Imperial Bedrooms

An exclusive excerpt from Bret Easton Ellis' sequel to Less Than Zero.

BY BRET EASTON ELLIS

"I love the view,” Rain says, holding a tumbler of tequila, standing on the balcony overlooking the city. I’m staring past her down at the empty space on Elevado where the Jeep was parked and it’s three in the morning and I come up behind her and down below the wind gently drapes palm fronds over the rippling water of the Doheny Plaza’s lit pool and the only light in the condo comes from the Christmas tree in the corner and Counting Crows’ “A Long December” plays softly in the background.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I ask. “Someone . . .more age-appropriate than me?”

“Guys my age are idiots,” she says, turning around.

“Guys my age are awful.”

“I have news for you,” I say, leaning into her. “So are guys my age.” 

“But you look good for your age,” she says, stroking my face. “You look ten years younger,” she says. “You’ve had work done, right?” Her fingers keep combing the hair that had been dyed the week before. Her other hand runs along the sleeve of the T-shirt with the skateboard logo on it. In the bedroom she lets me go down on her and after I make her come she lets me slide in. 

During the last week of December if we aren’t in bed we’re at the movies or watching screeners and Rain simply nods when I tell her everything that’s wrong with the movie we’ve just seen and she doesn’t argue back. “I liked it,” she will say, putting a light touch on everything, her upper lip always provocatively lifted, her eyes always drained of intent, programmed not to be challenging or negative. This is someone trying to stay young because she knows that what matters most to you is the youthful surface. This is supposed to be part of the appeal: keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can’t be held together forever—take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance. The surface Rain presents is really all she’s about, and since so many girls look like Rain another part of the appeal is watching her try to figure out why I’ve become so interested in her and not someone else.

“Am I the only one you’re interested in?” she asks. “I mean right now, for the part?”

My eyes scan the bedroom we’re lying in until they land on hers. “Yes.”

“Why?” And then a teasing smile. “Why me?”

This question and my subsequent nonanswer leave her wanting to impart information that, in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza, has no reason to even exist. You ignore why she left Lansing at seventeen and the casual hints of an abusive uncle (a made-for-sympathy move that threatens to erase the carnality) and why she dropped out of the University of Michigan (I don’t ask whether she’d ever enrolled) and what led to the side trips to New York and Miami before she landed in L.A. and you don’t ask what she must have done with the photographer who discovered her when she was waitressing at the café on Melrose or about the career modeling lingerie that probably seemed promising at nineteen and that led to the commercials that led to a couple of tiny roles in films and definitely not putting all her hopes into the third part of a horror franchise that panned into nothing and then it was the quick slide into the bit parts on TV shows you’ve never heard of, the pilot shot but never aired, and covering everything else is the distant humiliation of bartending gigs and the favors that got her the hostess job at Reveal. Decoding everything, you piece together the agent who ignores her. You begin to understand through her muted complaints that the management company no longer cares. Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it; this need is so enormous that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I’ve done it before. 

We sit in my office naked, buzzed on champagne, while she shows me pics from a Calvin Klein show, audition tapes a friend shot, a modeling portfolio, paparazzi photos of her at B-list events—the opening of a shoe store on Canon, a charity benefit at someone’s home in Brentwood, standing with a group of girls at the Playboy Mansion at the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party—and then always it seems we’re back in the bedroom.

“What do you want for Christmas?” she asks.

“This. You.” I smile. “What do you want?”

“I want a part in your movie,” she says. “You know that.”

“Yeah?” I ask, my hand tracing her thigh. “My movie?

"Which part?”

“I want the part of Martina.” She kisses me, her hand moving down to my cock, gripping it, releasing it, gripping it again.

“And I’m going to try and get it for you.”

The pause is involuntary but she recovers in a second.

“Try?”