FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31
3. morning
I woke up in the guest bedroom with no idea of how I’d gotten there, but I didn’t panic—I took this in stride—because the guest bedroom was something that had been happening with a regularity I hadn’t found alarming yet. Victor was barking from somewhere inside the house, and the clock on the nightstand said 7:15. I groaned and pushed my face deep into a pillow (it was damp; I had been crying in my sleep again) but then sat up quickly, with the realization that I needed to prove something this morning: that I was responsible, that I wasn’t an addict, that I was clean. But I couldn’t rouse myself because the hangover was intense and accompanied by its usual horniness: a painfully hard erection was sticking out of my boxers, which I stared at futilely, doing nothing with it. Finally I was gazing at myself in the mirror of the guest bathroom. I had the dehydrated and haggard face of a man ten years older, and my eyes were so red that you couldn’t see the irises. I guzzled water from the tap, then decided to make myself halfway presentable by pulling off the T-shirt with the marijuana leaf on it and then putting it back on inside out. Since I couldn’t find my jeans I tore the top sheet off the bed and draped myself in it. I walked out of the room a ghost.
Trudging toward the kitchen, I passed the housekeeper, Rosa, vacuuming the living room and I followed large footprints that seemed to have been stamped in ash onto the beige carpeting, which this morning seemed shaggier and darker than normal. As the ghost padded through the living room it stopped when it noticed the odd formation of the furniture. The sectional couch, the Le Corbusier chairs and the Eames tables had been rearranged for the party, yet this new setup now seemed weirdly familiar to me. I wanted to figure out why, but the sound of the vacuum merging with Victor’s barking forced the ghost to move quickly toward the kitchen.
The house had been referred to as a McMansion in the Talk article: nine thousand square feet and situated in a fast-growing and wealthy suburb, and 307 Elsinore Lane wasn’t even the grandest in the community—it merely reflected the routine affluence of the neighborhood. It was, according to a spread in Elle Decor, “minimalist global eclectic with an emphasis on Spanish revival” but with “elements of midcentury French chateau and a touch of sixties Palm Springs modernism” (imagine that if you can; it was not a design concept everyone grasped). The interior was done in soothing shades of sandcastle and white corn, lily and bleached flour. Stately and lavish, slick and sparsely furnished, the house had four high-ceilinged bedrooms and a master suite that occupied half of the second story and included a fireplace, a wet bar, a refrigerator, two 165-square-foot walk-in closets and window shades that disappeared into pockets in the ceiling, and each of the two adjoining bathrooms had a giant sunken tub. There was a fully equipped gym where I sometimes exercised halfheartedly and where Jayne’s personal trainer, Klaus, helped sculpt her flawless body—and there was a sprawling media room with a plasma TV that had a screen the size of a small wall and surround sound and hundreds of DVDs shelved alphabetically on either side of it, as well as a red felt antique pool table. And the house flowed: large, carefully designed empty spaces merged seamlessly into one another to give the illusion that the house was far grander than it actually was.
The ghost floated toward the kitchen, or “family headquarters,” that really was a marvel—all stainless steel and countertops made from Brazilian concrete, a Thermador range, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, two dishwashers, two stoves with noiseless fans, two sinks, a wine cooler, a drawer freezer and an entire wall of sliding glass that overlooked an Olympic-sized swimming pool (without guard rails since Sarah and Robby were already expert swimmers) and a Jacuzzi and a vast, intensely green and lush lawn, which was bordered by a huge and carefully maintained garden blooming with flowers I didn’t know the names of, and beyond all that was the clearing and then the woods. The ghost saw no party detritus cluttering the house. It was immaculate. Confused but impressed, the ghost stared at a vase of fresh tulips sitting in the center of the kitchen table.
Marta was already up, fiddling with a Gaggia espresso maker as the chic, hungover ghost wrapped in the Frette sheet hovered around the kitchen, placing his burning forehead against the wine-cooling cabinet for one brief moment (the ghost noticed bitterly that it was empty) before falling into a chair at the giant round table on the far side of the room. Marta was a purposefully unattractive woman in her midthirties whom Jayne had befriended while shooting a movie in L.A. She was loyal and discreet and handled all of Jayne’s business effortlessly—just one of the thousands of women from that town so attracted to celebrity and so devoted to its demands that she followed Jayne across the country to these cold and unknown suburbs. Before Jayne she had worked for Penny Marshall, Meg Ryan and, briefly, Julia Roberts, and she had the eerie ability to intuit whatever need or request the celebrity might have at any moment. Plus the kids seemed responsive to her, which took a lot of pressure off their mother. Jayne’s trust in her was what gave Marta drive and ambition; it was what flattered her and gave her sustenance. This was as close as she was ever going to get to being famous herself, and Marta took the job seriously. But she seemed sad to me, since growing up in that world I had encountered hundreds of Martas—women (and men) so enslaved to the cause of celebrity that their own world was annihilated. She had a small apartment—that Jayne paid for—in town. (I didn’t know where Rosa lived, only that her quiet Salvadorian father would pick her up from Elsinore Lane at eight in the evening and bring her back the next morning at dawn.)
