Private Screening Read Free

meet the aides already waiting in the next room, to plan his day.
    Suspended between present and past, Stacy stared out at Los Angeles.
    She had loved it since she had driven there with John Damone—a kid singer, her first single just released, who had never heard of James Kilcannon. “The freeway is forever,” a disc jockey had proclaimed as her beat-up Volvo joined a river of people on the move. She had begun tailgating and braking, shifting and accelerating, and as she’d hit Beverly Hills still high on the challenge, rows of palm trees seemed to float and vanish in the shimmering subtropic light. The image of a mirage had come to her then, and over time she had seen Los Angeles as a deceptive Oriental city and its absence of center as a metaphor: you could drive the maze for years, searching for the place where you could make things happen, but it kept moving behind some palm tree in a canyon you couldn’t find. Yet, that first day, she had felt that they would find it, she and Damone—passing a convertible at the West Hollywood line, her voice had come from someone else’s radio.
    It had been the first time. Stacy had pulled over to the side, and realized she was close to crying.
    She had been twenty-five then, and had written the song when she was seventeen, a thousand crummy clubs ago. “We’ve worked so hard,” she’d murmured.
    And one year later, when she had come back from her first exhausting concert tour to realize that she was making more money than God, she’d found a Spanishy-looking house in the West Hollywood hills so outrageous in its campiness that she’d grinned just walking through it: a bar modeled as an English pub with slot machines; a sunken bathtub with a bidet next to the sauna; Greek columns surrounding the pool. By the time she and Damone had found the black bedroom with mirrors she had been laughing out loud. “Looks like a wet dream from Walt Disney,” he’d remarked, and Stacy had decided to buy it on the spot. She’d moved her piano and all her sound equipment into the mirrored bedroom and stuck two palm trees by the pool so she could write songs under them. And now her face was as famous as her voice, and the city of mirages was her home. It disoriented her to stare at it from Jamie’s suite.
    She had met him four years later, with her third album number one, and her time so consumed by writing and touring that Stacy had wondered if she’d killed the rest of her. And then Damone had called to announce with exaggerated reverence, “Senator James Kilcannon wants to meet you.”
    That strangers called because they both were famous had no longer startled or impressed her. “He wants money, right?”
    â€œHe wants you to sing—the way the law works you can only give a thousand bucks, but by packing an arena you can raise four hundred thousand more.”
    â€œBut why would I want to?”
    â€œShall I tell him that?”
    She thought a moment. “I will.”
    But James Kilcannon had surprised her.
    Stacy had been used to meeting politicians so determined to project warmth that it felt like she’d been mugged. But an air of amusement about Kilcannon suggested that he held part of himself back; this hint of complexity had appealed to her. His hazel eyes had an iris so much wider than the normal that they seemed to absorb everything around him, yet his fine sculpted face made him look impossibly young to be president. “You’re wondering what I want from you,” he’d said. “Besides thirty seconds as a gossip item.”
    They were having lunch at Harry’s Bar. Like other things in Los Angeles, its original was elsewhere; one difference from Hemingway’s Florence haunt was the faces turned to watch them. Smiling, Stacy answered, “I’m just curious how you’ll rationalize it.”
    â€œSimply. I want to be president and I think I need you to do