Seeing Stars (15 page)

“You’re getting a divorce?”

“No, Mom.”

“There’s no shame in it.”

“I
know
there’s no shame in it.”

“I read in the
Times
the other day that they even have an expression for it now. Starter marriage.”

“We’re not getting a divorce. It’s not a starter marriage.”

“She’s in LA. You’re here. And this is till death do you part?”

“You know why she’s there, Mom. It’s as much of a sacrifice for her as it is for me.”

“So when are they coming back?”

When, indeed. Helene Rabinowitz let an eloquent moment of silence go by and said, “There’s my point.”

Hugh was increasingly aware of the flaw in their thinking: if Bethy did well—and Ruth was prepared to do whatever it took for her to do well—she wouldn’t
be
coming home, potentially not for five years or even more, if she stayed in Hollywood the way most of the working kids did, and fit college around their work and audition schedules. Ruth would be coming home for holidays and the occasional vacation; and the more successful Bethy became—and he would admit that she could be successful if she got the right break—the fewer of these there would be. Hugh could just picture the increasingly strained conversations between them; the fewer and fewer shared moments to pore over, until the marriage didn’t so much die as gutter out.

And yet, to leave his practice for one in Los Angeles would be financially suicidal. They needed every penny he was earning right now to stoke the ruinous bonfire that was Hollywood. Clothes that Ruth swore were necessary to clinch an audition. Haircuts and eyebrow-shaping and facial waxing that cost more every month than they would have spent in Seattle to coif the entire family. The never-ending classes and showcases and coaching upon which Mimi Roberts insisted. The higher car insurance and cost of automobile maintenance. The apartment. By his rough accounting, if the wholesale purchase of goods and services kept to its present level—and Hugh hadn’t seen any sign that it would let up—they would be spending between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars a year. In cash. Indefinitely.

When Hugh was in LA the last time, another studio father who sold boiled peanuts for a living had calmly told Hugh that he’d spent somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars so far to launch his daughter’s acting career. At the time, Hugh had thought the man was a cracker and a blowhard, but now he could see that he had just been honest.

So Hugh had privately begun to peruse online listings for dental practices that were taking on new dentists. He could hire a young dentist to take over his own Seattle practice for a few months—six months, a year—and if he told his patients that it was strictly temporary, they’d stay with him, he was reasonably sure. He’d been treating some of them for twenty years now—
twenty years!
—and they were used to him. They’d wait. He wouldn’t buy into the LA practice, of course, so he wouldn’t make much money, but the Seattle practice would meet its expenses even with a 15 percent patient attrition rate, if he paid the fill-in dentist less than he had been paying himself, which he was sure he could get away with. The arrangement wouldn’t work in the long run, but temporarily it would do. They’d never touch Bethy’s earnings to defray their expenses, of course, if there ever
were
any earnings, which Ruth kept assuring them there would be—
big
earnings, potentially. These they would put into Bethy’s college fund. Still, he could see how not only less scrupulous but also more financially strapped parents than he and Ruth were could easily burn through a child’s money. Just yesterday Ruth had told him on the phone about a boy Bethy’s age who’d made a quarter of a million dollars in one year by making lots of commercials. The kid popped up on TV ads all the time; even Hugh recognized him now. Freckles, shaggy haircut, weak chin, lippy manner. Who knew homely could pay so well? Ruth had said the kid and his family lived in a condo just a block from the ocean in Santa Monica. One more year like this one, the mother had told Ruth, and they’d bring the whole family out from Tucson. Four kids and a husband and they’d all be able to live off the kid’s wages, at least until the dad got his feet on the ground. On the other hand, Ruth had told Hugh some horror stories about families that had given up everything to come to Hollywood and their kids had never hit, or had given up the business, and they’d ended up bankrupt.
Bankrupt!
Putting that on a kid’s shoulders was more than Hugh could imagine.

But for now all of this was strictly theoretical. For now he kept going to work and cleaning and drilling and filling and repairing and replacing the teeth for which he’d trained all those years, and it was satisfying work and for that he was grateful.

A
FTER THEY’D FINISHED AT
B
OB’S AND
R
UTH HAD DRIVEN
them by the Disney headquarters and animation studio (“Let Mom drive so you can see!” Bethy had insisted to Hugh), Ruth pulled into their designated parking space in the alley behind their dumpy building and helped Hugh get his carry-on out of the trunk.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I can do it. I can do a lot of things by myself now.”

“I know you can,” Ruth said, mildly annoyed. “I just thought I’d help.” She stalked ahead of him and Bethy, rattling their apartment key.

“This is the pool,” Bethy said to Hugh as they skirted the swimming pool in the courtyard of their apartment building. “I mean, duh.”

“I remember,” Hugh said. “Do you swim much?”

“Not here,” Bethany said. “Look at it—it’s gross. I heard someone found a dead rat in it the other day.”

Hugh just raised his eyebrows.

“
Please
let us move to the Oakwood, Daddy,” she said. “Oh, please, please, pretty please? I mean, you wouldn’t need to give me a single present for Hanukkah or Christmas or my next birthday or
anything
, if we could just get an apartment at the Oakwood.”

Ruth looked back and saw Hugh inhale and, for just a moment, close his eyes. “Let’s not talk about this right now, honey,” Ruth said.

“You guys don’t even care if I swim in a gross pool with a dead rat in it—”

“Bethany,” Ruth warned.

“—even though I could get tetanus or rabies or dengue fev—”

Ruth wheeled around and snapped, “
Enough.
That’s enough from you.”

Bethany burst into tears and Ruth couldn’t get the damned apartment door unlocked, and Hugh took the keys from her and got the door open just as Bethany shrieked, “
You don’t even care about me.
” Hugh just sighed, and since there was nowhere to go inside the little apartment to get away from each other, Ruth turned on the old TV and they had the lights out by eight forty-five.

B
Y THE NEXT MORNING
B
ETHANY WAS CHEERFUL AGAIN
—she wasn’t a child who held grudges, God be praised—and Hugh looked more rested in spite of the lumpy mattress. They had him drive them over the hill to the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, where he treated them to crepes and they caught a glimpse of someone who might have been Zach Braff. On their way back, they drove through Laurel Canyon so Bethy could show Hugh the two-million-dollar dream home that had slid down the hill in a mudslide and was now in pieces, pressed up against a chain-link fence with gang tags spray-painted all over it. “I saw this TV special about how all the hills around LA are unstable, and they had the owner on it and he was crying,” Bethany said. “He said it took them two years to build it, and then it fell down the hill after they’d only been in it for, like, three months or something.”

“Well, it’s a terrible thing to lose a home,” Hugh said.

Bethany said, “One of my friends here—her name is Allison—doesn’t really have a home. Her mom moved in with her boyfriend and then they got married and they have this room that they call the guest room even when Allison is back there living in it. So she lives at Mimi’s.”

“Mimi Roberts boards kids?” Hugh said to Ruth, appalled.

“Sure,” Bethany chirped from the backseat. “Their parents live in like Ohio or Arkansas or wherever. It’s kind of all right, though, because they get lots of spending money and they can buy whatever they want at the 7-Eleven and stuff. Hillary—she lives with Mimi, too—bought six Snickers bars one day. We told her she shouldn’t eat them because she’ll get fat—well, that’s what Allison said—but Hillary just said tough titties.”

“Bethany,” Ruth warned.

“What?”

“That’s vulgar.”

Bethany shrugged. “So anyways, she ate them all and then she threw up and now she says she’s never eating another Snickers bar for the rest of her life, and I bet she won’t.”

“You don’t even want to know what those things do to your teeth,” Hugh said. “I could tell you some stories.”

Bethany turned to look out the window. Hugh was always offering to tell them some stories. In his view, the dental landscape was a slippery slope that led straight to bridgework and periodontics. Now all he said was, “I’ll show you the x-rays sometime.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bethany said.

They agreed that Hugh would take Bethany to an acting class while Ruth stayed at the apartment and did laundry in the creepy laundry room. She refused to go there after dark, and their days were all packed, so she and Bethy were down to their last sets of underwear. Bethany’s class was a special four-hour one with a guest teacher who was a former child star.

“Four hours—the kids are going to be in this class for
four hours
?” Hugh said when they told him.

“It’s important, Daddy,” Bethy assured him. “It’s on audition skills and redirects and cold-reading and stuff.”

“And those are things you can’t learn on your own?”

“Not really.”

“This is according to Mimi, I presume,” he said to Ruth.

“It’s very basic,” Ruth said. “Every client has to take it. Bethy’s lucky because there isn’t a boot camp going on right now, so it’s a small class.”

“Boot camp?”

“It’s an intensive program Mimi holds twice a year for kids who are new to Hollywood. By the end of ten days, the kids hit the ground running.”

“And is that a good thing?”

“What?”

“Hitting the ground.”

Ruth just shot him a look.

O
NCE THEY’D DROPPED
R
UTH AT THE APARTMENT
B
ETHANY
gave Hugh directions to the studio in what sounded to him like a new, grown-up voice. How had she learned this? In Seattle she didn’t even know the names of the streets between their house and her best friend Rianne’s, and she’d been traveling that route since preschool. Now her directions even included what lane he needed to be in.

At the studio, Hugh followed her into the greenroom, where a dozen or so children were milling around. Three girls were huddled on a sofa looking at something. They barely glanced up when Bethany came in.

“Guys! This is my dad. Daddy, this is Reba and Allison and Hillary.”

The girls had already turned back to Allison’s video iPod.

“Hi,” Hugh said.

“What are you watching?” said Bethany.

“A commercial. It’s Quinn. He’s supposed to be a brain cell or something.”

“A synapse,” said Hillary. “He’s a synapse. It’s for Sparkz.”

“Sparkz?”

“That new energy drink,” Hillary said. “It’s union, and it’s national. He’s making a wad.”

“He should be,” said Allison. “I mean, he looks gay in that suit.”

Without a preamble of any kind, a small man with wild white hair burst into the greenroom, took a stance, and yelled, “Are you ready to work those chops?”

The kids yelled as one, “We’re ready!”

This apparition was apparently Smidge Robinson, a former child actor and now one of the most sought-after kids’ acting teachers in the business, someone the girls were lucky to work with, Mimi had assured Ruth, for just $225 apiece. Hugh tried to identify the man’s accent. It had a vague Southern twang, but actors put on and took off dialects like sweaters. Hugh thought with sour satisfaction that he’d probably come straight from the heart of Brooklyn.

Smidge swept the kids ahead of him into the classroom. Bethany had explained excitedly at the Farmers’ Market that for the class’s four hours, they got to say or do anything. The idea, apparently, was to get the kids to stop being themselves, so they could be other people. As she explained it, this was a guerilla acting class with no holds barred, and if they broke down and cried, they’d get one of Smidge’s famous tin stars, which he would pin onto their clothing personally as a rite of passage. A lot of them hadn’t cried yet, Bethy had said. She had, but only once. She said she thought about Zippers, their tuxedo cat, who had died a year before. She said some of the kids thought about grandparents and stuff, old people they knew who’d died, but since she didn’t know anyone, she’d had to make do.

Now, in the sudden quiet, Hugh took a minute to scan the headshots of children and teens taped to the walls.

“The ones way up there aren’t clients anymore,” a girl’s voice said from behind him. “Mimi gave them their starts, though.”

Hugh turned. Which girl was this? She’d been one of the kids Bethy had introduced him to when they first came in. He found her headshot lower down on one of the walls: Allison Addison. She was a dark brunette and strikingly, almost shockingly, beautiful.

“They have other managers now,” the girl said offhandedly. “We’re okay with it, though.”

“We?”

“Mimi and me.”

Was this girl Mimi’s daughter? But he’d never heard anything about a daughter, and this girl, given her beauty, couldn’t possibly have sprung from those loins. He sat on one end of the greenroom sofa. “Aren’t you supposed to be in there?” He nodded toward the classroom.

“We’re doing a game where one of us has to leave the room. They’ll call me back in pretty soon.” She circled the room languidly, tapping each photograph with her finger until she stopped directly in Hugh’s line of sight with her back turned. Striking what he was sure was a pose, she lifted her shiny hair high off her neck and then released it so it spilled down her back, shimmering. Then she turned and plopped down on the couch beside him, crossing one long, thin leg over the other. “So you’re a dentist,” she said.