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  Her thin lips rimmed her dirty martini. “I’m not an actress,” she said flatly.

  Of course she wasn’t an actress. That was why he’d said it for God’s sake.

  “Oh, I just assumed. You’re very beautiful.” There, he thought, let her try to turn something so obvious against him.

  Her other hand played with the stem of the cocktail glass. The diamond band she had been sporting on her ring finger was nowhere to be seen.

  “Actually,” said Jade, “you got it right this afternoon when you offered to read my rough draft. What was it you said, with the proper motivation? You were correct, I’m a writer.”

  The flicker of hope returned. A job would be a far bigger score than just a one night stand. So what if he was off his game.

  “A writer, hey, that’s cool,” he backpeddled, “I only thought that maybe you did some acting, too. You know, just because. Look, I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression about this whole thing.” He let go of her hand and scanned the menu, trying desperately to remember what he had or had not said back in the coffee shop. He wasn’t usually this careless. “Ah, what are you working on at the moment?”

  “You saw it,” she said. “The script. It’s almost finished, actually. We’re doing the final treatment now.” She threw back the rest of her drink and set the glass on the table, looking at Garrett as if he were a meal that she wasn’t one hundred percent certain she’d ordered.

  She was an amateur, as he’d half-suspected. In his experience, a treatment wasn’t something you did to your own script.

  “We?” he asked.

  “William and I. You met my partner this afternoon.”

  A bitter taste crawled into his mouth and died there. Mild Beard. That cocksucker was cock-blocking him and he wasn’t even in the room! He wanted to ask her exactly what kind of partner. He wanted to ask if that was the reason she wasn’t following the Game Plan for tonight. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known what she was getting herself into. Nobody chose Jazz Hands unless they were interested in hooking up. He wanted to ask her why she was teasing him and if she enjoyed watching him suffer. He wanted to ask her what was going on with him and whether she had cast the spell that was making it impossible for him not to act like a douche. He wanted to ask a thousand other questions he would ask a friend and not a woman he had set his sights on carnally and, belatedly, in a professional capacity.

  He wanted to be honest with her, but he kept his mouth shut.

  The woman named Jade looked disappointed. “Yes, well, it’s sold. More or less. The final meeting is tomorrow.” To Garrett’s surprise, she reached out and slipped her hand back into his. He was aware of the alluring smoothness of it in a way he hadn’t been before and her wholly unexpected change in manner confused the hell out of him.

  “Would you like to have sex with me, Garrett?”

  “Sex?” he repeated dumbly.

  “Yes, Garrett. Sex. Would you like to put your big throbbing manhood inside of me, would you like to screw, would you like to come all over my enormous, luscious tits? I could go on, if you’ve forgotten what all the act entails.”

  Her breasts were nice, perfect even, thought Garrett, but luscious was taking artistic license. First she behaved contrary and distracted, and now what was this? He remembered her haste to get to the privacy of a table. Maybe he hadn’t been moving things along fast enough. An hour ago he would have sworn such a thing was impossible. Nobody upped the timetable on The Garrett Lindsay Big Experience. He had perfected the art of moving things along as fast as the constraints of polite society would allow. Short of banging his dates over the head with a club and yelling “Me: Tarzan. You: Jane!” he had it down.

  She was the one who’d been late. That hardly implied a lack of patience. None of it fit.

  “Um, yes?” he said, trying to regain his footing. “Sex. Sure. Luscious tits.”

  The woman yanked away her hand in disgust. She folded her menu and set it down on the table, then scooted back her chair. “Garrett, I expected better, I really did.”

  He got to his feet. “Better? Better what?”

  “They told me you were an actor, a ladies’ man, a player. You’re just...I don’t know what you are. I needed somebody I could draw from, somebody I could write, and obviously you’ve got some issues going on that you need to iron out. You’re all over the place. I’m sorry to have brought you here for nothing,” she added, in a way that made it clear she was more sorry about having her own time wasted than for wasting his.

  He was the one who had asked her out, damn it! Not the other way around. Then he realized what she had said.

  “Somebody you could draw from? You were looking for inspiration?” He latched on to the fact like it was the floating remnant of a sinking ship. After all the confusion, there it was. “Wait, I get it now. You’re having difficulty. You haven’t been able to do it on your own, to give your leading man that impossible-to-define edge that he needs. It’s hard. Believe me, I know,” he added with a cocky grin.

  Jade got to her feet. Garrett held up his hands to forestall her departure. “Go ahead,” he pleaded. “Ask me anything. I know all the tricks.”

  Jade’s laughter was harsh, wordless criticism.

  “Oh, Garrett.” The pity in her voice made him cringe. “Our leading man is fine. Nobody can write suave and dashing better than William. No, I needed inspiration for...how do I put this kindly? The ex-boyfriend. We wanted him to be a real—” she stopped herself. “It doesn’t matter. We had hoped to give him something special, to make him different than all the rest. You’ve seen them. They could be cut from cardboard. Half of the time it’s even the same actor playing them. But at least they’re working, right? Anyway, I’m sorry for the aborted evening.”

  Too flabbergasted to speak, Garrett watched her walk away. A character role, that was all she wanted him for. Not a Leading Man, not even a supporting actor, but a character role. He felt impotent. Professionally impotent, which was worse than simply not being able to get it up. There were pills for that. Not being a good lay was one thing, but this insufferable woman with her insufferable kryptonite personality didn’t even think he could play one on TV.

  He downed his vodka soda, scowling.

  IV: DANCING WITH THE LADIES

  “Are you kidding me? You called me here for this?”

  Garrett hated his agent’s modest, unimpressive office. He hated the Tenderloin district. He hated himself for not moving on to greener pastures. The type of agent who represented Garrett Lindsay ought to be a shark. Somebody with the entire top floor of a building on Mission Street to themselves, or maybe a bespectacled, round little Jew in a Hobbit hole of hoarded papers and awards, with keys to the secret Hasidic Fraternity of Hollywood Success dangling from his pocket.

  But no, he got Reagan Gaitskill, Wunderkind of Mediocrity, representation to the has-beens and wannabes of San Francisco. They’d known one another forever. She was his age, pretty in an unassuming way. Some would even say beautiful. But she was ineffective as an agent and there was no way in hell she was going to talk him into doing yet another singing telegram.

  “No,” he said. “Hell, no. No with a cherry on top, and why don’t you ever do anything different with your hair?”

  That earned him a look of strained patience.

  “I mean it, Rea. No.”

  “Do you plan on wearing a fancy three foot hat and dancing with transvestites four nights a week at the Club Mimzy for the rest of your life?”

  Garrett glared. “I haven’t done that in months.” It was a lie. “And hey, it’s a gig. Which is what you’re supposed to be getting for me. Or is that not how being an agent works anymore?”

  Reagan looked at her watch. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This could be your big break. You can’t always come at things head on. Sometimes you have to get where you want to go sideways.”

  “That’s what you said about the last three singing telegrams you sent me on.”

&n
bsp; Reagan pursed her lips. She slipped her glasses on and reread the details of the job. She’d had such high hopes for Garrett. Everybody had loved him on Day by Day. He had been so charming, with good looks and a talented tongue. He knew how to deliver lines so that they didn’t sound like lines. But he wasn’t getting any younger and neither was she. He had never gotten his Big Break. She simply didn’t have time for him or his empty bravado, not with the baby on the way.

  “Maybe you should stop waiting to be discovered on your own terms and start getting your face out any way you can. There’s no shame in making rent.”

  “It’s so degrading.”

  “What, paying your bills?”

  “No, showing up to some faceless suit’s office to embarrass his dumb ass because a coworker with twice his sense of humor decided that a good laugh would be worth the price of his Skinemax Wank-a-Thon subscription for a month. Miserable little people with miserable little frienemies. You really think this is how I’ll make my way back down to L. A.? What the hell kind of connections could I possibly make? This is the kind of shit interns suck somebody’s ball sack to do for free.”

  For a wonder he didn’t seem cocky about it, only depressed. He was standing next to the filing cabinet with its busted top drawer, the one with all the folders of success stories Reagan had represented right up to the point that they got big enough to realize that they didn’t need Reagan Gaitskill any longer, that she was a springboard and nothing more. She knew she shouldn’t be giving Garrett the means to abandon her, even if it would be a relief to see him go. Every time he came in it was a reminder of the feelings she’d had for him back when they were kids, feelings that had never quite gone away.

  She knew, too, that she shouldn’t be such a pushover. But it just wasn’t in her not to be. It was a vicious circle that began and ended right here in her postage stamp office, with its desk and three chairs and her an about-to-be mother in a business where kindness equated inversely with success. She had always been the type of person who believed happiness came from an appreciation of the little things in life. In her darker moments she wondered if she looked for happiness in the little things only because she’d never accomplished anything of substance.

  She sighed and looked again at her Omega. It was a twin to the one she’d given Garrett. Back when she fancied that her crush on him had been the L-word. Back when she still believed in happily-ever-afters.

  “Not every ball-sack intern gets to deliver a telegram to the president of OriCAL Entertainment.”

  Garrett froze mid-pace.

  “Michelle Lyon,” said Reagan, holding up an envelope. “Her home address is here. Second home, third home, I don’t know. But it’s where she’s staying at the moment.”

  “President of the OriCAL Entertainment?”

  “Don’t mess this up, Garrett. Don’t get cute. Whatever’s put you in this sad puppy dog funk of yours, get over it. Just show up, put a smile on, and use the gift you were born with.”

  “My enormous—”

  “Your voice, idiot.”

  She came around the desk. Standing in front of him in her two inch pumps, they were eye to eye. Her pregnant stomach protruded and her engorged breasts pushed her arms outward. She slapped the envelope to his chest. “Impress the hell out of Lyon or I’m dropping you, Garrett. I swear to God.”

  She held his gaze until he looked away.

  “We’ve had some good times,” he said. “I still think about that night we...you know.”

  “You had a good time, Garrett. I had semen dripping down my leg and cold take-out after you left.”

  It was a lie, and they both knew it. They’d only slept together the one time, but it had been intense, fresh, wrong, all of the things that made good sex Great. It hadn’t left her feeling like it had just been a one-off, a momentary lapse in fidelity, and that was the problem. It had made Reagan feel a lot of other things, all of them complicated, so she had strictly forbidden Garrett from ever happening again.

  Love was huge. It could be, should be, all-consuming. Love was the biggest experience of them all, and she couldn’t afford to let herself mistake the echoes of a teenage crush for something more. Imperfect happiness was so much safer. Perfect happiness nearly always turned out to be a lie.

  For a moment, standing face to face, her resolve wavered. He was right there, after all. Nobody would know. Her fiancé would never find out, not unless she told him, and she told Nick Polito very little that mattered. Like how she’d never told him she couldn’t stand green olives, or how she suspected Garrett, and not Nick, was really the father of her unborn child.

  The moment came and went.

  “Wear your tuxedo,” was all she said. Once again her eyes found her watch. She’d have to sell it if nothing came along soon. She hated asking her fiancé for money. She didn’t want him knowing when she had financial trouble because he was so godawfully nice about it. As if it wasn’t her fault because she was only a woman, after all. He would lavish her with expensive gifts as if that was all it took to forget her own shortcomings and insecurities. She hated that she was charmed by the blatant chauvinism of it all, that she had to quell the urge to jump up and down like a little girl when she opened blue Tiffany’s boxes or new Louis Vuitton purses.

  If only Garrett would follow through on something, anything. The OriCAL gig really was an agent’s wet dream. Good follow through with an in like that and there was no telling where it might lead. So many other careers had taken off from equally inauspicious beginnings. But she held out little hope. You just couldn’t magically summon good luck into being. Not with most people, and doubly so with Garrett Lindsay. Some things just weren’t meant to be.

  Some people just weren’t meant to be together.

  When she looked up again, Garrett was gone.

  V: NINETY-NINE RED BALLOONS

  He couldn’t believe it. Balloons? Just who the hell did this Bill Silverman think he was? It wasn’t enough that he’d hired Reagan’s agency to deliver a singing telegram, perhaps the single most justifiably loathed convention ever to fall out of fashion, but Garrett had to do so while delivering a whole shit ton of balloons as well. The whole thing stank. First the business with Jade and now this. He felt like he needed to sleep for a week and then get up and gargle with a load of buckshot. Marin probably wouldn’t even bother to clean up, he reflected. She’d just redecorate in reds and grays to match.

  He changed into his tux and had a quick lunch of cottage cheese and dried fruit. Best to save his last protein bar for dinner in case Marin didn’t show up wanting to go out somewhere. She never bought groceries, it wasn’t spontaneous enough.

  His phone beeped a confirmation. Reagan had scheduled a pickup from one of the taxis he could never force himself to think of as anything other than Purple Mustache Mobiles. Her fiancé owned a taxi company, but she never used his taxis. Garrett liked that about her.

  He went out to the curb to wait. He straightened his red satin bow tie and shot his cuffs. Whatever Reagan might think of his career slump, he would prove to her that he could still be the consummate professional. He was a Working Actor, Goddammit! At least, he was one today.

  When the taxi, an Escalade, finally showed up, Garrett amassed the red and silver balloons as best he could and climbed into the backseat. The purple mustache on its front bumper seemed to smirk at him as if to say: I may cart around assholes for a living but at least I don’t have to sing for my supper.

  The Escalade was black inside and out and fit his mood perfectly. Having to pick up the balloons like he was some kind of props man on a low budget movie set! All he needed was a red ball nose and some face paint and kids would have nightmares about him for a week. But at least he was wearing his tuxedo. There was something about the anonymous simplicity of black and white that gave him confidence and a heightened sense of self. But it didn’t do shit for his mood.

  The driver’s thick black dreads gave off an odor that said they hadn’t been washed since th
e last Academy Awards. Garrett rested his back against the leather seat, engulfed in Mylar.

  “Kid party?” asked Stinky Dreads.

  “Yeah,” said Garrett, in no mood for chitchat. “Kid party. They hire me to make balloon animals and tell jokes and then at the end I whip out my dick and frost the cake. You maybe just want to mind your own business?”

  Stinky Dreads laughed. “Is your bitch-ass for real?”

  Garrett batted a balloon away. “Look, do you have the address? We’re running late.”

  “Do I have the address? She-it.” Stinky Dreads paused to yell at a passing delivery truck, then jammed his foot on the gas. “I got your address right here.” He tapped his smart phone against his head in a gesture that made it unclear exactly where the address resided, his brain or his inbox.

  Garrett closed his eyes.

  He thought about his big scene, watching it play out in his head as if on storyboards. His pitch perfect baritone would be the first thing anybody heard. He wouldn’t ring the doorbell, he would simply sing. After three seconds or so, after it simmered and built up enough curiosity, he would burst through the inner door (instructions had assured him it would be unlocked), balloons chasing behind him like a flock of trained doves. He would march up to Michelle Lyon, Miss OriCAL President herself, deliver the latex bouquet and sealed note, and then be halfway out the door before the surprised applause began. He’d force Lyon to chase him down in the hallway, begging him to come back and have a seat. She would offer him a drink from the assistant whose sole job it was to tend to the needs of Very Important Persons. Then they would discuss his career options at OriCAL. It would be his moment of triumph, and all because he’d had the vision to see potential in what anybody else would scoff at as a pointlessly demeaning waste of their time.

  When the Escalade finally reached their destination, Garrett’s mood had improved considerably.

  “Mission Street, Century Tower,” read the driver. “How long you gonna be?”