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 in bed, lifting a glass filled with champagne to my lips, her face hovering above mine - that maybe she isn't acting with me.
We're shopping at the Bristol Farms on Doheny for another case of champagne in the last week of December when I lose her in one of the aisles and I become dazed when I realize that the market used to be Chasen's, the restaurant I came to with my parents on various Christmas Eves, when I was a teenager, and I try to reconfigure the restaurant's layout while standing in the produce section, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" playing throughout the store, and when nothing comes it's a sad relief. And then I notice Rain's gone and I'm moving through the aisles and I'm thinking about pictures of her naked on a yacht, my hand between her legs, my tongue on her cunt while she comes and then I find her outside, leaning against my BMW talking to a handsome guy I don't recognize, his arm in a sling, and he walks away as I wheel my cart toward them and when I ask her who he was she smiles reassuringly and says "Graham" and then "No one" and then "He's a magician." I kiss her on the mouth. She looks nervously around. I watch her reflection in the window of the BMW. "What's wrong?" I ask. "Not here," she says, but as if "not here" is a promise of somewhere better. The deserted parking lot is suddenly freezing, the icy air so cold it shimmers.
During that week we spend together things aren't completely tracking - there are lapses - but she acts like it doesn't matter, which helps cause the fear to fade away. Rain replaces it with something else that's easy to lose yourself in, despite, for example, the fact that a few of my friends still in town wanted to get together for dinner at Sona but the invitation caused a low-level anxiety in Rain that seemed alien to her nature and this became briefly revealing. ("I don't want to be with anyone else but you" is her excuse.) But the lapses and evasions aren't loud - Rain is still soothing enough for the texts from the blocked numbers to stop arriving and for the blue Jeep to disappear along with my desire to start work again on any number of projects I'm involved with and the long brooding silences are gone and the bottle of Viagra in the nightstand drawer is left untouched and the ghosts rearranging things in the condo have taken flight and Rain makes me believe this is something with a future. Rain convinces me that this is really happening. Meghan Reynolds fades into a blur because Rain demands that the focus be on her, and because everything about her works for me I don't even realize it when it slips into something beyond simply working and for the first time since Meghan Reynolds I make the mistake of starting to care. But there's one dark fact humming loudly over everything that I keep trying to ignore but can't because it's the only thing that keeps the balance in place. It's the thing that doesn't let me fall completely away. It's the thing that saves me from collapsing: she's too old for the part she thinks she's going to get.