Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,11

torture kick, a how far can you take it? kind of thing - and that Rip Millar was somehow indirectly connected to them.

"Rip said something about how I'd met a friend of his," I murmur.

"Did he say a name?"

"I didn't ask," I say. "I didn't want to know who it was."

I notice Julian's hand trembling as he runs it lightly over his hair.

"Hey, don't tell Blair we met, okay?" I finally say.

Julian looks at me strangely. "I don't talk to Blair anymore."

I sigh. "Julian, she told me she heard that you and I were at the Polo Lounge the other night."

Julian's expression is so completely innocent that I believe him when he says, "I haven't talked to Blair since June." Julian is totally relaxed. His eyes don't waver. "I haven't had any contact with her for over six months, Clay." He reacts to the expression on my face. "I didn't tell her we were at the Polo Lounge the other night."

On a break and I'm listening to a message Laurie left on my cell phone ("If you're not speaking to me at least tell me why ... "), then I delete it midway. The rooms of the casting complex surround a pool, and the rooms are filled with the boys and girls auditioning for the three remaining roles. Sudden interest from a rising young actor whose most recent movie "caused a stir in Toronto" has taken one of the available roles off the table, the part of Kevin Spacey's son. Only one boy out of the dozens seen yesterday has met the team's approval for the other male role. Jon, the director, keeps complaining about the girls. Since The Listeners is set in the mid-eighties, he's having problems with their bodies. "I don't know what's happening," he says. "These girls are disappearing."

"What do you mean?" the producer asks.

"Too thin. The fake tits don't help."

Jason, the casting director, says, "Well, they do help. But I get it."

"I have no idea what you're complaining about," the producer deadpans.

"It all seems so unwholesome," the director says. "And it's not period, Mark."

Talk turns to the actress who passed out while walking to her car after her audition yesterday - stress, malnutrition - and then to the young actor under consideration for Jeff Bridges's son. "What about Clifton?" the director says. Jason tries to move the director's focus to other actors, but the director keeps insisting.

Clifton is the one I lobbied hard for to be in Concealed, the one I took back to Doheny when I found out he was dating an actress I'd been interested in and who showed no interest in me since there was nothing I could offer her. It was made clear what Clifton needed to do if he wanted me to lobby for him. The actor eyed me with a chilled-out glare in the lounge of a restaurant on La Cienega. "I'm not looking for a dude," the actor said. "And even if I was, you're not him." In the jovial language of men I suggested that if he didn't comply I would try to make sure he wouldn't get the part. There was so little hesitancy that the moment became even more unsettling than I had initially made it. The actor simply sighed, "Let's roll." I couldn't tell if the indifference was real or faked. He was planning a career. This was a necessary step. It was just another character he was playing in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza that night. The BlackBerry on the nightstand that kept flashing, the fake tan and the waxed asshole, the dealer in the Valley who never showed up, the drunken complaints about the Jaguar that had to be sold - the details were so common that it could have been anyone. The same actor came in this morning and smiled briefly at me, did a shaky reading, then improved slightly on the second reading. Whenever I saw him at a party or a restaurant he would casually avoid me, even when I offered my condolences about his girlfriend, that young actress I had wanted, who overdosed on her meds. Since she had a small role in a hit TV show her death was recognized.

"He's twenty-four," Jason complains.

"But he's still really cute." The director mentions the whispers about Clifton's sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton's denial in a