Beautiful Stranger (2 page)

“Thank you all for joining us tonight. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to introduce to you the star and director of
Ben-Hur
—which we believe will be the most important movie of the decade—Mr. Jackson Sharpe!”

The enormous crowd applauded and cheered wildly.

“Make way, make way, make way!”

Anna heard deep male voices calling above the applause and watched as the crowd parted. Two by two, a dozen blond, silicone-enhanced young women in mini-togas strew rose petals as they walked toward the stage. Behind them, another dozen buff young men dressed as gladiators carried a gold-leaf-covered platform, upon which Jackson Sharpe lolled and waved laconically to the onlookers. Jackson himself wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. He seemed taller than his six feet, and was in rock-hard shape. His jawline was as sharp as a straight-edge razor, and sandy hair fell over one of his blue eyes. When you were America’s best-known action star, and the camera loved you as much as it loved Jackson, you dressed to please yourself and no one else.

Sam sidled up next to Anna as the throng cheered her father, who was now clasping his hands overhead like a victorious heavyweight champion after a knockout.

“I have to hand it to dear old dad,” she told Anna over the noise. “He knows how to make an entrance.” Sam stood on her tiptoes and tried to gaze over the heads of the crowd. “Have you seen Cammie?”

Anna shook her head. Not only had she not seen Cammie Sheppard, she didn’t
want
to see her. Just because Sam and Cammie were best friends since forever didn’t mean that Anna had to like Cammie, too—especially since Cammie had taken an instant dislike to her from the moment they met. Anna suspected it was mostly because Ben was Cammie’s ex, and if Cammie couldn’t have something she wanted, she didn’t want anyone else to have it either. Recently Anna and Cammie had been sentenced to do community service together over a trivial trespassing-on-a-private-beach regulation. Anna had almost kind of started to appreciate Cammie’s moxie and charm.

But then Cammie had made it quite clear that if she broke up with her current boyfriend, Adam Flood, she was going after Ben. And in general, what Cammie Sheppard wanted, Cammie Sheppard got. She would have no qualms about jumping into bed—table, locked bathroom stall at a trendy club, whatever—with Ben. Every time Anna thought about it she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

“There she is!” Sam suddenly exclaimed.

Anna looked over to see Cammie sashay over to Ben, wrap her arms around his neck, and give him the softest, tiniest of kisses on each cheek. Ben looked amused. Anna forced a tense smile, though she wished a movie extra in a gorilla suit would come in with a coconut cream pie and apply said pie directly to Cammie’s freshly powdered and lipsticked face. But in the world to which Anna had been born and bred—the gracious world of the
This Is How We Do Things
Big Book (East Coast WASP edition), displaying any kind of negative emotion publicly was simply Not Done, even with the help of a costumed extra. See Chapter Eleven: “The Art of Ignoring.”

The whole thing would have been easier to shrug off if Cammie didn’t look like … well, like Cammie. Crowning her tanned, toned, curves-in-all-the-right-places five-foot-eight body, Cammie’s strawberry blond locks shone with the same luster as her yellow satin Maison Martin Margiela sleeveless gown. Its loosely plunging V neckline left just enough to the imagination, which is to say it boldly featured the best breasts available on today’s market. Anna thought the whole Camilla Sheppard package should come with a warning label:
BEWARE: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE
. She took a step back to make room as Cammie edged toward her and Sam.

“Wake me when that’s over,” Cammie said without preliminaries, tossing her curls off her face as she nudged her chin toward the stage. Having hugged Marty Martinsen, Jackson was now going through an off-the-cuff but seemingly endless list of thank-yous to various people who had worked on the two-hundred-million-dollar epic that was his
Ben-Hur
. Anna thought it would be impossible to remember the names of every key grip, best boy, gaffer, wardrobe assistant, dolly operator, assistant director, assistant to the assistant director, and truck driver associated with his movie, but Jackson seemed to tick the names off effortlessly. It was a remarkable, if verbose, performance.

“Where’s Adam?” Sam asked. Eduardo slid his arms around her waist from behind, and Sam beamed.

“He’ll be here,” Cammie replied confidently. Anna knew that Cammie had given Adam, who was in Michigan on vacation with his parents, an ultimatum: He needed to be back in Los Angeles in time for the wrap party or their relationship would be toast. However bitchy this sounded, Anna recalled that it was an extension of an earlier dictum that Adam “get his ass back” to her two weeks ago. Anna couldn’t imagine forcing someone she loved to make that kind of decision. But then again, she couldn’t imagine being Cammie Sheppard at all. Only Cammie would look at an ultimatum extension as generous. And only she would decide ahead of time that if things didn’t work out with Adam, she was going after Ben.

“There’s Dee.” Cammie waggled her fingers in the direction of Dee Young, who was just arriving with her boyfriend, Jack Walker. Jack and Ben had both just finished their freshman years at Princeton, where they’d quickly become friends. Jack was in Los Angeles for a summer internship in the Fox reality TV department. Anna recalled how they’d met. Dee had just been released from an upscale psychiatric institution and needed a date for senior prom. Cammie had promised that she’d find Dee a date. The date turned out to be Jack. The rest was history.

Diminutive Dee wore a petal pink dress so short that Anna hoped she had on more underwear than Britney or Lindsay—even Anna, no fan or follower of pop culture, knew about their ventures into no-panties land. Instead of a tux like Ben or Eduardo, Jack—who bore a passing resemblance to music icon Beck—sported a retro pink-and-black sports shirt from the forties and black peg-legged pants. He’d recently grown a small soul patch like so many of the young guys who worked in the world of TV.

“You guys, hi!” Dee cried in her breathy voice.

She was tiny and adorable, with shaggy blond bangs that covered her eyebrows. After spending time at the Ojai Psychiatric Institute near Santa Barbara, she seemed like an entirely different person. While Anna had found the old Dee just a bit too cosmic for her tastes, it couldn’t be easy to go through what she’d gone through, and Anna really liked the new and improved Dee. “Hey, guess what? Jack got time off from Fox and we’re going to Hawaii. Evolution is working on their new album at my dad’s studio in Maui.”

Anna was surprised. Last she’d heard, Dee was feeling crowded by Jack’s talk about marriage and their future together in New Jersey. Apparently, Jack had been getting dangerously close to the
M
word with her: Marriage. And now they were going to Hawaii together?

“When are you leaving?” Anna asked politely.

“Tomorrow,” Dee answered with a grin that didn’t mar her pink lip gloss. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you and Sam and Cammie come visit me?”

While the idea was tempting, Anna knew she only had a few more weeks here in Los Angeles before going back east to start college at Yale. She was about to make the most polite demurral in history when Ben came to her rescue.

“Want to get some air?” he asked, gently touching her elbow. “There’s a buffet outside.”

“Go ahead, you guys.” Sam nodded. “My dad’s still just getting started with his thank-yous. Check it out. There goes Parker.”

Sam pointed to the stage, where her father had moved on to introducing his cast, and inviting them up to the stage. One of those actors was their friend Parker Pinelli, who looked like a cross between James Dean circa
Rebel Without a Cause
and a young Brad Pitt in his
Thelma & Louise
period. Tonight he was wearing jeans and a red Windbreaker to heighten the hey-he-looks-like-James-Dean comparison. Anna had to smile at that. Parker was the only guy there besides America’s Most Beloved Action Hero who was casually dressed, and it made him stand out—in a good way. Up onstage, Parker shook Jackson’s hand warmly.

“He should be shaking
my
hand,” Sam joked. “He got that part because of me.”

Anna grinned as Parker edged in next to Jackson. Parker had played the part of a stable boy who helped prepare Jackson for the big chariot race, and Sam had reported that Parker’s scenes were excellent.

“How ’bout we take a break?” Ben repeated. He moved his feet restlessly. “We can come back when the speeches are over.”

A break seemed like an excellent idea now that Anna had paid her requisite respects to Sam. Anna told her friend she’d see her in a little bit, and then she and Ben snaked through the crowd to the rear exit of the sound-stage. From there they walked across the Transnational lot—a collection of low-slung buildings, streets with false storefronts used for filming, warehouses, and one ultramodern structure that was the company’s corporate headquarters—and then out the main gate and onto the scruffy streets of Culver City.

Los Angeles was full of
über
-hip neighborhoods. Culver City wasn’t one of them. It was better known for auto-body repair shops and used furniture outlets than Porsche dealerships or designer storefronts.

“Sorry to drag you away back there,” Ben commented as they walked arm in arm. “A little dose of Jackson Sharpe being charming to his cast and crew goes a really long way. Same thing for industry parties. You know those girls who were throwing the rose petals? I think my father did them all.”

Anna laughed. Ben wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about plastic surgery. Ben’s father was plastic surgeon to the stars, responsible for the good looks of most of Hollywood’s talent over the age of thirty—both male and female—and quite a few under that age who probably didn’t need any work to begin with.

Ben had grown up around show business, and had told Anna many times how unreal that world was to him. When people wanted something from his father, they were his dad’s best friends. After they got what they wanted, they were gone. That was one of the many reasons he’d decided to attend Princeton rather than a school in Southern California. Anna, who’d been accepted early decision to Yale, had thought quite a bit about how much fun it would be to meet him in Manhattan when they were both at school in just a few weeks, as it was about the same distance from New Haven as it was from Princeton. On weekends, she’d hop on the train and be there in an hour and a half. Ben would be waiting for her at Grand Central, where he’d whisk her into a taxi, and they’d fly uptown to her empty Upper East Side town house, where they’d—

“I’m thinking about not going back to school.”

Anna stopped walking and gazed up at him. “
What
? Why?”

“Well …” he began. His voice seemed strangely loud, until Anna realized it was because there was so little traffic in this neighborhood. An orange-blossom-scented breeze ruffled his thick, dark hair. “You know how I started the Monday night thing at Trieste?”

Anna nodded slowly. Trieste was the club of the moment. Located on Hollywood Boulevard not far from the corner of Vine, a line of hopeful partygoers snaked down the block on a nightly basis, eager to be admitted. Ben had a summer job there and recently he’d started a Monday night event where the pounding sound system was turned off, drinks cost half their usual price, there was no dancing, and poets, playwrights, and various other artists could perform in a decidedly nonclub atmosphere. Trieste Mondays, as he called them, had already become quite successful.

He took her hands in his. “Don’t laugh at what I’m about to say.”

“Never.”

“I’ve been thinking that I’d like to open my own club.”

Anna looked at him wordlessly. A club? He wanted to drop out of college and open his own
nightclub
? But Ben was so smart. And he hated Hollywood. He’d just said he was sick of industry parties. Running a Hollywood club would be like doing industry parties seven nights a week.

“So … when did you get this idea?” she asked cautiously.

“I’ve had it for a while.” He let go of one hand and tucked his own into the pocket of his tux pants. “I get really excited about it, you know? Not another beautiful-people, let’s-keep-out-everyone-from-the-Valley bullshit kind of club. Something entirely different. One that’s accessible and just … cool.”

Anna couldn’t help but notice the enthusiasm in his voice—he was livelier than he’d been all night. Still, you didn’t just throw away an Ivy League education. She waited to see what else he would say.

He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “I sit in class at Princeton and my mind is a million miles away. I study, take exams, write papers, and I just don’t even know why I’m doing it. Being there doesn’t make any sense.”

“But maybe it doesn’t need to make sense right
now
,” Anna put in. “Maybe becoming an educated person is a goal. In and of itself, I mean.”

“But I just don’t
feel
it, Anna,” he insisted, his bright blue eyes shining in the dark night. “The best thing I’ve done in … well, in forever is to start the Monday night series at Trieste.
That
I care about. And when’s the last time you saw me excited over something that isn’t you?”

Anna nodded. She knew how hard he’d worked to do something different at the hip club du jour. And he’d succeeded. But still, how could opening a nightclub compare to going to one of the best universities in the world?

“Ever since my dad started Gamblers Anonymous he’s been an entirely different person,” Ben continued. “He took me out to dinner last week and told me he wanted us to make up for lost time. He said that whatever my dreams were, he was going to back them one hundred percent. That came after a twenty-minute monologue about how my grandfather made a lot of money in the rag and junk business back in Syracuse, New York, but never backed him in anything, of course. How everything he’d achieved he’d achieved on his own. He even paid for med school on his own.”