The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (18 page)

THURSDAY

T
here were several things that I could have been doing on Easter. For instance, a costume designer friend of Caleb’s was having a party in her Mount Washington home, complete with a grown-up Easter egg hunt. And Tammy had invited me to Easter dinner at her brother’s house in the Los Feliz hills—a dinner at which I could have finally met Davie Farrell, Tammy’s sister-in-law. Before becoming a dating guru, Davie Farrell had gotten her start as a life-coach-slash-career-counselor to people in the entertainment industry, and I could have used some free advice about what to do now that both my writing and stand-up careers had gone bust.

But, on Easter, I wasn’t at a dinner party receiving advice from Davie Farrell. And Caleb went to the grown-up Easter egg hunt all by himself, because I was stuck on freaking Catalina Island. Now, normally I would have loved a trip to Catalina Island. I’d been so broke since moving to California that I counted myself lucky if I could make my car payment on time, much less take a vacation. So, really, I should have been thrilled about being on the same island where movie stars like Bob Hope, Cicely Tyson, and Nicolas Cage had vacationed.

However, I wasn’t on vacation. I was in a guest suite in Mike Barker’s vacation home with one hundred and eighteen pages of pure crap.

I had been able to avoid Mike’s many calls and e-mails and put him off for a whole four months, but two weeks before Easter it had all come to a head.

I had been doing data entry and half listening to an audiobook when the receptionist said over the speaker system, “Thursday, please report to reception. You have a visitor.”

I had taken out my earbuds, thinking it was Risa (who tended to show up places unannounced whenever she felt like it) or maybe Caleb. He had never come over for lunch before, but who knew? However, I began to suspect who had really come to visit when several phones started ringing throughout the office and then everyone who was anywhere close to reception stood up to stare over their cubicle walls.

But I kept on walking, kept on hoping that it wasn’t who I thought it was. However, when I got to the reception area, I found two of my Latina co-workers standing on either side of Mike Barker while the receptionist took their picture. An amendment on that not-staring-at-celebrity rule I mentioned before: Most resident Angelenos refused to stare at celebrities if they were out and about in public. But as soon as celebrities entered some area where they seriously weren’t supposed to be, like, say, your ultra-boring place of business, then all unspoken contracts became null and void, and even resident Angelenos felt free to lose their mind.

“Me next!” my boss, Nancy, came running, stopping only to hand her camera to the receptionist, who apparently had been designated the picture-taker.

If all the attention bothered Mike, it didn’t show. He even thanked the two women for letting him take a picture with them, and then he slipped an arm around Nancy’s shoulders, complimenting her on her pastel-purple business suit.

This move reminded me of my father, who always had a ready smile for fans who approached him on the street. I knew how to operate pretty much any camera made before 2001 because I had taken so many pictures of Rick T and his fans. Back then I had admired him for being popular, for never forgetting the fans who had put him at the top of the charts in the nineties. But watching Mike do the same thing with my office workers, charming them with a few seconds of attention, only made me feel even more cynical toward both him and my father. I promised myself that I
would never smile at him the way my boss was smiling at him, just because he said, “Purple is a good color on you.”

I looked back over my shoulder. At least half the office was standing there, their eyes all asking me the same question: “How do you know Mike Barker?”

My heart sank. The nice thing about living in California is that there are so many people named so many strange things, that when I introduced myself as a day of the week, people barely blinked. Unlike on the East Coast, where men my age all seemed to know Rick T had a daughter named Thursday, none of my co-workers had figured out yet that Rick T was my father. By showing up at my office unannounced, Mike Barker had caused me a whole slew of problems.

Speaking of which, the movie star himself finally saw me and waved. “Ready for lunch?” he said, like he had actually asked me to go out to eat with him ahead of time.

“Um, sure,” I said, playing along. Lunch with Mike might buy me time to come up with a plausible excuse for Mike’s visit. “Let me just get my purse.”

But Mike waved me forward. “You don’t need it. It’s my treat.”

“Thursday, why didn’t you tell us that you were friends with Mike Barker?” my boss asked, seemingly on behalf of everyone in the office.

“Don’t tell the trades or anything,” he said to Nancy, like they were having a confidential conversation as opposed to talking in an open-plan office with several onlookers. “But I’m playing Thursday’s father, Rick T, in an upcoming biopic.”

The office exploded into a chorus of gasps and accusatory exclamations: “You’re Rick T’s daughter? His daughter, really? Why didn’t you tell us? I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”

“Okay, well we should get going,” I said to Mike, ignoring their questions.

He nodded at the office like they had all become close personal friends in the less than ten minutes he had spent with them. “It was nice to meet all of you.”

“Bye,” they called back, all smiles for Mike, but side-eyeing me like I had deeply betrayed them with my parental omission.

“Seriously, did you have to tell them I was Rick T’s daughter?” I asked after I climbed into the passenger seat of Mike’s bright-red Audi R8 Spyder.

Mike pushed a button and turned the key in the ignition. The car came alive with an aggressive roar of its V-10 engine while the top folded down like something out of
Transformers.
“It looks like we’re always going to start things off with an argument, so I’ll say that I didn’t even know you were trying to keep your identity secret. Plus, if you had returned any of my many calls and e-mails, I wouldn’t have had to surprise you at your place of work.”

I folded my arms. “I’ve been really busy. I haven’t been able to get to the script yet.”

Mike pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward downtown Burbank. “It’s hard for me to go out to regular restaurants because of the fan issue, but I can do a drive-through.”

“You don’t have to take me anywhere. I get it. I’m late. I’m sorry. I’m moving in with my boyfriend and it’s been crazy busy. But I’ll get you my notes and revisions, I promise.”

“Okay, when?” he asked.

“When?” I hadn’t been ready for that question. I scraped my head for a date that was far enough away that it seemed plausible but close enough to satisfy Mike. “Easter,” I said. “We have that Friday off, and I’ve set aside the entire weekend to read the script and get you notes.”

That, of course, was a lie. At that point, I’d already agreed to go to both the grown-up Easter egg hunt and Tammy’s family dinner, but I had to buy myself some more time.

“Really, you’ve set aside the whole weekend?” he said, his voice skeptical.

“Yes, yes I have. I’ve told everybody that I can’t come to their parties, because I feel so bad about not having gotten the script back to you yet.”

He nodded. “That’s a good idea to take the whole weekend.”

“Yes, and I can’t wait to tackle this script.” Another blatant lie. I had thought ten thousand dollars would be enough to make it worth reading a script that glorified my father. But I’d had to stop after the first five pages, in which my parents meet cute as teenagers in Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects Projects with hip-hop unfolding all around them like a graffiti-covered pastoral.

First of all, my mother had lived in those projects, but my father had grown up in Connecticut. Second of all, the only reason they had met as high schoolers was because they had both received college scholarships to Columbia from the same black leadership organization and had been introduced to each other at the awards ceremony in Manhattan.

In the script, my father steps to my mother all poetry and swagger and it’s love at first sight. In real life, my mother saw something in my scrawny, nerdy father and gave him a hip-hop makeover. In fact, most of the rhymes on his first record were taken from poems that she had written about growing up in the Marcy Projects.

Reading five pages had enraged me to the point that I had thrown the script across the room, and I hadn’t picked it up since. I wished I could just give it back. But it had already gone to paying off my credit cards and my next few months of student loan payments. I had decided to skip the rainy-day fund that Sharita had suggested, since I’d become used to living paycheck-to-paycheck anyway. Why quit now?

“I’ve got Easter weekend free, too,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll pick you up from work and we’ll take my boat out to Catalina. I’ve got a little place there—nice, quiet, peaceful. We’ll go. You can read over the script, and we’ll bounce some thoughts off each other.”

Alarm bells went off in my head as I realized Mike Barker was pulling that old Hollywood trick of sequestering the writer away to get the job done.

“I really don’t need anything that serious,” I assured him.

But I might as well have saved my breath. “Okay, then, I’ll pick you up next Thursday at your office,” Mike answered, as if I hadn’t put any protest.

He pulled into my parking lot and unlocked my door. “See you next week.”

And that had been that. I got out of the car still trying to figure out what had just happened and how I had been railroaded into spending Easter weekend with Mike Barker.

Then I had to call Tammy to cancel for Easter dinner, which was even worse. After I explained the situation, with a lot of self-deprecating one-liners, letting her know how annoyed I was both at myself and at Mike Barker for putting me in this position, her immediate answer had been, “You’re going to be spending three days alone with Mike in his house on Catalina?”

She didn’t sound angry, exactly, but she also didn’t sound like her usual happy self.

“More like I’m going to spend three days with a script, and he’s just going to be around.”

Silence, then: “I’m just a little concerned for the big picture of your career here. I really do think you should take this chance to meet Davie. I mean, she’s so great at what she does. Get this, I went in for a counseling session with her just last month, and she came up with a whole new career path for me. You’re now speaking to the official fitness representative for Farrell Cosmetics. I’ll be blogging about fitness, and speaking at high schools around the nation. We’re even going to do an exercise DVD, which we’ll give away for free with every fifty-dollar Farrell Cosmetics purchase as a New Year’s promotion.”

Now you have to understand something here. This new career path that Davie Farrell came up with for Tammy wasn’t just good, it was perfect.
Tammy exercised every day, not because she had to in order to stay model thin, but because according to her, “Exercise is just so much fun!” She was one of those people who would fall on a vegetable tray and say things like, “Mmm, carrots, they taste so fresh and yummy.” I was raised a vegetarian and even I wasn’t down with vegetables like that. There is nobody in this world who would make a better fitness guru than Tammy. And Davie Farrell had figured that out with just one session.

Resisting the urge to bang my head against the loft’s brick wall, I said, “That’s awesome, Tammy. I’ll be first in line to try out that DVD. But I don’t know how I can get out of this. I tried to reason with him, and he totally wouldn’t let me off the hook.”

“Yeah,” Tammy said, letting an uncharacteristic bitter note slip into her voice. “Mike Barker gets what he wants. That’s, like, his motto.”

“That’s why it’s better to just get it over with, right?” I said. “Three days and both Mike Barker and his awful script will be out of my life for good.”

On the other side of the line, Tammy sighed. “Okay, Day. But I’m going to miss you at Easter dinner. I even made sure you’d get the seat next to Davie.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll miss you more,” I said, wondering how I could possibly sabotage my career any worse than I had so far this year.

So that was how I found myself on Easter Sunday 2011 in Catalina as opposed to hunting for Easter eggs with Caleb and rubbing elbows with Davie Farrell. And by the way, Mike’s “little place” turned out to be a beachfront Mediterranean two-story, seven-bedroom
Architectural Digest
–level masterpiece of a house, with large colonnade windows overlooking a cliff that dropped down to a pebbled beach.

“This place is insane,” I told Mike as we walked through the house-shaped masterpiece.

“Yeah, I bought it after I made my comeback a few years ago. Plus, there’s no gambling on Catalina, so win-win.” He took my carry-on suitcase by the
leather handle, and led me up a winding stairwell lined with Catalina tile and an ornate black banister.

I tried to recollect what I’d heard about Mike’s gambling addiction. At one point, I knew, it had gotten so bad that he had fallen to C-list status, doing any paycheck movie to make ends meet and fuel his habit, but then a few years ago he’d overcome his addiction, co-starred in an indie drama, and gotten nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

“This seems like a good investment in your new life,” I said. “I’m trying to get over some of my own BS right now, too.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, glancing at me over his shoulder. “How’s that going for you?”

I shrugged. “A work in progress.”

He reached a white door and opened it. “Well, maybe this will inspire you.”

I followed him into a large suite that looked more like a travel brochure than a guest room. Coved ceilings and wicker furniture with creamy white cushions made the space seem even larger and airier than it already was, and though I couldn’t see the water from where I stood, if I opened the French patio doors that led out to a balcony, I was sure I’d find nothing less than a spectacular ocean view. I was impressed, but that was before I realized that this room would become my cage for the weekend.