ACT II: Scene 6
Move Yer Bloomin’ [Frogs]
BEVERLY HILLS & HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, COMPLETE WITH RED CARPET
Wherein our hero makes a bit of a splash.
“Back story?” He was buttoning his shirt, grabbing his tuxedo’s tie, and tying it in a perfect bow without a look. It wasn’t even one of those clip-each-side numbers like guys got for the prom back where I came from. At some point in the past, he must not have been so down on his luck, considering how automatically he formed the knot with each side an even length. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I still sprawled on the couch, staring too agog at his amazing transformation to move quite yet. So what if I openly admired the work we’d done? Painters and sculptors had to inspect their progress.
Ours was coming along fine. Just fine.
“It’s the information we need to invent about your life so that we have both our stories straight, if we get asked by anyone.” And believe me, we were both going to get asked. People who saw me come in with him were going to sidle up and pester me for details about who the hottest guy on planet Hollywood tonight was.
The grandfather clock beside the grand piano struck seven. If we were going to make it for the seven-thirty event, we’d better scoot.
“Miss Eliza?” Terrence poked his head in the door, as if he’d been awaiting the clock’s chime. “Are you and Mr. Lyon ready to go? You both look very nice, I must say.”
Henry came over and extended a hand to lift me from my spot on the couch. Good thing, too, considering the dress’s tight fabric and sequins likely to pop everywhere, just like the fireworks in my chest popping at the touch of Henry’s hand.
“Thank you,” I said once balancing on my feet again. I took his elbow, since I didn’t wear heels often in my Nanny to the Snobs life, especially because I dwarfed Mo-No as it was. But even in my heels, I didn’t reach Henry’s height. Something about that made him even more attractive to me in the moment, which thing shouldn’t have been physically possible, considering that he’d already knocked me down with his pheromones when he breezed into the room. “I’m probably going to need help both in and out of the car, as well. This is Polly’s dress and it’s dangerously snug.”
“Yes, it is.” His eyes roamed over my dress as he helped me into the back seat of the Rolls. “You clean up gorgeous, Eliza.”
Gorgeous? My neck flushed hot again. He kept making that happen.
Yeah, he’d have no trouble with the charm requirement of this assignment. I let that worry drop from my extremely long list of misgivings.
“So. My back story, eh?” Henry slid onto the back seat, much closer to me than I’d expected. “Let’s start with what you have in mind.”
At this moment the only thing I had in mind was Henry Lyon and the way his scent filled my entire head.
He flashed me a flirtatious look, and then when he reached across me for a bottled drink, whatever cologne Terrence had chosen wafted around me. That chauffeur deserved a raise.
“What’s your fantasy about my past, present and future?”
Fantasy? I gulped. I wasn’t the kind of girl who let her mind get carried away by fantasies about men, especially not about homeless men who thought they owned the bus station. At least not until this very moment when his wording prompted one. With all haste I gave my mind a sweeping-out, but I soon realized it might take an industrial broom to ouster the fluttering images of dancing with Henry’s strong arms, walking on the beach with him, and taking him to meet Black Jack.
“Because I was thinking my story could be, pretty obviously, that I’m from Oz.”
I returned to earth from whatever galaxy I’d been visiting to respond to his idea.
“Oz?” I blinked a few times. As in The Wizard of…?
“You know. Oz,” he said. “Of if you’re going to be bogan, call it Straya.”
“Strayer College? Sure. That’s…we’ll. It’s good. It’s unique. Not something someone would suspect or double-check on because it’s just specific and just generic enough no one would bother.”
Henry put down his Evian bottle and eyed me, as if I hadn’t understood his meaning.
“I guess Yanks just say Australia.” He emphasized each syllable: Au-stray-li-ah. I closed my eyes in a touch of shame. Some linguistics expert I was.
Even if by some miracle or bribe I received my Ph.D. someday, from this moment on I knew I’d never deserve it. I’d have to refuse, hand back any proffered diploma.
“Right,” I choked out. “Perfect, since you’ve already practiced and perfected the accent. It’s perfect. Perfect.” I was repeating myself, but this was because my eyes had strayed to his teeth again. Perfect, like his teeth when he smiled at me like he was doing now and emptying my head of every other word in the dictionary besides perfect.
“Actually, you’re interesting, Elizer. What’s your back story?” He cocked his head to the side, possibly laughing at me. At least he held a gut-busting laugh dancing in his eyes, if not impolitely exploding from his lips. Oh, he did have nice lips… Chapped, from the sun… They needed a balm. I could probably offer him a little of the gloss on my own lips, since I forgot to pack any in my handbag.
“Do you hail from all this Los Angeles mayhem originally?” His question grounded me again.
“Me? Oh, gracious no.” I shuddered. “Not me.”
He took another drink of his water bottle. “Knew it.”
“You knew what?” When he didn’t do more than tap his temple at my inquiry, I was forced to explain. “Good guess. I grew up about as far from Hollywood and Beverly Hills as you can get culturally and still be in the state of California. I’ve had to shoot more actual rattlesnakes with my .22 than all the Hollywood movie rattlesnake shootings combined.”
“You.” He raised a brow. “You can shoot.”
“Only when I have to, but don’t sound so incredulous. It’s generally only snakes. But I had to shoot a coyote once. It had a lamb by the neck.”
“I hate coyotes.” He shuddered, as if hearing a coyote’s yowl at close range in this very moment. “Most people say wolves are worse. Or dingoes. And everyone thinks hyenas are worse. But I’ll take all three of those wild dog situations over coyotes every day.” He finished his water. “When I was in the desert, I could hear them in the distance, you know? But then night fell, dark and purple, and the coyotes circled me, so I didn’t dare sleep with both eyes shut. Wore me thin.”
Oh, we were back in the desert again. Darn. That little conversational tangent brought me crashing back to earth, reminding me that this was Henry Lyon, a man who hailed helicopters in the sky and owned the bus station.
I fell crashing back to reality with a thunderous clunk.
“We aren’t getting anywhere with your back story, man.” I cleared my throat, trying to clear my burning shame as well. “Let’s focus.”
I almost wished I had brought a pen and paper to take notes so I didn’t forget later. This was too important to mess up. Then again, any kind of paper trail could be dangerous for us. We had to be careful.
“Options. What are our options? We’ve got construction firm—but in the back country. Professional gold miner.” I had to make sure we stuck with big money potential, but also with basics. Nothing too refined, or if his manners slipped into Bus Station Manners, he’d be suspect. The risks of this scheme slammed me hard yet again. “Wait! I know. Oil!”
Oil could be so unrefined it needed a refinery as a huge component of its industry in general. It was perfect.
Except Henry didn’t seem to agree. He cleared his throat.
“How about…what do you call it?” He looked away and back. “Cattle rancher.” He reached over and took my hand, uncurling each finger of my fist that I hadn’t realized I’d been clenching, and sending me back into the stratosphere, despite how loony I knew him to be. “Let’s have my story be—” he stroked my index finger “—I’m an Australian.” He stroked my thumb. “I run a huge cattle operation in the high country.” He followed along with each of my other fingers while I blinked back all the surging hormones my systems had sent into overdrive. “I’m here in the States exploring top-secret business opportunities.”
I heard the words. They went into my ear canals, but I didn’t process them at all. His fingertips were now sliding along the back of my hand, and then across my palm and my fingers again, and the only one of my five senses I could compute was touch, it was so engrossing. Showers of tingles filled every cell and molecule of me.
After a bit of my stunned silence, he said, “How does that sound, Eliza?” He said my name, with the Elizer accent again, and my sense of hearing kicked back in. “Cattle baron?”
“Right.” I gulped once, and then again. “Cattle baron.” That would explain any lack of polish, as well as the cowboy walk, and the great tan for this time of year. Wasn’t it the dead of summer there right now, while we were leading up to Christmas here in the northern hemisphere?
Perfect.
“Perfect,” I breathed.
“Perfect,” he said, lifting my hand and giving it a kiss, and turning my insides from mere tingling sparklers to the full-on Fourth of July. “A cattle baron might win any girl’s heart. Even a nanny’s.”
Uh-huh, I thought, blinking.
He was going to do just fine. We’d roll with it.
The Rolls rolled to a stop at a curb. A moment later, it pulled forward one car length. And again, another moment later, the car’s smooth ride inching us toward destiny at the end of a red carpet.
Terrence rolled down the glass window between the front and back seats. “We have arrived, Miss Eliza.”
Showtime.
***
The first moment of truth loomed. I glanced at Henry. “You nervous?”
Did he have any idea what effect he was going to have?
He couldn’t possibly. When we left Pickering Place, he hadn’t even looked in the mirror to see how slayingly sharp he looked in that dark jacket and stark white shirt, like he belonged in a 1950s heist movie with the Rat Pack themselves.
“It’ll be all right.” He put a hand on his door. “Wait there. I’ll give you a hand out,” he said, and he sprang out of the Rolls and came around to grab my door before Terrence could even fully stop. Henry took my hand in his and lifted me from the car onto wobbling ankles. With that roughened skin on his palms, like the ranch-workers’ hands back home, he placed my arm through his and propelled the both of us onto the stretch of red carpet, where a few camera bulbs still flashed for the couple in front of us I recognized as faded TV stars.
Well, the callused hands would be another detail that corroborated with his cattle ranch story. They certainly convinced me of several things at once.
I had to shut off all this hormonal firestorm, though, or I’d be a gelatinous mess and ruin the effect we’d spent all afternoon trying to accomplish.
Yes, Henry Lyon might be off his nut, but I was trusting him with everything right now, from my wobbly ankles to my dignity in general.
“Who’s that?”
Voices floated over the din to the sides of us.
“I don’t know.”
“She looks like Isla, but that’s not Sacha.”
“You know, he looks like a tall, younger Clint.”
“She looks like Heidi, but that’s not Seal.”
“He looks like Charlton resurrected.”
Apparently, it got to be too much for Henry. He tipped an imaginary hat at them.
“G’day, mates.”
A general swoon went up, followed by a chorus of sighs. Oh, brother.
“He’s Australian.”
“I love Australians.”
“It’s not Keith, is it? Because that’s not Nicole.”
It went on and on as we strolled at a dismayingly slow speed down the carpet toward the frogs and their choking sand. Then I heard, over all the chatter, Henry laughing to himself. At least he was having a good time, and even embracing it. I let out a held breath as we stepped off the end of carpet at last and into the theater lobby.
From there, the entrance to the theater itself gaped before us. I wanted to make a run for it, or claim needing a break in the ladies’, but Henry had me firmly at his elbow, and he led us inside where we looked for our seats.
“That’s the star, over there.” I pointed to the center section of the old theater with its red velvet seats and curtains hung beside the silver screen. “He also bankrolled the picture.” I’d done some internet research this afternoon. “Mainly, our goal should be to not insult him.”
“You mean by guffawing when the film is wallaby dung?”
Exactly. No guffawing. At all. Whatsoever.
“Maybe when asked we should say, ‘Isn’t to our taste.’” With tutoring—even at this late stage—maybe I could refine Henry’s edges a touch. Maybe.
“You know it’s going to be wallaby dung. Come on.” He helped me into my seat and sat beside me, resting his arm across the back of my chair and leaning in to speak in my ear. “It’s movies like these everyone secretly hates, but they say they love them so they can sound smart in front of the tall poppies.”
Tall poppies? Oh, he meant important people by that. At last my old brain dredged up an Aussie slang factoid from a college class. Add that to snags and mashed spuds, and I was batting one percent at this point. Marvelous.
“But you and I, Elizer, we don’t give a rip what the tall poppies think. We’re removed from all that fakery.”
I blinked. These were my thoughts precisely. “I—”
Nope, I couldn’t tell him so, or—wild card that he still was—he might go expressing that opinion to someone we met later in the night. The dreaded cocktail after-party still loomed, which would be the big litmus test of whether we could pass him off among the even more elite crowd of San Nouveau.
Lights dimmed, and the movie started. He kept his arm across the back of my seat. Partway through the first act, it slid to where it was touching my shoulder. In the second act, it caressed the back of my neck, warming me through. At the point when the heroine rubbed her head with Nair hair remover in a symbol of her misery, Henry leaned in and put a hot whisper in my ear.
“This movie is tripe.” The words were secondary to the sensation of his breath against my bare skin. Musk and spice and soap and heaven all floated around in there, blurring all thoughts for a moment. Finally I managed a retort.
“It’s somebody’s art.”
“One man’s art is another man’s tripe.”
He was right. This whole thing was tripe. Point of fact, I’d eaten tripe quite a few times. It was a staple in the New Year’s meals of menudo some of the ranch hands up from Mexico made for our family at the holidays.
A few minutes later, after the so-called hero of the movie set a pile of tires aflame in his neighbor’s yard, I had to volley back.
“Actually, I’ve had tripe. Calling this movie tripe is an insult to tripe.” I shouldn’t have said it, not when the creator of this atrocious mess sat within earshot. But my filter was gone, and I couldn’t suck the words back.
Henry gut-laughed—just as the scene changed into a moment in the show where no gut-laugh should occur. In fact, the heroine had just put her name on a form admitting herself to film school where she thought she could solve her problems. Yeah—it was funny, but the people here certainly wouldn’t think so. They’d consider it poignant.
The hot weight of angry stares pressed on the back of my neck.
Yeah, we should probably skip the after-party.
One and three-fifths eternities later, the credits rolled. I wanted to bolt for the doors, but not another soul stood. All applauded, calling out names as they scrolled by on the screen—right down to gaffers and best boys and the third cameraman for the location shoot in Death Valley.
“Frogs.” Henry turned toward me. “In the Sand.”
“I wish they had stayed in the sand where they belonged.” Finally, ten minutes later, we stood with everyone else, at which point both my knees and my will got weak. “Let’s just go. We’ll skip the reception and just head back to Polly’s place. I’m sure you’re tired.” Frankly, I was a bucket of nerves. We’d made our way in, but no way would we be coming out alive.
“Seriously? No way.” He said way like why. “That’s the whole reason we’re here. I won’t embarrass you. I promise. Cross my heart.” He crossed his heart.
I hoped to die.
“Don’t tell me you can talk to the people who made that insult-to-intestines with a straight face, and comment on it naturally, or better, without ripping it to shreds like it deserves to be.”
“Not a chance!” He gut-laughed again as we exited into the crystal chandeliered foyer and made our way to a red carpet-covered stairway to where the after-party would be held, and where my social demise would be completed. “But I am an expert at something else: changing the subject.”
Good tactic. I’d have to try it. Brilliant.
Okay. This would be okay. I kept telling myself that all the way up the stairs to the grand ballroom on the fourth floor of the theater.
I expected us to be the first couple to arrive as we exited the elevator into the sprawling room with its elegant floors and black and gold theme of the Golden Age of Hollywood. However, there were already scores of people milling around with champagne flutes and plates of canapés and overly loud actors’ laughs spiraling to the ceiling and back down to the marble tiled floors.
“Where should we—?” I was going to say start, but then a fizz of three girls in white beaded gowns sidled up to Henry and took my question right out of my breath.
“And?” one said, while another finished the question with, “Who is this?” and the third continued with, “We heard there was someone interesting from Down Under coming up to this party tonight. Mind if we spirit him away for a bit?”
My eyes adjusted and I recognized The Twins—girls who’d been child stars and were now physically full-grown but emotionally immature versions of their child selves. Tonight their white dresses sported feathered wings at their backs. I didn’t recognize their third wheel, non-Twin. Poor thing.
“Sorry, hon. We’re spiriting him away like the angels we are. We’ll try to have him back before the sun comes up in Sydney.”
I tried to mentally calculate that—and I figured it hadn’t even gone down yet there, if I could think straight. Which I couldn’t. Too many frogs and too much sand clogged my brain.
In no time, another group of giggling women had latched onto the angels guarding Henry. Why, yes, ma’am, he was the belle of the ball, at least for the moment. It reminded me of that little spot in the Bible in the Book of Acts where Paul goes to Mars Hill and all the people there want to do is hear or tell of some new thing.
Henry Lyon was tonight’s Some New Thing in Hollywood.
A group-laugh punctuated the air from his general direction. Fear stabbed through me of what he might have just let fly from his unrefined mouth.
I had to hear this. Grabbing a few stuffed mushrooms off a passing tray, I went over to try to casually listen in.
Before I went to UCLA, this type of gathering, this concatenation of bright young things, would have made me shake in my boots—although growing up I mostly wore ropers, not full-on boots. However, working for Mo-No had cured me of all that in a mere six months. Frankly, I could see through the glitz. These were just people. People in expensive clothes, sure, but they still had to blow their noses during hay fever season, same as everyone else. I currently worked for one of the Sparkly People, or at least an aspiring one. No way could they all be as black-hearted as Monique-Noelle, but none of them were immortal—or angels—either.
Glamour’s blinding light faded fast whenever I remembered that.
“And then, we were just past the point of no return, when suddenly, my horse Gypsy takes a veer to the right, despite my spurs in her flanks, despite the fact I’m tugging her reins to the left with all my strength. And before I know it, we’re galloping at full speed down a snow-covered incline your Olympic skiers would probably call a black diamond run.” He paused for dramatic effect, and the giggle of girls obliged with a gasp of fear.
“Next, there’s a wall of eucalyptus in front of Gypsy’s nose so thick I know she’s going to founder in it. There’s nothing for it—snow flying up all around us, the winter sun beating down, the calf gone into the eucalyptus. Gypsy is determined to round up that stray calf, if she kills herself—and me—in the process.”
Well, somebody besides me had watched The Man from Snowy River a few too many times. His story mirrored it in every respect except that he was chasing a calf instead of the escaped priceless colt of the girl he loved.
Good movie choice, if he had to pick one to build his fake life around.
“Did you get to the calf? Was she saved?” A breathless young thing touched her bare collarbone, batting her lashes at him. I rolled my eyes involuntarily.
He turned his gaze on her.
“What do you think, Livs?” Oh, my word. Henry was speaking to none other than Olivia Upton. I recognized her now. And he’d given her a pet name in two seconds flat. “Do you think Gypsy saved the day?”
Livs thought a second and then, biting her bottom lip, nodded.
Henry leaned in close to her and said in a sultry tone we all could hear, “She did.”
Livs and half her friends exhaled, with a visible sway, where they had to clutch each other by the arm to stay on their feet. He had them eating out of his hand.
“Oh, there’s my gorgeous date. Bye, ladies.”
“Bye, Henry.” A few of them came up and slipped something into his pocket. Their numbers, most likely.
Oh, my goodness. So far, so amazing.
“You’re winning them, Henry. Color me impressed.”
“You’re what’s impressive, Elizer. You in blue. Have you had a chance to see how your eyes sparkle in it?”
He was turning his charm on me now. It shouldn’t be working, considering all I knew, but dang if it wasn’t. The guy not only knew all the right lingo for the horseback riding adventure story—reins and spurs and all—but he also knew all the right lingo to rope in a woman.
Blast him.
“Have you actually ridden a horse?” I had to ask him. “You were pretty convincing back there. They believed—and hung on—every word.”
“I like a good yarn.”
He took my elbow again and steered me away from the madding crowd, farther from the orchestra, which made me feel like I could talk, tell him the thing that I’d been thinking the whole time I listened to his horse tale.
“So,” I said, “I didn’t mention this in the car when you were asking for my back story, but that was the hardest thing about leaving the ranch and coming out to L.A.” I let him guide me toward a secluded corner. The orchestra was playing the score from Frogs in the Sand, so the farther the better. He backed me up against a wall, which was great for quite a few reasons. One, I could take some pressure off my toes without having to manage a sit-down. Two, wow, he was leaning in close to me.
Yeah, the closer he stepped to me, the better. My breathing sped up, to match the coursing blood in my veins. Henry was really in my space now, and combined with the cut of Polly’s dress, the closer he got, the less I could breathe.
“What was hardest? Let me guess—leaving your favorite horse.”
“You’re clairvoyant now?”
“What’s his name?” Henry even guessed right that the horse was a he.
“His name is Black Jack.” I let him step a little closer. “But I call him Black.”
That spellbinding cologne combined with his own scent, clean now, but all him, was making all four of my non-olfactory senses shut off. It whisked me out of this room onto a dry, yellow-grassed mountain, atop Black, with Henry by my side on a dapple-gray horse, to match his eyes.
When had I noticed his eyes were gray?
“But you don’t see him nowadays.”
“Never.”
Henry was mesmerizing. I was under that spell a hundred percent. And I’d better make a speedy escape before I did anything to botch this whole operation.
“I think you’re ready,” I said with all the breath I could catch under the pressurized circumstances.
“To leave?” he asked. “But we haven’t even danced yet.”
“No one can dance to this music.”
“Touché. So what am I ready for, then?”
“To brave the gauntlet that is San Nouveau.”
And to meet Monique-Noelle.