Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,17
dropped out of the University of Michigan (I don't ask whether she'd ever enrolled) and what led to the side trips to New York and Miami before she landed in L.A. and you don't ask what she must have done with the photographer who discovered her when she was waitressing at the cafe on Melrose or about the career modeling lingerie that probably seemed promising at nineteen and that led to the commercials that led to a couple of tiny roles in films and definitely not putting all her hopes into the third part of a horror franchise that panned into nothing and then it was the quick slide into the bit parts on TV shows you've never heard of, the pilot shot but never aired, and covering everything else is the distant humiliation of bartending gigs and the favors that got her the hostess job at Reveal. Decoding everything, you piece together the agent who ignores her. You begin to understand through her muted complaints that the management company no longer cares. Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I've done it before.
We sit in my office naked, buzzed on champagne, while she shows me pics from a Calvin Klein show, audition tapes a friend shot, a modeling portfolio, paparazzi photos of her at B-list events - the opening of a shoe store on Canon, a charity benefit at someone's home in Brentwood, standing with a group of girls at the Playboy Mansion at the Midsummer Night's Dream Party - and then always it seems we're back in the bedroom.
"What do you want for Christmas?" she asks.
"This. You." I smile. "What do you want?"
"I want a part in your movie," she says. "You know that."
"Yeah?" I ask, my hand tracing her thigh. "My movie? Which part?"
"I want the part of Martina." She kisses me, her hand moving down to my cock, gripping it, releasing it, gripping it again.
"And I'm going to try and get it for you."
The pause is involuntary but she recovers in a second. "Try?"
If we aren't in bed or watching movies we're at the Bristol Farms down the street buying champagne or at the Apple store in the Westfield Mall in Century City because she needs a new computer and also wants an iPhone ("It's Christmas," she purrs as if it matters) and I'll hand the BMW over to the valet at the mall and notice the looks from the guys taking the car, and the stares from so many other men roaming the mall, and she notices them too and walks quickly, pulling me along, while talking mindlessly to no one on her cell phone, a self-protective gesture, a way to combat the stares by not acknowledging them. These stares are always the grim reminders of a pretty girl's life in this town, and though I've been with other beautiful women, the neurosis about their looks had already hardened into a kind of bitter acceptance that Rain doesn't seem to share. One of the last afternoons together that December, we're heading to the Apple store drunk on champagne, Rain nestling into me, wearing Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses as we walk beneath the overcast sky looming above the towers of Century City, the chiming bells of Christmas carols everywhere, and she's happy because we'd just watched her reel, which includes the two scenes she was in from a Jim Carrey movie, a drama that tanked. (After squinting hard at the screen, I enthusiastically complimented her and then asked why she hadn't listed the movie on her resume, and she admitted the scenes were cut.) She's still asking me if I'm telling the truth about her scenes as we move toward the Apple store and I assure her that I am instead of admitting how dismaying the performance actually was. There was no way those scenes should have been kept in the movie - the decision to remove them was the correct one. (I have to stop myself from wondering how she got the part, because that would be entering a maze with no escape.) What keeps me interested - and it always does - is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality? This is where the suspense of it all usually lies. And later, for the first time since Meghan Reynolds, I think hopefully - lying