Not Without You

He pumped against me, holding my hand against his body, and then he said, ‘It’s time, you pretty little girl. I want to play with you. You’re so beautiful. I won’t hurt you …’

So I acted then. I knew suddenly that I wasn’t going to lose my virginity to him. I wasn’t going to start a baby because I’d been violated in a car by this fat, awful man, because he had power and I didn’t. I pushed him back, in a different way this time. I caressed his neck and pushed my breasts into his gobbling face. ‘Let me do something,’ I said, sitting upright, playing bright and confident, laughing. Rose used to laugh, hiding and then appearing behind the willow tree. ‘Catch me if you can,’ she’d say, and then she’d vanish, her fleet steps taking her further and further away.

I kissed his neck, his oily, stubby neck, watching the palm trees over his shoulder so I didn’t gag. And then I opened his trousers, and did what I used to do with Richard. Only two weeks ago, two weeks and one day in fact. I rubbed him with my hand, pushing my breasts against him rhythmically, until he groaned, spurted his stuff all over: all over me, all over him, all over the buttery leather. And then, God help me, I kissed him on the mouth, and told him how much there was of it, how big he was, and how it scared me. And then I zipped his trousers up as his head lolled forwards and he panted, still making that snuffling noise in his throat.

He patted my head after his breath was back. Squeezed my breasts again. But I knew he wouldn’t be able to do it again, not for a while. He was old. I was young, I look back now and smile to think how extremely young I was. I wiggled myself back into my brassiere, slid the beautiful dress over my arms and shoulders again. I moved towards him. ‘Mr Baxter,’ I said, in a sweet, little-girl voice. ‘Could you zip me up again now?’

I gave a little giggle. And he did too, girlish and funny, as if we’d just enjoyed a picnic in the woods, not a rape.

‘You know some tricks, don’t you, Eve?’ he said. He zipped me up, and kissed the top of my neck. I held still. Now it was over, now he’d zipped me up, I felt sick. His hand stroked my thigh again. ‘Pretty girl, but you’re a clever girl too, aren’t you?’

‘Just like Helen of Troy, Mr Featherstone says,’ I said in my best cut-glass English accent.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good.’ He stared at me. ‘You’re beautiful. He’s right.’ He ran his fingers over my forehead, and I tried not to flinch, hating him, hating myself.

‘But I think you’d look better with a widow’s peak. Change the hairline. Moss is right. He’s always right, goddammit, the son of a bitch. I’ll speak to Tyrone at the studio – he’s the master. Smile?’

I smiled, automatically, too shocked to know what else to do. He was panting still, as if trying to regain his breath. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘The teeth, maybe the nose. But it’s fine. I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen much worse. Well done. We’ll arrive shortly. I tell you, I could use another drink.’

He gave another snuffling laugh and patted my thigh with his clammy hand. He didn’t seem unduly pleased with himself, or to think that he’d done anything wrong or marvellous. It was, I realised, purely transactional. In a way that made me hate him even more.

On the door of the Rolls was a tiny silver vase, fixed into the walnut, with a spray of roses in it. Mr Baxter took a single stem out and gave it to me. It was a white rose, beginning to bloom, its waxy petals slowly unfurling, glowing in the dark of the car like something ghostly.

‘This is for you,’ he said.

I took it and smiled at him, and put the rose in the buttonhole of my cape. I could smell its rich, heady scent. I knew that by accepting it I was accepting something bigger. I knew I shouldn’t but I did. I went along with it because I was desperate for the part, and I realised it then. I wanted to act, that’s all I’d ever wanted to do. But I know now I did it because my survival instinct is strong. Over the years, I convinced myself it was because I wanted to act. And so it became acceptable for me to do things that I’d never have done before, because I told myself I wanted to act. It came out of this night, the warm night that I met Don Matthews and he gave me an avocado; my first Hollywood party, the night I ended up in the back of a car with bruise marks on my thighs and scratches and an angry red rash from his stubble on my breasts, marks I ignored as I’d ignored the indignity of the situation and got myself through it. It was the beginning of everything, and the end of something too.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CAR WINDS through the dusty, shrubby hills, into Mulholland Drive, and begins its twisting final ascent towards Casa Benita. I’m staring out of the window, at nothing really, and so I jump when Denis, the security guard, taps on the glass and waves.

‘Hi, Sophie, that was quick! You’re back so soon!’

I wave at him, but don’t correct him. Denis is not as young as he once was. He was a doorman at Caesar’s Palace in the seventies. He’s seen a lot; I like to think of this job as his reward in later years for services to excessive celebrity behaviour. My life’s pretty boring: he just has to sit at the gate doing his crosswords and wave through packages and the occasional sushi takeout. No wrestling Frank Sinatra to the floor or mopping up Elvis’s girlfriend’s vomit.

As we pull up in front of the house Tina lopes onto the terrace. She is tall but her shoulders droop; the afternoon light catches her dark hair.

‘Hi, Sophie,’ she says as she opens the car door. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘I’m good, thanks,’ I say, hopping out. I stretch, looking up at the bougainvilleas and jasmine scrambling along the walls in a riot of purple and white. When I first came here to look around, all I knew was that it was Eve Noel’s old house. I didn’t expect to fall in love with it. The realtor stood by my side, like a cat ready to pounce, as I gazed round at the light, airy rooms.

‘If you knocked it down,’ she told me excitedly, ‘you could really build something beautiful here. I mean that hydrangea –’ she gestured out at the wall beside the pool, where white flowers and green foliage smothered the whitewash – ‘it’s been here like half a century.’

‘Why would you knock it down?’

She looked at me like I was crazy. ‘It’s old,’ she said.

‘That’s why I like it,’ I told her.

‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ I ask Tina now.

‘They say there’s a storm coming,’ she says sadly. Tina is not a positive person.

T.J. heaves out the box of scripts. ‘Can you put those in my office, T.J.?’ I look at Tina. ‘How are you?’

‘Good, good,’ Tina mumbles. Her lips are like hard chipolatas. I don’t know whether to offer to pay for it to be sorted out; I know a surgeon who could do it, but maybe she loves those lips, thinks they make her look like Nicole Kidman or something. She says awkwardly, ‘Carmen said to tell you she has lunch ready – you’re on week two of the diet already.’

‘OK, great.’ I take my sunglasses off and head into the sunny hall which smells of grapefruit, the floorboards gleaming in the midday glow. I breathe in. I love coming home. No matter how stupid the day, how cruel some studio exec has been, how spiteful some TV report about me is, being back here always makes things better. I control this environment and I feel safe here.

I decide to start on some of the scripts now: I’m so hungry, but if I hold out a while longer the lunch will go even further, though already I feel kind of faint. I’m glad I don’t have any interviews coming up. You have to munch down a burger and chips to convince the (female) journalist you love food and you’re just naturally this thin. I hate it. I wish I could just say once when someone asks, ‘Candice, no one’s naturally this thin, for fuck’s sake! I’m this thin because I eat bloody nothing!’ I know a famous actress, an A-lister, who wanted a baby but was so terrified of putting on weight that someone else had the baby for her and she wore an expanding prosthetic belly for four, five months. I don’t know how we got like this, but it’s wrong, isn’t it?

Tina follows me into my office as I sit down in the swivel chair and swirl around – I like the swivel chair for that very reason. I touch my fingers together, like when I was young and used to practise being a newsreader.

‘Any messages?’

Tina starts and frowns, glaring at her BlackBerry. A vein pulses on one caramel-coloured temple. ‘OK, well, while I remember, Sophie, Kerry from Artie’s office called about finalising the time for you to meet up with Patrick Drew. They’re thinking coffee, in a cool place in West Hollywood. He’s on board.’

‘Fine,’ I say, without any enthusiasm. I’m sure he’s going to be a massive douche. I wish I didn’t have to bother. Maybe I could get George to come along too? He is the director, after all. The thought of George makes me sit upright – a cool breeze seems to slide over my face and down my neck. George. Mm.

‘There are a couple of additional publicity days next week for The Girlfriend, you remember?’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘What do I have to do?’

‘Ashley sent over the schedule. You’re in NYC next week, going on The View and maybe Today if we can get it to work. And you’re on Ellen in a couple weeks, I’ve sent the dates to your diary.’

I am twisting round in the chair. ‘Great. You should come then – you love Ellen, don’t you? You could meet her.’

‘OK. Sure.’ Tina looks mortified at my attempt to be friendly. She always does, so I don’t know why I bother, except I hate the fact I work with her and have no other interaction with her apart from conversations about my schedule, my diet, my photo shoots, my security.

The door bangs open and T.J. appears with the box of scripts. ‘Here?’ he says, gesturing to the floor.

‘No, on the desk, please. I’m going to start going through them now.’ I try to sound businesslike.

‘But you hate reading scripts,’ T.J. says. ‘You never look at them.’

‘Thanks, T.J.’ I shake my head and ignore him.

‘Do you have anything on tonight?’ Tina asks me.

I’m waiting for George to call. ‘I’m not sure … I might slob out in the den. There’s an Eve Noel season. Lanterns Over Mandalay’s on TNT tonight.’

‘Oh. Haven’t you seen all her films like a million times?’ asks Tina with a shy smile.

‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘It makes me happy.’ It’s true, it does, even when I’m sitting there sobbing my heart out at the end of A Girl Named Rose or Triumph and Tragedy, which is a strange film, and Eve Noel herself is strange in it. It’s about a nurse who keeps having visions. I think they were trying to replicate the success of A Girl Named Rose but it didn’t work. It was a big flop. She disappeared afterwards, left this very house and no one knows where she went.

The thought still makes me shiver. I look up at Tina, a wave of longing for something washing over me. Lolling on a couch having silly chats and eating cheesy snacks, dissing programmes on TV – all things I don’t have any more. ‘You should stay over, watch them with me. You’d love A Girl Named Rose.’

‘I – well, I have to – sure, Sophie. Maybe.’