I felt terrible leaving Kat in the clutches of her terrifying mother-in-law, but by the time the detectives released us I was desperate to get home. I’d called Peter and asked him to pick Ruby up from school, and had found out that Isaac’s stomach flu had returned with a vengeance. I hated the idea of Peter taking him out, even just to do a carpool run, but not even Al could convince the detective that I was needed at home. In fact, he didn’t intimidate the supervising detective anywhere near as much as the diminutive Nahid Lahidji did. It was Kat’s mother-in-law who got us sprung. After she had engaged in a conversation with the detective in which she’d asked as many questions as she’d answered, she turned to me.
“Business card,” she snapped.
“Excuse me?” I said. By then I’d become as silent as Kat.
“Give me your business card. And your driver’s license, too.”
I proffered the requested documents wordlessly.
“Katayoun!” she said. Kat roused herself, reached into her purse, and handed Nahid her wallet. The older woman rummaged through it, tsking at the jumble of cards and bills until she found Kat’s driver’s license. She then reached into her trim gold purse and pulled out a sparking card case. She snapped it open, removed a thick business card printed on creamy ochre paper, tapped all the cards into a neat pile, and handed them to the detective.
“Check the names against the licenses,” she said. “And then we’re leaving. My daughter-in-law and her friend need to get home. As you can see, they are both in a delicate physical condition.”
The detective leafed through the small stack of documents and then handed our driver’s licenses back to us. “We’ll be needing to talk to you again,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied.
“We’ll see,” Nahid said. She poked Kat and said, “Katayoun. Up. We’re going home.”
Kat struggled to her feet, and I reached out a hand to help her. She shook her head at me, rubbed her eyes once, and then stood up. “I’m okay. Nahidjoon, I’m fine.”
Nahid clucked her tongue. Then she turned back to the detective. “I assume when you’re done here you’ll clean up after yourself. I’m planning an open house for next week, and I can’t have you making a disgusting mess here.”
His jaw dropped, but by then the woman had spun on her heels and was halfway across the yard to the outside gate, dragging my friend along behind her.
I turned to Al, expecting him to escort me out, but he shook his head slightly. “I’m going to hang out here for a while,” he whispered to me. “See if I can’t get in to see the body. You go on.”
Kat and her mother-in-law had already driven away by the time I got out to the front of the house, and it was a moment before I remembered that I’d left my car in the parking lot at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Nahid had hustled Kat into her own car, and Kat’s Mercedes was still on the street in front of the house. I debated waiting for Al to drive me, but, it wasn’t more than a fifteen or twenty minute walk home. In the middle of the trek, I realized that while I’d routinely walked dozens of blocks when I lived in New York City, since Peter and I had transplanted ourselves to the City of Angels—and of SUVs—my walking had been pretty much limited to trips to and from various parking lots, and the odd, desperate perambulation with a stroller, trying to convince a crying baby to nod off. I’d certainly never attempted a mile or so in this late stage of pregnancy. But the walk, or should I say waddle, was good for me. By the time I got home, I had managed to calm myself down sufficiently to fool the kids, if not my husband. We spent what remained of the afternoon playing Chutes and Ladders. Peter seemed to understand that I wasn’t in any shape to be alone, so he hung out with me and the kids. He hadn’t cleaned up the bathroom after Isaac’s latest adventure in emesis, but only because we have always had an unofficial division of labor that makes disposing of the children’s various effluvia my purview. There are other household unpleasantnesses my husband assumes responsibility for, including dealing with the cars, plumbing problems, and his mother. Trust me, it’s an even trade.
It was only after we got the kids to bed that I could collapse on the couch and recount to my husband the horror that I’d witnessed.
“So the shower didn’t have any effect on the progress of the rigor?” Peter said, when I was done describing the state of the actress’s body.
“Peter!” I said.
“What? It might come in handy some day.”
I shook my head. You’d think after eight years of marriage I’d be used to my husband’s voracious appetite for the disgusting detail.
He suddenly seemed to remember that we were talking about a real person, and not one of his celluloid corpses. He reached an arm around me and snuggled me closer to him.
“It was pretty awful,” I said, leaning my head against his chest. “Mrs. Lahidji said the woman was an actress. Alicia Felix. I’ve never heard of her, have you?”
He shook his head. Then he reached under the couch and pulled out the laptop he’d stashed there when I’d walked in the door. I had pretended not to notice that he had been sitting on the couch playing on his computer while the kids wrestled on the carpet, and I didn’t comment now. He tapped on the computer for a while. Peter had set us up with an Airport, so we could get a wireless connection to the Internet from anywhere in the house.
“Here she is,” he said. “I found her on TV-Phile.”
I lifted my head and looked at the screen.
The headshot that decorated Alicia Felix’s page on TV-Phile.com, a website devoted to the minutiae of canceled television shows and former personalities, was the same one I had seen in her apartment. It showed a gamine-faced blond woman with a thick head of tousled hair and a pout that somehow managed to look both sexy and innocent at the same time.
Alicia had an impressive list of television credits. She had appeared in guest roles on almost every major sitcom and drama in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She had even had a recurring role in a short-lived drama that I remembered watching when I was in law school. It had featured a cast of stunningly attractive prosecuting attorneys, and a few of us had gathered weekly to watch the show in the student lounge. We weren’t fans; rather our purpose was to jeer with our newfound expertise at the glaring errors and misrepresentations in the cases on the television lawyers’ make-believe dockets. I couldn’t honestly remember this Alicia; there had been too many young blond females in the cast.
Beyond the early 1990s, there were fewer and fewer entries for Alicia. The last listing was in 1997: she had had nothing since.
“What happened after 1997?” I asked Peter.
“Maybe she moved into film.” He clicked over to the part of the site devoted to filmographies. Inputing Alicia Felix’s name resulted in no hits.
“Does that mean she didn’t do any movies? Do they have every single actor listed online? Or could she have had some small roles that don’t show up?” I asked.
Peter wrinkled his forehead. “I think the site is pretty thorough. I mean, I know that the casting agents on our movies use it to dredge up information even on the most unknown person who auditions for us. I think this has got to mean she never made a movie.”
“Huh.” I leaned back on the couch and heaved my legs into his lap, pushing aside the computer. “Will you rub my feet, sweetie? Is helps me think.”
Peter lifted my left foot. “It’s like a little, tiny sausage bursting out of its casing,” he said, poking the swollen skin. His finger left an indentation on my ankle.
“That’s nice, honey.” I jerked my foot away. “Way to make me feel good.”
“Oh stop it.” He took my foot back in his warm palms and began rubbing. “You know I think you’re fat little feet are adorable.”
“Yeah, right.”
He tickled my toes and I giggled. “I do,” he said. “You’re the cutest pregnant woman around.”
I sighed. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew Kat. She’s gorgeous. She looks like a supermodel who happens to have swallowed a basketball. A very neat, petite little basketball.”
Peter reached his arms around my waist and heaved me on to his lap, grunting loudly. “I prefer women who look like basketballs, not women who look like they swallow them.”
I leaned against his chest, first checking to make sure that I wasn’t crushing the life out of him. Why am I one of those pregnant women who blows up to cosmic proportions? Why can’t I be like Kat, or like the other Santa Monica matrons at my yoga studio?
“How about a root beer float?” Peter asked.
Aha. The answer to my question. “Sure,” I said, rolling off his lap.
I followed my husband out to the kitchen, and while he scooped vanilla ice cream into the soda fountain glasses he’d bought me for our anniversary the year before, I mused aloud about Alicia Felix’s career.
“Maybe she stopped getting parts because she got too thin,” I said. “It was disgusting. She looked like an Auschwitz survivor.”
Peter popped the top off four different bottles of root beer. He was involved in a systematic and painstaking analysis of all commercial root beer brands, including ones available only over the Internet at shocking prices. There were literally two hundred single bottles and cans of root beer taking over our pantry. Every night we had to taste-test at least a few. And I wondered why I was so fat. He carefully poured root beer into the ice cream–filled glasses, careful not to the let any liquid foam over the top.
“I doubt that’s why she stopped getting cast,” he said. “There’s no such thing as too thin in Hollywood. You would not believe what some of those starlets look like in their bikinis.”
Peter’s most recent film, The Cannibal’s Vacation, was shot on an island in Indonesia. He was currently pretending to be hard at work on the prequel, Beach Blanket Bloodfest.
“Oh really? And just how careful an analysis did you make of these gorgeous women in their bathing suits?”
Actually, I was only pretending to be jealous. My husband is adorable, in that kind of thick glasses, mussy hair, skinny, and pale-skin way that seemed lately to have become so fashionable. He pretty much epitomizes nerd-chic. I’m okay-looking, for an average woman. Pretty even, when I’m not bloated with pregnancy. However, in Hollywood, pretty in a normal way just doesn’t cut it. Everyone here is beautiful, and if they aren’t naturally so, they pay top dollar to get that way. It’s enough to make anyone insecure.
“Oh, you know me,” Peter said. “Ogling all day and all night. Actually, if you want to know the truth, I did spend a lot of time looking at them. But it was more scientific curiosity. There’s something almost extraterrestrial about those skinny girls with the big boobs. They don’t look human.”
I leaned over and kissed my husband on the lips. “Thanks, honey. You’re so loyal.”
He buried his head in my chest. “At least I know these are real.” He sat up and handed me a root beer float. “Taste this one.”
I slurped.
“This one any better?” He handed me the other glass.
“I guess so. But honestly, honey, they all taste more or less the same to me.”
He shook his head and sighed. “You have such a primitive palate.”
I took another long sip, and said, “Delicious. So, if the concentration camp look isn’t a deterrent, then why hasn’t Alicia Felix been able to get any work for the past five years?”
Peter lifted his head and got his own drink. “How old was she?”
“I don’t know.”
He went to the living room and retrieved his computer. He clicked back to the TV-Phile site.
“Says here that she was born in 1973.”
I wrinkled my brow. “So she’s thirty?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her first credit is as ‘Bereaved Young Mother’ on St. Elsewhere in 1983. Something tells me that by ‘young’ they didn’t mean ten years old. She’s got to have been at least twenty then. Or been able to play twenty. That makes her birthdate no later than 1963. Or 1964, if she could play old.”
I leaned forward and stared at the screen. “No way. She took ten years off her age?”
“It’s pretty common,” Peter said. “You wouldn’t believe who shows up when we put out a casting call for a high school student. Women your age walk in and try to fake seventeen!”
“That old and decrepit, huh?” I said.
“You know what I mean. You’re young and gorgeous, but, baby, I hate to break it to you, you ain’t seen twenty in a long, long time.”
“Fifteen years,” I said.
“Yeah, well, for an actress like Alicia Felix, thirty-five is old, and forty is the kiss of death. If she was that old, that explains why her career dried up.”
I sighed, slurping up the rest of my drink. “That just sucks,” I said.
Peter nodded.
“Why is it okay for some of these ancient actors to play virile young men well into their sixties and seventies, but a forty-year-old woman can’t get work?”
Peter opened his mouth, but I didn’t allow him to get a word in edgewise. I was on a roll. “I mean, do they really expect us to believe that some gorgeous thirty-year-old would ever be married to Sean Connery, or Michael Douglas? Those guys are like sixty years old!”
“Um, babe?”
“What?”
“Catherine Zeta-Jones. Married to Michael Douglas.”
“Oh. Right. Still . . .”
“It’s unfair,” Peter said. “But that’s Hollywood. Just be grateful you’re not in the business.”
“Poor Alicia. It doesn’t look like she was in the business anymore, either.”