Nor did she complain about the fact that he still wore his wedding ring, and spent every Saturday afternoon without fail at his wife’s grave at Forest Lawn. If this was the sort of woman Jack was looking for, it was little wonder he failed to notice Kendall. But it still hurt.
As with her father, Kendall tried to get Jack’s attention by acting out, in particular bedding a string of Jester’s male acts to try to make him jealous. As with her father, the strategy failed miserably. In recent months things had hit an all-time low between the two of them. Consumed with longing and frustration and fury, Kendall had started drinking again. Two weeks ago she was breathalysed on Sunset and slapped with another DUI, her fourth. She was lucky to escape jail time. Jack, needless to say, was furious, refusing to allow her to fly with him to London for Ivan Charles’s party, an event he knew Kendall had been hugely excited about, and forcing her to stay home with a sobriety-coach-slash-jailer instead.
One day he’ll see what’s right under his nose, thought Kendall, bitterly. He’ll realize he loves me; that I’m the one who can help him get over Sonya. He’ll learn to love again. We’ll learn together.
Until that day, however, she wasn’t about to let Jack push her around. In a week’s time she’d be in London anyway, performing, and there was nothing he could do to stop her having the time of her life. Meanwhile, Kendall had no intention of joining a nunnery just to make Jack happy. Sex with her sobriety coach might not have been spectacular. But it was two fingers to Jack holier-than-thou Messenger. That alone made it worth it.
The next morning a perfect clear, blue-skied dawn broke over Los Angeles, just as Lex Abrahams was brewing his second pot of coffee on the stove. Lex rarely slept more than four or five hours a night and was always up before six. Years spent on the road as a photographer, flying from continent to continent at the whim of his famous, rock-star clients, had left him immune to jet lag and to exhaustion generally. Which was a good thing, as he now worked for Jack Whip-Cracker Messenger as Jester’s in-house photographer; a dream job as long as you didn’t mind insane hours, capricious artists and a pay packet that barely covered your rent and bills.
Happily, Lex didn’t. Photography was his life, music his business, and Jack Messenger one of the nicest, most decent men he had ever met. All in all, Lex Abrahams considered himself one of the luckiest twenty-eight-year-olds on the planet.
Especially this morning. This morning he got to see Kendall, to show her the first images from last week’s shoot for her new album cover. If Lex did say so himself, the pictures were awesome. For once in his life, he was actually going to impress Kendall Bryce. And, as Lex Abrahams knew perhaps better than anyone, that took some doing.
Pouring molasses-thick coffee into a red tin mug, into which he had heaped four spoons of sugar and a generous dash of Coffee-mate, Lex wandered out onto his patio. He loved it out here in the early mornings. It was a small space, basically just a gravel courtyard with a table, two chairs and a lone orange tree, but it was a sun-trap and it made his bijou one-bedroom apartment feel twice its actual size. At Kendall’s suggestion, Lex had recently screwed a vintage mirror to the rear patio wall, to make the garden look bigger. He peered at his reflection in it now, not out of vanity but because it was there, and saw what he always saw: a stocky, slightly too short Jewish man with dark curly hair, a long but not unattractive nose, and light-blue eyes that looked as if they’d been stolen from somebody else, somebody Swedish and blond … a surfer, maybe. If it weren’t for the eyes, Lex Abrahams would have been the most Jewish-looking Jew he knew. Ironically, given that he’d been raised in a totally non-religious household, wasn’t remotely kosher, and didn’t know the inside of a synagogue from a packet of peas. Still, as a photographer with a rare gift for capturing the idiosyncracies and beauty of the human face, Lex was glad he had ‘a look’. Occasionally he wished it were more the sort of look that girls like Kendall Bryce swooned over. A taller, blonder, more regular-featured look. But, generally, Lex Abrahams was comfortable in his skin, a fact reflected in his never-changing wardrobe of faded Levi jeans, white T-shirt and Target flip-flops.
Kendall’s pictures were on the patio table. In between sips of coffee, Lex leafed through them, trying to choose the best three for her perusal. Ever since his first job for Maroon 5, aged nineteen, Lex had learned never to give a client more than three images to choose from, especially for an album cover. Large files of JPEGs had a habit of causing major brain malfunction amongst musicians. They engendered indecision, irascibility and panic. Lex was a firm believer in physical prints laid out on a table, one, two, three. Of course, Kendall was a slightly different case. For all the dysfunction and imbalance of their relationship, Lex and Kendall were genuine friends.
Friends. How Lex had come to loathe that word. The truth – the tragic, pathetic, undeniable truth – was that Lex Abrahams was in love with Kendall Bryce. Of course, he had never declared his love and never would. To do so would be as futile a gesture as shouting at the TV when your team was losing, or calling up Graydon Carter and suggesting he forget about Leibovitz and hire you to do Vanity Fair’s next editorial shoot with the Obamas. Wishing it were so was one thing. Announcing your hopeless pipe dreams to the world was quite another. Kendall was as far out of Lex’s league as an NFL career was out of the reach of your average high-school footballer. Friends were as much as they would ever be. He should be grateful.
But, even as a friend, Lex yearned for Kendall’s approval. Deep down, part of him clung to a belief that if she truly valued him as an artist, a real talent, she might one day look past his mediocre exterior and see someone worth loving, worth being loved by.
The three photographs he plucked from the pile were unquestionably works of art, although Lex hesitated to take full credit for them. Who, after all, could make Kendall Bryce look anything other than perfect? The first two were body shots. Taken in the desert at dusk, beside a lone thorn tree, Kendall’s torso and arms were twisted in a mirror image of the tree’s trunk and branches. You could make out her face in profile, but the key to the image was her bare back and the billowing plumes of black hair cascading over her shoulders. The third picture was a straightforward head shot. Shot on old-fashioned film, in black and white, it captured a side of Kendall not generally glimpsed by the public. With her eyes wide and her face free of make-up, she looked young, vulnerable, emotionally naked. This was Lex’s favorite, but he doubted Kendall would pick it and Jester wouldn’t force the issue. Subjects rarely liked the portraits that dared to tell them the truth.
Lex walked back inside. Slipping the three prints into a fresh envelope, he carefully filed the rest and sat down to work on some editing. It would be four hours at least until Kendall was awake and up to receiving visitors, so he might as well get some work done.
By the time he next looked up, it was noon. How the hell had that happened? Quickly brushing his teeth and spritzing on some aftershave (Kendall had once mentioned that she found CK One a sexy scent, and Lex had worn it religiously ever since, to no noticeable effect), he jumped in his leased Nissan and headed towards Brentwood.
For once traffic was good. Ten minutes later, Lex turned the corner into Brentwood Park. Jack Messenger’s house was on a private road, but the security guard at the gate knew Lex well and waved him through. Every time he came here, Lex was reminded of the immense financial gulf that existed between music managers and photographers. Like Jack, Lex was at the very top of his profession, one of the most well-respected snappers in the record business. As well as countless iconic album covers, he’d shot Pepsi commercials and award-winning live concert footage for bands as diverse as Aerosmith and The Dixie Chicks. But somehow the great music industry money tree failed to drop riches on Lex Abrahams’ head the way it rained them down on the likes of Jack Messenger and Ivan Charles. And Kendall Bryce, of course, although nobody doubted that the artists would do well. They were the talent, the raison d’être.
Kendall’s my raison d être, Lex thought idly as he pulled up outside the Messenger mansion. Jack’s house was an Arts and Crafts
