23
My first winter in Los Angeles, a few months after I moved from New York, was a new experience of that season. December that year was one of stunningly clear mild days with nights that were cold, as if my freezer door had been left open, and I could walk through the frigid air knowing warmth was on the other side. And the mountains all of a sudden were there. In the fall, they had been hidden by haze and smog, but suddenly, miraculously, they appeared closer than ever before. I’d be driving along, up on the freeway or turning a corner, and I’d see them standing out against the sky: near, crisp, photo-ready. God’s art department working overtime.
I was juggling my waitress shifts with my job for Bill, while creating new art and learning about L.A.’s gallery scene. Not to mention thinking about Andrew and the sex we were having underneath, centered in, and on top of everything. Life is what I did around thoughts of him. And seeing him.
Which we were doing pretty regularly. Stephanie apparently had no interest in spending every night with him, God knows why, so it was normal for Andrew to call me at eleven P.M., usually our third or fourth call of the day, and say, “What’re you doing?” in that low, quiet, inside-of-me way. Then, “Get over here.” And I would. Drive the long road to his home in Bel Air, up and up and up to his world that I was part of during our regular hours of eleven at night to one-thirty A.M. The time of night that makes things invisible; we were veiled by everyone else’s sleep. The hours a road into the country of us.
One night after a long and deep and wonderful bout of each other while Andrew was being particularly cuddly after I had rubbed his back, I asked him if I could sleep over, and leave very early in the morning. The January night was cold, his bed was layers of soft warmth, and the sweetness of him was too delicious to part from.
“I don’t want people asking me who my new wife is,” Andrew said, then looked at me gravely, as if hordes of photographers and journalists descended upon him every morning at six A.M., and there was nothing he could do about this lack of privacy.
I almost said, “Who’s gonna ask you? Patrick or the maids? They all know I come here anyway, and do they really arrive for work that early?” But I didn’t. Though his excuse clearly had no basis in reality, I suddenly understood, as I lay there in his arms, that in his mind it did. That even though media hounds wouldn’t actually show up on his extremely private practically-impossible-to-get-onto grounds, he was so used to guarding his life and self from the public for over thirty-two years, that this rule he had come up with that only the “girlfriend” spends the night protected him somehow. And what was even more clear in that moment was that he was trying to protect himself from what he felt. Which made me see that I just needed to break through that wall, slowly and steadily.
That month, Andrew missed my birthday. He knew when it was or I figured he did. I hadn’t told him the first time it came around after we had met because he was in Malaysia, but on all of the subsequent ones he knew because I would call him.
“It’s my birthday today.”
“Happy birthday, sweet-y-vette,” he’d say, but nothing ever appeared. All those years in New York, I wanted flowers, roses delivered to my door, a huge bouquet to fill my bedroom, then petals to press between heavy books and laminate onto rice paper—his love in floral form. And it was pretty obvious how easy that would be for him. Patrick could have handled the whole thing. But I decided it just wasn’t who Andrew was. Some people don’t give birthday presents; they grew up in families where it wasn’t a big deal.
But on that birthday in L.A., my twenty-fourth, since we were involved in a deeper way, I was crushed when nothing arrived. And so pissed off that I avoided his calls on that day and the next two; I lay on my futon listening to the phone ring, knowing it was him.
Finally, I gave in and called him. He grilled me about where I’d been, worried I’d disappeared, and I was just happy to hear his voice again. So, he doesn’t give gifts. Okay. I knew he loved me. He asked me all the time if I loved him, and though he rarely said it himself, I knew it was what he felt inside. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me, and could hear it in his voice. And no other woman that he wasn’t working with had been in his life for years platonically. And the armor that Andrew wore got heavier with each passing hour. I could hear the changes in his voice as we talked throughout the day, then when I’d see him at night, it wasn’t just his clothes that came off, but that solid suit would be removed, revealing a softness inside that very few people knew.
And I felt backed up by him, protected. Loved and adored. His arms holding me, his sweet voice on the phone caressing me, his never vanishing, always taking my calls. Many times in the midst of dealing with an annoying customer at the restaurant, or struggling with an art piece, or a gallery offering me only a maybe and not a definite yes, I would automatically think, But Andrew loves me. He was myself. A part of me that I didn’t have came from him. And his voice daily and his body frequently sustained that belief.
I started going to parties with Viv. She was still seeing Craig, so I met a lot of his friends, and began recognizing names and faces in the social section of the L.A. Times—Craig and his cohorts’ parties were covered extensively. Men at the parties would ask me out and I couldn’t really say I was already seeing someone because Viv would wonder who that was. So to be able to keep seeing Andrew, undercover in a way, I’d go on some dates, but I’d never have sex with them. We’d just make out a little bit, schoolgirl-in-a-car kind of stuff, then I wouldn’t go any further, and after a while, I’d break up with them.
And they were all very nice men. An entertainment lawyer who took me to the best gourmet vegetarian restaurants and gave me a book on Buddhism for Valentine’s Day. An actor who was stuck in TV hell, successful by most people’s standards, but he only wanted to do films. And an architect who spent three months of each year in Bali acquiring a new tribal tattoo each time and wearing only sarongs there, plus a bunch of kinda-date guys (meet for coffee or a hike in the canyon) thrown in. Interesting, nice men. I just didn’t want to be with them. I wanted to be with Andrew. Constantly. The men couldn’t say anything without my comparing it in my mind to what Andrew would have said. And who could compare to him? And that was a problem because if it didn’t work out with Andrew—but it had to—what would I do? I was dating interesting, attractive, successful men, but none of them compared to Andrew.
And Andrew knew I was dating. He would call; I’d be on my way out. He would call; I’d still be out or would have just gotten home. And he’d want to know who they were and what we did—like he knew them, and sometimes I had a feeling he did or he made it seem that way, that he was having them checked out. There was no piece of information unattainable by him. He never acted jealous (like he had about Tim, derisively calling him Tim-my) and it was pointless to wish that he was. He so fully gathered the men into our experience that they practically weren’t people anymore, just fodder for the mill.
So it wasn’t a big jump when he asked which of them I was sleeping with. Or fucking, as he said.
“None of them, I’m seeing you.”
We were in his bed, it was past one A.M., and a February wind was moving and talking in the trees outside, though I knew it would abandon them by daylight.
“Yvette, you can fuck other men.”
I looked up at him from where I was below.
“I think you should,” he went on. “It’ll be good for you.”
How?
Then his movements came harder still.
I drove myself home in the chill quiet dark. My futon was always a depressing refuge after leaving his bed. I lay awake, trying to imagine if that was something I could do. Have sex with two men. I had a feeling it would be like drinking milk and beer in the same sitting. Nice on their own, but stomach-curdling in proximity. It wasn’t something I would do. Or wanted to.
But Andrew was pretty persistent. He started asking all the time, so finally…I lied. I figured that what Andrew really wanted was an additional barrier, another thing to put between us to protect how he felt. Me with someone else. Like him with Stephanie. And for me to betray him—even though he instigated it—was the only way for me to stay near him. So I pretended I did, but didn’t. And even though I wasn’t betraying him sexually (the make-outs hardly counted), I was, in fact, betraying him because I lied to him. About being faithful. That I wasn’t. But I was. I had known since I moved to L.A. that Andrew wasn’t only sleeping with me, he was seeing Stephanie. And supposedly, purportedly a bunch of other women as well, though that part I wasn’t sure about and couldn’t tell. But even if he was, I didn’t care. To be upset about any of that was as futile as moving to the Arctic and throwing a fit about the cold, a condition you knew existed before you went. Wear enough protective layers or move south.
And my lies were simple. It’s not like he needed details. Okay, sometimes he wanted them. But a “yes” instead of a “no” to the query usually handled it. He seemed comforted by it somehow. That I’d changed? I didn’t know. He’d ask if I loved him the best—that was easy and true. “Yes,” I’d say. “I love you the best.” I just never wanted to leave his bed, and if pretending to be in other men’s helped me stay there, then okay.
A few weeks later, Viv and I were having lunch on the patio of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. It was a dumpy little health food place that had a huge following because the food was great, plus they made their own special salad dressing. Tour bus companies paid for the meals of certain celebrities to dine on the patio, which was visible from Sunset Boulevard, so their tourist customers could “unexpectedly” spot stars when they went by, but from what I could tell, Viv wasn’t one of them. Viv was going on and on about a meeting she had had the day before with Andrew, while I pretended to need to look intently at my veggie burger to get the tomato and lettuce situated on it just so. I couldn’t believe his name was coming up with her again. It had been a nice couple of months since she had complained about how horrible he was, and poor Stephanie, blah, blah, blah. Viv’s agent had decided she should do a movie—and how different can that be from the characters she creates for her videos, Viv had told me—so he had arranged a meeting for her with Andrew.
“It went incredibly great,” Viv said as she popped vitamins in her mouth. She had a different combination she took with each meal. “Though I still hate him. And it was clear he wanted to fuck me and would have tried to if Stephanie wasn’t my best friend.”
Then she started her diatribe against him, but it was interspersed with waves of excitement that she would be in Andrew’s next film. My appetite was gone from listening to her go on and on. Some of the cheddar cheese on my veggie burger had melted into a hard, shiny surface of orange on my plate. Viv hadn’t gotten cheese on hers because she didn’t eat any dairy; her nutritionist had told her it goes straight to the hips. I imagined Viv’s food lining up in her mouth with marching orders in hand that would direct it to its bodily destinations, like travelers on the mother ship, to enhance her perfect skin, tight body, and soft lips. Viv was going strong with her “poor Stephanie being led astray” monologue. As I sipped my carrot juice, I thought that “poor Stephanie” looked to me like she could take care of herself. She was the epitome of Nordic beauty; I found it frightening. Her physical perfection was so high, it appeared calculated by a force other than God. Finally, an opportunity to end Viv’s vitriol presented itself—Viv’s ex-boyfriend’s current girlfriend walked in, thank God—so I signaled to Viv with my eyes, and we pushed back our chairs, grabbed our purses, went to the parking lot, and said goodbye. Viv was so grateful that I had noticed the new girlfriend so she could make her exit without having to say hello that she forgot all about Andrew.
As I headed west through the sunlit, neon-drenched, billboards-blazing brightness of Sunset Boulevard, I wondered again why Viv disliked Andrew so much. Her anger was so vehement and personal for a man she had only just met. And she had had it before they ever said hello.
But that was only one of countless conversations I found myself in where Andrew was discussed extensively by (a) people who kind of knew him, (b) people who knew people who knew him, and (c) people who knew People magazine articles about him. It was excruciating to sit and pretend that I (a) didn’t know him, (b) had little to no interest in him, and (c) agreed and/or believed all the crap they said about him. All the women who did it seemed to be inwardly angry that they had never slept with him, and the men appeared jealous of everything he’d gotten. Mostly their conversations were mean, with an undercurrent of reserved awe that I don’t think they were even aware of. It was their inability to comprehend doing everything that Andrew had achieved, and it permeated their rumors and stories, disclosing the envy and inferiority they felt. I’d make neutral sounds and facial expressions to keep my true thoughts and feelings opaque, all the while counting the minutes for their gossip to end.
The hardest part was not being able to defend him, to talk about who he really was, about what I liked and loved in him. Keeping quiet and pretending, while they tore him down and chewed him up. It made me want to protect him; I couldn’t believe this went on so much. But Andrew seemed to know it did; at least he knew that Viv instigated a lot of it. As I turned onto my street, I wondered how he could have lived with it for so long, but then I realized it must be like underbrush on a path that his boots kick through while he emerges unscathed.
That night at his house, Andrew told me about his meeting with Viv.
“All she did was talk about sex—mine. And practically right from the beginning, so I didn’t even try to bring it around to a professional conversation. I figured it was her meeting, she can blow it however she wants.”
We were in his kitchen, eating delicacies out of bowls from the fridge that the chef had created, sitting at the marble island on the hard metal stools. I had a feeling someone once had suggested cushions—a decorator maybe, a girlfriend from back when—but Andrew had vetoed it, liking the duality of outward discomfort while luscious food went inward.
“She couldn’t shut up about it,” Andrew went on. “All the women I’d fucked and how beautiful they were—‘What a list,’ she said. I told her that she hadn’t done too badly herself.”
“You mean the men she’s been with or…”
“What do you think?” Andrew smiled at me.
“Oh.” I was silent for a moment. That gave Viv’s hatred of Andrew a whole new twist. Maybe it wasn’t him she wanted to sleep with, but Stephanie. Or both. Who the fuck knew. “But how do you know who…”
“Word gets around.”
I should have known. This town really was just one big little high school and all inside information was reported to Andrew.
“And the shit she talks about me—what’d I ever do to her? You’d think she would have thought about that before she tried to get in my next film.”
“So why’d you meet with her, then?”
“Because I can, and I’ll make sure she never works on my film or anyone else’s.” He smiled at me quietly and deeply above his dark blue T-shirt, then pulled my head toward his chest and moved it down until it rested in his lap.
Andrew never asked me why Viv and I were friends. Maybe in the midst of his hatred for her, he understood what there was to like. And I did like her. She was vivacious and fun and wonderful one-on-one. We’d meet for coffee or lunch, go to salsa class or get a pedicure, and shopping with her was the best. She knew cool little undiscovered places downtown and in tiny neighborhoods where we could buy cheap, exotic things while we talked the whole time. L.A. was her city and to me she was L.A. The whole way she greeted life: huge smile, cute body, charm talking, and pure drive underneath. Being with Viv helped me understand how the city grew and moved. One-on-one was wonderful; it was when other people were involved that things got weird.
It was the weekend launch of Valiant Hour, the film Andrew had produced, directed, and starred in with Stephanie. There was tons of press for months before, and Stephanie was all over the talk shows on the nights leading up to the opening. Even Andrew did an on-camera interview, which usually he avoided. It was with Holly actually. She had moved out to L.A. and was the new entertainment goddess for a national news show and I suppose that’s how they met. There was a huge premiere for the film that I read about in the paper the next day, then finally the seventy-two-hour moment that everything had been shooting for arrived—opening weekend. The reviews moved Stephanie’s career to a pinnacle higher than it ever had been and Andrew was reaffirmed as the genius he was.
I went to a twelve-thirty feature on the opening Friday. Alone in the dark with my popcorn, watching Stephanie and thinking of Andrew viewing each frame, I tried to interpret the story line as some kind of allegory for them since she died at the end.
I had seen still photographs of the movie in Andrew’s kitchen one night. On a table in the corner under the windows, which the dark outside had turned into mirrors, was a light box with color slides spread out on top. Like the mess in a child’s room, it looked like it would be there for a while.
Andrew was picking the poster shot and other photos to be used for press. He pulled a chair up close to his so I’d be next to him and able to see his choices and rejects. They all had Stephanie in them. Good Christ, this woman looked like she would never die. She was above death, too full of a singular stunningness to succumb.
Andrew was making small piles; some he’d go back to, others he pushed aside. He would show me one, look at me with an eyebrow raised, then set it down in what he’d determined was its appropriate place.
At one point he said, “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this?”
I thought he meant looking at the slides that night, so I started to rub his back, which he gave himself into, but then he said, “Longer than you’ve been alive.”
Oh, that. I moved in front of him and removed my dress. The slides and Stephanie became a thing of the past.
I called Andrew when I got home from Valiant Hour to tell him how much I loved it. His voice got that formal tone it sometimes had—a combination of embarrassed, polite, and tongue-tied—but it would have been odd not to mention it, this huge thing going on in front of our eyes. And I was proud of him, which sounds silly and hubristic, but there it is. I would’ve sung his praises to the world if I could. So I said it to him, and he thanked me, simply and rather elegantly, then told me that the next couple of days were going to be crazy with Stephanie and everything.
By the end of the weekend, it was clear his film had done well. Exploded, you could say. I woke up Monday morning and began baking bread. We hadn’t seen each other in over a week, but I had known what was taking up his time, the culmination of years of his professional and private life up on the screen.
It had been a while since I had baked for him—that was in the fall, and now it was late spring. I decided to do apple bread, an old recipe of my grandmother’s that required two types of apples very finely chopped. I enjoyed the detail work. Cutting each apple slice into a precise amount of minuscule cubes that would almost melt when baked, the membranes of apple dissolving under the heat. I liked tools that create small out of large. A whole represented by a wee part. I remembered an art teacher at the School of Visual Arts who used to say, “If you want an orange, one slice is better than a whole apple.” Which was kind of how my relationship was with Andrew—a slice of him, which was better than the whole of someone else, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough for much longer. Hopefully, he’d get rid of Stephanie since the film was finally out.
The bread was cooling when Andrew called. It was almost eleven in the morning, far past the normal time that we spoke. My apartment was warm from the oven, and the open windows were letting in dim sounds from Wilshire Boulevard along with a small breeze.
When I told him what I was doing, he asked how soon I could be there. I had been to his home only a few times during daylight hours, and this was a Monday, a brighter workday than the others, the ravages of the weekend exposed, projects left undone on Friday loudly yelling their impatient needs. In the midst of all that, I entered Andrew’s home.
Patrick answered the door, a further signal of the careercentric day. While asking how I was, he led me to the pool where Andrew was sitting on a chaise longue, phone at his ear, notepad and pen on the low table next to him.
I was holding the two loaves of bread. I thought I would go into the kitchen for a knife, but Andrew gave me a silent kiss, while taking a loaf from me. He quietly unwrapped it, and broke pieces off with his hand, silently chewing while listening to the person on the phone. He pantomimed his delight about the bread to me with his face, and reached over and rubbed my leg. I was stretched out on the chaise next to him. The sun was softer up where he lived, muted by an ocean breeze that pushed it through so the harshest rays were dispersed someplace less fortunate. Glaring white towels were stacked on a wrought-iron shelf, and the pool was a miniature Aegean Sea—a fount of pleasure for men and mermaids.
Andrew finished his call and turned to me, but before the kiss was complete, Patrick was at his side with a list.
“Hold everything until I tell you, even Stephanie,” Andrew said, without even looking at the paper Patrick proffered. “And would you put these in the kitchen, please?” He handed Patrick the bread, then stood up, and taking my hand, walked me to his bed. It felt as if we were playing hooky from school, but the teacher knew where we were.
Lunch, the result of a call Andrew made to Patrick stating what we wanted, was waiting for us two hours later when we emerged from his bedroom and entered the green-walled, dark wood dining room. Sitting at the large round cherrywood table, I thought how very Andrew it was to not have a rectangular one, bypassing the need to decide who would sit opposite him at the other end.
On the long art-filled walk back to his bed, we passed a maid running a vacuum. She immediately turned it off when she saw Andrew, her body and the machine silent as if that would make them invisible as we went by. In bed again, we napped, then I woke him with my mouth. The room was dark from the wide expanse of drawn curtains, day for night.
Afterward we went down to his screening room, past his gym, and lay on the dove-gray velvet sofa watching the films that had opened against his that past weekend. And still he took no phone calls. Patrick rang in at one point to tell him he was leaving, and I could tell that he asked if Andrew wanted to know who had called, but was told, “No, tomorrow.” We were out of town together, gone. Escaping further into home, instead of leaving, but protected as if by great distance. After viewing most of one film, then part of another, and bits of a third, we got bored with them. I was more interested in listening to his reaction to the actors and directors and writers than what was on the screen anyway. One actor he called “a very talented little girl”; an actress was hard on the eyes to watch.
We went upstairs to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for food. He definitely had the best “leftovers” of anyone I’d ever known. Whole geographical regions represented by bowls and containers of scrumptious cuisine. It was heaven. The large house was still except for us, other than the constantly flashing light on his phones when there was a call to remind us that the world was outside while we pretended it wasn’t.
In his bed again, only sensations of him in me and him through me and me for him were present. It was quiet in the dark, in the almost pitch-blackness, in the inky ravenness, like his Ritz-Carlton room had been that night when we were together in it five and a half years before. As I moved on top of him, Andrew’s voice said firmly in my ear, “Why are you the only woman in the world who I believe truly loves me?”
He looked me deep in my eyes when he said it, then his words kept reappearing the longer we looked at each other, coming over and over again. Lying together afterward, each sound, each syllable, each breath they were carried on traveled deep into my heart, then journeyed out along my veins where they would never be separate from me.