Page 57 of Endless Summer: Stories
Jessie picks up on the first ring. “No one wants to talk to you.”
“But I’m—”
Jessie hangs up.
“Here,”Kirby says.
Fine,Kirby thinks. She’ll walk. She has only her purse and a loden suede weekend duffel that she bought at Joan and David, also in more prosperous times. She’s wearing Capezio ballet flats, black leggings, an oversize white button-down. She puts on Ray-Ban aviators, hoping she evokes Kelly McGillis inTop Gun,and off she sets.
Her spirits start to sing as she passes all of the familiar landmarks in town. There’s Steamboat Pizza, the Whaling Museum, and the Sunken Ship, where she and Blair and Tiger used to buy new rope bracelets at the start of every summer. Kirby knows that if she goes inside, there will be, next to the register, a glass jar of pristine new bracelets, white as bone. Is she too old to wear one? Yes, she thinks. She’s forty-freaking-one! She keeps going.
She passes Hardy’s General Store, with its familiar smell of sawdust and paint, then takes a right on Main. The sun is already hot; she’s sweating in her tight black leggings. How will she make it all the way to Red Barn Road?
She passes a farm truck parked in front of the Camera Shop. A woman who really does look like a sixties flower child is selling quarts of organic strawberries for six bucks. Ha! Kirby thinks. She thought that calling something organic and selling it for twice as much as normal was only a California thing.
She heads up to Mitchell’s Book Corner and stops for a minute to check out the titles in the window: John le Carré, Mary Higgins Clark, Salman Rushdie. As Tyesha always says,Reading is a great place to find your next movie,and it’s not always the bestsellers that are hits. Right, Kirby thinks. What she needs is a sleeper. She wants to pluck a book out of obscurity, pitch it, make it a blockbuster, and save her reputation—if it’s not beyond saving. There’s a book calledA Time to Killby John Grisham. Kirby has never heard of him, but it looks like a legal thriller and Scott Turow already has that territory covered. There’s a novel by someone named Kazuo Ishiguro calledThe Remains of the Day—definitely obscure, probably too obscure to be made into a film.
Kirby continues up Main Street and rounds the corner onto Fair. She needs to make a pit stop. When she reaches All’s Fair, she rounds the corner onto Plumb Lane, unlatches the gate, and steps into the backyard, just in case someone else in her family is in residence. She sees that the glass in the back door has been papered over. Vandalism, here on Fair Street? Burglary? Kirby eases the door open—someone must be staying here—and tiptoes into the kitchen, where she sets her bag down for one blessed second. She opens the fridge to find a carton of juice, a quart of strawberries that she’s betting came from the hippie on Main Street, a gallon of milk that’s three-quarters gone, eggs, a pound of bacon, a bowl of plump green grapes, a jar of apricot preserves, and—Kirby can hardly believe her eyes—a bottle of Moët et Chandon champagne.
It’s the answer to her prayers.
She hears what sounds like a herd of cattle upstairs, then little-person voices, and she swears under her breath—Tiger and the kids are here. While Kirby would love nothing more than to sit in the backyard with her brother and a couple of mimosas, she can’t handle Magee for even one second. Kirby grabs the bottle of champagne and slips out the back door.
She waits until she’s halfway down Lucretia Mott Lane before she pops the cork. It flies into someone’s rosebushes, and Kirby brings the bottle to her lips. She lets the bubbles run down her chin and all over her white shirt. It’s official, she thinks. She’s a lush, a derelict, a poseur, and a grifter. If Tyesha Bradford, Kirby’s girlfriend of the past two years, could see her now, walking down the charming, leafy Nantucket streets drinking Moët straight from the bottle at nine thirty in the morning, she would think… what? That she’d wasted eight grand sending Kirby to rehab at Clarity Farms? That she was justified in firing Kirby from her production company, Silver Dollar? That she was even more justified in breaking things off with her?
Kirby takes another slug off the bottle as cars pass—the usual Jeep Wagoneers and woody wagons. Kirby is relieved that she hasn’t seen anyone she knows, but as she reaches Caton Circle and starts out the Madaket Road bike path, she becomes annoyed. She could really use a ride. HowdareJessie hang up on her!
She should have returned the message that Jessie left on her machine a few days ago. But she had done one better—she had come in person. And she was staying. (What does that mean, staying?she wonders. Would she move into the house on Red Barn Road for the remainder of the summer and into the fall? Would she do the unthinkable and stay on Nantucketthrough the winter?There was, at this point, nothing left for her in LA.)
The more Kirby thinks about this, the more she dreads what lies ahead.
Namely: explaining herself.
As far as her family knows, she’s a success. When she moved to LA, she immediately got a job as the fifth assistant to the director John Hughes. (Basically, she made coffee and dinner reservations for the first four assistants.) But even so, she had worked on the movies that defined a generation:Sixteen Candles. The Breakfast Club. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.She befriended the second assistant, Tyesha Bradford—and then, one night at a party in Malibu, they became more than friends.
What a surprisethathad been! Kirby had dated only men up to that point but her chemistry with Tyesha was undeniable. Tyesha had been born and raised in LA; her family was in real estate. She was smarter than Kirby, better educated, sexier, savvier, more seasoned. She had that elusive thing called class. Kirby could see it in the way Tyesha layered her thin gold necklaces and wore her Stanford class ring on her index finger. She had buttery leather accessories—bags with the right-length straps, the perfect compartments for keys and wallet, boots with the right heel, the most stylish silhouette. She could order wine, speak Spanish with her doorman, discuss the latest work of Alice Walker, of Walker Percy.
The summer before, Tyesha started her own production company, and Kirby went with her. Kirby was technically a production assistant, but Tyesha treated her like a partner. When they produced an independent film calledThe Drum Major,Tyesha was launched into the spotlight, and she grabbed Kirby’s hand and pulled her into the bright circle right beside her. For a few golden months, they were courted by studios, invited to glamorous parties.
They needed a follow-up. Kirby suggested pitching their own story, a movie about a girl from Boston who moves to LA to escape her emotionally stunted family and meets a stylish, ambitious African American woman. They fall in love.
“You haven’t given me any conflict,” Tyesha said. “I’m falling asleep.”
“How about if the chick from Boston is a bad girl,” Kirby said. “What if she has a secret cocaine habit and sleeps with men behind her lover’s back?”
Even now, Kirby can feel the tension that had filled Tyesha’s apartment in Silver Lake.
“Do you have a secret cocaine habit?” Tyesha asked. “Are you sleeping with men behind my back?”
The answers were yes and yes. In fact, Kirby had been high the moment she said it. It was a testament to how screwed up she was that she hadn’t even meant to confess; the truth had just popped out.
Kirby scoffed. “Of course not.”
But smart, savvy Tyesha had gleaned the truth in the slight pause that preceded these words, and when she pressed, Kirby folded. Her lame defense: She had been using cocaine long before she even moved to LA (does Tyesha not remember her talking about her Studio 54 days with Warhol?); she’d thought Tyesha was fully aware and turning a blind eye. But Kirby had her habit under control. She only called her dealer, Brody, once a week and occasionally she scored at a party. When she did a line or two at a party, she sometimes found herself making out with some lighting guy or second grip named Scott or Dean, which led to having forgettable sex in the host’s closet while Tyesha was out at the party chatting up the most influential person in the room (one night it was Brigitte Nielsen, another night, Danny Glover).
“I know Glover is a legitimate big deal,” Kirby said. “But when I asked you to introduce me, you swatted me away.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Tyesha asked.
