Party Girl: A Novel (8 page)

“Steph, there you are!” I say like I’ve been looking all over for her and not swapping spit with her sometime fuck buddy.

There’s something different in her face than I’ve ever seen before. See, Stephanie is just about the most tolerant person I know—she’s put up with my moodiness and crying jags and negativity like no one else I’ve ever met—and no matter how inappropriate my behavior has been, the look on her face is always one of forgiveness. But now she’s gazing at me coldly, like I’m someone she doesn’t understand or have any interest in tolerating. Obviously, if I’d been thinking—if I hadn’t been high and liked the song and the feeling of connecting—I’d have realized that Stephanie probably wouldn’t have liked the idea of my kissing Gus. But somehow I never seem to understand these things until it’s too late. She gives me the world’s nastiest glare and starts walking down a staircase. I follow her.

“Steph! Wait! Can I talk to you for a minute?” I yell as I run after her. Gus is right behind me.

Stephanie looks past me to Gus and says, “You’re coming with me.” She grabs his hand and leads him outside and I’m left standing there alone, feeling even lower than the dirt they’re probably walking on.

And then I’m wandering around the party by myself, with the distinct feeling that Stephanie, Jane, Gus, and Dan have all left together and are currently talking shit about me. But maybe the coke has made me paranoid? After a solo coke bathroom visit, I start to think that this may be the worst night of my life and I should probably just try to find a ride home and call it a night.

But when I get outside, I realize that utter mayhem seems to have broken out on Temple Hill Drive, with cops flooding in, drunk people pouring out, and the odd random person showing up a bit on the late side. I get carried along with a crush of people the cops are kicking out, and realize that although everyone looks familiar, none of them are my friends. Depression and something worse—panic—starts to take over me.

As I stand there looking for someone—anyone—I know, Adam walks by.

“Hey!” I scream excitedly, grabbing his leather jacket.

“What’s going on here?” he asks as he gives me a hug.

“Cops are breaking it up, I’ve lost everyone I know and it’s been invaded by agents’ assistants,” I explain, gesturing toward the mayhem at the front of the house. “Why are you so late?”

“I just got off my shift,” he says, and I’m reminded that he’s an out of-work actor, someone who deals with things like shifts and punch cards and tips. But I’m so grateful to see someone I know—even if it is someone who abandoned me by the fire and then didn’t say good-bye to me in the morning the last time I saw him—that I force my judgmental side to relax.

Adam takes a look at the people milling around and suddenly says, “This looks a little like what Sartre might have created if he was crafting my own personal version of hell. Want to get out of here?”

I bring him back to my place because there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to go at two on a Saturday night-slash-Sunday morning, feeling optimistic again because the possibility still exists that tonight can be salvaged.

“Be right back,” I trill, leaving him petting one of my cats in the living room, and make my way to my bedroom.
I hope he’s sort of out of it and just thinks I went to the bathroom
, I think as I remove a framed print of Gretna Green—procured during a trip to England with my family like a decade ago—off the wall and pour some Alex onto its glass surface. I snort four lines quickly, then slide a bit onto my index finger and over my top gums for what my friend Lisa used to call “Numb-y Gummy” when we’d find her dad’s coke in high school. I light a cigarette and feel the coke flow through me as I make my way back to the living room, where Adam is continuing to pet my cat.

“I’m mad at you, you know,” I say, as I make my way over to where he’s sitting and join him.

“Mad at me?” he asks. He motions for my cigarette and sits up. “Why?”

“Why? Well, after telling me you wanted to take me away from our sordid Hollywood scene, you left me alone, without a pillow and blanket, by the fire, and then never even said good-bye to me when I left,” I say, amazing myself at how casually these details are rolling off my tongue. I don’t tend to be a fan of making myself vulnerable but then again, Alex has a way of making me forget about things like that.

“Oh, Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” he says, leaning back on the couch and suddenly wearing a sweet smile. I notice that his ears are bright red. I wonder if I’ve made him incredibly uncomfortable.

But then he looks at me confidently, right in the eye. “I held you as you fell asleep but then you pulled away from me and onto the floor,” he says. “I tried to tuck a pillow under your head and a blanket over you but you pushed them away. And then”—he takes another drag off my cigarette—“I watched you sleep, and thought about how it was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.”

It’s such a genuine and sweet thing to hear from a typically sarcastic person that I literally don’t know what to say. I wonder for a second if I ought to mention the whole making-out-with-Gus incident, but I love the feeling flowing through me so much that I don’t want to do anything that might make it go away.

So I just move closer to him and he puts his thick hand on my knee and we start talking—about nothing in particular but at the same time pretty personal stuff. It feels a little like how postcoital pillow talk is supposed to feel but never does—complete with the passing of the cigarette back and forth. I notice for the first time that he has one of the deepest, sexiest voices I’ve ever heard as he tells me how much he hates working at Norm’s Deli and how much it sucks to see this completely talentless but attractive guy he knows get called into auditions he’d kill for. We discuss how depressing Hollywood parties can be, and I explain to him how much trouble I have with my friendships. The whole time we’re talking, I’m wondering if he’s thinking about kissing me.

I don’t mention to Adam that I’m jetting to my bedroom for regular intervals of coke because I feel utterly certain he’ll judge me, and we seem to be getting along so well that I don’t want to risk putting him off. My next trip to my bedroom and inhalation of four lines, however, puts me a little on edge and I find myself rambling more manically than usual when I return. I suddenly see myself as an outsider, or a movie camera, might capture me, telling some incredibly pointless story about how I may or may not have a hostile relationship with the gossip columnist at work.
I need to chill out
, I pep talk myself, then immediately wonder again if Adam is thinking about kissing me.

And then I basically lose patience with wondering, and lean in to kiss him myself. Call me a feminist but I’ve never much seen the point of always waiting for guys to make the first move. Adam returns my kiss with far more passion than I’m expecting, and I’m suddenly literally dizzy as we continue to make out. The word “swooning” travels through my mind, as does the phrase “weak in the knees.” I’m not exactly sure what he’s doing but Adam has somehow found a way to access something apparently deep inside my larynx that is turning me on more than anyone ever has before. I wonder if I’m literally ever going to be able to stop kissing him. As I start to feel my chin tingle with that raw-verging-on-scabbed feeling I always get when I’m making out with a guy who has stubble, Adam suddenly pulls away and looks me directly in the eye.

“Wait a minute…have you been doing coke?” he asks. He says the word “coke” the way I might say “coconut,” something I hate, and I become immediately anxious, like he’s a cop and I’m being put through a sobriety test.

“What are you talking about?” I ask him but I’m really just buying time, wondering what the hell I’m going to say.

“I can taste it on you,” he says, and I disentangle myself from him entirely, lean back on the couch, and light a cigarette using a funky lighter I got at the Pasadena Rose Bowl flea market. I exhale deeply. I had no idea someone else could taste coke on you if they were kissing you, and I immediately start thinking of all the other men I’ve made out with while I’ve been wired who never said a word about it. Were they simply not familiar with the taste or did they just not want me to stop?

I cop to what I’ve been doing, both because it’s evident I’ve been thoroughly busted and because I’ve always been an atrocious liar. Adam doesn’t ask any more questions, but the moment is gone and my panties have become about as dry as the Sahara during the stress of The Inquisition.

And then things are completely, horribly awkward. He says that he should go because he has a lot to do tomorrow, even though he’d been telling me like ten minutes earlier that he had no plans at all.

“But I’ll call you,” he says, as he stands up.

I write down my number, even though I feel like we’re both just going through the charade of polite behavior and he doesn’t have any interest in calling me, because I’m an out-of-control girl who secretly does coke while she’s making out with someone. Then I walk him out, where he leans in and gives me a quick and absolutely rudimentary peck on the lips. He folds the piece of paper with my number written on it in half, and puts it in his jeans pocket.

“I’ll call you,” he says again, but when he walks down the driveway back to his car, he doesn’t look back once. I go inside and tears start streaming down my face. I’m not sure if it’s because I feel rejected, because there’s no more Alex left, or because I know that it’s going to take several vodka shots and at least four Ambien to get to sleep and that even still, I probably won’t be slumbering until long after the birds have started in on their oppressive morning chirping session. Or maybe it’s all those reasons. I chug from the bottle of Absolut I keep in my freezer without even chasing it with Diet Coke.

I get to work on Monday with every intention of going downstairs to apologize to Stephanie. During my Sunday of only occasional consciousness—I’d opted, after being up for a few hours, to take more Ambien and sleep the whole day through—I’d come to the conclusion that heavy partying was really beginning to have a negative impact on my life, and that I was going to cut back on drinking and stop doing coke altogether. Stephanie, who I’d heard make more than a few of these apologetic declarations herself, would have to understand.

But I also have to do a story on Ken Stinson, this incredibly cheesy actor who’s going to be playing Hercules in some terrible-sounding movie you couldn’t pay me $1,000 to see, and I decide that I should do the story first so that I can be more relaxed when I talk to her.

The story is for our “Most Beautiful People” issue, and though he’s not remotely beautiful and the editors are clear on that, everyone knows that they don’t actually pick the most aesthetically pleasing famous people—just the ones coming out in movies and TV shows the readers will flock to.

His publicist Amy connects the call and Ken tells me all the basics—no, he doesn’t go in for things like facials, he works out because he loves it and not for vanity—and when it’s over, I ask him if he has a childhood friend I could interview for terts.

Terts are tertiary comments from people who know the source well, and though
Absolutely Fabulous
typically likes to use terts from other bold-faced names, they allow us to use “civilians” for our special issues. So Ken, after confirming his height (five foot eleven) and weight (two hundred pounds exactly), gives me the name and number of his best friend from high school, back in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The high school friend—a real redneck-sounding guy named Chuck—seems sweet and genuinely proud of Ken’s success. He laughs that before Ken became “an actor stud,” he was a dork “just like the rest of us.”

I transcribe and start writing the piece with the speed of a mad-woman, noting that the height-and-weight stats Ken gave me conflict with the DMV records we always check them against. He must have thought that five foot nine and 180 pounds simply wasn’t “Most Beautiful People” material. Granted, he could have lied when he gave the DMV his stats, which could of course mean he’s even shorter and scrawnier than that, but there’s only so much a reporter can do.

And then, when I’m putting the finishing touches on the piece, I get an e-mail from Stephanie, which has the formality of an Ed McMahon Publisher’s Clearinghouse notification.
Dear Amelia,
I read, my heart racing.
I’m sorry to have to write this note but I just don’t think I can continue to be friends with you. I think you can figure out why. Best of luck in all your future endeavors—Stephanie.

Tears start pouring out of my eyes before I’m even aware of them and I have an urge to take the computer and toss it on the ground. She can’t be friends with me? She thinks I can “figure out why”? Jesus Christ. Who the fuck does she think she is, e-mailing me a goddamn friendship rejection letter like I’ve interviewed for a job she’s not hiring me for? You’d have thought Gus was her husband the way she was carrying on.

After a few minutes, though, I feel strangely calm. If I’m going to be thoroughly honest, I’ve been getting sick of Stephanie lately—she’s been a lot harsher and less comforting of late and I’d been starting to wonder if maybe we didn’t have as much in common as I used to think. Other people seem to have these friends that they’ve known since they were like in the playpen, or at least that they went to high school with, but I’m not very good at keeping those people around. Old friends never seem as exciting and cool as the new ones and Stephanie—who I met a year and a half ago, when I started working at
Absolutely Fabulous—
had seemed rather exciting for a while.
But I’m not going to let her make me feel guilty for the rest of my life
, I think, and decide to play her cold game, too, and not even respond to the e-mail. If I see her in the elevator, I decide, I’ll be cordial but distant.

I write the Ken Stinson piece in record time and the New York editor e-mails me back within minutes to tell me how thrilled she is with my work on this—an altogether unprecedented event. A few minutes later, Brian walks in smiling, saying the New York editor was just raving to him about my work, and hands me a piece of paper. I glance down at it and see that it’s an assignment to interview Kane—a British singer who specializes in inexplicably popular adult contemporary music and tends to date actresses.