The last movie Tina makes before Hollywood decides she is old is a thriller, a remake of a Japanese film about children who had been sold into slavery, tricked out, then killed, only to rise again as ghosts. In the original they haunted a hospital in Tokyo; in the current version, a decadent theater company in New York City. Tina plays the arrogant playwright who dies halfway through the film, her arms and neck lifted and stretched by the ghosts, then crushed by a stage door. She has to act in front of a blue screen, and when she watches it in playback on the monitor, her limbs stretched out like an animal on a spit, her belly and breasts rippling, she says to no one in particular, “They can CGI my ass, right?”
Tina tries hard to get along with everyone, the other actors, the DP, the AD, the producers, the hair and makeup crew, even the craft services guy. (But not the director; Tina hides from him instead. That guy was bad news. She worked with him once before, and heard he had bitter sex with at least two of the production kids, young girls, fresh out of film school. He gave one of them a black eye.) She wishes everyone a good morning and goodnight, says “please,” “thank you,” “if you don’t mind.” She smiles. She really lays that smile on thick, like she’s back in the pageants again, coming in second, always coming in second.
Last year Tina was a tiny bit famous. For thirteen years she was not famous, just a bit-part actress, a patient in an emergency room complaining to the nurses about the wait; a contestant on a game show (she had won thousands of dollars filling in the blanks of sentences, guessing the prices of products, remembering the tune to a song); or lately, a plant in a reality show, which was always the worst, because instead of feeling like an actress, she just felt like a liar. She would joke that she would do anything for $300, but it was not a joke. She needed that money.
But then she got the part on “T & A & Everything Else” as the quirky, fast-talking office manager in a plastic surgeon’s office (it lasted one year on Fox), and for once, after nearly fifteen years in the business, people knew who she was, or at least knew that they should know who she was.
That’s how she got this job. Her first big film role. She’d been mired in television for so long, she thought she had the face for the small screen, but as it turns out, she just might look great larger than life.
In between takes Tina hovers at the craft services table. There is way too much downtime on movie sets, more so than television, and she bores easily. Tina grabs a handful of grapes and dumps them into a shallow plastic bowl. She picks one up, skins it, drops it back in the bowl, and starts on another one. The craft services guy looks up from his copy of Us Weekly and laughs at her. He is wearing a “Hello My Name Is” sticker and has written “Craft Services” in the blank white space.
“You question my skinning techniques?” she says.
“Not at all. You’re doing it beautifully,” he says.
Tina continues peeling, grape after grape. She glances at the craft services guy. Craft services kid, may be more accurate. He has a pierced nose and lip, and there are several rings in both ears. His hair is messy, sticks straight up in a million directions. Rough, she thinks. But his skin is smooth, clean-shaven and without blemishes, well-manicured, she would say, and he has the most perfect eyebrows she has ever seen on a man. Kid. Whatever.
“I heard the skin is supposed to be bad for your digestion,” says Tina.
“That can’t be true,” he says.
“But what if it is?” she says.
“Huh. Right.” He looks back at his magazine, pulls it closer to his face. Flips a page.
“It probably isn’t,” says Tina. “But once I start something, I usually can’t stop.” She looks down at her grapes. “It’s kind of bad,” she says quietly.
He closes the magazine, turns his head right, than left, then leans in closer to Tina. “I heard that you’re supposed to take 10,000 steps in a day. For your health. Everyday.You know how hard it is to take 10,000 steps a day in L.A.?Impossible.”
“I’ll bet,” says Tina eagerly.
“Try counting your steps sometime. Just try it.” He nods at her. “You’ll see.”
“I will,” says Tina.
The next morning, after walking 650 steps from her parked car to the set, Tina found a full bowl of peeled grapes waiting for her at the craft services table.
Part Two
Her friend Rio, who is more famous than Tina, drops by the set. In the eighties there was a rumor that the Duran Duran song “Rio” was named after her. She was just 15 then, a stunning young model from Texas with lips red like cherries, though she told everyone Costa Rica. The rumor was frequently brought up in interviews, and Rio coyly denied it. These days Rio brings it up herself, like, Can you believe what they used to say? Me and Simon? And have you seen him lately? Never.
Rio was at the studio for a meeting, she tells Tina. The director spots her, strides over, kisses her on the cheek and whispers something in her ear. They laugh. They are so funny, thinks Tina. So funny.
They sit in front of Tina’s trailer and drink Diet Coke through straws. Rio tells Tina she is going to get some work done. In a few weeks she’s getting back on the Botox train, plus taking some injections in her pretty, shiny lips. Over the next six months there will be more work. Eyes, cheeks, a tightening of her ass and stomach. Implants, just little ones, just a little lift. “It is going to take ten years off of my life,” Rio tells her. “It’s time darling.” She sighs. Rio must be in a state of emergency, on orange alert.
Tina hated her life ten years ago. She sold makeup door-to-door in West Hollywood and dated aspiring actors with beat-up cars and children in other cities, a fact they would reveal to her months into the relationship, as an afterthought. Children as an afterthought. It makes her sad even thinking about it. She likes her life now, the way she looks now. She wishes she could stay this way forever. But no one ever gets surgery so they can look like they’re in their early thirties. Everyone just wants to look 22 again.
Tina shares a trailer with two other actresses, one playing the evil ghost madam, the other playing the sexy but world-weary historian. They are busier, she notices. Their phones are always ringing. While they chat away, Tina spends hours examining her skin, from her muscular thighs to her taut upper arms, her fading forehead, drooping gently, and the soft spots around her mouth that are sinking like a boxer on the ropes. She was always tall, she was always strong, but her face is changing every day. She can feel it.
“I can’t decide whether to go old or not,” says Tina.
“Me either,” says the historian. “Being young is exhausting.”
The evil madam, a pretty Asian woman in her forties (she claims, anyway), yells from the bathroom, “Wait as long as you can.” She flushes the toilet, then pokes her head out the door. “Once you’re old, you’re never young again.” She hurls her hands up in the air and yells, “I am never going to be young again.”
Tina and the historian both suck in their breath. Then Tina says, “But you look great,” and the historian joins in, “Oh my god, you’re gorgeous.” And they rush to her and embrace her, but carefully and lightly, like touching a newborn, so as not to ruin their hair and makeup.
Every day, the director yells more and more. His eyes and nose are red — in his world, it’s permanently flu season — and his voice, frustrated and nasal, crashes over them, like a wave in high tide. Tina spends more time at the craft services table, with the craft services guy, who brings her grapes in all different colors, sizes and shapes.
“Ray,” she says, because his name is Ray, “It’s forty steps from my driveway to my front door. I keep pretending to check the mail.”
“I have to park on the street so it’s 150 for me.” He unwraps a mini-Hershey’s bar. “Apartment building.”
“Lucky,” she says.
Ray tells her he is from New Jersey. They filmed a few scenes from “The Sopranos” in his hometown. He is excited about this.
He has eight piercings total, five that she can see. And three tattoos, plus he’s getting another one. His favorite tattoo is of the state of New Jersey, an outline of it is on his back.
“So I never forget where I came from,” he says.
Part Three
The director yells at her for the first time three weeks into the shoot. It was as if he hadn’t even noticed she existed until that moment, he had spoken to her so little, or not at all, even when she was in the scene, spraying his venom instead on crew members. Maybe he senses she feels more like a crew member than a cast member. Maybe she’s been spending too much time at the craft services table. Maybe he doesn’t know how loud his voice is, that’s what she thinks later on, when she’s crying in her dressing room.
“Tina, you’re not giving me anything I can use here, anything at all,” the director yells.
His name is Winston, and she thinks of the cheap cigarettes her mother used to smoke on the front porch with her girlfriends while they drank white wine, poured from a box. She tries to picture Winston meeting her mother, all his brashness and animosity toward women, his insecurity masked as bravado masked as confidence. Her mother would hate Winston.
Tina tries again. She is supposed to be scared; there are ghosts knocking on walls all around her, and she is trying to escape. She says her line louder. She says it with more feeling. She raises her eyebrows. High. Winston calls cut.
“It’s as if you’ve never acted before.” He wraps his arms around himself, walks toward her, circles her. “It’s as if you’ve never looked at a script, never memorized lines, never had to put yourself inside a character’s head, never once became someone else for the five fucking minutes it will take to complete this scene.”
Now, she is scared.
“Let’s do it again,” says Tina.
“Oh, of course we’re going to do it again.”
She nails it, she thinks.
“Good enough,” he says. He sighs as if he is in a great deal of pain, the kind of pain that one can only soothe by having a cocktail or inflicting some sort of small revenge on someone.
Ray tells her she was great. He puts his arm around her at the craft services table and she lets him keep it there. After work they decide to have a drink and make it for last call. At the bar he puts his tongue in her mouth and she lets him keep it there. And so forth.
Tina visits Rio at her beautiful home on the beach the day after she has all of her injections. Alterations, Rio calls them, as if her face were a skirt that needed to be hemmed. When Tina gets out of her car, she pulls in a huge suck of fresh ocean air like she always does. Tina has stayed here before, a few times when she was between work, five or six years ago, when she was thinking of calling it quits and heading back to Texas, to her hometown; and a few times when Rio needed her, house-sitting gigs (Rio has several large dogs that are intolerable to almost everyone but Tina), during the divorce, after the divorce, and also after three different breakups, including that time she thought she was a lesbian and dated that brutal-looking folk singer who sometimes scored animated films.
Each time, Tina willingly unloaded a carload of clothes and toiletries into the guest room, the one with the stunning view of the ocean, and the horizon, and the sunset. She could sit through anything for that view. Tina thinks this house is better than anywhere else on earth.
Rio is constantly talking about selling it. But she’s been doing that for years, so Tina isn’t too worried. Rio always feels like she needs to start some trouble.
They sit in the kitchen, and watch the ocean. Tina peels grapes, Rio sips through a straw. Rio doesn’t want to go outside yet. She decided at the last minute to get some laser work done along with everything else, so she’s been instructed to keep out of the sun. She’s wearing sunglasses, and her lips are inflated and tight, over-saturated with collagen. She looks like the Joker from the “Batman” movie, Tina thinks. Jack Nicholson with his stretched lips. Tina hates seeing Rio look like this, fighting this battle she’s never going to win.
“I have a set boyfriend,” says Tina.
“Ooh, good for you,” says Rio. “Who is he?”
“Ray.”
“No — what does he do?”
“Craft services.” Tina looks at Rio’s lips. She thinks they might be vibrating.
“Tina, really?” Rio laughs at her, she can’t help it.
“He’s very cute.”
“I’ll bet.”
“And sweet.”
“I’m sure.”
Tina peels silently for a moment and Rio rushes her hands through her hair, pulling the strands tight at the end, then smoothes her fingertips lightly on the side of her face, as if she could pull her skin tighter through simple touch.
“You can’t keep him you know,” says Rio.
“I know,” says Tina, her voice wavering gently, like a tiny bird hoping for a speck of food.
“What is he, twenty?”
“I know, OK?” says Tina. She starts to pop the grapes in her mouth, one by one.
Part Four
Tina’s in bed, watching the evening news. They’re covering the premiere, the director’s last film. It’s an action adventure film opening in January. It’s the only major studio release that weekend, so it’s expected to open big. Well, big for January. Tina snorts.
She had been invited to attend — all of the cast members with speaking parts were invited — but when she received the invitation, she passed on it.
“Pass,” she had said, and was amazed to hear herself saying the words out loud. Tartly. “I have plans,” she added quickly.
They interview one star, and then another, matching each other with polite banality.
“Yes, we had a great time filming it,” says the male lead, his thick wave of blond hair glistening under the lights of the camera, and his awkward but impossibly charming nose wrinkling as he smiles. In the background there are flashbulbs popping, and there is a quiet hum of conversation.
“We were like one big happy family.” Liar, she thought. Everyone’s a liar. “If that family was in the FBI,” he adds, makes a little gun out of his index finger and thumb, shoots the camera.
Oh, you’re going to hate yourself later, thinks Tina.
They cut to a quick shot of the director, waving and smiling, his arm around a beautiful but overcooked woman, bronzed like an ancient statue, with lips and cheeks and eyes puffed out like an overweight newborn. It’s Rio. The camera lingers on her for a second. The reporter calls her a classic beauty in a voiceover.
Say what you will about Rio, but there she is on camera. That woman always gets attention, thinks Tina. She really knows what she’s doing. She really gets herself out there.
“One more time,” says Ray. He pinches her right nipple, hard.
They’re outside a restaurant in West Hollywood, at a party celebrating the last day of shooting at a restaurant. The waitresses are all twenty years old and have no visible pores. Tina orders a lot of sake.
She’s been trying to avoid Ray for the last few weeks of shooting. It was easy: She had his schedule memorized, hours, minutes, seconds. She’d send a PA for food if she got really hungry. The grapes always showed up peeled.
But while she’s checking messages on her cellphone — Rio has called, again, third time today — in front of the restaurant, wedged in with a haggard young man in a suit who is simultaneously chain smoking and text messaging, and two girls dressed in different variations of the same look: Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance,” Ray approaches her and asks her to go home with him. He stands in front of her, blocks out the drivers pulling up in front of the restaurant and the valets/actors/models and the brutal young chain smokers, and puts his hand over her tank top and massages the underside of her breast gently before going in for a fierce pinch that stings Tina between her legs.
“Just so we know it’s over,” he says. It’s a line and it works. Tina is not immune to Hollywood. She does live there, after all.
One more frantic voicemail, and Tina agrees to visit Rio at home again the next day. She hasn’t seen Rio since she watched her on television with the director. Well if she’s going to hide things, so can I. I am not going to tell her anything about Ray. I am not going to say a thing. It’s my little secret, she thinks. He could just be my little secret. When she had put on her bra that morning, the material had rubbed against her raw nipples and it had hurt and made her hot all over again.
Part Five
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In front of Rio’s house a dog trots by, a small Pekinese wearing a rhinestone-studded collar. The sunlight strikes the dog’s neck and glows, and the dog briefly resembles an alien. Down the street a woman yells out, “Madison!” The dog looks back, then takes off running.
Run, Madison. Be free forever.
Tina knocks, and walks through the house. There are three huge vases of flowers in the foyer, two of red roses, the other of yellow calla lilies. The sun streams through the skylight and boils the scent of the flowers. Tina feels high for a moment. She leans in and takes a deep hit from a rose.
She calls out to Rio.
“Kitchen,” says Rio.
Tina slips through the house on the hardwood floors, slides her hands on the wall. This is a slick little world. In the kitchen Rio faces the ocean, the beautiful sunny day. She turns when Tina enters. She has a black eye. Also he has punched her so hard he split her lower lip, and part of it is flat, and part of it is twice the size of normal.
Whatever normal is for Rio.
Tina hugs her and curses him and says everything you are supposed to say and about twenty more things than that. She is quivering with fury.
If Tina had been there the day before she would have seen Rio cry, but as it is, Rio is all cried out. You wouldn’t know though, by her eyes. Rio has a very expensive eye cream made from the sperm of South African goats. It’s like magic.
“Thousands of dollars of work, ruined,” says Rio.
“Rio, did you call the police?”
“He gave me the lead in his next film,” says Rio, and that answer is enough for Tina, enough to know she has to give up on Rio. At a certain point in your life you can’t be fixed anymore. You can’t be put back together.
After the last movie she made before Hollywood decided she was old opened Halloween weekend to decent reviews and a blockbuster weekend, Tina gets a call from her agent. You should strike while the iron is hot, he says. Everything could change right now. He tells her about a new salon that just opened. He gives her the name of a doctor, a discreet one. He tells her to renew her gym membership. You’ve let yourself go during a time when you should look better than ever.
I look great. I look perfect, she says. You do your job and I’ll do mine.
She hangs up the phone and thinks about firing him but she doesn’t have time to look for a new agent. She has rehearsal for a play that premieres in two weeks. She plays a pregnant woman, a mother, of a reasonable age, of a reasonable height, of a reasonable weight. She pats her belly. It is swelled like a ripe, whole grape. Skin intact.
