“Whatever they are, they’re about one step up from sweatpants,” said the lady, pulling a bottle of water out of her fringed leather hobo bag. A rabbit’s foot, dyed green, was clipped to its strap. She held out her hand to me. “Janie Segal.”

“Of the carpet Segals,” said Kate. “My partner.”

“Could you not tell people that?” said Janie. “Not when you’re dressed as a homeless person. It doesn’t reflect well on my taste.”

“I’m Bettina Croft,” I said, feeling a little dizzy.

Janie lifted her arched eyebrows. “Of the Marcus Crofts?” She raised her fist. I’d seen enough TV to know to bump it lightly with my own. “Respect.”

“Bettina is a client,” said Kate, looking flustered.

“Cool,” said Janie, getting up. “Holler if you need me. Actually, don’t holler. I’m going to have a disco nap.”

She trit-trotted away. The heels on her boots narrowed until the part that actually bore her weight was barely the thickness of a sewing needle. Amazing. “Janie works nights,” said Kate, sliding into the rolling chair behind her desk.

“Ah,” I said.

“Back to business.” Kate pulled a contract out of a desk drawer, and I skimmed it, then took out my checkbook and glanced at my watch. They gave associates an hour for lunch at Kohler’s, and while I was confident that my bosses would indulge me if I was ten or fifteen minutes late, I didn’t like to take advantage. The only reason I’d gotten the job, I was sure, was because my mother had used Kohler’s to sell some of her things before moving to the ashram: they’d handled the auction of her pearls and her cocktail rings and the little Monet, a painting of a pond with lilies washed in lemony sunlight, which my dad had given her as a tenth-anniversary gift. There’d been two hundred applicants for my entry-level job, my supervisor had told me, and that was without Kohler’s even advertising anywhere, just word of mouth. I wasn’t sure if her intention was to make me work harder, but that’s what I’d done. Most mornings, I was the first one into the Crypt, a windowless chamber filled with reference books, jeweler’s loupes, and special raking lamps where the junior appraisers did the preliminary evaluations of lots of coins or jewelry collections or paintings we might take on for auction. I didn’t want anyone thinking that I was spoiled or entitled.

“Well, let’s get down to it,” said Kate. “We’ll see what we can see. But meanwhile — and this is none of my business, but I give all my clients this speech anyhow — you should be thinking about what you’re going to do with the information.”

I nodded, but of course I’d already made up my mind. I would find out the truth — that India wasn’t really named India; that she wasn’t really thirty-eight, that she’d probably never been to college and that maybe she’d been married before. Maybe she even had children, starter kids she’d pawned off on someone else so that she could present herself as young and fresh and untainted. I would give my father the facts, and he would, gently but firmly, send India away. Then maybe someday there’d be a knock on the door, and my mother would be there, smelling of patchouli and musk, her feet bare, her hair gray and her eyes soft and regretful. I’ve made a terrible mistake, she’d say. . and my father would open the door and let her in.

I walked back to work, through the soft spring afternoon, and bought lunch from a cart on Forty-eighth Street. “Pretty lady,” said the vendor, scooping the hot dog out of the vat of steaming water.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling myself blush. I’d never learned how to take a compliment, as my mother had more than once pointed out, and I wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t fat, precisely, but I was flat-chested and full-hipped, fifteen or twenty pounds more than what I thought I should weigh. I had nice skin that tanned easily, and all the pieces of my face were fine on their own — my nose, not too big; my eyes, a pretty hazel — but together, they added up to something less than beauty. My best feature was my hair, thick and glossy, somewhere between red and chestnut, that hadn’t been cut since I’d been in high school. From the back, at certain angles, I could look nice, but from the front, I had problems. My teeth were too big. Either that or my lips were too thin, or my gums were abnormally large, or something…

“Miss?” The cart guy was brandishing my dog. “Ketchup? Mustard?”

I shook my head and paid him, putting my change in my pocket and stepping into the air-conditioned, church-like hush of Kohler’s marble-floored, chandelier-lit lobby. I’d done what I could — told my story, paid my retainer. Now I’d have to wait and see.


INDIA

The last man I’d loved before Marcus was a guy named Kevin. I was living in Los Angeles when I met him. I was twenty-three and had been trying to make it as an actress for four years. I had had more or less concluded that my future might hold many things, but superstardom on screens big or small was not among them.

I wasn’t great, but I’d been good enough to land a manager, a man named Travis Martin. He had olive skin and bristling eyebrows and eyes so brown they were almost black. I suspected that his name was something else, something more ethnic, but I never asked. Travis tried to get me actual paying roles. He also got me bigger boobs and a slightly smaller nose.

“No offense — I think they’re adorable,” he’d said, eyeing my breasts the same way a housewife might consider the chickens at the market as she put dinner together in her head. “But if you want to work. .” He didn’t even bother saying the rest. I didn’t have the thousands of dollars surgery would require, and I told him so. He said he’d loan me the money, and he’d take a percentage of my checks when I started working, that it was an investment that would end up paying for itself. So I’d gone into the hospital and come out with breasts the size of grapefruits, two black eyes, and a bandage over my nose that nobody in my West Hollywood neighborhood looked at twice. The bruises had faded, and my breasts sat high and firm on my chest, but the work hadn’t come. I could sing well enough; I was a decent actress, but I lacked that special something, that gloss, that glow, that propelled an infinitesimal handful of girls each year from the open calls and go-sees to bit parts to big parts to walks down the red carpet during awards season (and then, typically, to liaisons with all the wrong men and a stint or two in rehab, but that wasn’t the part I cared about back then).

When I failed to land speaking roles, Travis got me work doing background, standing in or body doubling, along with jobs that were acting only insofar as they involved costumes. I worked for three years at a real-estate office’s annual Oktoberfest, dressed in a dirndl and black leather boots, pouring beer and passing platters of schnitzel and bratwurst from eight o’clock at night until two in the morning. The only acting I had to do was acting like I didn’t mind when the real-estate agents with gelled hair and gold chains would grab my ass or ask me to sing “Edelweiss.”

It was two a.m. the third year I worked the party, and I was thinking of nothing except counting my tips (as the night went on, men had stuffed bills into my frilly garter belts), unzipping my boots, and going home for a long, hot shower, when the cops rolled in, lights blaring, paddy wagons parked outside. The story, which I learned later that night, in jail, was that a few of the girls, like me, had come from legitimate talent-management companies, while the rest were in the employ of a soon-to-be-notorious Beverly Hills madam and had discreetly made themselves available for fun and games in a vacant three-bedroom suite.

Travis showed up with bail money, and I was released after none of the men said they’d slept with me and Travis provided W-2s to show that I really did work as an actress. We collected my belongings, my wallet and my watch, and he took me to breakfast at the Griddle, apologizing as I glared at him between gulps of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a stack of syrup-soaked pancakes. “I had no idea, Samantha,” he said, gazing at me earnestly and maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice that he had the same sculpted hair and heavy cologne as the real-estate agents at the party. . the men who, I’d heard from one of the girls in the holding cell, had paid to be fellated while balancing ashtrays on the girl’s head so they wouldn’t have to set down their hand-rolled cigars for the act.

“It’s India,” I reminded him. I’d had it legally changed right after my breasts healed. I took one last bite, set my crumpled paper napkin on top of my sticky plate, and pushed it away. “No offense, Travis, but I think I need another manager.”

His fleshy face hardened. “Wait, wait. Let’s not be hasty here. You still owe me.”

“And I’ll pay you,” I told him. “But I can’t work with you anymore.”

I got Kevin’s name from a friend of a friend of a girl I knew, someone who’d actually gotten cast in a network pilot. “He’s a baby agent,” she’d confided. I said that didn’t matter. Better a baby agent than an almost pimp.

Kevin had an office in a glass-and-marble tower in Century City. He’d gone to Rice, then moved to California and worked his way up from the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies in town. He was just signing his first clients: potty-mouthed comics who barely looked old enough to have learned the curse words they spewed onstage, wannabe starlets and fresh-off-the-bus singers and geeky fanboys who just knew they were destined to be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, mostly because their mothers had told them so.

Kevin wasn’t tall, maybe an inch or two more than my five foot six, with narrow shoulders and delicate wrists and hands. His clothes — sharply creased jeans and a checkered blue-and-white button-down shirt, a black leather belt with a silver buckle and black leather cowboy boots — were so well kept that they looked brand-new. He was losing his light-brown hair but not making a big deal about it, not attempting a comb-over or hiding beneath a baseball cap, and there was something about him, the way he looked at you when you talked, leaning close like it would hurt him to miss a word, that made you feel special.

He was a good listener, which was important for his line of work: after four years in Los Angeles I’d figured out that performers were black holes of neediness. Actors (I included myself in this tally, but at least I had good reasons to be needy) wanted to talk mostly about themselves, and they wanted you to listen, and if Kevin was prepared to do this — quietly, politely, intensely — then he’d be a success.

“Can you take me on?” I asked. He looked at my list of credits — scanty and padded, like my breasts before I’d had the work done — then gave me a look of earnest regret and shook his head. I wasn’t surprised. It was one thing to be nineteen, new in town and full of promise, but at twenty-three, if you hadn’t landed so much as a line and you’d spent four years trying, your prospects and potential had diminished considerably.

“I can’t offer you representation. However…” And he smiled, a charming grin that lit his face. “I’d love to take you to dinner.”

I figured I’d date him casually, just for fun. . a sport-fuck, as my roommate, Terri, would say, while I tried to find another agent who could get me the kind of job that meant I didn’t have to waitress, or temp, or be part of crowd scenes on cop shows, or spend all day on a gurney as an extra on ER. But then I learned that Kevin came from money. Big old family money, Houston oil money, the kind of money that meant that the art museum in town was named after your grandfather and your father had inherited one of the most legendary privately owned art collections in the world. It didn’t take long for me to abandon my dreams of stardom and decide to dream of becoming Kevin’s trophy wife instead.

Kevin lived with his brother, Carlton, who worked as an art broker. The brothers hadn’t used family connections to get their jobs, but they weren’t above using their trust funds to go in together on a spectacular penthouse apartment in an old Art Deco apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown. The apartment spanned the top floor of the twelve-story building. A fountain, with mosaic mermaids cavorting on its sides, splashed in the building’s tiled lobby, where a sad-eyed, soft-spoken Dominican man sat watching the security cameras. The boys’ place was enormous, with soaring, mostly empty white walls, high-ceilinged rooms with elaborate crown moldings, and all the latest electronics.