Blind Item(24)

CHAPTER 8

THE PEDICURIST PUSHED TOO HARD with her little instrument of cuticle torture and Nicola flinched, waking up from a hazy half doze.

“Sorry, lady,” the pedicurist snorted, anything but.

Blinking, Nicola looked up at the screen on the TV. Celine Dion was still performing her Vegas show, but judging by her defiantly dramatic arm gestures, the concert and the DVD it was on were drawing to a merciful close.

Every time Nicola came in to get her nails done, this same concert was playing on the three TVs suspended at various angles around the salon. They must watch this concert all day, every day, she realized. The manicurists were in Dion’s thrall, and would occasionally glance up at the screen with open adoration on their faces.

Last night she’d passed out almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, but Nicola’s sleep had been one long stream of ridiculously transparent dreams that any armchair Freud would have rated “too easy.” In one, her eight-year-old self went on a date with Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street, and in another she and John Oliver had sex atop a checkout at a Target, in front of a horrified clerk. As she dozed in the salon massage chair, she revisited the weird moment.

It’s probably a good idea if I stop hooking up with my TV crushes, she thought, chuckling, as the pedicurist resumed the vigorous filing of her toes. On the TV screen, Dion and her heart full of faux emotion were taking the string of bows that signaled the end of her show. One of the manicurists reached for the remote to start the entire thing over.

“Hey, excuse me,” Nicola called out, stopping her in mid button push.

“Yes, lady?” The manicurist paused, annoyed.

“Can we watch something else, please?” Nicola asked pleadingly. The manicurists all stopped work and stared at the blasphemer.

“What you wanna watch, lady?”

“I dunno, maybe just the TV?” Nicola continued, her voice getting softer as she lost her nerve. “It’s just, I mean, that DVD is on every time I come in here. Aren’t you guys, you know, sick of it?”

The women looked at Nicola as if she’d said the stupidest thing ever. However, the TV switched over to Entertainment Tonight. She learned that Courtney Hauser had gotten another DUI. Shocker. Or maybe it was a repeat.

She zoned out again. She had decided to send one of the pairs of Louboutins to her mom. They wore the same size, and her mother had never owned a pair of shoes that had cost more than fifty bucks. Nicola had already boxed up the champagne ones from two nights before. She’d ship them from the office later. Her mother worked as a manager at the local Motel 6, but the shoes would make her happy. A nail file jabbed into another cuticle and broke Nicola’s reverie.

Five manicurists and her pedicurist were glancing from the TV to Nicola, shaking their heads.

Confused, she looked at the screen, where the rapid-fire staccato of vapid banter from the hosts was converted to badly spelled closed captioning, that wondered if yet another starlet had “gone too far” and whether “rehab was only answer.” Nothing new.

Nicola slipped back into her thoughts, and this time it was Paul who took over. There was nothing significant about her first LA hookup, even though on paper she should have been dying to gossip about it—but she hadn’t told anyone, not even Kara or Billy. It had been a kooky date, a wind tunnel of noise and chatter, and later, just a wind tunnel. Any gossip value had been deadened by a fart.

Actually, she thought, I do want to tell this story to Billy and Kara, but it has to be in person. She pulled out her phone and sent a group text to the two of them.

GOSSIP PARTY OUR HOUSE TONIGHT!!!!

Kara responded first.

GURL BRANG IT. I ALREADY GOT YOU BEAT.

Her phone dinged with Billy’s response while she read Kara’s text.

HONEY MAKE IT RAIN. SEE YOU AT 9.

Nicola smiled, thinking about finally getting his full Vegas story. Billy was oddly gifted with being in the wrong place at the right time, and it had supported him well since he landed in LA.

He’d once unveiled a shocking scandal that had made him nearly twenty thousand dollars. He’d walked into a bedroom at a party, interrupting one of the world’s most beloved leading men squeezed into the clothing of his supermodel wife. The guy’s leading-man days ended four days later, in an Enquirer cover that announced in this relationship, the wife wore the pants—and he wore the dresses.

Lately, however, he’d been getting too close and having to navigate the fine art of screwing over celebrities without getting caught. He’d almost been caught in several publicist-set traps, but the near misses had taught him well.

Nicola had started to text her friends back when the pedicurist jerked her big toe sideways, splashing her foot down into the warm water.