Chapter 11
Hollywood Ending
If my son felt that he had to run away from home, I suppose there are worse places to run to than Paris. I’m relieved that he didn’t choose some remote region in China or an Alaskan outpost where modern conveniences and medical clinics are scarce. One of my fears, ever since I saw that movie about the boy who moves to Alaska and dies a wretched, lonely death because he accidentally ingests a poisonous plant, is that Billy will somehow come to a similar end. This is wholly irrational, I know—Billy doesn’t even like to camp—but one’s fears are hardly ever rational.
Despite Paris’s much admired charms, it’s hard for me to believe that my son will stay there for very long. My hunch (and hope) is that he will miss Los Angeles and his sister and friends here, his spacious condo and the energy of our sprawling dreamscape, if not also his father and me. I’m hurt that he wanted to leave and did so without any kind of warning—one day he was here, the next he wasn’t, and he left no note with any sort of hint about where he had gone and why. I realize that children leave behind their parents and childhood homes all the time, but both of my kids have lived in southern California their entire lives, having chosen to go to college here too. And usually when people leave, they give you a forwarding address or allow you the chance to say good-bye.
About Billy’s big move, my friends say, “It’s about time, isn’t it? Wasn’t it bound to happen sooner or later?” I know they’re right, but the comparison I make (only to myself) is this: his departure is like a cancer diagnosis. Despite the fact most of us have heard the sobering statistics—one in two people will suffer from some form of cancer before they die—when the diagnosis comes, it’s still a shock.
The irony is, my son and I seem to have grown closer across the distance of one entire continent and the Atlantic Ocean. He calls me every week now, or I call him and he calls back within a day or two. There are no more unreturned phone calls, no more plaintive or frustrated or angry pleas for him to call me back before I contact his building’s doorman and ask him to confirm that Billy is still alive. In the three months that he has lived in France, his attitude appears to have changed from bad to mostly good. He has told me twice that he loves me without me saying it first. He has started writing a screenplay (though he told me not to tell his father if I talked to him, because he did not want Renn to know anything about it until after he had finished it). He has a new girlfriend, a woman named Jorie who apparently is also taking time off from her regular life in the States to study art and learn French and finally make a real attempt at appreciating beauty. That’s how Billy has phrased it, at any rate. “There’s beauty to appreciate in California,” I told him after he said this.
His reply: “I knew you’d say that. But in France it’s different. The French practically invented beauty, at least in its modern conception.”
“You sound like a philosopher now,” I said. “I guess Paris is working for you.”
“It’s not just working,” he said quietly. “It’s saving me. I was going crazy in L.A. Things are a lot better now, but I had to get out of there to realize just how depressed I was.”
“Are you still running too many miles?” I asked him another time.
“No,” he said, “but I do run almost every day, and compared to what some people run, fifteen or twenty miles isn’t that much.”
“You don’t need to run more than a few miles at a time to stay in good shape if you’re already eating healthy.”
“I don’t do it just to stay in shape. I do it because I love it. I’m not changing my running regimen, Mom. We don’t need to keep discussing this.”
This is a little hard for me to accept, considering that it wasn’t very long ago that I got a phone call from Anna telling me that her brother was in the hospital because of what he had done to his body on his morning run. It has since been pointed out to me repeatedly that he is a grown man, that his collapse was a fluke, he can make his own decisions, he can take care of himself, etc. etc. As a doctor, I’ve heard this sort of petulant defense more times than most people probably have. I know that in Billy’s case, I’m not dealing with a fool, nor do I think he has a death wish, but it’s hard not to worry about him, and if something were to happen to him, it would be a little more difficult to get to Paris quickly than down the road to Huntington Memorial.
Billy’s original plan was to return home to run the marathon in March, but he has now decided not to, probably because of Jorie, though he said it was because he wants his first official marathon to be the one in Paris, which is only a couple of weeks away. I have my plane ticket and will be there for those 26.2 grueling miles through this most historic city’s winding streets. I don’t really understand why people think it’s a good idea to run so far all at once. The concrete and blacktop we have covered so much of the earth with are two of the worst possible surfaces for the human body to spend time bouncing up and down on. Whose idea was it that people should compete in races like this? When what we now call the marathon was first run in ancient Greece, it was out of necessity, not because people needed something to amuse themselves with.
I understand Billy’s desire to escape his California life, if only because he wants to look upon another vista for a while, another view of what a life can be. It’s not that the French have lives so much more healthy and mindful than our own, but I know that many of them do still take their time when it comes to some of the more important daily rituals—they buy their food from small local grocers and bakers and butchers, they take their time at the dinner table too, and they often dress themselves with an artistic flair (they are not known for wearing sweatpants and gym shoes to restaurants and movie theaters and doctor’s appointments, among other obligations that require them to appear in public). Something else: they read poetry. The last time I was in Paris, I was stunned to discover how large the poetry section was in one of the bookstores I browsed—as big as or bigger than the self-help sections in most American bookstores. Truly, this was a revelatory moment, and unaccountably, I felt my eyes well with tears.
That said, they do have race riots and poverty and plenty of criminals who rape and steal and destroy. They are subject to the same human failings that we are, but I do think that Billy is right to say that he is learning about beauty during his time in Paris. There is the Seine and its many bridges, structures that look like they were stolen from a fairy tale; its enormous but unbelievably intricate municipal buildings; its dozens of museums (a whole museum devoted just to Picasso, another to Rodin, a third to Dali, and each of them so very good)—all of this available whenever he walks out his front door. Paris has been here since the days when Christ allegedly walked the earth, its marketplaces thriving long before the Crusades began, before Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions, a time when America did not exist, not in the incarnation that the European invaders began to create after their arrival on its alien shores.
Paris, needless to say, is quite different from L.A., which in comparison is a newborn city, though they are similar in one crucial way—both are places where people believe they will be able, with a little good luck, to step into the lives they are destined for.
Something has happened since Billy moved overseas that was as unexpected as his sudden disappearance: I met someone. Or, I should say, I re-met someone. This man went to USC for his undergraduate degree too, and Renn and I were friends with him for a year or so, but then we lost touch because I think Michael had a bit of a crush on me. Renn thought so, in any case, and eventually stopped inviting him out with us. It’s a bit surreal to remember that there was a time when Renn worried about losing me to some other man. But he did worry, and this era lasted for several years, until a little while after Billy was born, when Renn became so busy and sought-after that people like Harrison Ford (gorgeous and funny) and Warren Beatty (gorgeous too, but his much-publicized playboy ways alarmed me) were regularly dropping by to hang out at our dinner table.
Now, three decades later, Michael appeared before me one morning a few weeks ago when I was at a bagel place on Colorado Boulevard where I sometimes buy a cup of coffee on my way to work. “Lucy?” he said. “Lucy Wilkins?”
He was standing behind me in line, and I almost jumped when I heard my maiden name. When I turned around to see who the voice belonged to, I know that my mouth opened involuntarily when I saw who it was. “Oh my God,” I exclaimed, much too loudly. “Michael Kinicki?”
There was one person standing in between us, a tired-looking blond woman in running clothes who was frowning at the chalkboards over the cash register, the ones that listed the cafe’s menu in Day-Glo colors. I stepped around her and walked into Michael’s open arms, his body’s warmth enveloping me. He looked fit and happy and had kept himself trim, I would later learn, from years of swimming mile after mile in his health club’s lap pool four days a week, his hair still a little curly and now attractively gray. He paid for my coffee and bought us both oatmeal and asked me to sit with him while we had breakfast. I had to call in to ask the receptionist to reschedule my first appointment, which I almost never do, but I didn’t want to leave him so soon after finding him again. It felt then like I had been waiting a very long time for his reappearance, even though I don’t think I had thought about him in years.
“You look fantastic, Lucy,” he kept saying as we ate our oatmeal. The compliment made me blush, but I loved it. What woman doesn’t want to be told she’s beautiful, especially by someone she also finds attractive? I’ve never been the type of woman who gets angry when someone whistles at me or tells me I’m pretty. I’m confident in my intelligence, but there are plenty of days when I don’t know if I’m still physically attractive. I don’t feel pretty as often as I’d like to, this being one of the more insidious effects of aging because it can’t be treated the way brittle hair or dry skin might be. When I was younger, I didn’t know if I’d care what I looked like after I reached a certain age, but I know now that I will care about it until I die or else senility sets in.
“I heard you’re a doctor,” he added. “Congratulations.”
“For a long time now,” I said, smiling into his cheerful, suntanned face. “Even longer than the Cold War’s been over.”
He laughed. “The Cold War? You don’t hear too much about it these days.”
“No, I suppose not. But you were a history major, weren’t you? I thought you’d get a chuckle from the reference.” I laughed a little, embarrassed. I was trying to impress him, the impulse there as aggressively as anything I’d felt in months.
“Poli-sci,” he said. “Close.”
“Let me guess, you’re an attorney?”
He nodded, his smile a little sheepish. “I am. Sad but true.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “As long as you’re not working for Monsanto or defending the Mafia.”
“No, not even close. I’m an immigration lawyer, but I represent the underdog, not the INS.” He paused and looked down at the table, picking up his coffee mug before raising his eyes again. “You know, I was going to look you up again when I heard about you and Renn.”
“You mean our divorce?” I shook my head, smiling again. “Everyone heard about me and Renn. His fans were mad that he’d left one nobody for another nobody. They were hoping he’d dump me for Meryl Streep or Madonna or something. You can guess how much fun that whole ordeal was.”
“I’m sure it was awful, but you don’t look like it did any damage.”
“That’s because I had a job to go with the kids and the philandering husband. My work kept me sane.” I paused. “Are you married?” He wasn’t wearing a ring, but that didn’t mean much.
“I was, but we’ve been divorced for four years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” But the truth is, I wasn’t.
He sprinkled more brown sugar on his oatmeal and stirred it into the few spoonfuls that remained in his bowl. “Don’t be sorry,” he murmured. “It was a long time coming. Sandy and I wanted to wait until both of our kids were in college, but it should have happened right about the same time you and Renn separated.”
“I tell people that it was Renn’s midlife crisis, even though we were both still in our thirties.”
“Midlife crises keep happening earlier and earlier. Some people even have two. Sandy and I were almost fifty when our divorce went through. You didn’t remarry?”
“No.”
“Didn’t feel like it?”
“No, I guess I didn’t. I was busy raising Billy and Anna and working full-time. I didn’t have much extra time to go out on dates. I did see a few people though, on and off.”
I had dated about a dozen men between the divorce and now, not too many, I don’t think, considering it had been more than sixteen years since I’d signed the divorce papers, but getting my hopes up a dozen times—even more, because there were a few men I was drawn to who ultimately weren’t available—it was difficult and often demoralizing.
“Your kids are out on their own now, aren’t they?” Michael asked.
“Yes. Anna’s a doctor now too, but she’s doing family medicine, not pediatrics like me. Billy’s living in Paris, being a dilettante.”
“Lucky guy.”
“I think he’s writing a screenplay now. I have no idea if it’ll be any good, but who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me and the rest of the world too. I didn’t think his father would be much of a writer, but Bourbon at Dusk turned out pretty well. You probably saw that it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.”
Michael nodded. “I thought for sure it would win in one of those categories, but at least Renn got Best Director. Didn’t Marek Gilson also win for Best Actor?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I thought the girl was better. I’m surprised she didn’t win.”
“I was too, but she was lucky to be nominated. There were a lot of good movies last year.”
My feelings about all this were complicated. It certainly wasn’t the first time Renn had gone to the Oscars and won. He had been nominated three times while we were married and had won twice, once for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting, but despite how much hype and anticipation surrounds this awards show each year, I did not look forward to it at all. For one, it was such an enormous hassle to prepare for. Which designers to use for Renn’s tux and my dress? Who should do my makeup and hair, and his makeup and hair? Which after-party invitations to accept? Which congratulatory phone calls to return first, because everyone we knew, everywhere on earth, it seemed, was calling to say how happy they were for us, how excited, and how Renn just had to do his next picture with so-and-so (so-and-so was calling too, of course; multiple so-and-so’s).
Renn couldn’t get a solid night’s sleep after the nominations were announced (which meant that I couldn’t either), because he could not stop thinking about whether he would win, or would it be one of the other heavyweights? Surely he was as good as they were, wasn’t he, if he had been nominated at all? I think that he probably was as good as they were, except in a few movies that couldn’t have been saved no matter how well he performed, like that absurd stinker where he played the transsexual opera singer. I could not believe it when he chose that project. It was after we were divorced, and he and his second wife were on the skids by that time too; I think his judgment must have been impaired. I sat in a theater in West Hollywood and watched him in this movie with all of the absurd wigs and the caked-on makeup and laughed in disbelief almost the whole time. What enormous hands and feet he had, especially in those yellow pumps. How ugly a woman he was! Several other people in the audience tried to shush me, but I couldn’t stay quiet for the life of me or anyone else. If they had known him the way I did, they’d have laughed so much that their stomach muscles would have ached for days afterward too.
As for this year’s Oscars, I watched them by myself at home, a bowl of air-popped popcorn in my lap, a glass of white wine on the table next to the sofa. Anna was busy at the hospital and had told me that they wouldn’t give her the evening off because they were too swamped from a recent E. coli outbreak, but I think this might have been a fib. She probably wanted to watch the show with her boyfriend instead of me, whom I still haven’t met. I felt a little uncomfortable watching the red-carpet coverage before the ceremony began; they kept showing Renn with Elise Connor, the commentators practically drooling on them. Whatever else she might be, she is a remarkably pretty young woman. She also seems sweet, and my thought all along has been that Renn, probably as old as her father, is out of his depth. And in fact she seemed to have figured this out too, because she broke up with him a week or so after the Oscars. It took me a little while to find out what was going on, but eventually Anna told me her suspicions, which her father would not confirm when she talked to him about the breakup. I, however, was surprised that even he would do something as selfish and contemptible as carrying on with his son’s ex-girlfriend, if Anna’s suspicions are correct. I still care about the man, but long ago I lost any illusions I might have had about his judgment where his personal life is concerned. He seems quite capable of rationalizing any decision he makes that involves his penis.
At the bagel café, before Michael and I parted ways, he asked for my number, and with his eyes on his feet, he asked if I would like to go out for dinner sometime. “Yes,” I said, feeling my heart leap. “I’d love to.”
“I’m so glad,” he said, raising his eyes to meet mine. “Maybe this weekend if you’re free?”
“Yes,” I said. “This weekend could work.”
He kissed my cheek before we got into our cars, and all day I kept thinking about him and what it would be like to kiss him. I had trouble keeping a smile off my face, especially when a patient’s worried mother was speaking to me about her inability to get her six-year-old son to stop eating dirt from the garden. I almost said, “Maybe he’s pregnant. Pregnant women sometimes crave dirt.” But obviously this would not have gone over well.
The next day, Michael called around six in the evening and asked me out, saying that he would pick me up at seven thirty on Friday rather than have me meet him at the restaurant. During the three days between his call and our date, I felt almost lightheaded with anticipation. But I didn’t want to feel this way; chances were, the date would not be as good as I hoped. It was possible that he would spend the whole evening talking about his ex-wife or his recent pitiful blind dates or some embarrassing health problem that he thought I would be interested in because I’m a doctor. These are all scenarios from other dates I’d been on in the past few years, ones with colleagues’ divorced brothers or cousins or businessmen I’d met online who weren’t anywhere near as charming in person as they were in the e-mails they’d sent before we met. There had also been a few men who had spent the whole date grilling me for every detail I would divulge about my ex-husband: What was Renn Ivins really like, and wasn’t it just the coolest thing to be married to him? The first time this had happened, I’d been so stunned that I’d laughed. “No, it wasn’t the coolest thing,” I said. “We got a divorce.”
For some reason, this had not sunk in. “Sure,” the man said, “but wasn’t it still cool to be married to him for a little while?”
It mystifies me how some people really don’t seem to have any idea what’s polite and what’s jaw-droppingly insensitive. Michael, fortunately, did know what was polite. He arrived at the house exactly at seven thirty and had a bouquet of red roses with him, the pink tissue paper and matching ribbon carefully arranged by a real florist, not some underpaid worker at the grocery store. He smelled very nice and seemed so happy to see me that I felt a lump rise in my throat. I think my children assume that I haven’t remarried because their father did such a number on me that I can’t bear the thought of legally binding myself to another man. But this isn’t the case. I haven’t remarried because the one or two men I’ve dated since the divorce whom I could imagine a future with eventually stopped wanting to see me. I think they thought that I was still hooked on Renn, even though (after a year or two), I no longer was, and I tried to make this clear to them, but they weren’t convinced.
Other, less suitable men haven’t been as quick to leave. In some cases, I’ve had to tell them that I was no longer interested in going out with them. It isn’t easy to do this, no matter how bored or irritated you’ve become with the man. People assume that being the one who rejects is infinitely preferable to the contrary, but it isn’t. I have never enjoyed upsetting other people, even those I suspected were only after my money or the perverse pleasure it brought them to say they were dating the woman Renn Ivins had married before the other woman he married and divorced.
In fact, this other woman, Melinda Byers, has recently performed a small miracle. She has made me feel something akin to sympathy for her. Her memoir about her marriage to Renn, This Isn’t Gold, isn’t as stupid and trashy as I expected. It’s actually somewhat interesting and often thoughtful. There were parts that made me angry and other parts that I found wildly self-indulgent and ridiculous, but on the whole, reading it made me feel oppressively sad.
Then, within a couple of days of having finished it, perversely, I began to feel almost happy. This woman, my most hated enemy for a time, had actually worried that Renn would leave her and come back to his children and me. She had suffered over this, had apparently lost sleep thinking that he should follow his conscience if it demanded his return to his family because she apparently felt guilty for having taken him away from us (her parents had also divorced when she was young), but at the same time, she wanted most fiercely for him to stay with her. This emotional schizophrenia has to be partially responsible for why he began to distance himself from her within a year of marrying her. Their marriage must never have been a peaceful one. I know that my kids liked her, and at the time, their affection for her really upset me, but I would rather that she have treated them well than have ignored or openly disliked and mistreated them. I might have said a number of ugly things about Renn in front of Anna and Billy, but I tried not to complain as often about Melinda. It was sometimes very hard to hold my tongue and I didn’t always succeed, but most days, I think I did.
I should say this—I probably wouldn’t have reacted the way that I did to This Isn’t Gold if it had been published a few years after their divorce. My wounds would still have been too fresh, my schadenfreude over their marriage’s failure too great—but with more than ten years between their divorce and now, I’ve mellowed. I know that I couldn’t have done anything to change what happened to Renn’s and my marriage. It was not my fault that he left. The fact is, he had too many attractive opportunities, too many available women lying directly in his path with their legs open and their brains closed for business. He was out of town too often too. If a marriage is going to last, I think that you need to be physically near your husband more than a few days a month.
Michael, I learned during our first date, had been living in Boulder for the past twenty-five years but had moved back to southern California, to Pasadena, in fact, where I live, a couple of years earlier, and he told me over lemon linguine and an avocado and shrimp salad that he never wanted to leave California again. That’s good, I thought, smiling at him. “Is your ex-wife still in Colorado?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s from there.”
“What about your kids?”
“They’re both still in college. One’s at Rice, the other’s at Colorado State.”
“Then grad school?”
“I’m not sure. If so, they’d better get scholarships. I’m cutting them off after undergrad.” He laughed. “Maybe not, but that’s what I tell them. They’re good kids. I’m lucky.”
“I’m sure they are. Mine are too. Usually.” I smiled. I could not stop smiling.
“Yes, usually,” he murmured, reaching across the table to take my hand. He held it until our waiter came by to ask if we wanted dessert and Michael looked at me and I nodded, smiling again, a little overwarm from the white wine we’d ordered with dinner. He ordered chocolate cake and I asked for raspberry sorbet, which arrived with a small chocolate shortbread cookie; I could have eaten about twenty of them, they were so delicious. When we were done, there was no awkwardness over the check, and watching him remove a credit card from his wallet, I thought, Thank you for coming back into my life. Please let this be easy.
On our way back to his car, he asked if I felt like driving over to the Santa Monica pier, and I said yes, surprised by his suggestion. I hadn’t been there since Anna and Billy were kids, and when Michael and I made our way from his car to the entrance, I realized that I was glad to be there again, among the shy teenagers on first dates, the adults milling around with their small children, and the workers, some cheerful, some weary, who manned the carnival games and called out to passersby. Michael steered me out to the end of the pier, and after a couple of minutes of staring at the waves, he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close because I was shivering through my thin coat. I felt him hesitating, but after a few seconds, he kissed me. We kept kissing for what must have been a long time, as if we too were teenagers, and in a way we were, this being our first date, and the giddy, nervous feelings no different for us than they would have been if we were still sixteen. When he pulled his face away from mine, it looked flushed, and I thought, I can take him home with me. I can take this man into my bed and he can spend the night and we don’t have to worry about our parents or anyone else finding out.
He drove me home after we kissed at the end of the pier for a little while longer, a chilly breeze off the Pacific eventually forcing us back to his car, where he kissed me again before taking us to my house. I had put clean sheets on the bed before he picked me up that evening, thinking that it was unlikely anything would happen, not so soon, but I knew now that I must have been thinking all along about inviting him inside, and I was almost faint with the suspense of it all. I wondered if I should say something about my expectations, but I wasn’t sure what they were. All I knew at that moment was that I wanted him, and he seemed to want me too. He gave me a shy, expectant look when he pulled into my driveway and I put my hand on his arm and said, “Turn off the car and come inside.”
I could almost feel him breathing behind me as we walked into the house, and I felt then that he was going to be good, and let me say this: he was. He really was.
We didn’t bother with the lights; I turned around to look at his face and he put his arms around me and right away I could feel him pressing against my stomach. I already thought that I might love him. This probably sounds a little ridiculous, but it is nonetheless true. The truth is, when we were in college I had had a crush on him too, but I loved Renn by that time and didn’t want to run around on him because this has never been my nature and I also felt that I might be imagining Michael’s interest. Or that he would stop liking me once I made myself available to him because he would think I was a floozy for cheating on Renn.
That first night Michael stayed with me, it had been almost two years since I’d had sex with anyone, not the longest I’ve gone without companionship since the divorce, but close. He told me that it had been a while for him too, but he didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask. He stayed until the morning, when I had to go to the clinic and see patients until one o’clock, and before I had finished my appointments for the day, he had already called to thank me for a “wonderful night.” He wondered if I’d be free again that evening, “if you’re not too sick of me,” he said, laughing self-consciously, and I called him back as soon as I got out to the parking lot and told him yes, he could come over around six and I would make dinner for him.
The fears that assailed me before we went out on that first Friday night: that our date would not turn out well, that too many years had passed since we had last known each other and we were now too different from who we had been in college, that we were nothing more than two lonely, aging people desperately trying to relive the happier days of early adulthood, when all possibilities were still open to us, seemed to be, to my profound relief and joy, unfounded. We might have looked older and weighed a little more and also been veterans of one failed marriage each, but his essential kindness, his sense of humor, his generosity and willingness to laugh, were still intact. I felt like he had been dropped out of the sky by some benevolent djinn.
But it worried me to feel so happy. If you’re used to nothing much happening, except for minor crises and disappointments, it’s hard not to be suspicious of your sudden good fortune.
When I eventually told Michael that I was going to Paris in a few weeks to see my son, he asked haltingly if I might let him . . . well, if he might be able to join me? He didn’t have to tag along with me the whole time if I didn’t want him to, but he hadn’t taken a vacation in a year and a half and he hadn’t been to Paris in many years, and what a romantic city it was. What did I think?
“Yes,” I said without a second’s hesitation. I had been hoping that he would ask because I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to invite him myself. We had only been seeing each other for two weeks when I brought it up, and though we had spent about ten nights together during those two weeks, I worried that I might be rushing things by asking him to join me on a vacation all the way across the continent, on the other side of the Atlantic. When I confessed this to him, he said, “Don’t be silly, Lucy. You’re a grown woman and I’m a grown man. We can do whatever we want. I want to go, if you really don’t mind.”
“Of course I want you to come. I just wasn’t sure if I should ask.”
“You should always ask for what you want,” he said. “No one can read your mind.”
“No, I suppose not.”
I called Billy the next day to tell him that I was bringing a friend with me to France, and he seemed genuinely curious. “A boyfriend?” he asked.
“A man friend,” I said.
“Really? That’s nice.” He paused. “You’re not planning on staying with me, are you?”
I laughed a little, grateful, I suppose, for his directness. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“If you want to, you could, but the second bedroom is about the size of a large coat closet, so you’d definitely be better off staying at a hotel.”
“Billy, we’ve already made reservations at George V.”
“Damn. Who’s paying?”
“I think we’ll probably split it.”
“Is this guy after you for your money, like that loser from a couple of years ago?”
“Michael has his own money.” He seemed to, but I wasn’t sure if it came from his law practice because half of his cases were pro bono and I don’t think the paying cases were likely to make too many people rich. He had alluded to some property he owned in Colorado, and I suspected that this was where his money came from. He kept picking up the checks when we went out, and I did not sense any nervousness on his end when the servers delivered these checks, some of them easily more than I spent on a week’s worth of groceries, to our table, like I had with other men who did not want to pay or were worried that they couldn’t afford to pay. His house was near the Rose Bowl and beautiful; he had traveled all over the world and dressed attractively but was not flashy with his wardrobe. If he didn’t have much money, he was doing a stunning job of obscuring this fact.
I did wonder what was wrong with him, though; when it came to love, my cynicism was deeply ingrained. There had to be something. But maybe it would be something I could live with. I hoped that my flaws were ones he could live with too.
“I want to ask you something,” said Billy. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with Dad? He’s not returning my calls. Since he and Elise broke up, we’ve talked only once, and that was before I knew she’d left him. I don’t think Anna has talked to him that much either. Less than she usually does, anyway.”
“I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I called him after the Oscars, but he didn’t call me back. I haven’t tried him again, but I will if you’d like me to.”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind. Maybe he’ll talk to you.”
“I don’t like that he’s not calling you and Anna back.” I tried to keep my voice even, but it rose a little. Renn was such a jerk sometimes.
“Me, I get, but I don’t know why he won’t call Anna,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t your father call you? Because of Elise Connor? Is he thinking that you’re still pining for her?” I knew about this because Anna told me, not Billy. Never Billy. He does not like to talk to me about his love life, especially when something is wrong with it, which seems to be a lot of the time.
He was silent.
“You aren’t, are you?” I said. “God, Billy, I hope not. She’s not—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off. “I’m not pining for her. She’s dating Marek Gilson now, anyway.”
“She is? How do you know?”
“Because she told me. She e-mailed me.”
“Aren’t you happy with your new girlfriend? I thought you were.”
“I am happy. Jorie’s great. You’ll see when you meet her. Everything here’s fine. My screenplay is half done, and I think it’s good. It might even be something I’ll be able to sell, or else I’ll make it myself.”
“You shouldn’t use your own money if you—”
He exhaled. “Mom, don’t worry. That’s still a ways off.”
“What’s its title? Do you have one yet?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if I’ll keep it. Right now it’s called Little Known Facts.”
“I like that.”
“Thanks. I’m still considering it though.”
“What’s it about? You know I have to ask.”
“To be honest, it’s about me. You, Dad, and Anna too, but I’m disguising everyone and a lot of the things that have happened to us.”
“Oh, I hope so,” I said, taken aback. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this revelation, but I was. I can’t say that I was pleased about it either because, well, my conscience was hardly clear. To state the obvious, Billy and Anna’s formative years were not the most idyllic on record.
“Don’t worry, Mom. You won’t look bad, if people even figure out that it’s about us.”
“I’m sure some of them will,” I said, knowing this was true.
We said good-bye a minute or two later, our conversation almost as worrying as many of the calls we’d had before he left. I did not know what sort of tone he would take in his portrayal of his father and me in Little Known Facts, and I could also imagine him frittering away all of his money on a project that would bomb, if he even managed to film the whole thing and find a distributor for it. I wanted to be glad that he was working on something that seemed to fill him with a sense of urgency and purpose, but he knew as well as anyone that the film industry is as mercurial as they come, and even if he did have talent, it wasn’t very likely that he would become a successful filmmaker. Even if his father helped him during every step of the process, there was still no guarantee that Billy would succeed at this new undertaking. And quite a few people would also dismiss him out of hand, saying that he was simply another example of a child riding a famous parent’s coattails.
I have never been very graceful about stepping back and letting my children make their own mistakes. Why watch them fail, I’ve always thought, when I can do something to help them succeed instead?
The answers the pop psychologists give us: because failure builds character. Because it teaches humility and discipline and gratitude for whatever successes a person might eventually achieve. Because it is the right thing to do.
Yes, I suppose so. Most of the time I have forced myself to let my children make their own mistakes. Or else they have insisted on making them, ignoring my advice. Billy more than Anna. Billy about ninety percent more than Anna, if truth be told.
Along with my unease over his screenplay, there was also his father’s silence. Renn had to be up to something. I called him a little while after Billy and I got off the phone. He didn’t answer. It feels sometimes like I am always on the phone or thinking about being on the phone or trying to ignore the ringing phone. It is much worse for my ex-husband, who has two or three cell phones and a landline, and his agent, personal assistant, and publicist also taking calls for him. I kept trying him until he picked up, about four more calls and five hours later, nearly midnight, when I should already have been asleep for an hour or more, especially because it was one of the few nights when Michael and I hadn’t gotten together.
When he finally picked up, I offered a halfhearted apology for calling so many times, but then without preamble, I said, “Why aren’t you talking to your children?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “I have been talking to them, but Life After the Storm is taking up a lot of my time. I’m in New Orleans right now, actually.”
“Renn,” I said. “If Billy’s telling me that you’re not returning his or Anna’s calls, I know something’s going on. Our son doesn’t usually complain about a lack of phone calls from you or me.”
I could hear him sigh. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I’m swamped, that’s all. More so than usual. The foundation is taking up every free moment; I’m working on a new screenplay with Scott Jost, and I just signed on to act in two new pictures later this year.”
“I heard that you and Elise broke up a little while after the Oscars.”
He hesitated. “Yes, we did.”
“I was sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks,” he said flatly. He sounded tired, his usual bluffness when we spoke on the phone, rare as our conversations were these days, absent. I felt a little guilty about grilling him, but I wanted to know what was going on, if he had gone out with Billy’s ex-girlfriend, if he was still going out with her.
“Are you seeing someone new?” I said.
He let a few seconds pass before answering. “No, not really.”
“I’m seeing someone,” I murmured. I hadn’t intended to tell him this, but his reticence was annoying me, even though I had no right to any kind of disclosure from him anymore.
“You are?” he said, waking up a little. “Do I know him?”
“You used to.” I paused. “It’s Michael Kinicki.”
“Who?”
“Michael Kinicki. We were friends with him for a little while at USC. You remember him, don’t you? You thought he had a crush on me.”
“Was he the guy who dated your roommate and always left his dirty underwear in the bathroom after he took a shower? Didn’t he also carry around a corncob pipe and say it was his grandfather’s?”
“I don’t remember him carrying a corncob pipe. I don’t think he left his underwear in our bathroom either.” I remembered the pipe but not the underwear.
“He did. You used to complain about it too.”
I didn’t reply.
After a moment, Renn said, “What’s he doing now?”
“He’s an attorney. Immigration law.”
“Oh. How long have you been seeing him?”
“Not very long.”
“Well, good for you.”
“You need to call your children,” I said.
“I will,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Lucy.”
“Yes?” I said. Just like that, I felt nervous. I recognized his tone as the one he had used the few times he had confessed to cheating on me.
“Billy isn’t going to want to talk to me if he finds out that his ex-girlfriend is living with me right now. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t called him or Anna lately.”
“What? Do you mean Danielle?” I said, my voice rising involuntarily. “Why is she living with you? She has her own place, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” he said slowly, “but if I tell you something, I don’t want you to talk about it with anyone else, not Anna or Billy or Michael Kinicki. No one. I’m not kidding.”
“You can tell me,” I said, even more nervous now.
“I can’t be alone anymore, not at my house. Since Elise and I broke up, I haven’t been able to sleep unless I take pills, but I’m all right if someone is there with me. I wake up in the middle of the night if I’m by myself and feel like I’m about to have a panic attack. The first few times this happened, I took some Valium, but I didn’t want to have to keep taking it because it was happening almost every night. Danielle has been accommodating. She’s a very kind person.”
“Is she with you in New Orleans right now?”
“No. I don’t have as much trouble when I travel. Oddly enough.”
“You’re going to have to tell Billy soon if you intend to keep her there for any period of time.”
“I know.”
“You should probably tell him right away. He seems happy with his new girlfriend, and he loves Paris. I don’t know if he’ll take it that hard.”
“I think he would. We had some trouble over Elise, and things between us are still pretty shaky.”
“I know. But you still need to tell him soon. Ask Isis what she thinks,” I say, letting a note of derision enter my tone. “I’m sure she’d agree with me.”
He falters. “Are you mad at me, Lucy?”
“I might be after you talk to Billy, depending on how he handles it, but right now I’m not.”
“Professionally, everything is better than it’s ever been for me, but somehow I keep f*cking up my personal life.”
“It doesn’t help if you have an affair with your son’s ex-girlfriend while you’re supposed to be in a monogamous relationship with one of the prettiest girls in Hollywood, who also happens to be younger than your own daughter.”
“I know,” he said morosely. “But I can’t seem to stop myself from acting like an a*shole.”
“More therapy,” I said. “Or try castration.”
“You’re not funny,” he said, laughing anyway. “Speaking of Anna, have you met her friend yet?”
“Her boyfriend?”
“If that’s what you want to call him.”
I froze. “What does that mean?”
Renn hesitated. Maybe he felt bad about telling me something that he knew would upset me, but I doubted it. He was probably only trying to figure out how to deliver his bad news with the greatest dramatic effect. “He’s married,” he said. “I suppose she didn’t tell you that.”
My stomach dropped. “He is?”
“Yes.”
Goddamn it, I thought. Goddamn it, Anna. “She told me he wasn’t,” I finally said.
“Well, I guess she lied to you.”
“Yes, I guess she did.” I paused. “She told me that you met him. What did you think?”
“I liked him. He’s very charming. If he weren’t someone else’s husband, I’d say that he and Anna might be a good match.”
“How old is he?”
“A lot older than she is.”
Wonderful, I thought. Another aging philanderer shopping for sex in a much younger age bracket. What a surprise. “How much older?”
“About twenty years, I think.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly.”
We really screwed things up, I wanted to say. No, forget that. What I wanted to say was, You really screwed things up. But I said nothing. I was hurt and angry, my daughter having told me a bald-faced lie to hide the fact that she was carrying on an illicit affair with a man who was supposed to be mentoring her, with a man who was not supposed to be taking advantage of the pretty young interns who were entrusted to him for one of the most crucial periods of their formation as physicians. I wanted to drive to wherever this opportunist lived and spit on his shoes.
But even more than this, I wanted to flee to Michael’s house and walk straight into his arms and not have to face the truth of what my faithless ex-husband had just revealed about our lovely and intelligent daughter, our precious second-born, the last child we would ever have together. I didn’t care if Michael had once carried around his grandfather’s corncob pipe or left his dirty underwear in Karen’s and my bathroom. We were all of twenty-one when we’d first known each other, innocent of most of the frustrations that life would eventually deliver to us, unaware of most other people’s sorrows, and so arrogant in our attempts to take over the world, to make an impression on someone other than our most willing admirers, if we had any admirers to speak of.
I said good-bye to Renn and went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed in the dark. What I wanted, I realized then, was a Hollywood ending. Every single day, I wanted a Hollywood ending with its hero who saves the people he loves from their worst fears, whether it be violent death via nuclear bomb or murderer’s gun, or a lonely death after a life lived in fear of romantic humiliation. There are countless ways to be unhappy, so many more, it seems to me, than ways to be happy, which could be one of the reasons why happiness is so elusive. If there are ten million ways to be miserable, there are maybe a million ways to be the opposite, if we’re lucky.
Renn, with his global reputation for being a Good Samaritan now that Life After the Storm has been successfully launched, with his acting talent and many awards and beautiful lovers and millions and millions in the bank, somehow has managed not to be happy. Our children, despite their own talents and good fortune, also seem to be struggling, though Billy appears to be happier than he has been in a long time, and for this I am grateful.
The choices we make and the choices that we allow to be made for us: these are the raw materials that compose our lives. Some days it feels to me as if I am stepping out of a dark theater into the brilliant sun of early afternoon—for a few moments I can’t see anything, and when my ghostly surroundings start to reclaim a more corporeal form, I worry that they won’t be recognizable. Because at times, they aren’t.
I can only hope that I have loved the people closest to me more than I have harmed them. This is something, however, that I don’t think anyone can know for sure.
Acknowledgments
Lisa Bankoff at ICM, Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury, and Sheryl Johnston: if it weren’t for you, this book would live nowhere but on the hard drive of my soon-to-be-obsolete laptop. Thank you for your kindness, generosity, and extraordinary guidance.
David Elliott: writer, friend, Hollywood sage—thank you for finding the time in your dawn-’til-dusk schedule to offer your expert advice and critique.
Cara Blue Adams, Stephen Donadio, and Carolyn Kuebler: you have offered me and many other writers the professional and spiritual equivalent of life support.
Thank you to everyone at Higgins Lake for letting me hide out in the bedroom to work on the last two chapters: Adam, Marilyn Berling, Sarah Walz, Andy Tinkham, Amy Tinkham, and Eric Stromer.
Paul and Linae Luehrs, Kate Ellis, Tony Ellis, Gary Kaufman, Melissa Fraterrigo, Pete Seymour: thank you for answering my many technical questions.
Adam McOmber and Chrissy Kolaya—thank you for listening (and for laughing, often).
Thank you, friends and family: Melanie Brown, Dolores Walker, Denise Simons, Noelle Neu, Elizabeth Eck, Kate Soehren, Dorthe Andersen, Melissa Spoharski, Leonard Sneed, Ann and Tom Tennery, Dave Wieczorek, Mark Turcotte, Bill Fahrenbach, Alison Umminger, Gregory Fraser, Mike Levine, Paulette Livers, Debby Parker, Ruth Hutchison, Kim Brun, Kathleen Rooney, Francis-Noel Thomas, Jane Goldenberg, Angela Pneuman, Laura Durnell, Michelle Plasz, Robin Bluestone-Miller, Anita Gewurz, Meredith Ferrill, Cindy Martin, Marlene Garrison, Mona Oommen, Melissa Underwood, Melanie Feerst, Lauren Klopack, Dave Ramont, Dave Sills, and the magnificent Mr. (Bill) Weber.
And thank you to my parents, Susan Sneed and Terry Webb. Persistence, joy: two of the many things that I’ve learned from you.