest the year before he moved in. The drugs sounded even better.

  They were still making Jenny smile as she rummaged through her brain for the power to reason with someone who was seriously pissed off. The best she could come up with, besides the good sense to stifle a laugh, was a meek, “We’re sorry.” Every other part of her was begging to start bouncing on the sofa again. After all, she and Rosie were still standing on it.

  “Fuck sorry,” the guy said. “You gotta leave. Now.”

  That struck Rosie as the funniest thing she had heard all night. “Deported,” she said in her own special way.

  “What?” the guy said.

  Jenny offered a translation and gave Rosie a look that begged her to shut up. Rosie started giggling so hard that it looked like she was having a seizure. Before the guy could go off worse than he already had, Jenny said, “She was making a joke.”

  “Well, I’m not laughing, okay?” he said. “And Jesus Christ, get down from there before you fuck it up any worse.”

  “We took our shoes off,” Jenny said. It was the best defense she could muster.

  While the guy was saying he didn’t give a shit, she grabbed Rosie, who was still having a giggling fit, by the hand, and the two of them stepped carefully onto the dark wood floor, like they were afraid it would move.

  That was when Jenny was reminded of how tall the guy was and how small they were. There must have been more than a foot difference, and the guy’s tats and piercings made him scary even though he was concentration-camp skinny. Then he spoiled everything by saying, “If you silly cunts ruined that sofa, my parents are going to kick my ass.”

  For the first time in her life, Jenny didn’t frown at being called a cunt or fight back by saying something equally nasty. She was too busy recoiling with surprise. “Your parents?” And then she burst into laughter. Rosie, who may or may not have understood what the guy had said, resumed laughing along with her. Mr. Rock-and-Roll Drug Fiend still lived with Mom and Dad. That was some funny shit.

  By the time she dropped Rosie off at her boyfriend’s place in Los Feliz, they had stopped laughing. They said they would have to hang out again soon, but Jenny wasn’t so sure about that. It wasn’t like they were big friends or anything. Rosie had just happened to call when Jenny was starting to feel the walls of her apartment closing in on her, and one thing had led to another.

  It had been fun but only in the fast-evaporating way that Jenny always had fun with the girls she met doing massage. Most of them weren’t very ambitious, or smart even, and they always seemed to be stuck with boyfriends who were only too happy to live off what they brought home. Jenny tried to think better of herself, but maybe she was a snob. Maybe she was the same as them. Oh, God, she prayed as she drove home, please just let this be the depression that always follows Ecstasy.

  Here was this drug that gave her more pleasure than anything she had ever taken. It was like a serotonin overload, an orgasm for the pleasure center of the brain, but two or three hours afterward, it always felt like the world was caving in on her. She wondered if she got depressed because the makers put rat poison in it, and if the urge to jump around like a maniac was just a side effect. The only thing she was positive about was that E shouldn’t be legalized. The law was the way it was to keep stupid people from doing too much of something. She knew she wasn’t stupid—okay, sometimes maybe—but she didn’t want to think about that now.

  It was almost 4 A.M. when she walked in the door of her apartment, a one-bedroom on the first floor of a homely stucco building northwest of Sawtelle and
Olympic. On the table by the front door were the schoolbooks she’d had every intention of reading before Rosie called. She had a paper due Monday in her Vietnam War class, and had planned to work on it tonight—well, it had been Thursday night but now it was Friday morning. She would go to sleep, and when she woke up she would start working on her paper.

  Thinking about it made her wish she had stayed in touch with Tran, a Vietnamese girl she’d met doing massage in North Hollywood. Tran’s family had escaped the Communist takeover on a rickety little boat, and sometimes when Jenny looked at her, with her delicate features and gentle eyes, she imagined Tran surviving the storms at sea by clinging to her dream of America. But what kind of dream was it that had led her to a jack shack with a rotting carpet? The answer to that question was unhappy, and Jenny didn’t do unhappiness. It cut too close to her own life and to the shadow world she was trying to leave behind.

  Massage was supposed to be a means to an end, not a defining experience. She wasn’t even doing massage now, so why should it be on her mind so much? She didn’t want to know the answer. Better she should climb into bed—a mattress on the floor, really, with lots of pillows—and treat herself to a couple of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems before she went to sleep. She pulled the covers up to her chin and leafed through The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 until she found “Squatter’s Children.” It was a favorite of hers, but before she got to the second verse, the one with the storm gathering behind the house where the girl and boy are playing, she was asleep.

  She rejoined the living ten hours later with her good intentions intact. They stayed that way through a breakfast of green tea and strawberry-banana yogurt. She knew she should have real fruit around, oranges or apples or something, but she really didn’t like fruit very much. It sucked that Gummi Bears weren’t good for you. If they were, she would have been the world’s healthiest person.

  She grabbed a handful anyway as she sat at the kitchen table that doubled as her desk, fighting off the urge to read more Bishop or play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003. When her eyes fell on one of the books she’d gathered for research on Vietnam, she was afraid she would never open it if she didn’t do it now. Her self-imposed guilt trip sent her to the book’s index, where she began looking for something about Ho Chi Minh and his relationship with the United States before the domino theory warped American thinking. She found it with the greatest of ease, but before she could start feeling virtuous, her private line rang with classical music. She could never remember the title or the composer. It was probably because the only people who had the number were two masseuses, an ex-boyfriend who wasn’t an asshole, and the girl who was calling now.

  Lindsey was a friend from high school who had stayed in touch, and when she moved into her own apartment a year and a half ago, the first person she’d invited over was Jenny. It was a gesture that still made Jenny feel good, so now she found herself answering the phone and getting an earful from Lindsey about the other women at the boutique where she worked. “One of the girls keeps farting in the changing rooms,” she said.

  But a little stink was nothing compared to what her boyfriend was putting her through. She said he was a gaffer, like Jenny was supposed to know what that was, and for the last two months he’d been working on a movie in North Carolina. Lindsey thought he was cheating on her. When she called his motel room, a woman answered, and he got on right away and said it was somebody he worked with and they had just wrapped shooting. Lindsey didn’t believe him because the three-hour time difference meant it was almost midnight back there. Jenny said they’d probably been doing night scenes—“Movies have them, you know”—but Lindsey didn’t want to hear it. She was too bummed. She didn’t have the money to fly to North Carolina to confront her boyfriend, and if she wasn’t careful she was just going to buy a couple of pints of Chunky Monkey and eat them both.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Jenny said, remembering how Lindsey had boasted of losing twelve pounds the last time they had talked. Was that really two months ago? Maybe Lindsey had already gained the weight back. She was tall, five-ten at least, and she had admitted to weighing as much as a hundred and sixty-five pounds. It was probably more, since women rarely told the truth about things like that. But what mattered now was that Jenny could relate to what Lindsey was going through with her boyfriend, so she said, “You want to hang out?”

  Lindsey wasn’t like Jenny’s Korean party-doll friends, who thought the only place they could have a good time was in a K-Town nightclub the size of an airplane hangar. Lindsey was beyond safe; she was sane. She wouldn’t think it was cool to have a waiter drag her over to a table full of socially inept guys who blew cigarette smoke in her face and thought drinking gallons of watered-down Crown Royal made them charming. She might even laugh at nerds who were scared that Jenny, at twenty-two, was too old for them.

  And Jenny thought she would be in good shape to work on her paper on Saturday and Sunday even if she blew off tonight. She believed it right up until the moment she walked into Lindsey’s Culver City apartment and Lindsey said, “I want to get laid tonight.”

  Lindsey got what she wanted in the spa at a condo complex in Marina del Ray. It was sometime after midnight and Jenny was a witness. She had seen people have sex before, but both times had been in two-girl massage sessions and the incentive was cash. This time, judging from the sounds coming from the other end of the spa, it was all about pure animal lust.

  Jenny and Lindsey had hit a series of bars in Venice and the Marina before Lindsey found Mr. Right-for-a-Night. He was a web designer named Randy who had a gap between his two front teeth and knew a lot about The Simpsons, which impressed Lindsey and meant absolutely nothing to Jenny. Randy wasn’t quite as tall as Lindsey, but that didn’t matter, especially when they were in the water.

  “Somebody’s having fun,” Randy’s muscular, red-haired friend Doug murmured to Jenny.

  Doug seemed like more of a puppy dog than a horndog, which was why Jenny found herself with him at the other end of the spa, the two of them as naked as Lindsey and Randy, watching the steam rise off the warm water. Jenny could feel Doug’s breath on her neck, and then his lips, small kisses, more like nibbles really, and not altogether unpleasant. He wasn’t her type—she liked guys who were older or cuter, or both—but just to show she wasn’t antisocial, she turned her face to him, flashing a smile that was an invitation to a kiss. He gave her one—and then he grabbed her left breast and twisted her nipple like it was the dial on a combination lock.

  “Ouch,” she said, trying to keep her voice down as she pushed his hand away.

  Doug looked confused. Either he couldn’t get his head around Jenny’s lack of enthusiasm or no woman had ever suggested that the work he obviously did with weights didn’t translate into a lover’s touch.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  But his hand went right back to her breast, and he moved in for another kiss, this time adding some tongue. Jenny pulled away, leaving it hanging in midair for a second before he put it back in his mouth. “Gross,” she said.

  At the same time Lindsey was going into overdrive. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. Or maybe it was “Uh, uh, uh.” Jenny had noticed that passion took a toll on enunciation. Doug, meanwhile, was using the love noises as the cue to make his big move. More kissing, more groping, everything in his master plan to get Jenny to do it in water she had every reason to believe was a germ hatchery.

  “You know you want to,” he said, breathing heavily.

  “In your dreams.”

  Suddenly she was under water. Doug’s hand was on top of her head, holding her there, and she wasn’t going to get back to the surface until he let her, no matter how hard she flailed her arms, no matter how fervently she wished she’d had time to take a deep breath. At last she stopped thrashing and started wondering how long he was going to keep her there. Twenty seconds must have gone by already, maybe thirty.

  Just when she thought she had hit her limit, he pulled her back to the surface, fl
ashing a smile that she thought looked idiotic and that he probably thought was seductive.

  “Are you on crack?” she gasped.

  “I want to fuck you,” he whispered.

  “And I want to scream for the cops.”

  Down she went again. Oh, my God, she thought, he really is going to kill me. At last she started fighting back, hitting him, scratching him, twisting and turning to get his hand off the top of her head. She thought she had succeeded when he let her resurface, but as soon as she called him “asshole,” he pushed her back under. It happened twice more like that, and then she heard the voice that became her salvation.

  “Dude, give her a break, huh?”

  It was Randy at the other end of the spa, leaning around Lindsey, who was still riding him to glory, not missing a stroke.

  “What are you talking about?” Doug said.

  “Like, you’re trying to drown her,” Randy said.

  “I’m just fucking around.”

  “You stupid motherfucking motherfucker!” Jenny shouted, wishing she were more fluent in profanity.

  “Hear that, man?” Randy said. “She doesn’t like it, so cut that shit out.”

  It looked like he wanted to say more, but Lindsey pulled his head back to where he could bury it between her breasts.

  “Whatever,” Doug said, his shoulders sagging.

  Jenny couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “You’re pouting? Why, because you didn’t kill me? Jesus, you’ve got to be the biggest asshole in the world. Maybe the biggest asshole in the whole history of assholes.”