Missing you,
H.
Garda ran over to Augie Rose’s offices during lunch to apprise him of the incoming email from Hugo Sand’s 18-year-old half niece.
“Can they even write when they’re that little?” he asked.
“Her ad specified older men.”
“I’ve seen those ads but they never made any sense to me,” said Augie, escorting Garda out to lunch at Le Chardonnay.
“Dearest, you don’t understand. Younger girls adore older men. If you need to ask why you’ve probably forgotten how awkward you were at nineteen.”
“I’ve never thought much of men in their forties who run after teenaged girls,” Augie confided to Garda as they shared a bottle of wine, “I’d feel like an idiot dating one.”
“Hugo suggested you might give her some editorial work. College girls are always strapped for money, you know.”
Augie smiled at the innuendo, tremendously touched that Garda had taken such a personal interest in his happiness on such short acquaintance. He kissed Garda’s hand and murmured, “I feel so connected.” And yet he also felt a twinge of unease at the entire proposition.
Bettie Brandon’s email was waiting for Augie upon his return from lunch. It simply introduced herself and stated that Hugo Sands had indicated that Augie Rose might possibly have some freelance editorial work for her.
He sent her a reply at once, telling her to come and see him the following day.
The next afternoon at around two p.m., Augie Rose was looking out his 10th floor window when he saw Bettie Brandon get off the bus on Little Santa Monica Blvd. and begin walking up Roxbury Dr. towards his building. A slight girl with shiny black hair that hung in a waist length ponytail of tight, rippling curls, she was dressed in pegged blue jeans, a checked shirt and hiking boots.
In a few minutes Augie’s secretary was buzzing to inform him of Bettie’s arrival. Augie had her sent in directly and rose from his desk to firmly shake her hand. She was a small, olive complected beauty, delicately formed, with large, dark eyes and a wide, full mouth. After thanking him for the interview, she disposed of her backpack on the floor and timidly waited for him to speak first.
“My friend Garda tells me you could use a little freelance,” Augie began, in a detached but not unfriendly manner.
“I’m not quite sure what that means,” Bettie replied.
“Freelance means assignments you complete outside of the office. I just lost my in-house editor and have quite a few small jobs I could give you. I notice you got off the bus. Don’t you have a car?”
Bettie shook her head, saying, “It’s not a long bus ride from Westwood.”
“See those paperbacks?” Augie indicated a small stack of books with plain pastel covers and provocative titles. “I’m about to recover them and I need back cover synopses. There are eight titles there. I’ll give you $50 per synopsis.”
“Wow,” Bettie took the books and looked at them.
“You don’t have to read them. Just skim them. Give me between a hundred and a hundred and twenty words each. Think you can do that?”
“Yes.”
“By when?”
“When do you need them by?”
“Think you can do them over the weekend?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Email them to me,” Augie said by way of dismissal.
Bettie Brandon left with the books in her pack, noting that Augie Rose had barely looked at her and feeling that the handsome publisher was completely uninterested in her scene affiliations.
Bettie neglected her schoolwork all weekend to complete the assignment and was still working on it Monday morning. The sex novels were awkward and her summarizations of them lackluster. She hadn’t enjoyed the assignment and wondered how such inept writers were ever able to have their manuscripts published. She also disrespected Mr. Rose for buying and recovering such brain drool. By noon she’d received an email from Augie Rose asking her whether the assignment was finished. Bettie emailed it straight back to him, realizing it would be better to keep to her deadline than try to rework her paragraphs any longer. Then she went off to her afternoon classes and her early evening stint in the library, where she already had one part time job shelving books.
Bettie wasn’t enjoying her freshman year. She had no affinity for her roommate, a cheerleader named Randi. She hated her dorm room, with its cinderblock walls and metal desks. She missed the lush trees and refreshing rains of New England. Her instructors either confused or failed to engage her.
She had also become disenchanted with her suitor, Gilbert Rush, a driven young realtor. He however, was becoming less of a problem since beginning an affair with one of his silicon enhanced, thin, blonde associate sharks. Bettie was untroubled by the development and felt quite ready to cut Gilbert loose, for since coming to L.A. her lover’s topics of conversation had narrowed to stock options, real estate envy and designer consumerism, none of which interested the college freshman.
Bettie Brandon hated L.A. The sky was ugly and the landscape virtually devoid of trees. The air held no scent. Bright, glaring concrete and soul killing post-Bauhaus architecture set the scene for general despair. Scrawny palm trees, useless mini-malls and appalling plastic signage dominated every vista. Public transportation was a cold, unfriendly thing. Libraries were few and far between. All restaurants and offices were kept icy cold, apparently by law. And the local newspapers were unreadable.
Westwood was only marginally pretty, massively inconvenient and almost completely without charm. Without a car or bike, distances even to and from the bus stop from within the village, where Gilbert’s condo was located, exhausted and deflated Bettie. Getting anywhere in the city other than Beverly Hills on the buses seemed to take half the day, and the end goals inevitably disappointed. Hollywood Blvd. made Bettie want to cry. The beaches were crowded, chilly and bleak. Parks were one square block of grass with no hills to climb, no trees to shelter behind. Downtown was but a dozen skyscrapers, divided from skid row by two blocks of food stalls, jewelry marts and pawnshops. The Civic Center stood desolately apart from restaurants and other city life. Indeed, there was no city life except in West Hollywood and Hollywood, venues which Bettie was just beginning to discover as she searched for cutting edge music and fetish clubs.
And then there was the onset of winter to contend with. Day after day low clouds hovered above and chill breezes blew in off the ocean, reaching all the way to the campus. Again and again she questioned her choice to come out, the only positive side of which was the considerable distance now extant between herself and her mother.
Then came the introduction to Mr. Rose. She had felt a fierce attraction for him the moment he shook her hand, partially because she knew he was a dominant and partially because he was an attractive, confident older man.
While her high school girlfriends hung portraits of Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves in their lockers, she had worshiped black and white glossies of Cary Grant and Robert Taylor, ordered from Movietime News. For it was while watching old movies that Bettie had first become attracted to suave, assertive men. As a small child she had noticed that these
