In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel by Shari Goldhagen Read Free Book Online Page B

weeks ago, her father and Gennifer had been in town and taken Adam and her to The Palm. While Gen had squeezed Phoebe’s arm in the ladies’ room and pronounced Adam “a doll,” her dad had barely contained a grimace when she’d said Adam was an actor, and he’d taken strange issue with Adam calling him “Dr. Fisher” instead of Larry.
    Phoebe doesn’t mention this. Nor does she ask if Adam is going to Florida. In February, after he shot the Goners pilot and he and Phoebe were hooking up, Adam had flown his mother out to visit, but he never goes home.
    She tells him Melissa, another hostess at the restaurant, is having an orphans’ Thanksgiving in Culver City (doesn’t ask if he slept with Melissa, who had asked Phoebe for his number last year after Phoebe and Adam’s acting class had come in for drinks).
    “We can do that if you stick around,” Adam says, and she thinks this might be his way of asking her to.
    “That’d be fun.”
    Still arm in arm, they walk the remaining ten minutes in silence. In her vampire life of afternoon auditions and Rosebud shifts all night, she’s rarely out in the world this early and is surprised by the sheer number of people (in cars, mostly in cars) being productive. A lot of them are actually lining up to vote at the hotel lobby.
    “We could skip this and get coffee.” Gently she squeezes his shoulder, sinewy muscle under cotton. “Gore’s winning California with or without us.”
    “You trust someone else to make decisions for you?” He grins; he may not be the best-looking guy in LA, not even the best-looking guy in their queue (it is Studio City), but when he smiles, she’d challenge any jaded person in this whole jaded city not to turn to microwaved butter. It’s the first time she’s seen it in a long time, and she wonders if this means Adam is off the couch for good, ready to take his rightful place as the only aspiring actor in this ghetto of aspiring actors she’s certain will make it. Wonders if tonight she’ll be fucking another voter.
    *   *   *
    The election has all but been called for Gore by the time Phoebe pulls open Rosebud’s famous bronze door around six.
    Other than the sleek television sets above the bar, the place looks almost the same as it does in the pictures from the forties and fifties, when Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis Jr., and Marilyn Monroe used to sip champagne cocktails and nibble veal chops in red leather banquettes.
    “Hey, dollface.” Burke—the flamboyant fan-favorite bartender—waves her to the bar lining one wall of the enormous restaurant’s front room. “Try this.” He hands her a tumbler of something fruity-smelling and brown.
    Taking a sip, she shudders.
    “It’s a Tennessee—rye whiskey, cherry liqueur, and lemon juice,” he says. “Looks like Gore’s gonna win, so I figured we needed an appropriate cocktail.”
    Two hours and 180 tables later, things are beginning to look a lot less sure for Gore, and Burke is mixing a drink called Texas Tea. On the TVs mounted between the shelves of liquor bottles, the NBC political guy is doing something wonky with a whiteboard every time Phoebe peeks over. By ten the place is packed, everyone maudlin. From what she gathers between seating guests, Florida has now been given to Bush.
    A cheer erupts around eleven, but she doesn’t have time to see what’s going on because Jake James, Commander Jason Bryce himself, sashays past four waiting parties and requests a table for his group of six stoned-looking dudes in jeans and T-shirts. A check of the book isn’t necessary; Phoebe knows he doesn’t have a reservation, and all the large tables are booked until the kitchen closes at midnight.
    “We’d love something outside,” Jake James says without actually looking at her. It’s a consolation that in her four-inch heels she’s taller than him.
    His last few movies were box office and critical roadkill, and Jake has done his tour of the rehab circuit, but he’s