“Birdie,” Imani continued, “I am now watching a live shot of TMZ outside an apartment in San Francisco. Please tell me that you are not making plans to emerge and give a statement.”
“I am not making plans to emerge and give a statement.”
Birdie heard Imani sigh.
“Okay, well, that is at leastgood. Now, is it too much to ask for you to just stay quiet and let me clean this up?”
“It is not too much to ask, no,” Birdie said, as Elliot looked toward her with his mouth open. “What did you think of the article, though?”
Imani sighed again. Louder. “I think you can polish shit into a diamond, but it’s still just a pile of turds at the end of the day.”
Elliot made a sound like he’d never been so insulted, and Birdie held out a finger that matched her glare, which indicated that he shouldzip it. She heard him blow air out of his nose.
“Staylow, Birdie,” Imani reiterated.
“Chirp-chirp,” Birdie whispered and hung up.
“So,” Elliot started.
“Well,” Birdie said.
“Are you going to tell me about Carter or am I left to assume that he’s another turd that I’ll polish into a diamond?”
“Oh, just to clarify, she wasn’t talking about Ian,” Birdie said. “She was talking about your story.”
“Birdie!” Elliot thumped the wheel, which accidentally triggered the horn, and the guy in front of them shot his hand out his window with a middle finger.
“Fine,” Birdie exhaled. “But to be clear, Iamlying low. If you want to go talk to Carter, you’re on your own.”
Birdie had met Carter on her thirtieth birthday. She’d been back in LA full-time by then for several years and had invited Mona to Santa Barbara to celebrate the milestone birthday. Mona had asked if Elliot could join, and Birdie demurred because they hadn’t spoken sincethat night. She lied to Mona and said that she really just wanted it to be a girls’ trip, and Mona accepted this at face value. Also, Birdie reallydidjust want it to be a girls’ trip. She and Kai had ended things yet again—and this time permanently, after a fight in his hotel room at the Wynn—when Kai panicked because the tabloids started sniffing around the rumors of the two of them. By then, Kai was on year three of a quasi-engagement: his team had thought he needed a stable, household-friendly woman by his side, and so Kai publicly proposed to his high school sweetheart.Peoplemagazine put them on their cover. He promised Birdie it was just for show, just to bolster his reputation, that Haley, his fiancée, was in on it, signed a lucrative contract. Stupidly, Birdie decided to believe him. Still, she cut off contact but sometimes caved and took his calls, so didn’t quite cut off contact. And she’d gone to his room that night at the Wynn, and once again left single. It had ended mostly on her terms, but was it really her terms when she would have stayed if he’d offered something more than he had?
Kai Carol was the biggest action star on the planet, the yang to Birdie’s romantic comedy yin. They’d met on set right as Birdie’s celebrity was exploding in her mid-twenties and had dancedin and out of each other’s lives ever since. Kai mostly did the dancing, to be honest. Birdie mostly did the standing around and waiting. But the breakup at the Wynn, just before Birdie’s thirtieth, felt permanent. Birdie needed a weekend with Mona to unwind, to pretend that she hadn’t made a catastrophic mistake by getting entangled with Kai Carol in the first place at twenty-five, and then off and on ever since.
Carter was the tennis instructor at the resort. He’d gone pro after college but peaked in the rankings at forty-first in the world and retired when his lower vertebrae refused to forgive him for a punishing match at Indian Wells. He spent weekends in Santa Barbara and ran a private clinic for fancy people in LA. At the resort, Birdie had signed herself and Mona up for a semiprivate lesson—she thought thethwackof the racket against the ball would be cathartic—but Mona wanted to sleep in. So Birdie pulled on her tennis whites (she could always dress the part, even if she knew next to nothing about tennis) and made her way in the blinding sunshine to the courts, where Carter welcomed her with a dazzling smile, luminescent dark brown skin that glowed from within, and an unwillingness to go easy on her, despite the fact that he complimented her last film when they met. But he was seemingly completely unimpressed with her fame, nor was he put off by her ambition. By then, Birdie had leaned into this ambition. She no longer apologized for asking for what she wanted on set, she no longer cowered when she was given an executive producer credit and then actually wanted to have input. The girl who had grown up feeling like an outcast in her family discovered that she was actually pretty brilliant, just at something entirely different than what she’d been told mattered. So she relished this curiosity, and she relished the power that came with this curiosity, and she relished her professional contributions, which were unique andunmatched and celebrated. So yes, she leanedwayinto this, even her tantrums, which she thought came as part of the package deal. She’d seen famous men excused as difficult but genius in her industry, and no one held their difficulty against them because the latter canceled out the former. And when she threw her racket and cracked the frame because she hit thirteen backhands in a row into the net while envisioning Kai’s face on that stupid yellow ball, Carter barely raised an eyebrow, though he made a passing comment about reining in her temper to improve her mental game.
All of this she found sexy. Extremely, incredibly sexy. So she paid for a three-hour block of lessons the next day before finally giving him her number and asking him to call her back in LA. He did that Monday. She was impressed with his no BS games even more than with his backhand or the way his quad muscle popped when he ran to the net.
Carter now lived in a small bungalow in Silver Lake, which, much like San Francisco, was hilly and winding and dizzying. Elliot had to consult the map on his phone four times before they finally turned down the right street and tottered by the well-appointed house with a lacquered navy door and well-maintained topiaries, and Birdie felt something like an ache for Carter. Still not a strong enough ache to convince her to confront him. If anything, the ache convinced her to leave it alone—why ruin something beautiful with reality?
Birdie and Elliot swapped places in the RV because he had to take a bathroom break—Birdie triedextremely hardnot to look in the rearview mirror toward the bathroom door that didn’t quite close, but she did catch a quick glimpse of his naked waistline before snapping her eyes forward. There was no parking because there was never any parking in Los Angeles, so she circled the area for a solid thirty minutes while Elliot, back in the passengerseat, groaned and griped and moaned about his deadline. As far as Birdie was concerned, they could have circled the block all day. The sun would set in a couple of hours, and then they could just slip into the darkness as if they were never here. Her pulse was beating loudly in her neck, and her mouth was as dry as her palms were sweaty, but still, she wasn’t going to see Carter; she wasn’t going to step into this any deeper than she already had. She sighed, and Elliot sighed louder.
“I hate Los Angeles,” Elliot said, as if complaining made finding a parking spot on the street any easier. “Just breathing in its air makes me crazy.”
“Too much sunshine for you?” she said. “Too many beautiful women?”
“Ha,” he said just once, though he didn’t deny the latter. Birdie knew she shouldn’t be envious of all the other women he’d slept with, but she was envious all the same.
“You know Hollywood,” he said. “Fun for about three days, then you wake up in the Valley and realize you’re crashing in a house where they shot a porno.”
“Well, you’d have to have watched the porno to know such things.”
Elliot half grinned. “Fair point,” he said. “If you ever need a recommendation—”
“You should know more important people,” Birdie cut him off because getting porn recommendations from Elliot was honestly just a bridge too far right now. “If you’re crashing at a porno house in Van Nuys, you don’t know the important people.”
Elliot cocked an eyebrow and let it go. Birdie wasn’t quite sure what she was insinuating. That if he’d called her up, back when she’d lived here, he could have crashed with her? They’d tried that once. He left.
“It’s not the porno houses I mind,” he said, and Birdie thought,Well, that figures. “But it’s just an endless string of highways connecting people whose ambition outsizes their talent. It’s just a complete land of make-believe.”
