A week later she married Chris in Las Vegas — cover of People in a black, almost athletic, Betsy Johnson dress. She'd never had so much coverage of anything like this in her career. Music was indeed a whole new level.
She toured 140 concerts per year: all-access laminates; catered vegetarian meals; football arenas and stadiums. Everywhere they went little trolls out on the fringes pandered to their most varied substance needs. It was fast and furious but full of dead spots and time holes in Hyatt suites and Americruiser buses and airport business lounges. Susan felt like she was in a comfortable, well-stocked limo being driven very slowly by a drunk chauffeur.
Larry was around full-time, but he was business only now; fun was over, or rather, fun had moved on. Sex was easier for Chris to find than for Susan. If Susan had liked stringy-haired bassists with severe drug problems and colon breath, she would have been in luck — but she didn't. The only thing that kept her around was access to free drugs, but a few well-placed questions to the people out on the scene's fringes allowed her to set up her own supply in Los Angeles, and she camped out at Chris's Space Needle house in Los Angeles.
«I'd introduce you to my lesbian friends,» said Dreama, «but I don't think you'd find what you're looking for. And how can you continue to let yourself be in such a phallocentric and exploitative situation?»
Susan ignored Dreama's PC dronings. «Chris tells me I should just phone up hustlers and bill them to the company. What a hypocrite he is. He found out I was seeing other guys — or at least trying to — and he turned into the Killer Bunny from Monty Python because I was putting his green card in jeopardy. If he were to walk into the room right now, we'd probably rip each other up.»
«There ought to be some way for you to meet somebody.»
«The only way anybody meets anybody in L.A., Dreama, is through work, which I don't have.»
Just under three years into their marriage, Chris had an album tank. In the magical way of the music industry, Steel Mountain was, out of the blue,over. The record company withdrew support, money shrank and Chris had to start playing smaller arenas and cities, and he accrued the bitterness that accompanies thwarted ambition. Susan saw his snide side. Chris had his lawyer pay Susan her monthly 10K in the form of two hundred checks for $50, and then the checks started coming less frequently and there wasn't much she could do about it. One morning Susan went out to her car — a pretty little Saab convertible — and Chris had replaced it with an anonymous budget white sedan which Susan called the Pontiac Light-Days. «It's like driving a tampon, Dreama.»
A year later Susan had a new agent, Adam, who took Susan on as a mercy client. He owed Larry fourteen months' rent on office space his B-list agency rented from Larry's holding company. He phoned and told Susan she had a big break, that a young director with a development deal at Universal wanted her to play the deranged ex-girlfriend in a high-budget action movie he was making. «Susan, this kid is young and he is hot. »
«What's he done?»
«A Pepsi commercial.»
There was silence from Susan's end of the line. Finally she asked him, «What's it called?»
«Dynamite Bay.»
«Why do they want me ?»
«Because you're an icon and you're — »
«Stop right there, Adam. Why me ?»
«You undervalue yourself, Susan. The public worships you.»
«Adam?»
«He approached each of the cast members of the old Facts of Life show before you, and none of them wanted to do it. So he chose you instead.»
«Oh. So I'm now retro?»
«If being retro and hot is a crime, you're in jail, Susan. In jail with John Travolta, Patty Hearst, Chet Baker and Rick Schroeder.»
Susan made the movie, and enjoyed herself well enough, but afterward was again unoccupied, which was worse than before, because she'd tasted work again. Chris was off-tour, and in the house much of the time. He and Susan fought all day, both reeling with disbelief that they were bonded to each other. Susan eventually moved into Dreama's place, where incense burned incessantly, and where Dreama's numerology clients barged into the bathroom to ask Susan if a 59 should date a 443. Between her pitifully small savings and her monthly income, she had just enough to rent a tiny Cape Cod house on Prestwick.
As Dynamite Bay 's 1996 release neared, Susan began doing press. She was in New York doing an interview with Regis and Kathy Lee. It was familiar, and this time she loved it. Chris finally got his green card and the two agreed to divorce after the movie had run its cycle. The movie fared reasonably well, but led to no new offers. At the hotel in New York, before leaving for JFK, Susan spoke with Dreama, who reminded her about an upcoming dinner at the house of a mutual friend named Chin. Dreama was going to bring Susan a new set of numbers to help her make future decisions.
Susan felt rudderless. The harmless nonsense of Dreama's numbers made as little sense to her as anything else. On the way to the airport, Susan asked the car driver to pull over at a deli just before the Midtown Tunnel, where she popped out and bought some trail mix, bottled water and a Newsweek . She had mentally entered the world of air travel, and put her brain into neutral, not expecting to have to use it again until Los Angeles.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Vanessa dissected her first brain one hour before she learned the correct technique for making a moist, fluffy omelet. It was in the tenth grade at Calvin Coolidge High School, Franklin Lakes, Bergen County, New Jersey. She was in biology class, where students were divided into groups of four, each assigned a pig. They were told to stockpile their observations, and then afterward the class would discuss brains. Vanessa had been given her own brain. In the Bergen County School system, Vanessa was always being given a brain to herself. It wasn't so much that she was a round peg in a square hole — it was more that she was a ticking brown-wrapped parcel in an airport waiting lounge.Treat Vanessa Humboldt differently .
Vanessa dissected her pig's brain quickly, with a forensic speed and grace that chilled her teacher, Mr. Lanark. Next came home ec, in which Mrs. Juliard demonstrated for the class the proper way to whip eggs, pour them into a buttered nonstick pan (medium-low heat) and use a Teflon spatula to gently lift up the edges of the nascent omelet to allow the runny egg on top to trickle underneath and cook. Once done, the eggy disk was folded over onto itself and presto, «a neat-to-eat breakfast-time treat.»
The students followed Mrs. Juliard's technique. Near the end of Vanessa's omelet creation cycle, as she folded the egg over onto itself, her life was cut in two. Vanessa stood in home ec, undoing the fold, and then folding it again over onto itself in different ways. The other students finished their omelets, ate them or disposed of them, according to their level of eating disorder, and prepared to leave, but Vanessa stood rapt. Her classmates were students who'd known Vanessa since day care, who'd seen her reject Barbies, hair scrunchies, Duran Duran and sundry girlhood manias of the era, opting instead for Commodore 64's, Game Boys and the construction of geodesic domes from bamboo satay skewers. They giggled at her.
«Vanessa, honey — you're not angry or anything, are you?» asked Mrs. Juliard, who, like most of Vanessa's teachers since kindergarten, trod on eggshells around her. They feared an undetermined future torture that would subtly but irrevocably be dealt them should they in any way displease this brilliant Martian girl.