Until I Find You

did.

Granted, it was not a role Jack could count on growing old in. (Hollywood didn’t exactly have a plethora of parts for foxy but graying Mrs. Doubtfires.) Nevertheless, it was a good start. Jack wasn’t as famous as Emma, whose first novel had been a New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks before My Last Hitchhiker opened in “select theaters.” And Emma was far more famous in Toronto, where there was no one more famous than a natural-born Canadian who made it big in the United States. But to hear Jack’s mother talk, not to mention Mr. Ramsey, you would have thought that Jack Burns had eclipsed Jeff Bridges (as a transvestite, anyway) and was even bigger box office than Harrison Ford.

My Last Hitchhiker was an awful movie, but Jack’s two close-ups caught on—the parody on Saturday Night Live didn’t hurt—and the candlelight vigil outside the UCLA Medical Center, where Justine Dunn lay in a coma from her awesome wreck, made a talk-show celebrity out of Wild Bill Vanvleck, who spoke glowingly of Jack Burns.

Of course he did. Myra Ascheim had committed Jack to making another movie with The Mad Dutchman. By singing Jack’s praises for what had been less than a supporting-actor role, Wild Bill was promoting his next film, which, alas, would not achieve the cult-classic status of My Last Hitchhiker. Although Jack was the male (and female) lead in this one, his second B-movie for The Remake Monster, there was no Justine Dunn counterpart—no celebrity actor or actress who suffered a well-timed car crash and lasting, career-ending disfigurement. (No unmerited publicity, in other words.)

Meanwhile, before his follow-up appearance as a cross-dresser in another Vanvleck remake, Jack was the beneficiary of Emma’s publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader, which was considerable. A People magazine piece, in which Emma referred to Jack as her roommate, included photographs of them looking cozy together—these in addition to that familiar movie still of Jack transforming himself from a woman to a man, the telltale smudge of pale-purple lip gloss lending to that corner of his pretty mouth the wanton look of someone who’s been roughly kissed.

“It’s platonic love,” Emma was quoted as saying. “We’re just roommates.” In another interview, Emma said: “I like taking pictures of Jack. He’s so photogenic.” (This was published with a photograph of Jack, asleep.)

Maybe only Alice and Mrs. Oastler believed that Emma and Jack weren’t lovers, and Jack knew that Leslie had her doubts. Lawrence, that fink, had his doubts, too. Emma told Jack that she ran into Lawrence having lunch at Morton’s. Lawrence had lost his job at C.A.A., but not to hear him tell it; he bullshitted Emma about starting his own talent-management company and wanting to be “unencumbered.” (Like Myra Ascheim, whom he’d so confidently called a has-been.)

Lawrence was “unencumbered” at lunch, Emma observed; he was just a liar who was out of a job. Morton’s—the enduring and expensive celebrity hangout on Melrose, in West Hollywood—was not a place where you wanted to be eating lunch alone. No deals were going down for Lawrence, Emma concluded; maybe that’s why he got a little crude with her. “Do you still claim you’re not banging your boyfriend?” he asked, meaning Jack. “Does Jack go on dates as a girl?”

Emma knew she could kick the crap out of him, but she let it pass. “You’re such a loser, Lawrence,” was all she said. It was sufficiently gratifying to her that Lawrence didn’t seem to know he was in one of the least prestigious booths.

Emma had resigned from her studio job as a script reader a couple of months before The Slush-Pile Reader was published. “Screenplay development just isn’t for me,” she’d told them, but one of the studio execs got hold of a set of her galleys. There was a kind of code in Hollywood, too vague and virulently denied to be a rule: you were not supposed to call an asshole an asshole, not in writing. It was the dim understanding of this studio exec that Emma had violated the code. To punish her, the exec copied Emma’s script notes and distributed them to the rejected writers’ agents. But the punishment backfired: once you start making copies, everyone sees them. The execs at other studios read Emma’s notes; after all, many of the screenplays in question were still making the rounds.

A few of those scripts were now films in production; a couple were in post-production, meaning they’d miraculously been shot, and one had recently been released, to tepid reviews. Naturally, the reviews weren’t as insightful or well-written as Emma’s notes on an earlier draft of the screenplay. Even the rejected writers’ agents liked Emma’s notes—two of them offered her a job.

A celebrity talk-show host at an L.A. radio station asked Emma’s permission to read some of her script notes on the air. “Sure,” Emma said. “Everyone else has read them.” (More publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader—not that Emma needed it.)

This didn’t win Emma many friends among screenwriters, but what really insulted the industry was that Emma said she wasn’t interested in writing a screenplay herself—especially not an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader. In the novel, she’d already made the point that the story was one third porn film; no one would attempt to make a serious movie out of that material. To virtually assure herself that no one would, Emma entangled the film rights to her novel with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—not to first novelists, anyway. She again asserted that she had no interest in adapting The Slush-Pile Reader herself, yet she insisted on retaining script approval, should anyone else be enough of a fool to write a screenplay, and she insisted on having cast approval and director approval—even final cut. The Slush-Pile Reader couldn’t be made as a movie under those outrageous terms.

When Emma showed up at all the usual places—she took Jack with her, more and more—it was widely assumed that she was doing research for another Hollywood novel, but Jack didn’t know (at the time) that this was the case. He thought she just liked to eat and drink. But Emma saw herself as a specter sent to remind the studio execs that there was such a thing as a script reader who could write.

In the movie business, they were already speaking admiringly of The Slush-Pile Reader as “not makable,” which could be quite a compliment in the industry—provided you didn’t make a habit of it.

Jack worried about Emma. She had bought the house they’d been renting in Santa Monica, for no good reason. The move from Venice had irritated her; she said she didn’t want to move again. But if the house in Santa Monica was no prize to rent, it was just plain stupid to buy it.

It was a two-story, three-bedroom house on the downhill end of Entrada Drive—near where Entrada ran into the Pacific Coast Highway. You could hear the drone of traffic on the PCH over the air-conditioning. Furthermore, as if Emma and Jack were permanently drawn to the perfume of restaurant Dumpsters, the driveway of the house intersected the alley behind an Italian restaurant. It wasn’t sushi they smelled—it was more like old eggplant parmigiana.

But they were living on Entrada Drive when Emma’s first novel was published, and she became what she called (with no small amount of pride) “a self-supporting novelist.” Her revenge on having wasted her time as a film major was complete; she had made it in the industry’s hometown by writing, of all things, a novel. Staying in the house on Entrada, even buying the stupid place, was another way of thumbing her nose at the industry. Emma had come to L.A. as an outsider; it meant a lot to her to stay an outsider.

“I’m not moving to Beverly Hills, baby cakes.”

“Yeah, well—we sure do a lot of eating there,” Jack reminded her.

It was a lot of late-night eating, for the most part. Jack didn’t drink, so he was always the driver. Emma could drink a bottle of red wine by herself—usually before she finished her dinner. She had a special fondness for Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills.

“Kate Mantilini is quite a distance to travel for a steak sandwich and mashed potatoes,” Jack complained; he didn’t eat bread, not to mention mashed potatoes. But Emma loved to eat at the long bar that ran the length of the restaurant. The industry crowd all knew her and asked her how the new novel was coming.

“It’s coming,” was all Emma would say. “Have you met my roommate, Jack Burns? He was the chick in My Last Hitchhiker—I mean the hot one.”

“I was the hitchhiker,” Jack would explain. Despite Myra Ascheim telling him to lose the stubble, he was usually growing a little something on his face—anything that might mitigate his androgynous first impression.

Monday nights, Emma and Jack went to Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood. You could watch Monday Night Football on the TV at the bar, yet the waiters wore tuxedos. There was a