Postcards from the Edge

Dysphoria

She was going to a party, but she was pregnant and she didn’t want to bring the baby, so she took it out and left it home. While she was at the party, she realized that you can’t do that with babies, so she went home. When she got there, the baby was blue, so she panicked and tried to get it back in. “How could I have done this?” she thought. “How could I have not known what would happen? I didn’t even want to go to the party.”

All of a sudden she was flying, soaring over great stretches of countryside, and it was wonderful. Wonderful. Then, in the middle of her flight, she thought, “I can’t fly!” and she realized she wasn’t flying at all but was actually falling from a great height. She was trying to get the wind under her arms to keep herself in the air when someone on the ground started shooting at her. She felt completely exposed. She couldn’t hide, couldn’t duck the bullets. She wanted to get farther inside her clothes. There was nowhere to go. She couldn’t go down because they were shooting at her, but they were shooting at her so it wasn’t safe to stay in the sky.

Then she was in the passenger seat of a car. The driver was in shadow, but she could tell it was a man. She wanted to get out of the car—it seemed to be out of control—but it was moving too fast, traveling great distances in a direction she’d never been. Suddenly they came to a house, and she opened the door and was in a tunnel, a long tunnel. From deep in the tunnel, she thought she heard a little baby crying, and then she heard the echoes of the crying and she got very frightened. She started to run, and then the man from the car was behind her, chasing her through deep snow with a gun…

The phone rang, jarring Suzanne from her dream and out of immediate danger. She lurched across her bed. “Hello,” she gasped, clearing her sleep-filled throat. “Hello?” she repeated, hearing the overseas hiss.

“Hello?” she heard a male voice cry from deep inside the phone. “Is Suzanne Vale there, please?”

“Who’s calling?” asked Suzanne, with her eyes shut tight to block out the morning sun experience.

“Sven Gahooden,” the accented voice carefully said. “I met her at an est intensive several years ago, and she told me to call her if I should ever—”

“Suzanne is on a verbal fast retreat in New Mexico,” interrupted Suzanne.

“The Insight Chaparral?” cried Sven.

“I think that’s the one,” said Suzanne patiently.

“Well, tell her I just wanted to share with her about a breakthrough I had watching a film of hers in Stockholm,” Sven said.

“I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne in her best let’s-wind-this-up voice.

“And that I’ve quit medical school to work full-time on the Hunger Project,” Sven finished.

“Okay, I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne with some gusto. “Good-bye, Sven.”

“Who is this?” asked Sven politely.

“A friend of Suzanne’s. Ruth Buzzi,” said Suzanne.

“Well, thank you, Ruth.”

“Thank you, Sven. Good-bye.” Suzanne replaced the receiver and shook her head. “Ruth Buzzi,” she thought with disbelief. “Maybe I should go on a verbal fast.”

The storm of sleep had blown her nightgown around her body in such a way that it was cutting off circulation in her left arm. She threw off her blanket as though it was a magic cloak and stood up, preparing to enter the dangerous arena of her day without its much-needed protection.

She untwisted her nightgown, walked into the bathroom, ran some bath water, and moved into the kitchen for some eye-opening orange juice. “A man with a gun,” she thought. “How obtuse.”

Suzanne went back to her bedroom and put a cassette in her stereo. She liked to listen to soundtracks in the morning. In the car she only liked rock ‘n’ roll, but soundtracks were house music. This morning she put on Somewhere in Time, which sounded like what she thought love was like. It sounded like longing. She listened to the music thoughtfully as she sipped her juice and walked back into the bathroom. Her thoughts seemed more like poetry to her, and less like idle chatter, with this music on. She turned off the water and sat in the tub.

The score started to gnaw at Suzanne a little as she bathed. It had been recommended to her by a musician she had gone out with once named Chester Pryce, whom she had liked but had never heard from again. She couldn’t remember whether she had liked him before she never heard from him again or only afterward. In any case, he had told her about this music—he said he listened to it a lot—but he hadn’t warned her that it sounded like feelings you had to be brave about. Suzanne imagined Chester listening to it in his car as he wistfully drove over a cliff.

She reached for her towel, stood up, and got out of the tub, surveying her reflection in the mirror. She had to get thin. In fact, she had to get too thin, so she could eat for a couple of days and not have to worry that much about it. “I won’t eat today unless I absolutely have to,” she thought.

Then she saw the looming largeness of a new blemish on her chin. It looked to her like a new feature. “I’m already worrying about wrinkles and I’m still getting pimples,” she thought. “Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.” She was especially dismayed because she had to go to her friend Wallis’s party that night, which would have been difficult enough for her to attend with relatively clear skin.

She got into her gym outfit, which was a black bathing suit with little teddy bears on it that she had purchased in Hawaii a few years ago after losing her luggage. She wasn’t what you would call enthusiastic about teddy bears, but it had been an emergency and the suit made her tits look good. She pulled on her turquoise-and-black-checked shorts. Her ensemble was less than stylish, but when Suzanne got used to an outfit, she stayed with it. She pulled on her black socks and turquoise sneakers, sprayed herself with perfume and deodorant, wiped some makeup under her eyes, got her purse, put on her sunglasses, and left for the gym.

She drove out to Venice behind a Kharmann Ghia with a license plate that read BURRRPP. She knew the route by heart so she didn’t even have to concentrate. She thought she was a wonderful driver, and she wished she could build a healthy self-esteem from that foundation. When it got down to the larger issues, though, she didn’t think believing in yourself as a driver meant that much.

With the sunroof open, the windows down, and the radio up full blast, Suzanne felt at peace. She had once decided that God was in her car radio, and He would play her songs she liked when He was happiest with her. The week before—when God was evidently not that happy with her—she had blown out her amplifier playing a Pretenders tape. The speakers had gone dead after she went over a speed bump during “Middle of the Road,” and she’d driven around after that in a daze of silence. She’d had it repaired the next day, and now the music—Bob Seger’s “Still the Same” as she headed west on Olympic—was so loud it made her legs vibrate. She was always a little sad when she turned onto Lincoln Boulevard, because it meant she had only one complete song left before she got to Gold’s Gym.

She liked going to the gym, or rather, she liked having been to the gym, and the only way to have been was to go. She liked that little blip that she got between her shoulder and her triceps from lifting weights. Still, she knew that no matter how much work you did, the only way to get your body to look really great was to eat right. Suzanne only knew how to eat wrong.

She had always eaten wrong. It was a tradition in her family. Dairy, red meat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and fried everything: American food. She knew what it did to you, but she couldn’t do without it for too long. Her diets lasted until about four thirty in the afternoon, when she couldn’t stand it anymore and ate something absurd like teriyaki beef jerky.

She didn’t like preparing food or sitting down to a meal, maybe because when she was young her mother had the children sit and “visit” after the meals. Suzanne felt that eating was a private thing that should be done in corners or in cars. Food was simply fuel for the body. Her car didn’t “visit” with the other cars when she filled its gas tank. She smiled as she drove past McDonald’s and Jack in the Box and smelled their familiar sodium fumes.

She got to Gold’s Gym fifteen minutes late and saw her trainer Michelle waiting in front. Michelle was a muscular blond girl from back east who had been a PCP junkie and who now used the gym to give her what drugs had.

“Sorry,” said Suzanne.

Michelle shrugged. Suzanne was always fifteen minutes late. “What are we doing today? Legs?” Michelle asked.

Suzanne’s face went into a fist. Legs were the hardest. “Chest and shoulders?” she pleaded wanly.

“Okay,” Michelle laughed, “but you can’t avoid those puppies forever. We’ll do legs tomorrow.” Suzanne was relieved. She had a day’s reprieve. She looked around as she followed Michelle back to the machines, recognizing some of the regulars: the tall guy with the headband and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on his arms, the wiry dark-haired actor who was always drenched with sweat, and her favorite, the giant black guy who was there all day, every day, and never spoke to anyone. From the way he acted, Michelle guessed that he’d served a lot of time.

“There’s your boyfriend,” she said under her breath.

“I love him,” Suzanne said moonily as Michelle positioned her correctly in the shoulder machine. “He’s so great,” she said, beginning to struggle with the weights. “He never talks… He’s the epitome of mystery… the paint-by-numbers guy… You can totally… fill him in… ” She was forced to stop talking as the exercise became more difficult.

“I wish I found him interesting,” sighed Michelle. “I wish I found anyone that interesting. I’m on E.”

“On what?” gasped Suzanne.

“E,” repeated Michelle. “Empty. Nothing motivates me. I haven’t had a good crush in weeks. Do five more. Five. Four. Three. Two. One more!”

“It’s too heavy,” Suzanne moaned.

“It’s only thirty pounds,” Michelle exclaimed. She let Suzanne rest for a few minutes between sets, then led her to the next machine.

Suzanne got quieter as she got farther into the exercises. She marveled that she did it at all, especially since Michelle was constantly reminding her that the whole thing was pointless without dieting. Because her dieting skills were so minimal, she ended up with muscles submerged in fat like islands under water. She watched a dark-haired girl with a giant back make her back even bigger and wondered, “What does it all mean?” But then, philosophers had been wrestling with that one since the dawn of man, so who was she to figure it out? She wondered if Kierkegaard had ever been to any place like Gold’s.

Finally they got to the last machine, which Suzanne hated because she had to sit facing herself in a mirror with bad overhead lighting. “Any word about Sal?” she asked, in an effort to take her mind off her body. Sal was Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, who had recently disappeared.

“Oh,” said Michelle brightly. “Didn’t I tell you? I can’t believe I didn’t tell you!”

“Well, tell me now,” Suzanne demanded. “What?”

“He’s in a rehab in New York,” said Michelle, with some obvious satisfaction. “One of those year-long programs.”

“A year,” Suzanne said, shaking her head. “I’d go crazy.”

“He already went crazy,” Michelle said. “I don’t know how much crazier you can go than shooting coke all day. Do two more. Two, one, okay! One more set, then some abs and you’re through.”

“Well,” said Suzanne, “he had a lot of practice shooting steroids.”

“And he even lied about that,” said Michelle. “Like someone could get a neck like a ham with just good old-fashioned exercise. He had a neck like a ham. You need help to get a neck like that. Ready?”

Suzanne did her last set in silence, trying to concentrate on something high on the wall so she didn’t have to look at herself in the mirror. She had done eight repetitions when she started to give up.

“Go!” cried Michelle. “You’re almost there!”

“No!” screamed Suzanne, embarrassing herself and finishing anyway, then letting the weight fall with a clunk. She did several unenthusiastic sets of abs, after which Michelle walked her to her car.

At the door they met Chad Paley, the Rams linebacker. “Hey, Sunshine,” he greeted Suzanne.

“Chad,” she said, “I bet you know. Who is that big black guy over there on the shoulder machine?”

He stared into the gym in the direction she had pointed, and his face darkened. “Keep away from him,” he said, glowering. “He’s bad news.”

“Why?” asked Michelle. “What did he—?”

“He served time for manslaughter, for one thing,” Chad said. “And for another thing, he’s gay. You can see him most nights on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Oh,” said Suzanne meekly.

“You stay away from him,” warned Chad paternally. He chucked Suzanne under the chin and strode back to the Life-cycles. The girls walked out without looking back at the silent man pumping iron for Hollywood Boulevard. “Stay away from him,” Suzanne said. “What was I gonna do, date him?”

They walked up to Suzanne’s BMW. “Tomorrow,” she said, confidently. “Legs.”

Michelle nodded. “And stick to your diet,” she said.

“I will,” said Suzanne, turning off the alarm and getting into her car.

“You will not,” Michelle said.

“Probably a little of both,” said Suzanne, starting her engine. “I will and I will not. The Zen diet.”

“And you’ll end up looking like a Buddha,” shouted Michelle over Don Henley’s “All She Wants to Do Is Dance” on the radio as Suzanne waved and drove off.

She went home to wash her hair and change clothes for her lunch with Al Hawkins, some manager who wanted to handle her career. Her friend Bob Becker had set up the lunch, and she was not looking forward to it.

She put on a little blue dress that both was comfortable and looked halfway decent. It fell exactly between her two clothing classifications: “dressing for me” and “dressing for them.” It was very hard to find a miracle dress like this, but she had accumulated three. This one had a little burn hole on the lower left side, but she was pretty sure nobody would notice.

She applied her makeup, checking on the steady progress of her blemish, and blow-dried her hair. She turned the dryer off four times while she was using it because she kept thinking she heard the phone ringing, but it never was. Then she put on some black high heels—which she felt firmly planted her outfit in the “dressing for them” category—and left for the restaurant she had selected: the Hamburger Hamlet on Beverly Drive.

About a block from the Hamlet, she found herself driving behind an enormous Bentley, the driver of which appeared to be on the phone. Staring at the back of his barbered head, Suzanne suddenly knew with absolute certainty that he was her lunch date. She tried to keep alive the possibility that she was wrong, but when he signaled his turn into the parking lot, she was overcome with dread. Could she drive around the corner to the Safeway and call the restaurant and tell Al Hawkins she was sick?

No. She’d already canceled and rescheduled this lunch three times. She had to go. “Oh, well, maybe I’ll learn something,” she thought philosophically as she handed her keys to the valet. She imagined herself smoking serenely on a pipe and gazing off to sea and saying, “Well, yeah, sure, he was an asshole, but he wasn’t your typical asshole. I really learned something that day at the Hamlet.”

The instant she walked into the restaurant she heard a loud New York voice bark, “Suzanne?” Sure enough, it was the skipper of the SS Bentley.

“Al Hawkins?” she asked meekly.

“The same,” bellowed Al, shaking her hand. “Why don’t we go to the table? Miss?” he called to a waitress. “Is our table ready? Thanks.”

Al Hawkins steered Suzanne to a table against the wall, under a mirror. He was under six feet, with a short, almost military haircut, brown eyes, a deep tan, and very good teeth—his, Suzanne guessed. He was wearing weird sunglasses on the top of his head, long thick black glasses, the kind Ferrari would make if they went into the sunglass business. He was wearing a blue button-down T-shirt, tight faded blue jeans, and neat little brown shoes. He was like a sergeant in the Show Business Corps, and Suzanne felt like some lowly private with AWOL leanings. He handed the waitress a couple of singles to get him some cigarettes and steered Suzanne like an invalid into her seat. “You sit facing out, okay? Okay,” he said. He was completely self-contained—he asked questions and he answered them. Suzanne felt superfluous.

“You’re not blond,” Al Hawkins said, fixing her with his intense glare.

“No, I never was,” said Suzanne.

“Well, you’ve never been blond in any of your films, but…” Al shrugged. “I know a lot of girls who, after a while, just… go blond.”

“Spontaneously?” asked Suzanne.

“No, they decide to do it after… Oh, I see. A joke.” Al smiled. “Shall we order?”

The waitress appeared with a pad and pencil. Suzanne ordered cottage cheese and fruit. Al ordered a number eleven, a cheeseburger with bacon and Russian dressing and French fries, and a Diet Coke. Suzanne hesitated, craving caffeine, then mustered all her willpower and asked for mineral water. The waitress left them sitting across from each other in silence. Suzanne watched Al light a Vantage as though she’d never seen it done before. She wondered if she was in the midst of an anecdote that, for reasons of proximity, she was not yet able to perceive. “You have a nice car,” she said.

“Isn’t she a beaut?” said Al, beaming as he blew out a lungful of smoke. “I had her shipped here from New York. Do you have any idea what a pain in the butt it is to ship a car?”

“I once had someone drive mine out,” Suzanne offered.

“Well,” said Al, “I would hardly trust my Bentley with a person.”

“I’ve never driven one,” she responded lamely. “They must drive smoothly or something to have become such a status symbol. I mean, a cliché doesn’t become a cliché for nothing.” She no longer knew what she was talking about, so she stopped, plunging them back into silence. Their table was becoming a cemetery for dead air.

Al gave her a thumbs-up gesture and said, “It rides like a dream.”

“Really?” said Suzanne. “That’s great.”

Suddenly, Al got to the point. “What I’d like to say right up front is how much I dislike your choice of agents.”

“Pardon me?” Suzanne didn’t quite know where she was.

“When Bob gave me your number, I hadn’t known you had gotten a new agent,” Al said. “I couldn’t possibly work with Mark Auerbach. I think he’s full of shit.”

“Really?” said Suzanne, without expression. She could just as well have said “hunchback” or “toaster” for all the impact it had on Al. He was on a roll now, and she was truly incidental.

“None of my people are with the Empire Agency,” Al was saying. “I moved all my people, even Zita Farina. She’s going to be a huge star.”

Suzanne nodded and wondered how much his watch cost as the waitress mercifully arrived with their food. She stuffed a banana into her mouth and made a mental note to kill Bob Becker.

“You know what I’d do with you?” said Al, salting his fries. Suzanne shook her head, even though Al wasn’t looking at her. “I’d put the word out that you were a client of mine and we were interested in projects, and see what kind of reaction we’d get. See where you stand.” He took a big bite of his hamburger and kept talking as he chewed. “You’re perfect for a series, ‘cause you can play intelligent, and people like intelligent. We have a series in development right now that you might be perfect for.”

“Well, send it to me,” Suzanne said, more to her cottage cheese than to him. “I’ll read it.”

“I’ll send it to you when we have a script,” Al said. “It’s a show for a guy and three women. You’d be great for the younger woman, the magazine editor. Very bright, funny, down to earth.”

“I’d like to do a series,” Suzanne said seriously. “I mean, I’d be stupid not to. But I keep thinking that movies are more—”

“You’re being naive,” interrupted Al, waving a French fry dismissively. “If you can get a good part in a pilot, you should go for it.”

“Who is this guy?” Suzanne wondered. “Whether I’m being naive or not,” she said testily, “I would like to explore it a little bit before jumping into television world.”

“It’s a potentially enormous career-maker,” Al said, chewing another big bite of burger. “Remember Happy Days? Henry Winkler got sixth billing. Remember Welcome Back, Kotter? Travolta was way down on the cast list, tiny speaking part.”

Suzanne decided she didn’t want a personal manager, and she certainly didn’t want one that got this personal. People she had known for years didn’t call her “naive.” She felt defeated. She didn’t seem to want to be anything badly enough to do what was required. She knew a lot of the right people, but she didn’t know them in the right way. Something about pushing your way to the front seemed so undignified.

She liked acting, all right. She just didn’t like a lot of what you had to do in order to be allowed to act: the readings, the videotapings, the meetings, the criticism, the rejections. She was too old, too young, too pretty, too short, not funny enough, too funny… It could wear you down after a while. After a while, it became a job in itself not to take those pronouncements personally.

“I’d like to see you do a guest shot on a Miami Vice or a Cosby,” Al was saying. “Do some really good episodic. They could build a whole show around you, and then, snap,” he snapped his fingers, “forty million people see you in one night. But even more important,” he said, gesturing with his thumb behind his back, “they see you.”

“Who?” asked Suzanne, looking over his shoulder.

“The industry,” he answered, exasperated.

“Oh,” Suzanne said. She felt nauseous. Al continued extolling the virtues of episodic, and when he paused momentarily, she interjected, “But not that many women go on to movies from TV. Except Shelley Long.”

“You don’t count Sally Field?” leered Al. “The Flying Nun made her.”

“What about Norma Rae?” asked Suzanne hopefully.

“The Flying Nun did it,” said Al confidently. “It made her.”

Suzanne didn’t want to argue Norma Rae/Flying Nun statistics for the rest of the lunch, so she got up and said with a smile, “I’m just going to the men’s room.”

“Quite the kidder, aren’t you?” said Al. “I like that.”

On her way to the bathroom she passed two women in their late twenties, who were standing by the phones and talking about how they could never live in L.A. because the nice weather all the time would annoy them. “I like seasons,” one of them said. When Suzanne came out they were still there, talking now about a mutual acquaintance of theirs. “I heard she blew Don Johnson,” said the woman who liked seasons.

When she got back to the table, Al had paid the bill. “I’m gonna keep up with you,” he said, rising to greet her.

“Okay,” said Suzanne, her chest tight. “Good.”

“I’m going to South Carolina tomorrow to visit a client,” he said as they walked to the parking lot. “But I’m going to keep pestering you about my pilot.”

“Great,” said Suzanne, desperate for her car. “I want to read it.”

“I wish you weren’t with that putz Auerbach.”

“Well.” Suzanne shrugged as her car arrived. “Thank you for lunch.”

“What lunch?” bellowed Al. “You ate like a bird.”

“I ate like a blonde,” corrected Suzanne, sliding into her seat and closing the door while Al tipped the parking attendant for her. “Thanks, Al.” She waved. “Talk to you soon.”

“Bye, sweetheart,” shouted Al. She watched him in her rearview mirror, working on his teeth and adjusting Al Junior, and imagined him nude except for a leather maid’s outfit and some nipple clamps. She waved again, then drove into the post-luncheon traffic.

She arrived for her facial ten minutes late, apologizing as she ran past the desk to the back for her pink facial robe. As she threw it on, a small dark-haired woman turned to her and said, “Susie?”

“Suzanne,” corrected Suzanne. “Yes, I’m… me.”

“This way, please,” said the woman, in a heavy Eastern European accent. Suzanne followed her into a small room. The woman turned on the light and motioned for Suzanne to lie down on the table.

“I am Marina, your skin consultant,” she said. “Will you be having collagen or a vegetable peel today?”

“Uh, vegetable peel, I guess,” answered Suzanne. She wished she had her regular facial lady, Jean, but she had rescheduled this appointment so many times in the past few days that Jean wasn’t available. Marina put a terry-cloth headband on Suzanne’s head to protect her hair, then moved some cleansing cream around on her face. She removed the cream with cotton and moved a big light over to examine her skin.

“When was your last facial?” asked Marina.

“Last month,” lied Suzanne. She had had two last week.

“You need a cleaning very badly.”

Suzanne thought she detected a note of contempt in Marina’s voice. “I know,” she said dejectedly.

“And,” said Marina, “you have one very big—”

“I know!” interrupted Suzanne loudly. “I know,” she repeated, more softly this time. “If it gets any bigger, I’ll have to set up charge accounts for it.”

“I don’t know if I can get rid of that for you,” said Marina doubtfully. “I don’t think it’s ready yet.”

“Just do what you can,” Suzanne said. “I’ll understand.”

“Okay, then we start,” said Marina, suddenly brusque, as she moved the hateful light away. She began mixing something behind Suzanne’s head, in a little porcelain dish. “Now,” she said gravely, as she spread something creamy and strange over Suzanne’s face, “you are going to feel a very big smell.”

It was true. Suzanne felt the biggest smell of her life. Marina passed a paper fan in front of Suzanne’s face to move the horrible vegetable peel fumes as they rose from the muck. After about fifteen minutes the stench died down, presumably taking with it a layer of Suzanne’s skin, so Marina removed the peel and began steaming Suzanne’s face for the deep pore work.

Suzanne hated the deep pore cleansing, but when you got down to it, that was really what facials were all about. She wondered what her skin would look like if she’d never had all these facials. Probably better. She’d probably ruined her skin’s ability to clean itself by getting it addicted to this whole process.

“Am I hurting you?” asked Marina disinterestedly.

“No, not really,” lied Suzanne.

“The nose and the chin are the worst part. We are almost done with the nose. It was very clogged. Are you using our cleanser?”

“Yes,” lied Suzanne.

“Well, you should use it three times a day,” said Marina sternly. “And use our scrub.”

“Okay,” said Suzanne. “Owwww!”

“Sorry,” said Marina without remorse. “The chin, you know, very sensitive.” She started to move under Suzanne’s chin onto her neck.

“No, no,” Suzanne said earnestly. “Leave that.”

“But it is a very big—”

“Just leave it,” she said adamantly. “Just do the part of my face the world sees, and leave the underbelly to me.”

“But—”

“It hurts too much and I don’t care enough, okay?” snapped Suzanne. “Leave it!”

“Okay,” sniffed Marina.

They finished the facial in silence, then Suzanne slipped off the little pink robe and paid the bill. She left Marina, whom she loathed and felt guilty for loathing, a big tip.

She decided to have the car washed. She always felt good when she got the car washed, like she was truly participating in her life. While she waited, she called her machine to check her messages. Mark Auerbach’s secretary had called about setting up a meeting for her on the new Spencer Matheisen picture, A Total Bust. Her dentist Dr. Gibbon’s assistant had called asking if she had forgotten she had an eleven-fifteen appointment for a cleaning. (She had.) She’d also had calls from Kate Rosenman, a producer friend of hers in AA, and her brother Thomas, who’d called from Turkey, where he was filming a documentary on the unearthing of Noah’s Ark. And, from New York, her friend Lucy Copeland had called from underneath a sleeping Scott Hastings—her newest married lover—“just to say hi.”

When she got back in her car, she noticed how clean the windshield was. She was going to feel good now, Suzanne thought. She was going to enjoy her life as though she was someone else living it, someone who had won living her life as a prize. Her house, her friends, her family, her clothes, her car… She was going to appreciate them as though she had had this whole other life before, and now she had won this one. She drove through the heart of Beverly Hills, down the palm-lined streets, listening to Steely Dan sing “Don’t Take Me Alive.”

By the time she got home, her determination to enjoy her life had been crushed under the weight of pre-party tension. She opened a Diet Coke, ate a miniature Tootsie Roll, called and left a message for Lucy—she knew she’d be out, but she wanted to go on record as having called—then went in to run her bath.

“Why can’t I look like Nastassia Kinski?” Suzanne thought, an hour and a half later, as she put the finishing touches on her makeup. She had read in Vogue that there was an operation that made your lips big like Nastassia Kinski’s. Unfortunately, it involved taking skin from your vagina and moving it to your mouth. Suzanne couldn’t quite bring herself to do this, fearing that it would ruin kissing for her. Still, it rolled around in her head for weeks as a vague possibility. She scrutinized her work and saw that she had disguised her blemish so well that it was now a highly conspicuous white spot, a headlight on her face.

She had a tendency to keep her chin down in her chest when her skin broke out. Even if people seemed to be looking in her eyes, she knew they were thinking, “Poor thing, she’s got a zit. Her life must not work.”

Sometimes when she looked in the mirror she thought, “Sure, that girl is attractive. She looks good.” As soon as she walked away from her reflection, though, she added, “But I’m not.” Her whole personality was designed to distract people from her looks. The fact that she was quite pretty—and that, on some level, she even knew it—made it all the more bizarre when she opened her mouth and Phyllis Diller came out.

She checked her outfit in her full-length mirror. With her tight blue skirt, with her top that snapped between her legs so that it looked tight, and especially with her stockings, she was definitely “dressed for them.” She stepped into her treacherous black heels, put on her black jacket, grabbed her blue bag, and took one last look at herself.

She sighed. “I look like a basketball with lips,” she thought. “An angry grape. A two-day-old balloon.”

“You look fine,” said her sane part, that tiny section of her brain that sat in the back and cheered.

“I look ready,” she thought, then said aloud, “Let’s party,” and strode off to her car. She switched on the ignition and “Burning Down the House” came blasting out of her speakers as she backed down the driveway.

She took the long way to Wallis’s house so she could have a nice, calming, deafening drive. She found she was now changing stations even when she found a song she liked. She had come to enjoy the quest for a good song more than the songs themselves. Interesting. She checked herself repeatedly in the rearview mirror as she drove.

When she was a block away she saw the parking attendants, dark men in red jackets and black pants. Suzanne saw the cars they’d already parked—the Porsches, the Jaguars, the Rollses—and suddenly panicked. She should have brought a date, she realized. Should have had her hair done. Should have worn a different dress, other earrings, less perfume. She got out of her car looking as casual as possible and turned it over to a total stranger. Looking at the lights on the lawn, she thought, “I could still leave. I could still turn around screaming and sobbing and grab my keys back from the man with strange sideburns and…”

Suzanne walked stoically up the imposing driveway, like a condemned man about to face a firing squad without cigarette or blindfold, to the huge, secluded stone mansion. A butler opened the door. She stood in the entrance for a moment experiencing waves of HPT—Hollywood Party Terror—then went in.

Under a large mirror was a silver tray containing tiny envelopes with the names of the guests on them. Suzanne smiled wanly at the butler and headed dutifully for the tray. After some graceful rummaging, she found her envelope. Her name was misspelled. The butler asked if she wanted anything to drink. “Does it show?” she replied, and ordered a stiff Diet Coke.

The wall next to the stairs was lined with art, lots of art. The house was clearly a showcase for this collection, and all the furniture was in bland, don’t-look-at-me colors so that guests could fully appreciate Wallis’s fabulous art. Actually, it was Wallis’s husband’s art collection, but whenever anyone thought about Wallis and Milton Klein, they mostly thought about Wallis. Wallis had the personality, Milton had the money. Wallis had the style, Milton had the hit television shows. Wallis had Milton.

In the ten years she had known the two of them, Suzanne had never actually had a conversation with Milton. She talked to Wallis a lot on the phone, but then Wallis talked to everyone she knew a lot on the phone. Wallis had once pointed out to Suzanne that one of her ears was “smushed in” tighter against her head, and had said it was from talking on the phone so much. She had speaker phones now, but she still preferred the old-fashioned method of cradling the receiver between her shoulder and head. Wallis liked to say that she wasn’t a gossip, she was the gossip, figuring that if you were going to be something you should be it completely. Wallis and Milton had had one daughter together and an assortment of children from other marriages. None of their offspring was in evidence tonight.

On the wall next to the guest bathroom was a painting that always looked very familiar to Suzanne. She assumed it was a famous painting, a Picasso or a Matisse. She thought it was awful. Maybe if she took an art class, she thought, she could appreciate some of the art that everyone around her seemed to appreciate. She wondered why she had ever quit smoking. Maybe she should just smoke at parties.

She walked down the two steps into the living room, with its unobtrusive furniture, its obtrusive art, and its view of the backyard that was set up to look like another painting: a painting of a backyard with a Henry Moore sculpture of a nude fat woman in it. She heard a squeal and spotted Wallis coming toward her, a smiling vision in red and blond. “If it isn’t the brain trust herself!” cried Wallis, embracing Suzanne. “You look adorable!” Suzanne knew then, with absolute certainty, that she must look even worse than she thought.

“You mean my huge rubber head?” she mumbled into Wallis’s perfect long hair that almost didn’t smell of hair spray.

“Your rubber what?” Wallis said, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you talking about? Come over here and say hello to Toni and Harlon.”

Suzanne knew Toni and Harlon from other parties. Toni Barnes had just won an Academy Award for playing the murderous florist in A Bunch of Violets, and Harlon DeVore was her boyfriend and business manager. Suzanne thought she should probably smoke. She would never win an Academy Award, and even if she did, she would probably always be as tormented as she was now, so what could a cigarette matter? She congratulated Toni on her Oscar and asked Harlon if he’d missed her, just to see how good a job he’d do of pretending to remember who she was. Then she moved over to a bowl of nuts to breathe privately and plan her strategy. She was in a full-tilt panic, but she tried to look like she couldn’t imagine doing anything more relaxing than standing alone at a table next to something that looked like pink whipped cream but was probably salmon mousse and picking cashews out of a bowl of nuts in a room full of celebrities in Bel Air.

Standing with her back to Suzanne was Rachel Sarnoff, an attractive studio executive who, Suzanne had heard from Wallis, had just broken off a three-month affair with Todd Zane, an English rock star and a legendary cocaine addict. Rachel had gotten Todd to promise he’d quit cocaine—Todd promised everyone he went out with that he’d quit cocaine for them—and then she’d caught him doing cocaine again, so she’d broken up with him. Suzanne wondered how Rachel was handling the breakup. She looked fine, but then, except for her, everyone in Hollywood looked fine all the time. That had nothing to do with anything.

Rachel was talking to a guy Suzanne vaguely knew from New York, a playwright named Tom Sarafian. From the conversation that Suzanne was desperately trying to overhear, she thought this was probably their first meeting.

“What does that mean, A Night Full of Shoes?” Rachel demanded. “It sounds so pretentious.”

“Of course it’s pretentious,” Tom said, trying to soothe her. “In New York, pretentious is commercial.”

“How can you stand it?” Rachel snapped. “How can you live there, with everyone so pale and intellectual and sweating from drugs?” Suzanne guessed the breakup with Todd Zane had been painful.

Just then, Wallis walked up to them with a “new girl.” Milton collected art and Wallis collected artists, and this was her latest find, a dark-haired dark-eyed beauty whom she was presenting to Rachel and Tom. “This is April Lanning, an artist from Manhattan. Milton bought a piece from her last week.” April smiled politely and said hello.

“Don’t you remember me?” asked Tom.

“No,” said April blankly. “Should I?”

“We dated in the Hamptons a few summers ago,” Tom said, then waited expectantly for her flash of recognition.

April looked quite embarrassed. “I’m afraid I don’t,” she said.

“Did you have sex?” Rachel asked Tom.

“I believe we tried, but I was…” He searched for the right word, then snapped his fingers as he found it. “Impotent!” he said brightly, as if it was a good word, like “tan.” April looked very flustered.

“Really?” said Rachel. “From alcohol and drugs, or do you have some kind of psychological disorder?”

“Well,” said Tom, “probably the latter. Let’s put it this way, it wasn’t the first time.”

“I don’t really… ,” April stammered. “The Hamptons?”

“Maybe it’ll come back to you over dinner,” offered Wallis. “Come say hello to Suzanne.” She steered April away from Rachel and Tom, who noticed Suzanne and waved at her. She smiled back, trying not to look at his sad crotch.

“Have you two met?” Wallis asked Suzanne as she practically carried April toward her. “Suzanne Vale, April Lanning.”

“No,” said Suzanne. Then, shaking April’s hand, she said to her, “But you once almost had sex with an impotent acquaintance of mine.” April looked ashen. “I’m kidding,” Suzanne said. “Nice to meet you.”

“You should see her pieces,” Wallis enthused, squeezing April’s arm. “I never knew I liked photorealism before.”

“Have you been in L.A. long?” Suzanne asked.

“Huh?” said April.

“I think April could use a drink,” said Wallis. “Come, dear.” She led April past the painting made of broken teacup pieces, toward the bar in the corner.

Suzanne saw her skin doctor, Walter Marks, enter the room and felt reassured. She made her way over to his beaming bearded face. “You’re disappointed in my hair, aren’t you?” she greeted him. “I have too much makeup on, don’t I? Be honest with me. Do I look orange?”

“You’re not drinking, are you?” said Walter. “No, of course not, you don’t drink.”

“You don’t drink either, do you?” asked Suzanne, kissing his cheek.

“Hardly ever,” he said. “I like to feel like I could perform surgery at any given moment.”

“That’s interesting,” said Suzanne. “My goal was to feel I could go into surgery at any given moment.”

“Who are you here with?” Walter asked.

“No one. You think I’m desperate, don’t you?”

“Impaired, yes,” Walter said. “Desperate, no. Why do you keep coming to these things when they cause you such torment?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m working on it in therapy.”

“How is Norma?” Walter asked. “What a terrific lady.”

“She’s great,” Suzanne said. “She said a great thing last week. I told her I thought people confused fame with success, and she said they confused fame with acceptance and—Who cares, right? You don’t care. Who’s that?” she asked with a nod of her head toward the door, where a fortyish blonde was standing in a dress that looked like it had something long and stringy sticking out from the bottom.

“Portia Lamm,” said Walter. “The agent. What do you suppose that thing is hanging out of her dress?”

“Probably the tie of the last guy who was up there,” said Suzanne, wondering what Portia Lamm had been on when she bought the dress. “Who’s the guy with her? He looks familiar.”

“That’s that European actor, Vittorio something.”

“Vittorio Amati,” breathed Suzanne. “Wasn’t he in Death Wore a Dress?”

“No,” said Walter, “you’re thinking of The Head of the Pin.”

“Was he in that?” asked Suzanne, watching the handsome actor talk to Wallis and Milton while Portia Lamm got their little envelopes. Walter reminded Suzanne of who Vittorio Amati played in The Head of the Pin, then started telling her about his visit to the psoriasis center at the Dead Sea.

While she was listening to Walter, her eyes scanned the bookshelves behind him, coming to rest on a copy of The Guinness Book of Sexual World Records. She reached over for it and browsed through it while Walter enlightened her on the history of scalp ailments. Suddenly, she interrupted him.

“Listen,” she announced. “‘Most Sexual Organs in an Insect.’ The tapeworm has thousands of penises.” Suzanne was the happiest she’d been all evening. “‘Most Perishable Sexual Organs,’” she read ominously. “Did you know that the bee penis breaks off in the other bee and he dies?”

Walter stared at her with a combination of amusement and what could have been concern. “This is weird of me, to be doing this, isn’t it?” said Suzanne, but before Walter had a chance to agree, Wallis breezed by and announced that dinner was ready. Suzanne reluctantly decided against bringing the book to the table and walked slowly with Walter to the dining room, hoping Wallis had seated her with someone good, or at least with no one bad.

She found herself sitting to the left of a short, swarthy man she recognized as the Czech director Gustav Bozena, and to the right of the guest of honor, a businessman named Fred Weaver, whose autobiography was moving up the best-seller lists fast enough to have attracted Hollywood’s attention. Fred was a thin, sixtyish man with even thinner white hair, blue eyes, a slight sunburn, and a small, almost feminine mouth. His face gave the appearance of having been sharpened especially for this party.

On Fred’s left sat Selena Warner, the aging British starlet who played Dorothea Pierce, the red-haired evil head nurse on Chestnut Lodge, a night time soap set in an insane asylum. Suzanne had been at several parties with Selena Warner—the most recent had been only three nights earlier—but, since it had never been a particular goal of hers, had never actually met her. Now, though, Selena smiled at her—or, more correctly, turned her face with the smile on it toward Suzanne—and said, “I saw you the other night, didn’t I?” Suzanne mumbled an affirmative response, but Selena’s attention had already shifted to Fred Weaver, who asked her something about acting. She answered as if she had all the important insights about the profession.

“Sir John once said to me,” she said, and Suzanne smiled and thought, I’ve waited my whole life to hear a sentence begin that way. She stared at Selena as if she was watching her on television and listened as she went on, “He said that he was sort of limited in a way himself. He showed me his hands and said he’d never done a day’s work in his life, so he couldn’t play a laborer. And he said to me that, in the same way, I could never play anything other than a beautiful woman. I don’t know if I quite believe that, but… Such a sweet man, Sir John.”

Suzanne felt she couldn’t really top the Sir John story, so she concentrated on avoiding the oysters in her oyster soup. She thought they looked like gray elephant boogers. Horrible food! Fred said something about business and Selena tilted her head and leaned in knowingly. Her lips moved over her teeth like bubbling water, and when she understood particularly well, she batted her eyelashes at him. Her face was a Richter scale registering her comprehension.

When he’d finished, Selena said, “Well, you know how actors are,” and turned her smile on Suzanne, who felt oddly flattered that Selena assumed she knew how they were. The conversation shifted, with no discernible segue, to how demeaning it was to have to depend on acting to express your creativity. Fred said that yes, he could see Selena’s point that actors had to wait to act until there was a camera or an audience, while painters—even bad ones—could just paint whenever they wanted to. Selena took out a stick of lip gloss and glooped some on her lips.

Suzanne shifted her attention to her right and, to her dismay, found herself in a conversation about film with Gustav Bozena, whose English was only marginally better than Suzanne’s Czech. She tried to ask smart questions, but she thought they just sounded pretentious. Gustav said he liked John Ford, he liked King Vidor, he liked Fellini. I can’t believe this, she thought. I’m an asshole at a party talking to a famous director about film. When she heard herself ask, “Do you believe that film is a more visual medium and that things should be described instead of dialogued?” she wanted to cut her head open and drip brains on the table. It was all she could do to keep from choking on her own social vomit.

“You do not look so American,” Gustav said. “You look European.”

“Really?” Suzanne said. “You’re crazed.”

Gustav said he came from Prague and lived in Paris, and that Suzanne didn’t look American because she looked right into people’s faces. “This Americans do not do,” Gustav said. “It is very European.”

“Really?” she said, and kept looking right into his face, as if to make sure he didn’t go back on what he’d said. She heard herself telling friends, “Gustav Bozena said I was very European.”

Across the table a rock promoter named Chris Hunt, who Suzanne thought looked like a losing Senate candidate—he reminded her of John Tunney—was telling a story about Noel Coward going backstage to meet the Beatles. According to the legend, which Suzanne recognized from Noel Coward’s memoirs, the Beatles had already left, so Coward went back to their hotel to tell them how much he’d liked the show, and then none of them came out to see him except Paul, who was very awkward. Coward had noted their rudeness in his diary.

When he finished this story, the girl next to him, Joan Lilly, a former top British model, declared, “Well, Noel Coward hardly stands the test of time.” She said it with total authority, as if she was stating an accepted political position and that anyone who thought otherwise was simply outmoded.

“In the final analysis,” said Chris Hunt, with the cavalier nonchalance you might overhear wafting out of a car as it drives slowly by, “the Beatles were just more interesting. Noel Coward,” he added dismissively, “was a wit.”

Suzanne stared at him, her eyes demanding, “Be serious. How can you make this an issue? How did we get here?” She guessed that he and Joan Lilly had never met before this evening, and now they were bonded for life in their rigid stance on Noel Coward’s pathetic inferiority to the Beatles. She wanted to say something to somebody about the absurdity of the moment they were all sharing, but conversation was now over for her. These two had given taking a position a bad name.

Somehow the topic shifted to Winston Churchill, whose wit was also belittled. An American television producer whose name Suzanne didn’t catch theorized that his reputation was based on the fact that every joke at that time was attributed to Churchill because they sounded better when told that way. “You know,” the producer said. “It’s like if you say, ‘I haven’t eaten in a week, so he bit me.’ It’s funnier if you say, ‘Churchill said it.’”

It turned out Chris Hunt was something of an expert on Churchill as well, and he rattled off several Churchill classics. Suzanne leaned over to Gustav Bozena and whispered, “It looks like one of our guests has done some reading.” Then she turned her attention back to her left.

“I honestly don’t know why people don’t like my character,” Selena was saying. “I haven’t killed anyone. My husband Charles has killed three people on the show.”

“Well,” Fred said, “I think the reason they don’t like Dorothea, or rather, why Dorothea fascinates them, is because she’s deceptive.”

“Oh?” said Selena. “That’s very interesting. I’ve never thought of that. That’s very intriguing.”

“Let me get totally into my now,” Suzanne thought. “We are in a fabulous house in Bel Air sitting under Picassos and discussing the character of Dorothea with Dorothea over bad oyster soup.”

She had embraced the values of the room and found she had nothing. She promised herself to remember this sensation the next time she was invited to a party.

She looked across at Joan, who seemed to be listening to a faraway concert of weird classical music, then looked at Chris. She thought he looked like an old boy—someone who should wear a backpack instead of carrying a briefcase, but a very high-style backpack.

She realized with dismay that this was her type of guy. She always ended up with guys like this, in relationships she likened to being partners on a school science fair project. She always felt like calling them up afterward and saying, “You left your beaker and your petri dish here. Do you want me to bring it to class tomorrow?” Now the old boy was telling a joke.

“How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” he asked, then looked around with his eyebrows raised and his mouth open. After a moment’s pause, he said, “Fish.”

There was another short pause, and then laughter. Selena Warner said, “How clever,” several times. Suzanne said, “Funny,” to Gustav Bozena, who nodded with reserved enthusiasm. She considered explaining it to him, then realized the enormity of the job and thought better of it. Then Fred asked if anyone had heard any WASP jokes. Suzanne had, but she said nothing.

Fred Weaver was radiant with joke hope. “Two WASPs run into each other on the street,” he said, “and one WASP says, ‘How are you?’ and the other WASP says, ‘Fine.’” He glowed and waited.

“Oh, I get it,” Selena said. “That’s the joke.” Everyone had a hearty delayed laugh. Gustav looked confused.

“What is a WASP?” he asked Suzanne.

She hesitated. “A kind of insect,” she whispered earnestly. “Like a bee.” He nodded and stared in front of him vacantly, using this news to try to unlock the puzzle of the joke. By now, though, Fred was telling another one.

“A WASP is trying on a suit in a clothing store and he turns to the salesman and says, ‘How much is this?’ and the salesman says, ‘Four hundred seventy-five dollars,’ and the WASP says, ‘I’ll take it.’”

Everyone at the table roared, even Gustav, who said to Suzanne, laughing, “A bee buying a suit!”

The desserts arrived, little cakes in raspberry sauce. Everyone made “Mmmmm” noises as they chewed and swallowed and clinked their forks against the china. Suzanne ate all her raspberry sauce, then broke apart the cake to find the filling, some kind of nut paste. Suddenly, there was a burst of laughter at the next table. Suzanne saw Wallis standing with Brian Whit-lock, a New York director whom she now whisked over to Suzanne’s happy group. Wallis was radiant. “I’m sure all of you know Brian,” she said.

“Certainly,” said Selena Warner, nodding enthusiastically. The others mumbled vaguely in the affirmative, though in fact no one at the table had ever met him.

“Well, I’m forcing Brian to tell this fabulous story of his to everyone,” Wallis said. “It’s just the most fabulous story.”

Brian looked embarrassed. “Wallis, just let me tell it, okay?” he said. He pulled over a chair and sat between Selena and Fred.

“I was invited to this concert in London last week,” he began. “Some benefit thing where everyone played—Bowie, Sting, Elton John, everyone. And the Prince and Princess of Wales were there. Well, I wanted to meet her so bad I was quite mad.

“Afterward,” he continued, “there was a reception, and I found myself standing a few feet away from her. I knew she could hear me, so I started saying all this funny stuff, and I could see that she was listening and laughing, and I thought, ‘She gets me. She literally gets me.’ So I got myself introduced, and the guy who introduced us said, ‘This is Brian Whitlock, he directed The Punishing Blow.’ And she said, ‘Really?’ It turned out she’d seen The Punishing Blow.

“So I’m in heaven, she’s asking questions about my movie, and I’m making her laugh—she was very cute—and all of a sudden I hear someone say, ‘Brian!’ Well, I’m talking to the Princess of Wales so I try to ignore it, and I hear again, ‘Brian!’ And I look, and it’s an Oriental girl in sunglasses. I have no idea who she is, but she knows my name and she comes and stands between the Princess and me and says, ‘I’m Yashimoto, I work in the office across the hall from yours. How long are you in London for?’

“So I lean behind her and I silently say to the Princess, ‘I don’t know who this is,’ and Yashimoto says, ‘I’m here doing publicity on this show and then I’m going to Lisbon tomorrow. Have you ever been to Portugal?’ And the Princess drifts away, and Yashimoto says, ‘I can’t believe you’re here, this is so great.’ And I say, ‘Do you realize who I was talking to?’ and she says, ‘Oh, I’m just one of those people who’s not impressed by anybody.’”

Everyone laughed uproariously, even Suzanne. “That’s actually true?” asked Chris Hunt.

“It has to be,” answered Selena on Brian’s behalf. “No one could make up something that absurd.”

“But did you know the girl?” asked Joan Lilly.

“She worked across the hall from me in New York, I guess,” shrugged Brian. “In the Brill Building.”

Everyone at the table seemed to be entertained, so Suzanne figured she’d take a bathroom break and kill some time. Soon, she thought, she could go home. Soon the bell would ring dismissing her from party class, and she would run up the street with her hair flying behind her, free…

She excused herself to Gustav, and to anyone else who felt particularly close to her, and ventured forth into the huge house. There was no one in the little waiting room, so she went into the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it. The walls were all soft rose-colored cloth, and the sink was rose marble. Suzanne put the toilet seat down and began some real party breathing.

She heard someone enter the tiny room just outside. Two voices. Two women. They seemed to be reviewing the evening. “Did you see Selena Warner?” one of them said. “She looks ancient.”

“And what about that burp of a husband she’s got,” said the other.

“Well, you know what they say,” said the first voice. “TV stars can’t be choosers.”

Suzanne was not breathing as comfortably now. Their voices suddenly became more muffled. Why couldn’t she hear them? She put her ear against the door.

“I feel sorry for her,” one was saying.

Who? thought Suzanne. Me?

“She hasn’t worked in a while, and she lives alone,” said the other.

It is me! she thought. Oh my God, they’re talking about me. How will I ever get out of here?

“Why can’t she get work? She’s a pretty good actress, and she certainly has connections.”

Suzanne was humiliated. I can never leave this powder room, she thought. She was breathing like a sick baby.

“Haven’t you heard?” said one of the voices. “She’s put on a lot of weight.”

Everyone knows! Everyone’s talking about me!

“Really?” said the other.

“Oh, yes, about thirty or forty pounds.”

“Really?” said the other.

Oh, thought Suzanne. Who? Thirty or forty. Oh.

She was devastated now. It hardly mattered that they hadn’t been talking about her. The way she felt now, they might as well have been. She had to get home, that much was clear. She flushed the toilet and walked out into the little room. The voices belonged to two attractive women in their forties, neither of whom Suzanne knew. She smiled and nodded at them as she passed, trying to look hopeful and thrilled.

She considered leaving without saying good night, but ruled that out when she considered how it would look. She went back into the dining room, where Wallis was presenting Brian to yet another table. Many of the guests were moving to the living room with their coffee and after-dinner drinks. Suzanne waited on the edge of the party, on the outskirts of the in crowd. When Brian began his story again, she caught her hostess’s eye.

Wallis came over. “I just can’t get over Brian’s story,” she said. “Imagine interrupting a conversation with royalty.”

“I was on acid when I met Princess Margaret,” said Suzanne. “Listen, Wallis, I gotta go. It was great. Great cake.”

“So soon?” Wallis pouted. “Phil Esterbrook might play one of his songs. Are you sure you can’t stay?”

“No, really,” said Suzanne, letting Wallis kiss her as she moved toward the door. “I’m retaining water for a couple of people, and I’ve got to return it by midnight.”

When she put her nightgown on and went to bed, she didn’t know that she intended to stay there. By Sunday afternoon, though, she was fairly dug in, with empty soft drink cans piling up on her night table and the slow burn of television branding her cowlike brown eyes.

“Hemingway needed his rest,” her mother assured her over the phone. “So did Paul Muni. Alfred Lunt would just retreat to his garden and let his wife answer the phone.”

It always relaxed Suzanne to hear her mother compare her favorably to someone like Paul Muni or Alfred Lunt. She settled down under her covers. “You’re just like me, Suzanne,” her mother said. “You just get overwhelmed sometimes. I don’t think you should feel bad about going to bed for a few days. You’re a sensitive, questioning personality.”

Suzanne wondered when she had begun to be more of a personality than a person. When her shrink had pointed it out to her, she’d felt as though she’d actually known it for a long time. When she was twenty-one she had written in her journal, “I narrate a life I’m reluctant to live.” Soothed by her mother’s voice, she found herself recalling the maternal voice of her therapist at her last session.

“I think that basically you are a very frightened, shy person,” Norma had said, her eyebrows slightly raised with the effort of insight. “You seem very open about yourself, but it’s really just part of your need to control. You want people to know that you’re well aware of the truth about yourself. It’s like a fat girl walking into a room and announcing that she’s fat.”

Suzanne had sat there glowing with a deep, happy blush. “That’s wonderful,” she exclaimed, gazing at Norma in admiration.

“You’re just excited because now you have another truth to entertain people with,” Norma had said. “Part of your little honesty show, which exists to make people think you’re not trying to stay as far away from them as you actually are.”

Suzanne had been thrilled. She’d been caught. Even as she had been hearing these new truths, she was storing them where she stored all the pertinent information she used when describing herself to new people, or when describing herself to old people in a new way. Describing herself was Suzanne’s way of being herself. It was as close as she got, and it was way off the mark. She had shaken her head with wonder and asked, “So, now what do I do?”

“Nothing,” Norma had said, as though this should have been obvious. “What could you do? This is simply how you operate.”

“So this is it? I’m sentenced to a life of lifelike behavior?”

“We obviously have a lot of work to do,” Norma had said. “You will, of course, always be like this to some degree. You have fashioned yourself a personality of highly intricate design. It would be almost impossible to dismantle, and that is not our purpose. I just want you to feel something, in between all this talking and thinking that you do. I want you to lead a life instead of following one around.”

Now, in bed, Suzanne heard her mother mention Jane Powell. “… and Shirley MacLaine took several years off,” her mother said. “Listen, dear, do you want me to send Mary up to fix you something? She has nothing to do when I’m out of town. She’s just sitting in my house watching TV and eating Fritos. She could come to your house and fix you a bacon sandwich, or chicken crepes. It always makes me feel better when I’ve eaten something…”

It was decided that Mary would come up and fix her a meal and straighten up her house. Suzanne hung up, sighed, and rolled over in bed to face the TV. Someone exploded. She searched her bedding for the remote control clicker, found it under several pillows, and scanned the stations for solace.

When Mary arrived she removed all the empty cans from the bedroom. Suzanne loved Mary, who had taken care of her since she was six. “What was I like when I was little, Mare?”

“You were a good li’l child,” said Mary, straightening the pillows behind Suzanne’s head. “You were always a good li’l girl. Now, what can I fix you for lunch?”

Suzanne asked for a bacon sandwich and German chocolate cake. Mary went off to the kitchen, and Suzanne rolled over on her side. She wondered how long she was going to stay in bed. She wondered if she would awaken one morning—maybe tomorrow morning—and feel like bounding back into her life, refreshed and unafraid. Just now, though, she felt stale and paralyzed.

She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned. She had plenty of evidence that she had a good life. She just couldn’t feel the life she saw she had. It was as though she had cancer of the perspective.

She was having trouble sleeping again, lying still with her thoughts tossing and turning. As far back as she could remember, she had had trouble sleeping. As a child she would wait out her naptime like a prison sentence. She would lie in bed and stare at the wallpaper pattern and wonder what would happen if there were no heaven. She thought the universe would probably go on and on, spilling all over everything. Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe, a lid that kept everything underneath it where it belonged.

Suzanne lay in bed staring at the television, waiting for her bacon sandwich, thinking about infinity.

By Wednesday, she felt kind of dingy. She accidentally caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and thought there was a giant shell on her neck. “Is that anorexia?” she wondered. “Is it anorexia when you look in the mirror and your head looks like the top of a squid without all the arms?”

She felt bloated. She’d been going to the gym for a while, and had really started noticing a difference in her body, but now she was getting soft and shapeless again. “Caspar the squid,” she said aloud.

Suzanne identified herself in her voice. She was as close as she ever got to being whoever she was when she was talking. She existed through sound. It startled her to see her reflection, because she didn’t identify with her appearance. She wasn’t what she looked like, she was what she sounded like. That was why she always got confused in the closet. What should she wear? It was hard to dress a voice.

She walked into her closet, Pandora’s Closet, bursting with options, and experienced the automatic reaction: “I have nothing to wear.” That wasn’t it, though. Obviously, she had plenty of clothes, but they were the wrong kind of clothes. They were clothes she had already bought. Suzanne only liked clothes she was about to buy. She knew someday she would find the exact right outfit that would make her life work. Maybe not her whole life, she thought, as she got back in bed, but at least the parts she had to dress for.

Around noon, her friend Lucy called from New York, where she’d gone two weeks earlier to be with the married guy she’d gotten involved with. Lucy liked affairs with married men because, as she’d explained to Suzanne many times, “You don’t have to have entire relationships with them.”

“I met him on that TV movie I did,” Lucy said. “Blood on the Snow, that ski resort murder thing. He played the murderer and he stalked me, and it was very romantic. I mean, he played a good murderer. He didn’t play a regular murderer, he played it like a charming guy. And we were on location in Idaho, and being on location is kind of a permission zone, anyway.”

“You’re a star fucker,” Suzanne said matter-of-factly.

“I like celebrities, I’ve got to admit it,” Lucy said, “but I’m not a star fucker. I’m a talent fucker, and this guy is very talented. Well, actually he’s limited, but the area he’s limited in is more interesting than most people’s entire range.”

“Scott Hastings,” Suzanne said. “He made that name up, didn’t he?”

“No,” said Lucy. “Actually, his first name is Bob. Robert Scott Hastings.”

“Bob Hastings,” said Suzanne, “Colonel Bob Hastings. No wonder he changed it. So, is his wife there?”

“Holster Hips?” said Lucy. “Yeah, they rented a house in Connecticut, but he’s in the city a lot rehearsing for his play.”

“Another married guy,” Suzanne sighed. “I have to say, I never did like that last one.”

“Earl?” said Lucy, with some surprise. “Really? You didn’t like him? I thought you liked him.”

“Well, I told you I liked him,” said Suzanne. “I had to tell you I liked him, because you liked him so much. In fact, you liked him enough for both of us. What happened with him again?”

“He started to get sort of removed,” Lucy said. “I mean, more removed than I like. I need a guy to be a little unreliable so I can stay interested. I don’t know any women who don’t feel that way, but then maybe if I didn’t feel that way, I would know other kinds of women. Anyway, he got so removed he started having an affair with Isabel Hasbar.”

“The English actress?” asked Suzanne. “Reginald Fleemer Hasbar’s sister?”

“Yes, that Isabel Hasbar,” said Lucy. “It was painful, but it was painful in an interesting way. It felt like it was a necessary part of the process, and… Wait, I’ve got another call… It’s him, I’ve gotta go.”

“Say hello to the Colonel for me,” Suzanne said, but Lucy had already hung up. She switched the channel and saw a girl and a boy having sex. The girl opened her eyes and looked over the boy’s shoulder just in time to see a man plunge a stake through the two of them.

Suzanne looked away, scanning the horizon of her room. Her house had been driving her crazy lately. Whenever she wasn’t in a relationship, her house drove her crazy. First, her curtains didn’t shut out enough morning light, so she usually ended up putting pillows over her head. But then, she also thought that she had too many pillows, and that they weren’t soft enough. One of the paintings over her bed had a tear in its canvas.

Also, there were two orange soda stains on the white carpet, next to her bed. The cover on her smoke alarm had broken off. There were too many exposed electrical cords she was helpless to conceal, and a large basket of cassettes whose plastic cases had been lost sat beside her stereo. There were just too many things. Things growing over the surfaces of her home like a happy cancer.

She turned back to the television screen, searching it as if looking for a sign. A sign of life. Two men were fighting, and one of them went through a plate glass window, and she found herself staring at the bloodied face of Graham Davies, her first in a series of three actor boyfriends. Graham had been the nicest of the three—in fact, he had been her only nice boyfriend, because Suzanne was one of those unfortunate women who did not find nice men interesting. She’d learned her lesson after him. She found undesirables desirable. She sought out unpleasant boyfriends, then complained about them as though the government had allocated them to her. Still, at least she felt like she was taking part in something, even if it was a nightmare.

She changed the channel. Two women in riding clothes were talking on a hill. Suzanne knew one of them. She had done cocaine with her at a David Bowie concert in London. The girl had been wearing a very see-through dress, and she had also been present the night Suzanne started her affair with her second actor. TV was filled with memories for her, a liquid scrapbook. Maybe if she watched long enough, she thought, her whole life would flash slowly in front of her eyes. Now the girl she knew was playing with herself on a bus.

She reached for the clicker again and watched Ronald Reagan getting off a helicopter and waving. He cupped his hand to his ear and shrugged his shoulders while his wife was dragged ahead of him at the end of a dog’s leash. You can see why he has her, Suzanne thought. She’s angular. With that pointed head and all those sharp edges, she finishes him off in a way, so he doesn’t just bleed into the rest of the big picture. She zips him in.

He was still smiling and waving. It’s like he’s our IV hookup in the White House, she thought. Doctor Reagan, with a bedside manner for a dying nation like you can’t believe. Suzanne punched the clicker, and an actor she didn’t recognize appeared on her TV screen explaining that there was no such thing as an actor’s director. There were actors and there were directors. He was very convincing, but then that was an actor’s job. It got very confusing sometimes. Sometimes actors heard that note of conviction in their voices in real life and actually believed themselves. She switched to channel 11, where a movie called The Tattered Dress was beginning, then punched up MTV. She watched a Bryan Adams video, and wondered what life with him would be like. Finally, she switched back to the girl she had done cocaine with. It wasn’t a good film, but she was somehow more comfortable watching someone she knew, however vaguely. The girl was describing how she’d had sex with her uncle.

Suzanne looked at her bedside table, which contained a bag of potato chips, some weird health cookies, a box of vanilla wafers, two empty glasses, one half-full glass of two-day-old orange juice, a half-empty can of flat Diet Coke, and a jar of peanut butter. She went for the peanut butter with two fingers.

The phone rang. She waited through the life-indicating three rings and then answered as though she was in the middle of an enormous amount of carefree fun. “Hello!”

“Hello, dear,” said a familiar voice. “This is your mother, Doris.”

“As opposed to my brother, Doris, or my uncle, Doris?” said Suzanne. “Since we’re all named Doris in this family, I suppose it is necessary to establish just which Doris this is. Otherwise, it could lead to some highly embarrassing—”

“How are you feeling healthwise, dear?” her mother, Doris, interrupted in a concerned tone. “Because I spoke to Dr. Feldman just now and he says you might have food allergies. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Then you could just stop eating the particular food you’re allergic to and not be in bed anymore. What exactly are you eating?”

“Just foods that lead inevitably to bypass,” Suzanne said.

“Don’t be smart, dear,” said her mother. “Remember my food allergies. I found out I was allergic to shellfish. My lips get all huge and my tongue blows up like a balloon, and they have to give me steroids or something. You could be eating something that makes you tired.”

“Could I be eating something that makes me apathetic and insecure?” asked Suzanne doubtfully.

“You underestimate the power of food allergies,” said her mother confidently. “I told Dr. Feldman you’d be calling him.”

“Just imagine,” Suzanne said. “Here I’ve spent all these years in therapy, and it could have been tuna all along.”

Suzanne was watching a black-and-white film starring Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers late Sunday afternoon, her ninth day in bed, when the phone rang. She grabbed it on the first ring. “You’re on the line,” she said.

“What if I were a guy?” said Lucy. “I would think you’re desperate.”

“I am desperate,” said Suzanne. “Are you back? I thought you were spending the summer in New York with Colonel Bob.”

“New York in the summer is like a cough,” said Lucy. “It’s like the whole country came here and coughed. Anyway, he went back to his wife.”

“How bad do you feel?” asked Suzanne compassionately.

“Not too bad yet, but I always have emotional jet lag,” Lucy said. “I just got home and crawled into bed, so that when the impact hits me like a crippling flu, I’ll be where I belong.”

“I’m going for a world record,” said Suzanne. “I’ve been in bed for over a week. My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.”

“Who am I speaking to?” asked Lucy. “Sylvia Plath?”

“Sylvia Papp,” said Suzanne. “Joe’s wife. Why don’t you come over here and join me in my not-so-silent vigil?”

“I’m going to be too depressed,” said Lucy. “I shouldn’t drive.”

“I’ll send a limo for you,” said Suzanne.

An hour later, a black limousine turned off Outpost into Suzanne’s driveway and Lucy got out. She was wearing her nightgown. She went into the house through the garage, walked back to the huge bedroom, and climbed into the bed. “Actors may know how to act,” she said, “but a lot of them don’t know how to behave.”

“So,” said Suzanne, “was it devastating?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Lucy. “I don’t know that you could be devastated by an actor. But you know what? It’s more insulting that he would dump me because he’s not that good an actor. He’s more like a TV actor than a movie actor, and it’s just not as interesting as being left by a movie actor. I mean, when I was left by Andrew Keyes, you know, it was Andrew Keyes, and I got an anecdote out of it.”

“You have slept with guys other than actors, haven’t you?” asked Suzanne, offering Lucy a bowl of stale popcorn. “I seem to remember you going out with a lawyer.”

“Bill Taft,” said Lucy. “Yeah. It was boring. He used to talk about stuff like clearing miles of forests in Canada. That’s what he talked about for amusement. I wanted to die in my salad at dinner.”

Suzanne reached for the clicker and changed the channel. Their friend Amy Baxter was on the screen in an episode of her series, Honey, I’m Home! “What do you think about this thing with Amy and the art director?” she asked.

“Amy will never stay in that relationship,” Lucy said. “She chased after him and chased after him, and now she’s got him. I think she’ll probably stay for a while because she’d be too embarrassed to leave so soon, but have you ever seen anyone look so bored?”

“That isn’t bored. That’s Amy,” said Suzanne. “This guy is fabulous. He’s real smart, he’s good-looking, he’s nice, and not even that too nice thing. He’s got money, he’s well connected, and he’s got great taste in clothes. It’s not like she found him under a rock. This is a great guy, but you know Amy. She’s holding out for a greater guy. Somebody better could move to Hollywood, and if he did, then she would want that guy. Amy has to keep about thirty percent of herself in reserve just in case.”

“Remember Sam Eisenberg?” Lucy said with a laugh. “She rolled through Sam like thunder.”

“You know who would be a real blocker for her?” asked Suzanne. “Todd Zane. She could try to save Todd Zane. That would be brilliant.”

“Did you ever sleep with him?” Lucy asked.

“Todd Zane?” said Suzanne. “No. Did you?”

“Yeah, I did,” said Lucy. “He is great. He told me someone told him that he gave head like a girl.”

“Really?” said Suzanne. “What does that mean? Good?”

“Yeah, I guess good,” said Lucy. She stuck a few pieces of popcorn in her mouth. “I swear,” she said. “I think I’m so slutty sometimes.”

“Could you go get me a Diet Coke?” Suzanne asked in a small voice. “I don’t want to walk by the mirror. My hair is so greasy it looks like it was poured over my head.”

Lucy went to the kitchen and came back with two cans of Diet Coke. “The last time I had sex with Scott Hastings—excuse me, with Colonel Hastings,” she said, “it lasted three hours.”

“You like to have that endless, nightmare sex,” said Suzanne. “You use it like a flesh feedbag, you just put some guy on your face and you go into it like… like I used to go into drugs, I guess.”

“Sometimes I think all I want is to find a mean guy and make him be nice to me,” said Lucy. “Or maybe a nice guy who’s a little bit mean to me. But they’re usually too nice too soon or too mean too long.”

“I think I’m ill suited for relationships,” said Suzanne, “and this is not a thought that’s going away. I mean, I can’t date my whole life. I didn’t even do it well when I was the right age. Think about it. What kind of a wimpy, pathetic guy would be willing to crawl through the moat of my personality and live in my house, with my stuff?” She opened her Diet Coke and sipped it as if she was sucking poison out of an aluminum wound. “I think I’m right on the verge of accepting that I’m going to live out my life in front of a television.” She pointed at the screen. “That’s gonna be the last thing I see before I die,” she said, starting to laugh. “Rob Lowe’s face in St. Elmo’s Fire. I’ll be in a hospital and they’ll be banging on my chest to get my heart started, and I’ll be staring over them at the TV screen, and this movie will be on it. It’s my destiny, I feel it.”

“I know I’m going to get old and be one of those crazy women who sit on balconies and spit on people and scream, ‘Get a haircut!’” Lucy said. “I know this, and I don’t really fear it. I’d just like to move toward it with as much grace and dignity as possible.”

On MTV, a new video came on by a pretty singer whose agent was featured in several scenes. Suzanne knew the agent from her high school days. Her cousin had given him a blow job at a party once, but that was before she’d found Jesus, who knocked those blow jobs at parties right out of her.

“Remember what it was like when you’d be getting ready to jump rope,” she asked, “and two people were turning it, and you were waiting for exactly the right moment to jump in? I feel like that all the time.”

“I keep thinking that we’ll grow out of this,” said Lucy.

“Grow out of it?” said Suzanne. “How much growing do you all of a sudden do after thirty?”

“Maybe it’s a hormonal thing,” Lucy offered.

“Maybe it is food allergies,” said Suzanne. “Maybe my mom’s right. Maybe this is all tuna.”

“Could we be having a nervous breakdown?” Lucy asked. “A controlled nervous breakdown?”

“I don’t know,” Suzanne said doubtfully. “I’m not that nervous, and it’s not really a breakdown. It’s more of a backdown, or a backing off. A pit stop. That’s what we’re having, a nervous pit stop. A not-so-nervous pit stop.”

“I feel like maybe I’ve learned my lesson now,” Lucy said. “I want to have learned it. Maybe this could be my epiphany. Maybe Scott Hastings was my epiphany, and now I’ll just move into the rest of my life like it was lukewarm water.”

“That’s the way it works in movies,” said Suzanne. “Something happens that has an impact on someone’s life, and based on that impact, his life shifts course. Well, that’s not how it happens in life. Something has an impact on you, and then your life stays the same, and you think, ‘Well, what about the impact?’ You have epiphanies all the time. They just don’t have any effect.”

“Maybe they do,” said Lucy hopefully, “only we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. Maybe right now we’re at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, but we just don’t know it yet.”

“I think,” said Suzanne, suddenly serious, “that we should agree that we won’t get out of bed until we decide what to do with the second half of our lives. This is like life’s intermission.”

“It could take a long time,” said Lucy dubiously, “because we’ve really made a big mess of it. We’re in our thirties already. I mean, what’s our plan here? I don’t feel like we really have a plan yet.”

“We could find our plan on TV,” Suzanne said. “That’s where most people learn about morals and ideals and stuff like that.”

“Is it really?” asked Lucy. “Because I watched TV and never got any. Or maybe I did, and didn’t know it.”

“You were probably watching the wrong channels,” said Suzanne.

“Okay,” said Lucy, “so our plan is that we stay here and watch television, the right channels, and we’ll figure out our values. Good plan.”

Suzanne sighed. “We have no lives. I think it was Freud who said that the way they determined if people were crazy was whether their insanity interfered with love and work. Those are the two areas. And we have no love and no work.”

“Does that mean we’re crazy?” asked Lucy.

“Well, certainly we’re… defective. We’re defective units. Something broke in our heads, some way we look at things broke, and now we have to fix it. Maybe there’s a way to look at things that makes it okay to not have work, or to wind up as maiden aunts. If there is, we should know about it.”

“I had a dream last night that I was driving in the dark without any lights on and no brakes,” Lucy said.

“I wonder what that means.”

“I don’t need to see a shrink to figure out what it means, okay?” said Lucy, who had never been to one. “I’m out of control. I know that about myself. And when I go out of control, I latch on to something that looks stable, and married men look stable to me. They look like they were etched in air, and they’re there for me to make them unstable. I like to try to jar them. Anyway, while we’re on shrinks, how’s Norma?”

“Norma wants me to lead a life instead of follow one around,” Suzanne said. “But she’s been away for the past two weeks. I’ve been on kind of an enforced shrink break, so I thought I’d just go to bed and see what I think about all this. I don’t want any advice. I mean, I like to talk to you, but I don’t feel like you have any advice.”

“Thank you,” said Lucy. “That’s very, very beautiful of you to say. Hey, I hear Jack Burroughs is doing Ziz! II. What’s the status of that relationship?”

“That never was a relationship,” said Suzanne. “It was just a theory both of us had for a while. If we’d have had a relationship, we suspected, we wouldn’t have liked it very much, so we didn’t have one. We just talked constantly about the one we didn’t have.”

“Who ended the theory?” Lucy asked.

“I finally left,” Suzanne said. “I stopped in mid-sentence one day and decided that’s where I wanted to end it. You know, I always thought you could work on a relationship, but there’s work and then there’s construction work.”

“Guys are great before you know who they are,” said Lucy. “They’re great when you’re still with who they might be.”

“Did you ever sleep with Jack?”

“No,” said Lucy. “We fooled around once, but someone interrupted us and it just never got continued. We were both real stoned.”

“Interesting,” said Suzanne. “You never slept with Jack Burroughs, and I never slept with Todd Zane. It makes us unique.”

“Do you think there’s anyone else out there who’s never slept with one of them?” asked Lucy. “Do you think there’s anyone who’s never slept with either of them?”

“Yes, and she’ll probably show up soon,” said Suzanne. “We’re probably having a meeting and we don’t even know it.”

“Let me just ask you one thing,” Lucy said. “Don’t you think this is a little pathetic? To just be in bed watching television?”

“It’s pathetic,” agreed Suzanne emphatically. “I think if you’re going to be pathetic, you should be pathetic. People don’t dare to be pathetic anymore.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone about this until we’re really sure pathetic is the way to go.”

“I think we should just really explore doing nothing,” said Suzanne. “I mean, there are a lot of people who essentially do nothing, but none who are boldly going forward and really doing nothing. We’ll be pioneers in real nothing. We’re the new woman, the Woman of the Eighties, with nothing and no one. Look at it this way. We’ve spent years fixing up and futzing around and being as vivacious as our nerves would allow, and it got us unemployed as actresses and as dates. So if all that effort got us nowhere, we could just as easily get nowhere without the effort. The goal should be to remove all stimuli and find out what your instincts are, if any. Because living in Hollywood, we haven’t used our instincts for a long time. We’ve used the instincts of our environment. We’ve seen what other people do and we’ve done the same in order to achieve their success.”

She sighed. “Yap, yap yap, yap, yap, yap,” she said. “Let’s just hope there are no Third World flies on the wall. If anyone from another culture—from anyplace outside of this specific Hollywood culture—overheard this conversation, it would confirm the worst of their suspicions.”

“Sometimes I feel so spoiled,” Lucy said, “like something left out too long in the Now-Playing-Everywhere sun. Still,” she added hopefully, “I’m very encouraged by this act of hibernation. So, what kind of revenge do you think I can have on Scott Hastings?”

“Revenge may not be a particularly higher-consciousness-oriented activity,” Suzanne said.

“But it is fun,” said Lucy. “Karmically speaking, I agree it’s probably very bad, but I obviously already have a large karmic debt. Otherwise, why was I sent to this planet attracted to men that don’t like me and unable to get an acting job? What the fuck, I might as well act out some revenge on this guy. Wanna help? I mean, you can’t have incredible karma, either—you’re with me. Come on, double or nothing on bad karma.”

“You’re so crazy,” said Suzanne, laughing.

“I want to call him and tell him not to call me,” Lucy said.

“I did this stuff already,” said Suzanne. “Don’t you see? We’ve become smart enough to justify stupid behavior. Like, ‘I’m angry at him and I didn’t express it, so I turned my anger inward and now it’s depression, so in order to feel good again, what I should do is call him and express my anger.’ It’s like, if we can make it sound smart enough, we’re allowed to do stupid things.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Lucy said. “Sometimes I feel like I should hum ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ underneath when you talk. But I feel bad, because he’s sort of famous, and I feel like maybe he’ll get more famous and I’ll have missed something.”

“You’re joking,” said Suzanne. “You think famous is what, successful? It’s not. This guy is a sad, withered guy. He always plays friendly psychotic murderers, and if you pretend something long enough, it comes true. You’re well out of it. And besides, he’s a moron. This is not a person who acknowledges that other people are right. This is not a person who says, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s very interesting, you’ve changed my thinking on this.’ This is a moron who says, ‘What’s your point?’ I guarantee you, you are wired up to have a bad call with this guy. You’ll get off the phone and feel like a putz.”

“Okay, okay,” said Lucy. “We’ll stick to our original plan. We’ll do nothing. The Human Stubble Plan.”

“We’ll be like those Indian women who go into the forest to have babies,” said Suzanne, “only we have no forest, we have no babies, and we’re not Indians. Otherwise, the resemblance is stunning.”

They slept in different rooms, because both of them were used to sleeping alone in king-size beds. In the morning, Suzanne woke up two hours earlier than she’d wanted to, and she lay there tossing around until Lucy leaned in the doorway and said, “Was there no air in my room, or did I use it all up?” She walked into the room. “Are you up?”

“I’m always up,” said Suzanne. “That’s what I am. Up, and in kind of a down mood.”

“Listen, I’ve been rethinking this thing,” said Lucy, who was eating a piece of toast. She sat on the bed, wearing a pair of Suzanne’s pajamas, which were small on her. “I think that if we stay in the house, it looks like we’re admitting defeat. I think that if we’re starting anew, there should be some kind of energy behind it.”

“I would like this all to be easier,” Suzanne declared. “Maybe we should live in a university town and teach acting, and be worshipped by all the young kids.”

Lucy ignored her. “I mean, you’ve given yourself a gestation period of nine days now. You know, like nine months, and now it’s time to break through these barricades of apathy. Let’s hit the stores. We’ll buy outfits for the second part of our lives. I’ve already called a cab. I’m going home to get dressed.”

Suzanne thought her bed had begun feeling grungy. “Well, it does seem an awful lot like I’ve just given up. I have to admit, it’s been more of a defensive move than a preparatory one.” She sat up. Outside, Lucy’s cab arrived and the driver honked twice. “All right,” she said, “but you have to stay with me while I dry my hair. I don’t like feeling that blast of heat in my empty head.”

“I’ll tell the cab to wait,” Lucy said.

Two hours later, they were driving into Beverly Hills in Lucy’s Honda. Suzanne definitely felt better being out. While she’d been drying her hair, she’d come up with a new message for her answering machine—“I’m out, deliberately avoiding your call”—and that simple burst of creativity had raised her spirits a bit.

“My mood is lifting,” she said, “like a small, heavy plane.” She was wearing her combat shopping outfit: a blue cotton dress with slits up the sides, and under it, black slacks with a blue belt. Suzanne only wore black and blue clothes. Her fashion statement was Bruised.

Lucy, on the other hand, was wearing a cream tunic with black pedal pushers. She carried a bag that fit perfectly under her arm, and her hair was done in a French braid. Suzanne’s hair was pulled back in a barette.

“I don’t understand how you can do those French braids,” said Suzanne. “It shows such a commitment to your appearance.”

“You’re an asshole,” Lucy said. “You’re so good-looking, and you just don’t want anyone to catch you trying to look good. You only want to look good effortlessly.”

“I can’t seem to outgrow my distaste for doing up buttons and pulling on stockings. It all seems so complicated. I walk into my closet and I suddenly feel like a man. Like I’m a giant man, and it’s bursting with some little girl’s clothes, and I’m like, ‘How do I put all of this on?’ and I wonder whose house it is.”

“How long have you been in therapy?” asked Lucy.

“I’ve never been in shopping and clothing therapy,” said Suzanne. “Norma doesn’t tell me how to dress.”

“She should,” said Lucy. “It’s much more basic.”

Suzanne was quiet for a moment. “It seems like I want them to like me for my mind, anyway,” she said, “so why not let them go straight for it? Why get them to like my legs? It doesn’t seem like that’s me. I feel like what I look like is government issue, it’s pretty much out of my hands. But I invent the stuff I say. That’s me.”

“That’s a very clever way to discuss it,” Lucy said, turning onto Rodeo Drive from Santa Monica Boulevard. “You’re really just lazy about your appearance.” She pulled into a parking space. “But the past is the past. We are now future-oriented, and shopping lies before us, glistening like a dream.”

They ambled into Bottega Veneta. Suzanne loved the smell of leather, and she briefly considered buying purses in every color. She could envision some day in the future when she would have a yard sale and sell all the stuff she would never use, which was pretty much all her stuff.

She watched Lucy looking at scarves. Lucy looked good, Suzanne thought. She knew how to dress to look thin. She knew how to groom herself. If she had a pimple, your eye didn’t automatically go to it. She had pretty good posture, and she didn’t adjust it according to her facial blemishes. She even had nice nails, while Suzanne’s always looked like she’d kept them short for a typing job and was finally starting to grow them out.

She wandered around eyeing purses, hoping no one would come up and ask if they could help her. If they could help her, they should have shown up years ago, she thought. Even though she was a recognizable personality, she often felt she had to impress shopkeepers with her purchases.

Lucy, conversely, was very frugal. Suzanne watched her haggling with a salesgirl over the price of a scarf and tried to determine what color purse she needed. She found a square black bag, very symmetrical, and as soon as she picked it up a saleswoman who smelled of too much perfume showed up at her elbow and breathed, “Isn’t that lovely?”

Suzanne jumped. “Oh, yes. Yes.”

“Why don’t you look at yourself with it in the mirror? It will go with anything.”

“I have a black bag, though,” Suzanne said dubiously.

“One can never truly have too many stylish bags of such unique design,” said the saleswoman. “This will probably outshine any of the bags you have at home. Look at it. It’s perfect for someone your size.”

“It is nice, isn’t it?” said Suzanne. “How much is it?”

“It’s very, very reasonable,” said the woman, taking the bag from Suzanne and opening it and looking at the card inside. She smiled a kind of sleazy smile, like a Stepford wife.

Suzanne felt a surge of panic as she realized she was being intimidated into an unnecessary purchase, then moved quickly through her indecision. In the short run it was easier to buy it, and Suzanne was always dealing very heavily with the short run. “I’ll take it,” she said.

Just then, Lucy came up to Suzanne with a scarf around her shoulders. “What do you think of this?” she asked, then noticed the black purse. “Oh, are you getting that?” she asked. “Don’t you already have a bag just like it?”

“Yeah,” said Suzanne blankly, “but…”

“What are you doing?” demanded Lucy. “What are you doing? How much is that bag?”

“I don’t know,” Suzanne said. “It’s a lot…”

“How much?” Lucy asked. She turned to the saleswoman. “Excuse me, I’m her agent, her shopping agent, and I intervene on some of her purchases. She’s in a delirium, she’s had a near-fatal illness.” She took the bag out of the saleswoman’s hands and opened it.

“Four hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. “Four hundred and fifty dollars, and you have a bag almost exactly like it at home. I think maybe we should save this money now, don’t you, Peanut? Didn’t our business manager tell us not to spend money?”

“Yes,” said Suzanne.

“Honey, why don’t you think about this bag?” Lucy said. “Think about it, and if it stays in your mind like a shiny diamond, we’ll come back and get it. Okay?”

“All right,” said Suzanne. “Don’t condescend to me, though.”

“I’m not,” said Lucy sweetly. “I’m patronizing you. You are a patron of the store, and I’m patronizing you. Come on.”

She took off the scarf and put it on the counter next to the black purse. “Thank you very much,” she said to the woman. “I’m sorry that she had a shopping problem.”

“You had a shopping break,” she said to Suzanne when they were outside. “And now the break is closing, and maybe we’ll go put some food in the break, in case it’s not closing.”

They went to the Magic Pan, which Suzanne liked because they used lots of artificial sweeteners. They served crepes filled with all sorts of things, but things she could recognize as food. She ordered a crepe filled with cinnamon-covered apples with ice cream on it and a Diet Coke. Lucy ordered a spinach soufflé and an iced tea, and then lit a cigarette.

Suzanne felt depressed from lack of purchase. She eyed Lucy’s cigarette enviously. “I wish I still smoked,” she said. “I shouldn’t have given up everything. Now all I do for fun is park illegally.”

“It’s good that you did all that giving up stuff,” Lucy said. “Anyway, you did doing-it-to-death to death.”

“I do like my additives, though,” Suzanne said. “I ask them to add more MSG.”

Lucy blew out a cloud of smoke. “Don’t you have a secret thought,” she asked, “that if we got work right now, we’d feel better?”

“I don’t know,” said Suzanne doubtfully. “I don’t think you ever get to relax. I mean, sure, there’s a couple of people who could, but I bet they don’t. Because by the time they get to where they could relax, they’ve gotten completely used to not being able to. How do you just suddenly become somebody who relaxes? The kind of ambition you need to get to that place is not relaxing. It’s searing. I think there’s probably something about living your whole life in a popularity contest—trying to get people to like you who you couldn’t give a flying fuck about—that kills relaxation.”

“I know what you mean,” Lucy said. “I went up for a part in New York, and I walked in and I thought, ‘Remember those clothes that you see in stores that always make you wonder who buys them? Well, here they are. They’re on the casting woman.’ That’s who I had to impress.”

“Here’s a great story,” Suzanne said. “An actor friend of mine was up for a job, and the director said, ‘You have the job. You’re perfect. I just have to go to New York to look at some actors.’ And my friend said, ‘What are you going to New York for if I have the job?’ And the guy said, ‘Don’t worry. I just have to go to New York.’ So of course the guy called from New York and said someone else had the job, and my friend said, ‘Well, I don’t want the job.’ And the director said, ‘You don’t understand. You don’t have the job to not want the job.’ And my friend said, ‘No, you don’t understand. If you don’t want me for the job, then I don’t want the job.’

“That’s how I feel about the whole thing,” she continued. “If you don’t want me for the job, I don’t want the job. If you don’t want me for the girl, I don’t want to be the girl. My want can only do so much in terms of changing what’s actually occurring with other people, and I’d like to keep it that way. I don’t want to feel that if I had wanted something more, or had said one other thing, or had worn a different dress, or had been more mysterious, or more open, then I would get something or someone I wouldn’t get otherwise.” She stopped while the waitress brought their drinks, then said, “Remind me. Why did we ever want to be actresses?”

“I didn’t want to be an actress,” Lucy said. “I was a singer, remember? Then I got an acting job, and it seemed exciting, and, I don’t know, the possibilities seemed endless.”

“Possibilities shouldn’t be endless,” Suzanne said.

“They are, though,” said Lucy. “There are so many different ways to be famous. You could shoot the Pope and he could forgive you.”

“What you don’t want,” said Suzanne, “is to be known as the person who shot the Pope who he’s still pissed off at.”

Lucy laughed and sipped her tea. “So,” she said, “I called him this morning.”

“The Colonel?” said Suzanne. “You asshole.”

“I admit it, I’m an asshole,” said Lucy. “I left him a message that said, ‘Hi, it’s me, of the Philadelphia mes,’ which was funny. I mean, if I’m going to be an asshole, at least I’m a funny asshole.” She took one last drag and put out her cigarette. “What am I going to do? Until I find someone else, I’m going to think about him. I have to keep a man in my head. It keeps my posture good.”

“And your grammar bad,” Suzanne said.

Lucy lit another cigarette. “Oh, you won’t believe who I ran into in New York,” she said. “Jane Peters.”

“Was she with Roland Parks?”

“No,” said Lucy, “but she did have the baby.”

Suzanne sighed. “She’s so beautiful, and she married one of the wealthiest men in the business, and they’ve got this cute kid… She’s got the perfect life, and she wants you to know it. She walks around like life’s helium is in her clothes.”

“Tell me about it,” said Lucy. “I met her in Bendel’s and she went on and on about how great their marriage is, and how their relationship is so solid they don’t even have to work on it. On and on. She actually said to me, ‘I never thought I would be so happy. If you had told me when I was young that I was going to be this happy, I would have laughed. I would have laughed.’ She actually repeated it.”

“I don’t know,” said Suzanne. “Maybe there’s some kind of joy I’ve never experienced, where you’re just flouncing around and giving everybody minute-by-minute updates on your never-ending glee. I don’t know, or maybe she’s just relieved that it’s not as bad as she thought it would be.”

“On the other hand,” said Lucy, “you can’t expect her to walk around with a glum face saying, ‘This is a nightmare. I wish I was poor and living in a little apartment and not working as an actress again.’”

“I think Jane should have a brochure printed up with career and relationship highlights. You know, pictures of them entwined on the couch watching TV, pictures of them laughing gaily with their agents over lunch at Le Dôme, or flying on their private jet to their private Hawaiian island. Then when she ran into any of us who might not be quite so fortunate, she could just hand us a flyer.”

“You should tell her that,” Lucy said, laughing.

“I sort of did,” said Suzanne. “She was going on about this one day, and I told her I’d give her my address so she could send me the brochure. I mean, it’s not a conversation, you know? ‘Roland and I just bought a place in the south of France.’ What’s my comeback? ‘Cary Grant proposed to me the other day’? I mean, if someone tells you they feel bad, you say, ‘Yeah, I felt bad once,’ or, ‘I feel bad, too.’ You isolate the area where there’s a basis for comparison. But if somebody says she’s married to a billionaire and they have this perfect life—not just that they’re having a really good time, but that they have a perfect life—what’s your comeback? ‘Breakfast this morning was tough on my kidneys’? Where is the comeback? I said to her, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

“Still,” Lucy said, “you have to admit, if you’re gonna sell out, sell out for the big numbers. Sometimes I feel like I’m auctioning myself off to the lowest bidder.” She sipped her tea. “Maybe I was dropped as a child.”

“You’re still dropped,” said Suzanne. “I don’t get it. You make yourself completely available and de-emphasize everything in your life. You put yourself totally at their disposal. A guy should be in your life because of who you are, not because of what you do to get him with who you’re not.”

“Why don’t we open a gift shop?” said Lucy.

“We should open a gift shop?” said Suzanne. “What is this, Non-Sequitur Day?”

Their food arrived. It was the first meal Suzanne had had set in front of her since Mary’s bacon sandwich. “I used to think that if I ate very slowly, I wouldn’t gain weight,” she said, her fork poised above her crepe. “You know, when you wolf it all down it feels like you’ve eaten a lot, but a little at a time… Oh, forget it.” She began eating very quickly.

Lucy laughed. “Your follow-through leaves a little something to be desired,” she said.

They finished eating in under ten minutes and drove back to Suzanne’s house, where they intended to discuss their evening plans. As it happened, neither of them had any. “It’s not like it’s a weekend,” said Lucy, pulling into the driveway. “That would be really tragic.”

There was a package in front of Suzanne’s door from her agent, apparently a script. Lucy squeezed her arm and said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” They went into the kitchen, and Suzanne got a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator while Lucy called her service for messages.

“What should I do?” she said frantically when she hung up. “What should I do? Barry called. They want me to sub for somebody on The Richard Collins Show. Tonight! Should I do it?”

“I don’t know. Do you want to do it?”

“If you came with me I’d want to do it,” Lucy said. “I have to admit I’ve been feeling the need to be televised lately. I think maybe I could be funny. If you and I were backstage kibitzing before, then maybe I could just zoom out there… I mean, this guy is sort of funny.”

“I’ve heard Richard Collins is funny at the expense of his guests,” Suzanne said. “He makes sure he’s funny first, and then you get what’s left.”

“Yeah, well,” said Lucy. “Do you know who’s on the show?”

“Oh, now we’re getting to it.” Suzanne laughed. “No, who’s on the show?”

“Larry Walker.”

“Larry Walker, the painter?”

“Yeah,” said Lucy, “it’s a late-night show, he gets all these weird artsy types. I’ve always wanted to meet Larry Walker, I love his work. Portia Lamm has one of his pieces. Did you ever see it? That one with the moonlight shining on the long, long hot dog? Come on, this is like spontaneity.”

“That would be a good name for a perfume,” Suzanne said. “What about hair and makeup?”

“They said they’d do all that at the studio. Come on, you don’t have anything to do tonight.”

“Well, I did have kind of a standing date with the bed, but I may have done all I can do there,” Suzanne said. “All right, I’ll come.”

“I’m afraid,” Lucy said. “I’m afraid I’ll go out of control and talk about Bob.”

“Colonel Bob?”

“I’m afraid I’ll talk about Colonel Bob,” Lucy said. “I’m such an extemporaniac. What if he makes me feel dumb and I reveal everything just to defend myself?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Suzanne asked. “Why don’t you call your manager and talk to him about it? Call Barry.”

“You’re so practical,” Lucy said. “That’s what being in bed so long has given you: a real strong, pragmatic, practical streak. It’s like you belong in your thirties.”

“Great,” Suzanne said. “Go call Barry.”

“Wait a minute, let me just be sure I’m getting this,” Lucy said. “Are you suggesting that I call Barry?”

“Go call Barry.”

While Lucy called Barry, Suzanne went into the bedroom to check her machine. Three messages.

“Funny. Suzanne, this is Mark. Listen, we’ve got this TV movie here, I guess it’s all right, and the guy has written me a note. Apparently he knows you. Anyway, it’s a pretty straightforward treatment of a subject I think you’re familiar with. It’s called Rehab! and it’s shooting on location in town starting in late October. I’m messengering it to you, it should be there this afternoon. This guy might… He tried to get your number, but I wouldn’t give it to him. He claims he knows you… Anyway, the script is all right, a little melodramatic, maybe, and they want you for the role of Katie. Two people have been cast: Joe is being played by Bernard Stevens, who was the Skipper character in that black version of Gilligan’s Island that bombed last year, and Sam is Kurt Hampton. He’s new, he just did a television film called Way Out There. So it’s largely being cast with television people. It has a good scheduling time and it’s a fairly credible project, I guess. The implication seems to be that if the ratings are good, they’ll do a sequel for the May sweeps. I just don’t know how you feel about the subject matter. Give me a call later on today. Bye. 859-4236.”

“Suzanne, hi, it’s Sid. Listen, remember that creep Alex Daniels from the clinic? The guy who went out and ODed about a week after I left? He called and pressured me into giving him your number. I hope you don’t mind, and I’m sure you do, but he said he was working in Hollywood now, so I thought… I just wanted to warn you, he’s gonna call, and I’m sorry. You can get me at my office, 724-3996. I’m sorry if you’re mad, and if you’re not, call me anyway.”

“Avoiding… ? How did you… ? Oh, oh, right, you’re joking. Uh, Suzanne, I don’t know if you remember me or not. This is Alex. We were in the drug clinic together. Alex Daniels? Do you remember me? Anyway, great message. I see you’ve still got your sense of humor. Are you still going to meetings? I’ve looked for you but I’ve never seen you at one, but I mostly go to the cocaine meetings… Anyway… Do you remember me, by the way? I’m calling because… I got your number from… I hope you don’t mind, but I got it from Sid. Anyway, remember I had told you about how I was maybe gonna write a script? Well, I did, and it’s getting made. I’ve been working on this for a year and this is like the third draft and it’s a go project, and I wanted to wait to be sure before I called. I hope you don’t mind, but I used your name in the pitch… Jesus, I’m going on too long here, sorry… I used your name, and also you told me to keep a journal and that really helped. Anyway, I’ve written a character sort of loosely based on you… Well, not that loosely. She’s an actress, her name is Katie… I hope you’re not mad. I hope you’re flattered, because that was a very big thing in my life, it had real impact… Anyway, your agent said you’d have it today, which is why I’m calling. The network is very excited about using you, although they did pitch some other names, people they said had higher TVQ. But you’re obviously ideal for the part. I mean, I did write it for you and, I don’t know, I hope you like it. If you have any questions, I can be reached through my secretary at my office at the studio, or at my new apartment in Century City… This is going to be so embarrassing if you don’t remember me. Oh, my numbers. I’m at 870-6324 or 965-0372. I’m sorry to have used so much of your tape. I’m the guy… I pushed you in the swing. Bye.”

Lucy came into the room. “Barry said—”

“Wait! I just want to play you this message,” said Suzanne.

“We’re going,” Lucy said. “We have to be there at five thirty. They’re sending a car.”

“All right, we’ll be there. Let me just play you this.” She rewound the tape. “Remember I told you about the drug clinic and all that?”

“Remember the drug clinic?” said Lucy. “No. No, were you in a drug clinic? It wasn’t something you like talked about for a while, was it?”

“Just shut up for a second,” Suzanne said. “Did I tell you about the guy… There was this guy who left, and he went out to some hotel room in the valley and literally exploded, and then he came back. Alex? Did I tell you about Alex?”

“I remember stuff about the black guy,” said Lucy. “The disc jockey from hell. And the fat one I met at that Italian restaurant that night. Who’s Alex?”

“All right, all right,” Suzanne said. “I told you about this guy. You forgot, you have too much of a life. Listen to this.” She played back Alex’s message.

“He’s a total jerk, right?” Lucy said when it ended. “I do remember hearing about him.”

“I have to say, he sounds better,” said Suzanne. “You cannot believe what this guy was like.” She held up the package. “We’ll read it in the car.”

“Who else is on the show?” Suzanne asked, as their limo headed north on the Hollywood Freeway toward Burbank.

“There’s Larry Walker, and some author, and somebody else, I don’t know who,” Lucy said. “I shouldn’t be so nervous, right? I mean, this isn’t the Carson show.”

Suzanne pulled the Rehab! script out of her bag and opened to a random page. “Sam says, ‘Did you see the new guy?’” she read, “and Joe says, ‘I think he’s still high on something.’ Sam says, ‘He says he knows Manson,’ and Joe says, ‘Shoot! It’s safer out there doing drugs than—’”

“Do I look nervous?” Lucy said. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Here’s a Katie scene,” Suzanne said, flipping through the script. “She’s sitting on a big floral sofa, and she’s yelling at somebody… She’s yelling at her father. ‘I’m afraid to tell you how I feel! Feelings are weak, and weakness isn’t allowed, is it?’ I’ve seen this! This was in that antidrug training film they kept showing us, Hooked on a Line. ‘You patronize me for having feelings. You’re so superior to your own feelings.’ He must have taken a tape recorder in with him. Is this legal?”

“Let’s not talk about this yet, okay?” Lucy said. “Let’s talk about Larry Walker and do I look okay? Is this lipstick too dark for television?”

“Let me see,” said Suzanne. “No, it’s not, but blot it down. That’s way too much gloss. The light will hit it and no one will be able to see your face.”

“I always see people with lip gloss on television, and I never like how it looks,” Lucy said. “But they’re always wearing it, so I figure maybe I should. Maybe it’s lucky.”

“The famous lucky lip gloss,” said Suzanne. “That’s brilliant.”

“I’m really glad you’re coming with me,” Lucy said. “This is real buddy work. Maybe you’ll like Larry Walker.”

“He’s an artist, and artists… This is going to sound like a generalization, but artists suffer for their craft,” said Suzanne. “That makes me very tense.”

“You might think he’s cute,” Lucy said. “Keep your mind open, unless I like him. If I like Larry Walker, then don’t keep your mind open. Close it like a clam. But there are some other people on the show, maybe somebody else’ll be cute.”

“My dream is not to meet someone on a talk show,” Suzanne said.

“What are you, above the talk show?” Lucy said. “I think talk shows are the singles bars for celebrities. Where do you think I met Andrew Keyes? I met him on a talk show in Chicago when I was promoting Hot Countries.”

“Really? I didn’t know that. I thought you met him at a party, and here I’ve been going to all these parties looking for my Andrew Keyes.”

“You’re funny, though,” Lucy said. “You’d be good on talk shows.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid I’d be good, and I’d end up the Joanne Worley of my generation.”

“I think you should forget all these ideas you have that stop you from doing things,” Lucy said. “That’s why you’re in bed all the time, because unfortunately you made that one movie where they paid you a little bit too much, and now you can afford to stay in bed.”

“I don’t see why we’re having an argument.”

“We’re not. All I’m saying is you should go on a talk show every so often. Because you’re funny.”

“What, everyone has to know I’m funny?” said Suzanne. “Or I’m not funny anymore?”

“No, you should keep it a big bad secret,” Lucy said, “so that only you and your bedclothes know. And your clicker.”

“My clicker,” said Suzanne, “thinks I’m incredibly amusing. It asked me out the other day. I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Okay,” said Lucy, lighting yet another cigarette. “So what should I talk about? Help me.”

“Well, don’t get pretentious. You know how when you get nervous you get pretentious to protect yourself?”

“Is that true?” said Lucy. “That’s weird. You’re kidding. You’ve always thought that? I feel bad now.”

“No, I don’t mean it bad,” said Suzanne. “I think it’s good pretentious. Everybody’s got their quirks. You just quote William Somerset Maugham when you’re nervous. Some people sweat.”

“Should I talk about No Survivors? I mean, it’s not coming out until November, but I can say what it was like to work with Rolf Eduard, and that it isn’t a remake of Freedom Train like everyone thinks. What else?”

“Why don’t you say the thing about singles bars for celebrities?” Suzanne suggested. “Say that’s why you’re on.”

“But can I do that without sounding slutty?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Suzanne said. “I mean, don’t flirt with the guy on the air, okay?”

“What do you think I am, a putz or something?” Lucy said. “I’m not going to flirt with him on the air. I don’t even flirt with them, I let them flirt with me.”

“Why do I feel like I’m the practical one of the two of us?” Suzanne said. “I’m like a ditz in my own life, but as soon as I’m in yours, I have something to do. Cleaning up the mess as you go.”

“I don’t know, I think I’m good for you that way,” Lucy said. “I make you feel like you’re stable, when you’re completely not.”

“This is really revealing about our relationship,” said Suzanne. “Who knew we would find out all this stuff on the way to Burbank to do a talk show? Does this thing have an audience?”

“No,” said Lucy, “which is why I’m doing it. Otherwise I’d really be sick now. But I can always do these. For Hot Countries they had me doing early-morning shows and there was no audience and I was brilliant.”

“I saw you on some of those, remember?” Suzanne said. “You were very good, very relaxed. It was like watching Hal the computer.”

“That’s when I talked about tunneling out of show business.”

“That was very funny,” said Suzanne. “Why don’t you say that?”

“I can’t do it again. That was two years ago.”

“Who saw it?” said Suzanne. “It was a morning show.”

“I can’t do it again,” Lucy repeated. “Maybe if I get stressed out I’ll make fun of my weight.”

“I know,” said Suzanne. “Tell them you’re retaining water for Whitney Houston.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Suzanne explained, “Whitney Houston is clearly not retaining water. She’s obviously getting somebody to do it for her, so let’s—”

“God, that’s perfect!” Lucy said. “Can I do that?”

“Yes, do that. Do that,” Suzanne said. “I can help you on something self-deprecatory.”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” Lucy said. “There’s the studio. I wish you could come out with me. You could just walk out with me like I’m your dummy or something, and we’ll never explain it.”

“Could you drop us at dressing room B up there on the left?” Suzanne said to the driver.

“All right, I’m just going to let you take over now,” Lucy said. “I have a heartbeat as big as the hills.”

Suzanne got a Diet Coke from a vending machine while Lucy got her hair and makeup done. It turned out Larry Walker was not going to be on the show—he was the canceled guest that Lucy was subbing for—but by the time she got out of makeup she was so self-absorbed she related this news to Suzanne with no sense of irony. Down the hall, the theme music for The Richard Collins Show began playing.

“I look okay?” Lucy said.

“You look fine,” said Suzanne. “You look great.”

“You won’t lie to me, right?” Lucy said. “You’re going to watch me and tell me how I am, and you’re not going to lie?”

“I won’t lie to you,” Suzanne said. “Look, there’s a cute guy over there, the one with the gray shirt. Why don’t you go talk to him?”

“I can’t,” Lucy said. “I’m too nervous about the show, and to add a guy on top of that… I can’t.”

“Oh,” said Suzanne, smiling. “Your priorities are sort of juggled around at this point, aren’t they?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Lucy said. “You can make fun of me all night long, but don’t make fun of me now. It erodes my real sense of who I am.”

“All right, all right,” Suzanne said. “So, who’s out first?”

“I’m out first, and then the author, and then I think Emily Frye, that actress who got the movie neither of us did.”

“Top Priority?” Suzanne said.

“Yes, the girl who got Top Priority.”

“You’re kidding,” said Suzanne. “Well, try to be as great as possible.”

“Oh, good,” Lucy said. “The pressure isn’t on. That’s good. My buddy.”

A tall man came up to them and said, “Lucy, you’re on.”

“I’ll wait for you in the green room,” Suzanne said.

“You better,” Lucy said. “You better wait for me.”

Suzanne walked around the corner and went into the green room. There were several other people in there, among them an attractive-looking man who looked like he was from New York. He was wearing a green corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows, a multiplaid shirt and a tie, and jeans and Hush Puppies. He had brown hair and wore glasses. Suzanne thought he had an air of studiousness about him, of not stability but something near stability. Of calm, almost. She nodded at him slightly and walked past him to another tiny couch, where she watched the television monitor in the corner.

It was quite an unattractive room. There was a big lamp in one corner, three couches, and a shag carpet. A woman wearing a dress with pearls on was drinking coffee on the third couch. She was wearing patent leather shoes with peach bows on them. A young girl who must have been her daughter was holding her purse for her. The girl was wearing a pink sweater and had blond hair down her back. Suzanne glanced briefly at the man in green corduroy. He was probably the author, she thought. He looked like he was wearing a writing uniform.

Suzanne looked back at the monitor, where Richard Collins was still doing his opening monologue. The probable author got up to get some coffee, then came over and sat next to her. “Aren’t you the girl who was in Seventh Tea House?” he asked. “Suzanne Vale?”

Suzanne was startled and embarrassed, and said, “Yes,” as if the question had been an accusation.

“That was very good,” he said.

“Really?” she said. “Well, thank you. You liked it? You like that kind of movie?”

“Well, no, I don’t really, but yes, I did,” he said. “I thought it was a well-made film and I certainly appreciated how difficult it must have been for all of you to be in it. Are you on the show tonight?”

“No,” said Suzanne, grateful for his taking control of the conversation. “My friend Lucy is. She’ll be on in a minute.”

“I read an interview with you once and you were very funny,” he said. “I can’t remember what magazine.”

“Probably in Omni,” Suzanne said. “So, who are you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Jesse Templeman.”

“The author?”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “You know my work?”

“No,” said Suzanne. “I knew there was going to be an author on the show. What have you written?”

“Well, actually, I’ve written a novel,” Jesse said. “It’s called The Appetite People.”

“Really?” Suzanne said. “And you’re promoting it, so you must be proud of it.”

“I am proud of it, yeah,” he said. “I worked on it for quite some time. It’s difficult to get a publisher.”

“Do you live in New York?”

“Well, actually I’ve just moved out here,” he said. “I’ve been living in New York, but they bought my book to make a film out of it and I’m writing the screenplay. I didn’t want somebody else to do it. I don’t know that I’ll be staying here after that. Hey,” he said, nodding toward the monitor, “isn’t that your friend?”

“Oh my God,” said Suzanne, realizing Lucy had already been on for a little while. She had promised to watch and tell her how she was. “Can they put the sound on? Can someone put the sound on?”

Jesse leaned forward and turned up the volume. Richard Collins was laughing very hard. Lucy said, “I mean, I’m too old to be in the Brat Pack and too young for my own exercise tape. What am I?” Richard Collins laughed harder.

“She’s very funny,” said Jesse.

“She is funny,” Suzanne said. “She was very nervous.”

“I’m nervous myself,” he said. “I feel dumb doing this, but my publishers… you know. Do you live out here? I guess you do.”

“Yes,” said Suzanne.

“Well,” Jesse said, “maybe we could… I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but maybe we could have lunch or something. Or go out sometime. What do you do to relax?”

“I don’t relax,” said Suzanne. “It’s sort of a therapy goal of mine.”

“I see.”

“But what I do that’s the closest I get to relaxing,” said Suzanne, “is I drive around and listen to loud music.”

“Well, maybe we can take a long loud drive sometime,” he said.

Suzanne looked back at the screen and saw that Lucy wasn’t there anymore. “Oh my God, I’ve gotta go find my friend, she’s gonna kill me,” she said. She scribbled her number on the flap of the envelope Rehab! had arrived in, tore it off, and gave it to Jesse. “This is my number,” she said. “Good luck on the show.”

“Thanks,” said Jesse. “I’ll call you sometime.”

Suzanne rushed past the tall man who was coming to get Jesse and saw Lucy running down the hall toward her. “Did you hear what I said about my father?” she asked hysterically. “He’s gonna kill me. He’s never gonna speak to me again.”

“No, honey, it was fine,” Suzanne said calmingly. “You were funny about the Brat Pack thing—”

“Did I have lipstick on my teeth?”

“You were fine,” Suzanne said. “But what did you say about your father?”

“I thought you said I was fine,” Lucy said. “Were you watching the wrong channel?”

“You were fine,” Suzanne assured her. “I saw everything but that. I looked away for a second—”

“At what?” Lucy demanded.

“I was talking to a guy,” Suzanne said. “The author guy.”

“Did he think I was good-looking?” Lucy asked. Suzanne nodded. “And you didn’t hear the father thing? Do you know what I said about my father? That he was a giant whale and I wasn’t sure he was actually my father. I called him my alleged father.”

“So?” said Suzanne. “He’s got a sense of humor, doesn’t he?”

“My father? The Republican nightmare?”

“Well, are you counting on his will for anything?”

“Don’t be funny about this,” Lucy said. “Oh, all right, be funny. The show is over, you can make fun of me now. So, you didn’t think it sounded slutty when I said I went on talk shows to meet guys?”

“To meet guys, no,” Suzanne said. “You didn’t say to blow them, did you?”

“You wouldn’t know,” said Lucy. “You were busy cruising the green room.”

“I was not cruising the… I was talking to… You tell me to do this stuff.”

“I don’t tell you to do it while I’m on TV,” Lucy said.

“Oh, it’s scheduled around your career now, my talking to guys?” Suzanne said. “Let me just tell you this one thing. You look great and I gave the guy my number. It’s been a breakthrough night for both of us. Now we can go and have some French fries and doughnuts and really live life.”

They walked out of the building and got into the limo. “What’s his name?” asked Lucy, settling into her seat, and Suzanne talked about Jesse all the way back to Hollywood, thinking the whole time, “He’ll never call me.

“And if he does, what if he’s a murderer?”