Love or Something Like It: A Novel

Book by Shaw Deirdre

Part One
The Summertime Party

 The first time we got lost on the way, winding up into the hills, crawling by mailboxes, peering at house numbers, finally spotting the gates by complete accident, the valet practically hiding in the bushes for godssakes. Inside, the host greeted us. He was Toby’s boss and the host of a late-night TV show, and after shaking my hand, he immediately spirited Toby away to an alcove and spoke to him in earnest tones about the day before’s diminished ratings. I moved away and stood awkwardly alone by the bar, trying not to look in the direction of any celebrities, who, it seemed to me, considered it an affront if a layperson so much as glanced at them. 

This, I suspected, was why they had gathered in celebrity-only clumps around the house, though I had the sense that their behavior wasn’t particular to this party. There was one such clump on the patio by the pool, just outside the open French doors, where they were all huddled together on several chaise longues: the retired but still beautiful 1970s model, the former Saturday Night Live cast member, a young movie actor whose cachet, like that of a wealthy fraternity boy, was somehow increased by his being known as an asshole. I made these identifications only after several furtive glances and soon felt I couldn’t risk another, so I spent the rest of the time reading the labels on the bottles of wine sitting on the bar. 

Finally Toby reappeared, along with the host, who stuck his hand out to shake mine. “Nice to meet you,” he said slickly, barely looking at me, and when I said out of reflex, “Oh, but we’ve already—” he stopped me and said without a smile, “I’m just kidding.” 

I was twenty-nine and had only just moved to Hollywood, having met and fallen in love with Toby eight months earlier while he was visiting New York— I’d been in the audience at a comedy club where he was doing stand-up; he’d heckled me from the stage, then come up to me afterward to apologize. This was my first celebrity party. So though it annoyed me that if people spoke to me at all they did it while constantly scanning the room for someone of higher stature to talk to, being annoyed by it was a cliché; it was what everyone had complained about when I’d asked them what Hollywood was like. And so I moved past it and instead took in the room with a sense of gratitude. This was the kind of party that I had previously only managed to spy on via the pages of InStyle magazine. I was lucky just to be here, I told myself, and being here was enough. 

Toby and I kept mainly to ourselves that night. We spoke only with a few other lowly talk-show writers; Toby was a TV writer, and outside of Hollywood his job monopolized conversations; I was a newspaper reporter with the education beat, an occupation that guaranteed my status here as a nobody. We ate alone at a candlelit table out by the pool, and then we smoked cigarettes on the front patio, eyeing the celebrities as they came and went along the steep front steps. 

We left early that night, thanking the host and skittering down the granite steps, bursting with a strange feeling of relief that we were young and undiscovered. But it was Toby’s boss’s party, and this man, possessing an astonishingly mistaken sense of his own permanence in the town, had made it clear that he had a vision—his parties would become Hollywood legends, the town’s hottest tickets. A few months later, another invitation appeared in the mail. And so we went. 

“Nice to meet you,” said the host again, but this time it wasn’t a joke, and I just shook his hand and smiled. I drank too much early in the evening so I could get up the nerve to look at the celebrities, and I hid in a corner, talking about elementary schools with the unfamous wife of a famous movie actor. Later Toby came to get me to smoke a cigarette and we stood with a few other writers on the small front patio, listening to the chatter of the guests inside the house. Again I felt the silent rules: the unspectacular people should gather here, should speak only when spoken to. Three months had passed since I’d moved to Hollywood, and I had spent them mainly covering school board meetings for a tiny neighborhood paper in Pacific Palisades. Toby and I had been nesting at home; at night we cooked and watched movies and cuddled on the couch. Now I wondered how Toby fared in this town of secrets that lay so close to the surface. “A four-three seven on a Wednesday night, and the demo’s a three,” I’d heard earlier as I’d passed through the living room. What could it mean? I imagined Hollywood as a brick castle; outsiders circled it looking for a door. Once you knew the password, a trapdoor opened, a magical world revealed. Now I looked at Toby; in his preppy white shirt and khakis, he was so sweet and fresh. The men at this party wore black shirts with black ties. They knew something that Toby didn’t, I thought, but I didn’t know what. 

Just then the door to the patio swung open and we looked up, and there was Merv Griffin. He wore a green sport coat and he had a thin brown cigarillo in his hand. 

He approached us and Toby offered him a light. 

“Thank you,” said Merv, and then he was quiet. 

“Did you come to the last one?” I asked him, because no one else said anything. He looked at me. “I did, my dear, and it was just as awful as this one.” 

I let out a barking laugh, and he laughed, too. 

Then the patio door opened again, and a man stepped out and then a woman. I recognized them immediately. They were a young couple, both pop singers, eccentric, very cool. They were known, but not by the masses; their fans were people who listened to more than Top 40. They had been popular when I was in college. The girl wore a pin-striped ochre suit with an ochre tie, her purposely stringy black hair and nerdy glasses still not able to obscure her beauty; his retro gray suit was reminiscent of flapper days. They were dressed by Hollywood standards. But they were awkward and self-conscious; they lit their cigarettes and looked at the ground. 

Their evident insecurity coupled with my confident afterglow from talking with Merv made me turn and say stupidly, “I guess there’s no chance of getting you guys to sing for us tonight, huh?” 

The guy looked at me coolly. “You’re kidding, right?” 

I turned away. I was humiliated, my cheeks burned. But then I thought, Well, who the hell are they, really? Washed-up singers. I’ll never see them again anyway. 

But later in the evening, when Toby and I took our plates from the buffet and walked up a few steps onto the patio by the pool, looking for a table, there they were, the only ones sitting at a table set for ten. 

“Should we?” I whispered to Toby, staring straight ahead. 

“Why not,” he said with a shrug. 

So we went and sat down with them, leaving a seat between her and me. We introduced ourselves, using first names only, and they did the same: Charlotte and Jack. We somehow began chatting about the high divorce rate among the party guests, which led me to ask if they were married, though of course I knew very well from reading People that they were—they had married in Hollywood a few years earlier in a suite at the Chateau Marmont; she had worn a blood-red dress. And they began to tell us about their wedding, how his brother (also a famous musician) had brought his horrible children and they had tipped over the cake, and how they therefore strongly advised us— were we to ever marry—not to invite children to our wedding, at which we all laughed, and Toby said, “At least not your brother’s children,” and then somehow, suddenly, we began to hit it off. 

They admitted their suspicion that they were being used—invited to this party just to lend the host a little edge—and they didn’t know why they continued to come, because they didn’t know how to handle themselves with all these mainstream celebrities, and we laughed and Toby said, “Eh, it ain’t that hard,” and I watched with pride how at ease Toby seemed in the conversation—with celebrities!—and then later, when Merv came up the stairs, looking for a seat, for some reason he took the one in between Charlotte and me, and then he gave Toby and me advice on where to go on an upcoming vacation—The French Riviera will bore you to tears, he announced; try Italy or Ibiza instead—and then more celebrities came over and sat down, until the very host himself came with his plate and sat, having decreed ours the best table in the house. 

“This ain’t so bad, huh?” Toby leaned over and said to Charlotte and Jack at one point, and winked. And they laughed and I could tell they agreed; they were having fun now, thanks to us. 

Later the four of us went inside to the great room, by the grand piano, and we all sat on a couch together, and I was drunk. “How come you don’t have children?” I asked, realizing at once how inappropriate it was but pushing on anyway. They...