My Liar Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAY 1995

  PART 1

  SMALL WORLD

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  PART 2

  CASTING

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART 3

  ACTION

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  PART 4

  REVERSALS

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  PART 5

  WINTER

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  PART 6

  SMART AND FINAL

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY RACHEL CLINE

  COPYRIGHT

  For J.G.

  “I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.”

  —Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

  MAY 1995

  For many who attended, David Bronstein’s memorial service was their first experience of mourning a friend. They were dazed by the enormity and absurdity of it. David, after all, had been smart and funny and healthy, well known and well liked—one of them. He had also blown open his head in the balcony of the old Fox Westwood Village. No one had witnessed the act itself, but for those who had to clean up at the theater and particularly for David’s friend Josh, who was called to identify the body and drive home David’s sad, empty Aries, the aftermath had been gruesome enough.

  The service was held while the jacaranda blossoms were out. A common joke about L.A. is that it has three seasons: mud, fire, and earthquakes. But mockers rarely mention the few weeks each spring when a violet haze transforms the city’s flat, white daylight as completely and freakishly as inhaled helium changes a familiar voice. As the mourners found their way to the service that afternoon, the jacaranda display took on added meanings: the tawdriness and ephemerality of life in the entertainment business, of course, but also the sweetness of that life when everything seemed to be going right, as it sometimes did and, hopefully, would again before too long.

  The mourners met at the University Synagogue on Sunset Boulevard. David’s parents had once hoped he would be bar mitz-vahed there, but at twelve he had dropped out of Hebrew school, already squirming away from their expectations. The chapel had seating in the round, like that of a Quaker meetinghouse, and the afternoon light streamed in through the clerestory windows. It felt peaceful and safe, or should have.

  As Annabeth Jensen looked around at the faces of her ex-boyfriend’s mourners, she saw levels of distress that went beyond ordinary sadness. A woman she couldn’t identify had been weeping openly since taking her seat across from Annabeth. Her face was already red and wrinkled like an enraged infant’s. On the aisle at Annabeth’s left sat one of the extraordinarily groovy counter workers from Vidiots, the store where she and David used to rent movies. She didn’t know his name—David might have—but he was jarringly handsome, with Cherokee cheekbones, tribal tattoos on his biceps, and silver rings on his thumbs and middle fingers. He was covering his mouth and shuddering with vehement sorrow.

  Annabeth felt like a dry-eyed scoundrel. Since first learning of David’s death three weeks earlier, she’d been driving around Los Angeles trying to find her sadness in the landscape, but every landmark had seemed to remind her, instead, of something about David that she’d hated. At the intersection of Pico and Clover-field, she’d remembered his constant need to debate which farmers’ market vendor had the best apples; waiting for her turn to merge onto the 10 from Lincoln Boulevard, she’d flashed on the way his smile revealed far too much of his upper gum; even driving past the Brentwood Country Mart on the way to the service that day, she’d found herself remembering his hideous blue Flojos—the special flip-flops he drove to Tijuana to replace every other year. And that, in turn, reminded her of the three months he’d spent limping after cutting his foot on the morning of the Northridge earthquake—his wounded quality was so much a part of his persona at that point that she’d almost forgotten the original injury. The earthquake seemed like another lifetime. She half-remembered the Nirvana song he’d been singing while they lay in bed that morning, how creepy he’d sounded. She probably should have seen that he was losing it then, but as she’d listened to the dogs barking and the transformers imploding and their world seemingly falling apart, David’s darkness hadn’t seemed that different from her own. She still couldn’t really believe he’d done it—and with a gun. No room for mistakes there. But letting down his listeners, betraying the abject, bottomless love of his parents? That wasn’t the David she thought she’d known. She stole a look at Naomi Bronstein, in the front row. David’s mother was the daughter of Holocaust victims. Her brimming blue eyes were trained on her lap, but Annabeth could see the fierce effort it cost her just to sit there, to sit still.

  David’s uncle—not the lawyer but the burnout from Mendocino—had begun speaking his piece. Uncle Ralph had been David’s de facto older brother, the one who introduced pudgy, adolescent David to marijuana smoke and the late, psychedelic sound of the Temptations. “With headphones on, and a little reefer in our hearts, we’re all black folks,” he said to the congregation of mourners, which did include a few genuinely black people: a friend from the Frisbee team at Vassar; coworkers from the Beverly Hills Public Library; and Eunice, the Bronstein’s former housekeeper. Annabeth saw Eunice shaking her head slowly from side to side. It was impossible to tell whether she was expressing sorrow or disbelief.

  The next speaker was David’s friend and next-door neighbor, Josh—the one who’d been home when the LAPD showed up that day. Josh shook back his shoulder-length brown hair and blinked himself into composure after a millisecond of emotional fog. “David’s disembodied voice was in some ways all of our best friend,” he said. Despite his peculiar grammar, Josh had a point. Many near-strangers had come to the service. They were there to mourn the loss of David’s diffident, earnest voice on the radio, talking them home during the city’s most solitary and contemplative hours, midnight to three A.M. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thinking of the times she had heard her boyfriend’s voice on the radio late at night, the times he seemed to have read her mind with his choice of music, Annabeth realized she was rocking gently. The stranger beside her, a gray-haired woman who might have been an old elementary school teacher of David’s, gestured vaguely, indicating her half-saturated tissue: she had others, but Annabeth shook her head.

  David’s father, Jerry, the last to speak, looked awful. “Naomi and I are grateful to you for coming, and I know David would have been glad to see you all here,” he said, but he broke off there, eventually folding up the paper from which he had apparently expected to read. When he regained his composure, he asked for a few minutes of silent meditation and returned to his seat. What had stopped him was the sight of David’s high school girlfriend looking back at him. He couldn’t remember her name. Bonnie? She’d been the one to call them that other time, from the emergency room, when Da
vid had thrust his hand through a friend’s shower door. No one had then mentioned suicide, or even depression—the cure had been stitches and the cancellation of David’s planned summer trip to work in an Alaskan cannery, which Jerry had never liked the sound of, anyway. But when he saw the uncomfortable resignation in the girl’s now-adult and angular face, the dime had dropped. She was sad but not surprised.

  Annabeth had never spent much time with Naomi and Jerry—she sensed that they disapproved of her, mostly because of her Scandinavian Lutheran heritage, although she never said as much to David and he would never have mentioned such a thing to her, even if it was true. But now she was certain that they blamed her. Even though her separation from David was supposedly mutual and they’d parted as friends, the whole thing was far too recent. She’d even talked to him on the phone a few days before his death. His parents probably knew that, too. But although he’d been full of complaints that day (KCRW’s new music director’s taste was soulless and empty, the Santa Monica Bay was full of fecal bacteria, when O.J. got acquitted it was going to be Rodney King all over again), none of them were new. How could she have known he was suicidal? She was already sick of asking herself this, but it was a question that wouldn’t go away. As she made her way out of the chapel, she hunched up behind the collar of her denim jacket and kept her eyes on the ground. She didn’t notice Laura Katz coming up on her with longer than usual strides.

  Laura had come to the service almost entirely to find Annabeth. Over the many months since they’d last spoken, she had come to regret their rift. And lately whenever she thought about starting her next picture, which she did almost hourly, she had begun to think about Annabeth’s editorial skills, which had saved her ass on Trouble Doll. She understood that now, and no carefully worded note or earnest phone call was going to do the job of apology that was required. Showing up to acknowledge David’s death, on the other hand, seemed appropriate. She’d seen enough to know that he had certainly loved Annabeth and that Annabeth had, in her own way, loved him back. Maybe Annabeth would be inclined to forgive Laura as a kind of voodoo-doll version of forgiving herself.

  Stepping into the parking lot, during that moment when everyone’s eyes were adjusting to the ridiculous brilliance of the still-early afternoon, Annabeth felt a hand on her forearm and turned. Seeing Laura’s face was a shock, but she allowed the other woman to embrace her and soon found herself resting her cheek on Laura’s shoulder. She was certain that she had never before hugged or been hugged by Laura, but she was now enfolded in Laura’s arms as though they had a long history of loving embrace. It made Annabeth wonder how she would feel if Laura had been the one to die instead of David—for a moment, she even wished it, but the wish was halfhearted. It occurred to her then that the soft fabric under her cheek was one of Laura’s fifty-dollar Japanese T-shirts and though no tears had yet fallen on it, if she remained there, they might. So she lifted her head.

  “It’s okay, it’s washable,” said Laura, and Annabeth had to laugh, in spite of everything.

  Other mourners were making their way to their cars while the two women stood there, and some who passed concluded that the director and her editor were lovers, or had been. It was the kind of gossip that was sometimes as good as currency in the freelance marketplace of L.A. filmmakers, whether or not it was true.

  Part 1

  SMALL WORLD

  1

  Annabeth had first met Laura two years earlier, at a party in the Hollywood Hills where a lady elephant had been hired to entertain the guests. It was in the spring, or maybe late winter—at any rate, on a clear, pleasant evening like so many in Los Angeles. It was late and the elephant had been retired to the bottom of the driveway—available for photographs with anyone bored or stoned enough to step away from the hustle and into the cool, jasmine-scented night. The creature was wearing a gold lamé circus-performance outfit that might have convinced small children that she was gay and happy, an entertainer by choice. There were, however, no small children at the party.

  “Stand back,” the trainer said to Annabeth, as she wandered down the hill. “She’s about had it with this job, and she’s got a temper.”

  “Really?” Annabeth asked, not meaning it. It seemed to her she could do nothing right at these insider parties—even the pachyderm was bored with her. She shouldn’t leave the house when she was feeling this way; her neediness was on her like a stink. Are you my mother, Mrs. Mean Lady Elephant? Mr. Tortured Comedy Writer? Ms. Unbearably Arch Indie-Feature Producer?

  “She doesn’t like women much, either,” the trainer added, assuming quite correctly that Annabeth—with her skulking stance and her formless T-shirt—was not anyone he needed to cultivate. Annabeth looked more closely at the elephant’s enormous brow and tiny eye and felt defeated; nevertheless, she headed back up the driveway to the house. She could hear the giant animal’s breathing and its anxious shifting of weight as she pulled herself uphill. Then the faint smell of hay, or something like it, triggered an emotion—regret? nostalgia?—and she turned to take a last look at the scene: tarted-up elephant, crabby guy in track suit, metal folding chair, BMW, Jeep, Mercedes, asphalt, cypress trees, enveloping lights of the L.A. basin.

  Annabeth encountered Laura, dark-haired, black-clad, near the patio. It was almost midnight, but she was just arriving. She’d had to park a good way down Hollyridge Drive and so, though sleek, she was also somewhat sweaty.

  “What’s with the elephant?” she asked Annabeth.

  “She’s mean, apparently,” said Annabeth, “and she hates women.”

  “You don’t say,” said Laura. “How did you manage to learn all that?”

  And that was when Annabeth realized she was talking to Laura Katz. The Director. She’d seen Two Chevrolets at Sundance in ’91 and had been following Laura’s career in the trades ever since. Photographs had not done this woman justice, though. Golden skin on a taut armature, eyes impenetrably dark—she was Annabeth’s opposite, her contrary. Successful people always turned out to be beautiful, too…well, successful women in Hollywood always turned out to be beautiful, or it seemed so to Annabeth, who was pretty when she tried to be—which was never.

  Normally Annabeth would have been much too self-conscious to crassly accost this woman at a party, but it was already too late to get flustered, so she just answered Laura’s question, providing additional details she’d heard earlier: that the elephant was a “picture” elephant (“You mean it’s in the Screen Elephants Guild?” quipped Laura); that their host had hired it to be “the elephant in the room,” so people would discuss it instead of his latest series—a wildly successful, utterly tasteless sitcom; and that the handler was peddling a wacky comedy about an experience he’d had during the Vietnam War with an elephant in a starring role.

  “Too perfect!” said Laura.

  “So you’re Laura Katz,” said Annabeth, immediately regretting her phrasing. Somehow, she had made it sound like an accusation.

  “I am?” said Laura, half-teasing. “Sorry, I’m not used to being recognized—I guess I should be a little more gracious.”

  “That’s okay,” said Annabeth.

  “Who are you?”

  “Annabeth Jensen. I used to work with Janusz?”

  “With Janusz!” said Laura.

  “You were at AFI together.”

  “God, don’t tell anyone that—they’ll figure out how old I am.” But seeing Annabeth retract, she added, “Jesus, you’re skittish—were they serving paranoia weed in there or what?”

  “No,” said Annabeth, realizing a second too late that Laura’s question was rhetorical.

  Laura walked ahead toward the patio’s bamboo gate, but Annabeth hadn’t really made up her mind to go back to the pool area. Before her visit to the elephant, she had found herself on the outskirts of a conversation there that she’d found deeply disturbing—a conversation among sitcom writers. These were well-bred, well-educated young men who had probably not fared well in the social maelstroms of
high school and college and who, in their late twenties and early thirties, had come to Los Angeles to exact their revenge. One aspect of their code of honor was that none of them ever laughed out loud at a joke—his own, or anyone else’s.

  The comedy guy Annabeth had had her eye on at the elephant party was named Andrew something. She’d met him a few weeks earlier at a Sunset Boulevard pub where he and his fellow wits had a standing weekly get-together. While waiting for refills at the bar that night, Andrew had told Annabeth he didn’t really like Guinness; he just drank it to seem cool. This had felt to her like an intimate admission, although probably only because she was drunk and he had the comedy-guy characteristic of looking meaningfully into her eyes while cracking wise. In any case, he had charmed her, and when she saw him again that night at the party, she wandered over to stand nearby, joining an ad hoc audience that loosely ringed his circle of humorists.

  At first, she felt perfectly content to be idling there. Then she noticed that the other bystanders were all men—the next generation of Ivy League comedy guys. She didn’t like to stand out, and she hated the role of female acolyte. But when the wisecracking started to die down, she thought that the little knot of wits might untie itself enough for her to catch Andrew’s eye. And, as it happened, he seemed to look directly at her as he spoke, answering a question she hadn’t heard.

  “Elizabeth? Fuckable?” he said, “I don’t know…I think I’d really rather douse her in Sterno, sodomize her, and set her on fire.”

  Elizabeth was the girlfriend of their host, and Elizabeth—although blond and lovely—had a summa degree from Yale in Middle Eastern studies. Andrew’s joke, as Annabeth ultimately parsed it, was about the unlikeliness of anyone ever doing any such thing to Elizabeth, especially anyone as fine-boned and circumspect as Andrew appeared to be. But, even among the comedy writers, in the laughless vacuum that was their air, this joke was not funny. At all. And that was the experience that had sent Annabeth down to visit the elephant in the first place. She had no desire to recount all this to Laura, but she did want to hold on to her new ally for as long as possible. When Laura reached out to open the gate that led to the pool area, Annabeth hesitated.