My Liar Page 2

  “What’s the matter? Is there some guy in there that you slept with and shouldn’t have?” Laura asked.

  “Uh,” said Annabeth, but Laura had already opened the gate and stepped through, leaving her no real choice but to follow.

  Annabeth called Laura a few weeks later, after much anxious consideration. Was it too soon? Was she imposing? But they had had a good time together and Laura had volunteered her phone number. Still, Annabeth didn’t really know how to call someone up just to chat, especially not someone so much further along in the business than she was. Ultimately, she decided to suggest lunch, but when she got Laura’s answering machine, she choked and left only her name and number.

  Laura called back the next day, which Annabeth took to be a sign of interest and enthusiasm. Usually, if she had the temerity to call a director about a job, it took at least three tries to get her call returned, often by an assistant. She didn’t expect Laura to have an assistant (“Can you hold for Laura Katz?”), but she also didn’t expect to get so rapid a response. However, Annabeth herself was out at the time of Laura’s call—riding her bike along the bike path on the beach, which she did almost every afternoon when she couldn’t stand her roommates for another second.

  When the two women finally did connect, they had trouble finding a conversational stride—they’d both been drunk when they’d met, after all, and by then the elephant party was almost a month in the past. Laura had been the one to place the call. She’d just read in the trades that Becca Lawson, a hair-tossing bimbo with whom she’d gone to UCLA, had been made Meg Ryan’s “head of production.” This could have meant almost anything, but it activated the engine of envy in Laura’s heart. Calling Annabeth was a way of rebalancing herself, making sure there were still people who wanted to be her the way she wanted to be…well, she didn’t want to be Becca, she just wanted to make Trouble Doll, already. She wanted to see her own name in the trades, again. And so she called Annabeth and pretended that her movie was just a little bit closer to going forward than it in fact was.

  “So, do you know Mia Goldman?” she asked Annabeth.

  “A little. Not really. I mean, she’s always been incredibly nice when I’ve called her about assisting, but I’ve never worked with her or anything.”

  “I’d heard she was interested in doing another indie project,” said Laura.

  Annabeth knew that Laura was shopping her next project around, hoping to make it independently. “Have you found a producer yet?”

  “Actually, I met a guy I liked last week, Arthur Simpson?”

  “Did he do In the Soup?”

  “Unh-uh. He’s been in London, at the BBC or something. But he’s American—very midwestern and aw shucks. Disarming. He kind of reminds me of you, in fact.”

  Annabeth didn’t know if this was a compliment or an insult. “Really?” she said.

  “Anyway, he had some good ideas. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the writer to finish the draft we’ve been talking about…For. A. Year. It’s so irritating.”

  Annabeth paused, wondering how to reintroduce the subject of lunch or whether she should. If Laura was thinking about Mia Goldman, there was no way she was going to hire Annabeth, who’d only just gotten her first full editing credit.

  In the silence, Laura went back to the previous topic. “He was wearing a seersucker suit—when was the last time you saw one of those?”

  “Wow,” said Annabeth. Her father had worn seersucker suits. At least she thought she could remember him wearing one.

  “Anyway, lunch,” said Laura. “How about the week after next? Wednesday? I have a screening in the afternoon so maybe, I don’t know, the Newsroom on Robertson?”

  “Sure, that sounds great.”

  “But call me first,” said Laura. “Friday? Just in case things get screwed up?”

  Which, of course, they did.

  2

  David was then working in the recorded music collection at the Beverly Hills Public Library, a little-known pocket of hipsterism. The Moorish façade of the building looked very beautiful whenever Annabeth drove past, but she had been living in Los Angeles for over ten years before she first went inside. She was in her seventh month of unemployment after finishing Golden State, and she was always on the lookout for a good, cheap source of a few hours’ entertainment. One afternoon when it was too windy for bike riding, she and her Honda found their way into the library’s recently renovated parking structure.

  While still working as Janusz’s assistant on Golden State, Annabeth had spent many fruitless hours searching for a song that the scatterbrained editor had heard on the radio. He’d lost the scrap of paper on which he’d written its name but could whistle part of it, was reasonably sure the word apple was in the title, and could think of no more perfect underscore for the chase sequence at the end of the movie. Abandoning her search for this nameless, wordless tune had been a personal defeat for Annabeth. Though Golden State had long since been locked and timed and prints struck with an old Steely Dan song doing the job of the fugitive tune, she still had fantasies about identifying it and sending a tape to Janusz at his new home in the Netherlands. But she had never even tried the public library.

  David, whose candid brown eyes belied the negativity of his KILL ROCK STARS T-shirt, was the first person she talked to at the Music Collection desk. He was immediately hooked by Annabeth’s challenge. Especially after she whistled the tune for him, leaning close, at library-whisper pitch. It was the most erotic thing he had ever personally witnessed at the BHPL, or perhaps anywhere. He got on the case immediately. The first step was to brainstorm, with Annabeth, all the names of rock ’n’ roll songs with the word apple in them that they had heard of…or could imagine. This was fun, but it didn’t get them very far: After “Little Green Apples” and “Apple Scruffs” they were largely stumped. They then amused each other for a while with hypotheticals: “Bite the Apple!” said Annabeth. “Fruit of Eden!” rejoined David. After a moment, he added, “Crabapple Jam?” Then they discussed the funny pronunciation of the name of the Simpsons’ schoolteacher, Mrs. Crabapple. Was it some pun they just couldn’t hear, some obscure reference too inside for the likes of them? Anyway, after their brainstorming project sputtered, they decided to divide and conquer: Annabeth would scan back issues of Rolling Stone and David would visit the various Usenet sites he had recently learned to watch for music news.

  They never found Janusz’s song, which was, in fact, “All Apologies.” (The apple clue had masked its identity even to David, who knew every note of every Nirvana song recorded to date.) But they bashfully agreed to meet at closing time at the peculiar Pico Boulevard bar called the Arsenal. It had real guns on the walls and a mock-Latin verse about buses full of livestock printed on the napkins. Heading west in their individual vehicles (David drove a brown 1984 Dodge Aries; Annabeth, a silver 1982 Honda Civic), they both listened to All Things Considered on KCRW, which was the only way either one of them ever really consumed national news.

  They didn’t go home together that night, mostly out of shyness, which may have been why their relationship lasted as long as it did. And when they did first lie down together two weeks later, the sun had not yet set. The plan had been for the two of them to meet at David’s apartment, then head over to Sunset Boulevard for dinner before catching Morphine at the Troubadour, but David had news: at the last minute, he’d been offered a tryout at KCRW, subbing in the midnight-to-two A.M. slot. When Annabeth had stopped saying “Omigod” and “That’s so amazing,” he took her hand and led her to his bedroom.

  Annabeth had never really had sober sex before—not with a new partner. She found it terrifying. All she could think about was what she might be doing wrong: Was it too soon to have arched her back that way? Should she have let him remove her clothes instead of tearing them off herself? Was her “what you see is what you get” cotton underwear a terrible mistake? Bright, late streaks of sunlight painted the bed as they lay there: everything was exposed. Later she pun
ished herself over the memory of David recoiling when she began to nuzzle his balls. He was just ticklish, but Annabeth felt reproached and shamed for being so—curious? Willing? What? That imaginary misstep was only an instant in an otherwise happy half hour of coupling in David’s clean, nearly empty bedroom, but in Annabeth’s not-so-sunny soul it lived on for weeks.

  Ordinarily, David would have been just as self-conscious, but he was in a rare moment of exaltation over his radio opportunity. In fantasy, he had already progressed rapidly beyond the two A.M. backwater and was behind the mike at Morning Becomes Eclectic, the station’s flagship music show. (Its hosts interviewed anyone they wanted to; were consulted by journalists, scholars, record executives, and filmmakers; had comped seats at every live performance worth seeing; and never paid for drinks.) And because it was radio, looks were irrelevant. David was self-conscious about his small stature and weak chin, but he knew he had a melodious, affable voice. The die was cast, the cards were stacked, the time was right…In any case, he didn’t notice anything amiss in Annabeth that afternoon. The skin on her back was so white, it looked like marble, or bone, or possibly even pearl.

  When they got out of bed an hour later, it was the most polite and easygoing “morning after” Annabeth had ever experienced. David had none of the sheepishness or defensiveness men usually seemed to exhibit in that situation. He made them a nice snack of scrambled eggs with cilantro, gave her a clean towel to shower with, and generally behaved as though they were the oldest and best of friends. He even walked her out to her car and, in the encroaching twilight, she looked west down Fifth Street and saw its parade of towering palm trees.

  “God, those are beautiful,” she said. “I always notice them from the freeway.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said David. “You know they’re full of rats.”

  “No way!” Annabeth loved this fact.

  “Yeah, it’s some urban mini-ecosystem, I guess.”

  “Rats in the trees—that should be the title of a song about L.A.”

  “Oooh, so cynical.”

  “Yeah, well. Prove me wrong,” said Annabeth, too quickly, and immediately felt a patchy rush of blood in her cheeks. David seemed not to notice, but she couldn’t be sure. Maybe it sounded casual enough—just a remark, not a long-held wish for a life of tropical ratlessness, of palm trees and moonlight and a boyfriend who looked her in the eyes when he kissed her.

  3

  Annabeth sat facing her wet dog of a reflection at Claude Hair Studio and determined that complete metamorphosis was an unreasonable expectation, particularly since all she ever specified was “You know, lose about an inch. Nothing foofy.” She wasn’t even certain she’d said that much this time—it was a large part of why she returned to Claude. He required little instruction and no chitchat. Alone in his two-chair salon on an unfabulous segment of Melrose Avenue, he approached every haircut with equal rigor, passion, and self-direction. The few hairs he separated out for each snip were part of a master plan to which he could mentally refer without even seeming to rack focus. He was incredibly painstaking, a little bit ominous, and the resulting haircut always looked exactly the same. She wondered if she was as focused and precise when editing—the activities were in some ways similar: intensely visual, conducted in the half dark, capable of almost infinite refinement. She kept hoping the artist in Claude would one day see through her diffidence and tell her she was ready to be transformed.

  “Just cock your head a little bit to the…yeah.” Claude regarded his work, pursed his lips, and dug back in.

  In Los Angeles, most hair salons seemed to Annabeth like theatrical places—brightly lit boxes intended to be peered into from the street. They offered special costumes to their customers, played carefully considered sound tracks, crackled with gossip, and called everyone by her first name. She would have liked to be the sort of person who felt deserving, or at any rate plausible, in such places, but she was not. The few times she’d tried, she’d found herself racked with worries: how to politely reject the offer of extra conditioner or special blow-drying or whatever substance or service seemed imminent, who and how much to tip. She was always afraid that out of sheer meekness she would wind up with some grotesquely chic effect she could never carry off. In contrast, Claude Hair felt like a secret clubhouse, a low-rent speakeasy one needed a password to enter. Silhoetted in the front window was something that looked like a snake tree and turned out to be an antiquated permanent wave appliance. It cast creepy shadows on the wall behind Annabeth as headlights passed outside. The presence of the snake tree and Claude’s eclectic mix tapes (Keely Smith, Yma Sumac, Ian Dury and the Blockheads) were the only clues she had to his actual personality. He was burly, fairly handsome, sometimes blond, and spoke as though he’d been taught English by Britons, or maybe even Afrikaners. She had no idea whether he was straight or gay or both or neither, but she felt certain that cutting hair was not his real creative focus. She could picture him as a performance artist, an action painter, even a pianist or conductor—something requiring much bigger gestures than the ones he used while cutting hair. She was picturing him conducting Einstein on the Beach when he caught her eye in the mirror and smiled as though at some secret pleasure.

  “You’re done,” he said.

  Annabeth had been sitting still and silent for almost an hour and needed to go to the bathroom. She knew her way to the one in the back of the storefront bungalow, which looked like it belonged to someone’s grandmother: 1930s pink-and-black tile. Once alone there, she stole a look at herself in the mirror and was disappointed. She wished she had the élan—the face, the clothes, the who-knew-what—to somehow animate the blond curtain that was her hair. Then she might look sleek and mod, like Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up—but she was just Vanessa’s dowdy sister Lynn in Georgy Girl. She could hear a woman’s muffled voice talking to Claude, up front; his next customer had arrived. She’d better go and pay.

  Laura recognized Annabeth immediately. “No way!” she said. She was already sitting in Claude’s chair and had been critically examining her own reflection.

  “Look—come here.” She extended her hand to Annabeth, who approached with something like wonder in her eyes: Laura went to Claude??? Laura was Vanessa Redgrave—well, Ali MacGraw, anyway. Laura swiveled the chair so her profile was reflected in the mirror and cocked her head at Annabeth. Claude stood back. “I’m thinking about a skunk stripe,” said Laura. “Just on the left, kind of Mrs. Robinson meets Susan Sontag. What d’you think?” Annabeth, smiling involuntarily at Laura’s allusions, tried to envision the proposed change.

  “Or we could do red,” added Claude, looking up from the issue of Film Threat he was scanning. “You know, a little less of a direct quote.”

  Annabeth was stunned as much by Claude’s sudden volubility as by the coincidence of seeing Laura seated in his chair. “Well,” she said, “this is going to sound retarded, but you’re so beautiful without it, I think it might be overkill.”

  “Ah, don’t gild the lotus blossom,” said Claude.

  Laura, whose mother was Japanese, could have done without the lotus-blossom remark, but it was her policy not to comment on that kind of thing. Because her appearance was unplaceable and her last name was Katz (at least since she’d dropped the Ito and its trailing hyphen, in college), she preferred to remain ambiguous. Looking at Annabeth’s reflection, she wondered about her outburst of flattery. It should have seemed too ingratiating to be credible, but Annabeth had said the words as though she had been to the factory where beauty was assembled—had even, herself, worked on the line—and knew firsthand what “beautiful” was and wasn’t. Her eyes were no longer trained on Laura, though, and she seemed lost in thought about something else entirely. Laura found that she resented this withdrawal of admiration.

  But Annabeth didn’t need to stare at Laura to keep her foremost in mind. She had seen her almost imperceptible flinch at Claude’s lotus-blossom comment and was now puzzling out what it might have meant. Laura’
s hair was shiny and coffee-colored and her eyes were gold, like cedar or tobacco. She might have had any number of ancestral sources: Gypsy, Filipino, Arab, Aleut—all equally exotic to Annabeth. Her own appearance was such that people assumed they knew everything about her at one glance: Scandinavian, Lutheran, probably from Minnesota, and therefore hardworking, reflexively “nice,” and a tightwad, most of which was true. She felt Laura’s gaze on her in the mirror and looked up.

  “Guess I better pay up now,” she said.

  “You can leave it on the counter,” said Claude.

  Annabeth got out her checkbook and wrote out her payment. She didn’t have to ask the price; it hadn’t changed in three years. Claude walked over to the sink and beckoned to Laura.

  “So what are we doing today?” he asked her.

  “Just lose the gray,” she said, taking her seat at the basin. “See you later, Annabeth.”

  “Bye,” said Annabeth. Obviously, this was the wrong time to bring up the never-rescheduled lunch date.

  4

  Being invited to listen to David’s recorded radio show was not the same thing at all as being given a mix tape, which was a courtship ritual that Annabeth understood. She watched as as he futzed with the tape-cueing mechanism.

  “This is really the best example I have of what I’m about these days,” David said, with his back to her. They were in the living room of his apartment, and his roommate, Ben, was away for the weekend. She had pictured them tumbling rapidly into the sack, but after being seated on the couch and then abandoned in favor of seemingly endless stereo ministrations, she recalibrated. From David’s jerky gestures, she could tell that he was nervous. And there was a portentousness in the way he then turned and waited for her to settle in before he hit “play.” Clearly this was not all about sex. It was early in the day to be drinking, but she was grateful for the cold beer he had set in front of her. She leaned back into the cushions and pulled her hair off the back of her neck, conscious that David was watching her with an intensity that should have been exciting but wasn’t. The futon couch was surprisingly comfortable and clean and she wondered if Ben (she hadn’t met him yet) was a homosexual.