It’s true what he thinks, my mother does love him.
“He’s good,” I say. “He stopped by today.”
“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
“No? Maybe. It’s Hugo. I never really know.”
My mother smiles. “He is handsome.”
I consider Hugo’s sweat-laden running clothes this morning. He does even make them look good. “He is,” I say. “The problem is that he knows it.”
Joan comes back into the kitchen. “What’s next?”
My mother points to the doughnut tray. “Those are for Amy,” she says. “Where is Amy?”
Joan shrugs and brings out the bagels.
“It’s not such a problem,” my mother says. “Your father knows I’m smart; it works.”
“Hugo knowshe’shandsome, not that I am, there’s a difference.”
My mother comes up to me. I see the lines around her eyes, her hair that she’s beginning to let go gray. “Mummashanna,” she says, taking my face in her hands once again. “It’s not attractive to state the obvious.”
Chapter Fifteen
Irina is in New York the following week to oversee a press photo shoot, and I mostly work from home. But Tuesday I go to her house in Laurel Canyon to check the mail and water the plants and fax over a new version of a script with my notes—Irina is old-school. I ask Kendra if she wants to come with me. Kendra is now the head of development for a showrunner on the ABC lot, and is always at work in Burbank, but today she has a doctor’s appointment on the west side in the morning, and we decide to meet at Irina’s house.
Kendra pulls up in her navy-blue Jeep Cherokee, the Chicks blaring. She is tall—six feet on a bad day—and she’s got a mass of curly black hair. She wears jeans almost exclusively, and most of her T-shirts are cropped—I used to think it was by necessity, but now I know it’s by design. She’s got great abs, so I get it.
I think about our first meeting. I didn’t immediately think we would be friends. In fact, I assumed we wouldn’t. We wouldoverlap for the time it took to train me, and then she would move on. I wanted her to stay just long enough to teach me all the logistics. I had no intention of reinventing the wheel with Irina. I just wanted to know what kind of oil the machine preferred and how to keep securing it.
The first day in Irina’s office Kendra gave me a big hug. I come from an affectionate family, but it had been a while since I’d experienced that level of unselfconscious display from someone I wasn’t related to or sleeping with.
“Welcome,” she said. “This job is a lot of fun.”
Later she’d tell me about the hard parts—Irina could be temperamental; the hours were sometimes very long; I’d deal with a lot of personalities and no one had any patience. But I always appreciated that she opened with joy. That’s who Kendra is. Fun first.
Irina’s house is situated on Lookout Mountain, right at the summit of Laurel Canyon. It’s an old house, built in the fifties, with a sunken living room, lots of wood and little light, and a neutral palette. The back of the house has an addition, though, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over Los Angeles. She has one of the most stunning views I’ve seen. There is a terraced lawn beyond the house, and a black stone pool in the yard. It’s a sexy house, a house with character, one that screams Old Hollywood, although Irina would hate the worldold. She’s fifty-eight, but no one is allowed to say that number out loud or put it down in writing unless it’s a health form.
“You don’t know what it’s like for women in this town,” she tells me often. “The parents on teen shows are in their thirties.”
I often remind her she’s not an actress, and that producing isa different skill set, and that standards of age when it comes to beauty are changing, but she always pushes back.
“No one wants to make a movie with someone they don’t want to fuck.”
I un-alarm the house, and Kendra goes to get some water for the flowers—the orchids take one ice cube of spring water, and the fiddle-leaf fig trees get eight ounces of tap, every two weeks. This is the third fiddle leaf I’ve killed, and every time their leaves start to turn brown for frustratingly vague reasons I feel like a murderer.
Irina’s cat, Moses, comes out from the bathroom and nuzzles up against Kendra’s leg.
“Oh, hi, baby.” Kendra scoops him up and cuddles him into her. “Who is looking after you?”
“Penelope,” I say.
Penelope is Irina’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who was once her wife. “Great with cats, terrible with plants,” according to Irina.
“What cycle are we in with that?”
There was no car in the driveway, so I know she’s not currently home.
