My Liar Read online

  “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded and shut her eyes as the recorded David introduced himself and his show, which was to be “a meditation on breaking the rules.” His radio voice was deep and soft, intensely sexy. She tried to imagine what she would think about this guy if she had heard him on the radio first, and only met him later. Definite crush. The first song on the tape was a noisy blast of punk, the kind of thing she hated. She tried to look like she was enjoying it, but two and a half minutes was too long to keep that up. Ultimately, she opened her eyes and revealed what she hoped was a not too painfully beseeching face to David. He nodded disinterestedly.

  She had assumed that deejaying was like editing, that it was about assembling and adjusting parts that are meant to fit and also about removing whatever is foreign to the whole. Now she sensed that she had been mistaken. Perhaps they had nothing in common at all. Then the second song began—it was Nina Simone singing “Don’t Explain.” But after her initial relief, Annabeth’s mind again became critical. He was treating his “theme” of rule breaking too obviously: angry punks, jarring juxtapositions, adultery…She had wanted David to surprise her. But maybe that just was too much to have expected and, anyway, this was only minute five of the twenty-five minute tape.

  David knew what she was thinking, more or less. These first two tracks, though dear to him in various ways, were mainly there to draw fire from the listener, to get rid of the obvious ideas so he could start playing with the subtler ones. Simone’s growling lullaby would soon give way to “Memo from Turner,” and Ry Cooder’s sly, Oriental-carpet figure of an introduction would unroll for Annabeth, coax her into the song, and then transform itself into a freight train. And, sure enough, by the time Jagger’s vocal stepped in, David could see that Annabeth had forgotten all about the show’s putative theme and was just completely listening.

  Annabeth had never heard this particular Stones’ song, and in perhaps a more unusual omission had never seen the movie Performance, from which it comes. At first she wasn’t even certain that the voice singing belonged to Mick Jagger, but its taunting rock ’n’ roll intimacy triggered a torrent of high school memories—days and nights with Trevor, the rich kid who’d been her boyfriend when she was seventeen. His older brothers had left him a trove of records and a marijuana connection in the Cities, which, together, had made the Rasmussen house Annabeth’s refuge for days a time. Trevor had actually been the one who’d convinced her to apply to schools out of state, and so had saved her life, she now realized. She hadn’t thought about him in years, but the music had reanimated him, from his sarcastic smile to his filthy Levi’s. She blushed, thinking of the time they’d had sex under the piano in the never-used room the Rasmussens called “the library.” He’d told her she was beautiful then, and she’d believed him.

  When David’s voice again emerged from the speaker, Annabeth was caught off guard. She took a long, head-back swig of beer to deflect his notice from the blush in her cheeks and to distract herself from the warmth in her vulva.

  “In my family,” David’s radio voice said, “we don’t eat pork, buy German cars, or serve cocktails, but we don’t light candles or pray either. It’s like, if we don’t actually identify ourselves as Jews, no one can ever use our Jewishness against us. Which is pretty funny, considering the past two thousand years. But maybe that’s why we think God will give us a pass on the rituals—or maybe it’s a test, a dare, Hit us again, you big bully, go ahead. But I grew up in southern California, I went to class barefoot in high school, ordered lobster Cantonese every Sunday night, knew the words to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ before I could say Baruch atah Adonai… So, to whom should I address my complaints? Or should I complain at all?” Annabeth didn’t entirely understand this speech, but she wanted to and was trying to formulate a question for David when he took the beer bottle from her hand and set it aside, then kissed her.

  Driving home the next day, Annabeth went over the “date” in her head. She put a lot of stock in the theory that within the first few weeks of any affair, lovers show each other the characteristics that will one day upend the relationship. The preceding afternoon’s enforced listening experience certainly seemed to have contained pertinent revelations. Vanity? A certain didacticism? But neither of these were deal breakers in her book. She just wanted to avoid mistakes she’d made before: guys who didn’t really want her around once they had her. Still, she had a feeling that she had received a warning, if only she could decode it. The content of the radio show had seemed mostly innocuous to her, in spite of its advertised theme. The Jewish stuff was a little bit bothersome, but only because it underlined the absence of cultural or family identity in her own life. She kind of liked the idea of going out for Chinese food every Sunday night with David’s parents, though. She wondered how long they would have to be together before he would invite her along.

  In fact, after only six weeks, Annabeth and David moved in together in Venice. A high school friend of David’s was giving up the perfect house, and together they could afford the rent. It was a bungalow on Nowita Court, a filled-in canal too narrow for automobile traffic, a “walk street.” This corridor was densely planted, which made it shady and cool in the summer but also unusually dark for southern California. A short walk west, across Electric Avenue, they had a cappuccino joint (Abbot’s Habit), two decent restaurants (Hal’s and Capri), and Babe Brandelli’s Brig, a skeevy bar with pool tables where guys like David could go to feel less suburban. The ocean, though invisible, was nearby—this was apparent in the density of the morning fog and the frequent appearance of darkly tanned young men wandering back to their cars in the early mornings, their black rubber skins half-shucked. Annabeth felt about seeing surfers in her neighborhood the way other L.A. newcomers felt about having fruit trees in their yards—now, she was living the dream.

  The little bungalow had been built as a summer retreat so, though charming, it was tiny, underinsulated, and short on closet space. It had five rooms, one of which they used mostly for storage: two bicycles; David’s ski equipment, tennis racket, and reel-to-reel tape player; Annabeth’s student films, many boxes of books, scripts, and records; two trunks; and five suitcases. It drove them both crazy that they were giving up a whole bedroom to this crap, but neither of them could figure out what else to do with it, so the room remained an indoor garage. The rest of the house offered a living room (complete with fireplace), a dining room, a rickety kitchen, and the “master” bedroom, which just about accommodated their full-sized mattress and two mismatched dressers—his and hers. David’s was incredibly neat and had framed pictures on it showing his family at his sister’s wedding, his long-deceased childhood dog (Brownie, a standard poodle), and an awkward teenage David standing in front of his first car, an AMC Gremlin. Annabeth’s dresser usually had at least one open drawer. As for family pictures, her mother had systematically burned them all when Annabeth was sixteen, which was when Eva had finally accepted that her husband’s last disappearance was permanent.

  Denise, the only friend from Duluth with whom Annabeth had kept up, had pointed out more than once that Annabeth’s childhood must have been harder than she let on, what with the mostly absent alcoholic father, the raging mother, the clueless older brother, and the “creepy” old house in the middle of nowhere. “And what about you?” Denise would ask on the phone, always with the same tone, implying that certainly something dramatic or momentous might need to be unloaded, but Annabeth always brushed off this question. She had no gruesome memories; there was always food on the table and clean laundry in the drawer. Even now, although she barely spoke to her mother, she would never have called her “bad” or “mean.”

  In truth, Eva Jensen had gone a quiet kind of crazy when Annabeth was an adolescent. As with all of his earlier disappearances, she had initially dealt with Gus’s final departure with equanimity. She continued to go to work, buy the groceries, pay the bills, and appear normal to the neighbors. Even after a year had passed and twelve-year-old
Annabeth had begun asking her to stop it, she still set a place for him at the dinner table and still saved his mail, unopened, though it had long since overflowed the tray on top of his desk. She went on buying him birthday presents and rotating his winter and summer suits from closet to closet for almost four years. Annabeth could remember throwing her trig textbook across the kitchen and screaming, “He’s never coming back!” at the top of her lungs. Loud enough so even the neighbors could have heard, she thought the next day, feeling humiliated. But the confrontation had ended with Eva strangely composed, only Annabeth in tears, and her brother, Jeff, upstairs in his room with the stereo turned up loud. Ultimately, Annabeth found the easiest thing was to pretend that her father had never existed. When new acquaintances asked about him, she began to say, “I never knew him,” which, all things considered, seemed perfectly true.

  Occasionally, in the months following his first tryout, David was called to fill in on late-night shifts at KCRW, but these calls always came at the last minute and there was never any subsequent comment about how he had done—he suspected no one at the station really listened to the radio at that hour, anyway. He presumed his audience was mostly composed of club kids and late-shift film technicians and he felt confident about his ability to provide entertainment to them, but he still very much wished one of the station’s grown-ups would give him a little notice, even criticism—something to let him know the job might one day be real, and was not just some weird dream he kept having.

  “You have to give that up,” Annabeth told him. “Nobody in the entertainment business gives meaningful commentary on the work of the wannabes. It’s like an unwritten rule.” Had Janusz Zielinski been there to overhear this remark, he would have called her a liar, but they were alone on the back steps. The afternoon air was warm and, for a change, the inky smell of the ocean was superseding the pong of cat feces that haunted their alleyway.

  “It’s not the entertainment business,” argued David. “It’s National Public Radio.”

  “Right,” said Annabeth. But she heard herself sounding like the cigarette-smoking old souse at the end of the bar and decided to dial it down a bit.

  “Okay,” said David, having taken her silence as an instruction to think again. “So music is part of the entertainment business…I can admit that. But why do you think it’s against the rules for anyone to acknowledge that I exist?”

  She looked at him fondly, the reddish-gold hairs on his forearm lit by the raking light, his downcast eyes, his fat peasant’s feet. The white stripes where his rubber thongs blocked the sun looked particularly vulnerable to her just then.

  “You exist,” she said. “But the thing is, they’re all looking up at whoever they need affirmation from. No matter how far up they get, there’s always another daddy.”

  He nodded, peeking out from under his shaggy hair at his really very new girlfriend, Annabeth. She was right. She often was when it came to this kind of thing. He was lucky, he knew it, and was terrified that she knew it, too.

  Although she talked tough about the entertainment business, Annabeth was just as tentative about her right to occupy a place in it as David was. She had recently come to the end of her unemployment payments and was feeling increasingly uneasy about watching her money market account balance dip below ten thousand dollars, which it was about to do. She knew that David was probably good for more than his income, but she didn’t want to ask him. (Indeed, David’s finances were a sensitive subject: his mother had been sent to Paris before the war with all of her parents’ assets. Neither she nor the family friends who had raised her had ever drawn from those accounts, or even really looked at them, except to make them over into a trust for David and his sister. By the time of David’s college graduation, it was already worth several million dollars. He claimed to have no compunction about spending this legacy, and had sometimes used it recklessly for stereo equipment and live performance tickets but, in truth, the family money cast as long a shadow over his life as the tiny Jews to whom it had once belonged.)

  Since moving to the house on Nowita Court, Annabeth had had a few vague conversations with former coworkers about features possibly starting up in the next few months, but nothing had panned out. She told herself that it was normal to have an uneven period when you jumped up a level (as she had, almost involuntarily, on Janusz’s departure). That was why she kept such a substantial savings cushion in the first place. But she also knew that she was not yet “really” an editor and that her job-hunting efforts had been insufficient—she hated networking. She was certain that all her peers believed Janusz had given her the credit on Golden State only to reward her for the four years of groveling they assumed she had done as his assistant. But Janusz had never asked her to pick up his dry cleaning or babysit for his kids. Moreover, she really had cut most of the picture. After Corey Hunt, their insecure young director, had come into the cutting room one day waving five pages of voice-over narration he’d written the night before, Janusz had lost it. He was fifteen years older than the Idiot (as they called him), ten times as smart, and twenty times as knowledgeable about cinematic storytelling. Moreover, Janusz’s wife was threatening to leave him if he canceled another weekend plan. “There is no focking way I’m shooting down my marriage so the Idiot-boy can make five new versions of the same movie with the same focking footage!” he concluded. In the end, Annabeth had been the one to recut the picture: first as a road movie, then as a fish-out-of-water comedy, and finally as a buddy picture. “Now you have a complete portfolio,” Janusz told her, by phone from Amsterdam, where he and Agniezka were in the process of moving. “Welcome to ninth circle of hell.”

  Annabeth had been working for Janusz for five years when he left. Even between projects, they had spoken on the phone every few weeks. He had seen her through three apartments, two boyfriends, one race riot, and two impacted wisdom teeth. In the long dry spell that followed Golden State, she often wished that she could just go back to being his assistant.

  5

  Laura and Annabeth coincidentally ran into each other one more time that summer, at a women’s networking brunch in Laurel Canyon. It was the kind of thing neither of them usually went to, but Laura was shopping for a producer for Trouble Doll and Annabeth was looking for an editing job, and so there they were. The difference between them was clear, however: Laura felt like she had something to offer, while Annabeth felt like she was looking for a handout.

  On her way there, at the treacherously steep corner of La Cienega and Sunset, Annabeth had a momentary vision of her car rolling backward down the hill, gaining momentum, and crashing into the busy intersection at Santa Monica Boulevard. She’d never heard of this happening, but the sheer physics of the situation seemed to guarantee that someday it would and, when it did, the projectile would certainly be a car like hers, with old brakes and old gears and a spotty record of repair. She disliked driving in the hills. The absurd, delighted street names, mazelike layouts, and enthusiastic plantings always seemed like an open invitation to disaster. If God existed and had any self-respect at all, he would have to take a swipe at this ridiculous display. But the folded and crumpled stretch of landscape that made up Laurel, Nichols, and Beachwood Canyons was where the movie business hipoisie tended to roost. Annabeth told herself she only had to stay at the brunch for five minutes. If there was no one there that she knew, she could turn around and go home. If she stayed for an hour, she would stop at the Brentwood Country Mart on the way home and reward herself with a frozen espresso.

  As her car climbed into the canyon, the shadows thrown by the bright sunshine shifted with the breeze. Her destination was a small, pink ranch-style house on Wonderland Avenue. It had the kind of anonymous exterior that told Annabeth it was probably a rental. This was a detail that she’d learned to take note of in Los Angeles, along with whether someone’s groceries came from Ralphs or Gelson’s, whether they “self-parked” or used the valets, and whether a washed-out-looking cotton T-shirt had come from Fred Segal or
the Gap.

  The brunch was already well under way when Annabeth entered through the unlocked front door. The living room was full of young women in flower-print dresses or the aforementioned Fred Segal T-shirts worn with linen shorts. Annabeth was the only person in the room wearing Levi’s and just about the only one not sporting a hair scrunchie. (They didn’t stay in her hair; it was too straight and thin.) She looked like she always looked, and she hoped that was okay because she didn’t know how to look any other way. The best she could do was to substitute a clean white T-shirt for her usual laundered-to-near-transparency black one and to don her “good” shoes, which were cowboy boots. She smiled abstractedly as she headed for the buffet table while surreptitiously scanning the party in search of a familiar face. While doing this, she overheard two D-girls gossiping about David Mamet, who had just doctored a script for the director or producer who employed one of them.

  Annabeth had learned about D-girls when she worked in cutting rooms on the Fox lot with Janusz. “De-welopment,” he had explained, “is what they call buying scripts and rewriting until they are too bad to be movies.” The girls themselves tended to be pleasant and well educated, but whenever Annabeth wound up talking to one—in the commissary or at duplication services—the girl’s eyes would glaze over as soon as she realized Annabeth worked in “post.” She would not have stopped to listen to the D-girls at the party that day, except the name David Mamet interested her. She had once heard him speak on a panel and he had been both both wise and hilarious. The conversation she overheard at the networking brunch went something like this: