sad as he did. He missed her so much. The next two weeks were going to be unbearable. “Give her my best.” They had talked to each other on the phone several times, and she sounded like fun, although totally different from Van.
“I will.”
“Let me know if she's turned green.” She had told him about the movie in green slime, and he had teased her about it mercilessly, telling her that that was typical Hollywood and probably the best they could do. Except Vanessa had taken umbrage at that. Her mother had made some beautiful films in her life, and one day they'd probably be in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art too. She was still eighteen, and they were her family, and he went easy on it after that. But he would have been horrified, Vanessa thought, if he could have seen the place where Val lived.
She had borrowed her father's car and driven to the place Val shared with at least a dozen other girls. And Vanessa thought she'd never seen such chaos and filth in her entire life. There was stale food left on plates in the living room from God knew when, and unmade beds in every room, some even without sheets, an empty tequila bottle lay on the floor, there were stockings hung in the bathrooms in all shapes and hues, and everywhere hung the rancid smell of too many perfumes. And in the midst of it all sat Val, happily doing her nails and telling Vanessa about her part in the film.
“And then I come out of this swamp … I hold out my arms like this” she did so, almost knocking over a lamp, “and I scream …” She demonstrated that too, and Vanessa covered her ears. It seemed to go on for hours, and she was actually impressed, as she grinned at her twin. It was good to see her again, even here.
“You've developed quite a range with that in the last few months.”
Val laughed. “I get plenty of practice every day.”
Vanessa looked around again. “How do you stand this place?” Between the smell, the filth, the disorder, and the girls, Vanessa knew she would have gone mad in two days, but Valerie seemed oblivious to it all, in fact she seemed happy there, happier than she had been at home by far, and she said as much to her twin.
“I can do whatever I want here.”
“And what does that include?” Vanessa was curious about what she'd been up to in the last three months. Val knew about Jason, although Vanessa hadn't gone into details about her affair, and she didn't intend to now. “Any big new heart throbs since I left?”
Valerie shrugged. There were a number of men in her life, one she cared about, and three she was sleeping with, but she knew her sister would be shocked so she didn't say anything. It didn't mean that much to her. A little dope, a little booze, a terrific piece of ass in some boy's apartment or rented room. There was so much going on in Hollywood that it didn't seem so terrible to be a part of it, and all of them in her apartment passed the pill around like after-dinner mints. There was always an open box somewhere in the house, and someone had told her not to mix brands, but they seemed to work anyway. And if there was a slip, she could always get rid of it. She wasn't as dumb as her little sister, Anne. “What about you?” Valerie turned the tables on her, as she started on the nails on the other hand. “What's that guy like you're with all the time?”
“Jason?” Vanessa feigned innocence and Val laughed.
“No. King Kong. Is he cute?”
“By my standards yes, but probably not by yours.”
“That means he has a harelip and a club foot, but he's cute and you think he's serious.”
“More or less. He's working on his Ph.D.” Vanessa sounded proud of him and Valerie stared at her. He sounded horrible to her. She hated intellectuals, she liked all the Hollywood types, especially long hair, open shirts, the California beach-boy look.
She looked at Vanessa suspiciously. “How old is this guy?”
“Twenty-four.”
“You think he wants to marry you?” That horrified her, but Vanessa was quick to shake her head.
“He's not that type and neither am 1.1 want to finish school, and come back here to write screenplays.” She and Jason argued about that all the time. He thought